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One day I will die, and sooner than I wish. Maybe some effects of climate change will do me in. At least nobody can say I haven’t done what I could to stop it. It’s what I do for a living.
Why perchance has the interest in a self-sustaining life skyrocketed you think? Could it be because people can barely afford food anymore?
Not just that, it’s a combination of factors. Sustainable thinking, independence, a connection to the world and self and much more.
It’s not always up to us, but also countries like China that open a new coal plant every week.
Gotta power the factory that has to send garbage to america
Per capita energy use in China is under the threshold for sustainable usage, and they’re hitting their climate goals a decade early.
Meanwhile, Europe remains a dumpster fire of emissions, while heavily consuming from China’s surplus manufacturing.
Pointing to the other side of the ocean and saying “You guys need to fix it” has been an American remedy for too long. Now we’re eating hurricane after hurricane as recompense.
i don’t think china is the example you want to point to on that…
Ah yes I also forgot India.
But yes, China:
https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-worlds-coal-power-plants/
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/02/27/energy/china-new-coal-plants-climate-report-intl-hnk/index.html/
https://www.carbonbrief.org/china-responsible-for-95-of-new-coal-power-construction-in-2023-report-says/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/10/climate/coal-plants-china.html
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-six-times-more-new-coal-plants-than-other-countries-report-finRenewable energy means nothing if you’re also poisoning the planet now does it?
none of these seem to factor in co2 per capita.
https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-per-capita/
The Eastern Block states simply aren’t to blame here. They have low per capita emissions and large populations.
China, in particular, is right on target thanks to its all-options energy growth strategy.
China is one of the world’s largest producers of nuclear power. The country ranks third in the world both in total nuclear power capacity installed and electricity generated, accounting for around one tenth of global nuclear power generated.
thank you.
By the power invested in me by, well, nobody whatsoever, can I just take a minute to say, let’s all cool down a little in the comments!
There’s a lot of arguing against:
- The idea that acknowledging the tragic reality of climate change makes you defeatist
- The idea that because we have had some great advantages in green tech we can sit back and let climate change fix itself
I don’t see anyone making those arguments here though! Just lots of people concerned about climate change with different skews of how positive/negative we should feel.
Personally, I swing between powerful optimism and waking in terror at 3:00am for the future we’re hurtling towards. I’m sure other people are the same, so let’s just be friendly to the fact that other people are in different vibes to us.
There are some people working together very well right now to dismantle the climate, so let’s all remember that when we’re talking with each other.
Peace and love!
Everybody in this post is a sustainability specialist.
I worry that climate defeatism has become a religion, and it will be difficult to separate it from policy discussion going forward.
Things just shifted instantly from “nothing needs to be done” to “nothing can be done.”
The Climate Denier’s prayer:
The climate isn’t changing,
and even if it was,
It’s not humans that are causing it,
and even if we are,
It’s better for the economy if we ignore it,
and even if that’s not true,
There’s nothing we can do about it anyways.
climate defeatism has become a religion
Going outside to 90⁰ weather in October is a religion?
No. Climate defeatism is.
If the sum total of “Say no to climate defeatism” is “Don’t feel bad during the latest in a series of historic heat waves”, then you’re not arguing against defeatism. You’re arguing for denialism.
Don’t feel bad during the latest in a series of historic heat waves
Good thing nobody actually said that, then.
A few folks I know switched smoothly from “climate change is fake” to “maybe it’s real but there’s nothing we can do about it at this point. Might as well live it up.” Basically anything to avoid change at any level.
I think that’s the defeatism they’re talking about here, not people pointing out the issues.
A few folks I know switched
All of that is just cope, though. Speed running denialism to acceptance. The bottom line is that - individually - there’s nothing any one of us is going to do to stop Indonesia from building a new coal plant or end fracking in West Texas or stop whatever the fuck this is…
These are large scale socio-economic problems stemming from an industrial system that does not need to account for its waste byproducts. “Well, you should just believe that climate change is real but also believe its fixable” is the correct sentiment. But simple sentiment has no impact on policy.
I think that’s the defeatism they’re talking about here
I have spent my entire life hearing people in positions of authority talk about climate change and watching the institutions they lead ignore the impacts whenever a change in policy might detrimentally affect domestic economic growth rates.
That’s why my heart is filled with doomerism. Even when we know, and even when we (superficially) acknowledge we can change the policy, the folks at the controls… don’t do it.
