gotta get this off my chest...

[Writers Bloque]

Do not go on tv and demand that I have to help save the planet, if your group:

Greenpeace - thousands of gallons of diesel used to blockade fishing ships and whaling ships. If you cared so much about the ocean, then use wind power, and store your wastes instead of dumping your shit and piss in the ocean.

Anti coal / gas: Stop flying private jets to attend summits on global warming. Hypocrites. Also do not tell me to buy an EV when you damned well know the production of EV's are more toxic and environmentally dangerous. Where are you getting the precious metals, rare earth metals and plastics to make those cars? Out of your ass? No, supporting EV would be cool, if you made them out of things that did not require all the things being done to get them that you are actively protesting.

Windpower: Find a fucking way to make the turbine blades reusable, then I might give a fuck, but when you have to buy up acres of land to store the broken blades, because they cannot be recycled, then fuck you.

Solar Power: See wind power and Anti coal and gas. Panels are made of toxic materials. fuck you too.

I am not an environmental activist, but I also do not want to see the planet die to pollution either, I just want people involved to stop being hypocritical. Nuclear is a safer option, with only 3  major accidents in its entire history.

Coal mines collapse, workers die, and there is an entire town ghosted because of a decades long and still active coal fire under it. Centralia, look it up and tell me I am lying. They based Silent Hill on it.

Oil drilling/ natural gas drilling. You mean to tell me you cannot think of a better way to extract it than being a total ass to the planet, or hiring drunk captains and ignoring safety concerns on your platforms? seriously?

Geothermal, go fuck yourself. you know damned well your energy production is severely limited and the range is short.

Hydroelectric? Maybe if you did not fuck the area around the plant, altering the land just to divert a river to still turn a turbine.

Sorry about my rant. Everyone at work is hassling me about this shit, and I have to keep my mouth shut or face the HR demons.

[Hilda]

Yesterday, for no particular reason, I went back and watched an old documentary about Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber.

I remember downloading and reading a copy of his Industrial Society and Its Future manifesto.

He deserves his life sentence for killing and maiming innocent people, but I also empathize (I'm trying to avoid the word sympathize)  with his impotent frustration at what man is doing to his environment. When I'm feeling particularly depressed, I have an awful feeling that we've already gone too far, and mankind will only sink deeper and deeper into a hell-hole of his own making.

[Vela Nanashi]

Earth and nature can recover even if we intentionally nuke the whole world as best we can, it will just take a long time (from human perspective), but new beautiful things will evolve again, it has happened many times in the past.

I think we humans have the potential to take life from the earth to the stars, and thus save life from the extinction that is guaranteed to happen more permanently when the sun burns earth to a cinder.

As for the fear of CO2 the solution is not the path of death that environmentalists are currently on (reduce human population, kill the farting cows, etc), but rather the path of life, where we burn all the fossil fuels, but also make sure the released CO2 gets converted into living things, biomass, plants, animals and humans, more life, I think at least, is better than less life, also we should use that energy of the fossil fuel to make better energy production mechanisms, and convert our infrastructure to produce more with less, and reduce fragility of our life supporting systems, and repair nature too.

Also if we humans don't use those fossil fuels eventually nature will burn them, when the crust is fed back into the mantle and heated to above the temperature of fire, and then later it will fart/burp that CO2 via volcanos and those underwater black smokers into the atmosphere anyway. To no use to humans, though plants will like the extra CO2 no matter if we humans burn it or nature does.

We should also try to capture garbage and algae blooms, burn/cook those without oxygen into nutrient and mineral rich ash that can be put on fields to replace missing nutrients plants need.

Also we could build multi level, efficient, fields and grasslands, that allow cattle to graze and food to be produced, and any methane produced can be captured by the enclosed nature of those fields to be burnt for energy too. We can be more efficient with the use of energy to only use the frequencies of light that plants need, and use, yes toxic, solar cells, to convert all the other frequencies of light to energy for the led lights with the proper frequencies for plants.

Also nuclear is a good idea, we are just speeding up what nature is doing in the ground, all that fuel will eventually fission away on its own. We could even put the spent fuel back in the mines it came from if we want. Though with molten salt reactors it sounds like we could consume 'spent' fuel too, until very little remains of it.

To me the future is bright, if humans decide to make it so, we already have the technology and knowledge to achieve a huge improvement to our own lives, and the lives of nature too, and if we focus even a fraction of the resources we use to kill each other on improving our lives and nature we could do so very easily.

