You are following the Part Line - the Republican and energy company Party Line. Try following the Science Line and help our children.
ETA: The current Republican party line that is. Not the line of Nixon and McCain, who actually gave a shit.
Are you equating companies that dump waste to save a buck with companies that make the car that you, I and everyone else in this thread drive? Or with that computer you used to type this…and the power used to run it??
Is it for their own wealth? Fuck yeah it is. But you know why they get wealthy? Because we all use that shit. You, me and MostlyClueless, along with hundreds of millions of others. They aren’t putting a gun to our collective heads to buy cars or burn those Christmas lights, we are telling them in the aggregate that this is what we want and they are fulfilling that.
As for the question in the OP, both my kids are old enough and havbe good enough educations to understand the problem and try to minimize their energy usage, but not radically.
An interesting question is what happens when the problem becomes too obvious even for people like Trump to ignore. Will the deniers say “nobody told me. How was I to know?”
‘Who knew the climate was so complicated??’…
I basically wouldn’t count on denier types ever coming around. I don’t expect left wing eco-loonies to ever come around to fission nuclear energy either. Basically, if they haven’t figured it out yet, they never will. That’s why I said, it’s going to be market forces that have the most impact on this. My take is that, like other dead end thinking, eventually it will just go out of favor as the old folks who are really invested in it die off and new folks come in with clearer heads. Even today, you have folks who deny evolution, and that’s been well over a hundred years at this point. But, it’s a pretty marginalized group, IMHO. Climate deniers I think will be the same…plus, if I’m right, it will be moot, since we will already be doing stuff to decrease carbon emissions by buying greener stuff. Not because someone told us we should or because the government forces us to, but because it’s better than the old stuff, and we wants it, yes precious, we wants it. We didn’t switch off of horses and buggies because the government told us too, nor because horses became scarce, but because cars, eventually, were better for the majority and what we wanted to do.
Mod Hat On
General note that to keep this thread to the topic at hand- how are you raising your kids under the presumption of a credible threat of climate change.
Some thread drift is normal, but a full on debate of climate change is better suited for a different thread.
XT, that is such an optimistic view, but I doubt it is enough to even make a dent.
The problem is there are too many humans on this planet. Sure, that’s been said before and we’ve always found a way out. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you. When the expanding human population is having a dramatic effect on the planet’s climate, I think it’s safe to say, yeah, there are too many people.
Sure, we’ve (mostly) solved the problem of not enough food. And, of pestilence and disease. But, the solutions just encourage more people, and it’s getting to the point where things that were considered ubiquitous a few generations ago (water, room to expand, wildlife) are now considered luxuries. If we solve these problems, it will just allow more people to fill in the gaps and further reduce the diversity of life on the planet. Reducing the diversity of life on the planet is not the direction we need to go.
To me, it seems obvious that if we keep our current course we’ll be doomed within 100 years, we are already doomed, since our current course is expanding exponentially. That is, if we stopped all further growth, we’d be doomed in 100 years. We obviously aren’t going to stop further growth, so the obvious outcome is some cataclysmic result that is not going to be fun for anyone. We really are at the point where we should be figuring out how to deal with a declining population, not trying to figure out if a declining human population is what is best for the planet.
If you really believed in climate change and understood the root causes, IMHO, you would not have children. If your understanding of the situation was only realized after you had reproduced, the only reasonable action would be to convince your offspring not to reproduce. While your offspring’s lack of children is not likely to have a strong effect on the future, you may rest easier knowing that you’re lowering the amount of suffering your progeny will experience (if only by reducing the number of your progeny).
The people you’re thinking of deny that climate change exists, period. We do not.