Almost as if the people in charge of oil and coal and such want us to be fighting about this type of shit…
So what is this indoor farming for cities?
I remember those boxes to grow salad in, vertically stacked, interesting concept because no need for toxic stuff and almost no water, and it’s right there so no need for shipping.
You still need fertilizer and electricity that is less efficient than sunlight to grow indoors.
But somebody once gave terrible math about being able to feed a city from a vertical skyscraper farm and it’s been latched onto very hard as a futurism solution.
Been growing plants for 30-years, using zero sunlight to full sunlight. The difference in energy use, manpower, all that, is stunning.
Food is food because it contains loads of energy. We eat corn not oak leaves. That energy has to be put into the plant, at a loss, to get energy out. TANSTAAFL, literally.
Precisely that, hydroponics to be more precise. It’s not everything, but a great start
indoor farming
This is opposite of reduction of enviromental harm
You had me until the ocean cleanup.
The ocean cleanup doesn’t even make a dent, it never will. The amount of trash we’re dumping into the ocean is far higher than they could ever clean up. You have to fight the problem at the root, then you can think about cleaning it up. Otherwise it’ll be fine to dump trash in the ocean “bc the cleanup guys will catch it”
Stop eating fish and the oceans will become cleaner. Most of the plastic trash that’s floating in the ocean comes from fishing ships. Like nets and lines.
Solar isn’t scalable, clean, or sustainable. The only real option is nuclear. Most of the benefits to solar come from countries involved in multiple genocides, territorial expansion, and diplomatic saber-rattling. It’s a neat toy for youtubers, but it’s no real solution.
I’d be real curious if you can back those statements up with peer-reviewed sources.
For one thing, it’s not exactly like Uranium is mined in democratic nations with strong labor protections.
Also, “it’s a neat toy” they say, meanwhile Germany produces up to 15% of it’s total energy by solar: https://www.agora-energiewende.de/daten-tools/agorameter/chart/today/power_generation/01.10.2023/30.09.2024/monthly
I’m pretty sure that guy just masturbates every night to Our Friend the Atom.
I read that the production of solar is also counter productive. Don’t quote me on that cause I read it when I was like 10 maybe.
The materials needed for solar are very toxic, and hard to remove, we also need a lot of them. We get these from places like China and Russia cheap because they don’t mind their citizens dying so much as they make a profit. That cheapness is the cornerstone to every renewable project today. If we found ourselves in a position unable to trade with China/Russia, we would have to mine it in our own borders, poison our own land, water, and citizens. America could just return to it’s own petrol fields, but other countries would face serious challenges.
I’m not saying none of this is true, but at the very least most of this is misleading. We’re figuring out how to recycle old solar panels on an industrial scale: https://youtu.be/FCtEWveySsA
But progress is a bit slower than expected, mostly also because panels are a lot longer-lived than previously assumed (this is a good thing).
Yes, panels use rare minerals, but so does basically everything we consume and use nowadays. There’s two answers to that.
A) does it still make sense climate-wise to use these resources in solar panels? This is what Life Cycle Analyses are for. In general, throughout their life cycle, PV modules help prevent more CO2 emissions than their manufacturing process releases, i.e. they are a net gain (https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/13/1/252). This is similar to EV vehicles, which break even around 60k km driven depending on your electricity generation (if memory serves https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2023/733112/IPOL_STU(2023)733112_EN.pdf)
b) is there a way to manufacture PV panels less resource-intensive and maybe even without relying on (Chinese) rare earth minerals as much? Yes there is. https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/publications/studies/ISE-Sustainable-PV-Manufacturing-in-Europe.pdf and see also sources above for next-gen differences.
That being said, for now it’s still economically more attractive (usually) to implement Chinese panels because they’re flooding the market. Still, it’s a net gain as outlined.
Real question: Most of things listed are consumer level changes. Isn’t the large majority of global warming being caused by industry emissions?
Large scale solar is also taking off.
Large scale solar farms have been a thing for decades. Large scale solar adoption is like wrestling with a hydra. The heads are Russia, China, and the middle east. Go nuclear, be the sun.
All that matters is cost in the energy transition. A certain subset of person likes fission because it’s always fun to be contrarian. But there’s a reason fission companies have gone bankrupt left and right, and that we’ve seen countless fission startups collapse over the last two decades. Nuclear proponents like to bitch about strawmen Greenpeace activists and people irrationally afraid of nuclear power. They like talking about these phantom barriers to nuclear, as if fear of nuclear power has anything to do with why fission is a dying technology.
