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  • The interesting part are those who still don’t write letters to their congressmen and still vote for climate deniers. I just can’t.

    It would be insanely easy to solve: Not one of the billionaires out there would recognize if they only had 999 mil left and neither would anybody else. That‘s a cool 10 trillion to pay towards climate change. You‘re welcome.

    That money was earned using earth, so to saving earth it goes back (because no earth, no money and our billionaire overlords suprisingly havent saved us yet.)

    • Though I agree with you on taking money from the rich people, that's mostly not how it works. Most rich persons has most of his "worth" in stocks. Even scammer musk's worth mostly is "worth" because of his ownership of Tesla and the such. He doesn't actually have that money.

      Most importantly: It's not insanely easy to solve, Sven if you pump in trillions. Even if we stop pumping carbon in the air tomorrow it will still take centuries until the atmosphere is back to normal, barring any carbon capture.

      The problem with is that the extra CO2 in the air comes from energy we took from burning fossil fuels. If we want to capture it back, we need to spend the same mount of energy that the world spent for the past, say, 2 centuries, from non carbon sources to get that done. This energy does not include the energy that the world needs to function.

      That is an insane amount of energy that, again, has to come from non carbon emitting sources.

      Also, until all energy comes from non carbon emitting sources, carbon capture is useless because if both you'll spent 100 carbon for each, say, 50-70 (optimistically) carbon you capture.

      If I say "Were not even close to 100% non carbon emissions in energy creation" it's a huge understatement. I believe something around 10% of our energy production is non carbon emitting. Cars are not included.

      Making all out cars electrical is also cute. It's a nice thought if it weren't that all that electricity still mostly comes from CO2 emitting sources so including conversion losses electrical cars may actually send more CO2 in the atmosphere.

      You want to actually solve this?

      Make ALL our electrical generation non CO2 emitting in the next 10 years. Air and solar are cute, but fractional and will remain that, probably for ever. We need nuclear power plants like there is no tomorrow in all countries, even the "bad" ones.

      This obviously isn't going to happen.

      We will likely end up with some form of atmospheric engineering where we're going to meas with the atmosphere, seeding clouds, or pumping other chemicals in there that negate the effects of CO2. I'm unsure what the results of that will be though

      Either way, you and I will NOT see the end of this, that is for our children's children

      • Even if we stop pumping carbon in the air tomorrow it will still take centuries until the atmosphere is back to normal, barring any carbon capture.

        That would, however, stop it from getting any worse, which is kind of a big deal because it's getting worse at a frightening rate.

        Making all out cars electrical is also cute. It’s a nice thought if it weren’t that all that electricity still mostly comes from CO2 emitting sources so including conversion losses electrical cars may actually send more CO2 in the atmosphere.

        You severely overestimate the energy efficiency of gasoline engines. A big reason to get rid of them is not only the fuel they burn, but how much of it they waste.

        We need nuclear power plants like there is no tomorrow in all countries, even the “bad” ones.

        You severely underestimate the resources required to build those. It costs some $20 billion to build one nuclear power plant. There's a reason everybody's focusing on solar and wind.

        Small modular reactors may be cheaper, but they also generate huge amounts of radioactive waste. Radioactive waste isn't a serious problem now, but it will be if we start powering everything with SMRs.

        Atom cracking will not save us. Not unless there's some kind of breakthrough.

        We will likely end up with some form of atmospheric engineering where we’re going to meas with the atmosphere, seeding clouds, or pumping other chemicals in there that negate the effects of CO2. I’m unsure what the results of that will be though

        1. It works.
        2. Big Oil chants “spray, baby, spray!”
        3. It works too well. Global freeze occurs. Everybody dies. Game over.

        Either way, you and I will NOT see the end of this, that is for our children’s children

        Have you stepped outside at any point in the last several years? Global warming is no longer a looming future threat for someone else to deal with. It's here and now.

      • This guy gets it!

      • That’s a disturbing but interesting take. Thank you very much.

