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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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GreyjoyBastard posted:So, here's a question. There are a fair few of varieties of things like corn and wheat http://bigpictureagriculture.blogspot.com/2011/04/geographic-wheat-class-areas-in-us.html Plus many varieties can tolerate a wide range of conditions. Look at Hard Red Winter Wheat (blue); that's planted from southern Texas to the Canadian border, which covers an enormous range of temperature, humidity, soil type and light regime. It's certainly likely the crops grown in a particular area will change, but with the variety of food crops available to humanity, we should be able to find SOMETHING edible that will grow in any given environment short of hard desert and tundra.
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Dec 13, 2011 12:45
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Dreylad posted:Well the fish-free oceans are already happening. That's largely from 100 years of straining the entire ocean with a fine sieve and eating everything that moves, no?
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Dec 14, 2011 00:30
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Dreylad posted:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification Oh I'm well aware of that, just saying it's not right to blame the difficulty of catching fish right now on it; that's due mainly to decades of industrialized fishing.
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Dec 14, 2011 00:39
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Dreylad posted:Honestly, overfishing isn't to blame. Fish stocks come back remarkably quickly if you ease off or shut down fisheries and try to help the environment recover. The acidification of the oceans is far more long-term and, uh, permanent. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cod_fishing_in_Newfoundland#Fishing_methods_and_the_fishery_collapse Fishery was closed over a decade ago, stocks still haven't recovered and probably won't due to ecosystem shifts. This is a fairly pointless derail to be honest, I'm mostly arguing the toss. Whatever the cause of past collapses, acidification is a HUGE issue and one that will have ever greater impacts as time goes on.
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Dec 14, 2011 01:03
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Outrespective posted:It's also funny that in the goal to make Clean Coal all civilization is succeeding in is removing a negative feedback from the burning of coal while retaining all the positive feedbacks. the goal of TRULY clean coal is coal with CCS (carbon capture and storage). Calling anything short of that "clean" is bullshit corporate greenwashing, if there's still CO2 coming out of the stack, that coal is not clean.
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Dec 14, 2011 01:42
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MeLKoR posted:I mean, yeah, if you can prove that they knew they were spewing bullshit and knew the consequences of that bullshit to the rest of the world then by all means put them on trial for crimes against humanity. But punishing people for simply being wrong or punishing the children of the guilty is a terrible concept. At this point, ignorance is not a legitimate defense. The scientific consensus is clear, and has been for decades. Deliberately trying to silence legitimate scientists who disagree with your vies (those scientists being the vast majority) is also an action where the ignorance defense falls apart.
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Dec 14, 2011 13:05
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Talking about space colonization as a solution to ANYTHING related to environmental collapse (other than *possibly* a severe shortage of specific elements like ultra rare minerals or isotopes of helium) is weird. Living in orbital or deep space is HARD. Living on mars or the moon is HARD. Harder than living in the Sahara. Harder than living in Antarctica. Harder than living on a floating platform in the middle of the ocean. On Earth it might be hot and dry, or cold and windy, but you still have access to air and are not bathed in hard radiation. However nasty conditions become on Earth, or currently are in specific regions, there will never be ANYWHERE that is as inhospitable as space or extraterrestrial planets within the solar system. It would be cheaper and easier to build underground arcologies or hollow out mountains than anything to do with space.
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Dec 15, 2011 14:10
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Deleuzionist posted:It's actually a good question: what is the viability of planting a trillion trees? Did Dyson do anything but calculate the amount of trees needed to reduce carbon in the atmosphere? Does he have any idea where they should be put, with what resources, what they should use for nourishment, and what other impacts on the environment would they have? Probably not. I would say very low. There are only less than half a trillion trees in the world right now, which cover about 1/3 of the land surface. Essentially we would have to cover nearly 100% of the land with trees, including the land which is currently not suited to tree growth like deserts and Antarctica. You could probably get this down quite a bit by going for super dense plantings, plantations tend to have a lot more trees per hectare than natural forests, but even so it's a lot of land for trees and not much left for food. In a sci-fi scenario, maybe you can make it work if we plant enormous plantations and switch our staple foods to tree-fruits (plantain is pretty good, and nuts are very energy rich), browsing animals and understorey plants that can grow under full tree cover. In a real world scenario forget it.
