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Iron Twinkie posted:Does that apply to the nearly 80% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck? My point is is that if people lowering their carbon footprints on an individual basis was a viable solution, it would have been done already. Bear in mind also that when we talk about individual carbon footprints, we're still negotiating on the margins. Just 100 companies are responsible for 71% of the carbon we've put into the atmosphere. eventually you have to stop pretending you're some kind of abstract rational actor homo economics policy decider and start just taking SOME responsibility for your actions
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Oct 2, 2018 21:37
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A 265 foot storm surge would probably defeat any seawall that NYC builds however.
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Oct 2, 2018 21:41
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Trabisnikof posted:Edit: regardless, NYC is one of the cities leading the charge to respond and mitigate climate change. You know why? It is huge and rich as gently caress. Of course they're going to build the seawalls to protect Wall Street. Will there be poor neighborhoods hosed? Probably. But the city is responding to climate change. Great, thank you. I think we could have saved a lot of each other's time if the solution started at the rich should live in hermetically sealed domes and the poor should die.
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Oct 2, 2018 21:46
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Trabisnikof posted:But the city is responding to climate change. LEED Gold is mandatory for all new construction but the island's going to sink under all their weight.  Call it a wash. Just move to Philly instead; buy a loft, start a noise band, get six or seven roommates, eat hummus with them, book some gigs, burn down an Applebee's, listen to Animal Collective, start some kind of salsa company.
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Oct 2, 2018 22:45
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Iron Twinkie posted:Great, thank you. I think we could have saved a lot of each other's time if the solution started at the rich should live in hermetically sealed domes and the poor should die. just lashing around randomly makes for a far less entertaining troll than say qkkl's trolling by density or fishmech's technically correctness* *its been more hit or miss recently
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Oct 2, 2018 23:16
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Alright, maybe I can take a few steps back and try and do a better job and describe where I'm coming from here. Let's start with a rather timely Guardian article. Save us the smugness over 2018's heatwaves, environmentalists https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/02/save-us-the-smugness-over-2018s-heatwaves-environmentalists quote:The reflexive condescension of environmentalism that looks down on those working in industry is precisely what we do not need. Working people whose livelihoods and families depend on resource extraction have no time for catastrophism, and defaulting to that desire sets back climate justice movements immeasurably. My frustrations around climate change discussions is that there is a whole hell of a lot of punching down. It's almost never about building a better future but about how the already marginalized have it too good. Yes you've been excluded from the last 40 years of econimic gains, your water is poison, your food is prepackaged garbage, you will work until you die, you are paying for health insurance you can't afford to use, and live in constant fear that one random push will send you spiraling into the abyss, but we're going to need you to live behind a fettid dumpster and take your place amoungst the excrement and rats that are your kin. Telling people that their lives don't suck enough isn't helpful. It doesn't accomplish anything other than making the person you're lecturing mad. Climate change is a system wide problem and has to be addressed at a system wide level. The way we grow and distribute food has to be changed at a system wide level to be less carbon intensive and more sustainable. Switching to clean, renewable energy has to be handled at a system wide level. If we want people to switch to electric cars for example then we need to build charging stations and other infrastructure to support that. gently caress, if we really wanted to get to as close to 100% adoption rates on electric cars as possible we could hand them out in exchange for people turning in their gasoline vehicles. You wouldn't have to force people to reduce their carbon footprints in that case. You'd have wait lists and people standing in lines barely being able to wait to get rid of the gas guzzling bombs most of us are stuck driving.
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Oct 3, 2018 01:07
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lol so not reading that crybaby poo poo
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Oct 3, 2018 01:33
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the environmental edition of "trump voters love him cuz you keep calling them racist"
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Oct 3, 2018 01:33
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Hello Mr. & Ms. Public, The last 100 years were spent indoctrinating you, your parents and your grandparents into an unsustainable way of life. You have been taught to judge one another based on your monetary worth. Your worldview has been shaped by a cold war that pitted a nepotistic, greedy, oligarchical capitalistic liberal system against a nepotistic, tyrannical, state-controlled socialist system. The echoes of this conflict still inform policy decisions today, and demonize any attempts towards collective action. NOW SAVE THE loving PLANET YOU SELFISH SHITHEADS 
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Oct 3, 2018 01:49
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Iron Twinkie posted:Climate change is a system wide problem and has to be addressed at a system wide level. The way we grow and distribute food has to be changed at a system wide level to be less carbon intensive and more sustainable. Switching to clean, renewable energy has to be handled at a system wide level. If we want people to switch to electric cars for example then we need to build charging stations and other infrastructure to support that. gently caress, if we really wanted to get to as close to 100% adoption rates on electric cars as possible we could hand them out in exchange for people turning in their gasoline vehicles. You wouldn't have to force people to reduce their carbon footprints in that case. You'd have wait lists and people standing in lines barely being able to wait to get rid of the gas guzzling bombs most of us are stuck driving. Yes surely the problem is that we haven't introduced these common sense solutions and not that a majority of people in the most polluting countries either don't believe they are necessary because they refuse to recognize the problem or simply don't want to pay for it because they're banking on the problem not affecting them during their lifetimes.