        The funny thing is that you can sell stocks. I know that a billionaire does not have dagoberts vault at home (maybe some do).

        But their net worth is calculated somehow and in selling all assets above 999 mil, you get exactly what I‘m talking about.

        I get that this is a long undertaking but we are still on the way up. This needs to stop now so we do it now. Use the money to stop the gravest polluters first and by the time you run out of money, you‘re a lot better on the scale.

        Btw the estimated cost to 2030 to stop climate change is 90 trillion. So this does part of it.

        Just wanted to put that out there. It’s surely gonna be a big job since most of us lack vision.

        Not like we could start working only on that since we need to make stuff nobody needs to impress people we dont like./s

        Also, my personal favorite in idiotic ideas is telling citizens to just not buy and suv. Just outlaw the production you maggots! We saw with covid how well voluntary behavior helped.

        Yes, I blame governments for not doing what needs to be done to save the fucking planet. A mass of humans is easy to manipulate if you’re rich and can not be given this much responsibility. We elect people for this.

      • I'm surprised this got so many upvotes, a lot of it is factually incorrect! For instance many grids worldwide are over 50% renewables. You can scrub carbon with a net carbon loss if you use solar powered to do it.

        There's also no reason that capturing the carbon would cost all the energy that was released by burning it (you don't have to make it into the same fuel molecule).

        Honestly this sounds like climate change denier shit, "it's too late there's nothing we can do, buy more oil.".

        On the positive side, I agree that nuclear is great!

    • Well, I don't have a congressman, which would make that hard :-P

      But yes, while I don't agree that our civilisation's issues could be easily solved by a one time very minor global redistribution of wealth, I do agree with your overall argument, for sure! 100%!

      These issues will only be fixed with a complete societal personality change. We'd have to completely rethink who we are, what we want in life, what our priorities are, as a civilisation and individuals. In a way fundamental enough to completely change how we distribute wealth and power, how we interact with nature and each other, the lens through which we view everything.

      I don't think those things will happen until there's a change in civilisation, as ours passes and the next one rises (which, while a turbulent time in history, will not be the end of the world, all civilisations come and go eventually, on the timescale of humanity), that's usually when such sweeping and complete fundamental changes in how we think and structure our entire society are allowed to flourish.

      It's sad that we won't live to see it. Maybe in the mean time we could cheer ourselves up a bit, by eating the rich? nomnom

      • I really like your way of thinking. Thanks for sharing it with me today. Made my day a little better.

  • Yeah at the end of the day, this is a failure of our government. It's so stuck on profits and processes, it can't save itself from certain death.

  • I'm thinking of moving to a state that's colder where I can buy land that has water within the property.

    I also think to do anything sizeable you need the resources a company can bring. Our problems are at scale. You need a scaled resource pool and reinvestment in that to work up to some of the issues. I like the idea of carbon extraction for example, but I don't see any resources invested in it from US companies.

    • Carbon extraction isn't a viable solution until its whole area is running on green energy. With current technology, at least, running it on a green power source will make less of an impact than hooking that green power source up to replace some fossil fuels.

      In other words, don't rely on heal spells until the battle's over. They'll never outpace incoming damage.

    • Carbon extraction, for the moment, is useless.

      Most energy production still emits carbon. Adding in loses, you'd spend 100 carbon for each maybe 50 carbon you captured. You'd literally be making it worse.

      Same goes for electrical cars. Car engines are pretty much as efficient as burning fuels get, so with electrical you have extra losses (losses in electrical transmission, extra conversions, storage in batteries, then the electrical engine itself) so they may actually end up emitting more carbon than fuel cars.

      Want to stop this? Make all electrical generation carbon frer

      Air and sunlight are cute but fractional and likely will remain that forever

      We need nuclear power plants, and loads of them. Spent fuel there IS a problem but it's a manageable one.

      Even if we replace all cars and powerplants for non carbon within the next ten years, it'll still take centuries for the atmosphere to return to normal.