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Dec 15, 2011 18:00
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Narxysus posted:Trees need the same fresh water we want to drink, and the world ain't getting more flush with water without salt in it. In catchment areas, there's a balance between density of forest and net water into the catchment, I believe. Evapotranspiration returns water to the atmosphere in pretty short order, trees don't suck up and permenantly sequester water, they return it to the air where it can fall again as rain. The biggest river in the world has as it's catchment the biggest tropical forest in the world. Trees also play vital roles in stabilizing soils. REMOVING trees causes desertification and water shortages far more effectively than planting them. Reforestation is in fact one of the main ways of rehabilitating degraded land in arid regions.
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Dec 16, 2011 12:28
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Narxysus posted:You are right, but in the process of evapotranspiring, they hold water for a time. A trillion trees worth of water becomes locked up in the trees, even if you call it a flow. They are vital for the creation of rain, but they lock up some of the stock of fresh water. I guess I'm saying they're lifeforms, we'd have to share. Would that affect the freshwater flux though? I don't know enough about the quantitative water cycle, but water is constantly moving from the sea to the land (via evaporation and precipitation) and back to the sea (via surface runoff and percolation) with a certain amount being locked up as groundwater, in ice and in organisms. If you fill up all the aquifers (ie, there is more fresh water in storage) once they're full it doesn't mean the amount available for use is smaller. During the filling up phase yeah there will be a bit less runoff, but once they are saturated the total amount of freshwater in the world is greater. There isn't a set tonnage of fresh water that can possibly exist in the world where if you lock up portions of that tonnage there is less available for use for all time, because freshwater is constantly being "generated" from seawater. It's the balance between evaporation, precipitation, sequestration and runoff that's important EDIT: to cut through all that crap, the important question is this: do trees substantially reduce usable surface runoff/percolation and aquifer regeneration? When talking about water for human use, that is what matters, all the fresh water we use comes from groundwater or rivers. In addition to this, remember that some forms of surface runoff are harmful contributing to soil erosion or flooding after storm events, do trees mitigate these harms? http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/53391/icode/ says yes, trees are a net boon to watersheds, most watersheds providing high quality water for drinking, agriculture and industry are forested. In general forests are agreed to be GOOD for water supplies Fatkraken fucked around with this message at 14:43 on Dec 16, 2011 |
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Dec 16, 2011 14:33
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duck monster posted:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/9234715/Wind-farms-can-cause-climate-change-finds-new-study.html As it says in the article, the KIND of change it generates is very different in character to the kinds of changes from greenhouse gasses. Wind turbines facilitate the mixing of different layers of air, which at night tend to form with a thin cool layer close to the ground and cooler layers slightly higher up. Turbines mix these layers. The effect is localized and the amount of actual heat in the atmosphere has not changed, it's just moved around. That's not to say it's not something to take into consideration of course, especially when siting windfarms in agricultural areas or in/near sensitive habitat (though as the article mentions, air mixing can be advantageous for frost-sensitive crops). But I'd want to see more work on the impact of windfarms offsite and long distances downwind and in larger scale air circulation, local effects are to be expected and can be coped with or even used to our advantage, aforementioned frost sensitive crops could for example be situated around wind farms. In fact there is already research on the potential beneficial effects to agriculture of lower-atmosphere mixing facilitated by wind farms http://www.earthtimes.org/energy/wind-turbines-help-crops-say-us-researchers/178/ so this news story is NOT out of the blue, the effect has been known about for some time it's just that this is a particular high profile Nature study with numbers. As an interesting journalistic exercise, check out an article on the exact same piece of research on a left-leaning paper (the tory-graph is known for being right wing pro market, the grauniad far more leftist and environmentally and socially conscious) http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/apr/29/wind-farms-night-temperatures-study?INTCMP=SRCH Just the title of the article tells you a lot: "wind farms can cause climate change" versus "wind farms can increase night time temperatures". Now whether you read that as the Telegraph pushing an inappropriately alarmist anti-renewables agenda or the guardian pushing an insufficiently rigorous pro-renewables one is left as an exercise for the reader... Fatkraken fucked around with this message at 16:56 on May 1, 2012 |
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May 1, 2012 16:38
