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Leave the liquid fuel vehicle infrastructure in place, create the liquid fuel from non-fossil methods.
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Sep 16, 2019 20:12
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How many times are you people going to need to be told that even if cars somehow ran off of nothing but well wishes, the prevalence of single occupant vehicles in western society has turned modern living into a nightmare of gridlock, infrastructure deficits due to unsustainable and extremely environmentally harmful vehicle supported urban sprawl, income inequality due to the massive costs involved in owning and operating a personal vehicle which is often the largest barrier to gainful employment. We need to park our cars and take the bus and only drive when we really really need to or we're all hosed. Doesn't matter if the car runs on gas, or electricity, or fairy dust.
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Sep 16, 2019 20:54
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Like seriously people one of the biggest environmental pieces of news to shake up the BAU narrative in the last year was about the enormous environmental problems we're causing other than, and in addition to, global heating. Biodiversity loss, ecosystem destruction, the extinction of one million species, and so on, are leading us to irreversible biosphere collapse. Part of this is related to and caused by climate change destroying ecosystems. But part of it is not, and is just related to us consuming way more than the planet's carrying capacity. Even if we magically solve climate change, if the solutions we end up with are "carry on as usual but now the products we buy and consume are zero-carbon" then we're still living a life that's nearly as damaging, and we're still going to end up destroying our biosphere, which means destroying the basis for human civilization. Single-occupancy electric vehicles are not the answer, continuing consumption at current levels but changing what we consume is not the answer, because continuing like that, even if we somehow get to negative carbon, still collapses the support systems that let us live our lives. Put simply, it doesn't matter if we solve global warming or not, if our solutions means we collapse the biosphere anyway because we can't stop overconsuming. If we poison the planet and drive a million species to extinction, civilization as we know it will not survive and it absolutely will not matter whether we did it by burning coal until we triggered a feedback loop leading to eight degrees of warming or whether we did it by strip-mining the ocean floor to get lithium to make batteries. It doesn't matter which option we take, because that pattern of environmentally destructive resource extraction to fuel industrial overconsumption is itself slow suicide even if you make it carbon-neutral. Our environmental crisis is larger than just greenhouse gases. Those are obviously a huge part of the problem and any solution has to address them as the top priority, but solving greenhouse gas emissions alone is not enough to save us, and so any proposals for how to solve climate change in order to save our civilization also have to address the giant elephant in the room which is that our current lifestyles of rampant capitalist consumption are unsustainable no matter where we're getting the electricity to power them. That's why the solution absolutely cannot be "replace power plants with solar panels and replace cars with electric cars" because that level of change still leads us to a future where we don't survive. If you want to say "that's politically impossible" then okay, but at least admit that what you're saying is that it's politically impossible to save civilization. Because, again, pretending we can just swap out high-carbon overconsumption for low-carbon overconsumption and that will solve all our problems is a fantasy.
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Sep 16, 2019 21:08
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Unormal posted:Leave the liquid fuel vehicle infrastructure in place, create the liquid fuel from non-fossil methods. lmao
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Sep 16, 2019 21:17
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Didn't see this posted here: The Limits of Clean Energy With a link to this paper: Limits to growth: Can nuclear power supply the world’s needs? quote:Nuclear power advocates can be broadly described in two categories: nuclear realists and nuclear utopians. A nuclear realist suggests something on the order of 1 terawatt of nuclear power as part of the global energy mix, providing security in terms of energy diversity and reduced carbon emissions. Nuclear power is attractive, for example, for highly industrialized populations living on islands with a paucity of natural resources. It can also be argued that nuclear power has a key role to play in meeting emissions targets (Brook, 2012) for mitigating climate change.1 ^^^ Protagonist, this is for you  quote:If a nuclear utopia is not feasible, are we doomed? Is there a competitive, massively scalable alternative to fossil fuels? Yes, and it turns out that the only renewable energy solution that is scalable well beyond 15 terawatts is solar thermal technology (Abbott, 2010). This technology uses large mirrors to focus sunlight on water, creating superheated steam that can generate electricity using a conventional steam turbine connected to a generator. The potential is enormous: The amount of solar power that reaches the planet’s surface is 5,000 times mankind’s current global power consumption, or about 80 petawatts. Obligatory hopeful conclusion. Though it makes sense since solar thermal is a simple process that can be run with abundant materials (polished steel reflectors and tubes, copper wiring for the generator maybe).