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Oct 3, 2018 04:19
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Jonah Galtberg posted:how expensive is seawater extraction and how long will it take to develop mature industrial-scale processes for extracting it We have several hundred years to figure it out since there's plenty of conventional mining left to do. I guess my point was that we have effectively unlimited Uranium reserves worldwide.
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Oct 3, 2018 04:29
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Papal Infallibility posted:Yes surely the problem is that we haven't introduced these common sense solutions and not that a majority of people in the most polluting countries either don't believe they are necessary because they refuse to recognize the problem or simply don't want to pay for it because they're banking on the problem not affecting them during their lifetimes. There’s a massive unbacked assumption behind this argument that decisions concerning regulation and such are made according to the will of ”a majority of people”. Somewhere between a quarter and the majority of people don’t even vote, depending on the place and election. The reality is that in absence of mass resistance to acting against popular will, the political process is handled by people who have good reason to think that they and even their grandchildren will be fine, for whom climate change is an ethical rather than existential challenge. A secondary concern. It’s why instead of actually being afraid and aggressively demanding that things get done, talking heads instead look for ways to relieve themselves of guilt. The solution for them doesn’t *have to* be fixing the actual problem, denying that it exists or convincing yourself that nothing can be done or you did everything you could is close enough. And resistance obviously requires a lot of effort and comes with the danger of getting assaulted, jailed and/or fired, so people need to be really feeling the effects before the motivation is there for non-activists. uncop fucked around with this message at 05:31 on Oct 3, 2018 |
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Oct 3, 2018 05:06
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EdithUpwards posted:Centralization is good and people who are opposed to high density living are morons on par with the anti-nuke crowd.
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Oct 3, 2018 05:28
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KetTarma posted:We have several hundred years to figure it out since there's plenty of conventional mining left to do. I guess my point was that we have effectively unlimited Uranium reserves worldwide. at current rates of consumption, sure there's hundreds of years worth of uranium left in the ground i wonder how much you'd have to divide that down by when you're using it to power the entire world?
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Oct 3, 2018 06:24
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Breeder reactors could power the entire world for a very very long time with the amount of fuel we have access to, but this entire discussion is always completely irrelevant every time it comes up. Nuclear power is too expensive for governments to go for and too scary for the average incredibly stupid person to accept. Fuel concerns don't rate compared to the actual issues that nuclear would have to overcome to be viable. To make any difference in time for it to matter the amount of action required would be beyond anything that's anywhere near realistic in any way.
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Oct 3, 2018 07:06
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ChairMaster posted:Breeder reactors could power the entire world for a very very long time with the amount of fuel we have access to, but this entire discussion is always completely irrelevant every time it comes up. Nuclear power is too expensive for governments to go for and too scary for the average incredibly stupid person to accept. Fuel concerns don't rate compared to the actual issues that nuclear would have to overcome to be viable. To make any difference in time for it to matter the amount of action required would be beyond anything that's anywhere near realistic in any way. don't try to separate nerds who loving Love Science from their deeply held mistrust of democracy and human interactions
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Oct 3, 2018 07:09
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I don't care about science any more or less than politics or democracy or human interaction, I just think it's worth being realistic regarding all aspects of the world we live in.
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Oct 3, 2018 07:18
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If nuclear is more expensive than renewable, why not just go for renewable? Is it the inconsistencies due to weather?
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Oct 3, 2018 10:05
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Renewables has its own score of logistical and technical problems.
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Oct 3, 2018 10:50
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Cakebaker posted:If nuclear is more expensive than renewable, why not just go for renewable? Is it the inconsistencies due to weather? the most sane proposals i've seen to get fossil fuels out of our electric grid, in lieu of a breakthrough in battery/capacitor technology, use nuclear power as a base-demand power source and various renewable's to supplement. apparently it's a bitch to spin-up controlled nuclear reactions at-will. lazy atoms.
