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There was a time that I lived 2 miles away from work. Driving that distance seemed absolutely pointless, as it was around the time that gas first hit $4 a gallon in these parts. If the weather really sucked, I'd drive because I had a LOT of "face time" with customers and had to be presentable, obviously. And being soaking wet was most certainly not "presentable." Even so, I'd ride my bike to work most days. I figured, it was a short ride. Got me extra exercise and saved me gas money. My coworkers literally thought I was insane. They couldn't even fathom the idea that I rode my bike to work. Nor did they take it well when they realized that I generally rode my bike to run errands whenever possible. I'd ride it to the bank, which was also close, and ride it with a backpack to the store if only needed less things than fit in a backpack. Major grocery runs I took the car, but generally I tried to do it by bike. My car mostly just sat there the majority of the time. They were seriously visibly and noticeably confused that I would actively choose riding my bike for anything that wasn't exercise. Or that I'd ride it to the bike trail instead of driving my car there with a bike on it. The thing of it is, cars have become so deeply ingrained into the cultural fabric of America that removing them is going to be really, really impossible. There is also the problem that bike commuters are frequently viewed as tree-hugging hippies that hate capitalism. If you walk anywhere, ever, people accuse you of having too much time on your hands. Our culture is so geared toward everything faster, right now, that people think you're loving insane if you ever choose not to drive.
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May 31, 2012 08:12
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the kawaiiest posted:Yeah, I feel tremendously uncomfortable, almost like there's something wrong with me, because I don't drive. When I ask for directions, everyone assumes that I'm driving somewhere and looks at me funny when I tell them that I'm walking. Yeah, there was a time that I lost my license due to medical things. Basically, I had a seizure and in this state, that automatically makes you lose your license for half a year. Understandable, really. Don't want people having a seizure at the controls of a heavy machine capable of spreading destruction and havoc. But what really drove me insane was when people assumed that I was just lying to cover up a DUI. It was really, really irritating. Same thing at times where I've walked places. And you're right, people look at you weird and assume you're a drunk that's not allowed to drive or some lazy poor that can't afford a car due to lazy.
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May 31, 2012 09:04
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the kawaiiest posted:Yep. And I bet people would continue to take their cars even if we had kickass public transport, because cars are also a status thing here and not driving means you're a filthy poor or something. Nothing is going to make people stop driving, I literally cannot even imagine this happening. Sucks for me, because I don't know how to drive and don't really want to learn and this is where I'm going to spend the rest of my life. I'd use the everloving gently caress out of public transportation if the US got a good system, for one. I could nap and read on the way to work or not have to worry about driving if I had to be in another state soon or something. And trains are faster than cars. I'd rather ride a bullet train 1,000 miles than drive that goddamned far. Which is another thing I hear. People are like but public transit is so IIIIINCONVEEEENIENT. Like, the idea of waiting ten minutes for a bus is utterly alien to a lot of people. And then they're all like "but I don't want to deal with homeless people and drug addicts." It's like they just want to shut off the outside world and live in their magic bubble where everything is perfect. Makes me facepalm very hard. I hear things like "but what would I do while sitting there waiting for the bus?" I don't know, make small talk with the person behind you? Write text messages? Read a book? Nap? Knit? Feed pigeons? Possibilities are endless. But god drat do they bitch and moan about traffic. Holy poo poo do they moan about traffic. Totally ignoring the fact that if America had a less lovely public transportation network traffic would mysteriously get reduced dramatically. But no, we can't do that sort of thing because MAH TAAAAXES!!!! Which is absurd...if taxes go up to improve public transportation. And you use it. You're spending less on gas. Duh.