I have a 1-year-old son and my wife and I hope to adopt a daughter soon. When my children are old enough to understand the topic, I will talk with them about it. I will also encourage them to read from a variety of sources with different opinions about this topic, and about every topic. But an outline of my personal opinion that I will give them is as follows:
I. The climate of planet earth is warming, at a rate somewhere between .1 degree C and .2 degree C per decade.
II. The major driver of this is human emissions of carbon dioxide and other and other gasses. A remarkable number of intelligent people seem to think it’s only carbon dioxide, while ignoring the role played by methane and other gasses. (Also, many of them just say “carbon” rather than carbon dioxide.) It may be the case that some natural trends also contribute to global warming as well.
III. Some people blame capitalism for global warming. They should be blaming communism instead. China emits far more carbon dioxide than any other country, and the amount they emit is rapidly growing while the amount emitted by the USA is rapidly declining.
IV. People who tell you that global warming will ruin your life, destroy civilization, or leave the remnants of humanity scraping out a meager existence in a barren wasteland are wrong. We have no way of knowing exactly how it will play out over the next 50 or 100 years. The facts show no clear support for claims that global warming leads to more droughts, hurricanes, or tornadoes.
V. The most important reason why we don’t know the future is that we don’t know about which new technologies will be invented.
VI. The future well-being of humanity and other species depends not only on how much the world heats up, but also on how we prepare and respond. It is much better to suffer a major hurricane in a wealthy country with strong building codes and good emergency response, then suffer a minor hurricane in a poor country with no building codes and no emergency response. Wealthy countries also have better environmental policies and more protected land. So if you want to make the world better for humans and animals, work to build prosperous, democratic, free market societies.
VII. Many suggestions for helping the environment don’t actually help, or help very little. Recycling, for instance, accomplishes very little, even if your city isn’t among those that just dump “recyclables” into landfills.
VIII. Much “green” engineering and public works projects are a waste of time and money. Solar roads, for example. Politicians spend money on showy, high-tech projects like this because they want to get media attention and appear pro-environment. If they actually cared, they would just build an ordinary road and put solar panels next to it. That would reduce emissions a lot more at a much lower price.
IX. Personal choices are generally undermined by government policy. For example, some say we should stop eating meat in order to reduce emissions. It is true that large herds of cows, pigs, etc… contribute greenhouse gases. But suppose we actually got a sizable number of people to stop eating meat for this reason. What would happen? Farmers would go to Congress and complain about falling prices. Congress would pass new subsidies in order to “protect jobs”. The number of farm animals would stay the same, or possibly even increase.
X. So-called “environmentalists” often support bad policy that would increase emissions. To name just a few examples:
[ul]
[li]They oppose nuclear power, almost universally. France generates almost all its electricity by nuclear power. The USA could do so, if we hadn’t stopped builing nuclear plants in the 70’s. Our carbon dioxide emissions could be much lower.[/li][li]Genetically modified foods. They’re great, but many environmentalists oppose them for no good reason. GMOs allow us to grow more food on less land, using less water, less pesticide, and less fuel-burning machinery. If GMOs didn’t exist, emissions would be much higher.[/li][li]The ethanol mandate.[/li][li]Fracking. By producing bountiful natural gas, which emits less carbon dioxide per unit energy than coal,it reduces emissions. Environmentalists hate it. Go figure.[/li][/ul]
A lot of “green” guides basically say “throw away the things you’re using, and buy ours instead.” Um, no, in most cases. If I do anything like that, it’s because I used up the product and bought that one as a replacement.
Every day I think at least once that I’ve made a mistake in bringing a child into this world. He is doomed to deal with a potentially disastrous ecology, a tenuous economic situation, and a fractious society that shows signs of disintegration. I could do what everybody else I know is doing and simply ignore it knowing that I’ll likely be dead before the worst of it comes to fruition, but I can’t help but feel guilty about it. The worst part is that there’s nothing I can do about it. I am but one of 7 billion or so people, and who am I in that context? I can’t tell the other 5 billion people that they can’t live better lives because the lifestyle my child is being raised in has damaged things to such an extent that for them to live that way will wreck the planet beyond recognition.