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Wolfsheim posted:Yeah, early on people were talking about poo poo like food shortages, horrific natural disasters, etc. I don't think being a white American is going to cut it if that's the case. The Whiteness is irrelevant. The American-ness probably helps though, because a) you guys have a freaking ENORMOUS military to keep out the great unwashed (and even in an oil crunch they're the people most likely to find alterntives, it's the US military that's leading the way on algal biofuels and nuclear batteries, however denialist the government might be) and that's quite apart from there being enough guns lying around for every man, woman and child to have one. And b) the US is physically large and climatologically diverse. It includes large amounts of land in northerly latitudes where increased temperature won't make farming completely impossible, and is big enough that changes in rainfall patterns are unlikely to affect the WHOLE country adversely. It also already exports a lot of food, so in any major productivity crunch could hunker down, ban exports and go closed-border. Europe and Russia are similar in that they also have large areas of land in northern latitudes which, if temperatures increase, could still be used productively by switching to traditionally more southerly grown crops. The countries that are at the most risk are the ones which are small, low lying, climatically homogenous, densely populated and equatorial. This includes a large portion of the global poor. These are not intended to be particularly comforting thoughts, knowing you'll probably survive in some form by virtue of being able to kill everyone who needs help is not a good thing. But unfortunately if and when serious climate chaos hits it will start at the Equator and move North, and the people already living in the North are likely to resist quite effectively.
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May 2, 2012 12:30
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 Hey guys it's OK, we don't have to worry. It turns out that if a Bad Man believes in a thing then that thing is false by definition. I will expand on this methodology to prove once and for all that the world is flat- HITLER believed the world was round!, what are you, Hitler II? (yes the photo is real)
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May 4, 2012 15:09
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Fortunately they've left a nice white space at the end of the question for someone to spray paint "yes".
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May 4, 2012 16:26
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Ytlaya posted:When people talk about something like NYC flooding, they usually ignore the fact that the water isn't going to just suddenly rise at once. It doesn't make any sense to think "what would happen in NYC if suddenly the water level was 3 meters higher?" They will have more than enough time to engineer something (unfortunately the same can't be said for areas that aren't important business/cultural centers). Not necessarily, you won't get the full 3 metres all at once but you'll get the sea creeping up mm by mm over the years without any ill effect, then a once-a-century storm will come along and the storm surge will be just that little bit higher which would be enough to breech various defenses and flood the whole thing.
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May 4, 2012 22:41
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duck monster posted:The problem with nuclear power is more a trust issue. People where told "never again" after cheynobyl and then fukushima happens and yeah, its going to be another decade or two before people trust the industry again. We can't just roll over and accept that though. Especially when every other power generation industry gets away with worse on a REGULAR basis. Oil spills, coal slurry pond collapses, dam collapses, tailings landslides, pipeline leaks, explosions, simply deaths through air quality. People have not lost trust in fossil fuels even after deepwater Horizon, and did not lose trust in hydroelectricity even after the Banqiao dam collapse killed as many people as nuclear BOMBS, let alone power. If the political will doesn't exist, fight for it TO exist. Political Will doesn't simply come from nowhere. quote:I might add, it certainly doesnt help here in australia that uranium mining companies are total loving cunts that are totally hell bent on loving over local aboriginal populations seemingly every time a new mine comes up for debate. What happened in Jabiluka was unforgivable in my eyes. yes I cheered when that shithole racist mine was closed down. I have no idea if the Mirrar people can ever be compensated for that. The loss of a sacred site to an aboriginal tribe is the equivilent of bulldozing mecca to a muslim. You just don't do it. Many mirarr still believe that mining the site could lead to cataclysmic consequences. They are a very spiritual people, and doing that to them was cruel. I won't attempt to defend Australian Uranium mining companies, but a) Australian mining is not essential to Uranium based nuclear power, if you're willing to put in the work you can yank the stuff straight out of the ocean b) many up and coming designs don't even NEED new uranium in an quantity, there are available methods of reprocessing waste and using alternative fuels, they just require investment and political will c) coal mining KILLS 10,000 desperate workers a year. The treatment of local and native peoples is a very good reason to attack Australian mining companies, but not a good reason to dismiss Nuclear Power as a whole.
