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Freakazoid_ posted:I would say Monsanto and GMOs are inseparable at this point. I know GMOs could be used for good, but they're currently being used for bad and we need to address that first, even if it means hampering GMOs for a while. That's the biggest problem, really; Monsanto is an evil, awful company. There's no arguing that but when you mention GMOs they're what everybody automatically thinks of. It's also a ridiculous argument to say "all GMOs are bad" because humans have been genetically modifying things since we figured out selective breeding. Sure, genetic modification could be used in nasty ways or to make new weapons but really that's true of like...everything. "This can be weaponized" is a poor reason to ban something entirely. Should we test stuff, make sure it's safe, and put some regulations in place to prevent awful things from happening? Sure. But ending GMOs entirely? That's just dumb.
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Jan 1, 2016 15:37
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Shayu posted:Do I give up my nice things like car, phone, heat for climate changes to end? Don't want to do that. There's not one single solution to climate change, or one thing we have to do. There's not a list of things we have to give up or keep. What solutions are put into place will dictate what we lose and gain. Those solutions will likely either be put into place by: 1. Rich and powerful people, as is currently the case 2. A large popular movement If it's 1, sorry, if you're worth less than a few million dollars, you don't get a say in the matter. What you give up is not up to you or anyone you know. If it's 2, that's a decision we'll collectively make together. My guess? Most people aren't going to want to give up most modern conveniences. The good news is we don't have to. Changing how our electricity is generated, for example, would be a huge way to reduce CO2 emissions, and would not affect cellphones, heating, or cars. If you're looking for more details, I'd recommend reading the OP.
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Jan 1, 2016 17:22
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The thing is that we could replace a lot of modern conveniences with alternative ones that work just as well - or better. One example - solar heaters. A poo poo but working version can be built from painted aluminum cans, glass, and a box. They work pretty well in a good chunk of the country, providing heat during the day. Problem is that it's an ugly black box on the side of your house, so gently caress that because of social reasons. Our houses suck rear end at retaining heat and cool air, which could be fixed by building them out of things that don't suck. Again, social reasons frequently prevent this. They could even be made virtually weather-proof, but screw it, because of appearances.
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Jan 1, 2016 18:24
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Evil_Greven posted:The thing is that we could replace a lot of modern conveniences with alternative ones that work just as well - or better. Show me this weather-proof house.
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Jan 1, 2016 18:27
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Verge posted:Show me this weather-proof house. Start reading
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Jan 1, 2016 18:29
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Evil_Greven posted:The thing is that we could replace a lot of modern conveniences with alternative ones that work just as well - or better. You can actually build houses that maintain good internal temperatures with loving dirt.
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Jan 1, 2016 18:37
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What is with a chunk of the left's obsession with 'climate reparations'? This just seems like a thing for the usual "gently caress the west, any way possible" crowd to hop aboard and masturbate about, rather than anything productive and useful.
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Jan 1, 2016 18:45
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Ok, domes kick rear end, no argument there but I don't see any miracle materials at work here. One of the problems with domes comes down to the sphere-container problem. A sphere is theoretically the best container for holding things because you use the least material to hold the most volume. The problem with this, however, is when we stop talking about holding liquids or start talking about holding many containers. The same issue with domes. Are we talking usable floor space here? Volume? Either way you slice it, that roof is gonna get low in some sections of the house. These issues I'm pointing out, by the way, aren't social: they're functional. The best containers for humans are cubes because humans don't like to be reshaped or spun on any axis. I assure you, I'd be fine with living in a dome if I were confident that the dome in question could house me in a way I'm accustomed to.
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Jan 1, 2016 18:53
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How much space do you reckon an attic encompasses in a 'normal' house? What about wall thickness or other dead space areas? They started building stemwalls before 2000 as a variation on the pure dome, which accommodate people a bit better - or at least make the structure look more like a 'normal' house.
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Jan 1, 2016 19:01
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Evil_Greven posted:How much space do you reckon an attic encompasses in a 'normal' house? What about wall thickness or other dead space areas? I don't consider the attic in a conventional home as wasted space because it does not extend outward into our land-space but I'd guess...1/4? I mean, all I'm saying is that I don't see the benefit to extending the structure outward. poo poo, a dome roof makes engineering sense, no question, and a dome house if you really need to withstand nature's wrath but outside those factors, I don't see a benefit outside of having wasted horizontal space, unless you're making the claim that they can make the walls significantly thinner. This is all, of course, secondary to the difficulty in the fabrication process (steel beams that don't go straight are a oval office!)
