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Collapse: The Climate Change Thread

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by downndirty, Sep 9, 2021.

  1. Aetius

    Aetius
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    I'm not one to say that individual choice is going to make a dent in this thing. It has to be done at a state, national, and international level. Huge shifts in financial incentives and actually forcing polluters to cover the cost of their pollution.
     
  2. downndirty

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    For many of the drivers, the individual choice is a false one. Did any of y'all choose to get clean energy delivered to your home? To do so would require a ton of work on your part in most places, if it's even allowed.

    I don't think making individuals guilty for living their lives is helpful. We've known for many years sustainability has a huge image problem: conservation is expensive, shitty, un-sexy and annoying. We like our guilt-free consumption. Even when sustainability is a selling point, there's a tremendous amount of greenwashing that goes on. No one researches how their Nikes get made,and even if they did, they are easily decieved. So, it's easy to think the individual choice doesn't matter, because it can get overwhelming. Is a Tesla better for the environment than a Corolla? Logically yes, but but but the carbon spent extracting the minerals! It's myriad, and some of that is intentional obfuscation.

    Dunno how climate change and guns are related, Dixie, but....I guess keep shooting til something happens. That's the kind of Texas response I would hope for: "Damn you, climate change!" *Gunfire*.

    Also, reacting to this issue is extremely privileged. If you can afford solar panels, a well, your own water purification and collection system, and have enough resources to live off of it....you overwhelmingly do not, by choice, but you're also better off than 99.97% of the planet. There's a reason living off the grid is the subject of reality tv shows and online mockery: it's a lot of work, for no discernible reward.
     
  3. dixiebandit69

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    Jesus Christ, I knew someone was going to bitch about that analogy, but I didn't think it was going to be you.

    The point I was trying to make was one that Walt brought up: Even if we (in the US/ Canada) bend over backwards to reduce our carbon footprint, is China? Or India? Or Russia?
    We should absolutely be expanding into cleaner sources of energy, but I don't think we should do so while bankrupting lower/ middle class people with higher energy bills and taxes.

    This is another reason why I'm not panicking about climate change. No one over here is going to do anything meaningful about it, anyway. Not while the corporate bribes keep rolling in.

    How are you going to change the weather (on a short notice)? You can't. All you can do is prepare for it.

    Texas is the number one producer of wind energy in the US by a huge margin, smartass.
     
  4. Revengeofthenerds

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    this is basically how I feel, with the exception that I do what I can for myself within financial reason just because I both have the ability, and I feel that it's the right thing to do for me and mine. I know it's not gonna make a dent in the grand scheme, but things like blackout curtains or wood blinds for the windows to use less electricity to keep the house the same temp (between 68-75). We don't recycle because there isn't a recycling program out here in the sticks and it's prohibitively annoying to take it somewhere ourselves, but any food scraps and leftovers food that went bad we always feed to the local wildlife.

    But I largely agree that nothing will be done that moves the needle until countries like China, Russia, especially India as you mentioned, get on board too. That should not preclude us from doing what they can as well, but it's kinda like NATO -- y'all gotta foot your end of the bill too. We're not the bank for everyone.
     
  5. Aetius

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    We also know that what's best (collectively) is the opposite of living off the grid. Urban living, with all its economies of scale and shared resources, is much more efficient than living in the exurbs or beyond. For any given society of semi-homogenous standard of living, the city dwellers have a much lower carbon footprint than the rural folk.

    As you said, conservation isn't sexy. Rooftop solar panels are sexy and flashy, but those same panels all in a giant array being managed by a boring-ass utility company is a better investment in terms of pollution-reduction/dollar. I don't want to knock people buying solar panels, because individuals spending (a little extra) to own solar panels instead of buying from a fossil-fuel-burning utility is a win, but when it comes to things like government incentives... just build the boring utility-scale plants instead of trying to realize the decentralized utopia through legislation.
     
  6. Fiveslide

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    That doesn't make any sense. The only way cities survive is the resources sucked from the rural areas and those workers. Where is your food going to come from? The materials build to ever sprawling housing for y'all to live in? If we all said it burns too much fossil fuel to feed LA or NYC, or any densely populated area, what would happen?
     
  7. Aetius

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    Everything is closer together in cities, so people travel shorter distances. Mass transit, cycling, and walking are also used more (although certainly not enough) which is more efficient than driving cars. Land is more expensive, so housing is smaller, and uses less materials and energy. Similar to the driving of residents, the movements of goods and services travels less distance, and in a more efficient manner. Less piping, wiring, and roads are required per citizen. Most services have a higher utilization rate, thus spreading their fixed costs (including carbon costs) over a larger number of people. Everyone is grid-connected in a city, so no one runs an inefficient local generator.

    Keep in mind that 99% of the goods used by a given rural area didn't come from that rural area. They were produced elsewhere, and shipped in, just like they were for cities. In fact most of them were probably produced in, or passed through, a city to get there. Shipping two ways to a city is more expensive than shipping one way to a city, and the further out from a city you go the less efficient those shipping methods get.