Anyway sorry about the rant, I hope I did not offend any of you.

[Hilda]

Earth and nature can recover even if we intentionally nuke the whole world as best we can, it will just take a long time (from human perspective), but new beautiful things will evolve again, it has happened many times in the past.

I was hoping someone else would jump in with a response to your thoughtful post.

You make excellent points about the recuperative and adaptive powers of nature, and the hidden costs of many of the green solutions to CO₂ emissions.

I'm pessimistic about the future because I see the fossil-fuel lobby and other interests steamrolling, or perhaps de-railing, all attempts to tackle the problem. And the ignorance of the "Problem? What problem?" public is heart-breaking.

Anyway sorry about the rant, I hope I did not offend any of you.

Definitely not a rant, and I'm sure you haven't offended anyone. 

[Vela Nanashi]

I am not worried about the fossil fuel lobby since, that is the wrong end to solve the problem at, we need the oil and other fossil fuels to make food and other resources that people need, so what we do need to do, I think, is to use some of that energy to bind the released carbon into life, like some of that coal once was, and from what I hear that is what most oil/coal etc people want to do to solve climate issues. So maybe you can see me as a lobbyist too, but I am actually not, I just think using technology to bind the released carbon in life is the solution Thus the optimism I have, as that is something we can pull off.

The really scary shit is the people who think it is a good idea to use sulfur dioxide to dull the light of the sun, as that will reduce the ability to bind carbon in plants/life, and then when that eventually falls down it becomes acid rain that, you guess it, kills plants, that is an exceptionally bad idea to do, in my opinion, since I like eating plants and I like eating creatures that eat plants, so killing plants or preventing them from growing is in my opinion a very bad idea

[Hilda]

I am not worried about the fossil fuel lobby since, that is the wrong end to solve the problem at, we need the oil and other fossil fuels to make food and other resources that people need, so what we do need to do, I think, is to use some of that energy to bind the released carbon into life, like some of that coal once was, and from what I hear that is what most oil/coal etc people want to do to solve climate issues. So maybe you can see me as a lobbyist too, but I am actually not, I just think using technology to bind the released carbon in life is the solution

I don't see you as a lobbyist, Vela, but I am having difficulty with the concept of utilizing fossil fuel to bind fossil fuel emissions. What does the energy input/output equation look like? And would reverting to the use of coal add to this equation in a positive way?

I see climate change as a race against time that we're losing. People are slashing and burning tropical forests to raise farting cows destined for hamburger steaks.I don't see the cleared forests recovering any time soon, even if people stopped eating cheap beef, the cows went home, and the land was abandoned.

The really scary shit is the people who think it is a good idea to use sulfur dioxide to dull the light of the sun, as that will reduce the ability to bind carbon in plants/life.

I hadn't heard of the plan to use sulfur dioxide to dull the light of the sun. I'd have to look it up before I attempted to comment.

Perhaps I'm looking at the environmental problem in the wrong time frame. I'm wondering what I can do to reduce electricity and water use, or use of plastic bags at supermarkets, but maybe I should be looking past the current crisis, and assuming that future generations will be living in an environmental dystopia, until science or nature restores the balance.

[Vela Nanashi]

This is a long post, the goal of it is to clarify what I mean, and why I think we should have hope for the future, not fear it, I hope I don't come off too annoying in this.

I am not suggesting that we use the energy itself of fossil fuels to bind carbon, I am not that silly What I am suggesting is we use fossil fuels to manufacture things that aid plants in growing, such as plastics and refined metals and glass for solar panels, fertilizer for plants, concrete, steel, glass for green houses and hydroponics, to grow food, and glass, concrete, steel, to build multi level farmland that is encapsulated and efficient in land area use, where we can grow crops in just the nutrients and light it need, and recycle water and its nutrients so those do not run off into the rivers and oceans to cause algae blooms. Also indoor grassland for cows to graze, and methane catching air processing.

As for faring cows, grass that dies, and it does that without the cows too, releases just as much methane as the cow would, or actually a bit more, since the cow uses some of what would have become methane to make milk and meat.

I do not like that we are clear cutting forests though, that is why I want to make enhanced land of multiple levels where we can efficiently make heaps more food than we can on a flat single level ground thing.

So the idea is basically use fossil fuels to make more efficient structures to maintain human life, and to produce energy, bind carbon into life via solar energy (plants+water+CO2 = bound carbon/food, plants+animals= meat/bound carbon, meat+humans = more humans/bound carbon).