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May 15, 2012 10:31
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duck monster posted:Or we could start getting this thorium thing happening. Seems to avoid all of the risks real or imagined , and theres loving tonnes of the poo poo lying around. Oh absolutely, that's what I meant by alternative fuels.
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May 15, 2012 16:41
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Konstantin posted:I just wish that environmentalists would educate themselves on nuclear power. Some blogs I read on the topic lump nuclear in with fossil fuels, or post alarmist stories of how bad nuclear is. I can just about convince people that nuclear is better than fossil fuels, but many cling to the idealistic view that we can get 100% of our energy needs from renewable resources, which is just not realistic. Baroness Worthington has an environmentalist background and is the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on Thorium, she used to be staunchly anti nuclear. It's not quite the same as accepting all nuclear, but it does show that Thorium could be what it takes in some cases. Some environmental journalists like George Monbiot are now pro nuclear, funnily enough it was Fukushima that pushed him over with the logic "if this is as bad as it gets with a 12 metre tsunami, it's a drat site safer than people have been telling me". He's super argumentative and confronts anti nuclear environmentalists on a regular basis, whether you think this is helpful or not is up to you but he doesn't let things lie (he's done similar callouts with Ian Plimer, the Australian climate change denialist). The best thing we can do as individuals is educate ourselves as thoroughly as possible and argue for nuclear from a position of knowledge. You're unlikely to win over the staunch anti folks, but you might make dents on the sidelines. Also join your local greens and stop letting them get away with poo poo science.
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May 15, 2012 21:27
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Kafka Esq. posted:What I wish for is an unbiased assessment of how long it would take to replace fossil fuels with nuclear, with appropriate deregulation steps and standardized machines, and what the trade off would be in safety, if there is one. I don't think there's any solid answer to this. It depends if you're relying on markets or going to "war footing" as with the Manhattan project or the space race. It depends on China, where the non-democratic government has a lot more power to enact unpopular laws. It depends on the results of the Thorium pilot projects. It depends on the costs of other fuels. It depends on whether climate change related disasters change public perceptions which could change the political barriers to investment.
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May 15, 2012 21:30
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Radd McCool posted:Regarding Thorium, if this online petition hits 25,000 signatures it'll get an official government response. It was put up a couple days ago by the individual who has been producing those popular Thorium documentaries. I assume that as a non American I can't sign this. However I'd urge someone with the background and knowledge to start a Thorium GBS thread and publicise the gently caress out of this petition. The UK got a Thorium All Party Parliamentary Group a couple of months ago, China is forging ahead because a one party system looks more than 4 years into the future, don't let yourselves get left behind.
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May 16, 2012 10:25
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Nuclearmonkee posted:Actually HDR Geothermal Plants make the prospect of using geothermal in more places a lot more feasible. Very cool technology. Though it's only being piloted in a few locations, it works perfectly well. Wow that sounds super cool. You even get the raw thermal energy from the hot water which I presume could be used in industrial or municipal heating projects. What's the recharge time on a well? the article says they cool beyond commercial use in about 20 years, presumably they eventually warm up again as heat is transferred back from the mantle. And why on earth isn't this at the forefront of the renewables push? It's incredibly cheap, the energy is widespread and the potential is measured in ZETTAjoules! It sounds too good to be true.