And yet, I still have to work, which means driving. And I still have to pay the bills, heat my house, feed everyone, and somehow make all of that harmless while Jim Bob in Bumfuck rolls coal in his truck that gets 10 miles per gallon and votes for the dickbag that consistently vote to finish the destruction sooner rather than later.
If my son isn’t doomed my grandchildren will be. Of all the things I’ve done, that may end up being the most irresponsible. I love my son. How do I tell him that he’s screwed? How can he possibly understand how screwed he really is?
Some of you might read this and say I’m way off base, that I’m exaggerating the extent of the disaster that awaits us. Time will tell. I’d like to think that I am a rational, intelligent, thoughtful person. It would be easier if I were an idiot, because then I wouldn’t care.
I don’t think you’re off base about the extent of the disaster, but I do think the truly bad stuff won’t happen in your child’s lifetime.
Dude, Malthus called and he wants royalties. Either that or you need to update your info from the 60’s and stop reading the population bomb. I’m not being overly optimistic (certainly not in contrast to the gloom and doom you are putting out) about population growth. It’s pretty easy to look up. Just about everyone agrees that population will peak, at the current trend, at something like 10-12 billion people, then start a sharp decline. As societies get wealthier they have less kids…that’s not optimism, that’s fact. And even poorer societies are starting to trend downwards. One of the big ironies of China and the CCPs stupid one child policy is that, even before they put it in place the trend was downward…all the CCP managed to do was fuck up their population mix (and cause a ton of misery and suffering, things it excels at).
At the same time this is happening our technology is getting greener. Not because the government is forcing us to green technology against our wills, but because green is starting to make more sense and be competitive (especially with government incentives). Within 10 years I think battery powered cars will be seen as superior to ICE cars in every respect, both from a cost perspective and a performance perspective. There are already experimental technologies to take C02 out of the air, and I think this is going to accelerate, especially is someone comes up with a way to make a profit at it. Coal is already on it’s way out, and nothing Trump does is going to stop that trend (China is still the biggest user, but even they are starting to slowly move away from it to better technologies). Hell, just taking the ICE cars off the road is going to have a huge impact, let alone advances in power and battery technology and carbon capture. And I’m not even talking about things like advanced AI or advanced materials (or the 30 years out tech, fusion), this is just trends of stuff we have already, today. We could always fantasize…perhaps the public will have a change of heart and build a few fission nuclear power plants.
We aren’t doomed, not unless tomorrow we find out that there is a 300km asteroid or comet that’s going to hit the earth in that time frame, or if we get hit by a gamma ray burst or something along those lines. It’s not all going to be skittles and beer, for sure, but it’s not doom either.
Help me understand this. Electric cars still rely on fossil fuels from the electricity generated at the power plant. In many cases, it’s from burning coal, which emissions are much more harmful than burning gasoline. The one advantage I see from electric vehicles is that it shifts the pollution from the urban center where the cars are driven, to wherever the power plant is located.
A lot of current reporting and discussion on the latest predictions is deeply flawed, unfortunately. When the talking point becomes “The world is doomed in 12 years” the groundwork is laid for future “skeptics” and “critical thinkers” to, wrongly, reference the unfulfilled predictions of the IPCC report.
What the IPCC says is that without drastic measures in that short a time we will not be able to stop warming at 1.5C, and that long term consequences of that are more catastrophic than previously thought.
It’s like we’re on a truck loaded with eggs driving towards a patch of rough highway, with only a dodgy cruise control to adjust our speed. The scientists are saying:
- We have barely been braking, although we told you we should start, in fact we’re still accelerating.
- We redid the predictions for stopping the accelerations at 55 instead of 60, and they show that:
A: We need to start breaking really hard if we’re to stay at 55
B: And we’re going to break a lot of eggs at 55, but it will be fewer than 60 - Unless we start breaking in the next mile, it will get bumpier and bumpier after that.
Everyone is hearing “disaster in one mile!” though, so when things are just imperceptibly bumpier after a mile, they’ll congratulate themselves on not letting off the gas when they didn’t have to.
