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WAFFLEHOUND posted:We don't know poo poo about the rate of change relative to previous change events, and this is one of the areas there's a lot of misunderstanding. Outside of meteoric events, the assumptions on time of climate change are largely "It happened around here". The argument we're seeing is that relative to previously recorded rates, climate change is accelerating as time goes on. This line of thinking operates on the idea that the rate of change is linear with time, which isn't the case. Our contribution is to compound an already occurring situation, and if you think us coming out of an ice age is an occurrence of the most recent era of industrialized human history then I hate to tell you this but you're wrong. I hate when interesting threads like this devolve into petty debates over issues of semantics and misunderstanding or reading comprehension problems when it's clear that we're already on the same side here, at least I think. Unless you think anthropogenic climate change is not real and we would be experiencing the same rate of modern day climate changes without it?
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Dec 9, 2011 21:48
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Office Thug posted:Just wanted to chime in to say these are impressive technologies for CO2 fixation. I especially like the electrochemical one, I've been looking for a good way to capture CO2 from the atmosphere for synthetic fuel production through fission-breeder nuclear reactors. Could this system also work in oceanic environments, like capturing CO2 from sea water solutions? I'd talked about it in a later post, but having a source of waste heat for use from nuclear or other power sources is perfect for CO2 fixation, since that heat can go towards chemistry (like what you mentioned using H2 as a source). I firmly believe that enzymatic chemistry will be the future of simple fuel production (people will always need hydrocarbons and alcohols). If you want CO2 in a usable format, Carbonic Anhydrases are the perfect candidate - there are no small-molecule or bulk catalyst systems produced by chemists that can compete with them in terms of stability and rate. You can isolate lime or baking soda to get HCO3-/CO3 2- without any electron expenditure, though understandably you'd be interested in the electrochemical system (since you have plenty of electrons to use). Since you have a simple hydrogen source from waste heat, you could just process things directly from oxalate to ethane, ethanol, or some other hydrocarbon or alcohol depending on the catalyst you use. Efficient hydrogen production can also be done enyzmatically - there are some pretty amazing proteins that will form hydrogen from protons (hydrogenases) that a few groups are trying to couple with solar cells (a nuclear reactor would work just as well though!), and some small molecule mimics from the world of inorganic chemistry that are struggling to compete. And of course you have the new cobalt-phosphate based oxygen-evolving catalyst that was recently re-discovered by Dan Nocera at MIT. Incredibly simple, it already works, and costs very little due to the high abundance of the compounds involved in its construction. Might be useful for what you do. Here's a link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.proxy2.library.illinois.edu/pubmed/19088970
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Dec 9, 2011 22:08
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Dreylad posted:the change we need to make are institutional and structural. If I read you right, you're saying that while the average individual can certainly help with their own personal lifestyle changes, there is nothing they can do to actually affect the climate problem? The common person in the USA (for instance) has, in practice, absolutely no effect on the country's environmental policies. Sounding like we're pretty screwed here.
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Dec 10, 2011 00:23
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Dreylad posted:This kind of thinking is fine, but the changes we need to make are institutional, not individual. You will never be able to convince all people, everywhere - individually - that they should give up their cars, and we should embrace better environmental practices. The thing I don't understand about the feasibility of making better environmental choices that are even close to the level of being large enough to impact climate change is the basic economic aspect. In theory it would be great if everyone walked or took public transit but what happens to the global auto industry in that case? You could make the argument that public transportation would be tremendously bolstered in such a scenario but obviously far, far fewer people would be employed even by a massively enlarged public transportation industry than the current global auto industry. That's not even to go into the impact that removing the economies of scale around producing the parts and equipment that go into private cars might have on the cost of building public transit capacity. On top of all that there are the millions of related ancillary jobs in manufacturing and marketing car parts, accessories, services, infrastructural maintenance and construction, public administration, research, etc. I'm not trying to attack you in particular or anyone advocating or trying to invent more environmentally sound practices I just haven't seen any meaningful analysis of how these things can be done while retaining something like sufficient employment. As it is automation in manufacturing has eliminated millions of jobs. As I hope everyone here knows it's not true that the US "doesn't make anything any more", in fact we manufacture more by most measures than we ever have, we just need very few (relative to 40 or 50 years ago) people to do it. This is very relevant to climate change because the collapse of a broad middle class based on good semi-skilled manufacturing jobs is (and has been for a long time) creating an underclass of working poor who quite understandably are never going to care about climate change. You simply can't care about climate change when you're struggling on a daily basis to take care of your family or just yourself. Even practices that seem environmentally sustainable don't necessarily make sense when examined more closely. Here is an example: the economic crisis has devastated the Chinese paper recycling industry and here is the relevant quote from that article: The Guardian posted:"Until about eight weeks ago, for example, the entire [US] west coast paper market was sent to China and most of it was sent south. It was processed and made into packaging for products that then shipped back to the US ... But when US consumer demand dropped off, that broke the cycle." The market for recycled paper really only exists to package newly made products. Yes of course it's still better for the environment that the packaging for new products is made of recycled paper but if the recycling can only be done amid a massive over consumption bubble based on credit it's hardly going to ever be a net positive for the environment. It's basically the same story with other recyclable materials like metals and plastics. Further down the lovely rabbit hole of unintended consequences comes the story of horribly unsafe recycling of lead batteries in Mexico. I don't think it's any environmentalist's fault that things like this happen I just think the overall net impact isn't really considered with respect to some environmental efforts. Things like this are always going to happen when you have deep systemic poverty, it always comes back to poverty. People generally don't care (because again, they just can't) about environmental degradation when they are struggling. The growing environmentalist movement in China is the perfect example as it coincides with the rise of the middle class. People have to have the time and money to care about climate change before you can even start to make meaningful change on the carbon reduction side of climate change and I just don't see how that will ever happen in time. Dogcow fucked around with this message at 02:15 on Dec 10, 2011 |