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May 21, 2012 17:44
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The Entire Universe posted:I think what he was referring to was fusion, which is nuclear, but is generally referred to as fusion because nuclear is the term already used to address fission and to start referring to both as an unqualified "nuclear" results in confusion. There are multiple forms of fission too, with wildly different costs and efficiencies (and waste profiles). For whatever reason* the forms that are widely in use at the moment are objectively some of the worst ways of actually using nuclear fuels. Piloting and ramping up production in efficient nuclear would probably take quite a while, not least because of the excessive amount of bureaucratic red tape and political hoops you have to jump through to do anything new with atoms. *blowing people up
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May 22, 2012 13:02
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TheFuglyStik posted:This is missing the point I'd like to see discussed at least once on this topic. Instead of worrying about how we generate more energy (or insert resources in other contexts) more efficiently, why do we never discuss ways to use less in these discussions? There is certainly discussion of using energy more efficiently in terms of policy. Home insulation schemes are pretty widespread to reduce heat loss in winter, white roof policies to reduce AC use in summer, tax breaks and trade in schemes for efficient cars and so on. Incandescent light bulbs are banned in many places, congestion charges keep cars out of the cities and encourage people to use mass transit. Some countries have improved building codes so that new homes have to meet pretty stringent efficiency requirements. It's not ENOUGH by any means but it's not completely off the agenda. What's really needed in developed countries is large infrastructural and cultural changes. MASSIVE investment in low energy mass transit like trains and electric busses perhaps accompanied by punitive taxes for inefficient cars, changes to food supply infrastructure (you can do this at least in part with subsidies and tariffs), changes to the way people view meat eating (make it a twice a week treat not a daily staple), changes to how people work (I bet half the workers in the country could telecommute), increased recycling of high-energy-of-extraction materials like electronics, better insulation and heating infrastructure (imagine using the waste heat from power generation or data-centres for municipal heating, reduction of water leakages (water needs a fair bit of energy to treat and move around and leaks are very wasteful) and of course changes in consumption habits. In developing countries, a stable sensible and corruption free governance is the only way to ensure that they are able to develop in a low energy/low emissions manner. This includes being free from IMF interference and "free trade" policies which tend to encourage exploitation by multinationals. I'd be more than happy to discuss energy-use reduction, either existing initiatives or hypotheticals. I think this could include new technologies which many environmentalists might balk at, like genetically modified crops which require lower inputs of pesticide, fertilizer, water and labour for the same yield. It's kinda ironic that two technologies which have the potential to have an enormous positive impact on the environment compared to business as usual, Nuclear power and GMOs, are the two things which many dyed-in-the-wool environmentalists refuse to even consider. Not that I trust Monsanto or the power industry further than I can spit, but the *technologies* are enormously promising.
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May 23, 2012 13:05
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TACD posted:Thought: do you really think we'll all be driving cars with carefree abandon like we do now in say, 50 years? If not, do you see any movement towards restructuring our society (American in particular) to function without such easy car access? In the UK people are talking about having to reign in driving for cost reasons NOW, let alone in 50 years. Whether they follow through or not is another matter, but costs are HIGH: unleaded is currently £1.40 a litre ($9 a gallon) and climbing and a lot of people are feeling the pinch, especially those with an excessive commute. Speaking for the UK, for most urban people a car often isn't necessary. I live on the outskirts of a large city and gave up driving well over a year ago when my last car broke down and I chose not to replace it, and life is pretty manageable. I hire a car maybe 2-3 times a year for events but don't use one on a daily basis. Very few of my 20-30something friends here have cars. It's less easy with young kids but still, I see plenty of mothers with pushchairs using the bus or tram and they seem to be doing fine. Commutes might be a pain if you don't work on the bus route or near a station, but living nearer work would solve that. Shopping is already moving towards an internet-delivery model, and the number of delivery vehicles would be smaller and have a far lower footprint than personal cars, especially because a well planned commercial fleet would be much easier to electrify. In rural areas it's a lot tougher, in more remote villages the public transport is pretty poor so a car is really handy. However, because of the relatively short distances involved in 90% of cases, it would just require a bit of planning and investment in better buses, not a wholesale restructuring of the way we live. I would say maybe 70-80% of people with cars could get along day to day without them with relatively minimal disruption to their lives with just a bit of bolstering to existing public transport routes. It might require quite a few people living closer to where they work though. I take it that the US differs from this significantly? I know the distances involved are often much larger, urban planning means walking can be difficult and public transport is often very poor. Would a lot of peoples day to day existence be impossible without a car?
