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The death cult of American evangelicals is pushing for a climate disaster for the same reason they are cheering on the Israeli beat-down on Hamas. They think i

The death cult of American evangelicals is pushing for a climate disaster for the same reason they are cheering on the Israeli beat-down on Hamas. They think it will bring about the second coming of Jesus. Seriously. these dudes get off on rapture fanfic which Jesus gives them power over everyone. To your point that as a society we have decided to prolong the status quo, I suggest a different perspective. I know that I won't move into a city and give up driving. It takes way too many things that make life worth living. I expect that you and others have a different perspective. I can accept that. ut hte discussion should not stop at that apparent impasse. The discussion fails by presenting a limited palette of unpalatable options as the only solutions instead of looking at wider range of options. I rarely hear about options that we can do locally that will help reduce the impact of carbon in the atmosphere. A common wish list item is not just bicycle friendly roadways but bicycle focused roadways. To do this you need to realize that everywhere there's a roadway, you need to make it bicycle friendly because people are not to give up where they live. I can get behind that for all year riding. There is no bad weather, only bad clothing. EV problems are almost all engineering problems. EVs that are good for 50-100 mile range like my Chevy volt is a good local car. Citroen has a design that's cheap to build, uses standard electronic components could be built in and for local community. Batteries are getting cheaper, lighter, with more capacity. Longer range travel has a variety of options ranging from short haul electric air, long distance rail and better charging networks Community virtual power plants. Batteries are getting cheap enough that you can drop in 4 kW of battery plus inverter for a few thousand dollars. Use those batteries to peak load shave which takes polluting plants off of the grid during high demand times. This is not something should be controlled by a public utility but by the local community. Vermont is doing this now to avoid the need to build more power plants. They even install solar panels at customers houses to add more power to the grid. Provide tax disincentives for maintaining a lawn and irrigation system. Make it easy to rewild anything covered with turf-grass. This is one of those long-chain effects. Rewilding does a very good job storing carbon and moisture in the soil. It provides food and habitat for insects, further enables more plant growth in environments that are drought resistant or at least tolerant. Rinse and repeat. Rewiding will also cut down the amount of pollutants created by two strokes lawn equipment. Some communities have started on this by mandating battery-powered lawn equipment only. Convert nighttime lighting 2700 K temperature lighting. More efficient, less damaging to the nighttime ecology. Reduce lighting intensity after 10 o'clock at night and use more motion sensitive full-cut off lighting. This easily saves 50% or more of nighttime power which could be used to charge batteries for the next day for peak loads. On airflight, mandate that air flights cannot create contrails. It's already known how to minimize them by changing altitude to avoid parts of the atmosphere which are prone to trigger contrails. You want to avoid contrails because clouds. Low altitude daytime clouds reflect heat upward. Reduce the number of clouds the ground gets hot. High-altitude clouds hold in heat like an insulating blanket. Minimize high-altitude clouds especially over the polar regions and a significant amount of heat radiates in the space. Here's an interesting article on radiation cooling both in the atmosphere and on physical devices that can be used to supplement or replace air conditioning. https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13729 https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13729 this is a well covered topic if you're an atmospheric scientist. There are several geo-engineering experiments that we should be checking about. There are some that are using calcium carbonate I believe to absorb CO2 the ocean. There is the ever popular iron fertilization which does work but it's very finicky apparently. Use them. It seems like every month there's a new chemical process which is efficiently does direct air capture for CO2. Pick a few, techniques, build a few machines implementing these processes in cities and on a bake-off. See which one works the best and when you have it working, open a mutual fund to individual people can invest in and profit from direct air capture. You might not think any of these items will have a big effect and you are right. We got to where we are by a thousand bad decisions but these ideas are like compound interest in that they build the previous day, week, month, year's effort. If we keep making more small wrong decisions, the death cult of climate change will be right. But we need a plan a model a way to sell small right decisions the individual people can do in their own land in their own life and their own cities. I have no illusions that will be easy or that everyone ago yeah let's march in the same direction but we need to introduce these small small ideas and plans on how to implement. If we can show that these changes don't have a big negative effect on people's lives, then will be able to start going after the production side of the CO2 problem. Change works only when you give them something good first before you take away what they know no matter how bad it is. One plan to keep thinking I gotta find a way to do it is to build 24 inch stoves that cheap-add landlord's use in crappy apartments to replace gas ovens. But instead of using the traditional resistive heating elements make them induction. Make the oven convection and if the house doesn't have enough current capacity, put a battery in the unit and use that to supplement the house current when cooking. The other thing is to leverage the New York State in window heat pump project to put heating in low-income housing in the hands of the tenants not dependent on the ancient gas boilers or even worse open air gas heaters found in many crappy old apartments. Small stuff like this has a big impact not just on the environment from people's lives. I know I can't do it myself had talked up whenever possible to try and find other people willing to work with me on it. It is discouraging that we are in a multi-situation failure scenario. There are some speckles of hope. There are people out there trying to reforest deserts to bring moisture back into the soil and make a self-sustaining environment. You see the videos on YouTube and a lot of the work makes sense. How real it is? I don't know. It's YouTube but reversing densification is one way to make things better around the world and it's relatively cheap. Some of the things I suggested could also be applied to troubled places to improve their environment. I think the important thing is not to get discouraged by the magnitude of it but to pick something and make a change happen. Make something positive, constructive that other people can buy into. Don't let the climate change death cult wear you down.

