Real question: Most of things listed are consumer level changes. Isn't the large majority of global warming being caused by industry emissions?
this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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Large scale solar is also taking off.
Large scale solar farms have been a thing for decades. Large scale solar adoption is like wrestling with a hydra. The heads are Russia, China, and the middle east. Go nuclear, be the sun.
All that matters is cost in the energy transition. A certain subset of person likes fission because it's always fun to be contrarian. But there's a reason fission companies have gone bankrupt left and right, and that we've seen countless fission startups collapse over the last two decades. Nuclear proponents like to bitch about strawmen Greenpeace activists and people irrationally afraid of nuclear power. They like talking about these phantom barriers to nuclear, as if fear of nuclear power has anything to do with why fission is a dying technology.
Fission is dying because it's just too damned expensive. Bitch all you want about the intermittency of solar; it's cheaper to just spam solar panels and batteries than it is to create an equal amount of reliable power with fission.
Nuclear proponents will always state that fission can be done perfectly safe, and that's true. But when you point out the cost, they then bitch about regulation making it expensive. Never do they connect the dots that it is precisely that heavy-handed regulation that ensures corporate profits don't result in unsafe power plants.
Fission is an inherently dangerous technology. Yes, some modern plant designs are "intrinsically safe," if they're built right and maintained right and no greedy bastard corporation cuts corners somewhere to save a buck. In order to do nuclear safely, you have to regulate the ever-loving hell out of it and make sure every step of the process is checked and double checked, and that there is some neutral third party looking over everyone's shoulders. Nuclear power, if done wrong, can go absolutely catastrophically wrong. It can render entire regions uninhabitable for generations. It can be done safely, but only if extremely heavily regulated and tightly controlled. And that is one thing that just inevitably makes fission power extremely expensive. There is no "move fast and break things" when you're splitting atoms. Development is slow, expensive, and bureaucratic. And that is unfortunately just the way it has to be for this technology to be used safely in a for-profit capitalist society.
How's it feel to be a fossil fuel stooge?
Quit huffing paint. The future is solar. Fission, like fossil fuels, is a dead-end technology.
What exactly does nuclear change about Russia, China and the middle east? That's a massive non-sequitur
Besides, think of China what you will, they've been key in driving large scale cheap solar
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Isn't China biggest producer of solar panel. And Russia LOVES nuclrar option. Not as much as France though.
my mind rapidly shifts from defeatism to optimism practically every week
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Everybody in this post is a sustainability specialist.
Indoor farming isn't scalable. At least not with the models that are being done now. They work for niche crops, but not staple carb sources like potatoes and grains. They can be profitable, but aren't a catch all solution.
The ocean cleaning projects also don't scale. We should be focused on keeping the trash from getting into it first by switching to recyclable and biodegradable packaging and forcing the fishing industry to switch back to hemp nets.
Idk about your first point but The Ocean Cleanup, has been doing great work creating plastic filters for the worlds most polluting river. I understand not creating the waste in the first place would be most efficient but this organization is doing a good job cleaning up the mess.
All true, but categorically the problem is growing much faster than the solution. It probably always will be unless it's stopped from the source.
I don't think that scalable and profitable are goals of indoor farming. It's done for self sustainability.
staple crops have too many subsidies to be a good source of comparison, and staple crops aren't very healthy for people in general.
Staple crops aren't just your cheap empty calories. Legumes, carrots, sweet potatoes, squash, soybeans, onions, and some very healthy grains are all staple crops. Even the humble potato is fine, though many preparations of it are unhealthy. Take this soup:
- Lentils
- Carrots
- Onions
- Celery
- Potatoes
- Beans
- Vegetable broth made from the odds and ends
- Herbs & spices
Regardless of the politics that modern staple crops are associated with, you still need calories. Why do you think rice was a second currency for a very long time in some parts of the world.
Also, the example of indoor farming that's near me is absolutely running off of government money, at least for now. They got a grand to setup in an old warehouse in downtown, but also own some empty property in the neighborhood. This could be just them future proofing or it would be them looking to flip the property once the main site raises the property values.
And then there's the MIT Food Computer, which promised a lot and delivered nothing. The smaller scale the production, the less efficient it is. If you want to feed the world's population without a steep decline in that population, you're going to need outdoor farming in addition to the indoor stuff.
Subsidies keep the farms alive in the first place. It's simply not profitable to grow anymore. We make so much it's too cheap to sell. Therefore the volume required and the margins are so razor thin. It's make a profit or be bough-out by a bigger company.
I read that the production of solar is also counter productive. Don't quote me on that cause I read it when I was like 10 maybe.
