HEMP
We have the technologies. The list goes on and on and on. We just need to employ them instead of waiting further for magical fixes.
Posting and liking memes is great, but real change comes from actions. If you are as concerned as we are about climate change, please consider joining or supporting climate activists near you.
I mean, some breakthroughs with large battery tech would be nice to really take advantage of solar and wind.
We’re pretty much there on flow batteries and a few others. The nice thing about grid storage is that kwh per kg is far less important than it is for EVs. That opens up a ton of other options.
Pretty much just need mass production at this point.
Has someone already produced a large-scale long-duration flow battery, like something that can handle a moderate energy grid?
I haven’t been following the tech very closely.
We don’t need new technologies to overcome the issue of global warming itself; we need them to overcome the issue of human nature. People (in the population level sense, not individually) are not good at long term thinking. Solving global warming with current technologies will require a change in lifestyle from just about everyone. It’s the kind of change that will have no perceivable reward to most people. That’s why a lot of those solutions like biking, veganism, etc, will never catch on.
I am vegan btw but the amount of people who say apathetic shit like ‘one person can’t make a difference, it’s all the corporations fault, wah’ is honestly depressing. We get the society we ask for and until people start asking for something different nothing changes.
On the human level, people won’t as capitalism is so deeply ingrained in our culture, do you drive? Stop driving you can’t because you have work that’s in the next town over? Get a job that’s closer? Stop buying non seasonal goods from your local supermarket? Stop buying random shit with air miles on it.
We can all make these changes but people won’t because our monkey brains seek the fastest root to serotonin therefore government must harshly regulate at the corporate level. Build infrastructure at the civil level.
I agree, and I think you’re even perhaps being a bit harsh, people can do things, but a lot of the time it’s so impractical as to not be worth considering. In a car based society it can be almost impossible to forego a car. And I certainly don’t blame anyone for doing what they need to survive or even just live comfortably.
The only thing I have an issue with is people who otherwise could, choosing inaction because ‘corporations’. Corporations are almost 100% to blame, political parties being able to take bribes/donations is one of the biggest failings of modern society and has led to so much harm it’s almost unfathomable. But I still don’t accept that as an excuse to do nothing, corporations and politicians aren’t going to change otherwise.
A world where everyone does the best they can to avoid and/or fight against bad systems is absolutely the ONLY POSSIBLE WORLD where positive change can happen.
How else would the world change if not through individuals choosing to do the right thing? Are really expecting the same people that have fucked us(rich/politicians) to spontaneously develop a conscience and change the world out of the goodness of their hearts?
Before you bring up guillotines, those ALSO require individuals to make personal choices and changes and take risks.
They also only ever believe that when it’s about work THEY have to do. If it’s about other people, or it’s about things that directly affects them, the tune suddenly changes.
I can’t, as an individual, end rape culture. Is that therefore an excuse to keep making rape jokes, defending rapists etc.? Obviously not, but by the logic of “people against individual change” it’s entirely logically consistent. As long as I say “rape culture bad”, I can keep supporting it. I just have to wait for magical “systemic change without individual change” to rain down from heaven.
I have a super mixed reaction here. On one hand, it’s a good attitude as an individual to do what you can. OTOH, is it apathetic to realize that one billionaire’s private jet adds more pollution than a thousand vegans can offset by being parsimonious with their consumption?
To keep a livable Earth, we need high-level systemic change to move the needle on that dial, not just a few thousand people making extreme sacrifices (tradeoffs? I shouldn’t talk about being vegan as a sacrifice, lol) in lifestyle.
Edit: I’m thinking partly of celebrities booking commercial flights instead of flying private jets, but I’m also thinking about multinational corporations doing stupid things. CVS printing mile-long receipts, Amazon (or others) shipping tiny things in ginormous boxes, or hey, the expectation that every product on a retail shelf must be shrink-wrapped.
You have to think practically: When has systemic change ever happened without individuals choosing to make a change? Never!