solardev 3y ago
I had to think about how to respond to this, because on one level I totally hear ya that there are a million little wins to be had in a billion different ways. Novel engineering tweaks and behavioral hacks are everywhere, much of it low-hanging fruit with low barriers (induction stoves, LED lights, whatever), while others eventually become a no-brainer given enough time (why not an EV if you're mostly just urban commuting anyway). But I don't think that's quite enough, mathematically. You nailed the heart of the issue: > It takes way too many things that make life worth living. I expect that you and others have a different perspective. I can accept that. > Change works only when you give them something good first before you take away what they know no matter how bad it is. Fundamentally, people don't want to lose something they've had already. Many don't even want to be inconvenienced. They view any sort of minor intrusion on their lives as government overreach -- maybe partially by personality, but also due to the intense conservative propaganda advancing this "me vs them" viewpoint on purpose. It's faux Old West ruggedness mixed with weaponized individualism. We've stopped being able to even think about collective problems, much less solving them. For what it's worth, I don't live in a city either, but in a pretty rural area where EVs aren't super practical, frequently fly (and don't care about the contrails), etc. So this isn't me soapboxing, just pointing out that my own climate scorecard is pretty terrible too. Maybe given a few hundred years people will trend towards wisdom and more ecologically sound behavior. But we don't really have that kind of time. It's kinda like wartime drafts... you can build up a standing army of volunteers if you have the decades and resources to slowly accumulate them, but in the heat of the moment, sometimes you just need to round people up against their will. Climate isn't quite THAT urgent, but if we wait for volunteers... well, we've already been doing that for three or four decades. The environmentalists have been doing it forever, and other people do it here or there... and mathematically it just doesn't add up to enough. That's how we got here in the first place. It's not a "death cult" to want stronger reins on private liberties in order to secure a collective well-being. It's an ideology, but one that half of America does not want, and without them, the rest of the world doesn't stand much of a chance. Unless China singlehandedly decides to do something about it, which might make a big enough difference. But not everything in the world can be solved by individual willpower alone. Sometimes it's individual will that's the problem to begin with. Our freedoms aren't infinite, and our choices have very real life-and-death consequences for others in the world.

solardev 3y ago

I had to think about how to respond to this, because on one level I totally hear ya that there are a million little wins to be had in a billion different ways. Novel engineering tweaks and behavioral hacks are everywhere, much of it low-hanging fruit with low barriers (induction stoves, LED lights, whatever), while others eventually become a no-brainer given enough time (why not an EV if you're mostly just urban commuting anyway). But I don't think that's quite enough, mathematically. You nailed the heart of the issue: > It takes way too many things that make life worth living. I expect that you and others have a different perspective. I can accept that. > Change works only when you give them something good first before you take away what they know no matter how bad it is. Fundamentally, people don't want to lose something they've had already. Many don't even want to be inconvenienced. They view any sort of minor intrusion on their lives as government overreach -- maybe partially by personality, but also due to the intense conservative propaganda advancing this "me vs them" viewpoint on purpose. It's faux Old West ruggedness mixed with weaponized individualism. We've stopped being able to even think about collective problems, much less solving them. For what it's worth, I don't live in a city either, but in a pretty rural area where EVs aren't super practical, frequently fly (and don't care about the contrails), etc. So this isn't me soapboxing, just pointing out that my own climate scorecard is pretty terrible too. Maybe given a few hundred years people will trend towards wisdom and more ecologically sound behavior. But we don't really have that kind of time. It's kinda like wartime drafts... you can build up a standing army of volunteers if you have the decades and resources to slowly accumulate them, but in the heat of the moment, sometimes you just need to round people up against their will. Climate isn't quite THAT urgent, but if we wait for volunteers... well, we've already been doing that for three or four decades. The environmentalists have been doing it forever, and other people do it here or there... and mathematically it just doesn't add up to enough. That's how we got here in the first place. It's not a "death cult" to want stronger reins on private liberties in order to secure a collective well-being. It's an ideology, but one that half of America does not want, and without them, the rest of the world doesn't stand much of a chance. Unless China singlehandedly decides to do something about it, which might make a big enough difference. But not everything in the world can be solved by individual willpower alone. Sometimes it's individual will that's the problem to begin with. Our freedoms aren't infinite, and our choices have very real life-and-death consequences for others in the world.