The world has experienced its hottest day on record, according to meteorologists.
The average global temperature reached 17.01C (62.62F) on Monday, according to the US National Centres for Environmental Prediction.
The figure surpasses the previous record of 16.92C (62.46F) - set back in August 2016.
I used to think the more apparent and devastating outcomes of climate change were bound to hit long after I passed away, but now I’m not so sure. Local storms are becoming more and more serious with every passing year, each summer is less bearable than the last and the nearby forests are burning down for the 2nd summer in a row. We are definitely speedrunning this shit.
Most of the climate change predictions I’ve heard in my lifetime have talked about stuff that would happen by 2050 or 2100. It’s always been bullshit, just a way of pushing out the consequences beyond a timeframe we can actually conceive of effectively. In reality this shit is already hitting us and accelerating hard.
2050 isn’t really that far away. if you remember the year 2000, that’s about how long.
I used to think the more apparent and devastating outcomes of climate change were bound to hit long after I passed away, but now I’m not so sure.
Too many people thinking like that is exactly why we are where we are today. And why it will continue to get worse.
Those of us who actually care about the world our children and grandchildren will have to live in have been trying to get some large scale action for decades, and we’re tired of beating our heads against a brick wall.
You constantly hear people say “oh, well we are in a warming cycle, so yeah, of course the Earth is going to get warmer”.
These are people on the Right who have moved past the point of denying the problem of Climate Change and shifted their argument to admitting it is happening, but not admitting that it is man-made.
In some ways, they are right - the Earth’s climate IS indeed shifting away from an Ice Age and moving toward a warming period, but what we humans have done is essentially thrown gasoline onto the already burning fire. We are accelerating the problem.Yah and we were actually headed to a 100,000 year cooling cycle. So even their supposed science is wrong lol.
We’re gonna blow right past it.
Billions will die.
It’s not even all about the climate though; it is human greed and cruelty that will kill the most: the haves butchering and purging the have-nots.
You are not a “have”.
For all intents and purposes, NONE of us who would actually be here, on Lemmy, in this comment thread, able to be reading this, are a “have”.
Unless your personal assistant’s butler’s niece’s boyfriend is sharing this with you, you’re probably just as fucked as he, she, and they are.
This is a bit unhinged but it is really quite correct.
It’s unhinged to be concerned about what’s going to happen when civil society breaks down due to climate change. It will happen eventually, we just don’t really know when.
Im just glad it’s shaping up to be so apocalyptic that there’ll be no safe haven for the owner class that caused it. Let them burn with the peasants they decimated for profit.
And that’s why the billionaires are investing in spaceships… Seriously though, they are really buying “doomsday” properties to ride it out.
Love that they are spending billions on bunkers to “ride it out”, when the moment they need to use the bunker, there is nothing to ride out, we are not coming back to the surface in the next few lifetimes if ever.
those who go to those bunkers might have a chance to survive and essentially be what will be left of humans if it gets so bad surface becomes completely hostile for life. If its those fucking shits that are partly responsible for all this, they will make humanity into mockery of what its now. But its also likely they just made “luxury bunkers” that are nice to live in but that cant actually support people as long as its needed.
Yup, I’m sure their grandchildren will get all the warm fuzzies growing up in a confined bunker with picture book after picture book of the blue skies, green landscapes, and animals that their grandparents helped destroy.
Those bunkers are luxury tombs and little else.
That explains a lot with billionaire space race.
It seems pathetic to me that people are so obsessed with self-centered “survival” at any cost. I don’t want to live in a bunker or a ruined world, and I couldn’t possibly care less about “my lineage” or genetic material or whatever.
So you care about human survival but not about your own survival?!
well, that’s not precisely what I meant, but sure. I would much rather not see humanity reduced to apocalyptic conditions at all. But if that was to happen, I’d not want to live in a bunker or in space and I’d feel bad for people who did. I also mean that I’m not concerned with “I and my offspring must survive into the future” the way some people are. I don’t have any kids… that might change things.
The COVID pandemic makes me their plan is to turn New Zealand into a bunker nation and leave us all to die.
I think that if they manage to fuck over the whole world, there is no amount of money and bunkers that can save them from the angry mob
There is no such thing as a semtex-proof bunker.
Like, just the billionaires on an island? Who will do all the labor required to maintain their lifestyle? Because they sure as he’ll aren’t. To paraphrase Pratchett, it takes a hundred people standing in the mud to keep one person with their head in the clouds.
There’s an island full of laborers already in New Zealand. The COVID response showed that they were willing to protect people already living there, so their response to climate change will be the same.
Who is this Pratchett character? Sounds like a righteous bloke lol
Terry Pratchett, author best known for the Discworld series of novels.
Too bad the security they will hire to keep their bunkers safe will quickly figure out that the money they are being paid isn’t worth anything any more… they will probably point us over to the air vents when we show up with the cement trucks.
Eh, ring of fire will get them
This exactly. One of the reasons I left NZ was a fear of earthquakes. My dozen Christchurch rellies all living in the least damaged house, with a bucket in the garage as their toilet, just confirmed for me that I’d made the right choice.
Probably.
