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Even more so than some of those technologies, although they sound very promising don't address the issue about the intensity of the energy expenditure required

Even more so than some of those technologies, although they sound very promising don't address the issue about the intensity of the energy expenditure required by the developped world mode of life, and we are wasting most of it. Decarbonize everything but keep going like yesterday won't cut it. So your algae shoes are great but it is not sustainable to buy a pair every month. You plastic eating bacteria are great but we can't keep using so much plastic anyways. It's not that I don't want it to be possible, it's just that the current reports about the state of the planetary climate system seem to indicate that we are on the edge of a cliff and that we have to make the best/choices decisions to avoid falling off of it. It's not going to happen, it is happening. Please people don't call me a doomer and stop the denial. Go listen to the people that are actually studying climate. They're are not happy about it. And rich smart tech people are not here to save you. They will buy themselves islands with private guards is what they're gonna do.

Retric 4y ago
I don’t know where the idea that western style energy consumption is an issue, but the sun provides several orders of magnitude more energy than is needed. The vast majority of the energy humanity uses is actually sunlight hitting crops. Our dependence on fossil fuels is mostly a question of costs and existing infrastructure. We have hundreds of millions of ICE cars and the infrastructure to keep them fueled. Swapping that to EV’s over 40 days is impossible, but doing so in 40 years is relatively easy.
- drekk 4y ago
  It's not just energy. You're responding to someone talking about how many things we buy and how much plastic we waste in general. Westerners need to learn that growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell. Even EVs are illustrating the problem. Rather than make transit efficient we're going to greenwash individual cars. Remind me where those EV batteries come from? Who cares about the externalities of lithium mining — just put multiple EVs in every home, widen the highways, add some interpasses. For people who don't have cars today (most of the world) will we be providing EVs as well? At some point it will be too late and people will experience a rapid decline in quality of life (it's already happening if you look at lifespan) with no recourse. Easier to be in denial about that than to, say, not eat meat every single day. Or not have same-day and two-day free delivery in a country where 80% of product transportation is done by truck. It would be nice to have a silver bullet, but the reality is people will have to make adjustments willingly or have it done for them by the biosphere. The Earth is going to be just fine. Whether or not we will remains TBD.
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    > how much plastic we waste in general There is already an excess of carbon to get right there on the atmosphere. Again, the problem is how the plastic is made, not the sheer amount of it.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Retric 4y ago
    Plastics covers a wide range of different materials some are roughly as damaging to the environment as wood. I don’t want to get into the rest of your post, but I would recommend digging a little deeper before you declare something a problem rather than a tradeoff.
    - culi 4y ago
      I have a problem with such a claim. When measuring how "damaging to the environment" something is, what are we looking at? Compostable plastics, for example, might seem more eco when looking at the waste, but the truth is that just means they're breaking down into micro-plastics faster How do we measure the impact of those microplastics? Is it by how expensive a micro-plastic clean-up would cost taxpayers? Is it by the (admittedly marginal, but very widescale) increases in health care costs to people that are impacted by it? I think if we actually took a full-scale assessment of these sorts of impacts, we'd have a lot of trouble making such a claim
      - Retric 4y ago
        I mean this quite literally. Cellulose is useful as plastic, it’s also what makes wood stiff. Worrying about cellulose micro plastics is like worrying about the cell walls of lettuce. You can’t digest the stuff but it’s non toxic.
    - tsol 4y ago
      Microplastic and microcellulose and very different. Only one has widespread microbes that have evolved to break them down.
