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Space is a great place to mine poo poo.
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Aug 13, 2018 04:16
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The great jovian guano mine
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Aug 13, 2018 04:20
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:This idea that the human race consistently allocates resources from easiest to hardest in order seems really counter factual. Lining up all the possible actions the human race could do and tackling them first to last seems like maybe something the machine emperor would do once he seized leadership of every country on earth, but it's pretty much never ever been the way anything in human history has ever been done. "X would be cheaper than Y" is a rational reason X should be done before Y but we live in a world that spent almost a billion dollar making hobbit movies no one liked while people lack health care or food to live. People don't operate collectively like that to globally sort what to do in what order. It's long been known that just out right buying entire houses would be cheaper for society than the cost of homelessness, but we apparently have like 500 million other things we are doing before we implement that plan. We have basically never ever operated in ideal order, rarely even in any top down enforced order at all. edit: Like are you coming out as being opposed to buy housing for the homeless because we didn't do that in the past? twodot fucked around with this message at 04:29 on Aug 13, 2018 |
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Aug 13, 2018 04:27
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twodot posted:"Humans have been historically bad at making cost efficient decisions, therefore" what exactly? Abandon the concept of making decisions based on cost efficiency? Abandon the idea that it’s a meaningful way to predict what will happen or even that anyone exists in a position to even decide and implement a one at a time directive for what all humans work on in what order.
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Aug 13, 2018 04:35
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:This idea that the human race consistently allocates resources from easiest to hardest in order seems really counter factual. Lining up all the possible actions the human race could do and tackling them first to last seems like maybe something the machine emperor would do once he seized leadership of every country on earth, but it's pretty much never ever been the way anything in human history has ever been done. "X would be cheaper than Y" is a rational reason X should be done before Y but we live in a world that spent almost a billion dollar making hobbit movies no one liked while people lack health care or food to live. People don't operate collectively like that to globally sort what to do in what order. It's long been known that just out right buying entire houses would be cheaper for society than the cost of homelessness, but we apparently have like 500 million other things we are doing before we implement that plan. We have basically never ever operated in ideal order, rarely even in any top down enforced order at all. I don't really understand what the movie example has to do with what we are talking about but I'll take a stab at it. The problem with your example here is that terraforming a planet would be society as a unified entity striving for an agreed upon goal, whereas the example you gave is not. The people making Hobbit movies and the people worried about lack of health care and food are two different people, its not like the people fighting poverty decided to spend that money making movies. Our society values making movies more than poor people having food and allocated resources appropraitly. The people who make movies spent their money in the way that seemed best, and the people concerned about poverty spent their money in the way that seemed best. Your example of fixing homelessness by buying houses as opposed to our current methods is more interesting. Operating shelters is cheaper in the short term, while buying houses is cheaper in the long term. The problem there is a lack of long term thinking. I would argue that terraforming the moon or mars would be more expensive in both the long and short term than fixing our problems here on earth, and thus it will not be done. I don't see how your point about how society doesn't operate in any top down enforced order has anything to do with what I posted, except to unwittingly confirm my point. Terraforming the moon or tackling global warming would both require a top down enforced order, and in that case the people in charge would absolutly be making rational cost assesments.
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Aug 13, 2018 04:37
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Abandon the idea that it’s a meaningful way to predict what will happen or even that anyone exists in a position to even decide and implement a one at a time directive for what all humans work on in what order.
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Aug 13, 2018 04:39
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Despite being certain that things are out of control and we're going to see unprecedented agony as our civilization enters its death throes over the next decade, I'm now working on a degree in Environmental Engineering at age 30. Mostly because I don't want to work on ropes for pennies my whole life, but also because even if the ship is sinking I would rather die having tried to plug some holes than sat around bitching about how bad the leaks are until I drown. Either start putting up or shut up, basically. You all know my posting record in this thread.