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May 24, 2012 02:26
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Loving Life Partner posted:So this seems like the place to ask: No. Just do the raw numbers. There are currently around 4.5 billion tons of uranium in seawater, only a small percentage is radioactive but it's still millions and millions of tons. There is millions of tons of radium, uranium, thorium and other radioisotopes in rocks and mineral deposits. Tons of radioactive isotopes are released from burning coal. None of these things have ended life on Earth. Radiation isn't a cake walk, it can cause major local damage and of course there are unpleasant isotopes in the waste, but there's just not enough material in a couple of power plants to be any credible threat on a planetary scale. In Chernobyl, which was much worse than Fukushima, the vast majority of the zone of alienation is in better ecological shape than before the accident: barring the red forest and the zones VERY near the plant, human presence and farming displaced and damaged more species than radiation. That's not to say there wasn't an effect, there were certainly impacts on numbers and genetic health, but animals and plants are rather good at coping with radioactivity at the population level. Remember that even in a clean environment most plants and small animals have ENORMOUS rates of attrition between birth and reproduction, unfit mutants are bred out surprisingly quickly. Hell, there are forms of crop plant breeding which involve bombarding plants with ionizing radiation. Outside acute radiation poisoning which really only occurs with clean up workers o people onsite DURING an accident, the biggest threat from radiation is cancer. The biggest single identifiable cause of cancer is smoking. Over one and a half billion people smoke, and 5 million die from it each year. That's a couple of orders of magnitude worse than the WORST most fringe projections for the WORST nuclear accident ever to have occurred, and several more orders of magnitude worse than more sensible projections.
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May 24, 2012 10:20
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Changing the subject slightly for a moment, one tiny ray of hope: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/may/24/heartland-institute-billboard-controversy Those terrible billboards equating belief in climate change with mass murder have backfired spectacularly and the Heartland institute is in a financial crisis and dropping donors left right and centre. I know it's not a big thing, but a major part of political apathy on this issue is due to public apathy, and a major part of public apathy is created or fostered by well funded denialism. Public support for sustainable energy IS growing, and the floundering of denialist think tanks is no bad thing.
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May 24, 2012 11:03
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The Entire Universe posted:This is the source of what he was talking about, I think. The kind of scenario being spoken of would undoubtedly be a horrible disaster, and cause a significant number of excess cancer deaths and environmental damage. It would be a tremendous problem, but something on a catastrophic scale, not an apocalyptic one.
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May 24, 2012 11:26
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-Troika- posted:I dunno about you guys but I sure as gently caress couldn't afford to pay for an electric bill that's five times as large every month. That would literally make my electric bill more than my rent in summer The cost wouldn't necessarily have to be passed onto the consumer, nationalised government funded development of clean energy would be the sensible move and that could be heavily subsidised. Of course that would require not kowtowing to free market capitalism, so it about as likely as everyone voluntarily giving up their cars.
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May 24, 2012 14:18
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To take the conversation in a slightly different direction I do have a question: what is it about the US/Australian lifestyle that makes their carbon footprint so much larger per capita than in a lot of other similarly developed countries? Is it just a lot of individual lifestyle factors adding up (larger cars, bigger distances to travel, larger homes, poor insulation, more goods consumed) or is there some major systemic reason to do with how energy is generated and used on a macro scale?