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May 31, 2012 11:06
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Your Sledgehammer posted:Problem is that those natural loops (water cycle, nitrogen cycle, etc.) have been formed and refined over literally billions of years, and they work just fine on their own. Trying to improve upon them is going to be a losing battle, and our efforts are necessarily going to be derivative of the work that nature has already done. The problem with those natural processes is that they happen too slowly to meet humanity's current needs. Though yeah, I assume you were being sarcastic on that last statement, but I've met people that actually believe that. They're all "Oh, just dump all that poo poo in the ocean. Thing's huge." Without realizing that's polluting a food source, for one, and for two, the poo poo tossed in the ocean tends to come back one way or another. It's part why sewage treatment plants and indoor plumbing replaced outhouses. Outhouses worked fine, as you just dug a big hole and put a building on it. There'd be an equilibrium point in the underground poo poo pile where the poo poo would decompose away as fast as you were putting it in. It's the basis of landfills. The problem is that the human race, with its current population, is producing more poo poo and garbage than nature can process. We're past the equilibrium point, overall, and the garbage is piling up. Hence, recycling. How long does it take to melt down a broken glass bottle and turn it into another non-broken glass bottle? Not long. However, it takes nature centuries to break down that same bottle. Sure, glass bottles aren't used much these days, but it goes for many, many things. It's faster to turn used paper into clean paper than it is to toss it in a dump and wait for it to turn into trees. Same goes for greenhouse gasses. Earth has a way of dealing with those, though part of that is "well life just changes to meet whatever you throw at it, so whatever...keep farting methane, cows. Earth gives no fucks." Life isn't going to end just because humans warmed the globe up. The issue there, of course, is are we creating a world that we can't survive in. The human race isn't capable of destroying the planet quite yet, but we're making it harder for us to inhabit. But, who knows? If we turn it into some kind of desert hellhole, maybe in 9 million years we'll have a race of intelligent lizard people that are freaking the gently caress out because the planet is getting too cold. ToxicSlurpee fucked around with this message at 16:20 on Jun 5, 2012 |
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Jun 5, 2012 04:43
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Advanced technology kind of can't exist without civilization. The infrastructure required to produce modern goods is complex. Which, of course, means that a tribe of 50 people can't manufacture fancy things like birth control pills and condoms. Given that people like to gently caress, that means having zero to two children per couple isn't likely to happen. As medicine kind of requires modern technology, we get to a higher infant mortality rate than with modern medicine, which leads to the heartache of more babies dying. There's also the problem of an increased likelihood of the mother dying during childbirth. So we'd be back to a situation where the life expectancy of women was shorter than the life expectancy of men, women would be watching more of their babies die, and would probably have less choice about when to become pregnant and how many babies to have.
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Jun 6, 2012 03:19
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sitchensis posted:Well look, if 97% of doctors you saw were saying that your current lifestyle of eating pure lard and chain smoking was seriously going to impact your future ability to be "alive", and the 3% of doctors you saw (who were actually just chiropractors that you paid) said that the other 97% were quacks and that you're just fine, well it stands to reason that agreeing with one or the other would mean you are politicizing this clearly very controversial issue! Who cares, I'm going to die anyway, I might as well enjoy it, even if I will have less time to enjoy than if I did give up my horrible habits.
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May 16, 2014 08:38
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blowfish posted:You lie, CO2 is plant food I feel like a lot of people that think "plants use this so they obviously just need more of it to do better" have never grown anything in their lives. Plants need water and light. Obviously, but some plants just die and rot if you overwater them and there are some plants that grow best in the shade. Hell too much fertilizer can make a plant die. But you know, global warming and ozone depletion are good because more plant food yay! Except that if you increased sun exposure enough poo poo would just catch on fire.
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May 20, 2014 05:24
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Mr. Wynand posted:So what's with the doom&gloom in the OP? (And also that equally alarmist UN report that came out last month) Humanity will pollute itself into non-existence if we don't change our ways/gently caress off to ruin other planets.
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May 20, 2014 23:08
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Mr. Wynand posted:This seems like an exceedingly premature prediction to make for something beyond a generation out. Mass die-offs and the collapse of recognizable civilization sure, but we're a pretty resilient land mammal all things considered, I doubt outright extinction is really on the table. Not that the distinction really matters. We might survive, we might not. The point is that, right now, we are polluting the gently caress out of the rock we live on and are dramatically altering its face. The human race actually requires a rather specific set of environmental circumstances to survive. Evolution and adaptation takes a very, very long time. We've been around for a very, very short amount of time. Now, every time something happens that causes massive amounts of extinction there is a list of things that die off and a list of things that survive. Nature has no obligation to keep any one species alive. Humans are one species out of many and the issues is that right now we are the catastrophe that is remaking the planet. Earth will still be here whether we are or not. We are pretty unlikely to actually destroy our comfy little rock. However, what we are doing is changing it. The changes aren't huge right now but, given 200 years, have the potentially to be absolutely massive. We've already caused a poo poo load of extinctions and we constantly cause more. Worse yet, our population is utterly ballooning, conflicts are breaking out over increasingly scarce resources, and we have invented weapons that have the potential to create yet another mass extinction event literally overnight. We're a resilient land mammal sure but we can only endure so much. There are a poo poo load of things that kill us very dead and if the planet shifts outside of our tolerance and we live nowhere but here we're hosed. The problem with global warming and pollution and what have you is that it has the potential to change the planet into one that we can't survive on.
