81–90 of 166 posts
Higher carbon dioxide makes us dumber: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7229519/ I wonder how long before in-home CO2 extraction becomes a thing.
We'll have AGI not because the AI becomes smarter but because humans become stupider.
This is actually really funny to think about.
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> My hunch is there are not many who want to suffocate while trying to exist for shareholder value. Have you... read the news lately? You say it's not a matter of politics, but the politicians are absolutely trying to roll back the clock, push dirty tech, eliminate all environmental protections and regulations.
You do us all a disservice by saying “the politicians”. The REPUBLICANS are attempting to ignore reality and burn more fossil fuels. Nobody else in America. Name the problem, otherwise you’re implying it’s a bipartisan effort.
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Never heard this take before. Care to elaborate? It seems like crop failure and disease are the typical causes of food shortages, if not outright human logistical failures. Sounds like saying pouring gasoline on a tiny fire is the only reason we aren't cold (ignoring that more firewood would be the solution). An unsustainable solution is not in-fact a good solution. So if your assertion is correct, then we should all…
The quality of life of a human being is directly related to the amount of free energy (i.e. thermodynamic free energy, not free as in no cost) they have access to. Life must be able to generate more energy than it needs, even tiny bacteria. As humans developed, we found more ways to access and utilize free energy.
There is a phrase: Energy return on investment (or EROI). You can map the development of humanity pretty cleanly to an increasing EROI over the entire course of our history.
Fossil Carbon allowed us to explode our EROI and gave us access to never before seen amounts of free energy. Unless we find ways to maintain that EROI, our quality of life will necessarily diminish.
Obviously we need to cut our use of fossil carbon. And if we don't, we're simply going to run out, and then we'll be stuck anyway. But we also don't have anything with a comparable EROI to replace it with.
This is the root problem we're facing. If we had working fusion, it would be a whole lot easier to decarbonize.
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You do us all a disservice by saying “the politicians”. The REPUBLICANS are attempting to ignore reality and burn more fossil fuels. Nobody else in America. Name the problem, otherwise you’re implying it’s a bipartisan effort.
Obama takes credit for U.S. oil-and-gas boom: ‘That was me, people’ https://apnews.com/article/business-5dfbc1aa17701ae219239caa... You have to be born yesterday to believe that Democratic leaders haven't merely hand-waved and virtue-signaled about global warming for decades. I realized this back in the 1990s. Democrats have superior rhetoric, and they are less openly hostile, but their long record of doing nothing t…
Like the Republicans are absolutely embarrassing on this issue, the idea that they’re “two wings of the same bird” is nuts.
This actually has me just as concerned as rising temperatures. And its a pretty hard thing to argue against, no matter your politics. Elon even brought it up when he did that interview with Trump in late 2024 to convince him that we should still care about CO2 levels in the atmosphere, even if you think the threat of a changing climate is overblown. Trump really had no response.
USA (along with the rest of the western world) is a huge cumulative emitter: https://ourworldindata.org/contributed-most-global-co2 But a distant second in per year emissions: https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by... The EU, not listed here, sits between the US and India at about 3.05 billion tonnes. It's all up to China, which took over a huge chunk of the world's manufacturing. And all up to…
Sorting the table by "per capita" is much more interesting IMHO.
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Clean tech will save the day (low carbon generation, batteries, electrification trajectories and rate of change, broadly speaking), but the global fossil industry will need to be dismantled faster than some will like. It is a matter of survival, not politics or economics. My hunch is there are not many globally who want to suffocate while trying to exist for shareholder value.
Nuclear will save the day in combination with clean tech. Clean tech on its own is too slowly to be meaningfully impactful by the time we need it.
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Never heard this take before. Care to elaborate? It seems like crop failure and disease are the typical causes of food shortages, if not outright human logistical failures. Sounds like saying pouring gasoline on a tiny fire is the only reason we aren't cold (ignoring that more firewood would be the solution). An unsustainable solution is not in-fact a good solution. So if your assertion is correct, then we should all…
> Green Revolution techniques also heavily rely on agricultural machinery and chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and defoliants; which, as of 2014, are derived from crude oil, making agriculture increasingly reliant on crude oil extraction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution
And it was the cheapest way only because most prices are fake, because they do not correspond to the cost of closed cycles of the materials used to make a product.
All those things require mostly energy, air, water and a few abundant minerals and metals to be made. Technologies to make them in this way have already existed for almost a century (e.g. making synthetic hydrocarbons, to replace oil), but they are still very inefficient. However, the inefficiency is mostly due to the fact that negligible amounts of money have been allocated for the development of such technologies (because as long as the use of fossil oil is permitted, there is no way for synthetic hydrocarbons to be cheaper), in comparison with the frivolous amounts of money that are wasted on various fads, like AI datacenters.
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You do the people causing this problem a great service with false equivocations like this. It is clear one group would prefer us to ignore the problem and do nothing at all - in fact encourage the problematic behavior - and the other would very much like to take action on the issue if they had the political power.
> the other would very much like to take action on the issue if they had the political power. They had political power! During the Biden administration, during the Obama administration, during the Clinton administration. Al Gore is a famous environmentalist... for making a movie after he was out of power. What the hell did he do for the environment when he was literally in the Oval Office, at the side of the Presiden…
The president doesn't actually control much in the USA, despite the nonsensical shit republican congresses let them get away with. Obama, Biden, and Clinton could not do anything that wasn't approved by congress.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_divisions_of_United_Stat...
Democrats have not really held enough power to do anything at all in like 40 years. A 1 or 2 vote "majority" in a chamber is not really meant to allow you to do anything.
Hell, that very first graph makes it pretty clear why shit is so bad in the US, we used to actually fire congress and replace them with different people.
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What difference does it make what they're referencing? I'm glad we agree that fossil fuels were necessary. It has nothing to do with "shareholder value" -- it has to do with minimizing human suffering. Also, it's noteworthy that US emissions peaked in 2007. We're down ~20% since then. The world is absolutely addressing climate change, and the worst case scenarios have already been avoided. Faster would be better but…
> It has nothing to do with "shareholder value" The reason other countries are able to move so much faster than the U.S. is because parties that have power in the U.S. push back with economic concerns. The distance between "shareholder value" and "stock market performance" is miniscule.
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Clean tech will save the day (low carbon generation, batteries, electrification trajectories and rate of change, broadly speaking), but the global fossil industry will need to be dismantled faster than some will like. It is a matter of survival, not politics or economics. My hunch is there are not many globally who want to suffocate while trying to exist for shareholder value.
I think you are being downvoted because people only skim "Clean tech will save the day" without reading the whole text.