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May 29, 2012 22:43
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Siphan posted:And fatkraken it has to do with the way our infrastructure is set up as well as the fact that we import our goods from around the world. Most energy use is in the transportation process Britain does that too though, we import pretty much everything. And most of our electricity is from fossil fuels too. I guess what I'm interested in is a kinda breakdown of where the differences come in: is it spread over the whole of peoples' existence or concentrated in one sphere? Is it a case of bigger homes AND cars AND driving further and more often AND using air conditioning AND buying more electronics AND transporting goods further AND inefficient farming, or are there a couple of things that are just done in a completely different way in the States versus Europe and make up the bulk of the difference?
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May 30, 2012 00:03
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froglet posted:We're equipped to deal with it now. The problem isn't lack of technology, it's that the nations that are in a position to do something about it have been delaying on doing anything because it's politically unpopular. It's like being trapped behind a wall of soundproof glass watching a toddler sticking a fork in a plug socket. YOU know what's going to happen, it would be easy to stop it from happening, but instead you just have to watch the inevitable disaster unfold. We have the technology. We have the manpower. We could do it with somewhat of a hit to our standard of living in the west but nothing like having to go back to the dark ages. But the way our society and politics are set up, it seems that we won't.
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May 30, 2012 11:16
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Siphan posted:This never happens fyi, even in cancer research today more money goes into drugs that treat but not cure because it is profitable to treat and not cure.  Curing various forms of cancer would be SPECTACULARLY profitable. The reason most drugs treat rather than cure is curing cancer is really really hard, not some grand conspiracy.
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May 30, 2012 16:23
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Paper Mac posted:Uh, there's no cure for cancer, so it doesn't really have anything to do with profitability, unless you're suggesting that basic researchers are deliberately suppressing a cancer cure in order to get more grants or something. Well, there are some cancers where the treatment can lead to permanent remission with no need for long term follow up treatment past monitoring, so you could see those cancers as somewhat curable. There might be some truth in saying pharmaceutical companies are more interested in creating products derivative of existing treatments rather than entirely novel cures, but this is not because there's more money in treatment than cure. It's because the structure of big companies makes them risk averse and the structure of patents means a novel molecule with an effect similar to an existing molecule gets a new patent. Looking for a new drug that is completely unlike any existing drugs is very risky, you might put in billions in R&D and end up with nothing. This, by the way, is why publicly funded pharmaceutical and medical research is absolutely essential, companies are OK at bringing promising research to market but VERY bad at the basic groundwork
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May 30, 2012 16:38
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Siphan posted:I learned that very quickly when someone argued that 28 thousand wasn't an unreasonable sum to ask of poor families when I claimed that most americans don't have the capitol to enter that alternative energy market. Any major infrastructural change like electric cars or replacing fossil fuel power stations with nuclear or renewables is going to require VAST subsidies (unless the Chinese or Indians crack Thorium and start selling it back to us, which is something I'm very much hoping for). Electric cars are worse than useless until the grid is decarbonised anyway, what with efficiency losses. Really a far far better solution for poorer families would be a well funded affordable public transport system. Rather than replacing cars with more cars, make cars unnecessary in the first place. Tons of less well off folks round my way in a UK city don't even own cars, myself and most of my friends included. I know planning in the states is very different, but there must be SOME locations where this would be feasible?
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May 30, 2012 17:10
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Paper Mac posted:So is the suggestion you're making that a some kind of improved cancer cure or a techno-fix for climate would be possible if the funding structure around research were set up differently? Pretty much all the necessary technologies exist and work. What has proven more problematic is deploying them at sufficient scale, which is a political issue more than a technical one. There are other technologies like CCS which DON'T work yet and could do with more R&D, but we could manage with what we have right now if there was the global political will do do so.
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May 30, 2012 17:13
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McDowell posted:
Thing is, the technology exists. Nuclear power exists, technologies to make nuclear fuel from the ocean exist, technologies which can make oil literally out of the air exist, technologies to pull heat from deep underground to make electricity exist, and there is still time that if there was the will it could be rolled out in time to avoid the worst of the disruption. The issue is there are vested interests working extremely hard to preserve the status quo until everything completely collapses and it is too late to do anything about it. We should be using what we have now to wean ourselves off fossil fuels as fast as possible. Individuals with sufficient influence and governments are not doing this.
