Current events general chat

I don't think this will work. I think he needs to go back to the Soviet Union's old strategy during WWII (which seems to have been used by pre-Soviet Russia a fair bit). That strategy is to keep throwing human fodder at the enemy until the enemy breaks.

The more people die, the smaller the logistical problems Putin will have to deal with.

(a little gallows humor)

 

Let's try to change the actual topic.
I would like to speak about climate change.

Being a geologist i am moderately informed on the issue. I'll try to put it simple.
Back in the carboniferous (or paleozoic) the atmosphere was filled by carbon dioxide, around 800% more than what's in the actual atmosphere. Due to how dioxide was processed by plants, being replaced by oxygen, the air composition changed and the plants, dying, took away from the cycle a large part of that carbon dioxide. It was no more part of the equation, it went "stored" in carbon and oil.
Fossil fuels, with "fossil" being the keyword.
Each time you burn those fossil fuels, you put again in the atmosphere all that carbon dioxide that was no more around since millions of years.
Imagine you have a nice aquarium with a perfectly working filter that magically clean itself... except you put in the aquarium dirt that wasn't there before. and again, and again... How long do you think the filter will be going to keep the water clean? How long before the fishes start to feel ill?

We can debate on the real effects, on the speed they are taking effect, on the (very possible) exaggerations of the alarm on global warming, on the time we can have to repair the damage... I am really open to such a debate, but we are altering our atmosphere, that's a scientific fact.

And too many people act as "Nah, it'll be fine", or "Climate changes are natural and have always been a part of earth's history"
The second statement is actually true: our climate has never been stable, but this doesn't mean we shouldn't care, and this time the cycle is being altered by a not-natural factor.

The lowering of temperatures in the early 1300 had as a consequence a serious famine in Europe.
During the Devonian, ocean oxygen levels dropped and 3/4 of the ocean species died.
If you die/suffer by "natural" climate change, the planet may not care, but you do.

 

I used to care a lot about the environment, now I care a little bit. I still recycle and try not to waste energy, etc, but I don't dwell on environmental issues much.

As a child I heard about acid rain is going to kills us all, then the problem seemed to go away and no one talked about it.

Then I heard about CFCs depleting the ozone and giving us cancer. Then apparently that stopped seriously being a problem.

Then about how the depletion of the rain forest would cause us to lose too much oxygen then it turned out the rain forest creates a fraction of the oxygen does.

There was nothing factually wrong in your statement Killer Angel, but in my relatively short life time I have heard the "________ environmental crisis is going to kill us all" five or six times and it's never as bad as the doomsayers say it is. It makes environmental activists sound like Chicken Little.

A lot of things have improved. They don't put asbestos in buildings, there are all sorts of chemicals which are used any more. It is now taboo to litter on the highways and they used to be normal. Cars are more fuel efficient etc. Humans are producing a lot less paper so there is less incentive for deforestation. Most trees are cut down now for fuel not paper.

A book called The Population Bomb was very influential in academia and my dad claims that reading the book is why he chose to only have one child. But now it appears birth rates around the world are dropping, many below replacement so the idea that humanity will grow beyond the planet's ability to sustain it seems remote where once it seemed certain.

All these positive changes makes it hard to take doomsayers seriously.

Then there is the issue that green technology is less green if you look at it closely. An electric car is not pollution free. An electric car exacerbates the power usage in it's local grid. If your local grid is nuclear powered. Your car is indirectly generating nuclear waste. If your local grid is coal powered your car is producing green house and the various other pollutants coal kicks up.

The batteries to electric cars are made use rare earth metals mostly unearthed by CCP shell companies that use child labor in Africa and slave labor in western China. They also pollute the local water and soil.

Ironically, the creation of modern solar panels leads to a lot of carbon dioxide emissions. Wind turbines are not carbon neutral either but they remain one of the cleanest energy sources available but they don't work everywhere and they still kill a lot of birds.

Plastic recycling plants can be pretty toxic. Aluminum and glass recycling plants are fairly clean but aluminum and sand are not exactly scarce resources.

My understanding of science is less than yours, but I was told multiple times by multiple source that if hypothetically tomorrow Scolenex invented a miracle engine that is cheap to make, produces tons of energy with no pollution at all and every factory, power plant and vehicle on Earth switched to this miracle engine...the global temperature would still rise due to the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere.

So it kind of makes the goal of reducing emissions seem pointless. You are just slowing the problem rather than solving it. But wait it gets worse. Western countries are being scolded by Greta Thunberg that we are polluting the planet with greenhouse gases, but somehow the CCP is getting a free pass from the American Left for some reason despite that they burn more coal than the rest of the world combine and their fossil fuel consumption.

The CCP lies and cheat with every treaty they are a part or they could just ignore the treaty or international agreement altogether like they are doing with the territorial disputes with the Philippines.

It's not just the CCP. Developing the countries around the world point out that Europe and the United States got to enjoy a period of industrialization where no one batted at an eye at carbon emissions and many say they deserve a century of unrestricted fossil fuel burning to get caught up. And morally speaking, they might be right.

It kind of makes fighting global warming seem unfixable, and if global warming is an unfixable problem, perhaps we should spend our time and energy on a problem we can fix.

We also have environmental problems that are separate from global warming. In mainland China is so bad in the cities there are health effects greater than smoking a pack of cigarettes a day for the local. The snow in South Korea often is yellow before anyone pees on it because of the particulates in China's air.

And China has a bigger fishing fleet than the rest of the world combined and they are raping the sea causing more irreparable and immediate damage than global warming.

Then of course we have a host of economic and political problems separate from the environment.

Normally if a politician or a political analyst says "We need to do something about global warming and we need to do it now!"

