Climate change activists

In My Humble Opinion
21

One part of that efficiency is not talked much about: Virtually all Formula 1 cars are hybrids now.

Turns out that in electric motors, maximum torque is produced from the get-go and regular engines had to deal with turbo lag so in formula 1 that was one very important reason to go that way; and as Formula E racing is showing to be viable, there is little reason not to see Formula 1 to also become fully electrical in the future.

How Do Electric Formula E Cars Work? - Season 2 Tech Explained


[On edit:]

Yep, and we should support car makers that are working to make those spectators stop their emissions.

22

Reducing carbon footprint by generating with renewable resource is only a small part of the answer, maybe even the smallest.

Less use of energy is the big one, which means washing in the sink instead of dishwashers, turning off air con, turning off central heating making clothes last longer instead of wearing ‘fast fashion’ - which is just another term for disposable.

Not redecorating your home every few months, using less water, not using water for non essentials such as car washing etc. Filling up and emptying pools almost every day - especially things like paddling pools, not running hot tubs all the time.

Making everything you buy last much much longer is more energy efficient - however its not going to fill the pockets of business

Plugging up all the leaks in the water distribution system - up to a third of all water is wasted in this way - but of course this eats into the utility company profits.

One of the big con tricks is related to cars - although newer cars are more energy efficient, the largest single energy cost of a car is in manufacture - yet here we find that electric cars are heavily promoted and will likely become compulsory in the middling future - and factor in the cost of disposal of said electric cars and all those batteries. The most energy efficient way is to massively extend the life of cars.

In the Netherlands cycling from place to place is the default - but generally were are too indolent and fat to concern ourselves with the concept of using ourselves as personal mobility systems - it has taken them decades to develop road and infrastructure so that cycling is a viable way to live, but most of us live in societies where amenities and shopping are centralised miles away from our residences.

These are all easily done things, some cost money, some require political intervention - but we are not like that, we tend to have a ‘dog in a manger’ attitude - why should I feel uncomfortable turning off air con if others are not doing it? There is a certain spoiler way of thinking - perhaps the greatest change to the use of resources is none of the above -----
Its about changing our collective attitude right through society - there are too many self interested and greedy folk about for that though.

23

Short reply: that is very simplistic, and as noted before I have noticed that guys like Lomborg are doing the real con by pointing just at simplistic things like that and ignoring the big picture, just for starters the manufacturing of newer cars is more efficient than before, the battery is the main issue here but new developments can also reduce the energy needed to manufacture them. Even so, right now the energy costs are really less for electrical vehicles.

For a longer answer one should check the investigation of this car misleading point from Lomborg and others from science writer Peter Hadfield:

Are electric cars really green? An investigation of Bjorn Lomborg’s claims.

24

How about sitting home alone in the dark? Is that ok to do?

25

I don’t have a car. I don’t have a dishwasher. I have two air conditioners, both broken. I don’t have a hot tub or a swimming pool. I haven’t gone to any big festivals because they’re too expensive.

I do eat red meat. But I have diabetes, so I won’t live to ninety or anything.

So get off my fucking back.

26

Well, one thing to mention here, there are ways to continue to get red meat or great substitutes with less emissions.

[QUOTE] Conventional meat production causes harm to our environment and presents risks to global health, but people aren't going to eat less meat unless we give them alternatives that cost the same (or less) and that taste the same (or better). In an eye-opening talk, food innovator and TED Fellow Bruce Friedrich shows the plant- and cell-based products that could soon transform the global meat industry -- and your dinner plate. [/QUOTE]
27

Of course you and I know that(I did say power unit and not engine, afterall) but that’s a fair point to bring up in the interest of fighting ignorance.

28

I would like an answer for this question, it’s the one thing that stood out on the list - all the others are big international sports and entertainment things that involve lots of people flying internationally (which is a huge contributor - skipping one transatlantic flight is better than *2 years *of not eating meat.) but holiday fireworks shows are usually local phenomena, aren’t they? It’s not like the amount of fireworks they burn would be a significant greenhouse gas addition- figures I can find are something like the 18 000 USA 4th of July shows = 12 000 cars emissions. So that’s 2/3 of 1 car’s per show. Small potatoes, really. And that’s not even considering the shows, like Sydney’s NY one, which are actively made to be carbon neutral.

I know there’s other pollution issues involved, but purely from a climate change perspective, this one list entry made me go “?”.

29

I can’t speak for any particular group of climate activists, but most of them are quite aware that individual choices can make only a small dent in global warming: worldwide action at the governmental level is needed to make a real difference.

So the main goal of climate activism is simply to raise popular awareness of the urgency of the issue, and get people to pressure their governments to mobilize.

If nobody even thinks about global warming, nothing will get done. If people are thinking about it, there’s still all too great a chance that our response will be too little, too late. But if people are thinking and talking about it, there’s at least a chance we’ll do what needs to be done in the limited time we’ve got.

30

The only thing I can think of is that the other examples are 10’s of thousands of people traveling a long way to watch, while fireworks are a shorter travel distance but by perhaps 100’s of millions worldwide. Other than that, I got nothin’.

31

Data time.

The amount of electricity generated in the US peaked in 2005 and has declined steadily since recovering from the Great Recession.

Since the US population has increased during that time, the consumption per capita has declined about 3%.