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May 22, 2014 01:15
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Strudel Man posted:No, it really doesn't. There is no credible climate-change scenario that results in the planet being uninhabitable to humans, and you just sound insane when you start talking about things like this. The worst-case scenario (unlikely as it may be) is civilization collapse, not extinction. Yeah, if we keep up what we're doing now. Our population is still increasing and I guarantee you we can figure out worse ways to damage our surroundings.
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May 22, 2014 02:47
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Strudel Man posted:With all due respect, your 'guarantee' carries absolutely no weight. Baseless apocalyptic rambling only distracts from the dangers that actually exist. The question isn't "can we come up with worse ideas" the question is "will we use them?" Look at human history; we can always come up with something worse. Many of those things we looked at and said "yeah that's a bad idea, let's never use it or never use it again." Mr. Wynand posted:Was there ever actually a time this side of the Paleozoic where humans could not possibly have survived? As long as there is at least some flora/fauna that has some nutritional value to us and isn't outright poisonous it seems you should be able to sustain at least a very small population of humans with hunting and gathering. After all, humans were able to expand outside their original habitat and across the globe long before evolution would have any say in the process. The quality of life and the populations supported in those habitats varied greatly, but it seems there are very very few places where no humans have ever lived. I understand that even during the Triassic–Jurassic extinction event there were was still plenty of edible biomass to go around, even if species diversity took a huge hit. Human hunters could in theory have managed to live off dinosaurs or shrews alike, as long as it was something. One of the biggest threats to human survival would be social regression and civilization collapse, actually. Our best bet, from a survival standpoint, is to establish ourselves in more places than just Earth. If civilization and technology still exist then we'll be organized enough to survive even catastrophic things like supervolcanoes and giant meteor impacts. If we regress back to a hunter-gatherer stage where we number in the thousands a massive catastrophe could utterly destroy us. Right now, as a race, we have an opportunity to ensure our survival. That opportunity will not last forever.
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May 22, 2014 03:11
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The other issue is that things like computers, kitchen appliances, and cars require a poo poo load of infrastructure in place and resources that come from multiple places. Fancy poo poo like that is absolutely not easy to build and part of the reason we can right now is centuries of development of the infrastructure, which requires a lot of organization to maintain. This takes the effort and expertise of a wide variety of people. Like that toaster example, there are people out there who are experts on toaster making. Part of the reason we can have people that specialize in making toasters is because we're organized and advanced enough to support the toaster maker. Same thing applies to everything else, but good luck using anything modern if the race regresses enough that nobody can generate electricity anymore. Power generation is in and of itself a difficult, complex thing to do on any sort of large scale.
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May 22, 2014 03:51
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Strudel Man posted:But yes, I am going to keep repeating ad nauseam that the human race isn't going to be wiped out as long as people keep baselessly asserting it. Humans as we know them will eventually vanish from the universe. Either we'll become something different or die off within a few million years.
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May 22, 2014 07:05
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Negative Entropy posted:True, but that has nothing to do with climate change at all. It does because enough climate change would change Earth into a planet we could not survive on, as we are. It might not happen for a few hundred years but the possibility is very real.
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May 22, 2014 07:35
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Spiritus Nox posted:To be fair, isn't "will be a bitch to implement" basically applicable to every sort of clean energy revolution? Are solar roadways really inferior to other such proposals in that regard? One of the biggest issues with solar power, and why stuff like solar roofing and solar roads are coming up, is that solar power is loving huge. Yes it's clean once you get past the production of the cells, it's renewable until the sun explodes, and fairly easy to maintain once it's put up but the problem is, generating solar power on any appreciable scale ends up taking up a lot of space. The idea is that you make things dual purpose. If it's a road and a solar collector then you just freed up a poo poo load of space for solar collection because of how many roads there are.
