I would be careful not to *exclude* the "the whole way of life on most of the planet would need to fundamentally change." part. Lying to people about what's ahead will cause massive blowback when people realize you were lying.
We are so fundamentally reliant on the fossil fuel subsidy for virtually every single thing in our lives, that most people's view of how to decarbonize is insanely incomplete.
We are facing the famous Carl Sagan line: "to make an apple pie from scratch first you must invent the universe". A lot of people think that they can just drop in one technology and it's going to fix any given thing, the problem is that in our highly industrialized civilization the feedstocks for any given technology rely on fossil fuels. People go "well here's a plant-based substitute" for one thing or another, and they don't realize that farming today requires lots of fossil fuel based chemical feedstocks such as ammonia, and is highly mechanized, which doesn't just require fossil fuels to operate but to manufacture, to refine the materials used in manufacture, to mine the minerals used in manufacture, to transport all the materials used in manufacture, and all of these apply to the machines used to manufacture as well, as well as the machines used to manufacture those machines.
I want to make something perfectly clear: almost none of the decarbonization that we see today is actually removing carbon. The West has simply made a deal with the devil and made Asia the painting of Dorian Gray.
The Asian continent, and particularly India and China, burn a vast majority of all coal burned on earth. What do they burn it doing? Making shit for westerners so our countries can pretend we are "net zero" carbon use.
People hold up the way solar panels are way cheaper than they were 20 years ago. Some of that is legitimate technological progress, but much of it is moving production from jurisdictions with labor and environmental regulations to jurisdictions that don't. It's no accident that the region that produces most of the world's polysilicon is produced in the region of China with the most coal and the most coal fired power plants.
I could go on forever, but the bottom line is that on a fundamental level, without the fossil fuel subsidy, we are past the carrying capacity of the planet in terms of humans. Even in the best view of things we can't feed this many people without that subsidy, and at the worst view of things, we definitely can't support the lifestyles we have today.
What we eat will change. What we wear will change. Where we live will change. What our homes look like will change. Our jobs will change, and they'll likely pay a lot less and require a lot more manual labor. And some of it might be for the better on an individual level, but for the most part lives will get much harder because you don't take away all the energy a civilization uses and make lives easier.
Premodern civilizations before the industrial revolution drove humans to use fossil fuels lived fundamentally differently than we do today. Today, most people live in cities. In the past, most people lived outside of the cities because while the per person resource is lower in the cities, those regions don't produce any primary feedstock and thus rely on rural farmland for renewable resources and rural mining for non-renewable resources such as metals(which can still be extracted without using carbon resources, at much higher cost).
Premodern civilizations also made use of technologies we consider reprehensible today. The Roman and Greek empires relied extensively on slavery. Premodern Europe ceased using slavery, but feudalism was another form of forced labor to make use of human horsepower to keep civilizations running used throughout Asia as well.
Another major problem with decarbonization is that not everyone is going to do it, and that could be a huge problem. If China and Russia keep burning fossil fuels and the rest of the world gives it up, what exactly would stop Russia's invasion in Ukraine if they can produce far more tanks and feed far more people? Disregarding even that, the only reason we have frictionless global trade today allowing for example people in Canada to eat fresh oranges in January is the huge US military keeping the seas relatively safe. Even if we could resolve the problem of how to fuel the huge ships that bring oranges to Canada, we wouldn't be able to resolve the problem of how to keep those treasure troves safe from pirates without an absurdly large navy policing the seas.
Most of the people who talk about decarbonization have never had anything to do with making things industrially, so the scale of lovely sounding sentences like "Just stop using oil" isn't apparent. That sort of disconnect from reality won't be possible without fossil fuels doing our manual labor for us. In Aristophanes play "The councilwomen", there's one powerfully satiricial moment where after laying out a utopia where nobody ever wants for anything, one of the councilwomen ask "But who will do the work?" to which another answered "The slaves". We live in a civilization with a similar issue, but instead of the slaves, it's fossil fuels doing all the work, and people have no idea how much work it's doing because the scale is so massive.