It’s the same for voting, or boycotting or unionizing or even guillotining. The french kings head didn’t spontaneously fall off, it involved many individuals making a choice, risking their life and even dieing.
I think biking has a much higher chance; improved fitness and health, and improved mental health from increased activity and time outdoors are tangible benefits people would notice in a not too short amount of time.
We have seen, that people and societies are extremely adaptable to changes in lifestyle. The transformation of the Netherlands to a cycling -friendly country for example. Car free city centers. People were very opposed to them before. But once the changes were made, people were happy with them and adapted to the new options. There’s also negative examples where people adapted to new negative lifestyles such as car centric cities. Or smog, pollution, garbage landfills, or rivers that one is not allowed to swim in due to pollution. People are surprisingly adaptable to new conditions. We just have to do it.
Thanks!
Trains are based. Fright me car stans
Veganism is the true renewable resource.
Cannibalism also
What a fucked up thing to say
Soylent green made from suicide booths.
Oh its fucked, but increasingly plausible.
In what way would this (totally not what op said) thing seem plausible?
Why? We are animals. Using a fuck ton of fuel to cremate, or pump us full of nasty chemicals and throwing us in the ground is not environmentally friendly, nor does it make sense long term.
Turn them corpses into fertilizer to boost crop yields. You want a sustainable future? Time to walk the walk.
I hope you’re on a watch list after that
Personally I think “second hand” is the technology of the future.
“No not that! I want to do EXACTLY as I did before but YOU do something about it. Can’t you like build a technology to suck the CO2 out of the atmosphere or something?”
Can we trail like monkeys to pick up trash?
It’s more a problem of all the human people want to live good lives, look at how many threads on the front page are talking about cost of living crisis and etc as serious social problems which need to be fixed - there’s a thread where everyone says we should all be in walking distance to all key amenities, I bet they all think that the average persons wage should be able to afford to enjoy those things regularly too and have access to healthy fresh food, good clothes, etc etc
The world people want where everyone has access to a good life has never existed, even in America there is still generational and regional poverty but globally it’s much more intense - it would be very unfair to say ‘sorry we’re not going to try and continue progress so you can live the same life I do, we’re actually going back so you get less and work harder - it’s not because further progress is impossible or anything but I personally don’t really like new technology so, well, sucks to be you I guess.’
The technology which you’re talking about carbon capture is an incredibly good technology and just because you don’t understand it doesn’t mean it shouldn’t exist. It’s not a magic wand of course but no one said it is, the uses with SAF and bioavailable carbon for example open up a lot of possibilities not just in rich nations but actually more so in developing nations allowing growth without oil infrastructure.
The problem with carbon capture is it’s not pulling anywhere near the amount of carbon from the air as needed and it’s currently very expensive. And it’s an easy out for politicians. A lot of the plans seem to be “we’ll do the easy stuff to reduce CO2 emissions, so how much more is the net emissions come to? Ok then we will do that much carbon capture… someday… somehow…”
And a good amount of it is pumping CO2 into oil wells… to extract more oil.
We really don’t know how well carbon capture will work on the large scales needed to balance the books on the “easy mode” net zero policies. Given how expensive it is, is it the most economically viable solution?
Sure the cost may decrease… but by how much?
A lot of question marks with it in terms of economic viability.
I do think it’s needed but I’d prefer it being something that’s just used for fuel that’s extremely difficult to replace, like fuel for airplanes. It seems feasible to tack on a big enough carbon tax on jet fuel to cover the cost of the carbon capture of that fuel. Sure airline travel will get more expensive, but that should be fine. But the level of carbon tax needed to cover the costs for ground transport using fossil fuels seems like it would be prohibitive.
What is the point of what you wrote?
Also nuclear. Nuclear is the way of the future.
Clean Fukushima corium first.
Pretty telling that the main counterpoint is referencing the second biggest nuclear disaster in history that made a staggering zero deaths.
Evacuation did almost 2500 deaths.
Evacuation was due to unwarranted panic as clearly stated by the Japanese government itself and the UN. People with your same mentality and irrational fear caused those deaths.