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May 24, 2014 07:04
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computer parts posted:Hydro damages the environment enough to make up for however many people it (doesn't) kill. Hydro power has been falling out of favor and environmentalists really, really don't like it. It is fairly clean but it goes far beyond environmental damage. Some fish species have gone endangered/very nearly extinct because of habitat disruption. Fisherman don't like it because it's loving up salmon and trout migration, which is also disrupting a few big time food sources. It causes problems downstream as less water ends up making it down the rivers. There are actually rivers that no longer reach the ocean, in part due to hydro power. If memory serves relative few dams are actually being built in the States (or was it none? I forget) and old ones are constantly being decommissioned. You really can't get a lot out of hydro power, especially when you look at how much disruption it causes.
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Jun 11, 2014 21:35
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Evilreaver posted:Big, mass production farm exist because the food is cheaper to grow there and transport elsewhere than it is to grow locally, full stop. Growing most things locally doesn't work for a variety of reasons, such as climate and soil conditions that favor different crops-- trying to grow a diverse crop menu on any particular soil is inefficient, and you end up spending more on fertilizer, pesticide etc than you would have on transport. Well, no. The major reason that big, mass production farms exist is because of corn subsidies. Like really, the government pays people to grow as much corn as they can, which leads to utterly massive corn farms, corn being in literally everything we eat, and corn being used to feed meat. Part of the reason we rely so heavily on artificial fertilizer is because growing gently caress tons of corn every year is guaranteed profit. The other snag is that a lot of diversity in crops has been lost in the past few decades. Different soil conditions led to different crops sure but with proper crop rotation and study of local conditions you could grow a very wide variety of foods in various areas. However, contemporary farming techniques rely heavily on monoculture crops of the same thing every year with absurd amounts of chemical fertilizers. Consumer attitudes of "I want to eat strawberries in Maine in December" certainly don't help but really, a lot of it is American food policy at the federal level.
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Jun 13, 2014 10:31
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computer parts posted:Their goals are "curb carbon emissions and replace energy generation with solar & wind". It's not necessarily the most realistic goal, but it's better than "I'm mad at the system". OWS does have some goals, though. The main one is "get money the gently caress out of politics" and "quit letting Wall Street make all the decisions." There are some lesser ones like "student debt sucks let's fix it" and "poverty is bad let's fix poverty." They're decentralized and have a lot of messages sure but "they have no goals" is a bullshit statement.
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Sep 22, 2014 16:46
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down with slavery posted:But there is enough arable land to feed everyone? Now there is. There won't be if the Earth heats up a few degrees C. It won't even take that much either. The phrase "global environmental catastrophe" gets used for a reason.
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Sep 23, 2014 02:02
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Trabisnikof posted:Citation needed. There are tons of sustainable resource plans out there. We can live at a energy/resource sustainable level. We choose not to do so, but the only solution isn't a reduction in population. I think it's a reference to the increasing poverty in the world on top of the fact that we have...what, over a billion people that are food insecure? Energy and resources are becoming increasingly scarce while our population is growing. It also complicates matters in that the Western world lives pretty well and a significant amount of the rest of the world wants to live as well as the Western world does. At the same time westerners aren't exactly jumping to give up their SUVs, 3,000+ calorie a day diets, massive houses, and conspicuous consumption. American business in particular only understands the word "more." The planet can only sustain so many humans. It is only so big. Maybe we need to reduce population, maybe we need to just cap it, but one thing is certain is that we can't grow the way we have been forever. We may very well already have pushed past the maximum capacity for Earth, given that this rock is getting hotter and the environment increasingly damaged. There was a time when we could, in fact, basically just do whatever we wanted and not worry about loving anything up because, you know, just move somewhere else and let the place we wrecked recover. There are too many of us to do that now.
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Sep 23, 2014 10:07
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SKELETONS posted:This sentiment is exactly what I mean - just warmed over Limits to Growth/Malthusian stuff. The pro-human argument is to reverse scarcity with technology and continue growth, rather than have this zero-sum future where every other human getting wealthier is bad because it means taking our share of the pie. Our main limit is the space and amount of resources we have available, which is currently limited to Earth and only Earth. There are talks of taking to space but the scary thing is we might be missing the window. The other thing is that we're wrecking Earth pretty fierce. For better or for worse we're at a major turning point in human history which has the potential to have us thriving and spreading beyond Earth to destroying ourselves and everything in between. A lot of it hinges on the decisions we make right now. The problem is that a lot of people think "ignore it and hope it goes away" is a good decision. Much of our economy, energy production, and industry is ultimately based on oil. There is only so much oil and it's getting harder and harder to get out. The theory is that we're going to run out in a matter of decades. Phosphorus is also a major component of modern farming methods and, guess what? We're running out of that too. The problem isn't necessarily people getting wealthier and our lives getting better but rather that a lot of people, especially in western society, are wasteful, often deliberately so. I worked in a restaurant for a long time and one thing I saw a lot of was people ordering a poo poo load of food, eating maybe a third of it, then just throwing the rest out. These were often people that drove horribly inefficient vehicles, lived in houses way bigger than they needed, and would brag about it. The biggest issue, I think, is that we have a society that encourages deliberately wasting resources just because you can.