Billionaires seem to think nature is irrelevant. See: Elon Musk and his Mars fetish lol
The ones responsible will be gone by the time the worst effects will be felt. Sins of the father?
Not the descendants that accepted and kept their family’s blood money without a second thought. The moment you, as an autonomous adult, choose to accept the power and wealth reaped through human misery, you accept the legacy of blood that came with it.
Anyone can walk away from blood money, or use ALL that blood money solely to provide restitution to the populations exploitated to obtain it. It doesn’t happen though, because human beings as a rule are the fucking worst. Most people, the fuckees, fantasize about becoming the oligarch fuckers, instead of dreaming of ending their oppression and restructuring society to prohibit amoral levels of wealth/power accumulation. Most humans, given power/wealth, would use their own suffering as an excuse to propagate more suffering.
Playing devil’s advocate here: do you live in the US or UK?
The US, not proud of it at all though, and would leave if I had an in pretty much anywhere in Europe or Canada.
Very true. I have an example in my family: my father-in-law owns a lot of land. That land, not so long ago, belonged to some native tribes that were all killed to have said land stolen. My wife said that, when her father dies and she inherits the land/money, she’s gonna donate most of it (maybe all, depending on our financial situation), because she doesn’t want the blood money.
Every time I (proudly) tell this to someone, they look at me like I’m crazy.
It’s hard to be optimistic, or at least determined, about the future when the prospect is bleak. Climate change is getting worse and here we are just pretending it is business as always.
Love that 2 days later the headline is still true 😂, but also it’s sad
Heat index of 112F where I am at. FML.
What the heck? I thought this was supposed to be fixed by all of us using paper straws and driving hybrids?
Well in reality there isn’t much we can do as normal folk to reverse or slow down the impending doom of global warming.
It’s all in the hands of the big corporations that we all know are the biggest contributors, to the whole debacle. They are not going to change a damn thing because is all about the extreme profiteering.
Yes and no, I think. Obviously one single person can’t make a tangible difference all by themselves, but to stop the thought process there does a massive disservice to the importance of collective action. It doesn’t take all that many people to affect change, both politically and culturally. Join CCL (US focus here), vote and advocate for carbon fee and dividend and other beneficial policies, buy less shit you don’t need, ride a bike if you can, and if you have the means electrify your home/vehicle and support more ethical companies. Basically, don’t blame BP if you’re putting 20 gallons of their shit in your 4runner every week so you can commute to an office job with a permanent rooftop tent and a “save our winters” sticker on the back (yes I live in the front range). You’re not responsible for all of humanity, but you are responsible for your own actions when you have the means to choose a less carbon intensive option.
I’ve been trying to make changes to my consuming habits for a good number of years in pro of contributing (however small it might be) to the climate change fight. But, just as on wintermule says in the comments. It might be a lost fight for us mere individuals.
Just look at the data and then you’ll realise that corporatins have been screwing the planet for a long long time now.
This is just propaganda from the 90s/00s. The amount of carbon that any one middle class home generates is nothing compared to the private jet class and the corporate desolation of the environment. I hate capitalism. I hate consumerism. I hate cars. But don’t act like the onus is on what basically amounts to a peasant class that already pays for almost everything and does nearly all of the work (the middle class). It’s systemic greed, deregulation, and industrial rape of the world’s resources by shit governments and corporations that have put us here. Stop making the middle class responsible for something they have no power to change even though most of us are anxious as fuck about it. If enough individuals can simultaneously change their carbon footprint to the point that it actually affects the coming consequences, then we should have just formed a general strike already to reverse capitalism caused climate change. But we didn’t.
The carbon emission from anyone in a developed country is a gargantuan amount compared to the poorest people on earth, especially if you consider the share of CO2 emissions since the industrial revolution.
The “private jet class” you are talking about is the “peasant class” of the developed countrles.
No one want to be accountable, corporate blame it on consumers, consumer blame it on corporate, and the state doesn’t want to act because they fear the backslash from both citizens and corporations.
We urgently need drastic change that will undoubtedly and severely lower our quality of life. No magic tech is coming to save us.
The “private jet class” you are talking about is the “peasant class” of the developed countrles.
???
Here’s the thing though: The collective carbon footprint of the middle class absolutely dwarfs that of the private jet class.
The middle class is responsible, the middle class will pay, and honestly I’m here for it.
The issue is people who consume/pollute 10x as much as others per person. People can try to reduce their footprint but it’s pretty lame when some rich person creates as much pollution in one unnecessary plane trip as my household would all year.
The issue is people who consume/pollute 10x as much as others per person.
Indeed, but 10x doesn’t cut it. The middle class pollutes about 100x more than the lower class per capita. But they’ll get what’s coming to them.
Okay, so my point was wealthy people dramatically exceed that figure, too. Your claim about total pollution isn’t that convincing since yes, obviously 150,000,000 middle class people have more of an impact than 1,000,000 very wealthy people. But per-capita, for sure the people taking private jets blow away the middle class. But is the average American wasteful? Sure. However also our society has been set up so it’s very difficult to live without a car and a ton of semi-disposable manufactured items. People emerging from poverty in countries like India and China have shown plenty of enthusiasm to live in the same wasteful way as the middle class in the west, so… also not sure what your point is. Those people don’t pollute as much because they can’t afford to, not because they’re morally superior.