    This is more true of suburbs and exurbs than true rural areas, but a lot of workers outside the city actually do all of their productive work in the city, they just commute longer distances to do it.

    I'm not saying we can all live in cities and eliminate rural living completely, just pointing out that rural living has huge inefficiencies that are only justified by the necessity of rural work (to farm, and log, and mine, as you mentioned). Someone who isn't involved in that work going "off-grid" increases the environmental burden on the planet.
     
  8. Fiveslide

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    Ok, I get your point a little better. I still do not think that further consolidating population into cities is the answer, less people is the answer.


    I'm well aware of this, I can get higher quality, fresher produce in the city because of it. Meats with an extra few days until expiration. Empty shelves because the more profitable stores got their entire order. Went months without our favorite canned peas because they never got shipped to our grocery store. And I'm not talking about a little mom and pop store. One of the biggest grocery chains in the southeast.



    Maybe part of the answer is to stop shipping food. If you live in an area or climate that can only grow potatoes and raise beef cattle, then you eat meat and potatoes, not pineapple and prawns. Like the old days. The cities would be screwed then, also.

    I'm not sure what Texans would eat, mesquite trees and varmints, probably.
     
  9. Aetius

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    Going with the theme of "not sexy" I've long considered one of the most straightforward available wins to be electrifying our rail system. Electric locomotives are cheaper, easier to maintain, and have a better power-to-weight ratio than diesel locomotives, and because trains run on fixed tracks you don't have the battery problem you have with electric cars or ships; you can just run wire along the path of the track. We don't make the shift because it's a chicken-and-egg problem: no one wants to invest in electrifying track when most locomotives are diesel, and no one wants to buy electric locomotives when most of the track is unelectrified.
     
  10. Fiveslide

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    Screenshot_20210911-104620-806.png

    Trains are already very efficient. Moving one ton of product 492 miles on a gallon of fuel isn't bad. I don't know how long it would take to get to a break-even point if you used the resources to electrify and maintain the track, convert to all electric locomotives. I think it would take much longer than you might think. I think slowly replacing the last mile transporters with electric might be more economical and make a larger dent in carbon production. An electric train grid would be great, eventually, I believe we can make bigger differences elsewhere.

    I'd have to break out my engineering text book, but you could calculate how much electricity it takes to move that much weight 492 miles. I haven't had to do that kind of conversion in a long time. Maybe Rush remembers the math better.
     
  11. Aetius

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    Trains are efficient mostly because trains are efficient. A steel wheel on a steel track is just primo low-friction, low-heat-loss shit. Gets my dick hard (but then fails to get me off due to lack of friction and heat). Electric trains are just as efficient from an energy usage perspective, but they would be able to get that energy from zero-emitting sources instead of fossil fuels. It would eliminate ~1% of all US emissions, which isn't a huge amount, but it's something we have the tech for already. Passenger cars and freight trucks are the big enemies in the transportation sector, but electrifying them is a much bigger engineering challenge.
     
  12. Rush-O-Matic

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    I try to avoid math. But, aren't locomotives already electric? I mean, they're diesel electric, the original hybrids, right? I think electric motors are how they move, and the diesel is mostly needed to start. That's why they're so efficient.
     
  13. Binary

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    I think there's a middle ground between, "you can't have anything that wasn't grown within 50 miles" and "you can get a fresh mango within a 10 mile radius any week of the year."

    The shipping industry (and international labor) is insanely cheap. I've worked for/with a few places that have done major manufacturing or raw material extraction in the US, only to ship containers full of these partially-assemblies or materials to China for <insert task> because it's cheaper to literally ship these materials to the other side of the Earth than it is to simply finish them here. This is not much different than the food problem; the labor of picking fresh fruit in Chile or wherever, plus shipping costs, is still cheap enough that it's profitable.

    You don't necessarily have to eat 100% local, but maybe we don't have to prioritize the availability of passion fruit in Massachusetts in December.

    Focus: I'm somewhere in the middle on this. On one hand, I am very environmentally conscious. I spend a lot of my time hiking/outdoors, and a good environmental agenda is a top issue when voting. I think climate change and protection of natural resources are worth so much more money than we choose to invest in them.

    On the other hand, my individual ability to affect this is so low that it's hard for me to stay up thinking about it. I make lots of individual decisions around reducing plastics, reducing my energy consumption, buying sustainable products or from companies that do good things. My car gets 30+ MPG despite the fact that I'd rather be driving a 4Runner. My diet is majority-vegetarian which is both healthy and reduces environmental impact. But it does feel like so much pissing in the wind, and I try to not let it overtake my life. I vote with my wallet and encourage others to do so, and vote in the polls when the opportunity presents itself.

    Otherwise... eh. This isn't why I'm not having kids. I'm not poor, so I have the ability to somewhat insulate myself from the worst effects of climate change. So I try to do my (small, maybe useless) part and otherwise keep moving forward.
     
