I’m 42 and I don’t remember a time when it wasn’t obvious that we needed to phase out fossil fuels. Global warming was already known. The 70’s oil crises had even convinced conservative politicians that “energy independence” was an important goal even if they couldn’t grasp the concept of an energy transition. The Exxon Valdez spill happened when I was in elementary school. (We did a “science experiment” where we put canola oil and water in containers and used different materials to remove the oil.)
Fossil fuels have been obviously awful for at least 5 decades. Imagine how much less CO2 would be in the air if in 1985, we got on the good timeline instead of the “Biff becomes president” timeline.
Let’s go even further back. We had a lot of environmental activism in the 1970s. We got the clean air act, the clean water act, started recycling efforts for at least bottles and cans, and paper. Solar panels were a hot topic and President Carter installed some at the White House. My parents were part of a trend toward all electric houses fed by nuclear (what a disaster that was). Cars got a lot more efficient.
We had a great start. Then Carter lost his second term, and Republicans went ham on our future
Thank Nixon for the epa
Leave it to conservatives to destroy the planet by inventing fake regulators they can control.
Clean water act actually helped.
Only under Democrats. It is hamstrung, bypassed and suffocated under Republicans, just like the EPA. When conservatives have power, regulation becomes a weapon for them. There is no regulation a conservative will not pervert for their own benefit.
Nothing good in history has ever come from conservatism. Nothing at all.
Have you ever considered that first world nations are just going to use whatever energy source is the cheapest until it is no longer the cheapest?
I live below sea level and have a degree in economics. I have definitely considered the fact that I’m paying for the negative externalities of fossil fuels each time my flood insurance rates go up.
For the record, my house is raised above sea level and I have solar panels. No one has to chime in with “just move” overly simplistic arguments. We’re better prepared than most Americans since we already deal with it.
Fucking mermaids on Lemmy now smh
Poor unfortunate souls.
That’s not possible, nobody could be better prepared than Best Countrytm!
Then we’d be doing fission. Fossil fuels aren’t required to pay for their externalities the way nuclear is, not to mention that the fossil companies have spent decades lobbying and campaigning to keep from having to be responsible for their own bullshit, as well as campaigning to make other forms of energy seem / be less viable (either through PR messaging or regulatory capture).
Nuclear fission is not paying for the biggest externality either, its waste products. That for some reason seems to be the people’s problem. And even then there doesn’t exist a permanent storage solution for it as of today anywhere on the planet (yes, I know Finland thinks they have it figured out next year, but at a capacity of 5500t it will only hold the waste of the 5 Finnish reactors). It’s absolute insanity to me how this gets brushed away so easily.
Should just bury this shit in a subduction rift and let the earth eat it
And that’s how you get Godzilla.
The problem with that is that the subduction rifts generally also have volcanoes that spew a bunch of that material back to the surface/atmosphere. It might take a few centuries for it to go through all that, but IMO better to bury it in one place and risk future people not understanding it (they’ll figure it out quickly enough if they are human or similar intelligence) than to put it somewhere where the Earth itself will eventually reject it violently and people affected won’t have much choice or understanding of what happens as a result.
Usually but not always.
Are you saying that nuclear is cheaper than renewables?
In the alternative universe we’d have been building fission power for decades when it was cheaper than renewables, and it would still be running today.
In this universe we didn’t though, I’m not sure why the multiverse is relevant here.
We were talking about power strategies from the 1980s and the person above said it would just be the “cheapest”. If countries really were just building the cheapest, it would not have been renewables back then.
We were already talking about a counterfactual.
I guess. If we’re in this hypothetical alternative universe then those plants built in the 80’s would be at the end of their lives and we’d be looking to spend a fortune to replace them with new nuclear or we’d be saving money by building renewables.
I’m still not sure what this line if discussion is accomplishing though.
Maybe cheaper than renewables and grid scale batteries over the lifetime of the reactor. Perhaps you could correct me, but my understanding is that grid scale battery facilities don’t even exist yet. Given the current state of battery technology, you’d need to replace the batteries at that facility in, what, seven years? Ten is really pushing it, right? That’s not going to be cheap.