No, it’s propaganda to absolve people from their collective responsibility and blame the nebulous capitalist and corporatism boogeymen while ignoring things they actually can accomplish, like voting for policies and regulations that will have an actual impact. The Soviet Union and China have emitted a shit ton of carbon, but I suppose that’s all capitalism’s fault too. Your post is a walking contradiction - people have no responsibility or agency and shouldn’t bother doing anything, yet are also supposed to general strike and fix everything. Your attitude is pro-status quo and therefore serves the entrenched interests you claim to be rallying against.
like voting for policies and regulations
Ahh yes, the “just vote harder” argument. Speaking of “pro-status quo” lmao. What is your next advice to those of us who already vote (which is the bare minimum, not some silver bullet that ends all of our problems)?
Climate crisis, corporate ownership of government, and governmental corruption are all reality because you didn’t vote enough, you stupid idiots! /s
Considering huge numbers of people don’t vote at all, and many others that do vote against their self interests and for their short term gain over environmental policies, we collectively have a lot of work to do on this front. I agree voting is the bare minimum but it bears repeating since we suck at it.
If you actually care about my “next advice”, you should be writing your reps, nationally and locally, on a regular basis, you should organize with groups like CCL, and you should get involved in local transportation and housing policy discussions. What’s your job/career? Can you enact any change there, or move to a job that has more opportunity? I could go on and on. Not attacking you personally, but most folks I’ve met with the doom and gloom, not my problem attitude don’t do fuck all.
You’re asking me what people can do and I’ve given multiple examples. What are your ideas? All I’m hearing is we should have done a general strike and killed capitalism, as if cheap natural gas is only a problem when a capitalist burns it for profit.
China is not communist though.
Calling to individual action to solve climate change is literally the status quo
Many things can be the status quo at once. I’m just tired of binary, weak thinking that blames any one party 100% and absolves all others, which is why I started my original post with “yes and no”. It’s not productive, and it’s already crystal clear what we need to do as a society - go read Drawdown for a simple primer on decarbonization and what needs to happen. If people actually did the individual action thing en masse it would have a real effect (not enough in isolation of course) but surprise, lots of people don’t actually give a shit and hide behind their nihilism and the “corporations are the real problem” thing. Folks should focus on enacting policies first, then individual actions where they can. Doing nothing is, well, worth nothing.
No no no, you don’t understand. Now you have to stop eating meat and they need your permission to block out the sun
See below for proof
Unironically, yes we really should eat much less meat and use more renewables sources of energy (like blocking out the sun with solar panels)
I always find it strange that the most immediate and effective change any individual can make is giving up or greatly reducing their animal product intake. Will it fix the world? No. But would it actually at least somewhat of a difference? Yes. Is it something you can do right now, today, without any real effort whatsoever? Yep.
But what is pretty much no one willing to do? Give up/reduce animal products in their lives.
It was the easiest change I ever made. 31 years ago. No meat. No dairy. No eggs.
Oh, and no car.
Guess that’s too hard for people and they’d rather die in a war over water.
People don’t make any sense.
I don’t totally understand this either, though recently maybe more I understand it better. Seems like people cannot live without those things. I know someone who started crying when she realized she couldn’t spend as much money as before (only to use the crying to get more money to buy things). Or my sister, who asks my parents for money all the time so she can maintain her chosen lifestyle. If she can’t do that then life becomes difficult. It boggles my mind that ‘difficult’ is not being able to vacation twice a year but whatever.
The stress that less-vulnerable people experienced during covid when the main thing they had to do was not expand their social life for a year or two was a good example of how people are. The anger at not being able to go to the bar every weekend was nuts to me.
Few people can live a monastic life and feel like they are fulfilled, and fewer if any will feel good about that kind of life if they are forced into it. So who and how are they making those choices? We aren’t taught to be frugal, we’re taught to spend, it’s our education towards living a “good life”.
I think if you got people to stop eating meat and driving 2 blocks to the grocery store they’d grow depressed, frustrated, productivity would drop, birth rates would drop, life expectancy would drop. People need that stuff to feel good about their lives, and if you want to take it away you either need a near perfect competitor or take it away by force.
People do these things to fight negative emotions. If you want people to change their ways being arrogant and not showing any empathy won’t help.
Anybody who is dependent on consumerism got to that point because society sells these things like tasty food, vacation, alcohol, tech gadgets, etc., as an easy fix for pain and other internal struggles. It’s not about teaching them to be frugal. Almost everybody has something they rely on to deal with their negative emotions, but it’s easier to see in others than in ourselves.
Oh I guess I wasn’t clear, but I absolutely see this in myself. That’s how I came to this conclusion recently because I’ve been cutting back so much and I realized that I can’t, I just can’t. I need a beer on the weekend, I need to enjoy a meal at a restaurant every once in a while, I love the convenience of using a car to get somewhere.
But I am for sure judgy of people who seem to make zero effort and take any intrusion on their lifestyle to be ‘too much’. I mean driving 2 blocks to the grocery store? Really. They are able bodied people.
What? Arrogant how? I feel like we’re saying the same thing here.