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May 30, 2012 20:22
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This US car-chat is nuts. I'm in the UK. I live on the outskirts of one of our bigger cities, population somewhere around 550,000 people. I'm right on the edge in a swallowed village, walk 15 minutes in the other direction and it's fields and woodlands. I think we're about 5-6 miles from the city centre. There is a bus stop 2 minutes walk from the house. Buses leave every 10-15 minutes throughout the day. About 20 minutes away on foot or 5 minutes on a connecting bus is the end of the tram line, the trams go straight to the centre in under 15 minutes. Because there are dedicated tram lines that don't always overlap the roads in the rush hour it's a lot quicker to take the tram than to drive, and the carriages are clean, modern and very safe. The trams are well used and fill to capacity at peak hours even running every 5-10 minutes. The nearest big supermarket is 2 miles away. While most people do drive to this one (as I used to when I still had a car), there are good links: buses and trams stop right outside. Not owning a car is only a mild inconvenience for single people, and while a family shop would be harder to fit on the bus, there are delivery services from almost all the major supermarkets. There is a primary school, a secondary school and a nursery within 10 minutes walk, if you go past at 3:30 the pavement is CROWDED with kids and parents walking home. In fact, most of the pavements are pretty well populated, it's not like there's no traffic but there are a lot of walkers too. The city centre is largely pedestrianised. Unless you are disabled, have a large family with no good school nearby, have a job in an area where you cannot afford to live or have other special circumstances it is NOT necessary to own a car around here. I have not noticed and significant drop in my quality of life since giving mine up. Bar occasional taxis and hire cars for longer trips 2-3 times a year, public transport is plenty On the US front, I've heard stories of huge swaths of low density housing which were built during the bubble being completely unsellable now because they are too far from any services and people in the area cannot afford to run a car because of gas prices. Is this the case? Fatkraken fucked around with this message at 10:43 on May 31, 2012 |
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May 31, 2012 10:39
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Willie Tomg posted:That's cool and correct but we're talking about high profile failed 3rd party delivery services like Webvan, not direct delivery by the grocery store. I think I brought it up talking about the UK situation, in the UK it's almost all run by the store but they have nice websites with a memory feature and the like and it's pretty user friendly. I think some stores do a shop and drop too, you go down there, pick everything in a trolley, pay, leave it in the store and they deliver it. I would imagine that kind of service is mainly used by people without cars since it's much easier than humping 30kg of groceries home on the bus
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Jun 2, 2012 22:33
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a lovely poster posted:What manslaughter? I don't understand what makes you think Anarchoprimitivists would simply tear everything down overnight and let the cards fall where they may. Over a sufficient time period it's concievable that it be done without a massive loss of life. It boggles my mind that people who critique other economic or political systems seem to think proponents of an ideology want to snap their fingers and simply make all the changes at once. Did it ever occur to you that other people might actually care about loss of life? In the primitivist society they advocate, premature death would be a daily occurrence. There's a reason we recommend women have access to a hospital when they give birth, and have mass vaccination programs and distribute mosquito nets. There's a reason we use antibiotics when people are injured. Even giving birth every 4 years as in a hunter gatherer late weaning mode, a modern woman could have 6 or more children over her fertile lifetime, on average only two would survive to adulthood in a stable population (as well as the chance of dying in childbirth or of other factors before that reproductive potential is reached). The idea that when you have a child they will most likely survive to adulthood is entirely a product of civilization (and even today there are plenty of places where this isn't true). Hunter gatherer societies may be fairly egalitarian within a group, but inter-group warfare or low level violence is common in all but the most sparsely populated regions. Life in even an ideal anarcho primitivist society would be a lot harsher, a lot shorter and a lot more precarious than any of our lives today.
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Jun 8, 2012 14:54
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