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Inglonias posted:You're starting to make me not want to come to this thread for good news and cheery thoughts, you know that? There's a lot of potential good news, but very little actual news. Another problem with the topic is that there are a ton of things that we could be doing, or which might pay off in a decade, but there's little for it now. All you can do is keep your own backyard as clean as possible.
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Dec 15, 2015 20:06
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Overflight posted:How exactly do you guys handle it? Is it fear of death that simply keeps you from doing anything drastic? There are a lot of really interesting projects you can read about which offer some hope, which I try to read at least as much as the doom-and-gloom Guy McPherson predictions. Off the top of my head, there's biochar, CO2 capture (to turn it into a biofuel or make it into carbon nanotubes or sequester it or a half-dozen other things), urban farming, algae curtains, advances in solar, electric cars, cloned meat, the Great Green Wall of Africa, kelp farms, etc. The government is slow to react at best, current capitalism is likely incompatible with dealing with this problem, and we're still struggling with people in high places who aren't even willing to admit there's a problem, but progress is being made every day, in a number of different ways, and there's plenty you can do or read or watch that makes things look like they might be okay in the end. Our extinction is not guaranteed. Sure, your descendants might eat a lot of kale, soy, and cloned protein, but they'll be there.
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Mar 22, 2016 02:24
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I'd expect to see a lot more of this: http://www.gizmag.com/growing-underground-subterranean-urban-farm-london/38297/ Manhattan alone could probably support a few dozen of these, and it's not hard to imagine disused spaces turning into "squatter" versions of this setup.
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Mar 22, 2016 18:42
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Trabisnikof posted:Underground greenhouses seem to make little sense to me outside of high-end produce in cold climate cities. So I bet that the tunnel farms are a big hit with the London chefs, but I'm not sure if it is realistically scalable outside of that niche. One of the big reasons why this kind of farm appeals to me is that a lot of modern cities have a bunch of spaces like London's WWII bomb bunkers that are currently unused. Manhattan is famously as deep as it is tall, with tunnels a thousand feet below ground level, and a lot of other cities have something like it, e.g. the Seattle Underground or Los Angeles's several half-finished subway stations. Right now, they're doing nothing except occasionally serving as a historical attraction. It also has the benefit of turning an unused city space into a carbon consumer, and as was said, expanding the amount of land used to produce food. With an aquaculture setup, and ideally running the power off of a solar grid or some other renewable source (you could probably power a good piece of it with a hand crank if you really had to), it's a good example of a possible, sustainable way to deal with several different problems.
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Mar 22, 2016 21:29
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The whole thing is blips. Every running combustion engine is a blip; every moron who throws a plastic bag out the window is a blip. This is about making enough small gestures at once, not making two or three big ones, and it always was. It's not the single solution to one thing; it's a partial solution to several things.
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Mar 22, 2016 21:44
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Radbot posted:Is this the thread where we try to feel good about the lovely half-measures that, even if they weren't just TED talk fodder or simply don't work at all, wouldn't do anything to stop what's coming? You know how occasionally, some politician or another will criticize a policy on the basis that it doesn't go far enough to address an issue, and thus shouldn't be implemented at all? They always give the impression that the only solution they'd accept is some imaginary, grand gesture that solves the entire issue overnight, and it makes them look silly, because either they'd rather have the problem than even a partial solution, or they don't recognize the problem at all. Yes, the ideal, somebody-found-a-genie solution would be to restructure the grid around new-generation nuclear reactors, modernize mass transit, and move everyone into smaller, vertical urban spaces that produce much of their own food locally. That's not going to happen today, however, and so it's worth discussing the various small ways in which people are addressing the problems being brought to us by climate change, and the idea of repurposing unused urban spaces as farms is one step, especially as the technology and practices get revised. Uncle Jam posted:Maybe but that doesn't mean you get to ignore that sequestered CO2 must be stored somewhere permanently and not reused again. For that, I kind of like this: http://www.gizmag.com/c02-atmosphere-carbon-nanofibers/39015/ A lot of stories I see in the tech press right now are discussing uses for carbon nanofiber, most of which are computing-based, and pulling them out of the atmosphere could work well for it. These guys are also online in Calgary right now: http://carbonengineering.com/ Radbot posted:Maybe we can see a single example of a proposed carbon sequestration project that, even in someone's wildest dreams, would capture a gigaton of carbon a year. Of course, that's nowhere near where we'd need to be, but let's start there. Done. http://www.canadianbusiness.com/lists-and-rankings/most-innovative-companies/carbon-engineering/ Wanderer fucked around with this message at 22:11 on Mar 22, 2016 |