Do we have to move off of fossil fuels? Undoubtedly. No argument there. Even ignoring man-made climate change, the fact is that fossil fuels are limited, and we've already burned through billions of years worth of compressed biomass that in some cases would never return even if we left the earth alone. As well, climate change is going to change our lives, and so is the increasing difficulty of finding fossil fuels to burn. However, multiple things can be true at once, and it's true that staying on our current path is going to mean a big change eventually in terms of our lifestyle, but it's also true that changing the path is going to mean a big change in terms of our lifestyle. That's just cold, hard, reality.
The key here is to nail your feet to the ground and look at and talk about the reality of your options, rather than pretending if only our stupid leaders would listen to us then utopia is around the corner. The reality is that a lot of slow moving things are going to have to happen, and it's going to look different in the future than today. Transition too quickly, then the whole project will collapse and you don't get a choice in the end.
We are so fundamentally reliant on the fossil fuel subsidy for virtually every single thing in our lives, that most people's view of how to decarbonize is insanely incomplete.
We are facing the famous Carl Sagan line: "to make an apple pie from scratch first you must invent the universe". A lot of people think that they can just drop in one technology and it's going to fix any given thing, the problem is that in our highly industrialized civilization the feedstocks for any given technology rely on fossil fuels. People go "well here's a plant-based substitute" for one thing or another, and they don't realize that farming today requires lots of fossil fuel based chemical feedstocks such as ammonia, and is highly mechanized, which doesn't just require fossil fuels to operate but to manufacture, to refine the materials used in manufacture, to mine the minerals used in manufacture, to transport all the materials used in manufacture, and all of these apply to the machines used to manufacture as well, as well as the machines used to manufacture those machines.
I want to make something perfectly clear: almost none of the decarbonization that we see today is actually removing carbon. The West has simply made a deal with the devil and made Asia the painting of Dorian Gray.
The Asian continent, and particularly India and China, burn a vast majority of all coal burned on earth. What do they burn it doing? Making shit for westerners so our countries can pretend we are "net zero" carbon use.
People hold up the way solar panels are way cheaper than they were 20 years ago. Some of that is legitimate technological progress, but much of it is moving production from jurisdictions with labor and environmental regulations to jurisdictions that don't. It's no accident that the region that produces most of the world's polysilicon is produced in the region of China with the most coal and the most coal fired power plants.
I could go on forever, but the bottom line is that on a fundamental level, without the fossil fuel subsidy, we are past the carrying capacity of the planet in terms of humans. Even in the best view of things we can't feed this many people without that subsidy, and at the worst view of things, we definitely can't support the lifestyles we have today.
What we eat will change. What we wear will change. Where we live will change. What our homes look like will change. Our jobs will change, and they'll likely pay a lot less and require a lot more manual labor. And some of it might be for the better on an individual level, but for the most part lives will get much harder because you don't take away all the energy a civilization uses and make lives easier.
Premodern civilizations before the industrial revolution drove humans to use fossil fuels lived fundamentally differently than we do today. Today, most people live in cities. In the past, most people lived outside of the cities because while the per person resource is lower in the cities, those regions don't produce any primary feedstock and thus rely on rural farmland for renewable resources and rural mining for non-renewable resources such as metals(which can still be extracted without using carbon resources, at much higher cost).
Premodern civilizations also made use of technologies we consider reprehensible today. The Roman and Greek empires relied extensively on slavery. Premodern Europe ceased using slavery, but feudalism was another form of forced labor to make use of human horsepower to keep civilizations running used throughout Asia as well.