Tepco didn’t told the true so even a model had failed. You cannot rewrite the story it is done. Check the recent studies and numbers about rising cancers.
Cite these studies. Spoiler: they do not exist.
Your statement about zero death was false. Even the last UNSEAR report is in total contradiction with that (248 occurrences with the word “cancer” in the last one). EU large scale studies about nuclear workers can be found here : https://www.bmj.com/content/382/bmj-2022-074520 I can also provide studies specifically for Fukushima concerning thyroides, lung cancer and diabetic links.
There was lemmy in the 60s? /s
But I do agree if we find some way to deal with the nuclear waste nuclear energy would be perfect. I’m really hopeful for fusion research lately.
Nuclear waste is a largely solved issue. The volume of very radioactive waste is quite small, and safely contained with a variety of solutions.
It’s solved if your government gets off its ass about it. Reprocessing waste for reactors is one of the few places where nuclear makes sense. Way better than burying it for thousands of years.
Otherwise, the economics have ran past it. We have solutions without it; we just need to scale the up. There are a few other niches, like cargo ships, where they make sense. For general power use, no.
The issue is not the volume it is the duration.
TBH, nuclear waste is a political problem, not an engineering one. Finns figured it out, no reason other countries couldn’t.
Fusion of course is better (though some small amount of radioactive waste will still be produced due to neutron activation of the materials used in the equipment), but it seems like it’s been 10 years away for the past 60 years. And we really shouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of good—we need to phase out fossil fuels yesterday and fission is good enough for answering the needs of the industry; solar and wind is good enough for distributed residential power and also a good choice for poorer countries who lack the knowhow or even stability for safe operation of nuclear.
fusion isn’t gonna happen, how did Finland ‘solve’ nuclear waste?
Fusion is all but guaranteed to work eventually. If a breakthrough was made today that makes it commercialy viable, it would be ten years before we see a reactor putting power on the grid.
It’s not something we want to hang our hopes on. ITER will probably work if nothing else gets there first, but we need to look at other things long before that comes online. There’s no reason to wait and every reason to go full speed on what we have.
Apparently ‘solved’ means ‘bury it in an underground vault’. Finland buries their nuclear waste. The U.S. had planned to do the same at Yucca Mountain, but political infighting canceled that plan, IIRC.
I don’t know what “second heat” is, but I want a hand pump…
It means buying used rather then buying new. Too much usable shit gets thrown out and nee shit gets made to replace it. That uses fossil fuels to do.
He was making a “Don’t dead open inside” bit where if you read the text wrong it says “second heat” and “hand pump” instead.
“Second heat” sounds like runner’s high for sex.
I was. Wasn’t funny, but I won’t let that stop me!
The only technology that should be on that list, since using it would enable all the others to thrive: UwU hungry guillotine
It hungers for the blood of the investors
This kind of comment always makes me a little anxious, lol. Technically, I’m one of the investors due to the stock shares in my 401k.
Everyone loves to rail against the billionaires, but in the event of a revolution, I’m afraid that I’d be up against the wall as a mere “thousandaire”.
The people who make those kinds of comments are the ones that weren’t paying attention in history class.
If you think your 401k makes you one of the investor being discussed, you are very confused. Your 0.000001% of total capital investment puts you very very far down the guillotine line.
Oh, I don’t think I’m being targeted by the rhetoric. What I do worry about is anger at the billionaires being redirected at “all rich people” where the bar for “rich” is merely “owns a house”. Angry mobs have a way of getting out of hand in spite of any logical arguments why you shouldn’t need to worry.
Is it the 401k or the home ownership? Shifting the goal posts is highly suspect that you are in the wrong side of this issue. Those siding with the rich are worthy of the angry mob’s wrath, in my opinion.
Accusing me of “shifting the goalposts” is really shitty. I’m not making some grand political argument here, lol, I’m just vaguely musing about my prospects if we have a “cultural revolution” style upheaval here.