We should recycle water better than we do, but water never vanishes while on earth, it remains on earth, just not always where we want it or in usable form, we can use power/electricity to desalinate water and make salt too, that salt can be piled up somewhere or used, water can be used, power can come from solar panels that we make with help of fossil fuels to process raw materials into said solar panels. Solar energy can also be used to grow certain algae in vats to make a oil/gasoline/diesel substitute if needed to run old machines until we can replace them with new machines that use electricity, and also to get the oil for other chemicals we need.

We should also get solar satellites up into space so we can beam energy to the ground and also to harvest and refine materials in space, asteroid mining and such. Solar panels in space should be more efficient than on the ground since there is no atmosphere to deflect sunlight from them.

Also yes I am a bit radical in that I want to release all dead carbon from the earth and make it into life, it will take some engineering to do that, when it is all bound in life it is not going to be a problem anymore.

Also cows/cattle + humans moving them around + desert = grassland I should find the video about that for this post

of course I do not agree with him about everything, but it really helps give hope, so watch the whole video:)

As for our own impact on the environment with water and energy consumption, most of us are not even a fraction of the problem, compared to much worse things going on in the world, sure we can lessen our impact some, get a heat pump that can act as AC in summer and heater in winter, rather than use other forms of heating, also insulate your home to improve the performance of that heat pump, it is much more efficient use of power to move heat from one place to another and recycle heat from all our other machines too, get more efficient freezer and refrigerator, modern ones draw a lot less power than old versions did. Make sure you have the old replaced units disposed of in a responsible way though. As for water, that is harder for us to individually fix, however it is better for the environment to get filters/reverse osmosis maybe, for tap water, than buy bottled water, as bottled water in plastic or glass bottles consume a lot of energy to make and ship, while tap water and the filters cost less, also there could be ways to upgrade homes so that water that is used for showers and dishes can be used to water the garden, and even sewage can potentially be processed into useful nutrients for plants, but one has to do that step very correctly. Those things are hard or impossible to do if one lives in a city in an apartment though.

Also if you live in a house you can get solar panels to offset some of the energy consumption, though they cost a lot of energy to make, and as said elsewhere toxic materials too, so the environmental impact of that may be sideways rather than pure good, or pure bad/evil.

Also if you eat meat, and you can afford it, guy grass fed meat from local farmers, at least then you offset your own impact quite a bit. If you eat plants, try to get them locally and in season, but don't feel high and mighty and good for eating only plants, tonnes of creatures get killed by farming too, and pesticides also really fuck with the environment, and not all green farming techniques are better, some use worse kinds of pesticides, but really it is hard for most people to know for sure, if you have land try to grow some plants yourself, if you are allowed to maybe get some chickens too, they produce fertilizer for your garden and eggs for eating, properly managed you will get a greener garden from chickens, I know not everyone can do that though.

Cities as they are currently set up are not sustainable, but I think we can build high rise farm towers, or under ground farms, as long as we have power for the led lights, and we can also build water and nutrient recycling, yes those use power, but again we should be shifting slowly to using more of the sun, and nuclear power, and use fossil fuels to get there, again fossil fuels are fine if we bind the released carbon in life, it stops doing harm then.

[Hilda]

Thank you for that very informative response, Vela. I'm afraid I didn't make myself clear when I asked about the energy input/output equation.

What I was trying to say is that I see rapidly increasing global warming as one vector, and solutions to warming as the other. I see the warming progressing far more quickly than innovation and implementation of solutions. Put another way, I feel we're running out of time, and the solutions aren't keeping pace with the problem.

As I said in my previous post, perhaps we're looking at the same thing in different time frames. If you're optimistic about the future, how soon do you think we'll see a turnaround in global warming?

[Vela Nanashi]

TLDR answer: 10 years to within my life time we can turn this around, and I am not young or the healthiest, beware that I go into some of the problems we are facing ahead in this post, and then explain why I am still an optimist.

I think people are putting way too much fear uncertainty and doubt into the global warming/climate change thing. Let me try to explain what I mean. We are coming out of a ice age still, the normal average temperature of earth is hotter than it has been for quite a while and still is. The heat will release more water from the ocean, making more rain, that will be needed to reduce droughts, we just have to make the land not wash away in the rain, but capture the rain, by having plants growing on it. Also many of the rich climate people who say we will all drown as sea levels rise, buy property exactly where the waters will rise first, and they fly fuel guzzling jets everywhere, rather than some less climate effecting mode of travel, so I would not believe what they are saying, since they clearly do not believe it themselves.