Another major problem with decarbonization is that not everyone is going to do it, and that could be a huge problem. If China and Russia keep burning fossil fuels and the rest of the world gives it up, what exactly would stop Russia's invasion in Ukraine if they can produce far more tanks and feed far more people? Disregarding even that, the only reason we have frictionless global trade today allowing for example people in Canada to eat fresh oranges in January is the huge US military keeping the seas relatively safe. Even if we could resolve the problem of how to fuel the huge ships that bring oranges to Canada, we wouldn't be able to resolve the problem of how to keep those treasure troves safe from pirates without an absurdly large navy policing the seas.
Most of the people who talk about decarbonization have never had anything to do with making things industrially, so the scale of lovely sounding sentences like "Just stop using oil" isn't apparent. That sort of disconnect from reality won't be possible without fossil fuels doing our manual labor for us. In Aristophanes play "The councilwomen", there's one powerfully satiricial moment where after laying out a utopia where nobody ever wants for anything, one of the councilwomen ask "But who will do the work?" to which another answered "The slaves". We live in a civilization with a similar issue, but instead of the slaves, it's fossil fuels doing all the work, and people have no idea how much work it's doing because the scale is so massive.
Do we have to move off of fossil fuels? Undoubtedly. No argument there. Even ignoring man-made climate change, the fact is that fossil fuels are limited, and we've already burned through billions of years worth of compressed biomass that in some cases would never return even if we left the earth alone. As well, climate change is going to change our lives, and so is the increasing difficulty of finding fossil fuels to burn. However, multiple things can be true at once, and it's true that staying on our current path is going to mean a big change eventually in terms of our lifestyle, but it's also true that changing the path is going to mean a big change in terms of our lifestyle. That's just cold, hard, reality.
The key here is to nail your feet to the ground and look at and talk about the reality of your options, rather than pretending if only our stupid leaders would listen to us then utopia is around the corner. The reality is that a lot of slow moving things are going to have to happen, and it's going to look different in the future than today. Transition too quickly, then the whole project will collapse and you don't get a choice in the end.
2% of natural gas is used to produce ammonia which is used for various critical industrial purposes.
To replace that with electricity, I estimated it would take 30% of all carbon free power sources on earth in 2009 (when I looked into it)
The power required to actually electrify industries is massive, and without the fossil fuels subsidy the whole way of life on most of the planet would need to fundamentally change.
To replace that with electricity, I estimated it would take 30% of all carbon free power sources on earth in 2009 (when I looked into it)
The power required to actually electrify industries is massive, and without the fossil fuels subsidy the whole way of life on most of the planet would need to fundamentally change.
Pretty sure I owned one of those, and it was mostly air. You could lift it with a couple fingers.
Most important thing about the left: They don't believe a goddamned thing.
The Liberal party of Canada elected a hedge fund manager to be their prime minister, then Canada elected the Liberal Party of Canada, headed by a hedge fund manager, to be prime minister.
It doesn't make any sense at this point to keep bothering to point out hypocrisy, because their moral framework doesn't actually hold hypocrisy as wrong because truth doesn't exist except as a path to power and an expression of power.
The Liberal party of Canada elected a hedge fund manager to be their prime minister, then Canada elected the Liberal Party of Canada, headed by a hedge fund manager, to be prime minister.
It doesn't make any sense at this point to keep bothering to point out hypocrisy, because their moral framework doesn't actually hold hypocrisy as wrong because truth doesn't exist except as a path to power and an expression of power.
"Expecting me not to give my kid drugs and strangle them to death is white supremacy"
ok.
ok.
Two geese.
One digs in the dirt all day to get worms for hatchlings.
One plays quack all day. Not because it can't, but because digging is for the birds.
"Equity" says it's unfair the dirt digging goose has so many worms and the quack goose has none, take from dirt digging goose and give to quack goose.
Equitable, but not fair.
But third goose was born without wings, can't fly, struggles to get to dirt to find worms. Works harder than digging goose, but can't get enough worms to survive.
Wingless goose didn't ask to be born without wings.
Not equitable, but also not fair.
The world is complicated. Quack tournament goose exists, so does wingless goose.