Me, I’m just thinking about people whose fortune is able to change the world, like billionaires because you need a hundred millionares to do what one billionaire can do without effort
The math doesn’t check out.
I wasn’t talking about their capital in its entirety. For a billionaire, a hundred million is just 10% of their wealth whereas it would take a hundred millionaires to achieve that amount of money.
If you want more comparisons, I saw this page a while back: https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/
Im looking forward to the ant pizza from CyberPunk 2077.
No, seriously, I think it might actually taste good if you do it right.
What is that, a pizza for ants?!
🐜🇮🇹🍕🤌
To be fair, a lot of the new technologies people talk about regarding this are some of these things, but improved. For instance, better batteries or solar cells, recent improvement to which has already had a pretty notable impact (for instance, better solar panels making solar energy cheaper, which makes even entities concerned only with profit more likely to adopt it.)
Usually it’s just an excuse to do nothing, hoping for a magical technology that saves us from all our problems
Thorium reactors are the Hyperloop of energy generation!
“Veganism”
Let’s reign that in just a bit to Vegetarian for now. Incremental steps.
You can totally incrementally step towards veganism. That doesn’t mean that veganism isn’t the correct end goal.
I think Veganism is just silly though. To completely disregard animal husbandry, forgo chickens laying eggs, cows making milk, all the things animals produce just seems like purposefully hindering ourselves when we still haven’t figured out how to feed everyone.
Start by replacing meat so we don’t needlessly slaughter animals, sure, got me there, but I can’t understand veganism as a practical solution to anything. It’ll help climate change, sure, but it won’t significantly impact it enough to solve it and we have better alternatives to doing that.
Veganism can not only help with climate change, but also total land use, species extinction, deforestation, ocean eutrophication, antibiotic resistant bacteria, zoonotic diseases and soil erosion. Also, keep in mind that over 90% of worldwide livestock and 99% in the US are factory farmed. And we still needlessly slaughter egg-laying chickens and dairy cows once they’ve been overworked to the point of no longer being profitable enough to keep alive.
I get your perspective on it and if we had 1:1 alternatives for all these products like we’ve done with Beyond meat or Impossible burger I’d probably be more willing to consider Veganism, but I also think that chicken and cows who can no longer produce should be turned into food. I get that the idea of ending a life short isn’t morally appealing especially when I just pointed to plant based replacements but in the interest of cheaper and more available food I think it would be more harmful to us (in spite of the issues you listed) than it would be beneficial for the climate.
Veganism can work I just don’t think we have any of the development into replacements that we need to commit to that. Butter, yogurt, dairy as a whole is such a massive industry. Eggs for cakes, butter for baked goods, we’d need to replace all of it and figure out how to keep the things we’ve normalized without destabilizing it all.
Those alternatives exist already. Instead of eggs, you can bake with apple sauce, banana, chia, flax or non dairy yogurt and get great results. Oil and margarine serve great in place of butter. You can make cheese sauce from nuts/cashews and nutritional yeast. Also, depending on where you live, there’s a wealth of commercially produced dairy and egg alternatives.
Just this past week I made amazing blueberry lemon muffins with coconut yoghurt and lemon bars with corn starch in place of eggs.
In terms of price, vegan options can be substantially cheaper than animal products, and if we (in the US anyway) started subsiding vegetables instead of meat and dairy, they could be even cheaper.
I’m curious about your stance. You mentioned it’s needless to kill animals for meat, but you also think we should use animals for milk and eggs and then kill them after they’ve become too exhausted to keep producing?
The morality of raising animals to slaughter them in their prime for meat seems bankrupt at best and repugnant to me personally. An animal that has lived it’s life, produced products for us naturally, and has done so humanely I see no problems with whatsoever. If a bird wants to use the hair I cut off my head for their nest, I wouldn’t consider them morally wrong for using what I produce to benefit themselves.
Animals who get too old and are past their prime will stop producing and are near their natural death. They’ve lived their lives, hopefully in humane conditions, but are on the way out. Using them for meat at this point, to me, feels like giving them one final purpose rather than just allowing them to become fertilizer.