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Sep 16, 2019 21:28
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EvilJoven posted:We need to park our cars and take the bus and only drive when we really really need to or we're all hosed. Doesn't matter if the car runs on gas, or electricity, or fairy dust. I think we should go even further and make our cities pedestrian and bike friendly similar to the Netherlands or the London Underground.
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Sep 16, 2019 21:35
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If you're still looking at the problem and believing it can be resolved while also maintaining the density, centralization of goods distribution, standard of living, and population levels, of western nations in 2019 - goons I feel pretty sorry for ya.
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Sep 16, 2019 21:56
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An interesting article relevant to well publicised plans to move to a 100% renewable grid that attempts to quantify how cheap mass storage must become to make that feasible:IEEE posted:Energy storage would have to cost $10 to $20/kWh for a wind-solar mix with storage to be competitive with a nuclear power plant providing baseload electricity. And competing with a natural gas peaker plant would require energy storage costs to fall to $5/kWh. It's nice to have a ballpark value for what would make it work. I haven't read to closely, but I think this ignores the cost of updating the grid.
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Sep 16, 2019 22:54
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Nocturtle posted:An interesting article relevant to well publicised plans to move to a 100% renewable grid that attempts to quantify how cheap mass storage must become to make that feasible: Are the nuclear costs based on estimates or historical figures?
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Sep 16, 2019 23:31
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EvilJoven posted:How many times are you people going to need to be told that even if cars somehow ran off of nothing but well wishes, the prevalence of single occupant vehicles in western society has turned modern living into a nightmare of gridlock, infrastructure deficits due to unsustainable and extremely environmentally harmful vehicle supported urban sprawl, income inequality due to the massive costs involved in owning and operating a personal vehicle which is often the largest barrier to gainful employment. that's a lot of suburbia that is going to have to get violently remodeled and a lot of state budgets decoupled from dealership monopoly bribery and the whole american obsession (and human in general, but particularly) with the car meaning freedom and just an american value i don't disagree, mind you, but the US has been built up around the car since the second world war, cities get by on being density but that's a tiny bit of the country. . .
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Sep 17, 2019 01:44
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What’s this dealerships monopoly?
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Sep 17, 2019 01:48
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Tab8715 posted:What’s this dealerships monopoly? In order to buy a car at a physical location, you must go through a dealer. It's not legal for, say, Ford to sell cars from a store directly to people, instead they have to franchise a dealer and then the dealer can sell cars to people. Government mandated middlemen, as it were.
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Sep 17, 2019 01:54
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vyelkin posted:If you want to say "that's politically impossible" then okay, but at least admit that what you're saying is that it's politically impossible to save civilization. Because, again, pretending we can just swap out high-carbon overconsumption for low-carbon overconsumption and that will solve all our problems is a fantasy. Rime posted:If you're still looking at the problem and believing it can be resolved while also maintaining the density, centralization of goods distribution, standard of living, and population levels, of western nations in 2019 - goons I feel pretty sorry for ya. Lately, I've been getting a small amount of pleasure looking at the blatantly pointless and wasteful aspects of our culture, and thinking, "lol, that won't exist in 100 years." It's amazing that this run of consumerist culture tapped out the earth in about 100 years...yikes. There needs to be a global symposium of scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, faith leaders, and community leaders to reinvent what a meaningful life is versus the American dream of owning more things than your neighbors. Multiple studies show that experiences are more satisfying and rewarding than owning things.
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Sep 17, 2019 02:00
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Tab8715 posted:I think we should go even further and make our cities pedestrian and bike friendly similar to the Netherlands or the London Underground. Biking and extended walking are only going to happen in New England, the west coast up from NorCal, pockets in the Rockies and the northern part of the great lakes. Comparing to Europes finest is uh, what you are talking about takes many decades or centuries to grow. The London tube has been built since the Victorian age, and those nice walkable city cores stem from medieval times.
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Sep 17, 2019 02:14
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sauer kraut posted:Biking and extended walking are only going to happen in New England, the west coast up from NorCal, pockets in the Rockies and the northern part of the great lakes. Of course, I agree and that’s the way things should have been built and now we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place.