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Dec 10, 2011 02:09
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Dogcow posted:The thing I don't understand about the feasibility of making better environmental choices that are even close to the level of being large enough to impact climate change is the basic economic aspect. In theory it would be great if everyone walked or took public transit but what happens to the global auto industry in that case? You could make the argument that public transportation would be tremendously bolstered in such a scenario but obviously far, far fewer people would be employed even by a massively enlarged public transportation industry than the current global auto industry. That's not even to go into the impact that removing the economies of scale around producing the parts and equipment that go into private cars might have on the cost of building public transit capacity. On top of all that there are the millions of related ancillary jobs in manufacturing and marketing car parts, accessories, services, infrastructural maintenance and construction, public administration, research, etc. I guess the good news is that on a long enough time scale, the demand for employment will drop dramatically. I mean, we have to come to grips with the fact that many of our staple industries are the reason we're plunging headlong into environmental upset. We have to accept that nothing in the universe entitles us to the lifestyle that we in the first world enjoy right now.
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Dec 10, 2011 03:31
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Cobweb Heart posted:Sounding like we're pretty screwed here. Of course we are, if the whole "we need to drastically reduce carbon output or suffer enormous consequences" is even remotely correct- because there's not a loving chance in the world of it happening outside of some miracle science cure. There's simply not going to be enough "we can't ignore this it's so goddamn obvious it's climate change" events until it is absolutely too late, not to mention the nightmare of trying to organize governments globally. Even assuming countries aren't composed of politicians/leaders who only care about the immediate future it would be nearly impossible.
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Dec 10, 2011 03:44
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Dreylad posted:This kind of thinking is fine, but the changes we need to make are institutional, not individual. You will never be able to convince all people, everywhere - individually - that they should give up their cars, and we should embrace better environmental practices. Although that being said, it is useful if you're trying to build environmentally responsible communities at a small level. I think this is a cop-out. It has to be both. If as an individual you feel it should be institutional what do you say to an institution that feels it should be individual? The time to start is now, with what we can do, and then push on to influence institutions. The more people behave in an environmentally conscientious way the easier it becomes to affect institutions. If it's normal in your country to separate recyclables in your rubbish it's a lot easier to persuade the management of a chemical company to stop polluting a river - the people you're talking to already act to preserve the environment at home. There's no real difference between the attitude that I don't have to improve my behavour because it's up to individuals and the attitude that our country doesn't need to improve its behaviour because China is worse.
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Dec 10, 2011 03:48
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Morose Man posted:I think this is a cop-out. It has to be both. If as an individual you feel it should be institutional what do you say to an institution that feels it should be individual? No, he's right, your list is just things people can do to feel better about themselves and wouldn't change a loving thing.
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Dec 10, 2011 04:00
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Morose Man posted:The time to start is now, with what we can do, and then push on to influence institutions. The more people behave in an environmentally conscientious way the easier it becomes to affect institutions. If it's normal in your country to separate recyclables in your rubbish it's a lot easier to persuade the management of a chemical company to stop polluting a river - the people you're talking to already act to preserve the environment at home. The energy controversy of the moment in Australia is coal seam gas exploration and frakking. Now, it wouldn't even rate as an issue if the demand for natural gas wasn't worth the commercial risk despite the process being a terrible idea. Not even the NIMB factor is having sufficient leverage to slow the sector down, the last map of proposed CSG sites I saw is incredible, it's all over the place. Without getting into the irony of requiring supertankers to transport this all over the globe, you've got a set of processes that not even state governments feel able to deny. And you're talking about populist pressure on institutions? You really don't know the half of it. I'm sure our science nerds could list hundreds of bad industrial processes for which there are better alternatives NOW but will never be phased out because commercial inertia ignores them. What about the massive inefficiency of the power grid (estimated at 15% in Australia)? Or the growing salinity of arable land? My point is, there's heaps of known problems with hard scientific evidence behind them, and if they don't initiate a response, climate change is just not in the race. quote:There's no real difference between the attitude that I don't have to improve my behavour because it's up to individuals and the attitude that our country doesn't need to improve its behaviour because China is worse. The attitude isn't the problem. The problem is the habit of externalizing problems. Unless that gets changed, no amount of public anguish will change anything because the system externalizes that away. edit: speling
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Dec 10, 2011 04:45
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Doddery Meerkat posted:No, he's right, your list is just things people can do to feel better about themselves and wouldn't change a loving thing. Have fun driving around in your 4x4 blaming the government for not doing anything.