I get that doesn’t sound morally pure and it probably isn’t, but I would rather old animals be turned into food than allow humans to go hungry out of pretentious moral aspirations. If we can afford to be moral we should be but if we can’t, we can’t. I won’t lose sleep knowing a family gets to eat because we didn’t allow that animal to either away naturally.
As far as replacements go, that’s genuinely fantastic. I hope we scale that up and don’t let meat farmers lobby to destroy it. Like I said if we can replace products to the degree we don’t suffer by insisting on morality, we should. Full stop.
I think we have fundamentally different outlooks on animal agriculture. It seems like your position is based on the idea that animals used for milk and eggs are treated well, live long natural lives and are killed at the end of their lives when they would have died naturally.
An animal that has lived it’s life,
Animals used for milk and egg production live a small percentage of their potential lifespan. The effects on dairy cows of repeatedly being impregnated, giving birth, producing enormous quantities of milk, and going through the cycle again takes a harsh toll on their bodies. It’s normal for a dairy cow to only endure 4 or 5 cycles of this before they literally cannot physically continue, at which point they’re no longer profitable and are sold for slaughter. Similarly for egg-laying hens, the stress and mineral demand of ovulating multiple times a day means that they rarely live past two years. For the males of these breeds, it’s even worse. Male chickens of the egg-laying breeds are mostly useless to the industry, so they are killed immediately after hatching, usually by way of an industrial macerator or gas chamber. Male calves might live to 8 months to be slaughtered for veal, but if there’s no market for veal they are frequently killed immediately after birth.
produced products for us naturally
Modern egg laying chickens and dairy cows are man-made breeds far removed from their natural wild counterparts. Hens trace their lineage to red jungle fowls, who naturally ovulate at a similar rate to humans, about once a month. Selective breeding has increased this amount to once a day, sometimes even more. The extreme pressure on their reproductive system frequently causes health issues like egg yolk peritonitis, cloacal prolapse, and osteoporosis. Similarly with modern dairy cows, bovine mastitis, udder sores and infections are common due to our selective breeding to maximize milk yields. Even otherwise healthy animals face grueling lives because they’re part of a species that was engineered for one purpose: profit.
has done so humanely
Modern animal agriculture is overwhelmingly inhumane, which is why livestock animals are almost always excluded from animal abuse legislation. Ignoring the above points about how they’ve been selectively bred and are worked to exhaustion, investigations into egg and dairy farms have found absolutely shocking treatment. If you have the stomach for it, they’re worth watching to understand the scope of animal abuse that is commonplace in our society.
Plus, they forgot nuclear. Oh, and thoughts and prayers
The difference is nuclear is a good solution.
These are all good solutions, for very different problems, admittedly…
Haven’t met the guy that had his problems solved by thoughts and prayers but I guess it’s possible.
That’s where I was being sarcastic, silly.
Obviously nuclear is a good solution and t&p is meaningless
Oh good, sarcasm on the internet is about as easy to detect as carbon monoxide. I need a meter to send off alarms sometimes.
Heat pumps really shouldn’t be on this list. They’re no magic bullet for heating. They require electricity to run. As it gets colder outside the heat pump loses efficiency until you’re somewhere in the teens and you’d just be better off using straight electric heat strips in your air handler. Most electricity generation still creates carbon emissions. High efficiency gas furnaces create very low carbon emissions. I have an open-air natural gas fireplace insert that can run unvented (probably shouldn’t, but it can) do to how well it combusts it’s fuel leaving virtually no CO.
We seem to be having a lot of success with heat pumps here in Canada.
Yeah it’s not going to work on the coldest of days. Yes you need to have a secondary source of heat for those days. Yes it uses electricity.
But there many days that you need heating which aren’t the coldest of days. And a heat pump will save you lots of money on your heating bill. Electricity can be generated without fossil fuels. The percentage of electricity generated by fossil fuels is dropping.