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Sep 17, 2019 02:16
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sauer kraut posted:Biking and extended walking are only going to happen in New England, the west coast up from NorCal, pockets in the Rockies and the northern part of the great lakes. So stop subsidizing unsustainable lifestyles by not accounting for the enormous externalities of far-flung and sprawling small settlements. Make people either densify rapidly or move to places that are already dense or on rail lines or both. Much of how North American communities has been built is completely unsustainable and any future where we survive means those places won't exist anymore in their current forms. If that means abandoning suburbs, rural communities, and small towns because people suddenly find out their lifestyles aren't actually affordable when the massive environmental costs are finally factored into the price tag, then so be it. They'll either adapt or die just like the rest of us.
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Sep 17, 2019 02:42
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 This is my bike commute in the morning 1 mile from campus in a town of 100k...absolutely ridiculous. In 2.9 miles, I go through 10-11 traffic lights. Even though biking is faster than driving on this route (biking elsewhere is a death wish), I still get aggravated how horribly designed this place is. Everyone is idling in their cars with the A/C blasting. No one has their windows down. Is this the freedom the automobile promises?
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Sep 17, 2019 03:23
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vyelkin posted:So stop subsidizing unsustainable lifestyles by not accounting for the enormous externalities of far-flung and sprawling small settlements. Make people either densify rapidly or move to places that are already dense or on rail lines or both. Much of how North American communities has been built is completely unsustainable and any future where we survive means those places won't exist anymore in their current forms. If that means abandoning suburbs, rural communities, and small towns because people suddenly find out their lifestyles aren't actually affordable when the massive environmental costs are finally factored into the price tag, then so be it. They'll either adapt or die just like the rest of us. It’s weird how NYC or Boston is more experience than a Houston or Atlanta suburb.
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Sep 17, 2019 03:25
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This may be of interest to the thread https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VH3oGQt9VUo RIP Syndrome posted:^^^ Protagonist, this is for you Aw thanks 
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Sep 17, 2019 04:25
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RIP Syndrome posted:Didn't see this posted here: The Limits of Clean Energy this paper makes a lot of unreasonable assumptions, including the rather curious notion that economies of scale have a higher rate of error and a conflation of political problems with technical ones e.g. waste disposal. some of them are reasonable, but apply pretty much equally to any other energy source. the author also affords solar a hope of technological improvement which they don't offer nuclear when rare earths issues are no longer seen as a problem there don't get me wrong, renewables are important, but we are absolutely going to need a massive increase in nuclear energy generation regardless
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Sep 17, 2019 07:49
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So I’ve read a lot of this thread, and I have a question. I have a 20 something year old car, work from home and often only drive twice a week for grocery’s. My next car (say in the next year) was going to be a used Prius. That’s better right? I know an an ideal world I wouldn’t drive at all, but that is not viable at the moment. Also, diet wise I’m mostly mediterranean, is that the best for doing my part? I take bags to the grocery store, don’t buy heavily plastic things, and so on.
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Sep 17, 2019 08:56
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Yes, you're doing great keep it up. Thank you for helping us to get this pesky climate under control. A few more like you and we've got this.
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Sep 17, 2019 09:33
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sauer kraut posted:Biking and extended walking are only going to happen in New England, the west coast up from NorCal, pockets in the Rockies and the northern part of the great lakes. I know I'm able bodied, but I've lived with bicycle as primary transportation (motorcycle as second) in LA, Austin, Dallas, DC, Richmond, Fairfax, and Savannah. There are so many areas of the USA that are bikeable, one just has to be fit, and ready to be slightly uncomfortable, and do some planning. Small sacrifice for the exercise and cost savings, let alone the climate effects.
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Sep 17, 2019 10:06
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http://en.rfi.fr/contenu/20190917-earth-warm-more-quickly-new-climate-models-showquote:Greenhouse gases thrust into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels are warming Earth's surface more quickly than previously understood, according to new climate models set to replace those used in current UN projections, scientists said Tuesday.
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Sep 17, 2019 13:51
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poopinmymouth posted:I know I'm able bodied, but I've lived with bicycle as primary transportation (motorcycle as second) in LA, Austin, Dallas, DC, Richmond, Fairfax, and Savannah. Our unhealthy population is tied into climate change as the Global Syndemic. Get healthy to help save the planet. quote:These three pandemics—obesity, undernutrition, and climate change—represent The Global Syndemic that affects most people in every country and region worldwide. They constitute a syndemic, or synergy of epidemics, because they co-occur in time and place, interact with each other to produce complex sequelae, and share common underlying societal drivers. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)32822-8/fulltext
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Sep 17, 2019 14:20
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What's with folks being jerks to folks who want to personally improve their habits climate wise ? Yes, it is 90% the fault of corporations and not individuals and we should be picketing outside every concrete maker, petrol refinery and its ilk but being dicks to individuals isn't helpful.