Sorry, I didn’t mean this on you specifically. Just that we can not tell people (as a society) to just live more frugal without addressing the overall problems that drive so many into consumerism. It’s a bit like how people treat drug addicts. I see the same in the recent climate debate. Instead of focusing on the root issue, it is reduced to judging other people’s morals or character.
So if this milestone is a death sentence, does that mean it’s time to give up?
You haven’t?
As long as I know how to love I know I’ll stay alive.
Hell no I haven’t lost hope. But I’ve heard from climate scientists on this who assure me that this isn’t a civilization killer.
Nuclear war could be, as could AI. But global warming isn’t a matter of the survival of the civilization. It’s a matter of completely survivable hardship.
We should give up hope that things are going to be fine and it’s all going to work out paintlessly.
That isn’t necessarily the same as giving up hope that we’ll survive and adapt.
How do we do that? How do we prevent further damage to the environment by fossil fuel companies and such? It doesn’t feel like that’s feasible… ~Strawberry
Fossil fuel companies are run by ordinary humans with names and addresses.
Just sayin
Keep yourself occupied and do the best you can. Informed descisions of individuals can bring more change than governments. You might not stop the oil from being sold, but if there is less demand for it, profits go down and that has great effect on the rate at which oil is pumped out of the ground.
I don’t know what decisions I can make that would make any significant impact on this. I mean private jets, for example, produce more emissions than any other part of the aviation industry. If some billionaire who took private jets regularly chose to stop doing that, it’d have a much more significant impact than me eating vegan hot dogs instead of meat hot dogs. And that’s not accounting for how many run massive polluters like Exxon-Mobil and actively lobby against measures to combat climate change. And this isn’t some abstract, random, unchangable force of nature. They are making the choice to do these things and could easily choose to stop at literally any time they want and still have their dragon hoards afterward. But they don’t. What kind of choices could I make that could have anywhere near that kind of impact? ~Strawberry
The choices of yourself influence the choices of those around you. And collectively we have much more impact on climate change than for example the private aviation industry. The following article contains a few ideas and their impact to start with. https://news.sky.com/story/climate-change-what-does-the-ipcc-mean-by-choice-architecture-and-can-it-change-our-behaviour-12582739
Don’t corporations emit the most carbon and such in the world? This is a systemic problem that requires systemic solutions. ~Strawberry
I mean, the term “death sentence” does imply a lack of survival.
Not everyone sentenced to death has been executed, so it implies survival is difficult rather than impossible.
That’s not really how the phrase is used colloquially. It means a person is gonna die.
It probably comes from earlier periods of history when if you heard someone pronounce a death sentence, your head was getting chopped off within a few minutes.
Okay, but this isn’t the 1400s
These days people recognize a death sentence as an injustice that can be stopped.
Really?
It’s an idiomatic saying.
Sure, but that’s the point - a death sentence isn’t certain death anymore, so saying this milestone is a death sentence is completely accurate.
Or do you think these scientists actually meant “we are all 100% going to die”?
These temperatures will kill people. They will cause crop failures. The death, hunger, and hardship will cause people to leave their homes to come to more habitable regions.
But there will still be habitable regions for generations still to come. A lot has been lost, and more will be before we fix what we broke, but plenty can still be saved as long as we don’t just give up
So would you say morale is a really important factor in our global warming response?
Maybe these scientists should stop talking about hopelessness and death sentences and start talking about challenges and hardship.
I disagree.
People need to be angry. We’re being murdered and we must defend ourselves.
So you have all the moral justification of a person fighting for his life here? That’s a pretty significant level of moral authority to wield.
Yes.
I won’t die quietly.
I mean, pretty much anything goes then right? Like, if I crush a puppy’s skull with my foot it’s a horrible thing to do. But if that was the only way I could avoid dying people would understand.
So basically being in fear of your life means “I get to do anything to anyone and it’s justifiable”
Well, no, I’m not that greedy for life. After a certain point it’s not worth it and I’ll just make it quick and painless. Life isn’t always preferable to death, I’d need to be able to live with myself afterwards!
Depending on who you ask it’s the most important. Once people are educated they can make informed decisions themselves. Just do what you can and are willing to do and don’t wait for the governing bodies to change their pace. The IPCC report actually contains solid Data on what individual behavior change is most effective, this article lists a few things https://news.sky.com/story/climate-change-what-does-the-ipcc-mean-by-choice-architecture-and-can-it-change-our-behaviour-12582739
Now we watch in horror as corporate lobbyists and their lackeys prevent such measures from being implemented at any wide scale, especially in countries and regions that produce the most pollution and still choose to keep fracking and all that. ~Strawberry
They are unlikely to actually stop any individual from becoming vegan or at least making an effort to become one. The attitude that it is to öate and we can’t do anything about the catastrophe is precisely the feeling they are hoping for so we continue to consume their products. You can however at any time just stop.
Isn’t the article talking about systemic solutions rather than just heavily individualized ones? ~Strawberry
So it’s inaccurate to say that it’s a death sentence?
I wonder if there’s any loss of trust that results from saying false things?
There are people alive today who will witness entire countries disappearing beneath the ocean, so it’s not wrong to describe the climate crisis as a death sentence of sorts.