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Dec 10, 2011 04:58
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Sitting Here posted:I mean, we have to come to grips with the fact that many of our staple industries are the reason we're plunging headlong into environmental upset. We have to accept that nothing in the universe entitles us to the lifestyle that we in the first world enjoy right now. You're right of course that nothing entitles a 1st world lifestyle but I think the big thing people miss is that however terrible the gap between the 1st and 3rd world is it's also a fact that millions of people in the third world make what little living they have supplying the 1st world in some way. The Chinese recycling market probably being the most obvious. Most people probably think it's horrible that a Chinese person has to spend their life digging through a landfill for recyclable materials to make a living, and they would be right, but take the 1st world lifestyle away and there are not even those scraps to live on. Millions of people around the world make a living in similar marginal industries. You can say this is modern empire and colonialism and all of that and I would agree. But in the real world it's irrelevant because it's just not going to change substantially. There are too many people and too many historic structural injustices. Beside which it's a big misconception that pollution and environmental degradation are solely a product of the industrial revolution. Western Europe had big problems with deforestation at the dawn of the 16th century among many other examples of pre-industrial environmental damage. It's about the number of people and their density. Even at a 16th century level of environmental damage 7 billion people could do one gently caress of a lot of damage. The notion that we can somehow accept a lower standard of living and/or technology and that will reduce carbon output by some meaningful level is bizarre and ridiculous. It's frankly just an idea rooted in 1st world white guilt that has no relation to reality. Our global food system alone is a gigantic edifice that requires huge hydrocarbon inputs and a massive industrial base for all people from the poorest in the world on a tiny Indian government rice ration to the gluttonous 1st worlder at Red Lobster. An industrial base that cannot exist without the global consumer economy. In fact reverting to some kind of 19th century industrial economy (if it were even possible) circa the first green revolution would be far, far worse for the environment as industrial production at the time was horribly wasteful and polluting. There are thousands of toxic waste sites around the US alone dating to the 19th century still today.
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Dec 10, 2011 05:22
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Cobweb Heart posted:If I read you right, you're saying that while the average individual can certainly help with their own personal lifestyle changes, there is nothing they can do to actually affect the climate problem? The common person in the USA (for instance) has, in practice, absolutely no effect on the country's environmental policies. It's true individuals have little impact on national policies, but as a member of an organization that advocates for greater sustainability you could have a much larger effect. Like gun owners writing angry letters on their own probably make much less of an impact on U.S. policy than the N.R.A. Well, that's my theory anyway. Organization is probably the second biggest key to politics after cash. Dogcow posted:
You seem pretty sure that factories building trains won't provide the same number of jobs as provided by modern car manufacturers, why don't you offer us a little more evidence to support your claim? All you've offered so far is jus' cus. Besides even if you're right the economic losses caused by reduced employment in the auto industry could be offset or even surpassed by consumer savings on the purchase and maintenance of expensive personal vehicles. You make important points regarding modern "Green" industries like paper recycling, which generally aren't sustainable in the strictest sense. Using Webster's definition: "of, relating to, or being a method of harvesting or using a resource so that the resource is not depleted or permanently damaged" Paper recycling isn't sustainable because each time the paper is recycled its quality decreases until it eventually becomes unusable and freshly logged pulp is required for the next ream of paper. That's why recycled paper gets used to make lovely packaging material. The same goes for recycled aluminum. Your standard beer can contains multiple alloys with small percentages of poo poo like manganese designed to give the top and sides different strengths. When you melt the whole can down you get a less useful alloy that can't even be reused to make more cans. Instead of recycling you get downcycling, A process in which you continually degrade the quality of your materials until you eventually have to throw them away anyway. To make recycling really sustainable you'd have to close the loop, so to speak, and be able to use your recycled material again in the original production process.
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Dec 10, 2011 05:44
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SGRaaize posted:This thread is making me depressed, but it really sounds unbelievable that people are suggesting catastrophic scenarios in the next 20 years and literally no one is thinking about it, which does give me some doubt to these claims. The thing that makes it a bit hard to visualise for most people is that none (Well most ) of the scientists are not suggesting that in 20 years from now we go to bed in happy valley and wake up in mad max hosed world. Its a process. The weather slowly gets wierder, the droughts get longer, fishermen get shittier catches, and more and more you'll hear of floods and hurricanes that are just a bit worse than a few years before and it all happens inch by inch. The thinking now is that this process actually started quite a while back, starting with the industrial era. Remember the ethiopian famine of the 80s (Some of you might be too young). Well a lot of that might well have been the the early warning signs of trouble ahead, as with the banglidesh floods. The problem with slow incremental negative changes , is that they are hard to percieve since we are conditioned to percieve catastrophe as a punch in the face. As a result its easy to look around and go "Eh... its not so bad" and think maybe the scientists are just hollering alarmingly or worse doing it for some mysterious nefarious reason. On the other hand I don't quite know what sort of timeframe the run-away CO2 scenario operates on, but perhaps THAT might actually be a pretty alarming thing to witness.
