4 ms·

The numbers don't work out. Let's say in USA we cut meat consumption, car usage and air travel in half. That is quite a lot, congratulations to our eco-consciou

• e12e 5y ago
  Seems to be missing that the US can cut US emissions, but cannot cut other countries' emissions. So if you can drop (say) 5% global emissions and choose not to - that's just willful ignorance?
  • bookofsand 5y ago
    A. "serious bicycle or transit prioritization in our major (US) urban areas" will not make a dent in the world global emissions. B. The level of cuts required to bring the world to sustainable emissions level, combined with global population growth and global equity, would require that everybody to live with under 1.7t/year CO2 emissions by 2050. This is the level of Albania, Colombia or Morocco, complete political dead end on both left and right. The crux of the problem is that there are no solutions. Even the 'we should do something about it' crowd is utterly incapable in articulating the depth of the cuts needed avert disaster, or articulate the life of the average American after such cuts. Hint: the Great Depression would be 'the good times' in comparison.
    • scoofy 5y ago
      Cool, low-hanging fruit is just, woe is me, too much trouble! No problem, let's do nothing then. Should be a fun ride. Going to be Great Depression either way! I'm not saying we can fix it, I'm a nihilist at this point, I'm saying we could have fixed it 15 years ago.
      • bookofsand 5y ago
        The US should figure out ways to cut emissions in half. Unfortunately: A. That will not fix the global problem, as US population is too small. Even if we were to completely shut down energy production in the US, the rest of the world would build enough power plants to cover for it and then some in less than 20 years. Industrialization of 10 billion people (3% in the US) is not pretty. B. It is unclear what to concretely do in the US to significantly cut emissions. To simplify, the right doesn't want to hear about it, and the left is content with promoting minor inconsequential Potemkiniads. We never had a chance to fix the problem, not with 10 billion people yearning an escape from poverty.
• nine_k 5y ago
  The PerCapitaEmission thing is something we can curb without returning to to stone age, given today's technology. We have two major technologies that allow for producing useful energy without producing much or any greenhouse gases: nuclear and solar. Wind and hydro are also on the table, but are more constrained by the environment. We also have reasonably well developing technologies for meat-like protein production from plants (see e.g. the "impossible burger") and lab-grown meat. They are currently a bit expensive, but it's mostly the matter of investment. Sadly, all that massive construction requires steel and concrete, which emit CO2 during production. Here comes carbon sequestration: we absolutely have technologies to quickly grow massive amounts of trees, cut them, and put them to use either as a long-term construction material, or just burn the hydrogen out of them to produce energy, and bury the carbon in the empty coal mines, playing back the carboniferous epoch process. This all does not require colossal amounts of novel science or sci-fi technological breakthroughs. It does require though that petrol cars and trucks get steadily replaced with electric, coal mining all but stopped (we need carbon for steel production), oil pumping severely limited (we still need jet fuel until we can synthesize enough), coal-fired plants demolished or turned into nuclear plants. It requires massive construction of solar, wind, and nuclear (gasp!) electric generation, and massive construction of battery capacity to make solar practical for base load. It requires shutting off most of beef production, and replacing it with fish and shrimp farming, lab-grown meat, and plant-based pseudo-meat; red meat should become a luxury like salmon roe or caviar. The obvious problem is that most people would totally not cooperate if they'd have to quickly and radically change their way of life, their idea of what prosperity looks like (bye grilling beef over coals!), and their jobs (coal industry? oil industry? bad luck!). Can this be overcome? Either most of the Earth's population, across national, political, and religious divisions would willingly make such a change, or an planet-scale dictatorship would emerge and consistently and efficiently pursue the goals of climate change reversal, while not severely affecting productivity. I see both scenarios utterly unrealistic :( So, buy that realty next to a major northern river 1000ft above sea level. In a century it will have the best climate Earth can offer.