It’s difficult to explain how dire things have already gotten and how much worse they will keep getting while still acknowledge that even worse outcomes can still be averted.
The death of some land I guess?
It’s difficult to explain how dire things have already gotten
I mean, being able to articulate your argument is a key point of determining whether it’s a position worth defending right?
I think you should get really concrete about what exactly’s going wrong and how it weighs against other things happening in the world. Like with COVID we’ve got numbers. With obesity and crack we’ve got numbers. With tsunamis we have numbers. And they’re pretty well-defined (despite some controversy in attributing deaths to covid).
What are the numbers with regard to climate change? I think it’s much harder to define a climate change death, or a climate change life disruption, than it is to define a heart attack death, or a crack addiction.
while still acknowledging that even worse outcomes can still be averted
I feel like that would be easier if we clearly defined it. Like “5 million people have lost their homes to rising sea levels, but if we slow it down we can prevent another 2 billion from losing theirs”.
It’s not that hard to conceive when you get it defined clearly.
if you haven’t, yet, please share your thoughts–we could use your optimism!
If you want some optimism, read How to Spend $50 Billion to Make the World a Better Place by Bjorn Lomburg.
Honestly, I’m not sure if I’d want to bring a child into this kind of future. I’m not even sure how long I’ll last in this future.
You know how they talk about the Fermi Paradox, and the Great Filter? This might be it. We made it past nukes (for now), we may or may not make it past misaligned AI… but I’m not sure we can survive this.
It makes it difficult to get in the mindset of planning for one’s financial future. Retirement savings? Will I even live long enough to see those?
Anyone have any idea how long before we actually all burn up?
Lets build a giant air conditioner to keep the global warming out
Or, this will sound crazy but hear me out, we put a giant ice cube in the ocean.
Oh, like the one Daddy puts in his drink when he gets home from work!
… and then he gets mad.
That’s a great idea. We could get them from a local comet, I’m sure it would never run out.
Relevant Futurama what if: https://what-if.xkcd.com/162/
I particularly enjoyed this:
Outer space is a lot higher up than Niagara Falls,[citation needed]
Any significant good news? I feel like that would be more helpful. ~Strawberry
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That’s a false dichotomy. There are more power sources than coal and nuclear.
Also electricity generation is not the only source of emissions. Car traffic, cruise ships, aiplanes, all need to be reduced and can’t just be replaced by nuclear power.In theory, yes. In practice, nuclear plants that are shut off are almost always replaced with fossils, with the specific fossil fuel of choice often being coal.
Energy is not something where you can just pick one solution and run with it (at least, non-fossils, anyway). Nuclear is slow to ramp, so it usually takes care of baseline load. Renewables like wind and solar are situational, they mostly work throughout the day (yes, wind too, differential heating of earth’s surface by the sun is what causes surface-level winds) and depend greatly on weather. Hydro is quite reliable but it’s rarely available in the quantities needed. The cleanest grids on the planet use all of these, and throw in some fossils for load balancing, phasing them out with energy storage solutions as they become available.
You can’t just shoot one of the pillars of this system of clean energy and then say you never tried to topple the system, just wanted to prop up the other pillars. Discussing shutting off nuclear plants without considering the alternative is pure lunacy, driven by fearmongering, and propped up by no small amounts of oil money for a reason.
Replacing nuclear with renewables is simply not the reality of the situation. Nuclear and renewables work together to replace fossils, and fill different roles. It’s not one or the other, it’s both and even together they’re not yet enough.
So when you do consider the alternatives, moving from nuclear to the inevitable replacement, fossils, is still lunacy, just for other reasons: even if you care about nothing more than atmospheric radiation, coal puts more of it out per kWh generated, solely because of C-14 isotopes. Nuclear is shockingly clean, mostly due to its energy density, but also because it’s not producing barrels of green goo, just small pills of spicy ceramics. And if your point is accidents, just how many oil spills have we had to endure? How many times was the frickin ocean set on fire? How many bloody and brutal wars were motivated by oil? Is that really what a safer energy source sounds like to you, just because there are two nuclear accidents the world knows about, and a thousand fossil accidents, of which the world lost count already?
And deflecting to other industries is also quite disingenuous. Especially if your scapegoat is transportation, since that’s an industry that’s increasingly getting electrified in an effort to make it cleaner at the same logistical capacity, and therefore will depend more and more on the very same electrical grid which you’re trying to detract from.
There is massive work being done to improve large scale energy storage (big batteries) so the renewables become less and less situational. Large scale energy storage is significantly less constrained than car batteries, because weight is a one time cost. Even gravity based batteries could become viable.
Also, in response to the previous commenter, electricity generation is by far and large the main source of emissions accounting for more than half, with more than a quarter being agriculture. Transportation is 14%, and given the future transition to electric vehicles, one might argue that half of that can be tack’d on to electricity generation’s share. (Half because electric cars are more than twice as efficient at energy conversion than petrol cars. Toss in some power line losses and that’s a reasonable estimate)
All of that is great, and I’m all for it. Can’t wait for the first grids with no fossils whatsoever, once energy storage improves enough that it can take all the balancing load. When we reach that, it will mark the start of the era where nuclear is actually being replaced by renewables rather than fossils.