Nuclear is 2-4 times more expensive and grid scale batteries (the most costly way of storing power) are already being used.
Grid scale batteries for solar day/night cycles can work. There is no good solution for seasonal fluctuations. Of course, a very large part of Earth’s population lives in close proximity to the equator with far less seasonal influences. It’s just unfortunate that those that pollute most (per capita) do not.
Wind works great at higher latitudes but what we need to be looking at is high voltage DC lines to transfer power over long distances with minimal loss.
Or you could take a page from the Soviet energy strategy and build a bunch of pumped storage plants or their equivalents, no batteries required.
I know people who say that global warming is a conspiracy to not let the developing countries develop. Everyone will try to use what’s cheaper while we’re considering money to be the biggest deal
They can make energy sources cheaper or more expensive and even do so.
How?
Funneling subsidies and tax breaks from fossil fuel to sustainable energy sources. In the Netherlands alone, the around 40 billion euros are spent by the government each year directly or indirectly subsidizing fossil fuel.
Kerosine airplane fuel is untaxed for example, while consumer car fuel comes with a 20% (ish) tax.
Subsidies don’t actually make something cheaper, it just shifts the burden to the taxpayer.
Taxing fossil fuels to the point where they are no longer the cheapest option is a nation shooting itself in the foot, which is why none of them do it.
It’s not just about price for the individual. It’s about economic expansion.
Sure it shifts the burden to the taxpayer and I would like my tax money to be spent on other things please.
Companies aren’t going to change their policies voluntarily, it’s up to governments to make better decisions with my money and make other options more viable.
It’s not just companies though. It’s states.
Militaries, for example, would not be able to improve as quickly if we forewent the cheapest energy sources or made them artificially expensive.
Charging them for the negative externalities. Like coal kills way more people than nuclear but there’s no tax on coal plants for the harm caused.
Then you’re artificially increasing the cost of the fuel.
It’s still going to be absolutely cheaper than alternatives.
Putting a tax on externalities isn’t artificially increasing the cost of the fuel. It’s fixing a market failure.
Putting a tax on externalities isn’t artificially increasing the cost of the fuel.
I’m sorry, what?
Allowing fossil fuels to not pay their use costs is artificially decreasing the cost.
I totally agree, but nations won’t understand that because they are modern-day fiefdoms.
Their main purpose is to support their ruling class. Funnel as much money as quickly as possible.
Dude if Bush jr didn’t steal the elections backed up by the republican supreme court, we’d have Mr Fusion in every device
No we didn’t. This dog and pony show was put on so everyone can take in profits while signaling to the public that they are “working on it” and “we’ll get em next year” so we don’t storm the castle.
Bingo. Look who all was involved in this thing and who was hosting it for fuck sake.
K, I guess we can revisit this topic in a decade when the house is actually on fire and we need to abandon it. So, that’s good I guess.
40 years ago i had a t-shirt that said the world was running out of time…
Time won’t help any more
I mean, we aren’t totally screwed. Just climate will get worse and worse until we stop burning fossil fuels. It will eventually stabilize at whatever amount of carbon we end up at when we stop. It’s just, how bad will it get in the meantime.
Won’t stop us from mass migration, and deaths on an order of magnitude that makes covid look like a blip, and also mass extinction of a large majority of the species on earth. But, we can pull through (I think, maybe)…
Earth isn’t screwed. Humanity is.
Is it supposed to be comforting knowing that a mostly lifeless husk of a planet will exist after we kill off basically every known species? There’s such a thing as too much optimism you know. It’s OK to let the unnecessary death of everything you’ve ever seen be the point of the conversation.
I disagree with your prognosis. The earth has been hit by massive meteors, or huge volcanoes erupted - plenty of species survived. Your ancestors, in fact. There’s radiotrophic fungus growing in the Chernobyl reactor. The earth will be fine, as will many of the lower species.
We’re fucked if we don’t change our ways, though.
Again, “the Earth will be fine” is not a comforting statement when it is immediately followed by “but anyone and everything you know will die”. I don’t know why someone always insists on making that distinction. It’s not meaningful to anyone reading it.
It’s not meant to be comforting, it’s supposed to be tongue in cheek.
The idea that humanity could kill everything on earth forever is laughable. Sure, we can fuck up the earth, but a million years from now it will be full of life. A million years is nothing for a planet.
You’re still not getting the point. In what way is that a comforting thought to you? In more simple terms, why does it make a damn bit of difference to you what happens in a million years?
In this potential future you, your family, all your friends, and everyone you’ve ever met are dead for no better reason than unchecked human greed and when confronting that possibility all you want to talk about is hypothetical flora and fauna. You’re disassociating from the actual problem to the point that I don’t think you’re truly processing what it means for you.
I believe humanity is a disease on this planet. We have never done anything good for it. Our existence will be a minor blip in its history and completely unnoticed in the universe.
I mean, the species on the planet, and the climate kind of is, so yeah, it kind of is. What’s your definition of screwed that says the planet itself will be just fine?
The carbon sequestered in the earth in the form of coal, oil and gas hasn’t always been in the earth. After all, hydro carbons are in fact hundreds of millions of years of dead trees buried under mud sequestering atmospheric CO2. Which implies there was a time with all that CO2 in the air yet still trees to capture it. By releasing it all, we reset the biosphere’s clock to about a time when earth supported a different kind of life (one without us in it), but life nonetheless.
Frankly, the comparisons to Mars and Venus seem a bit overblown.
Maybe, maybe not. We’re dealing with extremes that are accelerated here that have never been seen before in earths history, except when the dinosaurs went extinct, and I think 4 other very sudden climate changing events. But this one being human driven is unique, bcz all other events were naturally occurring (except the meteor impact of course). Species don’t have time to adapt to sudden changes in climate like this. We are very likely killing all life on earth right now, and it’s possible it will never recover.
Life will adapt and rebuild.
You assume it will get better when we stop burning fuel but many things dont just get better when you stop doing what is bad. A lot of things have a point of no return, where you can’t just undo all the damage that has been done
I’m not assuming, that assumption is rooted in science. I’m also not saying things will get better. What I am saying is that the climate will stabilize at whatever new normal there is with the amount of carbon in the carbon life cycle, that means whatever extremes exist at that point, will continue to exist.
mmmnope. Heard of the clathrate bomb?
There is a fuckton of methane locked in permafrost soils.
Once they start to melt, you get a chain reaction.
Methane is very potent, and will cause issues for sure. You’re absolutely right about that. But it also has a much shorter half life than carbon does, so it doesn’t have the same kind of long term effects as carbon does.
It has a much shorter half life but what does it degrade into?
Does science say when things will stabilise after we stop using coal and oil? I bet it’s not immediate. I bet it will take a lot longer than many think if not hundreds of years just to stabilise into something that maybe isn’t even liveable.
Yes, something like a hundred years or so before it stabilizes. I forget what the models are saying, bcz I don’t do climate science, my fiance does, so I usually ask her these queations.
Also though there are already products being made in carbon negative processes including sequestered jet fuel and various building materials. The cost (economic and ecological) of power generation has fallen dramatically and continues to do so while design tools continue to improve, this enables better and more ecologically’ sustainable infrastructure which will help increase the rate of transition to ecologically’ sustainable living.
We absolutely will be pulling significant amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere in twenty or thirty years from now, both from bio processing (algae to plastic for example) and direct capture.
It’s hard to guess what the world will look like in a hundred years but any model that assumes things will stop changing is just being silly.
Yeah, I’ve seen a lot of research on carbon sequestration, and I’ve not seen anything actually promising on it. We can’t rely on processes that aren’t in place, and aren’t proven to work to pin the hopes of our species, when the real solution is right in front of us. Stop burning fossil fuels
Have you now? A lot of research, and nothing promising?