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Mar 22, 2016 22:07
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blowfish posted:Getting rid of a billion combustion engines is not a blip. Building ten thousand nuclear reactors is not a blip. Filling every unused subway tunnel and cold war bunker on earth that exists is a blip. Unless this underground farming thing leads to wider applications of indoor farming in large-scale purpose-built indoor farms it can never be more than a blip even in an unrealistic best case scenario. You're thinking on a macro scale, and that's a good way to go into a despair spiral. Like I said, every positive thing's a blip and every negative thing's a blip. A restaurant owner who doesn't have to truck his greens in from California is a blip; a guy who decides to walk down the block instead of driving a few miles is a blip. A brand-new waste-recycling nuclear power plant is a lot of blips. Hell, this is going far afield. I was talking about LED-based urban farming or something like it as a possible reaction to climate change reducing arable land. As a carbon-capture reaction, it'd have a (small, indirect) impact but isn't a solution. blowfish posted:Reforesting half of China and Brazil. Probably multiple gigatons per year at that scale. There's also this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Green_Wall
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Mar 22, 2016 22:22
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Radbot posted:Wow, a ton of carbon a week, and it doesn't even get sequestered. Call me when they actual start sequestering anything at literally any scale. You asked for something that would work even in a wildest-dream scenario, and I gave you one. They're working on scaling up the tech and finding uses for the calcium carbonate it's turned into. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/carbon-capture-squamish-1.3263855 There's another Still, the research is being done, with or without the government. It's an interesting field. Wanderer fucked around with this message at 23:16 on Mar 22, 2016 |
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Mar 22, 2016 22:31
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Here's an interesting article about vertical seabed farming and its benefits. It's definitely written from the point of view of an evangelist, but this isn't the first time I've seen somebody suggest kelp farming as an oceanic filter. I want to try kelp noodles. Apparently there's one of these in the Bronx river, according to the comments, as a "pollution farm"; it isn't making food, but it's filtering the water. Uncle Jam posted:You'd need tens of millions of those carbonate things to do what is needed. Just as a comparison the number of Starbucks and McDonald's are in the tens of thousands. "We can't solve the entire problem all at once with one thing, so we'd better not do anything at all." It's a pilot project, and it's not the one magic bullet. Once you have that plus CO2 sequestered in cement plus vertical farming plus moving away from petroleum-fueled combustion engines plus non-coal power generation plus whatever else you'd like to add to the list, you start making real progress.
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Mar 27, 2016 20:35
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Trabisnikof posted:Or alternatively, I'm sure there is a Reddit out there that will echo chamber for you perfectly. /r/collapse. I go there sometimes to gaze at the trainwreck syndrome. These are dudes who think Guy McPherson is a modern-day prophet. Of course, if you decode a lot of what they say, it gets more interesting. It's a toxic intersection between survivalists, preppers, right-wingers, and the general disaffected, who wish society would fall apart for one reason or another. Half of them are writing libertarian fanfiction in the guise of futurism and half of what's left are depression tourists. computer parts posted:This is by design. The media is not your friend. Yeah, this can't be stated enough, especially in the mainstream, which is choking itself to death in an attempt to appear unbiased. That's the real insidious genius of high-profile deniers. As long as they exist in the positions they hold, major media organs have to act as if they have a point. The question isn't "can we adapt," but rather, what shape the adaptation will take and what civilization will look alike during and afterwards. If you look at scientific periodicals, you can get a better idea of the shape of it, because climate change is coming hand-in-hand with a number of other impending societal shifts: widespread automation, artificial intelligence, cloned meat (they can make perfectly potable ground beef, but it's not cheap enough to market), the imminence of affordable and widely available 3d printing. Like I said to you earlier, Overflight, you really don't want to spend all your time reading about how we're doomed, or you'll turn into a wreck. There are people out there who are aware of these problems and who are working to help solve them, alone or in groups, privately or publically, and most of them could use your time, money, or attention. If you're in New York or New Haven, for example, I mentioned GreenWave a few days ago, and they're looking for volunteers. You could also sign up to help with the Ocean Cleanup, or just see what kinds of environmental volunteer work are available in your area. Even if you just walked around picking up litter, that's more useful than panic.
