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The history of humanity is doing things that don't scale, aren't sustainable, and then figuring out how to deal with the problems created by the massive leaps f
by fleitz 12y ago
The history of humanity is doing things that don't scale, aren't sustainable, and then figuring out how to deal with the problems created by the massive leaps forward we made, utilizing the surpluses generated by ignoring the long term impacts of our decisions.
Burning fossil fuels and ignoring the future impact is probably the best thing we ever did as a species, especially if you like whales.
- Daishiman 12y agoPhysics and the environment don't work that way. Our society has never been as energy-intensive as it is now, nor has its impacts been as wide. There's not much that we'll be able to do about the massive amounts of plastic released into the oceans, or the levels of mercury and lead pollution throughout the world. If the fact that we were not able to externalize the costs of carbon pollution ends up leading to the collapse of the Antarctic ice shelves leading to a massive sea level rise that can't ever be fixed then that sort of kills the argument. The same can be said for the destruction of ecosystems that can never be recovered for that matter.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- hyperbovine 12y agoSo basically you are saying there is no upper limit to our ability to engineer our way out of the disasters we create. A lot of people, myself included, are extremely skeptical of this point of view. It seems incredibly arrogant.
- fleitz 12y agoNo, I'm basically saying that the current CO2 problem is something we can engineer our way out of. There are plenty of other theoretical problems that I don't think quickly engineer our way out of, like escaping an expanding sun, a sufficiently large blackhole, etc. However for the strawman of "we can engineer our way out of anything in 20 years" I would agree with you that that is arrogant. As I noted in the deleted post, the reason the IPCC still publishes reports is because it's a problem we can do something about. Do you disagree with this assessment? Are we beyond the point of no return?
- Daishiman 12y agoPhysics and the environment don't work that way. Our society has never been as energy-intensive as it is now, nor has its impacts been as wide. There's not much that we'll be able to do about the massive amounts of plastic released into the oceans, or the levels of mercury and lead pollution throughout the world. If the fact that we were not able to externalize the costs of carbon pollution ends up leading to the collapse of the Antarctic ice shelves leading to a massive sea level rise that can't ever be fixed then that sort of kills the argument. The same can be said for the destruction of ecosystems that can never be recovered for that matter.