While I understand why people feel pushed to this point, these sorts of solutions always frustrate me.
Toying with this kind of thing is asking for something unpredictable and terrible to happen. We KNOW what we need to do to stop climate change, we just have to actually DO it. And offering an “easy” way out (which could turn apocalyptic if they’re wrong about how to do it correctly) is just gonna make governments more hesitant to do the hard work required to fix things.
Also, can you imagine the damage that DIMMING THE SUN would have on ecosystems already struggling due to human interference?! Plants fix carbon and cutting down on sunlight will also almost certainly cut down on photosynthesis and thus on carbon fixation. Is that something they’ve considered?
I know they’re just trying to help but I really feel like their energy would be better spent trying to advance renewable energy or carbon sequestration technologies.
Most discourse about self-driving cars and nuclear power:
“We need to be more careful about saving millions of lives! A few dozen people might die in the process!”
Honestly, I’m nonzero sympathetic to the viewpoint that technology can make things worse, and we should be cautious about it. You want to argue that social media and clickbait have made our lives worse? That’s a defensible position.
But that caution seems incredibly misplaced when the technology is specifically designed to fix one of the major causes of death in the status quo.
I feel like the main problem here is that people just entirely forget that, like, new tech should be compared to the status quo, not to perfection.
Imagine Toyota came out with a new car, which was half the price of existing cars, and also was twice as safe, and put out half as much pollution. It would be amazing!
Now imagine they didn’t call it a car, they called it a kuruma or something. Everyone would hate it! “Dozens of people are dying in kurumas!” “Kurumas are taking up lanes that could have been used by cars!” The media would report on “The Kuruma Menace”. Some poor people who couldn’t afford cars would buy kurumas, and everyone would complain about the increased traffic/pollution caused by them.
This is how I feel about people’s reactions to basically every transit innovation ever. Scooters, Uber, self-driving cars, Lime, etc. People always hate them even if they’re a strict improvement over cars. Because instead of comparing them to cars, they compare them to what if people stayed home and did nothing.
And, like, maybe that holds water if you’re the kind of person who think everyone should stay home and do nothing. But most of the critics are people who drive cars! I could talk about how not being stuck at home is a human need, that people are willing to pollute and risk their lives for, but I don’t need to, because these people already know that, that’s why they have cars!
Drilling down into specifics: A lot of the criticism of Uber comes because it’s taking people away from public transit as well as from cars. And yes, cars are in fact less safe, more polluting, cause worse traffic, etc, compared to public transit.
But, like, notice basically everyone I know who complains about Uber owns a car.
People who don’t own cars tend to like Uber. It gets them home when buses aren’t running; when they’re in a rush, it gets them in town in half an hour rather than three hours by bus; it lets them go places while being blind; or while in suburbs underserved by transit. It gets them to hospitals when they’re too sick to bike, for 1/50th of the cost of an ambulance. It lets children go places when their parents don’t feel like driving.
But the car owners? They’ll tell you all about how Uber is ruining their city, because it allows poor people and disabled people the convenience of a car every once in a while, and the convenience of a car just happens to come with tradeoffs.
i’d love to hear how your logic ties into nuclear energy
Like the others, nuclear energy is one of those things where it always gets compared to “not using energy”, rather than to coal.
And as long as a single coal plant exists, the question isn’t “is nuclear power better than nothing?” but “is nuclear power better than coal?” – i.e. “should we replace this coal plant with a nuclear plant?”
Because you don’t need to get bogged down in the tradeoffs of “are deaths and environmental effects worth having electric power?” when we as a society have already said ‘yes’ to the same question regarding coal. If you disagree with those tradeoffs, you should be lobbying for dismantling coal, or at least for replacing it with nuclear as we move towards
Estimates for coal deaths range in the millions of deaths per year. Nuclear is responsible for, like, on average, one death per year? Most meltdowns result in zero deaths. Literal meltdowns!
(Nuclear is even safer than solar and wind – if you’re wondering how, people sometimes die falling off roofs while installing solar panels. Nuclear power hysteria kills more people than nuclear power itself does – more people died in the Fukushima evacuation than would have died if they just ignored it!)
Sure, nuclear energy has byproducts which are not great. But the question isn’t “are the byproducts better than nothing” but “are the byproducts as bad as millions of deaths every year?”
Which, even if you didn’t know anything about them, it’s probably less bad than millions of deaths per year, considering there are relatively few things in the world quite that bad, and we’d probably hear about them if they were. [1]
Casual research (skimming the Wikipedia article) confirms this: nuclear waste is being dealt with. There’s room for improvement, but considering there hasn’t been a single death involved, it’s clearly significantly less bad as millions of deaths per year.
It’s not like nuclear waste is magic. We have a pretty good understanding of it: It emits radiation which lessens over long periods of time, and we know how to block radiation, how far away from it is safe, etc etc.
I know this has some good points, but please for the love of god do not try and convince people that nuclear energy is good. Nuclear waste is a huge issue actually and the u.s. technically still has no plan in place for it. Also meltdowns can have serious, long ranging and long term effects on people’s health.
Deaths caused from solar or wind are due to improper implementation, not something that the energy in of itself causes. Interactions with coal and muclear energy in of themself cause damage to the environment and to living things.
Do you notice that this is the exact thing I was talking about, though? I could talk about how you’re wrong about how big of a problem nuclear waste and meltdowns are, but I shouldn’t even need to, because they’re nothing compared to the widespread environmental destruction and death caused by coal power.