Tell me about the things you’ve seen research on, like the closest to being promising but not thing that you’ve read research on…
Should be easy because you’re basically an expert in the tech, right?
I’m not am expert in it, my partner does research in climate adaptation, and there are people who do that research in her department. As far as I’ve heard, there isn’t anything that promising on the horizon. And I can’t stress this enough, we should not be relying on tech to try to save us when all we have to do is stop burning fossil fuels. It’s really that simple. But everybody wants business as usual, so we’re putting our hopes in pipedream technology that doesn’t exist hoping it will save us from ourselves. Seems pretty stupid to me.
Ha ok, changed a bit now hasn’t it? So you talk to your partner in depth about these subjects but can’t ask about it to help you answer the questions because of reasons…
What you actually mean is without doing any research you assumed something that fits with your preconceived dislike of technology solutions? Or maybe you just saw someone else say it so repeated it with a slightly exaggerated truthiness tone to and make it seem more believable.
Stop burning fossil fuels isn’t something we can just do over night, especially when people fight against good alternatives - and double especially when people fight against them based on knee jerk emotional response without really knowing much about it…
Carbon based efuels are going to be a huge part in the transition to an ecologically sustainable society, the model using sequestered carbon and renewable power generation is just one of several incredibly promising areas of chemistry at the moment.
When the house…? The house is mostly burned down. We’re trying to figure out how to survive without a house, and motherfuckers are walking around striking matches and dropping them on piles of newspaper.
We’d like them to stop doing that, but the house is a total loss. We need a strategy for what comes next, because we’re all completely fucked.
You’re not so good with analogies are you? The house is the earth, abandoning it means leaving the planet bcz it’s uninhabitable for humans.
That doesn’t make any sense, though. You’re being too literal. The house is the habitability and sustainable nature of Earth’s ecosystems. It’s where we live now. The fire represents the climate crisis, which is past us now. The battle is lost. The Earth will be fine, but humanity has to figure out how to survive without the natural protections and abundance that have allowed us to grow unfettered. It’s too late to look for ways to recognize the warning signs of a fire, or to prevent a fire, or to look for ways to extinguish a fire.
Leaving the planet might work, if we had anywhere else to go, but we’re nowhere near the technological capability to terraform the Moon or Mars, and even further from leaving the solar system.
No, we’re stuck here, where there used to be the conditions that protected civilizations from storms, famines, droughts, and extreme cold. We’re not all going to survive it, but those who do will need to solve some of the problems we created.
Are you like a bot or troll farm? Honestly, who puts this much effort into a comment about an analogy…
Nah, just bored.
the house is on fire. we don’t f’ing care. By ‘we’ I mean the oligarchs and their sycophants.
Cop28: an over the top parody of Don’t Look Up.
I have to try again to watch it. The premise was already hitting you over the head from the beginning but the movie was too badly done to watch through. I really should though
I had the opposite reaction. I thought the movie captured essence of the subject material so exceptionally that I don’t want to see it again, it would just make me depressed. There’s some truth to satire but in this case the satire ended up being too close to the truth. I think COVID did this movie a solid. Without COVID I probably would’ve dismissed the movie as too unrealistically over the top. But with COVID literally keeping me home there were just too many parallels for me to dismiss the movie as “it would never happen, we’re better than that”. Ugh, just thinking about it is getting me down.
It was so on point in a lot of things, it wasn’t satire, it was basically a documentary. I love that movie. And also hate it. For the same reasons as you do.
That’s also what I loved it the Death To 2020 and Death To 2021 movies by Charlie Booker. They’re mockumentaries when they were released, but now, just 2 years later, they’ve gotten less “far from reality”, to put it that way.
we’re for the jobs the comet will bring
Just think of all the flood barriers we will have to build!
We’re all gonna die from climate collapse soon, aren’t we?
If you’re able to post on Lemmy, your country is probably going to be fine for a hundred years or more. Already impoverished places on the other hand are unfortunately going to be hit the hardest in 50 or fewer.
And where do you think those impoverished places will migrate to?
If you think we now have a migration crisis, think again.