My point here is that switching off nuclear is premature for now. It’s a very clean source of energy once you look at the per kWh numbers and nuclear waste management solutions are actually extremely safe. (The videos where they test the containers by smashing actual trains into them are kinda fun – and those tests are done with liquid water, which is far more susceptible to leaking than solid ceramics.) Of course, if we reach a point where wind, solar, and hydro can fully replace fossils and start eating into nuclear’s share then that’s gonna be a very different conversation, and I’m fully with renewables in that situation, but we should always keep the alternatives in mind when we shut something off.
That’s why we’re not just shutting down coal plants altogether, because there’s just nothing to replace them. Although an energy policy where you just flat out ban
renewablesfossils and tell the market that that’s the supply, now go figure it out would certainly be interesting. Very expensive and terrible for the economy, but interesting nonetheless. (Definitely the based kind of chaos if you ask me.)edit: okay, that was a weird word to accidentally replace, lol
There are more problems with nuclear energy, though. The biggest being that we burden future generations for literally thousands of years with a growing amount of waste. I am not sure why this is always missing from the discussions of people who are pro nuclear power.
It is making the same mistake again as we did before: creating a problem for future generations to solve. And in this case the problem is dire and, because of the immensely long timespan, we have no way to reliably plan ahead for so long.
Because the actual amount of waste that has to be stored for that long is minimal and can be shoved kilometers down into the earth’s crust with the same tech that’s used to extract oil. Nuclear waste storage is a great headline topic but there have been a lot of innovations in the past ~50 years.
As for lower tiers of waste (as in, less dangerous, more numerous, mostly consisting of stuff like tools used to work on the power plants, which is what actually goes in the yellow barrels usually depicted with grey goo), several reactor projects existed that actively used that radioactive waste for even more energy generation, usually targeted extremely hard by anti-nuclear activists because it would take away their talking points. The science exists, the opposition is usually political and driven by fear tactics. But this is why we store those lower tiers of nuclear waste on the surface, not because it’s the best place to put it but because it’s where we can retrieve it once we find a use for it.
And again, consider the alternative. Fossils also fuck up the environment and it’s not a good thing that they do it faster. The only way their effect would go away that fast is mass genocide of the ecoterrorist flavor, and exactly what future generations are we talking about in that case?
Spent fuel can be reprocessed in a modern reactor. Even if that wasn’t possible the storage is extremely safe.
nuclear plants that are shut off are almost always replaced with fossils, with the specific fossil fuel of choice often being coal.
Being from Germany, I have often read such arguments and at least here that is simply not true.
The decrease in nuclear power was accompanied by a decrease in fossil fuel.
Could that decrease have been larger if nuclear had been kept around longer? Possibly.
But if we are talking about building new power plants, the money is typically better invested in renewables. They’re faster to build and produce cheaper energy.I’m not sure what the point is.
German Electricity is dirtier than France’s therefor no other sources of electricity exist beyond coal and nuclear?
That would be a weird conclusion seeing as both countries also use other power sources.@geissi
except from countries lucky enought to get a lot of electric damn, there is no example of countries having a stable network mainly reliying on renewable energy production, because they are not stable. Doing so requires a lot of new powerlines, storage solutions, … and at the end may still be unreliable during winter / summer peaks. Its is much easier to have a mix with the fundamental ensured by a drivable power plant and there are two ““clean”” choices: water and nuclear.Its is much easier to have a mix
A mix of more than just coal and nuclear, right?
So other power sources do exits and we should use them?
Germany, specifically, was one of the worst offenders in this category. They do renewables at maximum capacity (like everyone else) but there’s still a massive gap to fill, and with issues of strategic dependence around hydrocarbons, the obvious answer to fill in the missing capacity was coal. Most of the time you get a mix of coal and natural gas, whichever is easier, but in Germany’s case that mix was almost entirely on the side of coal.
And without abundant hydro power, or an energy storage solution that could store a full night’s worth of energy even if the current deployment of renewables was able to generate that (which it’s pretty far from), there aren’t a lot more options. Germany’s strategy to shut off its nuclear plants out of fearmongering has been a heinous crime against the environment.
When oil companies love your green party you know you fucked up.
there’s still a massive gap to fill
in Germany’s case that mix was almost entirely on the side of coal
I’m assuming the ‘gap’ refers to the reduced nuclear capacity.
So you’re saying that Germany replaced the power previously generated by nuclear power almost entirely with coal power?Do you have ANY statistics to support that?
The only actual increase in coal energy I know of was an unplanned short time rise due to the war in Ukraine and the loss of gas imports.
Edit: Also the original argument was that coal and nuclear is a false dichotomy. Your own comment mentions a mix of coal and gas, mentions renewables, so clearly there are more than those two options, right?
There was a link in this very same thread (right here) that compares France to Germany. It’s a very simple case study: a country that does use nuclear pollutes 10x less per kWh than a country that actively destroyed its nuclear capability. It doesn’t get any more simple than that.
Unless your argument is that if Germany didn’t shut down nuclear it wouldn’t have deployed renewables, which I hope it isn’t because it would be a completely lunatic point to make, the situation is the same no matter how you twist the mental gymnastics. Germany’s grid is one of the dirtiest in Europe largely because of the lack of nuclear baseline, which, if it was kept, would make it one of the cleanest.