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Sep 23, 2014 11:09
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There's also entire chunks of the ocean that nothing can live in thanks to all the drat nitrates washing off of farms. Yeah we're getting gently caress tons of corn but we're wrecking fish as a food source. We're loving things up on a grand scale.Trabisnikof posted:Really, peak oil? We can do better than this. Please find a reputable source that backs this up (that is post-fracing). We're running out of oil. The only question is how much we have left. It might be 50 years, it might be 100. Whichever it is we're going to have to deal with that problem. The sooner we come up with renewable alternatives to oil the better off we'll be. ToxicSlurpee fucked around with this message at 14:00 on Sep 23, 2014 |
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Sep 23, 2014 13:53
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Trabisnikof posted:We don't have time to wait on changing our global socio-economic system before addressing climate change that's the problem. A lot of capitalists are actually responding to climate change and the we won't do anything towards mitigation/adaptation if we say "gently caress you, we won't work with you until you become socialist". Part of the problem though is that some capitalists have their bottom lines threatened by doing anything about climate change at all. Some industries (lumber comes to mind) have been working very closely with environmental movements and environmental scientists because if there are no trees there is no lumber industry. Having poo poo loads of trees around also helps in a lot of other ways. The issue is areas like the coal industry. Environmentally speaking we'd be way better off if we just plain quit burning coal for power but no coal burning means no coal industry and the coal industry really doesn't like that.
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Oct 2, 2014 15:01
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Radbot posted:Increasing energy efficiency = hippie bullshit - Forums poster tsa That's a common belief, though. Suggesting that maybe we should eat less beef because beef is hideously inefficient is a dirty goddamned hippie idea so gently caress you I'm eating extra hamburgers this week. Environmentalism and hippies are very strongly connected in the minds of many and being a hippie is bad so obviously riding a bike to work or buying a smaller, more efficient vehicle is bad. So is recycling, for that matter. Everything good for the environment is a thing that hippies like and hippies are bad so we must oppose literally all of it for no other reason than to spite the hippies. Look at coal rolling for gently caress's sake. This is people deliberately burning more gas and belching black smoke into the atmosphere for no other reason beyond pissing off environmentalists, hippies, and/or liberals.
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Oct 2, 2014 23:16
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Lemming posted:Most people don't coal roll. Most people don't really give a poo poo about the specifics, they just think that doing anything about it is too expensive. The reality is likely that it is not, and this is the important argument to change peoples' minds. Nobody is going to care about global warming until it physically affects them, but the health implications of pollution already affects people, but they just don't realize it. No, most people do not coal roll but most people can't be convinced of even little things like "if you go one day a week without eating meat you'll be doing way more than you think." Americans in particular just flat out don't want to make any sacrifices at all. Things like carbon taxes, developing cleaner technology, switching to sustainable power sources, etc. all cost money now and that means that I might have to wait an extra year before replacing my car or eat fewer steaks and you know what, gently caress that noise. Who cares if 50 years from now the world will catch on fire? I want a steak and an SUV today. America is also very prone to conspicuous consumption. One of the most baffling things I've seen in the States is people just throwing out insane amounts of food because "meh, gently caress it, who cares." The other side of it is effort. Recycling is where this really comes to mind. A gently caress ton of people just outright refuse to do things like "have two separate containers for garbage and put recyclable stuff in the blue one."
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Oct 3, 2014 02:18
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Strudel Man posted:That's not conspicuous consumption. That depends on the person. I worked in a restaurant for five years and trust me, there are people that will order a poo poo load of food and throw over half of it out for no reason other than because they can.
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Oct 3, 2014 02:34
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When I was a kid Christmas in these parts was always snowy as hell. Now it's rarely snowy. Something is going on.