Though thanks to technological and social advancements life in those countries is getting better at an impressive rate, of course people in affluent countries are fighting this progress every step of the way but it’s still happening.
Natural language information systems and sensor driven automation for example enable things like lowering the cost of basic healthcare to almost zero while vastly improving it’s scope and quality - sadly many people, for example many I see here on lemmy, are fighting these developments in various ways; trying to purposely poison datasets used to develop the vital tools that will enable this, boycotting places that use these technologies, and trying to agitate for heavy handed legislation to cripple their development such as intense and absurd new forms of copyright law.
I won’t write the million word essay I want to about the ways these technologies could totally change the game and enable a huge efficiency boost that allows us not only to halt climate destruction but to reverse it - it’s all pretty obvious though, robots building and maintaining ecologically’ friendly structures will enable things currently impossible, especially with automated design tools facilitating implementation of rapidly developing technologies.
But it’s hip to be negative and for reasons I simply can’t grasp a huge amount of very vocal people are fighting to preserve the current awful state of things - they want human potential to be wasted working in shitty manual jobs and corporate wage slavery for the rest of human history. They want building designs to remain limited by human ability and availability of skills, they want a system where poor people can’t afford to live decent healthy lives due to the inescapable math of it requiring more human labour to live well than any one person can produce therefore for some to live well a caste system must exist whereby those above get a larger share of the production potential thus leaving the lower classes without the means to have a fair return on their work.
But the people who really suffer are the children working in coffee plantations and chocolate manufacture, in cobalt mines and wheat fields, in sweatshops and prison factories… No one cares about them, people love to pretend to care of course but they’ll fight against things that could improve their lives simply because they fear change or because they’re greedy about the most absurd shit - they try to make it impossible to train natural language models because ‘it’s stealing my IP by training on the nonsence I post to the internet’ and a dozen other silly statements that all boil down to ‘I don’t want things to change for the better because I’m doing ok’
Commuter aided design could help solve the logistical problems that create privation and which cause ecological and climate damage, they could massively reduce the cost of living for everyone and improve our lives in pretty much every way - to get there we need to have natural language tools and Computer Vision tools. like a tech tree in a video game, LLMs like chat GPT and general purpose CV like stable diffusion are vital if we’re going to unlock things like digital triage, diagnosis, and treatment (not just of people either but imagine actually being able to repair your TV because the computer looked at it and said ‘test this capacitor by using this setting and placing the probes here, a new cap will cost a dollar and I can order it from a company that meets your code of conduct’)
What I’m saying is there’s massive hope for the future but people fight it and deny it because they love misery,
So somehow you managed to exploit climate change to sell corrupt and broken art-stealing LLMs. I don’t know whether I should be disappointed or impressed.
You want to maintain the system that keeps billions in poverty simply so you can try and cling to a privileged position in society. You’re as sick as Elon Musk except his selfishness actually benefits him, you’re trapping yourself in a worse existence just through selfish greed, then you have the hilarious pretence of doing it for morality.
The world can be depressing and cruel but fuck it’s funny sometimes.
And now you’re derailing the thread.
Okay, ignoring you now
What you mean is ‘oh yeah good point, I’ll pretend you’re a baddie and claim my inability to answer is actually the moral high ground’ thanks
Well, no. Some of us will die from the wars started due to climate collapse.
And some of us will die from the after effects, as agriculture, trade, and civilization break down
Agriculture doesn’t have to break down. We will probably have to start farming vertically though, which needs a looot of energy. But it should also be more sustainable since we can grow everything closer to where people live.
I love the idea of vertical farms, especially with being able to use physical barriers instead of pesticides and herbicides, but I do wonder if it can really replace the hundreds of millions of acres currently used for farming in the US alone.
Well, a lot of that is used for feeding animals, so if everyone would go more or least completely vegan, you’d need a lot less of those farms.
All these fossil fuel addicts don’t realize that their home-countries won’t support human life anymore in a few decades. And they have so much money, that pivoting their investments to renewables would be no problem, even profitable for them and their offspring some financial experts might say. But they won’t because the wells aren’t dry yet.