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Mar 31, 2016 19:31
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What are some of the most at-risk areas in the third world? It'd be interesting to look at it case-by-case and guess what a likely reaction's going to be. I'd figure that once the dust settled you'd see a lot of first-world investment in formerly third-world locations. After all, what better location for "going Galt" can you imagine than the flooded-out, nearly-abandoned ruins of Honduras?
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Mar 31, 2016 20:36
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khwarezm posted:I don't understand why we would assume that it would assist the denialists to go from 'its not happening' to 'its happening and we're all completely hosed'. The most obvious position is to just say 'Ah well its happening but its not that big a deal, we won't really have to change our institutions or way of life particularly dramatically particularly if that means we'll have to be held accountable, heck some of the effects might be positive', if anything exactly what you're saying would line up well enough with the direction denialists are shifting to, an emphasis on technological solutions, adaption as it happens and much vaunted 'green Capitalism' that doesn't undermine the current system, that's not a denunciation of what you're saying by the way just an observation. Gotta tell you, I'm not 100% on what you're trying to say here.
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Mar 31, 2016 21:51
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khwarezm posted:I take you're saying that the denialist conspiracy has permeated the media hard? So is the hopelessness and emphasis on the potential extreme negative of Climate Change that Mozi is concerned about an aspect of this conspiracy? Because I don't how it would help denialists (or whatever position they've shifted to now) at all. I'm really saying two things. 1) Due to repeated accusations of "bias" over the course of the last 20 years or so, and the tendency of denalists to also be pretty hardcore right-wingers, mainstream media doesn't go as hard on skewering denialists as it could or should. They're trying to appear sufficiently objective that they can avoid the "liberal media" label, so they cover both evidence and denial as if they have equal ideological weight. 2) Impending doom gets clicks and gets you to tune in at six to see the full story, and we've been culturally hardwired to expect a big, flashy apocalypse for quite a while now. Thus, the media engenders hopelessness, or at the very least, encourages you to know about it, but not think about it because it's depressing. More importantly, many of the behaviors that would help mediate the situation--spend less, drive less, generate less trash, you don't need to eat meat at every meal--run contrary to the desires of late-stage American capitalism, so most of the media sources don't want you to adopt those behaviors. I don't think it's any kind of formal conspiracy, but it is a particularly tenacious kind of change resistance. It's a problem all over the place, really; a lot of behaviors that worked just fine a hundred or fifty or even twenty years ago are anywhere from destructive to unsustainable at current population/technology levels, but people don't want to give them up even in the face of evidence. In a lot of ways, these are civilization's growing pains.
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Mar 31, 2016 22:33
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Grouchio posted:So there's literally no good news to be had anymore? Isn't the US making progress in cutting carbon emissions, for example? And the rise of electric cars? There's some, here and there. Check my post history so I'm not repeating myself too much. The problem is that it's mostly about practices that could help, technologies that aren't mature, and initiatives that are barely past the start-up stage. There's not much in the way of a silver bullet and likely won't ever be. Uranium Phoenix posted:Mostly because, if we despair and give up, it can always get worse. I couldn't agree more. It's easy for a lot of people to brush it off as "hopium" and revel in the despair (or try to sell each other survivalist kits), but that's really a luxury.