The materials needed for solar are very toxic, and hard to remove, we also need a lot of them. We get these from places like China and Russia cheap because they don't mind their citizens dying so much as they make a profit. That cheapness is the cornerstone to every renewable project today. If we found ourselves in a position unable to trade with China/Russia, we would have to mine it in our own borders, poison our own land, water, and citizens. America could just return to it's own petrol fields, but other countries would face serious challenges.
I'm not saying none of this is true, but at the very least most of this is misleading. We're figuring out how to recycle old solar panels on an industrial scale: https://youtu.be/FCtEWveySsA
But progress is a bit slower than expected, mostly also because panels are a lot longer-lived than previously assumed (this is a good thing).
Yes, panels use rare minerals, but so does basically everything we consume and use nowadays. There's two answers to that.
A) does it still make sense climate-wise to use these resources in solar panels? This is what Life Cycle Analyses are for. In general, throughout their life cycle, PV modules help prevent more CO2 emissions than their manufacturing process releases, i.e. they are a net gain (https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/13/1/252). This is similar to EV vehicles, which break even around 60k km driven depending on your electricity generation (if memory serves https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2023/733112/IPOL_STU(2023)733112_EN.pdf)
b) is there a way to manufacture PV panels less resource-intensive and maybe even without relying on (Chinese) rare earth minerals as much? Yes there is. https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/publications/studies/ISE-Sustainable-PV-Manufacturing-in-Europe.pdf and see also sources above for next-gen differences.
That being said, for now it's still economically more attractive (usually) to implement Chinese panels because they're flooding the market. Still, it's a net gain as outlined.
I was on a road trip this weekend, and we had to clean the windshield 5 times. So it looks like the bugs are making a comeback thanks to restrictions on Monsanto products.
You had me until the ocean cleanup.
The ocean cleanup doesn't even make a dent, it never will. The amount of trash we're dumping into the ocean is far higher than they could ever clean up. You have to fight the problem at the root, then you can think about cleaning it up. Otherwise it'll be fine to dump trash in the ocean "bc the cleanup guys will catch it"
Stop eating fish and the oceans will become cleaner. Most of the plastic trash that’s floating in the ocean comes from fishing ships. Like nets and lines.
It is catching up, but slowly with still quite a ways to go (at least from 2022 data) . . . the probem is population and demand can grow exponentially too - or if not they can have s-curves with short term exponential growth. Especially for, say, a developing economy that is growing car ownership/usage, or is transitioning from high infant mortality to low and fertility hasn't dropped as it seems to after economic growth.
End result - fossil fuel use has also grown, a lot, over the last 30 years. Even despite the ramp up of renewables. Both in total energy source, and as a source of electricity.
What seems to work best from this data is decent sized economic recession like 2008 (a bit) and a pandemic (a bit more) - just need them to last a bit longer. /s /not-s
The other thing that is quite helpful is stuff like clean air regulation (for example LCPD and IED) - here is the UK electricity source graph as an example of coal switch off following that type of regulation.
But even there with direct regulation to shut the large coal plants (over about 30 year period), it has been gas that takes up the slack. But this is 100% politically driven regulation; nothing to do with the price of solar, or even windmills. It took the 70s recessions , smog choked cities, and a callous devil-posessed prime minister who literally set an army of violent thugs (with badges) on the coal miners to set up the conditions for that - otherwise we might still be stuck with coal a bit like Australia seems to struggle with. It helps that we can't do open cast mining here though so coal was economically redundant anyway.
Building out more and more renewables doesn't mean anything if emissions aren't falling - and they aren't. Since 2021, nearly 4 full years, the world has closed less than 1% of active coal power plants.
The buildout of renewables has arrived hand-in-hand with an increase in total energy usage. The energy mix has improved greatly in favor of renewables, tons of CO2 per KWh is way down, unfortunately we just use more KWh so total emissions are still rising.
Everything in the meme is a leading indicator for positive change, which is wonderful, but the actual change needs to materialize on a rather short timetable. Stories about happy first derivatives don't count for much.
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kind of an ironic choice of template for the message
Disposable diaper use is going down, and a decreasing proportion is getting landfilled.
I worry that climate defeatism has become a religion, and it will be difficult to separate it from policy discussion going forward.
Almost as if the people in charge of oil and coal and such want us to be fighting about this type of shit...
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I approve of the overall message but indoor farming is kind of insane in the present day. It uses incredible amounts of energy and our scarce building materials to do something we can do much more easily outside.
Long term it might be important but I don’t think it makes sense until we solve the current energy crisis.
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indoor farming
This is opposite of reduction of enviromental harm
Is it defeatist to face the facts that we have released more carbon in 2023 than any other year? Is it defeatist to realize not only are we polluting non-stop, we are also destroying the oceans, we are destroying ecosystems and we are destroying ourselves at a rate that we can't control? That a majority of people are content living their lives this way if it means they don't have to make the hard choice of having and using less? We're already well past 1°C and are not going to slowdown it seems until its too late.
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