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What should be done... about climate change


Rippounet

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1 hour ago, larrytheimp said:

So squeeze any drop of petroleum out of the Earth and if there's any left and anyone still alive, rad!   ??? 

That's seems, ..... Stupid.

Suicidal. The term is suicidal.

We won't have the luxury of doing this little "experiment" anyway. Things will get way uglier than that because we're getting +1,5°C soon and that will change everything. 

Anyone who thinks humans will peacefully let "the market" fix this is delusional. I have an 8-letter word that's our actual future if we dont act now. The rest is horseshit. 

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Genocide. 

Because what's going to happen when humans, the most dangerous animals on the planet, realize their survival is actually at stake? When agricultures starts to fail? When the refugees number in the tens of millions?

We'll be lucky if there's anyone who can have the luxury of waiting for "the market" to fix anything.

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It also would be helpful if Tesla didn't keep shooting itself in the foot every other quarter and Musk didn't say incredibly stupid stoner bullshit every other month. Because if Musk is the world's only hope, we are sooooo fuckkkked. 

The other real problem is that even if what he does works - where he adds a crazy amount of batteries and replaces every single use of ICE out there (which includes things that aren't remotely on Tesla's roadmap, like planes and shipping), that's still only 29% of the carbon emissions. It doesn't stop fossil fuel use from generating that electricity (and realistically there's no reason they should as more electricity is required for all those cars), it doesn't stop the industrial issues, it doesn't do anything to actually remove the excess carbon. 

If the thought is that the best we can do is simply wean ourselves off of using most fossil fuel in 30 years time, we're already hosed. At that point we'll be spending a very large amount of our resources simply fighting natural disasters every year, and it won't matter if we're using ICE or not. We'll be having to deal with hundreds of millions of people displaced from their lands due to lack of water and impossible living conditions. We'll have to deal with routine megafloods and megadroughts that wipe out crops for a year. We'll have to deal with large areas of the coastlines becoming entirely uninhabitable. Of major weather events that cause trillions in damages. 

I do think that the only real solution at this point is technological, but it can't be an iterative one. There simply isn't time. 

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3 hours ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

As you can see, it will be a gradual process. You folks hoping for a solution in a shorter period of time are delusional. It will have to be a market driven transition, over decades. And if it takes another 100 years to remove the excess carbon from the system, well, then that is reality.

But the above is the only realistic approach. And even that requires visionary companies like Tesla to make it happen, against some powerful vested interests.

This is most likely true... but it's hard to predict the future decades in advance. An optimist would argue that a sufficiently motivated and determined government can dramatically accelerate progress towards a given goal. We know that this is possible because, for example, the United States has done it before with the moon landings. It may be that China or, much less likely, the EU or Japan could do something of the sort with regards to the development of cheap, clean energy sources today.

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4 hours ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

First get electric cars to be appealing. Then as more people buy them, use the resultant economies of scale to gradually reduce the cost so that the mass market can afford them. That allows market share to grow even more. Then - in best case 10 years from now - electric vehicles might be the majority of new car sales.

Or alternatively, just ban the production and import of ICE vehicles; effective immediately for imports, and a year to phase out production. There'll be a shortage of new vehicles for a while as EV production ramps up, but that's not a big deal; people can keep their existing cars for longer and repair instead of scrap & replace.

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1 hour ago, Rippounet said:

Genocide. 

Because what's going to happen when humans, the most dangerous animals on the planet, realize their survival is actually at stake? When agricultures starts to fail? When the refugees number in the tens of millions?

We'll be lucky if there's anyone who can have the luxury of waiting for "the market" to fix anything.

I think the "plan" is for the heirs of Musk and Bezos to watch from Mars/space to see how it works out and if the non-space focused side of the 0.1 %(the genocide faction) can survive after the rest of us are dead.  ;)

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1 hour ago, Kalbear said:

It also would be helpful if Tesla didn't keep shooting itself in the foot every other quarter and Musk didn't say incredibly stupid stoner bullshit every other month. Because if Musk is the world's only hope, we are sooooo fuckkkked. 

The other real problem is that even if what he does works - where he adds a crazy amount of batteries and replaces every single use of ICE out there (which includes things that aren't remotely on Tesla's roadmap, like planes and shipping), that's still only 29% of the carbon emissions. It doesn't stop fossil fuel use from generating that electricity (and realistically there's no reason they should as more electricity is required for all those cars), it doesn't stop the industrial issues, it doesn't do anything to actually remove the excess carbon.

He also has a solar power company and manufactures utility-scale batteries which can smooth out peaks in power usage. No, for all his eccentricities and apparent inability to understand SEC rules, Musk is doing about as much as one member of the ruling class can do to limit climate change. The problem is that he is very nearly alone in this. The vast majority of the elites today are either openly interested in continuing the usage of fossil fuels (because it financially benefits them) or vocally against climate change in principle, but not willing to do anything about it in practice beyond, say, taking a private jet to a Sicilian vacation spot where they will talk about how much they oppose climate change with others of their kind.

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2 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

Once again, these posts are hilarious. You guys are soooo screwed if you think you have 30 years to fuck around.

I didn't say we had thirty years to fuck around.  I said we had 20-30 years before the fossil fuel supply end of the equation forces major changes to the energy situation regardless of programs initiated now.  And that assumes going full tilt with fracking, oil/tar sands, drilling in dubious areas, and increasing energy efficiency.   