- culi 4y ago
  Do you think solar panels are infinite? Have you looked at the price of lithium lately? It's been exploding and the only reason solar panels are economically viable is due to heavy gov't subsidization. What happens when a solar panel dies out after ~25 years? We're already in an e-waste crisis. Less than 10% of panels in the US get "recycled" (and by that ofc we mean shipping them to 3rd world countries so we don't have to deal with it). There's only one facility in the whole world currently that has the capability to fully recycle a PV panel (Veolia in France). Every other place just takes the easy parts out and dumps the rest because the economics and risks to health aren't worth it Not to mention rapidly ramping up production of stuff like EVs is going to have devastating immediate impacts on the climate. EVs are only more carbon-efficient than ICEs after a few years. The reason for that is because of the initial production of EVs produces almost twice as many GHG emissions as the production of an ICE. That's significant since initial production can be as much as half of a vehicle's lifetime GHG emissions
  - Retric 4y ago
    > Do you think solar panels are infinite In practice they basically are. Panels are 90-95% silicon which makes up for around 28% of earths crust. That’s largely why they aren’t recycled, they simply aren’t made of partially valuable stuff. The mounting brackets etc on the other hand are actually recycled.
    - cassepipe 4y ago
      But you are missing the point, getting lithium, mining in general, or other collecting practices require a lot of carbonized energy or have bad influence on ecosystems that actually are guarding against worse climate change
      - Retric 4y ago
        Using words like “a lot” is deceptive here, quantities can be large relative to individuals and minuscule relative to the environment. That said, mining can be done using 100% renewable energy just like anything else.
- cassepipe 4y ago
  You are assuming that we have enough energy to harness all that energy from the sun. Extracting materials to harness all that energy costs energy, carbonized energy. Another issue is we don't really have 40 years anymore depending on how you look at it. So the issue still stands. Crops do harness energy from the sun, but they can only do so at a certain pace which does not correspond to human pace, and in certain conditions, a stable given climate, which we are guaranteed to be leaving behind us now.
  - Retric 4y ago
    The issue is emissions not time. If you cut down emissions by say 75% then you have four times as long to hit the same amount. Climate change isn’t some wall where X is absolutely fine and X + even 1% more is disaster. We are seeing negative effects today and they just get very slightly worse as emissions increase time the CO2 ppm increases by 1.
    - cassepipe 4y ago
      I mean, yes, that was implied, since we have not even starting decreasing the amount of carbon we let into the atmoshpere time = emissions. It's like I tell you I earn X$ dollars and month and then you tell me "Yes, but only if you go to work that month". I guess you are right but you're kinda missing the point. I really don't see emissions being reduced by 75% any time soon, so then, no, we don't have 40 years. Even if we stopped emitting carbon now, there would be bad consequences further down the road. Exactly, this is not some wall and partly unknown territory, the thing is that this destabilization has inertia and we will suffer the consequences even after we have started actively removing carbon from the atmosphere if that ever happens. Another thing are self sustaining global warming mechanism that have been kicked off and that we don't know the effects of. So it won't get slighly worse, it is getting exponentially worse.
      - Retric 4y ago
        The US has dropped CO2 emissions by 15% since 2007. That’s a meaningful change. Global numbers aren’t a rosy, but if you look at a developing country like China it produced 17.7% of their electric from renewables in 2008 and that jumped to 27.8% in 2019. While their economic growth more than offset that change, solar and wind adoption is currently much faster than economic growth both in China and around the world. As to self sustaining global warming that’s not exponential. The current amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will result in a fixed amount of warming that hasn’t happened yet. It’s not an exponential increase just a lag between emissions and increases temperatures.