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Dec 10, 2011 08:35
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Morose Man posted:I think this is a cop-out. It has to be both. If as an individual you feel it should be institutional what do you say to an institution that feels it should be individual? I don't disagree. What I posted was that the more important changes are institutional, not individual. But yes, some individuals on board is important in creating a broader movement. Ultimately that movement has to change our institutions because that is where most of our waste and pollution comes from. However, I don't think recycling and environmental stewardship go hand-in-hand. Industry and individuals are often at odds because recycling doesn't get in the way of manufacturing, extraction or production. I have no doubt, for example, that plenty of Albertans in Canada reuse and recycle, but many of them will then drive up to their job at the oil sands and continue to extract an incredibly energy and water intensive carbon fuel. I don't really see how demanding for institutional changes is a cop-out because it still requires individual participation, at least in democratic countries. And of course China isn't even remotely as worse as any western industrial nation -- anyone who insists China, Brazil, or India is as bad as the rest of us is ignoring the history of carbon emissions. Dogcow posted:The thing I don't understand about the feasibility of making better environmental choices that are even close to the level of being large enough to impact climate change is the basic economic aspect. In theory it would be great if everyone walked or took public transit but what happens to the global auto industry in that case? You could make the argument that public transportation would be tremendously bolstered in such a scenario but obviously far, far fewer people would be employed even by a massively enlarged public transportation industry than the current global auto industry. That's not even to go into the impact that removing the economies of scale around producing the parts and equipment that go into private cars might have on the cost of building public transit capacity. On top of all that there are the millions of related ancillary jobs in manufacturing and marketing car parts, accessories, services, infrastructural maintenance and construction, public administration, research, etc. Well here's the thing: it may not be feasible. The transition may be very painful. There may be massive unemployment, and the creation of huge rust belts and all those terrible things, but ultimately something's gotta give. I will always allow for the possibility of someone or some group coming up with a new paradigm or socio-economic framework that allows us to shift to a sustainable civilization while maintaining our current quality of life. But for every degree of average global temperature we gain we lose about 10% of our current food production, so the rule goes. I doubt that rule would last for long if we get bumped up about 3-4 degrees average global temperature, but at that point no one will really care. If you want some specifics (that are still a fair amount of guess-work) I recommend checking out the youtube link I posted earlier. The most important Dyer makes in his book, that I think we all have to come to grips with is that through our last 150 years of geo-engineering we've broken a number of ecological self-regulating systems that even if we damaged, would often recover and adjust. Now we may have to do the work ourselves, which requires a lot more scientific study, and the understand that we're going to have to grow up as a species and start trying to figure out how to keep things from falling apart. If we get through this crisis. duck monster posted:On the other hand I don't quite know what sort of timeframe the run-away CO2 scenario operates on, but perhaps THAT might actually be a pretty alarming thing to witness. We're at 392 ppm of C02 in the atmosphere at 2011, with about 2 ppm/year. We were at about 280 ppm at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Runaway* C02/global warming would be around 450 ppm (2 degrees higher average global temperature), and most estimates have us hitting about 500-550 ppm before we get C02 emissions under control. *Point of no return in the sense that we lose control, and the warming triggers positive feedback from natural sources that drives further warming. Up to that point if we shut off all our carbon emissions, then the warming stops... in about 20 years after the fact. Dreylad fucked around with this message at 09:58 on Dec 10, 2011 |
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Dec 10, 2011 09:29
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eh4 posted:The energy controversy of the moment in Australia is coal seam gas exploration and frakking. Now, it wouldn't even rate as an issue if the demand for natural gas wasn't worth the commercial risk despite the process being a terrible idea. Not even the NIMB factor is having sufficient leverage to slow the sector down, the last map of proposed CSG sites I saw is incredible, it's all over the place. Without getting into the irony of requiring supertankers to transport this all over the globe, you've got a set of processes that not even state governments feel able to deny. Part of the problem here is that in Australia, mining changes everything. Australians seem obsessed with the idea that mining is the only reason we're not a third world hell-hole, when in reality it contributes maybe 10-15% at best to the economy at best. You could eliminate all mining in the country and the economic hit would be barely noticable to most people. But the old idea that Australia is rich because we "rode the sheeps back" and now ride the excavators back is so strong even people opposed to mining believe it. Back in the 90s a bunch of us where involved with trying to stop old growth forrest logging in high value forests. We went full ape on it, digging up roads, setting up tree sits, digging tunnels and all the feral poo poo that goes with that. The conservation council and the city "green-o-crats" (as we dubbed them) did a bunch of lobbying and rallies and stuff. End result , we pretty much shut that poo poo down , more or less (although its not quite, there was still some, and a bunch of fuckery from government redistricting old-growth designations to 'regrowth' designations on account of say, some dude cutting tree down 100 years ago or whatever. Point is , we fought the law and we won. Flip forward 4-5 years later to the ludlow forest campaign. This was a huge campaign that on the surface ought to have been a guaranteed win. It was one of only two stands of the "tall tuart" tuart variety in existance, it was a tourism forest that formed a major part of busselton/bunbury tourism, and had a full infrastructure of tourism roads, and even a small town of about 30 people (ludlow) entirely dedicated to servicing it. Plus as the scene of an indigenous massacre, and its role as a traditional meeting place and burial place between the various tribes of the bilbumen Nyungah, Wiping that off the face of the map seemed inconcievable. Until they found titanium in the sands beneath it. The campaign to stop it was a loving monster. We had *every single person* in ludlow onside and at rallies, huge sections of bunbury and busselton, pretty much every greenie in the state, rock stars like John buttler and peter garret (prior to his sell-out to the labor party), football celebrities, a sympathetic press, pretty much the entire aboriginal movement, and all the old school blockaders setting up tree-sits, and what not. Rallies with thousands and thousands of people. Researchers from all 4 universitys putting out pleading press releases demanding the government not even countenance the idea. But in WA mining is king, and the government, labor i'll add, not the tories, gave the go ahead, and ludlow was bulldozed and a mine built. Most greenies will never ever forgive labor for that. We sadly don't know if the remanants of the Tall tuarts will survive. Some scientists now say that as a result of the mine which bulldozed half the remaining area of the tree, disrupting the water supply of the other half, its quite possible the species will go extinct. There is NO way this would have happened if it was just for logging (Actually all the major logging companies refused to get involved with this operation saying that it was insane to log it. The mining company had to log it, itself.) but it happened because it was logging. There was no logic to this , except that a mining company, who coincidently had just out of the blue decided to become one of labors biggest donors, wanted to do it, consequences be damned. Oh, and I believe the mine doesnt operate anymore. The loving thing was only projected to take 4 years. And now they are "rehabilitating:" the land. I dunno if anyones ever seen a "rehabilitated" sand-mine, but another term for it is "cow paddock", since with all the nutrients sucked out of the soil and the water table ruined, all you can really do is plant lawn and drop some cows on top of it. Sand mining is loving evil. Keep that in mind next time you brush your teeth and get a nice sparkly titanium sheen to your chompers. Whatever the case , it really opened my eye as to the power of mining. This wasn't a multi zillion dollar operation. We where talking about 3-4 hundred mil tops, and amortized over the loss of tourism in the area , its likely a net loss since that unique and wierd looking forest is never coming back. But oh no if we lose mining everyones going to have to work in a factory  Australians deep down are very environmentally conscious people. But we have an inbuilt terror of poverty that has been exploited to stop us acting on that instinct. Environmentalists need to work on that and explain that mining really isn't that big a thing in our economy in the scale of things, and whilst it'll never go away, we can work to sensibly keep it at a sustainable level that isn't sabotaging our future. e: Sad story regarding that. One of the key people in the campaign to save ludlow, Chris, an older british chap, who became famous for his custard pie attack on the CEO of the mining company involved , committed suicide soon after. None of us know quite why but most of us believe the scale of environmental catastrophe losing that fight created might have simply have become too much for the poor man. He really was a nice dude too. duck monster fucked around with this message at 10:36 on Dec 10, 2011 |
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Dec 10, 2011 10:28
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duck monster posted:Part of the problem here is that in Australia, mining changes everything. Australians seem obsessed with the idea that mining is the only reason we're not a third world hell-hole, when in reality it contributes maybe 10-15% at best to the economy at best. You could eliminate all mining in the country and the economic hit would be barely noticable to most people. But the old idea that Australia is rich because we "rode the sheeps back" and now ride the excavators back is so strong even people opposed to mining believe it. I wish this was more generally known, but even if it was I'm not sure it would be internalized. I live in a region still dominated by its history of mining. You look at the landscape and all the trees (I'm talking huge areas) are stunted little eucalyptus scrub that hasn't changed since the 1930's because there's practically no topsoil left after the mining and every bushfire prunes them back. And that was more or less small to medium-scale gold mining, nothing like open-cut or sand mining. There are cyanide sands all over the place, god knows what other toxic stuff is buried around here. Culturally, we're still deep believers in terra nullus. We don't think any of this will come back to bite us because its a big country and you can bury anything; of course, until it does bite us and the buried past disinters. Your mining anecdotes don't surprise me: WA in some ways is a odd cultural analogue to Queensland, where a former Premier couldn't actually understand why his interests in coal might appear to outsiders as a conflict of interest, much less anything more improper. Currently, North Queensland fisherman are bemoaning the latest reservation of the Barrier Reef. That frankly annoys me; everyone has known for decades that the future of seafood is fisheries, their excuses are particularly thin given the history of prawn fishing up there. We're a microcosm of the issues of the North in these ways.
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Dec 10, 2011 12:12
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Dreylad posted:I don't really see how demanding for institutional changes is a cop-out because it still requires individual participation, at least in democratic countries. No, of course it's not. Refusing to modify one's own behaviour on the grounds it's someone else's (even an institution's) job to worry about it is the cop-out. I think we're essentially on the same page Dreylad. Our governments, our companies, absolutely must do a lot more. And I think that even more after watching the Gwynne Dwyer video you very kindly linked. But I do feel that part of influencing institutions is setting an example and living the lifestyle. If I were CEO of Shell and someone criticised me I'd be looking to discredit them. Over here with the Occupy St Paul's protest demonstrators were criticised for buying coffee from Starbucks (the implication being they're not as anti-capitalist as all that). It's easier to influence institutions if you behave more responsibly individually. And it's easier for institutions to defend themselves against criticisms if they can point to apparent hypocrisy in their critics.