Worse, if you try to limit help to wingless goose, some Quack tournament gooses might claim they lost a feather.
And if we help wingless goose, should they have to keep working as hard as digging goose to deserve help? Is that fair? Maybe, but isn't being a wingless goose already really hard?
Anyone who says it's an easy problem to answer is being a silly goose.
One digs in the dirt all day to get worms for hatchlings.
One plays quack all day. Not because it can't, but because digging is for the birds.
"Equity" says it's unfair the dirt digging goose has so many worms and the quack goose has none, take from dirt digging goose and give to quack goose.
Equitable, but not fair.
But third goose was born without wings, can't fly, struggles to get to dirt to find worms. Works harder than digging goose, but can't get enough worms to survive.
Wingless goose didn't ask to be born without wings.
Not equitable, but also not fair.
The world is complicated. Quack tournament goose exists, so does wingless goose.
Worse, if you try to limit help to wingless goose, some Quack tournament gooses might claim they lost a feather.
And if we help wingless goose, should they have to keep working as hard as digging goose to deserve help? Is that fair? Maybe, but isn't being a wingless goose already really hard?
Anyone who says it's an easy problem to answer is being a silly goose.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tO1L3SKhfU
It's important for everyone to remember it doesn't just happen elsewhere, it happens in first world nations, it happens in places that sniff their farts about how wonderful and advanced they are, I guarantee it happens in America too.
The laws of physics really don't care where you live if you try to violate them. :(
It's important for everyone to remember it doesn't just happen elsewhere, it happens in first world nations, it happens in places that sniff their farts about how wonderful and advanced they are, I guarantee it happens in America too.
The laws of physics really don't care where you live if you try to violate them. :(
The laws of physics supercede the laws of man. You are not the fictional person on TV. If you go up against a car, every single car on the market today will win.
Russia and China are both not looking so good right now. I wonder if both regions enter a warring States period if the governments collapse in the next 20 years?
You forget to lock down your YouTube creator page and your Twitter during ONE (1) Christmas day ayuaska trip, the world loses their goddamn minds!
Odin frowns on our broken world!
Odin frowns on our broken world!
I thought it was funny that the same day he implemented that, he and Musk started shaking a hankerchief around over on X and TS to distract from it.
I failed my drug test -- I couldn't figure out what half the drugs they gave me were! I should have studied harder and taken more drugs beforehand, but I didn't want it to come to work high.
I got mixed signals on this one.
(I think it's a different guy than you're talking about)
(I think it's a different guy than you're talking about)
Meanwhile the swatzika enjoyers all like "no, that pussy isn't with us", and the Israel lobby all like "no, that gigachad isn't with them"
One thing that's kind of humorous is a lot of Americans are going "I don't know why you'd want to leave Mexico anyway, low prices on groceries, you can hire people and relatively low cost, wait for your regulations... In fact you know what I'm moving to Mexico!" And then they moved to Mexico.
If I were going to move to the US, my guiding light would be "obey the law". That way I wouldn't get deported for disobeying the law.
Doesn't actually seem like a big ask.
Doesn't actually seem like a big ask.
ngl, people who hold up Athenian democracy as anything but a good example of the dangers of democracy don't know enough about Athenian democracy. There's a reason why Plato and Aristotle both wrote that it's shite. Not to mention their teacher was sentenced to death by that same democracy for the crime of being kind of annoying.
Plato did see the fall of Athenian democracy, though temporarily, within his lifetime, and by the end of his student Aristotle's lifetime, it was basically dead. Aristotle's student Alexander would become the king of the Macedonian Empire and the democracy in Athens would be replaced with an oligarchy.
Plato did see the fall of Athenian democracy, though temporarily, within his lifetime, and by the end of his student Aristotle's lifetime, it was basically dead. Aristotle's student Alexander would become the king of the Macedonian Empire and the democracy in Athens would be replaced with an oligarchy.