The rulers of today have already bought nice chunks of London, Paris, New York. They’ll be fine.
Those are also locations that won’t support human life in the future.
The only place will be Antarctica.
Ive lost hope in humanity changing and actually solving climate change a long time ago.
Fair enough. Climate scientists have been warning for the past half century, and now that we are starting to feel the effects, slowly change is starting to come in. We are wayyyyyy too late. Of course we should keep up our efforts but the world and biodiversity as we know it is beyond saving.
I don’t believe we ever did, no.
There’s a small chance something devastating won’t happen before big changes happen to try and reverse climate change but odds are a lot of shit is gonna happen that’s gonna lead to a lot of people dying. Not end of the world shit, but a lot of people are gonna suffer because of greed and lack of improving the world
“We came tantalizingly close to preventing your house from burning down!”
… by publicly announcing that “we must eventually stop pouring gasoline on it!”
Tantalizingly close to a deal that would inevitably fall apart anyway…
See:
"Every one of the world’s leading economies, including all the countries that make up the G20, is failing to meet commitments made in the landmark Paris agreement in order to stave off climate catastrophe, a damning new analysis has found.
Less than two months before crucial United Nations climate talks take place in Scotland, none of the largest greenhouse gas emitting countries have made sufficient plans to lower pollution to meet what they agreed to in the 2015 Paris climate accord."
Sadly it affected profits.
We can not put an end to scorching the earth, because a Sheik wants to build a 170-kilometre-long and 200 meter wide city in the desert.
Doesn’t matter because it would’ve been non-binding and they would have failed to do it even if it was.
Don’t let this stop you. Wind and solar is cheap - often the biggest barrier is NIMBY not allowing construction, so demand your local/national political climate stop that. Allow solar by right on any roof. Allow wind turbines by right on all ag land. Encourage your utilities to put in storage systems to use that renewable energy “when the wind doesn’t blow”. Encourage good programs to buy renewable power over fossil power (everyone should pay for their share of the power lines and storage batteries - this is a large part of the cost of power)
Electric cars are already becoming popular. There are many things that you can do to encourage that. Better yet, your can encourage great transport in your city (most cities don’t have great transit!)
There are many areas already running their grid on a majority renewable power. We know this works.
The above measures won’t get rid of all fossil fuels, but they get rid of the vast majority. They work with today’s technology as well, and are affordable without subsidies!. No need to invest anything new/more. Just ensure that laws don’t get in the way.
beep beep. freeze some embryos and program bots to thaw in a thousand years. books on tape ftw
Just make sure no one named Ted Faro gets anywhere near the project.
I HATE him. Who Ruins the species twice. Worst person to ever exist in any fiction. If him, hitler, and Stalin were in a room and I had 6 bullets I’ll put all 6 in Ted and continue to beat his corpse.
That’s why I’ve been honing my bow, spear, and computer hacking skills.
Raised by wolves or horizon zero dawn was like that.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Ultimately, draft language explicitly calling for the phaseout of fossil fuels was stricken from the final text of agreements brokered at this year’s climate talks.
It mirrors language in a recent letter addressed to participating governments from COP28 president Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber — who also happens to be the CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.
The UN’s decision to hold the summit in the United Arab Emirates, a major oil and gas producer, wound up giving the fossil fuel industry unprecedented access.
Then the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) sent a letter to its member states pressuring them to “proactively reject any text or formula that targets energy i.e. fossil fuels rather than emissions.”
“This text is a step forward on our path towards phasing out fossil fuels, but is not the historic decision we hoped for … given the overwhelming momentum among countries in support of a renewable energy package and a long overdue fossil fuel phase out, we needed a far more ambitious result.” Andreas Sieber, associate director of policy and campaigns for environmental group 350.org, said in a statement before the draft agreement was finalized at the conference’s closing plenary.
Leading up to the conference, the world’s biggest greenhouse gas polluters — the US and China — committed to working toward that goal together when each country’s climate envoys met in California in November.
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