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Dec 10, 2011 12:35
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Morose Man posted:No, of course it's not. Refusing to modify one's own behaviour on the grounds it's someone else's (even an institution's) job to worry about it is the cop-out. It also helps to drive institutional change if you demonstrate a demand for more responsible products. I know we can't consume our way out of a crisis, but there are some necessities that are not gonna go away, but which can be produced in a more appropriate way. Power for instance, many companies have renewable tarrifs and commit to matching every KWH you use with a KWH bought from renewable sources. It's not prefect (baseload stuff), but it does help drive investment and essentially subsidize the industry. On a more everyday side, some supermarkets stock only free range eggs now. That would not have happened if every consumer had rejected the higher welfare but higher cost option in favour of battery eggs, but by demonstrating a willingness to compromise on price, egg buyers influenced supply. In the long run, institutional change is the only answer. But that is easier to achieve if a large number of people make personal changes.
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Dec 10, 2011 12:46
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WAFFLEHOUND posted:This is absolutely the case. What is the issue is our impact on an already changing climate. There's no question we're loving up a lot of things with pollution and our carbon dioxide output, Do you have a point of disagreement or do you just like to state all your agreements in an argumentative, patronizing, and condescending manner?
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Dec 10, 2011 13:05
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BobTheFerret posted:I'd talked about it in a later post, but having a source of waste heat for use from nuclear or other power sources is perfect for CO2 fixation, since that heat can go towards chemistry (like what you mentioned using H2 as a source). I firmly believe that enzymatic chemistry will be the future of simple fuel production (people will always need hydrocarbons and alcohols). If you want CO2 in a usable format, Carbonic Anhydrases are the perfect candidate - there are no small-molecule or bulk catalyst systems produced by chemists that can compete with them in terms of stability and rate. You can isolate lime or baking soda to get HCO3-/CO3 2- without any electron expenditure, though understandably you'd be interested in the electrochemical system (since you have plenty of electrons to use). Since you have a simple hydrogen source from waste heat, you could just process things directly from oxalate to ethane, ethanol, or some other hydrocarbon or alcohol depending on the catalyst you use. I had no idea enzyme chemistry was getting good this fast. This is extremely good information and I'll definitely keep looking into it to see what I can find in terms of fuel synthesis. Fatkraken posted:In the long run, institutional change is the only answer. But that is easier to achieve if a large number of people make personal changes. Trying to improve efficiencies, whether it's individual or institutional, to stave off the looming unsustainably problem is a dangerous gamble in my opinion. There's only so much you can do by improving efficiencies until you hit those pesky physical limits to the ressources you absolutely depend on. It's a gamble because if efficiency fails then we will need to compromise meeting our basic needs, not just luxuries. Energy is a good example of this. I did some less-than-ideal calculations assuming everyone was a healthy adult woman and found that to live and breath we would require about 1/20th of the energy we currently consume over a global average. Any reductions of energy production below that will inevitably lead to lower population. Any reduction in energy production may also risk leading to lowered quality of life and shortened life spans after a specific tipping point, depending on how the shortage impacts the economy and society. Suffice to say, if you decide to improve your own conditions through more efficient use of what you have, go for it by all means. It would be something ideal for you to do in any case since it can lead to tremendous personal savings if you can fork over time and money to cover the initial costs. However putting all your money on just that and getting others doing the same with the intent of keeping our very basic resource problems at bay is going to be very risky. The other option is to support different, equally cost-effective or even advantageous sustainable resources that would allow society to keep trucking along. Nuclear is one of these due to its massive specific energy, along with synthesizeable organic compounds to chemically replace metals or other inorganic compounds for industrial or individual applications. I'm more concerned with securing energy because it will really help in securing many of our other resources, especially food and water. You can do all kinds of crazy poo poo with enough energy, synthesis of fertilizers to enrich soils, recycling resources, production of potable water, and even geo-engineering. Efficiency would help just because it could make sustainable resources even more potent, but we need sustainable resources to begin with. We'll also have to be careful in which resources we invest, we don't have much time. Also there is no reason why you can't bet on both individual/institutional efficiency improvements and resource improvements, sometimes those even go hand-in-hand as some resources only become accessible when they are fully utilized (see Nuclear thorium or uranium cycles, which require breeding to implement). Office Thug fucked around with this message at 19:05 on Dec 10, 2011 |
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Dec 10, 2011 19:02
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Wow, at what point does the act of bombing all fuel refineries become rational self action?
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Dec 10, 2011 20:21
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trollstormur posted:Wow, at what point does the act of bombing all fuel refineries become rational self action? Never, because you don't need to refine coal.
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Dec 11, 2011 00:23
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The Read Menace fucked around with this message at 18:20 on Jan 14, 2015 |
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Dec 11, 2011 06:24
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I would love a one world socialist government run by the UN. It would be like the government form of an exceptionally polite and unassuming Englishman.
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Dec 11, 2011 06:27
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You can go right to the UN site and see it, it's all right there, you just have to read BETWEEN the lines!
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Dec 11, 2011 06:28
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VideoTapir posted:You can go right to the UN site and see it, it's all right there, you just have to read BETWEEN the lines! Its all about looking for code words, like "sustainability" which actually means "homocommunist global dictatorship" and uh also secret symbols in logos since for some wierd reason evil doers like putting arcane symbols in the letterheads. I guess when you send an internal memo that says "TURN UP THE DOOM METER ON THE HAARP" , the guys in the tech department might not really get enough of a sense of DOOM DOOM DOOM unless theres a loving eye in the pyramid in the logo.