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Aug 13, 2018 05:18
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Grouchio posted:What would be a better way of reducing emissions in Ontario then? I don't want to seem fatalistic. It's quite possible the Liberals win the next federal election and the carbon tax becomes policy long enough for people to get used to it and appreciate its goal. The Liberals recently watered down the proposed tax following the recent conservative electoral win in Ontario, presumably in part due to a fear it was becoming a political liability. This is at least proof that voting matters and can directly affect climate policy, even if it went the wrong direction this time. There are lots of other ways to reduce emissions, and this article does a good job describing the importance of restricting the supply of fossil fuels: Vox posted:It’s time to think seriously about cutting off the supply of fossil fuels It seems obvious to say that people should organize to oppose fossil fuel supply and development. However it's worth pointing out the advantages relative to demand-side restrictions like carbon taxes. In particular while carbon taxes are big easy political targets for conservatives, no-one really likes coal plants and it's much easier politically to regulate or NIMBY them out of existence. In the Canadian context the focused local and political opposition to the Trans Mountain pipeline effectively shut the project down, until fairly recently... Nocturtle fucked around with this message at 05:43 on Aug 13, 2018 |
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Aug 13, 2018 05:24
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Rime posted:Despite being certain that things are out of control and we're going to see unprecedented agony as our civilization enters its death throes over the next decade, I'm now working on a degree in Environmental Engineering at age 30. 
Lampsacus fucked around with this message at 05:49 on Aug 13, 2018 |
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Aug 13, 2018 05:34
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Rime posted:Despite being certain that things are out of control and we're going to see unprecedented agony as our civilization enters its death throes over the next decade, I'm now working on a degree in Environmental Engineering at age 30. I just graduated (at age 40) in May with a bachelor's in environmental engineering. Make sure you do an internship. I didn't and I'm finding it difficult to get my foot in the door anywhere. twodot posted:Abandon the concept of making decisions based on cost efficiency? You're attempting to reason with someone who is totally okay with emitting gigatons of CO2 for entirely superfluous purposes. Is it all that surprising that they're taking a "we can't ever really know anything" stance?
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Aug 13, 2018 08:03
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Nocturtle posted:I don't want to seem fatalistic. It's quite possible the Liberals win the next federal election and the carbon tax becomes policy long enough for people to get used to it and appreciate its goal. The Liberals recently watered down the proposed tax following the recent conservative electoral win in Ontario, presumably in part due to a fear it was becoming a political liability. This is at least proof that voting matters and can directly affect climate policy, even if it went the wrong direction this time. I don't mean to be dismissive, but this article just doesn't work for me. Any economic boost that came from performing this policy would be offset by financial collapse elsewhere, from a world suddenly panicking that it no longer has fossil fuels to run on. You'd have chaos as energy, farming and food supplies would effectively die. You wouldn't be able to implement this sort of thing without at least the resources in place to offset any negative result that comes from it, and that would require huge funding and research into renewable alternatives. Proper emission targeting and carbon tax is a more realistic method of targeting than putting up big barriers and saying "Nope, no more fossil fuels. We're closed."
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Aug 13, 2018 08:43
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sure not everywhere at once, but we very much need to start building and setting the precedents for "hey this public company thinks it has X00 million in 'reserves' underground but no, that fake-money is gone now, sort that poo poo out in bankruptcy court or something" that will be a hot mess for sure, but I think the lesson from the banks is very clear: sooner is better than latter, they will not sort their own poo poo out. edit: we can either nationalize whats left of the 7 sisters & coal co's, or we can bankrupt them. there is no namby pamby naive liberal techno utopist future where exxon and BP turn into wind farmers. every day you wait is another dozen megatons. StabbinHobo fucked around with this message at 14:57 on Aug 13, 2018 |
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Aug 13, 2018 14:52
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Hello Sailor posted:I just graduated (at age 40) in May with a bachelor's in environmental engineering. Make sure you do an internship. I didn't and I'm finding it difficult to get my foot in the door anywhere.  The program I'm applying for has a mandatory co-op, thankfully. Hope you can find something soon, I'm optimistic as I hear the age bias is not nearly as severe in civil engineering fields as it is in Software.