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Apr 8, 2016 03:25
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Isaac0105 posted:The idea of progress is dead, industrial civilization will be dead soon but humanity might still go on. That should be enough of a tomorrow for you to do good for. This is something I've been thinking about for a while. I mentioned /r/collapse a couple of pages ago. I ran across it last summer while I was reading about climate change, in the run-up to the Paris summit, and it's a clearing house for a lot of disparate voices: accelerationists, economic doomsayers, survivalists, preppers, etc. I've stopped back by there every so often out of some loose-tooth impulse, to see what they've dug up this time that's proof of an imminent, total system breakdown. To believe anything else is "hopium," best disregarded; the accepted, proper reaction is to stoically accept one's fate and start investing heavily in gold, ammunition, and isolated, fertile land. The common line running through most of it, however, is a basic lack of imagination, which leads to an inability to see beyond an initial conclusion. We have a lot of problems; many cannot be conveniently solved (peak copper/helium/phosphates/oil); many are intrinsic to the current system, and thus cannot be solved without adjusting or abandoning the system (climate change, third world exploitation, income inequality, general capitalism downsides); therefore we'll be extinct by 2030/2050/2100 and/or living in a post-crash libertarian hellscape within a decade. Charitably, it's wishing the whole thing would burn down, so something nominally better can be built; uncharitably, it's a bunch of sad sacks wanting to be the biker gang or mall enclave in a zombie apocalypse movie. However, a lot of the individual problems that fall under the umbrella of general environmental despoiling and/or climate change are being worked on, are at least theoretically solvable, and even if the solutions and adaptations aren't being as urgently pursued as we'd all prefer, they are being pursued. Climate change is fascinating in this regard, because even if it isn't as motivational a topic in culture or politics, it's already having a serious impact in areas like renewable power, architecture, corporate planning, and military research. We're rapidly going into a period where climate concerns are going to come to the fore in most parts of modern life, likely faster than we think; electric transportation running off solar power, a decentralized renewable power grid, the (re)birth of the regenerative economy, our existing infrastructure replaced with whatever comes next, you name it. As I mentioned before, Western civilization is culturally hardwired to expect and even look forward to a big, flashy apocalypse. Christianity's mythology is built on them--the Flood, the Rapture, the Second Coming--and that influences us, even those of us who aren't religious. On some level, we all expect the asteroid to hit, the plague to break out, or the San Andreas fault to go off, and we likely always will. If you're expecting civilization to crumble or the species to go extinct from this, you're not studying the problem hard enough. You shouldn't be saying "we aren't adapting"; you need to read the science, design, and energy journals and ask yourself, "How are we already adapting?" Even if absolutely no new technologies arise in the next ten or twenty or fifty years that affect the situation, you can already see the shape of what's coming as a result. More importantly, now is the time to start working towards affecting that shape. I do agree that it's a mistake to buy into the idea that we can innovate ourselves into a cleaner version of the same system; we can't simply install solar panels, put up some wind turbines, and expect everything to move along roughly as it does now. There are likely to be sharp changes in how we live, good and bad; I'd be surprised if travel doesn't get harder, for example, and I'd expect our diets to change whether we like it or not. We're also likely to be moving into a phase where we end up with fewer and fewer physical goods, due to scarcity, changes in manufacturing, and simple lack of demand (3D printing is only getting cheaper). But outright collapse? No. It's a big, reactive system, and unless there's a vast, sharp threat from outside of it (supervolcano eruption, drug-resistant influenza epidemic, etc.), it's already reacting. I'd be more inclined to think industrial civilization will end due to automation than due to climate change. Isaac0105 posted:I very highly doubt that, unless you've got a few dozen Saudi Arabias of oil stashed away under your bed. We won't need them. There's a lot of research going on into alternatives.
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Apr 8, 2016 19:51
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Salt Fish posted:I think there are two things working against your post. The first is that while most doomsday theories are wrong, only 1 needs to be right for it to actually become doomsday. I'm not saying that global warming is going to be a doomsday scenario, but we have to evaluate it on it's own merits, and the existence of unrelated unlikely scenarios doesn't inform the severity of the issue. I'm more talking about our cultural doomsday fetish than the likelihood thereof. Even if you aren't yourself Christian, pop culture is steeped in it, especially within living memory. That leads to a society that's weirdly in love with its own potential destruction. Salt Fish posted:The 2nd thing working against your post is that global warming is not a sharp instantaneous problem. It will be 100 years or more before the worst effects are realized. While this does give us some time to react it present a different problem; the actions we take today will only register in 50+ years. This means that we need to act preventatively before the problem presents itself. This is the most dangerous facet of global warming because our systems cannot respond in real time, greatly contributing to the effects we'll end up experiencing. That's the thing. We are taking preventative measures. You might disagree about the form those measures are taking (i.e. the occasional discussion in this thread about how, were some among you made the God-Emperor of Mankind, there would be so many thorium reactors you guys), and those measures certainly aren't as wide-ranging or as intensive as the situation demands, but measures are being taken. I think I've said it before, but D&D tends to overvalue direct, political/governmental reaction, and ignore/undervalue independent, academic, and corporate action. It's also a very American forum, so anything that isn't happening here tends to get ignored unless it's a disaster. You miss a lot that way. Here's a pretty decent follow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/carbonremoval
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Apr 8, 2016 20:18
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Oracle posted:America is in the top three polluters in the world though, so we do have an outsize effect on what's gonna happen. I think we're #2 behind China? Yeah, you're not wrong. A lot of what's going to happen will have to happen here. However, that same American focus means you miss a couple of things that are worth talking about. Algae Tec in Australia, for example, is a startup dealing with algae farming; they're establishing a production facility for making algae-based food, which is one of the odds-on favorites for feeding people in a post-oil world. More importantly, the same company is working on algae as biofuel, and algae farming in general is a potential useful carbon capture technology. There was an interesting article I read earlier that I can't find again about how you can grow potable spirulina in the dark, which forces it to use dissolved carbon in the water around it to grow. You lose out on some biomass, but it's one of several ways that have been suggested for using algae as a filter to help remove carbon from seawater. Also, as of Wednesday, there's another Australian group that's marketing solar cells you can make with a 3D printer. There's another company with a similar product in Israel that was using them to help electrify rural India. I suppose my tl;dr here is that climate change is what's shaping the future, but it's probably not what's going to end the future.