If your argument is that the renewables deployed in Germany should be counted towards replacing nuclear, then you must also accept that Germany failed to significantly cut into its fossil plants with renewables, which other countries managed to do in the same timeframe, because its entire renewable capacity had to go towards filling a gap the shutdown of nuclear left. It’s the same difference either way, and it suffers from the same fallacy that you’re pretty clearly intentionally making at this point: that you are unwilling to consider nuclear in the context of its alternatives, and are only willing to talk about it either in a vacuum, or in an idealistic situation where renewable capacity and energy storage are high enough that shutting off nuclear will not lead to an increased demand for fossils.
I’ve addressed that idealistic future in this very same comment section by the way: as soon as we reach a point where we can eliminate fossils and any renewables deployed cuts into nuclear’s share, as opposed to that of fossil plants, I’m against nuclear. But that’s not the reality of the situation yet. The decommissioning of nuclear plants in Germany was extremely premature, and harmed the environment, both with increased radiation and with gargantuan amounts of CO2 output.
Renewables > Nuclear > Fossils. It’s literally that simple. As long as we have fossils, replacing them with nuclear would be beneficial, and any decrease to nuclear capacity is a negative. If you can offset something with renewables, it should be fossils, not nuclear.
I’m saying that coal or nuclear is a false dichotomy, meaning there are other possible choices.
Comparing the carbon intensity of France to Germany does nothing to address this argument.Your last comment then stated that Germany has replaced coal with nuclear.
Comparing the carbon intensity of France to Germany does not address this argument either.If you want to show that Germany replaced nuclear with coal then you need to show the development of the energy mix in Germany and show where nuclear capacity decreases and coal increases.
Comparing Germany to France does not show the development in Germany.
And since both countries have a power mix with more than two energy sources, it certainly disproves that there are only two options.Here is a map of carbon intensity of electricity generation:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electricityFrance has 85g/kWh, Iceland has 29g without nuclear.
Does every country have the same potential as Iceland? No.
Is nuclear the only alternative to coal? No.
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I’m all for getting rid of the cruise ships. Floating land-whale-buffet reef-destroying pollution devices is what they are. I’ve seen firsthand the effect they have on Caribbean islands they make their destination, and it’s never good.
Tell that to the people near Zaporizhzhia right now.
We thank people who disregarded nuclear energy.
Do you really think governments actually gave a shit about some deluded hippies? Nah, they were just the scapegoats the politicians used to pretend they weren’t in bed with the fossil fuel lobbyists.
I thank the oligarchs and their willing consumption enthusiasts. This apocalypse is brought to you by unchecked, insatiably greedy capitalists and capitalism.
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I take no offense to being called a communist, even though I’m a socialist. I have a great deal of pity for the sycophants of capitalism, though, cheering their own exploitation and oppression as their masters terraform the planet to be hostile towards human life in the name of quarterly profit expectations.
Your family will be burning from the global oligarch’s fine work, and you’ll be blaming the invisible communists and socialists that countries like the US used military means to decimate through global destabilization the world over to further capitalist interests. The capitalists won, are fully in charge, and have captured their own regulatory bodies in most of the world. This is the world of capitalists own making. They run the show, we are living in what the capitalists would consider their utopia, where they live like modern Pharoahs as most of the species subsists to further enrich them.
We crossed that threshold years ago, man made climate alteration is a runaway train of multigenerational suffering at best, and possibly the end of human civilization for ages at worst. Have fun cursing the dirty commies when you’re thirsty with no recourse 🤣
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Way to minimise the last 40-50 years of capitalists actively working to stop any real progress on climate change. Sure progress is being made now after they figured out it was getting bad and there was money to be made in green tech. That doesn’t excuse the decades of lobbying and and actual propaganda put out by capital interests that we are all paying for now.
That you are spouting off about “communist propaganda” tells me you either grew up in the 80’s and really bought the red scare line or you bought the far right propaganda telling you to be scared of ‘CHI-NAH’ (to quote the orange traitor).
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“You couldn’t far wronger in this question lol”
Sure. I couldn’t “far wronger”.
What a thoughtful and fact filled reply that furthers conversation.Try making a point or defending your position if you want to be taken at all seriously.
As it stands why should anyone think you might be correct in your statements and not just dismiss you out of hand as a moron who is far wronger?deleted by creator
Holy shit you are delusional if you believe any of that. A simple google search on climate science coverup by fossil fuel companies (like Exxon, Shell, and BP) in the 70’s is just a single example and it would take you almost no effort to learn. That you haven’t even done the very LEAST you could to not be embarrassingly wrong, should serve to let anyone reading anything you comment on to simply dismiss your ramblings as misleading at best.
You need to take a look in the mirror and ask yourself if maybe you got this wrong since myself and MANY others have pointed out the various things you are just factually incorrect on.
I’m not holding out hope though, I am willing to bet you will just double down in your fantasy instead of facing reality. Feel free to prove me wrong, little would please me more.