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Jan 1, 2016 20:10
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https://calearth.org/building-designs/what-is-superadobe.html I always thought these designs looked pretty impressive but I don't know enough about building structures to know how viable they would be in different regions, but yeah most of them are built using the dirt onsite. The other problem would be getting loans for them due to how unconventional they are.
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Jan 1, 2016 22:57
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If people want a less earthship-based* source for the potential effiency rates of buildings here's one too: http://www.rmi.org/Buildings *not a dig, just some people can't get over sod.
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Jan 1, 2016 23:05
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Another house design is the Passive house. It can reduce the amount of energy needed to heat a house by 75% to 95%. Essentially, it's just an extremely airtight well insulated house that uses the sun and ground to assist.   There's plenty of building designs that are better able to resist extreme weather or massively cut down on energy costs. As with most things that could solve major problems with energy use, the problem is that those designs aren't being used. I would guess that housing companies really don't give a poo poo about energy efficiency, nor do the people (or corporations) buying them. Given how many people rent (both houses and apartments) and how we've got an entire generation that simply can't afford to buy their own housing, this is yet another thing that probably won't change any time soon without some sort of political movement.
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Jan 1, 2016 23:14
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Verge posted:I don't consider the attic in a conventional home as wasted space because it does not extend outward into our land-space but I'd guess...1/4? I mean, all I'm saying is that I don't see the benefit to extending the structure outward. poo poo, a dome roof makes engineering sense, no question, and a dome house if you really need to withstand nature's wrath but outside those factors, I don't see a benefit outside of having wasted horizontal space, unless you're making the claim that they can make the walls significantly thinner. This is all, of course, secondary to the difficulty in the fabrication process (steel beams that don't go straight are a oval office!) This house looks pretty loving rad, using two domes that blend in tremendously well. I think it might be more susceptible to weather, though. Fabrication is a non-issue. They use rebar - either steel or basalt, not beams.
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Jan 2, 2016 00:26
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Uranium Phoenix posted:There's not one single solution to climate change, or one thing we have to do. There's not a list of things we have to give up or keep. What solutions are put into place will dictate what we lose and gain. Those solutions will likely either be put into place by: Do like China and overthrow the western imperialisms and serfdom, become people republic. Improve life of all the poor and save the environment. The rich people no longer will destroy the planet and still we use the phone and heat because lords will not take them from us.
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Jan 2, 2016 09:51
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Trabisnikof posted:From a US perspective, I would add: the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act, Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, and the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act. Those are just off the top of my head. All do massive amounts to protect our environment and society to this day. El Perkele posted:That's a weird list since it only contains very particular aspects of environmental policy and completely disregards stuff like water and energy management, urban planning, ecosystem services etc. Saying that "green governments cannot lead to effective environmental protection" is a pretty bold claim. I could just as well claim that social democratic governments cannot lead to effective socialdemocratic societies, and say that minimum wage laws are a relic. It's not quite solid enough - and green movements and parties have been at the forefront of actually drafting and proposing environmental legislation, often against considerable adversity from other political factions. Oh, and the most visible EU conservation projects in Baltic area are area conservation and water/soil management projects, not organic farming, unless farming subsidies are lumped underneath conservation policies, which just makes everything insane That's kind of my point though: Environmentalists provide pressure that gets policy makers to realise we should actually do something to conserve nature and maintain natural resources, resulting in policy which in some cases is actually useful. The US never had greens in government or even any green congresscritters yet got the conservation policy Trabisnikof mentioned. In the EU it's similar with only a small number of elected greens outside of some specific countries like Germany. EU directives get imposed top-down on all countries to surprisingly strong effect and secondarily lead to more country-level larger scale conservation as a follow-up because of the directives' initial success. And yes, there have been attempts to redirect EU farming subsidies into conservation so they should count. As farming is the major land use cause and the main driver of habitat loss together with climate change, subsidising environmentally sustainable farming must be part of conservation - ignoring this means basically giving up on effective conservation of anything not in a protected area. One of the early EU examples was money for letting fields fall fallow to promote declining farmland biodiversity in addition to reducing overproduction. This turned out to be something of a failure because taking intensive heavily fertilised farmland out of cultivation and expecting low-to-mid nutrient communities to magically appear in a few years is just nuts. Right now, according to the common agricultural policy, we'll spend tens of billions of euros on various environmentally-motivated farming subsidies which are advertised as quote:'Greening' of 30% of direct payments to farmers will be linked to three environmentally-friendly farming practices: crop diversification, maintaining permanent grassland and conserving 5%, and later 7%, of areas of ecological