"Something" in this context means, "burns less fossil fuel and eat less meat" but neither of these things by themselves will fix global warming.

There are spillover political and economic benefits to burning less fossil fuels but I like meat too much to give it up.

As much as I like the taste of meat, I am not motivated by pure selfishness. I will point out that there are lands that are not conducive to farming but are conducive to grazing. Beyond this I think most human beings are healthier when they get more protein, and plant proteins are somewhat limited compared to animal proteins.

Personally, just me, I feel better when I eat about 40% of my calories with protein, 40% carbs, 20% fats (percentage in terms of total calories). But carbs are addictive so I usually eat about 60% of my calories in carb form to my detriment.

I think the best way to combat global warming is to find a cost effective way to lock Carbon Dioxide into solid form, mimicking the natural processes of the Carboniferous Period.

That seems to be the only long term solution I can see besides eradicating all of humanity so humans stop polluting entirely.

I don't see how half-measures with reducing emissions will make more than an iota of difference, like fighting a tidal wave with a thimble.

I guess I've hinted at it before with talking about a pollution free super engine. Even if the entire world (including Putin and the CCP) made fighting global warming their top priority, I believe we cannot fix global warming with our current tech.

In order to fix global warming we need great technological advancement.

Technological advancement is getting harder. I think the education system in the West is floundering. The cost of higher education has been rising at about double the rate of inflation for the last sixty years mainly because of bloat. Colleges have way more administrators than they need.

Neo-Marxist ideology has gotten so pervasive in academia that it has begun to impair the STEM fields which is one engine of technological innovations.

Before college, in kindergarten through high schools education has been drifting away from teaching critical thinking skills and more about creating obedient little drones that say and think the right things.

Educational systems that prioritize obedience over lateral thinking stifles creativity and by extension slows down technological innovation.

There is a reason why despite Chinese universities graduating more engineers than American universities, but most patents come from Western countries, it is because the CCP educational system has been prioritizing obedience over free thinking for sixty years. And for the last twenty-five years or so, so has the West.

I could go on a long rant about how our education system is screwed up but that is not directly related to the subject of global warming.




Anyway to summarized, if someone says they want a solution to global warming and their solution is not based around involve the phrases "encouraging technological innovation" and/or "curtailing the CCP's excesses" then I generally come to two conclusion.

1) the person espousing their "solution" is means well but they are wrong.

2) the person espousing their "solution" is lying. They have an ulterior motive other than fighting global warming.

 

That is absolutely true.
Is there a problem? yes.
Is it productive (or even true) to cry DOOM? no, not by a large margin.
Plus, is true that the global warming and pollution are different issues, with a not-so-direct relation, and we should be very careful in mixing them.

But let's treat it as "global enviromental problem". What can we do about it?

yes, recycling is a thing, simply because it lessens the amount of waste we produce.
We look at the sky and think "it's infinite, it can contain an infinite amount of smoke"; we look at the sea and think "it's infinite, it can contain an infinite amount of waste". Except they are not infinite, and we can see it when we need to use masks in certain big cities when smog becomes relevant, and when we discover that the fishes we eat contains particles of plastics. So yes, to reduce the amount of waste by recycling is simply a reasonable way to reduce the indirect damage we do to ourselves.


however, it doesn't address the issue, which can be summarized in 4 simple steps:
- our society needs energy,
- the request for energy is only going to increase,
- the fabled green, renowable energy sources, are simply unable to provide that amount of energy.
- we are not acting as a single entity. Every measure we take will be almost worthless if not taken on a planetary scale, and that's not going to happen.


so, what can we possibly do? I'm not sure i know the answer.

Funnily enough, nuclear power is actually the "greener" source of energy we have.

 

I concur. I think we reached this agreement before. That would help. In the United States we have a good place to put nuclear waste. We have a big desert without tectonic fault lines, but a tiny number of NIMBYs are blocking it.

NIMBY stands for "Not in my Backyard"

NIMBYs are the cause of most local problems, but that's another topic. Essentially there is a homelessness problem on the United State's blue cities because the well-to-do all say they want to help alleviate poverty but they will piss and moan if a zoning committee proposes to build a unit of low income housing is built near where they live. Because that will lower their property value and 80% of their net worth is in their home, so they will watch their local zoning board like a hawk and squash any attempt to make housing more affordable.

 

Of all of the Ukrainian Analysis podcasts I have listened to, in my opinion this is most informative and intelligent one.

 

BP may be the world's fifth largest oil company but they are probably the most reprehensible one.



I immediately thought of the South Park Season 14 depiction of them.



Here is the real video they were mocking.

 

This is why I do not like Elon Musk. The video does end on a positive note. Electric cars in the future might be less better. But the current electric cars are not eco-friendly or human friendly.

 

Here's some hard hitting news.



If you want a detailed dive into the Ukraine War with nice visuals, check out Kings and Generals video series.

 

Here's a current event that is positive, not gloomy, and a big deal for a history buff like me.

 

Putin used to be the head of the KGB. Remember, you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

 

The Hot Fuzz quote is pretty accurate

 

Basically, the government tries to minimize it and cover the damage done as much as it can?
CCP is not that far, after all.

 

There were three train derailments in the last 72 hours, the Ohio one is just the messiest. Train derailments have been slowly ratcheting up the last several years.

American railroads were nationalized during WWI and Obama, Trump, and Biden have all loosened train safety regulations in their tenure.

When Covid shut down large segments of the economy, it created a backlog in all forms of shipping rail included, which has incentivized a lot of companies to cut corners on train safety in order to move more freight more quickly.

EPA said the Ohio thing is fine but we need to ban gas stoves.