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Apr 8, 2016 22:17
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Prolonged Priapism posted:I'm not trying to minimize the reality of what's coming, but I do think (reasonably well off) Americans in particular tend to overreact, because we've had it so good and so easy for so long. The rest of the world is a little more realistic. Well put. I was thinking about this while I was at the gym, and the whole post puts it into better words than I think I'd be capable of today. There are a lot of problems ahead of us, and society is likely to be very different at century's end, but we know what most of the problems are, we already have people working to solve them (decarbonization, air capture, blue crude, algae biofuels, vertical/urban farming, biochar, GreenWave kelp/mussel farms, using cement to sequester CO2, the Great Green Wall, etc.), many of them can be solved, and the larger media/cultural landscape is still stuck on certain entry-level concepts. Once you step outside of that central, unfortunate narrative, the shape of the problem shifts. There's probably a follow-up here, where a lot of the steps that will have to be taken are exactly the kind of thing that flies in the face of certain cherished American tenets. Witness, for example, the "rolling coal" fad, or rich Californians trying to contravene the water rationing last year. We still fetishize the individual in a way that is almost specifically designed to impede decarbonization, and that's the kind of thing that only shifts in crisis or over generations.
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Apr 9, 2016 21:48
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Overflight posted:As bad as this sounds, shouldn't we start heavily pushing for subsidized euthanasia (as in "non only can you do this judgment and pain free whenever you want, we will even pay an institution or next of kin of your choice to do so)? It would alleviate the ones remaining and provide a good option for those who don't want to stick around to see any of this happening. We aren't there yet. There's a decent chance we'll never be there. This isn't an unstoppable, hell-for-leather run towards the world as depicted in The Road. We're talking about climate change as an agent that drives societal, financial, and cultural reorganizing and rework; we're not talking about the entire planet becoming utterly unsuitable for human habitation on an abrupt time frame. You probably need to talk to a therapist.
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Apr 10, 2016 02:49
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Trust me, the only fun you'd have on /r/collapse is if you own a company that sells survival kits.Grouchio posted:Since the media tends to focus coverage on climate skeptics and deniers far more than the scientific community, what can stop them from doing so? Why do these deniers have so much power over the US sheeple? To go back to this: I think it's simply an attractive prospect. By living in the first world at any point after 1951 or so, you are virtually guaranteed to have been part of the problem at some point, or else you didn't participate in society. The general notion of climate change chips away at several ideas that have become basic bedrock. It dovetails neatly with some of the issues that play into wage stagnation and class warfare. We're just now seeing penetration of the idea that the system's inherently rigged; for more and more people, you were either born on third base or you'll never make it to home plate. The climate change narrative comes in at the end and says, not only that, but now that we've been playing it for a while, it turns out we shouldn't have been playing the game at all. So some people double down. It's easier to believe that climate change is some kind of hippie conspiracy, or liberal attempts at control. That's assuming it isn't simply coming from their religion, or simple reflexive opposition. I've known a couple of people who, if a liberal told them they were on fire, would have a seat and calmly burn to death. Prolonged Priapism posted:The range of possible futures is large. Unprecedented catastrophe is certainly possible. Collapse similar to historical examples is possible, though there are many scenarios, some much worse than others. Maybe the world just sort of limps along as ad-hoc adaptive measures are put in to place scattershot. It's also possible that we get our collective poo poo together and actually make the world better in the face of this crisis. Which scenario is most worth our attention? Our discussion? In a thread called "Climate Change: What is to be Done?" At this point, my current bet's on the "ad-hoc adaptive measures" thing. I figure it's not an accident that Space-X has gone into high gear and half the science periodicals have run articles lately about how relatively affordable it'd be to start a lunar colony. The big money's already looking up and out. Then again, the thrust of my point over the last couple of pages has been that within the boundaries of our predictive ability, there's a lot more going on in preventative and adaptive fields than most seem to be aware of. Some of it's down to mainstream media inadequacy; some's down to people using climate change to fuel their depression or as a springboard to discuss their personal pet hatreds; and some of it's because most of the science is raw and untested. (Today's weirdness: I mentioned the university team that can turn atmospheric CO2 into carbon nanofiber. Now there are applications for carbon nanotubes in computer construction. Can't be too long before somebody puts those two things together. Imagine a MacBook Air made from the air.)
