As oceans warm, great white sharks are overheating

This might be the worst idea I've ever seen. I'm glad they are so interested in reducing the effects of global warming - that's fantastic - but they are literally purposefully releasing a toxic, major air pollutant into the air to create in their own words "clouds of dust" for the purposes of reflecting sunlight. Sure, there might be a slight cooling effect but who in their right mind could possibly think this is a good idea?!

I understand they are deploying to the stratosphere and not the troposphere but I can't imagine there aren't any negative second-order effects.

As someone who lives in a city with a major PM2.5 problem that effects the millions here on the daily (near an active stratovolcano no less!), reading about what they are doing was somewhat infuriating.

An easier path would be to stop subsidizing the core of what is making junk foods to begin with. For that matter, at least in the US, having individual states require limitations of importing pre-processed goods could help too.

I've thought that it might be an idea for more states to require at least half of all beef and chicken to be imported into the state in at least half-carcass form. This would incentivize local farming, and local processing, reducing the more centralized processing and the environmental impacts could be further reduced in a lot of ways. That's just for meat.

Forcing insurance company accounting to average to single-payer modals and limit coverage combinations to no more than 3 choices across the nation could help with another part. Refactoring all federally funded insurance (medicare/medicaid/va/federal-employees) into a non-profit insurance corp that does likewise and any private company can also buy policies from would help to. Finally, establish "part time" work as no more than 10 hours a week averaged per 4 week window. Then require all employers to provide medical insurance for all workers that meets what the npo insurance provides.

The recent changes to USDA food guidelines are a step in the right direction, mostly... but there's still room to improve. Education in and of itself should improve dramatically. For that matter, actually having schools "make" most of their food instead of relying on premade/packaged goods would be a massive step in a right direction. Have every student participate in meal preparation at least a few hours a week as part of school work would help a lot.

I'd like to see some incentivization for more companies returning to a dividends model that includes employee profit sharing as part of said formula. I think this would do a LOT to shore up the middle class again.

Sorry, just went off on a total tangent... hitting reply anyway, but don't take anything too serious/deep... these thoughts are kind of always lingering in the back of my mind... I've just never been in a position to actually act on any of them politically.

The warmer ocean thing seems to be blanketing over the real issue: we are overfishing.

Which is really heartening to me, because decreasing the temperature of the ocean seems daunting, but not dragging giant nets through the ocean nonstop seems pretty straightforward.

They’re blaming entities with power. E.g. 90% of the US have no impact on policy evidenced by there being no correlation between their policy preferences and real policy (2011 Princeton study).

> Can any legislature get away with dramatically increasing taxes on meat, fish, gas, and plane tickets, just at a level high enough to account for environmental externalities? Even dictatorships couldn't get away with it because it would cause too much unrest.

Is the idea to increase the VAT or something? The taxes on consumption?

Okay, so how would this work? You increase these taxes so that the bad consumers don’t travel for pleasure (just companies for business). Eventually people just buy what they need, like food which is presumably decently locally sourced, enough clothes to not freeze or be indecent. You’re still left with gas for commuting to job because people live an hour from work not out of choice but because of real estate prices. And what are in the stores are Made in China or Vietnam because that’s how the global market works; cheap shipping from cheap countries.

But these taxes would organically change all of that?

The usual narrative conveniently focuses on how Joe Beergut is causing problems by driving to work. And that this is how taxation should work; individual income, individual consumption, individual taxes. The more and more “libertarian”, the more the narrative slide towards taxes on income, taxes on consumption, and eventually just a flat tax because that is “fair”. But that seems to leave the big blindspot of corporations and individuals that might own fleets of trucks that of course tax the road infrastructure—no taxes for them?

But what headway could be made if the externalities were all caused by Joe Beergut. Libertarians and the environmental narrative might agree.

Except you have no idea what the capability of sharks are to adapt to different ocean temperatures. As sharks swim across various parts of the ocean or at various depths in a single day, the temperatures change far quicker than ocean temperatures over the last 100 years. The idea that you could guess that sharks can't adapt to a wide range of temperatures is nothing but a wild guess on your part because it agrees with your biased belief that sharks are in danger due to climate change.

But sharks have been around for 400 million years, longer than trees have existed. The amount of change they have endured is far greater than that, and sharks are likely the most adept at climate change.