this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2024
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[–] [email protected] 10 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

My headcanon past 2050 is basically nuclear wasteland. I try and stay optimistic in the moment, but the old faith in humanity gas-tank is running a little empty these days.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 22 hours ago

I feel you. There is this little bit oft hope, that all my effort actually achieves something. But its like hoping for thr existance of god it feels like

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 day ago

well yeah, you can't just try, you need to actually do it.

Stupid title, grammatically at least.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 day ago (5 children)

This is a by-product of modern society (maybe late stage capitalism). We need to be sold a "solution" to a problem. Reducing consumption is not something that can easily be sold hence these carbon capture, recycling plastic "solutions".

Unless someone can make money off of it, reducing emissions is going to be difficult.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Instead of UBI, we should give every citizen carbon credits that they can then either use themselves for cars over certain (adjusting) emission limits or more likely sell to companies. Every company has to pay for their CO2 (and downline for imports)

The interesting thing would be people not necessarily spending their carbon credits like they do money. As there is no real incentive to sell to one company or another, other then tiny rate differences.

Also... always peg the price to what it costs to clean the carbon out. That creates a greater incentive to not skirt, as it might get cheaper over time.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

So, because I can afford an EV , to electrify, to add solar, I also get a carbon bonus to sell or bury.

While normally I like where you’re going, we’re already past the point of early adopters deciding to do the right thing in lot of ways and need to scale up for affordability.

Or if your goal is to influence more personal decisions, like how much meat you eat and what temperature you set your thermostat, I’m not sure it’s enough

[–] [email protected] 1 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

It's simple, you have a shared resource running out, nobody wants to grab less of it.

Grab less of it yourself - the others will compensate for you. Produce some of that resource - the others will just profit from it for longer.

The biggest emitters are too strong to be climate-crusaded, the smaller ones do successful bribing and greenwashing, but I think there will eventually be climate crusades - against those poor bastards who formally fail to do something right, but don't really contribute meaningfully to emissions.

Other than finding some wonderful (like in Total Recall) process to turn fossil fuels into matter practically not separable and not usable as fuel, I don't know what one can do.

Profitable personal mobile nuclear batteries are still not reality.

Some new magical principle of producing energy, sufficiently decentralized (here go big NPPs). There's none, so prepare for dark future.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (1 children)

As far as energy production goes, we already have the technology: solar, wind, nuclear. We also already have the technology for cars and personAl transportation. Above all we have transit. If we can get our shit together with things we already know, we’d be in better shape. If we would have done it as little as ten years ago, we could have stayed within the Montreal targets for global warming.

Now it’s no longer enough. We need to fix harder areas as well: aviation, shipping, grid storage, steel and cement, etc, and we need it asap … how is there still not any urgency?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 21 hours ago

You need technology cheaper than fossil fuels. Some of fossil fuels' downsides are upsides for some people (political control), which necessitates the difference in cost by a big enough margin to counter those invisible benefits. A revolution.

There's no urgency, I think, because Earth's population is going to start shrinking. The emissions are going to slow down for that reason.

Countries that won't have some quality, not quantity, approaches to their economies by then are going to fall hard.

I guess that's how EU is going to make the world owned by Europeans again.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 23 hours ago

Things that reduce consumption are frequently successful in capitalism. Generally, using less, costs less. There are always those selling a thing who are trying to increase the consumption of that thing, but often at expensive of those selling a competing thing. One successful way of doing that is to be cheaper to buy or run or both, by doing more with less.

However, sometimes we want something to be made with more a bit more to last longer and be repairable.

Raw capitalist won't do all this on its own. The invisible hand isn't very good at planning long term. Governments need to structure markets for outcomes they want, and keep measuring and correcting.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Carbon capture does not make money, wtf?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Carbon capture doesn't make money. Selling the service of carbon capture does.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 22 hours ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

tldr; Greenwashing/marketing mostly.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Sounds tenuous. Gimme the full version.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Here you can find more info. I hope it's helpful

https://is.gd/eFvIJN

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 hours ago

So you got nothing. Nice.

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

If the people won't rise up for the sake of their own children then the only solution is to out spend climate change. Capitalism won't save itself, it will monetize the downfall. So in a way these tech companies are doing exactly what their suppose to but not really what they should.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 day ago (1 children)

People won't even rise up for their own sake. gestures in every general direction

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The only examples this article gives of irreversible damage:

  • homes destroyed by hurricanes: clearly and obviously reversible. Build new houses. Fin.