There’s actually a news article from the March 1912 edition of Popular Mechanics warning about how ‘the furnaces of the world’ are ‘burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year’, and how ‘when this is burned, united with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly.’ They conclude that adding 7 billion tons of CO2 per year ‘make(s) the air a more effective blanket for the earth and raise its temperature’ and that ‘the effect may be considerable in a few centuries’. Their only mistake was underestimating how much CO2 future generations would put in the atmosphere. They estimated a few centuries for 7 billion tons of CO2. I’m wondering what they’d make of 43 billion tons.
Capitalists ignored the clear warnings from scientists about pumping CO2 into the atmosphere for over a century because it wasn’t economical for them to do something about it. It was always somebody else’s problem. Until it wasn’t. Where do you live? New York, that has recently had some of the worst air quality in history thanks to Canadian wildfires? Or Denver, where it was our turn in April and May? Or when we got the horrible DECEMBER wildfire that burned into Boulder? Man, wildfires in fucking December. NOW it’s fashionable for Capitalists to at least pretend to care about the environment, but shit, if there could be a dollar made burning down the last forest, you fucking better believe that capitalists will gleefully play a Captain Planet villain while they do just that.
Edit: A fun link: https://bigthink.com/the-present/1912-climate-change-prediction/
During the latest decades they didn’t know very well about the damages they were causing
Yea, they (the capitalists) have known full well for at least two decades the damage they were causing.
laws were passed in capitalist countries to remove it promptly
Promptly on what timescale? Geological?
It’s always too little too late. If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t be in this mess. Reality speaks for itself.
Exxon has known the damage they were causing since at least the 80s and have spent absurd amounts of money alongside their competitors lobbying governments and paying scientists to keep the status quo. We had at least some evidence that burning fossil fuels was going to cause global warming at the turn of the 20th century.
What you’re saying isn’t entirely false, but it sure is bending over backwards to be nice to the capitalist societies that caused this problem. Also there aren’t any communist countries causing this problem, China is every bit as capitalist as the US in how their economy functions these days, they’re communist in name only. You’ve been influenced by capitalist propaganda friend.
Most environmental solutions are also being created in capitalist societies, and the richest countries (which by coincidence are capitalist) are the ones that are decreasing their emissions by a considerable amount.
Only because those capitalists societies are offloading the work that generates those emissions on to poorer countries because it’s cheaper to do it there.
Yes, the German method. We lower our emissions not by using nuclear power, but by moving our coal outside of EEA and buying it back at 5x the price!
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Thank the good old Green Party of Germany! Restarting all those coal plants and shutting down nuclear reactors!
God, that’s so depressing. I genuinely don’t understand how we - any of us, in any country - are supposed to be okay with these political mechanisms filled with incompetent, out-of-touch, self-interested codgers. I’m not willing to take action, but when our entire world is being picked apart by the public sector and sold for parts by the private sector, what are we to do?
Lobbies. The German “green” party if fully funded by Russia, which has a vested interest in keeping coal, but especially nat gas (which despite the CO2 emission is still labelled as “green”) being the primary source of energy.
Yeah, I’ll take a source for this one. Coal power generation has not increased in Germany whereas the Green party’s policies in 1998 led to the first large scale deployment of solar energy in the world.
At least companies created incredible profits for a small number of shareholders for a short period of time. Totally worth it
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That’s a pretty weak take. Do you know how profitable it is to hire a short-gain CEO, pump his stock, sell before the inevitable crash and follow him to his next venture? Immensely so.
Think how great the world would be if everyone did that, jumping from sunken venture to sunken venture, burning through any and all good will, until the only thing that still has worth is the planet you’re on, but even that is nothing because Mars is the next frontier you can sink our money into.
Think before you speak so poorly of those better than yourself
It’s a joke from a viral editorial cartoon. Don’t be such an antagonistic jerk.
edit: If you were attempting satire then I’ve fallen victim to Poe’s law because there are lots of people who sincerely believe exactly what you wrote. Hopefully that isn’t the case here, and if so I retract the jerk comment. If you do believe what you wrote, my comment stands.
I think that’s ok. We don’t need to take everything here seriously. You can take it seriously, I can take it satirically. OP can say they can’t remember original intent.
was fucking hot in western WA yesterday, my first year gardening and have had some plants bolt :(
edit: I shouldn’t have used the term bolt cause even I didn’t know what that meant before this season, it just means that a lot of my plants flowered due to stress from the heat, which often makes things like kale bitter, or spinach tough. In my case it was bok choy, and just now cilantro, but that was probably more from me planting late.
Just curious, by ‘bolt’, did you mean the slang to run away quickly, or does that have a different meaning in planting and vegetation?
Edit: thank you all for the replies.
It means they go to flower/seed really fast
It’s where something intended to grow slow and low as a leafy vegetable such as lettuce or cilantro stops growing leaves and sends up a tall central stalk for flowers and seeds. It kinda ruins the intended growth effect if it happens too early.
Today I learned…
In addition to what the other said, the leaves also get tough and bitter. Our first crop of lettuce went this way, now I’m doing a batch indoors since it’s still too hot.
I like to plant my leafy greens inside an arch trellis, that way the squash and cucumbers shade the greens. My arugula is still trying to bolt but I can keep it pretty decent by topping it when I see it look like it’s heading that way.