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Apr 10, 2016 04:35
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There's a more useful idea to be gleaned from between the two extremes. Americans who get worked up about climate change seem to want to jump straight to living historic on the Fury Road, as opposed to the intermediate, more likely stage where you're forced to abandon many or all of your current creature comforts. The American apocalypse is one where you can't get a steak, it costs too much to drive your car, and you're crammed into a postage stamp of a room with two other people. It is also known as the way in which many people have to live right now.
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Apr 10, 2016 20:34
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El Mero Mero posted:Assholes that sit around demanding ideological consistency and connected belief to action mappings are insufferable and do more to hurt group cohesion and collective planning work than anyone else. It's all no true scotsman bullshit. I'd go so far as to say that it's the single thing keeping what passes for the American progressive movement from getting too much done. It doesn't matter that this person agrees with you about 75% or 80% or 99% of the issues you could hope to name; there's a point of disagreement somewhere and that makes that person the enemy. (It's on my mind this morning because, reading about Patton Oswalt's wife's death, most of the reactions you stumble across are simple condolences. Every so often on social media, some Bernie Sanders supporter is mad as hell, and isn't letting a little thing like this stop them from going off on a rant.) Placid Marmot posted:Given that this is probably the thread with the highest proportion of ACC believers in the forums, but that these people appear not to actually want to change their own damaging behavior, I propose that we change the thread title to: Don't be a confrontational prick. Nobody actually disagrees with you, but you come off like you're out to score rhetorical points in an imaginary game, and it's poisonous to actual discussion.
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Apr 23, 2016 18:38
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And that leads to part of a different problem: the degree of hyperbole assigned to the situation. Living like a war orphan isn't in the cards for much of the Western world, barring something along the lines of nuclear winter. Assuming we remain paralyzed, and that various technologies remain precisely the same as they are now (everybody working on cloned meat just fucks off home for some reason), it would almost certainly mean civil unrest, and possibly even civil war. As early as the '90s, I remember a couple of futurists and science fiction writers (specifically Robert Anton Wilson) talking about the potential for conflict between California, Nevada, and several neighboring states over water rights. What climate change does mean is the end of certain creature comforts that many affluent Westerners have grown to take for granted. Your children may have to be vegetarians or vegans; they may be reliant on mass transit, without the option for their own independent transport; they may live in smaller spaces, and/or be forced into urban enclaves. It's not the end of the world, but it may very well be the end of what we currently know as comfort. It will certainly be replaced by something, and you can see the beginnings of that in the emerging field of "boomers explain milennials to other boomers" lifestyle thinkpieces; old systems wither in the face of disinterest, and new systems are adopted in their wake. The challenge of climate change, to my mind, isn't that it's an unstoppable apocalyptic force, but that it's a massive, world-changing event from outside the current culture. It's an imminent demand to have less, which isn't the same as being less.
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Apr 23, 2016 21:39
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I'm expecting "We need to unshackle the free market so it can deal with the challenges of climate change" at some point in the next year or so. It'll probably come after a couple more spikes in the solar installation base.