interest as from 2018 or measures considered to have at least equivalent environmental benefits. Permanent grassland is meh, it may or may not be anything more than a biodiversity desert (but it's green and nice to look at) depending on the relevant area's land use history and how the grassland is used. Crop diversification is not really conservation relevant unless you manage to link it to reduced fertiliser or pesticide use. Conserving bits of areas of ecological interest in the middle of farm land is a losing proposition in any scenario where runoff is a thing. "At least equivalent environmental benefits" can at least be reinterpreted to something resembling land sparing, though I don't think this is being done in practice to any meaningful extent. Instead of subsidising organic farming we should subsidise restoring large scale ecosystem processes by having large non-agricultural areas with large animals or other ways of getting moderate levels of disturbance to keep these processes going. Freakazoid_ posted:I would say Monsanto and GMOs are inseparable at this point. I know GMOs could be used for good, but they're currently being used for bad and we need to address that first, even if it means hampering GMOs for a while. In addition, I don't see how Monsanto is any worse than [insert arbitrary multinational corporation], the main ~monsatan~ stories are either really old (yeah let's beat a dead horse about who produced agent orange for the Vietnam war 50 years ago, in other news I think trying to hold the Honourable East India Company accountable for exploiting colonies ca. 1600-1870 in 2015 provides any benefit beyond a symbolic statement) or not actually true (no, Monsanto didn't actually go out of their way to sue people whose fields have some GM crop contamination, and no, Indian farmers aren't killing themselves over evil Monsanto debt specifically). Aside from that, Monsanto and GMOs are only inseparable in the public opinion because idiots keep crowing about how they are one and the same, ignoring the existence of multiple other large agricompanies and public or semi-public research efforts (see e.g.: Rainbow Papaya, Golden Rice, last year's low-methane-emission rice, the African Orphan Crop Genome project).
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Jan 2, 2016 12:24
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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Shayu posted:Do like China and overthrow the western imperialisms and serfdom, become people republic. Improve life of all the poor and save the environment. The rich people no longer will destroy the planet and still we use the phone and heat because lords will not take them from us. I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to say with this word vomit, or where you got "Do like China" from what I posted. Did you have a question about some of the claims I made in that post, or would you like to post an argument?
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Jan 2, 2016 18:54
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Trabisnikof posted:Or bio-sequestration will likely need GMOs to be effective enough by the time we get our act together. Although a lot of people think we still shouldn't be talking about geoengineering. People complaining about GMO's in general need to do some serious fact checking by taking a good look at food production over the last 50 years. Is it all good? Of course not, nothing is. But the amount of good GMO's have done cannot be denied. If it weren't for them, we'd be facing really big problems already. All this blind GMO hate seems to originate from the same branch of environmental activism that is less and less about science and facts and more about gaia/mother earth crap. Batham fucked around with this message at 19:28 on Jan 2, 2016 |
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Jan 2, 2016 19:24
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Batham posted:People complaining about GMO's in general need to do some serious fact checking by taking a good look at food production over the last 50 years. Is it all good? Of course not, nothing is. But the amount of good GMO's have done cannot be denied. If it weren't for them, we'd be facing really big problems already. A big part of it is anti corporatism too, see goon on last page saying monsanto and GMOs are 'inseparable'.
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Jan 2, 2016 19:50
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gently caress You And Diebold posted:A big part of it is anti corporatism too, see goon on last page saying monsanto and GMOs are 'inseparable'. the venn diagram of generic anti-corporatism and thinking environmentalism means worshipping mother nature and living in warm embrace with her consists of two concentric circles 
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Jan 2, 2016 20:03
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Batham posted:People complaining about GMO's in general need to do some serious fact checking by taking a good look at food production over the last 50 years. Is it all good? Of course not, nothing is. But the amount of good GMO's have done cannot be denied. If it weren't for them, we'd be facing really big problems already. Whether or not this is true hinges on the assumption that allowing hundreds of millions (billions?) of people to subsist in abject lifelong poverty is an objective "good", compared to them never existing due to a lack of carrying capacity in the food supply. Personally I consider Norman Borlaug to be in the top five creators of human misery in the history of our species, and a fine example of the road to hell being paved with good intentions. 
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Jan 2, 2016 20:46
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Rime posted:Whether or not this is true hinges on the assumption that allowing hundreds of millions (billions?) of people to subsist in abject poverty is an objective "good", compared to them never existing due to a lack of carrying capacity in the food supply. Human birth rates increase, not decrease, in the face of adverse conditions. Also are you advocating intentionally starving people to death as active population control 
suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 20:51 on Jan 2, 2016 |
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Jan 2, 2016 20:47
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blowfish posted:Human birth rates increase, not decrease, in the face of adverse conditions. There's too many people living on earth, but truly it's the poor people who are at fault for existing. I wonder if that same logic extends to vaccinations as well.