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Aug 13, 2018 15:42
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as long as i can still wear my turban im ok my turban im
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Aug 14, 2018 11:27
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Conspiratiorist posted:Your intentions might be pure but I believe you're the one who doesn't know anything, my good sir. Ambaire posted:What the gently caress did I just read?
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Aug 14, 2018 11:30
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quote:Richard Alley, a glaciologist at Penn State, has described the Earth’s climate as a highly complex system that, based on small forces that are still only dimly understood, tends to lurch from one steady state to another. “You might think of the climate as a drunk,” Alley wrote in his great book The Two Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future, which was first published in 2000. “When left alone, it sits; when forced to move, it staggers.” Also bad news for those of us hoping liberal application of sulfates to the atmosphere could paper over this problem: Science Daily posted:Blocking sunlight to cool Earth won't reduce crop damage from global warming
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Aug 16, 2018 01:11
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We can't control our appetites.
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Aug 16, 2018 01:11
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Do you guys ever have this nagging sense of doom that permeates all other social and political views? I always find myself thinking ‘all this progress on this topic or issue will mean gently caress all when we are living in a mad max hellscape in a century.’
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Aug 16, 2018 02:05
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Burt Buckle posted:Do you guys ever have this nagging sense of doom that permeates all other social and political views? I always find myself thinking ‘all this progress on this topic or issue will mean gently caress all when we are living in a mad max hellscape in a century.’ Yeah, but what are we gonna do? Best to just get moonshine drunk about it. https://youtu.be/lHcEWhbQkEg
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Aug 16, 2018 02:50
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Burt Buckle posted:Do you guys ever have this nagging sense of doom that permeates all other social and political views? I always find myself thinking ‘all this progress on this topic or issue will mean gently caress all when we are living in a mad max hellscape in a century.’ Only in regards to hopefuls, like expecting economic or social progress in regions that will be (likely) rendered uninhabitable during the second half of this century, or the expectations that things will "go back to normal" after whatever current instability passes re political and economic arenas of developed countries.
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Aug 16, 2018 02:58
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Burt Buckle posted:Do you guys ever have this nagging sense of doom that permeates all other social and political views? I always find myself thinking ‘all this progress on this topic or issue will mean gently caress all when we are living in a mad max hellscape in a century.’ Yes but then I  and feel better
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Aug 16, 2018 03:08
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Burt Buckle posted:Do you guys ever have this nagging sense of doom that permeates all other social and political views? I always find myself thinking ‘all this progress on this topic or issue will mean gently caress all when we are living in a mad max hellscape in a century.’ my suggestion is to find the bottom of the floodplain closest to you, and plant it full of dense water-tolerant swamp trees. in five years when everything is underwater, the trees will still be standing, half-submerged and most likely alive; they will have become what is known as a hammock, an island with living roots that provides a sanctuary above the water for roosting birds like egrets and ibises
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Aug 16, 2018 11:07
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https://twitter.com/LasVegasSun/status/1029880420156895233?s=19quote:DENVER — A vital reservoir on the Colorado River will be able to meet the demands of Mexico and the U.S. Southwest for the next 13 months, but a looming shortage could trigger cutbacks as soon as the end of 2019, officials said Wednesday.
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Aug 16, 2018 12:00
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Burt Buckle posted:Do you guys ever have this nagging sense of doom that permeates all other social and political views? I always find myself thinking ‘all this progress on this topic or issue will mean gently caress all when we are living in a mad max hellscape in a century.’ I live with the hope that I'll live to see the paid climate deniers shills and their backers get a measure of justice as the poo poo continues to hit the fan.