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Sep 17, 2019 15:22
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V. Illych L. posted:this paper makes a lot of unreasonable assumptions, including the rather curious notion that economies of scale have a higher rate of error and a conflation of political problems with technical ones e.g. waste disposal. Let's look at what it actually says: quote:A scale-up to 15,000 reactors could attract even more problems that are not factored. For example, the combinatorial possibilities for human error rapidly increase with scale. They're not talking about economies of scale, but the nonlinear increase in complexity of bigger systems. Let's say you'll have to co-locate more reactors on average (e.g. 20 per site instead of the more typical 4) to reach the target of 15000 reactors (vs. the 500-600 currently in existence). The complexity of tubing and control systems, feedwater intake and outflow, crisis response, etc. doesn't necessarily scale linearly in that situation. quote:some of them are reasonable, but apply pretty much equally to any other energy source. the author also affords solar a hope of technological improvement which they don't offer nuclear when rare earths issues are no longer seen as a problem there I agree with that, but I wasn't making that kind of post. It's more of an exploration of the upper limits on different kinds of generation. There's preciously little of that in the existing debate and plenty of people who go "all nuclear, problem solved" or "all wind, problem solved". But at the scale fossil fuel generation is currently at, each of these may run into limits (e.g. rare earths or lithium) or their own horrendous environmental consequences. The existence of such a limit for nuclear well short of the 15TW we need rings true to me, especially since we can't even agree on where to store the waste after half a century and with a comparatively tiny number of reactors. So, as much nuclear as we can afford, yes, but it won't come close to replacing the generation capacity on its own.
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Sep 17, 2019 15:55
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silicone thrills posted:What's with folks being jerks to folks who want to personally improve their habits climate wise Ever been the new guy trying to do their job right in a workplace where the norm is to slack off as much as possible? How did your coworkers treat you?
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Sep 17, 2019 15:58
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silicone thrills posted:What's with folks being jerks to folks who want to personally improve their habits climate wise It’s every internet leftists dream to finally show everyone that they were right about capitalism! Take that! The thread is extremely hostile and the most aggressive in D&D. The continuous apocalyptic circle jerk is annoying as hell.
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Sep 17, 2019 16:14
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I guess for me I know things are bleak but If I don't personally make any effort then like... what's the point? I may as well just kill myself if I think there's no point in trying to doing anything. Even if my individual contributions mean nothing, it still makes me feel better and whats wrong with that?
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Sep 17, 2019 16:22
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i want to keep playing games until i can't first  if it makes you feel better, it's obviously not nothing, is it
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Sep 17, 2019 16:24
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Tab8715 posted:The continuous apocalyptic circle jerk is annoying as hell. Imagine how annoying the continuous apocalypse is going to be! The point, by the way, is to find and pursue what gives you personal meaning (despite the bleakness). But keep in mind, for some folks (like dead gay comedy forums goons), chuckling along at the stages of grief is a form of catharsis, and even meaning. "The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy!"
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Sep 17, 2019 16:35
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silicone thrills posted:I guess for me I know things are bleak but If I don't personally make any effort then like... what's the point? I may as well just kill myself if I think there's no point in trying to doing anything. Even if my individual contributions mean nothing, it still makes me feel better and whats wrong with that? It’s a distraction at best and moral licensing at worst. We need to do a few things: We need to rebuild solidarity with all the people who have been atomized by our toxic society. Especially the people who work in the industries that are destroying the world. They need our gratitude and respect for all the work they’ve done and retraining for whatever’s next. - Don’t “buy American”, loving unionize and/or get active in your union. Build a network with other unions around you. We need to get all those industries out of politics and we need to develop new structures that mitigate for that consolidation of power. - Don’t just vote, march and disobey and strike until your city, state, and country fix their loving governments. Get arrested along with thousands of other people. We need to rebuild community and make those communities more resilient than they’ve been since like the Renaissance. It’s no coincidence that climate change is happening with all sorts of preventable social diseases like opiate addiction, self-harm, and all sorts of mental illnesses. This is even more necessary now because our food security is under threat and we’ll have hundreds of millions of refugees who will need to be fed, housed and supported even more than the loving oil workers. - volunteer, plant gardens, meet your neighbours and share food with them. Find the loci of loneliness in your community and fight them. We need to understand what parts of the biosphere can be saved locally and let go of the parts that can’t possibly survive. Then we need to redesign our infrastructure so that those parts can help us. - learn the names of some local plants, their uses and food value. Identify people who still have some skills in these areas and work with them. Once you’ve done a few of those, tell me if you have the energy to worry about your lightbulbs and grocery bags.