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Oct 3, 2018 11:07
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Cakebaker posted:If nuclear is more expensive than renewable, why not just go for renewable? Is it the inconsistencies due to weather? Well, "they" are, there's never been more investment or faster growth in renewables than now. Unfortunately that only amounts to I don't know maybe 10% increase in capacity each year and nobody knows how long that is going to be sustained or if it can be ramped up without massive investment and time. 70% of all power investment over the last two years (I think) has been into renewables, and it's fair to assume we'd have to increase spending a huge amount over this to increase the rate of capacity growth. As of 2017 all sources of renewable energy account for around 18% of all power consumed. I don't know the relative rate of increase. From the above it's pretty simply that expanding renewables to cover the power production from coal, oil and gas isn't happening near quickly enough, might not ever start happening quickly enough and might for all we know be more expensive and more challenging (and more dangerous and more carbon emissive) than building out nuclear alternatives. There's also a question of if renewables can even provide the kind of power we need to start thinking about carbon capture while maintaining modern society and standard of living while raising the third world into better living conditions. From what I've read, they physically (as in the laws of physics prohibit it) cannot. Maybe that's a question for the power generation megathread which I ought to follow more closely. But I'm hardly an expert, that's just what google tells me so I'd feel better if the people who actually work on and know about this poo poo commented on it.
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Oct 3, 2018 11:24
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Cakebaker posted:If nuclear is more expensive than renewable, why not just go for renewable? Is it the inconsistencies due to weather? this is one of the hardest parts for people to get their heads around what things are "expensive" or not is a function of how they are both priced and produced under our current "capitalist" system, not some abstract truth. the price of oil coal and gas fails to account for the costs of carbon, while the price of nuclear wildly over accounts for the risk of disaster. my favorite example of how dumb this can get is offshore wind, where its easier to to deal with the loving sea than to sort out land rights and transmission rights of way in coastal america. the u.s. navy and the chinese govt have proven very clearly that nuclear does not have to cost what we have made it cost, it is purely a function of our social/economic order, not some underlying truth of the technology. the point here is not even to be pro-nuclear, its to point out that saying something is "expensive" under our current system is almost completely missing the point that our current system PRICES WRONG
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Oct 3, 2018 13:52
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StabbinHobo posted:this is one of the hardest parts for people to get their heads around Yeah, this is actually the most important point that really can be made in relation to climate change and our potential efforts to mitigate it: Nothing "costs" anything but labour and parts. To even begin to effectively tackle our issues you have to step outside of the box that is called capitalism and realize that money is not a resource and there is no shortage of money that makes any of this impossible. We live inside a capitalist paradigm and we keep mistakenly building on its very stupid an inapplicable assumptions to formulate how we even analyze the problem, much less try to find solutions. Question your assumptions if you think of climate change in terms of monetary cost or markets. These assumptions didn't come from a place of realism and physics to begin with, and I'm even guilty of doing this in my last post.
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Oct 3, 2018 14:02
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Good answers, thanks!
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Oct 3, 2018 14:29
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Nice piece of fish posted:To even begin to effectively tackle our issues you have to step outside of the box that is called capitalism and realize that money is not a resource and there is no shortage of money that makes any of this impossible. We live inside a capitalist paradigm and we keep mistakenly building on its very stupid an inapplicable assumptions to formulate how we even analyze the problem, much less try to find solutions. and as stabbing hobo stated similarly in the post previous. this is the big thing, and what is so difficult. it is extremely, extremely, extremely difficult to do this. everything is coached in these terms. i attempted to approach this in the retail collapse thread and it was nearly ignored as a concept, and instead i was shouted down regarding a stupid cage. which if you follow a few posts before and after this is this weird, surreal ironic parody of discourse quote:im depressed lol posted: Edit: the real horror i imagine is framing the debate in terms of a 'carbon budget', in our current economic paradigm, implies that if we overshoot we'll just get a planetary federal reserve bailout. oh i guess we'll borrow some environment from venus, or mars... oh. im depressed lol fucked around with this message at 15:38 on Oct 3, 2018 |
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Oct 3, 2018 15:30
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It's loving insidious, because I can feel myself falling into the trap again and again when I think about governmental response and interest groups and... it's just so ingrained it's unreal.
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Oct 3, 2018 16:13
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StabbinHobo posted:the u.s. navy and the chinese govt have proven very clearly that nuclear does not have to cost what we have made it cost, it is purely a function of our social/economic order, not some underlying truth of the technology. I don't think you can really cite the US Navy as an example on cost, since we don't have a clear picture of what their reactors actually cost and their plants are vastly different in size anyway. As for the Chinese, you're correct that the Chinese are able to built plants ~30-50% cheaper than in the US (pro-nuclear source, but shouldn't matter since its nuke-to-nuke comparisons): http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspects/economics-of-nuclear-power.aspx
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Oct 3, 2018 18:10
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capitalism is a malignancy that must be excised, burned, or poisoned, whatever it takes
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Oct 3, 2018 18:11
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In general, new power is cheaper in China and India because of their economic structures (pro-renewables source, but again renewables-to-renewables): https://www.irena.org/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Publication/2018/Jan/IRENA_2017_Power_Costs_2018.pdf 
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Oct 3, 2018 18:25
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Anyone know much about thorium reactors and how far off we are? It's nuclear with thorium as the fuel. Compared to uranium, it's safer, cleaner and cheaper. But there's technical hurdles we still haven't cleared. Anyone following this?
