6 ms·

The assertion is that, as cool as iPhones and flying are, this lifestyle may or may not be sustainable, e.g. regarding the CO2 levels. Leaving aside your silly

The assertion is that, as cool as iPhones and flying are, this lifestyle may or may not be sustainable, e.g. regarding the CO2 levels. Leaving aside your silly anger about "hippie bullshit" (really?) and regardless of our history of "competing, losing, getting ahead", what would you propose? Are we just going to brace for pain, and then compete over diminishing ressources? Consider: all of environment protection legislation that we take for granted now was once "hippie bullshit".

taylodl 10y ago
It goes beyond bracing for pain. We'd better be bracing for extinction. And our iPhones and supermarkets won't save us, only our ingenuity will and we now have an administration not much interested in that. This does not bode well for us.
- lambdadmitry 10y ago
  Oh please. The "extinction" meme is all around the thread! I challenge you to elaborate the exact mechanism of humanity's extinction. Why on earth should humanity go extinct because of climate change?
Cthulhu_ 10y ago
> Consider: all of environment protection legislation that we take for granted now was once "hippie bullshit". In part; I think environmental policies and technologies are very strongly influenced by economics and capitalism. I mean they managed to monetize CO2 emissions via emission rights. It's making money out of vapor. There's probably a few people getting very rich off of the emission rights market. The other one is alternative energy sources. Solar panels are a good example; they're expensive, have a limited lifespan (10-15 years), and yet provide a huge amount of goodwill and feel-good. There's a lot of people getting very rich off of a product that, in the end, is not actually sustainable and does little to nothing to alleviate the emissions problem - not when the production of a solar panel costs more energy than it'll generate during its lifetime. I'd argue the only environmental protection stuff that is still primarily motivated by hippie bullshit is things like the ban on whaling and the conservation of nature areas. Neither of which has much of an impact on the environment, unless it's on a huge scale (like idk, spanning all of the Amazon plus all of the deforested areas of the past fifty years).
- pg314 10y ago
  > not when the production of a solar panel costs more energy than it'll generate during its lifetime. That is no longer true [1]. [1] http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/april/pv-net-energy-040213.html http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/april/pv-net-energy-04021...
- caf 10y ago
  It's making money out of vapor. No, it's making money out of the process of assigning a limited resource to the most economically efficient use. ...not when the production of a solar panel costs more energy than it'll generate during its lifetime. This is just rubbish. The embodied energy payback period of solar PV was already under 4 years a decade ago.
eli_gottlieb 10y ago
>Consider: all of environment protection legislation that we take for granted now was once "hippie bullshit". No, all the environmental damage we now defend and wish we could take for granted was once, and remains, valid science. Bio-time, bio-space, and the folding and unfolding of DNA across the ages are in fact hippie bullshit.
- huxley 10y ago
  I get what you're trying to say but you're probably not old enough to remember (or weren't born yet), however environmental protection legislation was considered "hippie bullshit" well into the late 20th century.
  - nickjarboe 10y ago
    Nixon created the EPA. I don't think he was generally for hippie bullshit. If one is to believe John Ehrlichman[1], Nixon put marijuana on Schedule I to try and destroy the hippies. [1]http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard-nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie/ http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richa...

taylodl 10y ago

It goes beyond bracing for pain. We'd better be bracing for extinction. And our iPhones and supermarkets won't save us, only our ingenuity will and we now have an administration not much interested in that. This does not bode well for us.

lambdadmitry 10y ago
Oh please. The "extinction" meme is all around the thread! I challenge you to elaborate the exact mechanism of humanity's extinction. Why on earth should humanity go extinct because of climate change?

Cthulhu_ 10y ago

> Consider: all of environment protection legislation that we take for granted now was once "hippie bullshit". In part; I think environmental policies and technologies are very strongly influenced by economics and capitalism. I mean they managed to monetize CO2 emissions via emission rights. It's making money out of vapor. There's probably a few people getting very rich off of the emission rights market. The other one is alternative energy sources. Solar panels are a good example; they're expensive, have a limited lifespan (10-15 years), and yet provide a huge amount of goodwill and feel-good. There's a lot of people getting very rich off of a product that, in the end, is not actually sustainable and does little to nothing to alleviate the emissions problem - not when the production of a solar panel costs more energy than it'll generate during its lifetime. I'd argue the only environmental protection stuff that is still primarily motivated by hippie bullshit is things like the ban on whaling and the conservation of nature areas. Neither of which has much of an impact on the environment, unless it's on a huge scale (like idk, spanning all of the Amazon plus all of the deforested areas of the past fifty years).

pg314 10y ago
> not when the production of a solar panel costs more energy than it'll generate during its lifetime. That is no longer true [1]. [1] http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/april/pv-net-energy-040213.html http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/april/pv-net-energy-04021...
caf 10y ago
It's making money out of vapor. No, it's making money out of the process of assigning a limited resource to the most economically efficient use. ...not when the production of a solar panel costs more energy than it'll generate during its lifetime. This is just rubbish. The embodied energy payback period of solar PV was already under 4 years a decade ago.

eli_gottlieb 10y ago

>Consider: all of environment protection legislation that we take for granted now was once "hippie bullshit". No, all the environmental damage we now defend and wish we could take for granted was once, and remains, valid science. Bio-time, bio-space, and the folding and unfolding of DNA across the ages are in fact hippie bullshit.

huxley 10y ago
I get what you're trying to say but you're probably not old enough to remember (or weren't born yet), however environmental protection legislation was considered "hippie bullshit" well into the late 20th century.
- nickjarboe 10y ago
  Nixon created the EPA. I don't think he was generally for hippie bullshit. If one is to believe John Ehrlichman[1], Nixon put marijuana on Schedule I to try and destroy the hippies. [1]http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard-nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie/ http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richa...