 

Yes, it will be Hell's own mess - worse case, resource wars that effectively ends civilization across much of the planet.  (I figure a decades long recession/depression with authoritarian overtones is the most likely result.)

 

The recommendations I made with the railways and electric cars and redesigning suburbia to be people friendly would soften the blow some, but even if civilization doesn't crash,  green energy will not be enough to keep things 'as is.'  

 

Kalbears crack about steak puzzles me; there be a lot of real estate more suited to grazing than planting crops.  

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1 hour ago, Fragile Bird said:

And in other happy news, Greenland lost 11 billion tons of ice this week. In. One. Day.

Watching videos of the Arctic Shelf cracking apart is so depressing.

Anyways, step one to fixing this crisis: remove most elected officials over the age of 50. We need to put people with a sense of urgency in charge. The elderly will not feel the effects of climate change like us Millennials will.

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29 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Watching videos of the Arctic Shelf cracking apart is so depressing.

Anyways, step one to fixing this crisis: remove most elected officials over the age of 50. We need to put people with a sense of urgency in charge. The elderly will not feel the effects of climate change like us Millennials will.

Good luck booting out the old farts. Some will self-select, though.

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saying we're almost out of oil for the past 50 years. Hasn't happened yet.

the basic contours of hubbert's peak oil thesis are correct, though it was likely difficult to predict in the 50s how extraction might develop or if anyone would figure out how to use byproducts like natural gas.  these things delay the inevitable, but there comes a day when one barrel of oil is used to extract one barrel of oil, at which point rational actors stop doing it.  sadly, rational is a standard we can no longer assume, as i can see trump spending a barrel to extract a half barrel out of spite.

 

my google news thingy is spamming me with 'articles'/ads for impossible burgers and other protein substitute products. i suppose that's something.

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To paraphrase something I've read somewhere...

What most people fail to appreciate is what the latest scientific news about global warming mean from a political perspective. The level-headed reasonable folks of yesterday betting on technical/technological solutions to be implemented thanks to the market are now the crazy delusional ones, while the hysterical radical environmentalists are the ones actually lucid.

I was reading today that according to the latest GIEC report we have about 8 years left before the +1,5°C is certain. Needless to say we know for a fact that we will not act in time to avoid +1,5°C.
Of course we could simply assume that things have to run their course and in the long-run humanity will somehow have to find a way to survive +4°C or +5°C. But that's forgetting just how hellish the world is going to become while we slowly turn things around.
In a nutshell, climate change is bad enough, but you need to add human geopolitics on top of that. What happens when the entire agricultural sector of a nation that has nuclear weapons fails? Will that nation simply accept its fate and peacefully disappear?
What about all those walls we are erecting? Does anyone not see their true purpose? Does anyone not see how desperate the next wave of refugees will be?
I don't think anyone is really ready for this type of future. I may be alone on this but I'd even rather live under a totalitarian eco-fascist state of sorts. Take my car and my computer and my steak... I don't mind if it's for the greater good. "Freedom" is just a buzzword anyway.

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1 hour ago, Rippounet said:

To paraphrase something I've read somewhere...

What most people fail to appreciate is what the latest scientific news about global warming mean from a political perspective. The level-headed reasonable folks of yesterday betting on technical/technological solutions to be implemented thanks to the market are now the crazy delusional ones, while the hysterical radical environmentalists are the ones actually lucid.

I was reading today that according to the latest GIEC report we have about 8 years left before the +1,5°C is certain. Needless to say we know for a fact that we will not act in time to avoid +1,5°C.
Of course we could simply assume that things have to run their course and in the long-run humanity will somehow have to find a way to survive +4°C or +5°C. But that's forgetting just how hellish the world is going to become while we slowly turn things around.
In a nutshell, climate change is bad enough, but you need to add human geopolitics on top of that. What happens when the entire agricultural sector of a nation that has nuclear weapons fails? Will that nation simply accept its fate and peacefully disappear?
What about all those walls we are erecting? Does anyone not see their true purpose? Does anyone not see how desperate the next wave of refugees will be?
I don't think anyone is really ready for this type of future. I may be alone on this but I'd even rather live under a totalitarian eco-fascist state of sorts. Take my car and my computer and my steak... I don't mind if it's for the greater good. "Freedom" is just a buzzword anyway.

See, of those two choices I prefer the wall over the “eco fascist state” option thankyouverymuch.

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21 minutes ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

See, of those two choices I prefer the wall over the “eco fascist state” option thankyouverymuch.

The wall isn't going to be enough, and you'll be getting a fascist state either way. Do you prefer your fascism to dictate what you can and can't eat, or do you prefer your fascism to dictate whether or not human beings are killed en masse? 

It also is remarkable how willing someone is willing to give up their freedoms to corporations while deriding giving up their freedoms to government. I've never understood how it's perfectly cool to let corporate people simply rule you without representation or any kind of democratic process but government is obviously the big bad. How does that work, exactly? 

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3 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

The wall isn't going to be enough, and you'll be getting a fascist state either way. Do you prefer your fascism to dictate what you can and can't eat, or do you prefer your fascism to dictate whether or not human beings are killed en masse? 

It also is remarkable how willing someone is willing to give up their freedoms to corporations while deriding giving up their freedoms to government. I've never understood how it's perfectly cool to let corporate people simply rule you without representation or any kind of democratic process but government is obviously the big bad. How does that work, exactly? 

Yeah, at least with government 'of the people' theoretically have some influence over the forces that control geopolitics.  Where as the libertarian crowd just wants to kick back and let the gangsters and big corps  run shit.

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