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Apr 24, 2016 01:15
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I'm talking about the nation descending into civil war over water rights and I'm the optimistic one. Gotta love climate change.Rime posted:You'll be too busy remembering what almonds tasted like, the last time you saw one, ten years prior. "You drat kids, with your vat-grown Can't Believe It's Not Almonds. Let me tell you about when California had agriculture--"
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Apr 24, 2016 10:06
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Incidentally, on the do something front, let's talk about that for a second. If possible, in response, leave your "that can't possibly help at all given the sheer scale of the problem" and "that won't matter unless we do [your pet cause/technology] immediately and completely" at the door. It would be nice to discuss that. The modifications you can make to your lifestyle to help reduce your carbon footprint are pretty well-worn territory: adjust your diet, eat locally, don't loving litter (I live within a block of a small suburban shopping center and the sheer amount of random plastic crap that people just throw into the bushes makes me want to hole up on my rooftop with a sniper rifle), don't drive unless you have to, etc. I'm sure there are less obvious methods, such as local farming co-ops you can contribute to or participate in, that I'd never have thought of. It might also be worth talking about resources and methods by which you could actually help solve some of these problems for a living; a friend of mine abandoned his graphic design career for a job in the environmental sciences, and I know the Ocean Cleanup is hiring. You could also check out Greenwave, if you have access to the oceanfront. I'm also reading a bit about the algae industry, as a food producer and general carbon sink. A couple of years ago, there were people talking about algae curtains as a biofuel generator, but I'm not seeing too much movement on that front.
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Apr 24, 2016 19:56
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I'm a big believer in breaking things down. A single big problem or project is typically something you can address as a series of individual challenges, and making it a list of achievable tasks goes a long way towards making the whole thing less intimidating. So yeah, on the macro scale, walking down the street and picking up all the random plastic crap in the gutters means nothing, but on the local, micro scale, it's something, and you have no idea what knock-on effects it'll have. Maybe somebody else starts doing it too on the next block over; maybe you'll start some conversations about it with passersby; maybe you turn it into a local movement or get the local children involved. Journey of a thousand miles, single step, etc. Getting involved in local politics on any level is a strong first step, and it's something that modern progressives already need to do, given the sheer number of unchallenged shitheads that flock to town, county, and state politics. I'm hoping that's a consequence of the Bernie Sanders campaign: inciting a new generation to make their voices heard and get to the goddamn ballot box in non-presidential years.
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Apr 24, 2016 21:59
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That's actually a pretty consistent throughline in a lot of lifestyle/economy pieces. As a consequence of not having any money and/or lousy jobs, younger people don't participate in the economy or in society to the level that economy or society would presently prefer: they aren't buying cars or houses, they're marrying later if they do at all, etc. In turn, due to that lack of opportunity, they're revitalizing some smaller areas (Buffalo, New York is a big one, or it was at one point). They can't get the goods that once signified "success," so they're making do without, and in so doing, undermining the system that's doing its best to gently caress them to death. Side note: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/04/26/a-majority-of-millennials-now-reject-capitalism-poll-shows/ I'll go so far as to agree that within the current capitalist framework, an adequate response is virtually impossible, but the framework is less rigid than people seem to want to believe. The current hyperactive consumption state is, to go into some of the same territory that whitey delenda est was covering, a relatively new construction. It can be challenged; it can be overcome. In fact, pressures within that same framework are already moving to do the job, with the coming mainstream of automation, drones, and self-driving vehicles. When you take away even the lovely, entry-level jobs, what's left? Do you come up with a bunch of government sinecures to bolster the rolls? Do you crack the first trillionaire open like a flesh pinata and distribute his assets and meat among the poor? Does somebody try universal basic income and promptly bollocks it up? What I'd guess would be a lot more likely is that capitalism will attempt to react to climate change via what I've seen a couple of people call the "regenerative economy": some hell-blend of projects, infrastructure, service, and renewables research that attempts to turn the whole thing into a way to get about six dudes rich like pharaohs, while simultaneously making sure that Elon Musk can't go a single waking moment without an approving slow blowjob from some facet of the press or public.
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Apr 27, 2016 07:50
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Interesting article about "carbon farming" in Australia: http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/apr/28/could-carbon-farming-be-the-answer-for-a-clapped-out-australia Another article about sustainable farming certification: http://www.greenbiz.com/article/are-sustainable-farming-certifications-making-difference Surprise Giraffe posted:I seem to remember reading about something like this years ago. That chemistry of the oceans or atmosphere could get all hosed up cause of climate change. Not sure how you could adapt to that one on any level. Not well. At that point, you're probably talking about geoengineering. There was a study I read last summer about how you could theoretically sequester a lot of the CO2 absorbed by the ocean by using powdered olivine, which was an attractive prospect since it's one of the most plentiful substances on Earth. It isn't anywhere near cost-effective, however, but I could see crap like that being greenlit very quickly, and probably without enough research.