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Oct 4, 2014 04:48
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Salt Fish posted:Living well is its own reward and it DOES help. It might make the problem .000000000001% better but our choices do matter. One thing I need to keep reminding people of is that one person's actions matters simply because there are 7 billion one persons on this rock. If everybody in America each individually recycled one more can every year that's 300,000,000 more cans getting recycled. How much effort does it take for a single person to recycle one can? Not much, really, but it gets even bigger if it gets into the multiples. Suddenly that one tiny bit of effort from each person compounds into a massive change. It can even be as simple as "I turn lights off in rooms I'm not using" or "I do not live alone in a three bedroom house." The issue is that Americans really, really hate being inconvenienced at all. Some people refuse to put forth the effort to put recyclables into a separate container while others simply must eat meat every meal of every day. Then you get people that don't care how inefficient their gigantic SUV is "because I feel safe in it." Even so, a tiny effort is better than no effort and people doing little things really, really adds up. Even so, it isn't all that hard to convince most people to think about things they normally don't. If memory serves a neat statistic is that recycling one aluminum can saves enough electricity to power a television for a year. That's pretty big when a poo poo load of people recycle more cans.
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Oct 9, 2014 00:37
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crazypenguin posted:I think it's a bit of a mistake to focus too much on sacrifices. It's part of why deniers... deny. It plays into the pessimism. By all means, go vegetarian yourself to reduce environmental impact, but don't insist its absolutely necessary for everyone. It's almost certainly not. Except that rampant, unrepentant consumerism is actually a major part of the problem. Americans are frequently absolutely gluttonous about the resources we consume and a significant portion of the rest of the world wants to consume as much as we do.
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Oct 9, 2014 02:32
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Trabisnikof posted:Are we talking about climate change or something different? Because American consumerism isn't a major part of the climate problem. We can be as consumerist as we are now and meet all our carbon goals. Really, consumerism is absolutely part of the problem, not just because of how wasteful and polluting American lifestyles ultimately are but a lot of the rest of the world looks at how Americans live and want to live just as well. The other snag is the ridiculous inequality. One of the major pieces of fallout from American lifestyles is how much of the pollution and garbage we end up exporting to poorer nations that are happy to have god awful environmental laws to get American businesses to build factories there. Part of getting American carbon down was just sending it elsewhere.
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Oct 9, 2014 04:34
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A big flaming stink posted:look i'm well aware that socialism and capitalism have gone at it and capitalism won. i'm simply highly skeptical that government reg will not be subverted by capital interests. which it kind of has been so far. Incidentally, this is part of why right wings tend to hate the idea of world governments or any sort of regulation that the entire planet must hold. Strong international law means that it's suddenly illegal to just move your factories somewhere that's unstable enough that laws aren't enforced, desperately poor enough that they'll let you puke coal ash into the air as much as you please, that has a puppet government that will do whatever you want it to, or is corrupt and easy to bribe to hell and back.
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Oct 9, 2014 11:39
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A Bag of Milk posted:Peaking emissions at 2024 and then cutting to half of 2014 levels by 2050 doesn't sound like an impossible goal. Increasing instability may even reduce emissions, just like the crash of 2008 did temporarily. Even +3.6 degrees will be pretty unpleasant though. The big problem we're running into is that we're just running damage control at this point. This rock is going to get hotter and that is not good for us. We're at the turning point where we can decide how hot that is but it's going to take sacrifices and long-term planning, neither of which sound good to billionaires that only care about profits this quarter. You're also dealing with unholy alliance of business moguls that care only about how many dollars they own and evangelicals that believe the Earth becoming uninhabitable to humans is literally impossible because Jesus. Then you get people that just don't care because gently caress it, whatever, I won't be alive to see 2050 so it doesn't matter. :buys SUV, drives across country:
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Nov 30, 2014 23:27
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Isn't there a certain amount of extra carbon locking that can be done by applying things like vertical farming practices? Like, couldn't there also be vertical tree farms or doing things like urban trees on top of buildings?
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Dec 8, 2014 10:32
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blowfish posted:Vertical farming is about reducing land use by increasing energy inputs. The carbon locking isn't different from the same mass of crops grown in any other way*. Rooftop gardens can't have excessively big trees since they are rooftop gardens, and will therefore have less standing biomass than an equivalent area of actual forest. True but I was thinking along the lines of locking more carbon with a smaller footprint. I also wasn't suggesting like redwoods but maybe small fruit trees on top of roofs. I was just reading that some cities have been encouraging things like rooftop gardens. It makes sense as the amount of surface available per human shrinks; instead of having the tops of buildings just kind of being there plant some stuff. There are trees small enough for that, right? Or if nothing else maybe encourage shrubs or flower gardens in places where it is practical. Even so we've already seen the human race's trend toward making taller and taller buildings. The rooftops are there why not turn them to some practical use? Of course the other concern in many places is water and how to get it there.