      Want to carbon capture? That is HARD because of loads of technical problems but one to keep in mind: all that carbon (yes yes, CO2) in the air is because we took energy from a system and used it. CO2 was the result. You want to take out that CO2, you need to spend the same amount of energy to take it back. With losses in conversion, you'll need to spend probably double that. With what nature can remove by itself, you mght get a 10% discount.

      What does this mean? We need to spend the same amount of energy as we generated over the past two centuries on top of the energy we need every day to be able to capture all that CO2. That is a metric shit tonne of CO2 and capturing it requires first and foremost that ALL our energy production is CO2 free.

      Ah also: for technical reasons airplanes will never be electrical, cargo trucks neither. Yeah yeah, tesla truck blah, nobody will use it and musk, besides being an absolute moron, is also a scammer. Electrical trucks are not worth it because of battery weight. Think batteries will magically become 2000% more efficient? They won't. Batteries are pretty much elat the roof of what's possible and barring some revolutionary new energy storage that may or may not exist, batteries won't become much more efficient beyond maybe tops 30% more than we have today. Either way, cargo trucks d Airplanes need light batteries and even li-ion batteries (lithium being the lightest metal) won't cut it. Cargo trucks would lost most of their cargo capacity in batteries or would require recharging (and waiting for hours) way WAY too many times. Fuel based trucks lose their gas whilst driving and become lighter. This adds range and cargo weight. Electrical ones don't. Electrical (heavy) trucks aren't practical and won't be used.

      Also, battery fires are a removed and are almost impossible to put out. All it takes is one electrical fire from a car in a tunnel that will kill a few hundred people to make people reconsider battery cars. Now imagine trucks.

      Same for airplanes. A laptop battery in and airplane is risky. An electrical plane would require 50-70% of it's weight in batteries (so we transport 100 people instead of 300) and of that thing catches fire, which happens a lot, those 100 people are screeeeewed.

      Hydrogen also won't work as the atoms in the gas are so small that they escape though just about everything. You'll need very heavy tanks to transport it compressed enough so you'll again lose the "weight war", if you will.

      So we'll continue puahing CO2 in the air with airplanes and trucks, but cars are doable. Powerplants are doable.

      But look at the will of politicians. More and more politicians are willing to lie about climate change because that's what their conspiracy theory believing base believe, so they'll happily parrot that bullshit because they'll watch the world burn if it means they can rule the ashes.

      Then there are the millions of scammers with perpetual motion machines or their magic clean water from air machines or their Hyperloop ideas that were refuted over a century ago yet we spend literally billions into that because humanity is stupid and dickish...

      I dunno. This can be solved if we wanted to but I think humanity in part doesn't care. The young just watch TikTok, the old are too dumb, somehow.

      Call me cynical all you like but I see a humanity ending problem in front of us and it can be solved but share holders and the rich must be kept happy before that! And if you try to say anything about that, you get the army of trained removed (yes, that is the acceptable word for people that have a good brain but refuse to use it) yelling over you that theyr read a Facebook post saying that science is evil.

      In a sidenote, various diseases that were nearly eradicated are coming back as well because of anti vaxxers now. Humans suck.

      So before you can even start thinking about solving this you first need to fix the removed problem. People need to start believing in science and reality again because too many people are now with their heads stuck in fantasy world where "god would never allow this" or "scientists are evil because EVERY GODDAMN TV SHOW AND MOVIE NOW SHOWS EVIL SCIENTISTS.

      /rant.

      But I do encourage you to tell me I'm worng in anything I said. Please, if you think there is a solution, please please tell me

      • You want to take out that CO2, you need to spend the same amount of energy to take it back.

        Non sequitur. Nobody said we had to turn atmospheric carbon back into the same fuel it originally came out of.

        Electrical trucks are not worth it because of battery weight.

        This is only an issue for long-haul trucks, so, obvious solution: electric trains. No battery required.

        Also, battery fires are a removed and are almost impossible to put out. All it takes is one electrical fire from a car in a tunnel that will kill a few hundred people to make people reconsider battery cars. Now imagine trucks.