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Aug 16, 2018 16:21
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Burt Buckle posted:Do you guys ever have this nagging sense of doom that permeates all other social and political views? I always find myself thinking ‘all this progress on this topic or issue will mean gently caress all when we are living in a mad max hellscape in a century.’ I do believe that the environment is a more important issue than...well everything. Progrees against racism, sexism, income inequality....don't really matter if there is no planet to live and everyone is dead. A lot of people I talk to don't think about it that way because racism and sexism etc affects them now and in tangible ways.
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Aug 16, 2018 16:28
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Drastically reducing income inequality -- hell, let's just destroy capitalism and institute global full communism -- would go a massive way towards mitigating climate change.
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Aug 16, 2018 17:25
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friendbot2000 posted:I do believe that the environment is a more important issue than...well everything. Progrees against racism, sexism, income inequality....don't really matter if there is no planet to live and everyone is dead. A lot of people I talk to don't think about it that way because racism and sexism etc affects them now and in tangible ways. Climate change affects them tangibly right now, too. Live on the east coast of the US? Enjoy your hurricanes. The west coast? Enjoy your wildfires. Central US? Enjoy your alternating drought/flood precipitation patterns. Sure, you were getting them anyway, but now you get them more frequently and/or more intensely. It's just hard for the average person to notice because it's a slow rate of change.
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Aug 16, 2018 17:34
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Burt Buckle posted:Do you guys ever have this nagging sense of doom that permeates all other social and political views? I always find myself thinking ‘all this progress on this topic or issue will mean gently caress all when we are living in a mad max hellscape in a century.’ Yes, every day.
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Aug 16, 2018 19:56
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Perry Mason Jar posted:Drastically reducing income inequality -- hell, let's just destroy capitalism and institute global full communism -- would go a massive way towards mitigating climate change. Wow, it's harder to say something more wrong. There is not a single example of a time/place where increasing living standards didn't result in significantly increased greenhouse gas emissions. Not one. Poor people are far better for the environment than rich people, it's really odd you would make a statement so profoundly at odds with reality and sense-- I mean this is incredibly basic stuff: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/25/business/china-davos-climate-change.html People move out of poverty and then immediately consume far more meat and resources than before. Also communist countries have not been historically been any better environmentalists than capitalist countries, in fact the USSR was one of the worst environmental offenders ever. https://thediplomat.com/2014/10/how-the-soviet-union-created-central-asias-worst-environmental-disaster/ quote:The Aral Sea, which is actually classified as a lake, has been steadily shrinking since the 1960s following Soviet irrigation efforts. The lake, which lies between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, began suffering its current fate due to a Soviet-era economic plan that sought to irrigate the nearby desert in Uzbekistan to prompt greater economic output. For a short time, Uzbekistan became the world’s largest exporter of cotton. This economic boom would not have been possible without the Soviet effort to divert water from the rivers that fed the Aral Sea — the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya. As a result of that human intervention beginning in the 1960s, the lake began to slowly recede. By 2007, the Aral Sea had shrunk to 10 percent of its original size. According to NASA, this precipitated a broader economic and environmental crisis. Just one of a billion different things they did that was a disaster -- suffice to say if you think communism has a good track record in this regard you don't know history. I mean communism doesn't stop people from wanting things or wanting higher standards of living it just has never worked that way. And more things, regardless of the economic organization, basically necessarily means more GHG emissions. Again lets look at China, which has 18% of the worlds population and 28% of the worlds consumption of meat: http://www.agriculture.gov.au/SiteC...in-china-v2.pdf quote:A number of studies have shown that the increase in consumer income in fastgrowing More rich = way more meat consumption is an indisputable fact. People, given the means, love consuming poo poo and always have, there's not a place or time or economic setup where this hasn't been true. The difference was for 99.99999999% of humanity there were < 1 billion people on the planet and for most of that there were like 100-200 million. The idea that we wave a wand and poof humans no longer act as they have acted for tens of thousands of years is magical thinking that has utterly no evidence to back it up. tsa fucked around with this message at 00:27 on Aug 17, 2018 |
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Aug 17, 2018 00:22
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Throughout history increased urban population was tied to increased horse usage until it wasn't. It is possible to improve standards of living while reducing carbon emissions. This has been proven with replete examples, but lets hold up economic behavior of the 1800s as proof of what is and isn't possible.