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Dec 11, 2011 07:46
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duck monster posted:Its all about looking for code words, like "sustainability" which actually means "homocommunist global dictatorship" and uh also secret symbols in logos since for some wierd reason evil doers like putting arcane symbols in the letterheads. Read Merchants of Doubt. It pretty much explains a lot of the ideology and symbolism of denialists, who turn out often to be the same people and organizations since the 1970's tobacco campaigns. It appears that the big motivation for the contrarian scientists involved is their Cold War obsession with communism. Once the actual communism ended in the 1980's they had to invent it elsewhere and it's a bit spooky to see bits of their campaigns echoed by the loopier fringes of the deniosphere.
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Dec 11, 2011 11:23
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Morose Man posted:But I do feel that part of influencing institutions is setting an example and living the lifestyle. If I were CEO of Shell and someone criticised me I'd be looking to discredit them. Over here with the Occupy St Paul's protest demonstrators were criticised for buying coffee from Starbucks (the implication being they're not as anti-capitalist as all that). I agree that a plan which seriously addressed the problem of climate change would best be carried out by people who set a good example and are hard to accuse of hypocrisy. And there can be personal and moral value in living a more environmentally-conscious life even if it doesn't produce a meaningful impact. But avoiding hypocrisy as a means of institutional change is only a relevant consideration if you have a serious plan for carrying out that institutional change beyond setting a good example. You're right that part of influencing institutions can be setting an example, but it's the same way that owning a nice suit is part of running for President. If I don't have a plausible campaign, all I've done is make myself look nice in front of a mirror.
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Dec 11, 2011 18:02
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Most people would be surprised just how many "expert" global warming denialists have ties with sectors that would be affected negatively by stricter regulations on emissions or by moving away from fossil fuels to alternatives: http://www.desmogblog.com/global-warming-denier-database Information on these people isn't hard to find or anything. You can easily google names and find them in past or current positions as part of energy sector companies or lobby groups recieving funding by the energy sector. They can exhibit combination of characteristics that make them questionable, like having ties to energy, not being involved in climate science at all, having no peer-reviewed papers, being part of extremely fishy institutions that don't physically exist, and so on. Their stunts are quite impressive too. One thing they did was gather up 900+ "peer-reviewed" papers which were then stated to refute climate change (http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2011/04/900-papers-supporting-climate-scepticism-exxon-links). One of their favorite things to do seems to be playing with the scientific process to their advantage, taking the side of uncertainties that favor them at face value, kind of like taking a scientist' quote that global warming is "highly likely" and saying "it's not 100% likely therefore it is uncertain and should not be remidiated until we are certain". The logical fallacy here is that nothing is ultimately certain due to limits of reference, measurement, and understanding, so you need to resort to statistics to make the least risky choices. If they knew anything about the philosophy behind science, specifically Thomas Khun's works on refutation of theories being a necessity to performing meaningful experiments, these con artists could convince people that scientists and their practices are inherently uncertain and thus cannot be trusted. This is not so much a problem with practitioners that can link their research to development of useful technologies, but it's especially dangerous to researchers in purely academic fields used to improve the understanding of our established theories. Fields like climatology are dependent on outside funding to survive, in Canada it's been cut to pieces when the conservatives came into power, for instance. People need to arm themselves information and learn how to fight this crap. Climate change is a huge deal and on top of the usual difficulties we come across when trying to persuade others to acknowledge it, we're also fighting embedded industrial interests that have a lot of money and simultaneously a lot to lose if policies shift to accept and combat climate change. It's going to require people practice critical thinking, something I think a lot of vested interests really don't want to happen.
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Dec 11, 2011 18:28
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duck monster posted:Its all about looking for code words, like "sustainability" which actually means "homocommunist global dictatorship" and uh also secret symbols in logos since for some wierd reason evil doers like putting arcane symbols in the letterheads. If anyone is interested they can see the rest of my (ongoing) chat with this interesting fellow on the newspaper's website here
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Dec 11, 2011 19:59
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At this point I'm really hoping that the oil runs out. That isn't going to be any fun for anyone at all, but it will definitely end all the moneyed interests in not dealing with this and other issues in a hurry, and I fear those fucks just aren't going to go away or be reasoned with in less than 30 years otherwise. We did pass peak oil already, right?
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Dec 11, 2011 21:26
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Office Thug posted:Most people would be surprised just how many "expert" global warming denialists have ties with sectors that would be affected negatively by stricter regulations on emissions or by moving away from fossil fuels to alternatives: http://www.desmogblog.com/global-warming-denier-database Of course Ross McKitrick is a fellow at the Fraser Institute.  , I'm glad to see how often the National Post comes up on this website.
Stephen Harper fucked around with this message at 23:29 on Dec 11, 2011 |
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Dec 11, 2011 23:13
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Ignatius M. Meen posted:At this point I'm really hoping that the oil runs out. That isn't going to be any fun for anyone at all, but it will definitely end all the moneyed interests in not dealing with this and other issues in a hurry, and I fear those fucks just aren't going to go away or be reasoned with in less than 30 years otherwise. We did pass peak oil already, right? They'll deal with it by war first, which is easier. Climate change will force resource wars on its own in any case; you can guess between who pretty easily.