Now how quickly could we stop this climate problem? Right now everyone is trying their best to do exactly the wrong things, they want to reduce cows, reduce farm land, build on farm land, cause starvation, starving people are very bad for the environment, they strip and burn the land in desperation to try to get food, and that leaves more dead lands, and that is very bad.

I still given all of that have hope, cause I see all the technologies we already have and all the technology on the near horizon, and all the technology we are working on that is just beyond the horizon too. What we need is to invest some of the energy we still have easy access to into these technologies, and we need to help people out of poverty and stop the coming famine as soon as possible, though that might take over a year to turn around, maybe more than two years, and that will have to happen before we can turn the climate thing around.

There are ways to extract carbon from the air using electricity and make useful materials from it, such as graphene, that will boost solar cell and other renewable sources usefulness to us humans via batteries. There are also ways to enrich parts of the ocean so that good kinds of algae and plankton grows, that then can end up in fish that will capture carbon and also be food for us, we do need to stop the Chinese and other fleets of ships that are stripping the sea of life though (I suggest not looking it up since it is very enraging and depressing to see).

I think we can turn around this disaster in a decade if we focus on it the right way, or we can continue down the path of death, that current environmentalists want to go down, and we will make things so very much worse, until hopefully people have enough and focus on fixing it, either way I think in my lifetime we will be past this and live in a better, happier and healthier world, I may be delusional but I give it a 60% chance that we won't continue down the path of death for much longer, and choose life, the rest of the percentage range are increasingly dark and horrible fates, much less than 1% of that is the probability we wipe ourselves out, and much less than 1% of that is that we succeed to take life and the earth down with us during that death.

Also I have to bring this up, more CO2 in atmosphere gives much more growth of plants, and I see that happening locally, things grow a lot faster than they used to, and get bigger, than I remember from when I was a child, and I am bigger too

So I am still optimistic

Also on the solar cell front, I don't know what you guys are doing in the states, and china and so forth, in europe we are supposedly recycling over 90% of dead solar cells for their materials, though I have not dug very deep into the details of that.

Oh and one more thing, we need to produce things more locally all over the world, not have countries that care less than us about the environment produce everything for us, that is in fact worse for the environment than producing it ourselves, and we need to build nuclear and other power sources, and extract the less dirty fossil fuels so that we can help each other around the world to have enough energy to not burn the dirty fossil fuels right now, until we figure out how to make them less dirty.

It is far more important for the environment that we do what we can to protect and grow life, not poison the world, not starve people, not kill animals that we believe fart, not waste our resources on wars.

Oh and plastic vs paper vs cloth, for bags and other things, you need to look at the total cost/impact of creating the product, and not at what it itself is made out of, and then try to reuse the product as much as possible before putting it in the proper place for it to be burned (not land filled or dumped in ocean) or recycled/composted (depends on material), also if you need multiples of the product to finish a job rather than one that cost is important too (such as paper straw vs plastic). Now personally I use steel straws that had a huge up front cost in energy, but they will be used by me for the rest of my life and maybe will be used by those who inherit my stuff when I die I also believe that products that are not flimsy crap are better than products that are seemingly made to be used for a short while and thrown out, yes they cost more resources to make, but they can last if you care to maintain them, and I have been and still am poor so I know the value of reuse of things

Reuse > recycle too

[Vela Nanashi]

I was a bit unclear in the beginning I see, no coffee yet this morning Earth's temperature across all its life bearing existence, has on average been hotter than it has been and is right now is what I meant to say, it is sort of there if you squint.

That is probably not the only bad writing in my post either, but I will leave it

[Vela Nanashi]

Oh and some more hope fuel/information, things are not as bad as they seem, also not agreeing with everything he has to say, but I have read/heard these things from other sources too:

[Army of One]

I am not an environmental activist, but I also do not want to see the planet die to pollution either, I just want people involved to stop being hypocritical. Nuclear is a safer option, with only 3  major accidents in its entire history.

This statement is a bit of an interesting one. Sure, nuclear power generation has been deemed relatively safe, but we end up with an issue on the wastes. Now we, the general public, know absolutely nothing on the impact of nuclear waste generated by these plants, how long we need to store them for before they become non-harmful, and thus whether we have the space on this planet to store it all. Indeed, here in Australia alone, there have been many cases of abnormally large cancer clusters forming because of the presence of such wastes.