        There are plenty of EVs on the road already. If that was as likely as you're trying to make it sound, it would have happened many times already.

        Yeah, lithium-ion batteries are volatile, but they aren't that volatile. Solid-state batteries are even less so.

        removed (yes, that is the acceptable word for people that have a good brain but refuse to use it)

        I won't comment on whether it's acceptable, but it definitely isn't correct. The R word refers to people whose brains are impaired, not merely underused.

        Call me cynical all you like but I see a humanity ending problem in front of us and it can be solved but share holders and the rich must be kept happy before that!

        That's the real problem, not the technology. We can solve this problem. We don't even have to sacrifice our modern civilization and creature comforts to do it. But we won't, because some very lucrative businesses would become obsolete in the process, and their owners would sooner burn down the world and rule over the ashes than tolerate the loss of their wealth.

    • Hey, so be careful if you're planning to move up north-up north.

      The ground has started exploding in some areas that have permafrost, and some of the lakes are starting to release a lot of methane. Think Alaska and Siberia.

      https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201130-climate-change-the-mystery-of-siberias-explosive-craters

      The weather is probably going to be fucky in one way or another everywhere you go. I don't think there will be an area that you can move to to really escape climate change. Wildfires are kicking the butts of many communities that are further north, and the winter ice storms that happen are pretty deadly too. I can't imagine that those things will go away or improve anytime soon, since they are heavily thought to be linked to climate change.

      Some of the great lakes are so polluted now that the governments of both the US and Canada have recommend a safe yearly maximum number of fish to consume. The limit for at least one of those species is literally zero, due to how much fish absorb from the water around them. These are "forever chemicals" that are being absorbed.

      We still need to try to work on climate change, regardless of location. I hope that people don't think moving north will protect them from the effects of climate change, because it probably really won't.

      I know that you probably already know that, but I would like more people to see this stuff. I've seen too many people saying that they think just moving up north will make them safe from climate change.

  • It's already happening, collapse on this scale is a slow process, and hard to observe from within.

    The roman empire didn't collapse from start to end in a single lifetime, after all.

    Nobody alive today will be around to see the "collapse" collapse, the extremely dire breakdown that comes as a sudden crisis in civilisation terms, but we will continue to see a lot of hardship from our dated and crumbling institutions and our society slowly losing its grasp on what it is, etc.

    In the end, just like the romans, our civilisation's collapse doesn't mean apocalypse, it's not the end.

    All civilisations rise and fall, and while ours is by far the grandest and strongest in many respects, it's also the weakest, relying entirely on extremely fragile global systems that, should they fail for even a single month, would throw the planet into chaos (electricity grids/Internet), hastening or even triggering that final sudden crisis, once three slow rot of a dying civilisation has already set in.

    But until then, such events will be overcome. Not until that rot has truly set in, and a sudden crisis is upon us all, will things finally collapse as we know it.

    So that's kinda good news for us, right? :-)

  • I live in Michigan where we just had at least 7 tornadoes yesterday, and NOAA is basically saying get used to it, this is the new normal. I’ve been in this house for 20 years and I’ve never seen devastation like this. I’ll be without power for several more days because massive 200 year old oaks were snapped like toothpicks and my street is littered with downed power lines.

    7 people have died, and when this happens in winter (which they’re saying it will), people will freeze to death in the aftermath. Things will get ugly soon.

  • Okay, jokes aside, how do I convince my dad?

    He’s Silent Generation (86), and he’s very smart and savvy otherwise (he’s an aerospace engineer, still has his 9-5 job in airplane development and has recently started driving for Uber to fill his spare time), and plays VR games on Oculus with me and my sister on weekends, but he doesn’t have patience for our climate change talk. He’s extremely liberal otherwise, but he thinks this is all overblown and the natural cycle of climate, telling us he’s seen these changes before.

    How do I convince him this is different? Im at a loss. Or maybe I shouldn’t bother because at his age it doesn’t matter and I should just let him ‘be right’?

    My sister is disturbed by his attitude, but im not sure it matters, really.

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