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Sep 17, 2019 16:40
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Cool to miss the point there bud and my previous post where I said that in a less wordy way. Again, 90% of the problem isn't individuals but given that you can only vote/picket/neighborhood garden so much, individual contributions can make some people feel better. I found that it was easier to start off with individual contributions then once I got comfortable with that, I started going to my neighborhood garden patch and going to meet with others about voting.
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Sep 17, 2019 17:03
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Tab8715 posted:It’s every internet leftists dream to finally show everyone that they were right about capitalism! Take that! Look my goon, study up there says 6-7 degrees of warming within 80 years, that means optimistically 3 degrees withing forty years. Industrial agriculture will begin to experience disruption before that. We're already seeing waves of refugees fleeing central America due to the collapse of subsistence agriculture at barely a degree of warming, leading to the rise of Facism in America. We started seeing the same thing years ago in Europe. We'll be lucky if the Amazon exists in ten years. And hey, that's just carbon. That doesn't touch on how refining enough rare earth's to build pie in the sky battery capacity would create enough toxic waste to cover the Gobi desert, or how we've fished most fish into collapse and are going to happily eat the remainder into extinction, or any of the other thousands of severe ecological cascade failures currently occurring and accellerating across the world while I type this out. You are living in the apocalypse, right now. The peak of human civilization and quality of life was a decade ago. We are all on the downhill slope, picking up speed at a furious pace, while a bunch of wankers who haven't gotten over their normalcy bias whine about how this is antagonistically dramatic and electric vehicles can still save the western middle class lifestyle.
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Sep 17, 2019 17:12
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The issue of winding it all down is politically impossible so people just keep making it worse "everythings hosed, get mine" style. But it's very important that we not risk making some areas radioactive!
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Sep 17, 2019 17:22
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poopinmymouth posted:I know I'm able bodied, but I've lived with bicycle as primary transportation (motorcycle as second) in LA, Austin, Dallas, DC, Richmond, Fairfax, and Savannah. It's much easier to use a bike in Los Angeles now than it was 20 years ago because you can use Metro to extend your range. I also have a folding bike so I don't have to worry about locking it up, I just keep it with me.
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Sep 17, 2019 18:15
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Shame how expensive folding bikes are. Coming back to your bike to either find it completely gone or various pieces missing is a bitch. Luckily almost every job i've had in the last 10 years has had full bike lockers/showers as a company benefit but I know I've not taken my bike certain places because I couldn't think of a place that would be good to lock it up at. Generally bus in those cases.
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Sep 17, 2019 18:19
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Rime posted:Look my goon, study up there says 6-7 degrees of warming within 80 years, that means optimistically 3 degrees withing forty years. Industrial agriculture will begin to experience disruption before that. We're already seeing waves of refugees fleeing central America due to the collapse of subsistence agriculture at barely a degree of warming, leading to the rise of Facism in America. We started seeing the same thing years ago in Europe. We'll be lucky if the Amazon exists in ten years. Rime, you are preaching to the choir. I appreciate your input this thread has literally flipped my worldview upside down. I don’t know how to communicate to you I get it other than that I do. Yet at the same time, telling people were just screwed and gently caress you for driving a Prius is not helpful. And the context wasn’t will driving a Prius save the planet it was will driving a Prius help. And it will the more carbon we emit the worse it gets. Emitting less is a good thing. Actions that reduce emissions are a good thing even as individuals which in the end doesn’t really matter because the only thing that will make a real difference is systemic change.
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Sep 17, 2019 18:31
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| # ? Jun 9, 2024 18:57 |
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It's not "gently caress you for driving a Prius" it's "don't worry about personal lifestyle changes. if you feel like you need to *do something* then political organizing is the only thing worth the time and effort" with a little bit of "lmao we're all hosed no matter what"
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Sep 17, 2019 18:51
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