  14. Nettdata

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    If I remember right, the electric part is in the transmission. There are mechanical transmissions, electric transmissions, and hydraulic transmissions. I have no clue how popular each type is, but I think most went to the electric because there was no mechanical linkage to break, they were able to withstand higher loads without blowing up, and they had an electronic circuit breaker that didn't require mechanical repairs when they did blow up.

    We used to make them (diesel electric, and some hydraulic) here in London at the GM Diesel plant... until eventually it was owned and shut down by Cat around 2012.

    It was a really cool school trip to go and see them being made though.


    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_Diesel
     
  15. wexton

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    Diesel generator, at least all of the CN ones that i know of are. I sign the fuel slips for our place.
     
  16. downndirty

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    Not to repeat, but this is patently untrue. The economies of scale mean that living in cities is much more efficient...why else would cities exist? Think about it this way: your home is an island. Everything you have there gets transported in by boat, nothing is grown there. Would you rather have hundreds of people living on the island, so one boat load of stuff reaches everyone, or hundreds of islands with one person each?

    Agriculture and food processing can be done in cities, most of our food trends and food processing start there. Parts of Europe, Japan and Korea have massive greenhouse operations to feed their cities, they don't rely on the same farming techniques that the US does. Our "sprawl" is driven by a lot of factors, resource surplus being one of them. The "citiies suck resources away from the country" is a myth aligned with "cities are evil, rural living is good". The rural areas supply the citiy because it makes sense, economically for them to do so, and we have a LOT of subsidies allowing them to make a surplus. Rural areas produce things that a city requires only because it's cheaper to do so than in the city. NYC can produce all the food, power and water it needs, it would just make the price of those things go up.

    As a general rule, the cities create value and export it. Rural areas, on the whole, receive more of that value than they create. The cities benefit from economies of scale, so a lot of the resource consumption is driven by lowest cost. It's not like if Vermont didn't export wood to NYC, NYC wouldn't exist...NYC'd choose a different resource, and move on. If NYC didn't buy Vermont wood, Vermont couldn't switch millions of acres of forest to producing concrete. Similarly, NYC can buy wood from anyone: it's big enough to sustain a market and ride out price fluctuations. Vermont might not be able to sell wood to Atlanta or Chicago, and losing NYC woud be devastating. See: steel mills in Ohio, PA, and MI since the 1970's.

    Another fun concept is the paradox of efficiency in sustainability. First, we've never used less energy. There's no reason to expect we, as a group, will ever do so. There's a large connection between our economic growth and energy consupmtion, so as long as growth is the target, we will use more energy. How and what that energy does will change, for example, refrigeration can get much more efficient, but offsetting that will be more freezers, or another kitchen gadget or three. Second, as energy gets diverse, it gets cheaper (generally). So, instead of burning coal, we get solar, wind, etc. and that means the price falls due to basic competition. It's vastly more complicated, and the rate-payer might never see a difference, but that's at least the goal. Third, and most importantly, cheaper means we use more of it.

    The most poignant analogy is I go from an F-150 to a Prius. With the F-150, I skip some trips, or take the train/bus because to drive there at 15mpg is expensive. To go from DC to my parent's house is 500 miles, and costs me around $120 in fuel alone. At that price, I might as well fly. The Prius, at 40mpg it only costs me $40. So, not only do I do it more often, but I forego flights, buses and trains, because $40 is cheap as fuck. As efficiency improves, I use more, not less.

    So the argument isn't necessarily for conservation or efficiency, but "virtuous cycles" where more consumption is a net positive. Ie, vehicles that produce water vapor as exhaust, where the more mileage driven, there's a benefit. It's one of the arguments for electric cars: we can generate electricity several ways. This gives us an opportunity to find "virtuous" ways of doing it.
     
  17. Crown Royal

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    Very cool plant, we took a trip there too. They also used to make the Titan at that factory, the largest truck in the world.

    0AB21CDF-F8E5-4DB0-8B4B-A4A471D3DC27.jpeg
     
  18. Fiveslide

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    https://interestingengineering.com/china-to-test-thorium-fueled-nuclear-reactor

    "An experimental nuclear reactor in China is making waves.

    Fuelled with thorium, the China-based nuclear reactor is about to start tests. While this radioactive element has seen reactor trials before, many scientists and industry experts agree that this could make China the first country to come within leaping distance of developing the technology to a commercial scale, according to a report from the journal Nature.

    If it works, this could serve as a major milestone in the global community toward creating safer, more efficient alternatives to conventional forms of nuclear power."
     
  19. GcDiaz

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    And if it doesn't work, will they own up to their mistakes and the resulting environmental catastrophe?
     
  20. Juice

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    They took full responsibility for causing a global pandemic, I see no reason why they wouldn’t take responsibility if they destroy a chunk of the planet with an un-tested and and extremely radioactive type of fuel like thorium.