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Aug 17, 2018 01:06
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Trabisnikof posted:Throughout history increased urban population was tied to increased horse usage until it wasn't. I believe the CO2/person in France is about 50% of that of the USA. I don't think people in France are worse off. Probably better off due to decent health care, mass transit, and delicious pastries.
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Aug 17, 2018 01:10
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Trabisnikof posted:Throughout history increased urban population was tied to increased horse usage until it wasn't. i think impossible-vs-not is a false dichotomy, the truth is: "its *technically* possible but in practice very very hard and only marginally so far. we've mostly just shuffled things around the world" on a sub-century horizon we're not gonna do better than like a 50%/2:1 improvement. we should still totally go for that, it will be an important part of things, but the baaaasic rule that energy-consumption correlates to quality of life, especially for people getting that first few k kwh/yr. StabbinHobo fucked around with this message at 02:52 on Aug 17, 2018 |
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Aug 17, 2018 02:48
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VideoGameVet posted:I believe the CO2/person in France is about 50% of that of the USA. Not 50% it's actually 70% less, and it sucks how little people want to talk about that because of the way it never fits in people's narrative of some weird morality thing that people need to suffer and repent to solve through penance. Instead of a technical problem with real world attainable solutions. France is proof you can solve global warming and have a western life style and that global warming is a solvable problem and that boils certain people's blood that really just want to see the things they declared sinful wiped away.
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Aug 17, 2018 02:53
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it will all be underwater in five years
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Aug 17, 2018 03:29
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Not 50% it's actually 70% less, and it sucks how little people want to talk about that because of the way it never fits in people's narrative of some weird morality thing that people need to suffer and repent to solve through penance. Instead of a technical problem with real world attainable solutions. France is proof you can solve global warming and have a western life style and that global warming is a solvable problem and that boils certain people's blood that really just want to see the things they declared sinful wiped away. Even if every nation on Earth was emitting 70% less carbon we'd still be spewing shitloads of it into the atmosphere. It would definitely be an improvement but to avoid catastrophe we as a species essentially need to be carbon negative right now. Nothing short of severly curtailing the resource consumption of the first world long enough to fully convert the power grid of every nation on Earth to renewables and nuclear will get us where we need to be. It would be nice to slow the increase in depth of the hole we've put ourselves in but someone eventually has to be grown up enough to say "you know maybe we should just stop digging."
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Aug 17, 2018 03:38
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It's clear North American consumption is beyond wasteful, and major emission reductions would still be compatible with a high quality of life. Even if we ultimately need to go carbon negative its silly to worry about at a time when there's so much unnecessary, over-the-top consumption fossil fuel consumption. Related (stolen from the trade war thread):  We REALLY have to stop eating cows and start eating the rich.
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Aug 17, 2018 03:44
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Mazzagatti2Hotty posted:Even if every nation on Earth was emitting 70% less carbon we'd still be spewing shitloads of it into the atmosphere. It would definitely be an improvement but to avoid catastrophe we as a species essentially need to be carbon negative right now. Is there a reason you feel that is true? No mainstream science says that is the case.
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Aug 17, 2018 04:03
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Is there a reason you feel that is true? No mainstream science says that is the case. I was being hyperbolic, not that it matters much because the work required to get us carbon negative would take generations to achieve, even if we started tomorrow. Future societies are going to be hosed over by the damage we've done already. We're in the "how severely will we be hosed?" phase at this point, and the longer drastic changes to the way humans consume resources are delayed, the more likely the answer is going to be in scientific terms "pretty loving hosed."
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Aug 17, 2018 04:36
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