3 ms·

What are you talking about?

polytely 6y ago
I think they are talking about the idea that individual recycling, less consumption will somehow fix this problem, as all the big polluting industries would like you to think? I think the only ways to actually tackle this is to put a price on pollution/unsustainable resource extraction, but that requires an enormous amount of global coordination.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  > but that requires an enormous amount of global coordination. I think this is the biggest lie in favor of the fossil fuel industry. Here's this from the thread yesterday: https://www.electricitymap.org/map https://www.electricitymap.org/map California is doing better than most because they use solar and nuclear (but also quite a bit of gas). France is even greener, because they use almost entirely nuclear and hydro. Likewise Ontario. Meanwhile there are places like Australia that are still burning coal. Even switching to gas would be a marked improvement, but there is absolutely no reason they couldn't be using as much solar as California right now. California pays less for electricity than Australia. Until recently France had been paying less than California -- and then Germany shut down their nuclear plants and caused a regional supply crunch; now they're about the same. They're still lower in Ontario. So what's stopping everybody from doing the same, without anybody forcing them to? Squat. But if you convince everybody not to do it until everybody else is doing it then the fossil fuel industry just needs to control a couple of major holdouts to bust up any kind of international agreement and then nobody does anything. Meanwhile if you do it yourself without anybody forcing you to, that gives the alternatives economies of scale. Solar is where it is today in large part because of places like California. Batteries are where they are in large part because of companies like Tesla. Nuclear is in the sorry state that it is in large part because people haven't been building it. Doing it is how you get others to do it. You don't have to wait for anybody else. And you were never, ever going to get e.g. Russia to sign a treaty that gets them to stop burning fossil fuels. But once you have 75% of everybody, then you can get an agreement to have everybody slap the last holdouts with major tariffs.

I think they are talking about the idea that individual recycling, less consumption will somehow fix this problem, as all the big polluting industries would like you to think? I think the only ways to actually tackle this is to put a price on pollution/unsustainable resource extraction, but that requires an enormous amount of global coordination.

AnthonyMouse 6y ago
> but that requires an enormous amount of global coordination. I think this is the biggest lie in favor of the fossil fuel industry. Here's this from the thread yesterday: https://www.electricitymap.org/map https://www.electricitymap.org/map California is doing better than most because they use solar and nuclear (but also quite a bit of gas). France is even greener, because they use almost entirely nuclear and hydro. Likewise Ontario. Meanwhile there are places like Australia that are still burning coal. Even switching to gas would be a marked improvement, but there is absolutely no reason they couldn't be using as much solar as California right now. California pays less for electricity than Australia. Until recently France had been paying less than California -- and then Germany shut down their nuclear plants and caused a regional supply crunch; now they're about the same. They're still lower in Ontario. So what's stopping everybody from doing the same, without anybody forcing them to? Squat. But if you convince everybody not to do it until everybody else is doing it then the fossil fuel industry just needs to control a couple of major holdouts to bust up any kind of international agreement and then nobody does anything. Meanwhile if you do it yourself without anybody forcing you to, that gives the alternatives economies of scale. Solar is where it is today in large part because of places like California. Batteries are where they are in large part because of companies like Tesla. Nuclear is in the sorry state that it is in large part because people haven't been building it. Doing it is how you get others to do it. You don't have to wait for anybody else. And you were never, ever going to get e.g. Russia to sign a treaty that gets them to stop burning fossil fuels. But once you have 75% of everybody, then you can get an agreement to have everybody slap the last holdouts with major tariffs.