Deaths caused from solar or wind are due to improper implementation, not something that the energy in of itself causes.
Deaths aren’t less bad when they’re accidental… The deceased’s family isn’t going to feel any better if you tell them it was preventable.
The only way this matters if we’re talking about what we should do in the future, when these deaths can be entirely prevented. At that point, yeah, I agree, we should stop using nuclear power, and switch to, like, Dyson spheres or something. But that’s not relevant to what we should be doing now.
Also, if accidental deaths don’t count, Nuclear has zero deaths.
Not to mention that the half-life for fossil fuels’ impact on the carbon cycle is infinite. It’s just easier to ignore when you can dump your toxic waste into the atmosphere
Also coal power stations still release more radioactive waste than nuclear plants do, just because they burn through so much coal that the trace amounts of radioactive elements adds up. And with nuclear power plants you actually bother with trying to contain it.
“To fully process what we are losing on Earth, I had to stop responding only as a scientist. My way forward comes instead from my experience of illness. My stem cell transplant wasn’t pointless just because I will, eventually, die of something. The years I’ve gained, however few or many they may be, are precious beyond measure. So too with the Earth. Each generation of humans living in relative abundance, each species saved from extinction for another 50 years, and each wild place left to function and inspire in its wildness, is precious beyond measure.”
I know it’s hard not to feel hopeless with the threats of extinction, climate change, and environmental degradation looming over our heads, but there are lots of smart, passionate people out there making a difference.
Here is a small sampling of positive environmental/conservation stories from 2018:
The European Union voted to entirely ban the use of certain single-use plastic products. Increased public pressure on American businesses has led several major chains to voluntarily phase-out certain plastic products used in their stores.
The Ocean Cleanup organization has launched a trial vessel designed to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. With the information they gain from this vessel they hope to eventually launch many more.
A recent UN report suggests that the ozone hole is healing itself and may be partially repaired by 2030 and entirely by 2060.
While the situation of the world’s coral reefs is still dire, tons of incredibly talented and passionate people are working not just on protecting the world’s reefs, but also on rebuilding previously damaged ones. This just became much easier due to the discovery of a method called “microfragging”, which causes new corals to grow at 40x the usual rate. There will soon be over 100,000 new corals added to the rebuilding of Florida’s reefs.
The kakapo went from being extinct in the wild to now having a steadily growing wild population of 116 birds. Several critically endangered species like keel-scaled boas and California condors were found to be trending upwards in recent population analyses.
In 2018 Hong Kong finally joined the rest of China in banning ivory trade. China also recently banned the “medicinal” use of rhino horn and tiger bone.
Younger generations are shown to be significantly more concerned about issues such as environmental degradation and climate change, so with each passing year a greater percentage of the working and voting population is on the side of environmental protection and stopping climate change.
It’s vitally important that we cultivate an attitude of defiance and hope, rather than one of hopelessness and inaction. One of the most useful skills that people involved in environmental activism or conservation can cultivate is the ability to get back up and keep fighting even after terrible setbacks.
As long as there are people living on this earth, as long as there is a single patch of forest or a single coral reef, this fight will be worth fighting.
Others please feel free to add other positive environmental/conservation stories as I know I only mentioned a small number of them.
Hey, this isn’t dogs, but climate change is a legit concern. I found this incredibly interesting and informative, and if you go here [ https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/chapter/19/ is southeast, but look under ‘chapters’ to find your region ] you can see more detailed information.
Prairies are some of the most endangered ecosystems in the world, with the tallgrass prairie being the most endangered. Only 1-4% of tallgrass prairie still exists.
Prairies are critically important, not only for the unique biodiversity they possess, but for their effect on climate.
The ability to store carbon is a valuable ecological service in today’s changing climate. Carbon, which is emitted both naturally and by human activities such as burning coal to create electricity, is a greenhouse gas that is increasing in the Earth’s atmosphere. Reports from the International Panel on Climate Change, a group of more than 2,000 climate scientists from around the world, agree that increased greenhouse gases are causing climate change, which is leading to sea level rise, higher temperatures, and altered rain patterns. Most of the prairie’s carbon sequestration happens below ground, where prairie roots can dig into the soil to depths up to 15 feet and more. Prairies can store much more carbon below ground than a forest can store above ground. In fact, the prairie was once the largest carbon sink in the world-much bigger than the Amazon rainforest-and its destruction has had devastating effects.
I just have to add–that extensive root system? It’s not just how the plant eats, and how it keeps itself from getting pulled out of the ground during storms, or dying when its aboveground portion is eaten… it’s how it talks to its friends and family, how it shares food with its friends and family, and more than likely, how it thinks.That’s a whole plant brain we’ve domesticated away, leaving a helpless organism that has trouble figuring out when it’s under attack by pests, what to do about it, has very little in the way of chemical defense so it can do something about it, and can’t even warn its neighbors. Even apart from the ecological concerns, what we’ve done is honestly pretty cruel.
Whether or not you think this should qualify as a form of “intelligence” as we know it (which in itself as a pretty nebulous and poorly defined thing), plants exhibit complicated interactive behaviors that help them grow and thrive, and the way we harvest a lot of them for our produce just doesn’t even give them a chance to reach their maturity and begin trading nutrients the way they’re supposed to.
ifesbob 