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Dec 11, 2011 23:32
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Desmond posted:I hate when interesting threads like this devolve into petty debates over issues of semantics and misunderstanding or reading comprehension problems when it's clear that we're already on the same side here, at least I think. Unless you think anthropogenic climate change is not real and we would be experiencing the same rate of modern day climate changes without it? I think it's real, I also think it's vastly overblown and is being used by both sides of the political spectrum as a boogieman to implament/fight changes in environmental standards, ignoring the fact that there are very good reasons to start clamping down on CO2 output and pretty much everything else that don't involve using lovely science. Pellisworth posted:Bioturbation stuff and: Speaking in geologic timescales, you've got it backwards. We've been coming out of an ice age for a while now, and we're still coming out of it. This is why I was saying earlier it's stupid to think we can reverse any warming trend, because it's not like overarching warming has been a recent event in human lifetimes. As for the problems with paleoclimates, we can really only get certain information from sedimentary layers, and a lot of what people assume scientists have isn't there. For example, we don't know the exact dates on various strata, as you pointed out carbon dating only works to within a time period relatively nonexistant in geologic terms (60,000 years). The point I was making is that we don't have any loving idea at all about how fast these changes happened, so we have no way of knowing if what's going on now is being made massively worse by us or not. We're certainly not helping it, but climatologists are awful at writing their own PR and are pretty bad at looking at paleoclimates. Of course there's a lot of life dying off right now. Going into and coming out of an ice age is historically one of the biggest indicators for a mass extinction event, and right now there's greater marine biodiversity than at any other point in the history of the planet, and considering previous thawing event mass extinctions are around between 35%-45% of species die off, yeah, big loving shock. But the most important thing to remember is that paleoclimatology is often restricted to "in this period of a few hundred/thousand years (depending on dating method and resolution), it was generally warm/generally cool." Everyone seems to be thinking that well of course the warming trend would be linear if it weren't for us without really thinking about it. toy posted:Finally, why is your ice-age view not more widely accepted and transmitted, if it reflects the actual "in the know" science? It's very widely accepted, it's just that that particular piece of data is more the realm of geologists than climatologists and people often go "Well who the gently caress would listen to some rock guy for information about climates?" The other problem is there is a bit of a PR disaster with the right and while there are a lot of really loving good reasons to be for legislating carbon restrictions and environmental protections, and people see anything as "Well maybe this is a bit overblown" to be an attack on environmental policy. Basically it's kind of hard these days to take an issue people care so much about and go "Well, you're right, but for the completely wrong reasons." Ignatius M. Meen posted:At this point I'm really hoping that the oil runs out. This won't happen any time in a long long long long time. Nobody alive today will have a tombstone with readable text on it when oil finally does run out. What may run out sometime in the next century or two is oil that is profitable to extract at the current standards of profitability.
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Dec 12, 2011 01:35
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Back to the real world, it seems Durban decided something. Not everyone is joyous.
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Dec 12, 2011 01:43
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eh4 posted:Back to the real world What part of what I posted is not in relation to the real world? Or is it that I disagreed with your preconceived worldview?
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Dec 12, 2011 01:51
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WAFFLEHOUND posted:I think it's real, I also think it's vastly overblown and is being used by both sides of the political spectrum as a boogieman to implament/fight changes in environmental standards, ignoring the fact that there are very good reasons to start clamping down on CO2 output and pretty much everything else that don't involve using lovely science. But the ultimate elephant in the room is the massive amount of $$$ spent by fossil fuel industries to obfuscate the problem and the science.
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Dec 12, 2011 01:58
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WAFFLEHOUND posted:This won't happen any time in a long long long long time. Nobody alive today will have a tombstone with readable text on it when oil finally does run out. What may run out sometime in the next century or two is oil that is profitable to extract at the current standards of profitability. That's kind of what I meant. Sorry I didn't say it exactly like that?
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Dec 12, 2011 02:02
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McDowell posted:But the ultimate elephant in the room is the massive amount of $$$ spent by fossil fuel industries to obfuscate the problem and the science. Correct. The problem is the issue and the politics have become entangled to the point of stupidity, and now you can't say "Wait, the science here isn't so great" without being in the pocket of Big Oil. Like I said, there are some really goddamn compelling reasons for a lot of the legislation that is getting put forward to clamp down on emissions. There's also some really stupid pseudoscience getting flown under the same banner by people who will latch onto anything that could possibly gain oil companies profit as inherently evil, like Fracking. In other words, there's this awesome situation where scientists are inherently helping the enemy by attempting to clarify things. Ignatius M. Meen posted:That's kind of what I meant. Sorry I didn't say it exactly like that? Looking back up I still didn't get this from what you said. Sorry, could just be lovely reading on my part.
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Dec 12, 2011 02:07
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Well, no, I wasn't being the most clear on that, and I'm sure there's people who don't understand that oil isn't a resource that just straight up vanishes rather than becomes increasingly harder and harder to get out of the field until such are (practically) dry. I really should avoid assuming certain science facts are obvious enough everyone knows everyone knows them and won't say dumb things that sound like they don't.
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Dec 12, 2011 02:12
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