  • rising sea levels: reversible. Cool the climate, get more glaciers, lower sea levels. Obviously it's more of a "100 years from now" solution, but it's definitely a solution.

  • lives lost: yeah, that's a fair point.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 day ago (5 children)

And also irreversible is The decline of biodiversity. Once a species is extinct it won't come back.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 23 hours ago

Guess we'll have to Jurassic park this shit but with Pandas

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

And to those who say "well, the Earth will bounce back": we're much closer to the end of Earth's ability to support life than to the beginning. Earth doesn't have endless time to evolve new kinds of creatures. We could be doing damage from which Earth's biodiversity never recovers.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That's not a good argument... this is such a small blip, the earth has been much hotter and colder then now and will stabilize again before it's eventually destroyed.

To me, the better argument is simply: Wouldn't you like there to be humans or soem sentient beings that remembered you in the future? Maybe not you specifically, but the culture and art that you contributed to?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

Right, Earth will be here, life will find a way ….. but cockroaches and jellyfish can’t read

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 day ago (3 children)

The problem is people are only going to change their behaviour once the consequences hit them, and with global warming, the consequences won't really hit them until a long time later.

The second problem is the consequences are dramatic. And very hard if not impossible to turn around.

To really get people and companies to change their behaviour, we would need an immediate consequence to behaviour that is bad for the environment.

Bottom line is, some people try, some people don't give a shit, and in the end we will have to deal with it.

I hope governments are watching carefully, we will need to keep a lot of water away from us in the future, and we'll have to deal with the changing climate too.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

We’ll have a big environmental 9/11 moment where a major American city becomes permanently uninhabitable and then there will alot of handwringing about “What could we have done!?” Then we’ll start getting lukewarm serious about it for maybe a few years, but by that point it’s way too late.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 21 hours ago

So far, we have smaller towns wiped off the face of the earth and can’t seem to figure out they should be moved rather than rebuilt

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Governments will fail. Wherever unpopular "Green" Measures are implemented, the right-wing cockroaches appear, destroying any discourse.

The consequence will be a global war by stupid populists who think that is one solution (which it kind of is,... Dead people won't emit CO2)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

In the Netherlands a number of cities were banning fossil fuel for deliveries in the city. It was in planning for years, easing into implementation.

Our new government just scrapped all of those plans because the largest party doesn't believe in climate change, and another party in the coalition is the "farmer's movement" party and opposes environmental regulations.

😢

[–] [email protected] 1 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Something kinda funny about people in the netherlands not caring about climate change.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago)

It's probably not very funny to all the people in the Netherlands who are not right-wing idiots. Sounds like the Netherlands are experiencing something like Florida: when the problems get really urgent and bad, half the population fights hard to prevent action and preserve their delusion that everything's fine.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 day ago (4 children)

This is clearly a "why not both" situation.

Emissions must be cut and new technologies for reversing existing damage must be developed. There's a whole bunch of different things that needs doing, because there is simply no single solution, but using one approach to argue against another is certainly not helping anyone.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago

There's a point made at the end of the article that most people seems to have missed entirely:

Existing facilities that can filter carbon dioxide out of the air only have the capacity to capture 0.01 million metric tons of CO2 globally today, costing companies like Microsoft as much as $600 per ton of CO2. That’s very little capacity with a very high price tag.

“We cannot squander carbon dioxide removal on offsetting emissions we have the ability to avoid,” study coauthor Gaurav Ganti, a research analyst at Climate Analytics, said in a press release. The priority needs to be preventing pollution now instead of cleaning it up later.

It's obviously a matter of "why not both?", and both the article and the scientists behind the report agree on it. However, a lot of people are betting their eggs on the idea that climate reversal technology will suddenly become a lot more effective and cheaper than it is right now. And sure, that may be the case, or not. For how many years have we heard of flying cars or self-driving autonomous vehicles and predicted that they were just around the corner, at most a few years away, but nada so far? Betting on the invention of a new technology that'll make a very expensive process today way cheaper is a VERY naive and bad approach.

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[–] [email protected] 222 points 2 days ago (14 children)

Two types of people reading this:

"Oh no! We should do everything we can to mitigate the damage."

and

"Fuck it, might as well keep doing what I'm doing."

And it's the latter that got us here in the first place.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 2 days ago

It's the parable of office pizza: some people take 1 slice because there are many people to feed.

some people take 3 slices, because there are many people to feed.

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