And this got pretty mixed up, but I’m posting it unadjusted, because I’m lazy.
But electric power generation is increasingly greener as well, shifting from coal and oil to natural gas. Plus wind and solar are increasingly in the mix. Then you have hydro, geothermal and nuclear, though that seems to be waning, sadly. If one assumes a greener grid, which is the trend, then as folks naturally switch to electric vehicles you are going to get less carbon emissions over the life of the vehicle than a new ICE car. You also won’t need big trucks moving fuel from refineries or ports to distribution centers to gas stations, all of which takes a hell of a lot of CO2 to accomplish.
The real issue is electric car performance, price and materials, all of which seem to be diminishing as time goes by (though I think materials is still going to be an issue when we start talking about building millions of these things a year…but it’s a solvable issue).
I think it’s fine…it’s a fairly good analogy. I’d say that the US is coasting, but coasting at 65 and our slowing is not very rapid. The EU is coasting at 60. China and India are hitting the gas, but they have a get out of jail free card so they won’t get any tickets any time soon, and while they are hitting the gas they are also doing a lot of work looking into new braking systems (or, in China’s case, stealing other countries braking systems, reverse engineering them and then making knock offs of the things on the cheap).
But you are right…a lot of folks in these type of threads lately are getting the wrong message and are all in full on gloom and doom mode. Which is pretty unhelpful. It’s not a cliff edge we will plummet off in 1 mile, it’s your rocky road. No matter what we do at this point, it’s going to be bumpy. If we continue down the same old path the ruts are going to get a hell of a lot bigger and the ride is going to be a lot bumpier. If we turn to the side, the ride is going to be bumpy as well, but there is a nice gradual upward slope that will slow us down enough that it will just be bumpy, not teeth rattling.
Car engines are very inefficient converters of energy, especially when you average all the time they spend idling or accelerating at not-ideal revs. Coal plants are not much better, but there is more potential for improvement and potential technological advances like carbon capture, than for gasoline engines.
Comparisons vary, since they have to make a lot of assumptions, and sometimes leave out important elements such as the emissions from production and transportation of gasoline, or the difference in emissions from recycling batteries and producing new ones, but at least some of them come out with no difference or the edge going to the electric car, even when using coal power.
Gasoline powered cars also stay polluting even if other energy production goes greener.
Well I should have used a train instead, one of those with multiple locomotives. The whole train is moving at the same speed, but some locos are using more of the coal than others. And the US has a lot more 1st class cars with cushy seats, while Bangladeshi are in a box car with open doors.
Maybe a while ago, but denying change at all is getting more and more untenable, so from what I’ve seen the party line for deniers is exactly yours - humans don’t contribute that much, it’s the sun, it happened in the past anyway, oh, 30 years ago they were predicting a new Ice Age.
I looked at a climate exhibit in a museum yesterday, and they specifically said humans were the major cause.
Here’s the thing. Climate change is a ship that has sailed. Oh sure, we’ll cut down on some emissions, but the writing is there. We haven’t even stopped emissions growth let alone worked on actually getting them out of the environment. The global emissions leaders are quickly becoming third world countries and you’re not going to convince them to let their people starve rather than take advantage of cheap energy, nor should we expect them to be convinced. Since 2000 when emissions really became a thing, the EU has cut emissions by a sizeable amount and the US has cut emissions by a less sizable amount. Everywhere else? Explosive growth. China is obviously the big dog with over three times the emissions it had in 2000, but India is catching up fast and the global south as a whole has increase emissions by around 50%. This game is over barring some sort of technological solution that we haven’t yet envisioned. I don’t want to be a jerk about it, but it’s true. We’re no longer in a place where we can talk about stopping climate change. Now it’s just about mitigating its effects. So what exactly am I supposed to tell the kids? I can either tell them horror stories about what their world is going to be. I can turn them into little environmental stormtroopers in a fruitless quest to stop a hurricane with a ceiling fan or I can raise them to be nice people who conserve what they can and let them worry about the impact of the change when they are older.