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Apr 30, 2016 03:19
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http://www.thestranger.com/slog/201...ate-change-casequote:As for the judge's ruling on extraordinary circumstances, "It's not climate change that's the extraordinary circumstance, it's that this agency hasn't done what it's legally obligated to do for almost 30 years," Rodgers told me after the courtroom let out. "And [Judge Hill] recognized that a court has a responsibility to step in and protect the rights of young people that are being harmed by climate change. This is world-changing and it's amazing."
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May 2, 2016 18:24
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http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/may/02/ethiopia-famine-drought-land-restorationquote:The interpretation of forest and landscape restoration is broad. It can cover a range of activities, including agroforestry, timber plantations for the production of fuel wood and the restoration of degraded forests. As greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere continue to break records, restoration is one way to capture carbon dioxide in the soil, trees and other vegetation. For example, restoring 15m hectares in Ethiopia could capture as much as 1.42 gigatons of CO2 – the equivalent of removing almost 300m cars from the roads for one year.
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May 3, 2016 21:27
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Zimbabwe is selling off a bunch of protected animals to keep their preserves open, because the drought has been making it difficult to keep them safe. I've mentioned the Great Green Wall initiative a couple of times before, but it does represent some degree of forward planning, which is nice to see. In some ways, they've got their poo poo together better than the West does.
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May 6, 2016 23:34
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http://www.businessinsider.com/ethiopia-is-experiencing-one-of-the-worst-droughts-in-50-years-2016-5?r=UK&IR=T Interesting article about a low-tech way of helping to deal with Ethopia's drought.
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May 17, 2016 23:03
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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/ex-nasa-man-to-plant-one-billion-trees-a-year-using-drones-10160588.htmlquote:With two operators manning multiple drones, he thinks it should be possible to plant up to 36,000 trees a day, and at around 15% of the cost of traditional methods.
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May 24, 2016 00:10
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Salt Fish posted:Your first question should be "how many trees would we need to plant to offset our carbon use" and I recall the answer being something like 200 trillion. I believe the primary use of something like this isn't strictly CO2 sequestration, but instead, is meant to combat desertification and soil erosion. The long-term idea is to use this sort of thing to push back the boundaries of the Sahara, and as part of regenerative farming. That, in turn, involves permanent CO2 sequestration via biochar.
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May 24, 2016 05:28
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http://news.mit.edu/2016/hot-new-solar-cell-0523 Here's a handy use for carbon nanotubes: a new high-efficiency solar cell. Since we've already got the ability to make the nanotubes out of airborne CO2, this could address two problems simultaneously.
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May 26, 2016 20:13
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Triglav posted:What are the things we've approached post-scarcity on? Last I checked, this world of ours is a closed ecosystem, the only additional material being provided by meteorite. You can already make a surprising amount of items with a 3D printer, and you can pick up a relatively poor one for as little as US$350. In a theoretical near-future where a flexible 3D printer is at least as ubiquitous in the home as a computer, that removes many everyday items from the marketplace, along with the stores that were built to sell them to you and the overseas factories that produce them. Physical media is also rapidly falling out of favor. I know that in the video game industry, game sales that involve an actual disc plateaued around 2012 and have been slowly sinking ever since. There's a reason why GameStop is rapidly growing to resemble some kind of vaguely media-themed pawn shop more than an actual games store.
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May 29, 2016 04:36
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Triglav posted:So your examples of us approaching post-scarcity are plastic toy printers and digital media? Plastic is even a petroleum byproduct. Do you have any examples of post-scarcity commodities? They're a couple of examples of what's basically post-scarcity manufacturing. A lot of our economy's built around the idea that we need other people to make certain goods for us. When just about anyone can make certain goods, it cuts off part of the market at the knees. I've seen a couple of people talking about the notion as part and parcel of the imminent automation crash.
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May 29, 2016 06:15
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Triglav posted:I have a hard time believing plastic printers will do much beyond to adding to pollution. People are currently using 3D printers to make solar cells that generate power at 20% efficiency. You can also use them to make things like composite blades for wind turbines, titanium medical implants, and parts for a some-assembly-required house. Hell, even the lousy off-the-shelf Best Buy 3D printer could probably make you a zip gun.
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May 29, 2016 07:18
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This is a mirror of an article on Forbes. The guy who was engineering artificial leaves has now come up with a bacterium that eats hydrogen and atmospheric CO2 and turns them into alcohols, providing a carbon-neutral fuel source. http://i.imgur.com/Eh5yzAJ.jpg
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May 30, 2016 03:56
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