Also geothermal heat pumps are a thing. They’re way more efficient than air source heat pumps on the most extreme days.
Degrow already!
Plant-based plastic replacements. Everyone fails to do a universal kind but plastic in your shopping bag is different from plastic in a PET bottle.
Yeah plastic is next to impossible to recycle because there after so many kinds. We need to fully remove this shit from ALL packaging. I want biodegradable packaging for literally everything, AND hemp based materials for industrial.
Yeah we already have the technology needed, we have to implement them.
And much of the tech is actually very old. Electric trains are like a century old. So for a lot of things, we have to re-implement technology we foolishly removed.
Oil was just a bad technology path. Gotta get back on the right path.
The technology path is fine, the adoption isn’t.
Path: plastics are miracle materials. Lots of great uses for it.
Adoption: mass producing single use throwaway shit everything.
Long term plastic aren’t as big of an issue as one time use plastics are. Wax paper and aluminum containers can both replace consumable bottles for instance.
Our battery tech is not up to par, and chances are, will never be. Need something in replacement. Nuclear, not the same, but good enough.
Nuclear trains and cargo ships might actually be necessary, even. In North America and over oceans, getting the vehicle weights, the weights of cargo and the distances between cities to work under any reasonable system means not just DC but even AC are insufficient in transmission range on land (and of course useless in the middle of an ocean), and companies like Amazon and AliExpress account for a lot of direct climate-disrupting emissions and a good chunk of the wealth letting assholes like Bezos live like kings at everyone else’s detriment.
While nuclear container ships would be very useful for reducing emissions I’m not sure I want to trust shipping companies with nuclear reactors given the track record of ship accidents and noncompliance with environmental regulations. Feels like they’d just dump the nuclear waste into the ocean.
Also piracy would suddenly become a much bigger issue.
Nuclear trains, WTF? There have been electric trains for over a century. In fact most Diesel trains actually have electric motors powering the wheels with a diesel generator powering the electric motors. Instead of having to think about repercussions of what happens when a nuclear powered train derails in a populated area, why not just run some overhead wires over the tracks like people have been doing for a century?
One of the problems with hydrogen is the lack of density means there’s a need for larger fuel tanks. This is less of a problem for cargo ships and trains than it is for most other vehicles. And again less worry of nuclear materials being hauled around population centers or in areas where there’s pirate activity.
Okay, to be fair, I was assuming the nuclear trains would be doing cross-country freight hauls and never for passenger service.
Upvoted for the hydrogen, you’re probably right about fuel cells being a better option.
The main problem with hydrogen is distribution. You’d have to build pipelines to a lot of train terminals to refuel the trains. So it seems to me running overhead wires for electric trains would be the better options for most cases. Yeah it’s a century old technology there’s nothing sexy about it, but since it’s old tech it’s well tested and will be reliable. The thing with technology is that you usually have to have a transitional phase that’s viable. Many “diesel” trains actually have electric motors that drive the wheels, they just haul around a diesel generator to power those electric motors. So you could use the overhead wires where available and run the diesel generators on parts of the track that don’t have that in place yet while transitioning. Then when there’s complete electric coverage, do away with the diesel generators entirely.
I think hydrogen for ships makes sense because a port could have a hydrogen terminal similar to present day LNG terminals. LNG is transported by ship so hydrogen could also be transported to the terminals similarly. Eventually hydrogen pipelines can be built from there, but pipelines take time to build.
The main problem with electric is also distribution. 95% of all North American heavy rail lines are unelectrified.
I can see taking a risk on hydrogen trains might not pan out, just saying electric is something that draws from the electrical grid (which is at capacity in the Pacific, Texan and Atlantic grids) and there’s no easy/single solution. If only for avoiding pirates by staying far from shore indefinitely, ships should at least have the option to be nuclear but require a US Navy-certified team at the port to inspect it and do needed maintenance/repairs before each time it sets sail.
As for nuclear trains, at the very least you have to admit that it’s not as simple as “just transmit power along the rail line from LA to NY”.