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Oct 3, 2018 18:59
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"what about <keyword technology>" is another form of completely missing the point
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Oct 3, 2018 19:29
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Accretionist posted:Anyone know much about thorium reactors and how far off we are? It's a breeder reactor technology. Breeder reactions are 100% infinity times better in every way than nonbreeder reactors to a degree that verges on comedy but like, the US agreed to not use most types of breeder reactors and vaguely extends that to not using any other kind either.
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Oct 3, 2018 19:29
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:It's a breeder reactor technology. Breeder reactions are 100% infinity times better in every way than nonbreeder reactors to a degree that verges on comedy but like, the US agreed to not use most types of breeder reactors and vaguely extends that to not using any other kind either. If that was true (even ignoring your hyperbole), you'd think other countries (like China) would be building a bunch of new breeder reactors instead of building other fission designs. Maybe instead fuel costs are a smaller part of the cost of operating a plant than you think, operating expenses for breeders are higher than you think, and capital costs are a larger part of the cost of nuclear than you think.
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Oct 3, 2018 19:37
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Trabisnikof posted:If that was true (even ignoring your hyperbole), you'd think other countries (like China) would be building a bunch of new breeder reactors instead of building other fission designs. Other countries ARE building a bunch of breeder reactors.
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Oct 3, 2018 20:27
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Tollymain posted:capitalism is a malignancy that must be excised, burned, or poisoned, whatever it takes it's a shame capitalism = my way= only way of life to most people. posts like this read in a psuedo-they-live-sunglasses fashion as: "you're scum, i hate you, die, don't believe any of this" and it's right back to SUV shopping. im depressed lol fucked around with this message at 20:48 on Oct 3, 2018 |
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Oct 3, 2018 20:36
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I tend to agree with the notion that 99% of the bullshit anyone says to do right now is peanuts against climate change. Seems like a few months ago we were having a similar discussion when someone said "Well to stop climate change all we need to do is stop having babies" and it was like well, no what we need are huge, vast, society changing plans and maybe as part of those plans you might if you want to really get controversial talk about how people shouldn't be having like five kids or whatever. But I think pretty much anything that curbs climate change barring some awesome technological breakthroughs is going to be radical and controversial. No more privately owned vehicles, reorganizing not just our way of life but entirely how we organize the spaces we live, moving people out of suburbs and rural areas. Not because a bloo bloo politics, but because the closer we are all packed in together the less miles we have to travel to get to things and things have to travel to get to us. And we can argue against it all we want, but realistically climate change is going to cause the majority of those things to happen anyways its really just how much death and destruction we can handle before we get to that point.
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Oct 3, 2018 20:45
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Nice piece of fish posted:Tuned in to a public broadcasting program on nuclear power yesterday on the state channel. Was pretty interesting. The question of the programme was "Considering climate change, why aren't we switching to nuclear power and how dangerous is it really?". They went to Chernobyl, examined that and Fukujima and Three Mile, interviewed the heads of the major environmental organisations and the best radiation scientists on the globe working with the UN and poo poo, even people who were on-site in Chernobyl. Also we're going to get dumber (or at least less able to think clearly) over time as CO2 levels continue to increase.
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Oct 3, 2018 23:12
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Forced relocation is considered a crime against humanity by the International Criminal Court. Granted the United States withdrew from the treaty and the odds for the US being sent to The Hague is pretty much zero anyway but let's not mince words what we are talking about here. Herding people into ghettos or worse is never good, common sense, or reasonable. It's a pretext (or just text) to exploitation, dehumanization, and genocide. Take a moment to try and imagine what this would look like being done by the people running ICE. That is not an acceptable option. We have to do better and if we can't then our species deserves to be scoured from the face of the Earth. We find a way to get out of this together or gently caress you no one does. For fucks sake, if we accept that we have to upend, rethink, and remake society, can't we take a few extra steps to setup and build infrastructure that doesn't require MAGA hats dragging the undesirables out of their homes? Jesus.
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Oct 3, 2018 23:20
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Maybe the way our brains work is incompatible with what we need to be.
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Oct 3, 2018 23:25
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Doorknob Slobber posted:...Not because a bloo bloo politics, but because the closer we are all packed in together the less miles we have to travel to get to things and things have to travel to get to us... How is that a better plan then just switching everyone to electric vehicles? Jesus Christ. We could spend the equivalent to One Year of the United State's Military Budget to fix our roads and just GIVE people electric cars.
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Oct 3, 2018 23:25
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