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Jan 2, 2016 23:35
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computer parts posted:There's too many people living on earth, but truly it's the poor people who are at fault for existing. I was pretty clear that it's Norman Borlaugs fault, and he wasn't very poor. The poor can't help being born into irreversible poverty and dying young after knowing nothing except misery and toil, but it's possible to prevent that from happening to billions in the first place. Borlaug hosed up big time. He introduced agricultural practices which allowed for a population boom in undeveloped nations with no ability to support those people economically, and which utilized farming methods which have proved ruinous to the environment as the decades have worn on (rendering it increasingly difficult to grow enough food to support these subsisting masses of humanity). You'd have to be morally and ethically bankrupt to see any of this as a good thing.
Rime fucked around with this message at 23:57 on Jan 2, 2016 |
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Jan 2, 2016 23:51
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Rime posted:I was pretty clear that it's Norman Borlaugs fault, and he wasn't very poor. 
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Jan 3, 2016 00:03
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Rime posted:I was pretty clear that it's Norman Borlaugs fault, and he wasn't very poor. Ah yes. If only we'd allowed millions to die in squalor and poverty we could have saved millions from squalor and poverty. This is either a twisted form of utilitarian logic rampaging beyond the bounds of all reason or the shallow rationalizations of a sociopath.
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Jan 3, 2016 01:10
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Squalid posted:Ah yes. If only we'd allowed millions to die in squalor and poverty we could have saved millions from squalor and poverty. This is either a twisted form of utilitarian logic rampaging beyond the bounds of all reason or the shallow rationalizations of a sociopath. The green revolution and widespread use of inorganic fertilizers did nothing to alleviate poverty or squalor, it simply added exponentially more bodies to the pile. Where once you had extremely poor people making do with subsistence farming, and dying of starvation, now you have double or triple the number of extremely poor people growing poorer to buy the specialized materials required to produce their crops and dying of starvation in unprecedented numbers. Materials which have quite literally salted the earth they are being used on, and are rendering it unable to produce crops due to a build up of salts and contaminants. This doesn't even take into account the famine events sparked by decade-long droughts or disastrous monsoon seasons brought on by global warming, these deaths rest purely on the few who continue to believe this course of action was in any way wise. If saving a few million lives yesterday to instead watch hundreds of millions die in coming decades isn't sociopathic (or at the very least, criminally short sighted), then frankly I do not know what is. In any case, that genie has long escaped the bottle and there is little we can do to change the tragedy already underway in the developing world. 
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Jan 3, 2016 01:26
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Rime posted:I was pretty clear that it's Norman Borlaugs fault, and he wasn't very poor. 
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Jan 3, 2016 01:27
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Rime posted:I was pretty clear that it's Norman Borlaugs fault, and he wasn't very poor. If only the rich man had kept his technology from the grubby poors, then they wouldn't be in poverty.
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Jan 3, 2016 01:29
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Rime posted:I was pretty clear that it's Norman Borlaugs fault, and he wasn't very poor. .....I'm a little confused here. I understand the issues environmentally that you are addressing, but how does increased crop yields and decreased need to use pesticide and herbicide use that coincides with GMOs mean his advances are a bad thing? CommieGIR fucked around with this message at 01:34 on Jan 3, 2016 |
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Jan 3, 2016 01:30
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"Sorry black Africans, but for the good of the world you need to keep watching your children die young.  "
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Jan 3, 2016 01:32
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Borlaug himself said it best: "Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things"
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Jan 3, 2016 01:48
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CommieGIR posted:.....I'm a little confused here. I understand the issues environmentally that you are addressing, but how does increased crop yields and decreased need to use pesticide and herbicide use that coincides with GMOs mean his advances are a bad thing? Population booms don't trickle off as the food supply does, and Borlaug dropped the biggest crop yield advancements since the industrial revolution on the world and then peace'd out. These crop yields dramatically increased population growth in undeveloped nations, because god forbid any government anywhere take steps to stop humans breeding like vermin (see reactions in this thread), population growth which continues to this day. Unfortunately, these agricultural practices have a creeping destructive effect on the growing medium, thus reducing crop yields in the long-term. This would have been disastrous on its own, but now climate change is amplifying the effects with things like decade-long droughts. From the man himself: Norman Borlaug posted:"Africa, the former Soviet republics, and the cerrado are the last frontiers. After they are in use, the world will have no additional sizable blocks of arable land left to put into production, unless you are willing to level whole forests, which you should not do. So, future food-production increases will have to come from higher yields. And though I have no doubt yields will keep going up, whether they can go up enough to feed the population monster is another matter. So what did he do? Tossed his miracle out there and just prayed that somebody pulled something better out of their hat down the road, lest hundreds of millions of people starve to death. He knew what would happen without population control measures. He knew it would do nothing except increase the number of people living in squalor and "knowing the physical sensation of hunger". He knew he was kicking the can down the road and consigning masses to misery and death in the future. gently caress that guy.