Fission is dying because it’s just too damned expensive. Bitch all you want about the intermittency of solar; it’s cheaper to just spam solar panels and batteries than it is to create an equal amount of reliable power with fission.
Nuclear proponents will always state that fission can be done perfectly safe, and that’s true. But when you point out the cost, they then bitch about regulation making it expensive. Never do they connect the dots that it is precisely that heavy-handed regulation that ensures corporate profits don’t result in unsafe power plants.
Fission is an inherently dangerous technology. Yes, some modern plant designs are “intrinsically safe,” if they’re built right and maintained right and no greedy bastard corporation cuts corners somewhere to save a buck. In order to do nuclear safely, you have to regulate the ever-loving hell out of it and make sure every step of the process is checked and double checked, and that there is some neutral third party looking over everyone’s shoulders. Nuclear power, if done wrong, can go absolutely catastrophically wrong. It can render entire regions uninhabitable for generations. It can be done safely, but only if extremely heavily regulated and tightly controlled. And that is one thing that just inevitably makes fission power extremely expensive. There is no “move fast and break things” when you’re splitting atoms. Development is slow, expensive, and bureaucratic. And that is unfortunately just the way it has to be for this technology to be used safely in a for-profit capitalist society.
How’s it feel to be a fossil fuel stooge?
Quit huffing paint. The future is solar. Fission, like fossil fuels, is a dead-end technology.
What exactly does nuclear change about Russia, China and the middle east? That’s a massive non-sequitur
Besides, think of China what you will, they’ve been key in driving large scale cheap solar
Nuclear is the only energy that really solves our problems. Nothing to really be confused about there.
You’re taking solar for granted. You’re not asking the important questions. Like, what if they wont sell to us anymore, what’s the human cost of human life? Can you honestly openly hold solar as some separate high accomplishment against the genocides China and Russia are openly complicit it?
The same can be said for nuclear. Potentially even more so. 3 countries produce almost all of the world’s uranium. What if they stop selling? You can build a domestic solar panel industry if you want, you can’t magic a uranium deposit under your feet. Nuclear is slow, expensive and a national security risk. Renewables are none of these things. Stop shilling for the energy companies that want to keep their monopolies.
Silliness. Your counterpoints are valid, but mostly restate my last comment with somehow even less sense. Buying solar panels from China isn’t more a national security risk than uranium from Australia? I don’t think you really have a well though out point here.
I’ll restate my own here for posterity and leave you to it. Solar from China Russia bad. Nuclear from literally anyone else good. Nuclear is safer, cheaper, and more efficient in every way at scale.
Remember, solar is untenable, poorly adopted, and is actively being pumped in price. This is as cheap as it will ever be all things equal. Nuclear has had none of those luxuries. If you think the price drop of a untenable solution is impressive, wait until you see one that really works.
Nuclear is consistently among the most expensive ways to generate power, and only afloat due to massive government subsidies, especially when it comes to waste storage. Whereas solar and wind are only beaten (in some metrics) by natural gas when it comes to power per dollar, getting even cheaper at scale.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
Your original point was that renewables are being blocked by China, Russia and the Middle East. I disagree on China, but that’s not the point. How will nuclear, with all strings attached, succeed there, whereas solar and wind won’t? Silliness.
Like, what if they wont sell to us anymore, what’s the human cost of human life?
Come on, you’re smarter than that. Are you seriously asking, “what happens if China cuts off our supply of solar panels?” Are you a troll, or just dense?
Think about it. Just think about that for one god-damned second. Solar panels last for DECADES. And even after decades they still retain 75-80% of their original capacity. We move everything to solar, and then China cuts us off from new panels. So then…oh no…we can’t get any replacement panels. Clearly the whole nation will collapse!
Of course not. Unless you’re Mr. Burns, you’re not blockading the fucking Sun. This isn’t oil, or natural gas, or uranium someone can blockade or embargo. If the US gets cut off from new Chinese solar panels, we have literally DECADES to ramp up our own production until things really become a problem.
my mind rapidly shifts from defeatism to optimism practically every week
Nuclear is the way to go. If we can’t manage that we never had a shot as an intelligent race to begin with.