Have we been regressing towards the stone age? Of course not!

Note also how production using coal and oil has dropped quited a bit. Natural gas has taken up most of the slack but renewables are becoming a a factor.

In terms of CO2 it’s a lot better to burn natural gas than coal.

So we’ve been cutting back on CO2 production in an important sector of the economy and I don’t see anyone wearing bear skins around.

It was mentioned the stone age thing is a straw man argument. It’s important to distinguish between two types of straw man arguments.

  1. Ones that make you think (even if misleading).
  2. Ones that make you stop thinking. (Being misleading is the whole point.)

This is the latter.

The OP needs to ask why someone wants them to stop thinking?

32

Because they don’t use a lot of fuel and resources. We could cut every form of entertainment, and it wouldn’t make much of a difference since they consume a very small sliver of our total energy and resource use.

That’s in absolute terms, which are sometimes not the best tool, but entertainment is insignificant in per consumer terms as well.

It’s illogical to suggest that cutting emissions even by draconian means would send us back to pre-industrial times, unless car pooling is pre-industrial, eating less soy-fed beef is pre-industrial, not flying to Mexico for vacation is pre-industrial.

It’s not easy, and it’s likely people’s strong relative sense of deprivation will doom the necessary changes, but that will be because of nonsense claims that we have to go pre-industrial, not because we actually have to go pre-industrial.

33

Simple example: plant more trees. Actually, 1 trillion more trees. I don’t know about the US but India’s on it.

I have a healthy dislike for all kinds of activists, especially the ‘human rights’ and ‘environmental’ variety. Usually come with nefarious political agendas. In India these “activists” played such dirty political games that many got booted out, including Greenpeace, supposedly the top dog in the activism industry. Having been booted out of India, Greenpeace is now singing a different tune.

Also I don’t need a fucking activist to tell me to respect human life and the environment - that comes implicitly to me, and I suppose to every sane person in the world.

34

U.S. Fossil Fuel Subsidies Exceed Pentagon Spending

Stop paying insanely wealthy corporations to pollute?

35

Either most people in the world are insane, or your supposition is wrong. Even without the impending environmental impact of climate change people all over the world are currently making decisions that lead to habitat destruction and extinction.

36

I think it’s really simple: We need governments to stop subsidizing fossil fuels.

Burning fossil fuel has a cost, in terms of pollution (including CO2). Right now, you can burn fossil fuels and not pay for cleanup of pollution. That’s an unfair subsidy.

And that’s not even getting into massive foreign aid & military spending that goes into safeguarding our supply of oil. We wouldn’t have spent >$2 trillion dollars on a war in Iraq if that part of the world didn’t produce oil.

37

This is just a strawman attack on climate activists. You are making up things that you think they want, and attacking that.

38

IMO a lack of choice mostly explains it for the majority of people playing a role in environmental degradation. For example, forest-dwelling communities in India that for ages fiercely protected their forests began to destroy them when their survival was at stake - many reasons including population and economic pressure. Plastic bags provide unbeatable economic value compared to other materials, which are even today mostly unavailable in large parts of India. People did not mindlessly destroy their own ecosystems until industrialization arrived and made it both necessary and expedient to do so.

39

I’m a fan of the Carbon Tax. Free market magic is often oversold, but I think this is the type of problem it is well suited for. Environmentally unfriendly options will be less appealing, but if it is really important, then we can pay the tax. People with small carbon footprints, like Two Many Cats will be relatively unaffected, and no one’s telling Dallas Jones what to do.

The only real drawback is that it deters the poor more than the rich, though a lot of the rich are price conscious.

40

At the policy level, there doesn’t need to be a one-size-fits-all solution, but it can be a combination of different factors: add more solar, add more nuclear, increase fuel efficiency, make better dwellings, promote electric cars, research more technologies. Stabilization wedges: https://cmi.princeton.edu/wedges/intro (more like pie slices in that each slice/wedge can be a part of the whole).

Nobody is really calling for primitivism. More like, look at California and its climate initiatives (municipal climate adaptation plans, passenger car fuel economy, cap and trade, renewable energy mandates, EV subsidies, residential code improvements, etc.) It still somehow manages to be one of the world’s biggest economies.

The biggest barrier to climate change action can be summed up in one word: Republicans.

At the individual level, it doesn’t really matter what you do. Fly all you want, eat all the beef you want, just don’t ever vote Republican and actively get them out of office.

Climate change is no longer a scientific or engineering problem. It is a problem of Republican propaganda and corruption of electoral processes. What it is, is a crime against humanity.

If you don’t believe in the participation of federal politics, you can also tackle it (less efficiently) at the state or local levels. That’s what campaigns like the Sierra Club’s Ready for 100 (percent clean energy) campaign is all about: bypassing Republican stonewalling and working directly with local governments to move forward on climate action.

350is another group advocating policy solutions at both the national and local levels. For example, they work with communities to create cleaner grid mixes (the mix of generation technologies used in a given area) through programs like community choice aggregation, which lets ratepayers/voters in an area democratically opt-in to cleaner energy mixes (more renewables, less fossil fuels). These days, the cost increase is minimal to none.

None of this requires primitivism. Most of it isn’t even visible to the average person. The engineering is there. The political will is what’s missing. The Republicans are who’s stopping it.