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Jan 3, 2016 01:52
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Protip: Comparing humans to vermin, especially non-white people, make you seem like a huge racist.
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Jan 3, 2016 01:53
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Rime posted:Population booms don't trickle off as the food supply does, and Borlaug dropped the biggest crop yield advancements since the industrial revolution on the world and then peace'd out. These crop yields dramatically increased population growth in undeveloped nations, because god forbid any government anywhere take steps to stop humans breeding like vermin (see reactions in this thread), population growth which continues to this day. No, this is a really stupid take on advances in plant breeding and food crops. Blaming Norman Bourlag for population booms is really petty and makes zero sense. Also, blaming Norman for loving Climate Change? That's a riot. You aren't even using that quote in the correct context, he was BERATING people for failing to help provide better, tougher crops that could allow African nations to become an independent food providers. Africa's issues stem from nearly non-stop civil war and genocide, not freaking advances in food crops. Holy poo poo. computer parts posted:Protip: Comparing humans to vermin, especially non-white people, make you seem like a huge racist. Check out his probation record. He really is a loving racist. CommieGIR fucked around with this message at 01:59 on Jan 3, 2016 |
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Jan 3, 2016 01:55
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computer parts posted:Protip: Comparing humans to vermin, especially non-white people, make you seem like a huge racist. humans are a blight on this planet hth edit: btw the solution to famine is not make more mouths to feed further down the road Marijuana Nihilist fucked around with this message at 02:02 on Jan 3, 2016 |
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Jan 3, 2016 01:59
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Oh, of course, it's extremely racist to think that hundreds of millions of people, of any nationality, dying of starvation in abject squalor is loving horrifying and should have been avoided at all costs.
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Jan 3, 2016 02:05
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Rime posted:Oh, of course, it's extremely racist to think that hundreds of millions of people, of any nationality, dying of starvation in abject squalor is loving horrifying and should have been avoided at all costs.  Yes, let's blame the guy who tried to solve that by increasing crop yields. Bravo.Y'know, I suspect getting the Catholic Church to promote Birth Control in Africa, where they currently fight against birth control and safe sex methods, MIGHT have more to do with that than blaming the guy who strove to solve food issues directly impacting those things. Marijuana Nihilist posted:edit: btw the solution to famine is not make more mouths to feed further down the road Norma Bourlag did not advance crop methods and then say "Go ahead and gently caress away, you guys. You're golden" and its incredibly ignorant to even attempt to blame him for overpopulation. Correlation does not imply causation. CommieGIR fucked around with this message at 02:43 on Jan 3, 2016 |
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Jan 3, 2016 02:07
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Rime posted:The green revolution and widespread use of inorganic fertilizers did nothing to alleviate poverty or squalor, it simply added exponentially more bodies to the pile. Where once you had extremely poor people making do with subsistence farming, and dying of starvation, now you have double or triple the number of extremely poor people growing poorer to buy the specialized materials required to produce their crops and dying of starvation in unprecedented numbers. Materials which have quite literally salted the earth they are being used on, and are rendering it unable to produce crops due to a build up of salts and contaminants. This doesn't even take into account the famine events sparked by decade-long droughts or disastrous monsoon seasons brought on by global warming, these deaths rest purely on the few who continue to believe this course of action was in any way wise. el oh el. Ace level trolling here. It's objectively false that a greater proportion of the global population is dying or in poverty today than 60 years ago. A) more food != more babies. Humans aren't loving minnows you muppet. Malthusian logic is wrong and has been for decades. B) More food actually means fewer babies because well fed people make better, longer term decisions. Decisions like family planning. C) There's a bunch of other reasons you're wrong but rather than go into it the high level take-away is that poo poo's complicated therefore your simplistic understanding is wrong. QED
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Jan 3, 2016 02:38
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"Alleviating suffering only leads to greater suffering" is certainly a convenient worldview for the comfortable. Though I'm pretty sure that is all trolling, it's at least an interesting way to do it -- got any citations to back up the central point that crop yield advancements in underdeveloped areas resulted in population booms that can't be supported? I'd expect the opposite.
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Jan 3, 2016 07:31
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