Retric 4y ago

I don’t know where the idea that western style energy consumption is an issue, but the sun provides several orders of magnitude more energy than is needed. The vast majority of the energy humanity uses is actually sunlight hitting crops. Our dependence on fossil fuels is mostly a question of costs and existing infrastructure. We have hundreds of millions of ICE cars and the infrastructure to keep them fueled. Swapping that to EV’s over 40 days is impossible, but doing so in 40 years is relatively easy.

drekk 4y ago
It's not just energy. You're responding to someone talking about how many things we buy and how much plastic we waste in general. Westerners need to learn that growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell. Even EVs are illustrating the problem. Rather than make transit efficient we're going to greenwash individual cars. Remind me where those EV batteries come from? Who cares about the externalities of lithium mining — just put multiple EVs in every home, widen the highways, add some interpasses. For people who don't have cars today (most of the world) will we be providing EVs as well? At some point it will be too late and people will experience a rapid decline in quality of life (it's already happening if you look at lifespan) with no recourse. Easier to be in denial about that than to, say, not eat meat every single day. Or not have same-day and two-day free delivery in a country where 80% of product transportation is done by truck. It would be nice to have a silver bullet, but the reality is people will have to make adjustments willingly or have it done for them by the biosphere. The Earth is going to be just fine. Whether or not we will remains TBD.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  > how much plastic we waste in general There is already an excess of carbon to get right there on the atmosphere. Again, the problem is how the plastic is made, not the sheer amount of it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Retric 4y ago
  Plastics covers a wide range of different materials some are roughly as damaging to the environment as wood. I don’t want to get into the rest of your post, but I would recommend digging a little deeper before you declare something a problem rather than a tradeoff.
  - culi 4y ago
    I have a problem with such a claim. When measuring how "damaging to the environment" something is, what are we looking at? Compostable plastics, for example, might seem more eco when looking at the waste, but the truth is that just means they're breaking down into micro-plastics faster How do we measure the impact of those microplastics? Is it by how expensive a micro-plastic clean-up would cost taxpayers? Is it by the (admittedly marginal, but very widescale) increases in health care costs to people that are impacted by it? I think if we actually took a full-scale assessment of these sorts of impacts, we'd have a lot of trouble making such a claim
    - Retric 4y ago
      I mean this quite literally. Cellulose is useful as plastic, it’s also what makes wood stiff. Worrying about cellulose micro plastics is like worrying about the cell walls of lettuce. You can’t digest the stuff but it’s non toxic.
  - tsol 4y ago
    Microplastic and microcellulose and very different. Only one has widespread microbes that have evolved to break them down.
culi 4y ago
Do you think solar panels are infinite? Have you looked at the price of lithium lately? It's been exploding and the only reason solar panels are economically viable is due to heavy gov't subsidization. What happens when a solar panel dies out after ~25 years? We're already in an e-waste crisis. Less than 10% of panels in the US get "recycled" (and by that ofc we mean shipping them to 3rd world countries so we don't have to deal with it). There's only one facility in the whole world currently that has the capability to fully recycle a PV panel (Veolia in France). Every other place just takes the easy parts out and dumps the rest because the economics and risks to health aren't worth it Not to mention rapidly ramping up production of stuff like EVs is going to have devastating immediate impacts on the climate. EVs are only more carbon-efficient than ICEs after a few years. The reason for that is because of the initial production of EVs produces almost twice as many GHG emissions as the production of an ICE. That's significant since initial production can be as much as half of a vehicle's lifetime GHG emissions
- Retric 4y ago
  > Do you think solar panels are infinite In practice they basically are. Panels are 90-95% silicon which makes up for around 28% of earths crust. That’s largely why they aren’t recycled, they simply aren’t made of partially valuable stuff. The mounting brackets etc on the other hand are actually recycled.
  - cassepipe 4y ago
    But you are missing the point, getting lithium, mining in general, or other collecting practices require a lot of carbonized energy or have bad influence on ecosystems that actually are guarding against worse climate change
    - Retric 4y ago
      Using words like “a lot” is deceptive here, quantities can be large relative to individuals and minuscule relative to the environment. That said, mining can be done using 100% renewable energy just like anything else.
cassepipe 4y ago
You are assuming that we have enough energy to harness all that energy from the sun. Extracting materials to harness all that energy costs energy, carbonized energy. Another issue is we don't really have 40 years anymore depending on how you look at it. So the issue still stands. Crops do harness energy from the sun, but they can only do so at a certain pace which does not correspond to human pace, and in certain conditions, a stable given climate, which we are guaranteed to be leaving behind us now.
- Retric 4y ago
  The issue is emissions not time. If you cut down emissions by say 75% then you have four times as long to hit the same amount. Climate change isn’t some wall where X is absolutely fine and X + even 1% more is disaster. We are seeing negative effects today and they just get very slightly worse as emissions increase time the CO2 ppm increases by 1.
  - cassepipe 4y ago
    I mean, yes, that was implied, since we have not even starting decreasing the amount of carbon we let into the atmoshpere time = emissions. It's like I tell you I earn X$ dollars and month and then you tell me "Yes, but only if you go to work that month". I guess you are right but you're kinda missing the point. I really don't see emissions being reduced by 75% any time soon, so then, no, we don't have 40 years. Even if we stopped emitting carbon now, there would be bad consequences further down the road. Exactly, this is not some wall and partly unknown territory, the thing is that this destabilization has inertia and we will suffer the consequences even after we have started actively removing carbon from the atmosphere if that ever happens. Another thing are self sustaining global warming mechanism that have been kicked off and that we don't know the effects of. So it won't get slighly worse, it is getting exponentially worse.
    - Retric 4y ago
      The US has dropped CO2 emissions by 15% since 2007. That’s a meaningful change. Global numbers aren’t a rosy, but if you look at a developing country like China it produced 17.7% of their electric from renewables in 2008 and that jumped to 27.8% in 2019. While their economic growth more than offset that change, solar and wind adoption is currently much faster than economic growth both in China and around the world. As to self sustaining global warming that’s not exponential. The current amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will result in a fixed amount of warming that hasn’t happened yet. It’s not an exponential increase just a lag between emissions and increases temperatures.