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Dec 8, 2014 12:47
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Excelsiortothemax posted:Is there anything being developed that takes the carbon out of the air? If C02 PPM keep going up, wouldn't it make sense to make something that removes it from the air? Carbon emissions are measured in megatons and gigatons. That's millions and billions of tons. It would make sense but you're talking about thoroughly obscene amounts of carbon. What would you plan on doing with 2,000,000,000,000 pounds of carbon after you sucked it out of the atmosphere? That poo poo needs to go somewhere. Sucking it out of the air also isn't exactly going to be cheap either. It isn't likely to be profitable. You might say "well then taxes!" but we've seen how much the rising right wing of the world loving hates taxes. Then there is the other snag that a lot of the richest people in the world, you know the ones that are buying and selling politicians, are making their money by perpetuating the fossil fuel thing that is causing so many carbon problems in the first place. Good luck getting those guys to agree to become less rich to clean up the mess they've foisted on the rest of us.
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Dec 8, 2014 16:42
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Trabisnikof posted:Generally "assuming growth necessary to keep the same standard of living to population growth" and/or "assuming growth necessary to bring the world's population to the same standard of living" are great ways to find a resource shortage somehow. Yeah but the thing is there are interests at work that want poo poo to keep chugging along the way we are now with the assumption of infinite growth. Whether we like it or not we're running into issues with how humans are behaving that will, in the long term, make things really hard for humans. CEO Fatty McRichpants might get to buy his 30th yacht in the short term so he doesn't want to change. Yuri McDevelopingcountry is probably also getting tired of dirt farming 18 hours a day while wearing rags so he'd definitely welcome the opportunity to work in a factory 12 hours a day if that means he gets slightly nicer stuff, pollution be damned. Global population and consumption overall are still growing. It's a mathematical certainty that if we don't change our ways or spread out beyond Earth we're going to hit a limit. It might be catastrophic, it might not, but the status quo is impossible to maintain forever. That's why climate change discussion is such a huge deal; the people wildly profiting from the status quo don't want it to go away.
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Dec 22, 2014 20:19
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Friendly Tumour posted:The kind of indescribably irresponsible bullshit that the nuclear industry got up to prior to 1980's is probably the main reason why nuclear energy got such a bad reputation among environmentally aware folks. Pity that, things have improved a lot from those days. But really, it's not unreasonable when you look at the standards by which reactors used to be built back then, that they tend to go boom 40 years down the line. Isn't building a nuclear power plant also at the moment prohibitively expensive? One of the biggest advantages of burning stuff for fuel is that the stuff you burn has a crap load of energy locked into it that can be released really, really easily. Like coal is just as cheap as it is dirty.
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Dec 24, 2014 01:36
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katlington posted:So the federal government could overrule the nimbys tomorrow if it wanted to? Like it has with gas? It sounds like nimbys are allowed to stop renewables. There's the problem of votes, though. If a Democrat politician came through a neighborhood and was like "hey by the way, we're going to build a shitload of things here all of you deliberately voted down in location elections" you can bet there'd suddenly be a lot more Republicans in the area next election.
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Jan 1, 2015 09:04
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Evil_Greven posted:Have any better ideas? The reason people speak doom and gloom is because it might already be too late. But hey, look on the bright side, CEO Wealthy McRichpants bought his 17th house and 14th yacht this year!
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Jan 4, 2015 07:15
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 09:02 |
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One of the biggest problems is that the Earth is actually pretty loving big. It's a very complex system that is difficult to measure with any sorts of exactness and I think that's part of why the deniers are having a field day with the information. There's a gently caress ton of info out there and you can manipulate it to justify all sorts of dumb opinions. This is why you hear so much "CLIMATE SCIENTISTS DON'T AGREE!!!" bullshit. Which year is the hottest year depends on what you measure and how so they twist that into the scientists knowing nothing. Which is stupid, it's scientific fact at the moment that this rock we live on is heating up.
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Jan 7, 2015 13:12
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