Now, I am no nuclear scientist, hence why I would like to hear, from a nuclear scientist, about the nuclear wastes, their effect on the environment and humanity, and the requirements of space for storage.

[Pornhubby]

Perspective.  We are doomed.

Hominids diverged from apes in the last 14.5 hours of the year, if one year represented the age of the Earth.

Anatomically, modern humans only arrived in the last 23 minutes of the year.

Explanation: The age of the Earth is about 4.54 billion years.

So if we represent the history of the Earth by one year, then
1 day represents: 12.5 million years.

Anatomically modern humans date from about  200,000 years ago. So anatomically modern humans have been around for the last 23 minutes of the year representing the age of the Earth.

And look how much damage we’ve been able to do in 23 minutes.

[Writers Bloque]

Perspective.  We are doomed.

Hominids diverged from apes in the last 14.5 hours of the year, if one year represented the age of the Earth.

Anatomically, modern humans only arrived in the last 23 minutes of the year.

Explanation: The age of the Earth is about 4.54 billion years.

So if we represent the history of the Earth by one year, then
1 day represents: 12.5 million years.

Anatomically modern humans date from about  200,000 years ago. So anatomically modern humans have been around for the last 23 minutes of the year representing the age of the Earth.

And look how much damage we’ve been able to do in 23 minutes.

Very Insightful. But we by far are not the most destructive species to its own environment. Ever catch a cold? Got an infected cut? Well my friend you will have known the most destructive species solely based on its total impact on its Environment. The Single celled organism, or Bacteria, and even Fungi. How can I compare us to them? Simply. Take a culture. Give it all the food it can handle in its dish, and let it grow overnight. By morning or sooner they will be dead. Why? Somewhat like humans, they eat and reproduce unchecked the only real limit, just like humans is resources. For them its sugar and other things, for us, its everything we need. So in terms of pure impact on our Environment, they alone wear the crown of most destructive. You can argue scale, but still, bit for bit, they are the most destructive. And the saddest part of it all, they lack any awareness of their impact. Most microbe's hurt us with their wastes, some actively damage cells, but all in all in the end, there is no single species on this planet that does not harm its environment, even if the impact is small, it still counts. Elephants and Rhino's are notorious tree breakers. Hell, even the new theory on dinosaurs says that they were the worst at destroying their environment, just by existing. Greenhouse gases, deforestation,etc. So to say mankind is the worst, is on the same level as blaming Kudzu for taking over a field. It does as it does. And even though we possess a higher intellect, and should be more caring about the environment and our impact on it, we will do as we do, until we to make the planet unable to continue to support Human life.

And the tragically, most obscene, and generally sci-fi twisty bullshit fact.....

The bacteria will still be here fucking up its own environment, blissfully unaware its killing itself. We may be long gone, but those micro fuckers will still be ruining their own shit long after us.

[Vela Nanashi]

We have had many mass extinctions caused by different forms of life, like the ancestors of the plants, killed what 99.99% of all life. Those pink/purple bacteria that also killed as much, and themselves, at least the plants survived what they did.

We are nowhere near as bad yet, and in fact if you watch the videos I linked here, we have clearly got the potential to fix some problems other life has been causing and even our 'destructive' tendencies are helping many forms of life, not of course all forms of life, but many kinds.

Also we don't have nearly as huge an impact as we think we do, we are like a mouse that thinks its fart is going to bother the volcano it is next to, the earth, nature, does not care, destroy the weak and something new and more powerful and wonderful will evolve, just give it a few million years.

What we or some intelligent species may do, that no earth life has done yet, is spread earth life to the galaxy, and turn all that dead material out there in the galaxy into more life, that to me would be truly a wonderful grand thing for us to do, and if life fails to make something intelligent enough for that, eventually it will burn as the sun expands and consumes the earth, and any tiny sins we may have done to life and ourselves will mean exactly nothing, even if we are saints that do no harm, it will mean exactly nothing, our sun will destroy the earth regardless, and on an even longer perspective all stars will burn out and the universe will return to a cold dead state, where no life exists, intelligent life may with great effort extend how long the interesting part of time will play out, where there is life that can observe the universe, if we do or do not do that, it matters not, in the end all will fade into the heat death of the universe.

Still even with that eventual end I have optimism for the future, we or what comes after us, can do amazing beautiful things, even during my life time, it is interesting to me how much pessimism exists though.

Just because I feel they fit: