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my mind rapidly shifts from defeatism to optimism practically every week
Nuclear is the way to go. If we can’t manage that we never had a shot as an intelligent race to begin with.
indoor farming
This is opposite of reduction of enviromental harm
I worry that climate defeatism has become a religion, and it will be difficult to separate it from policy discussion going forward.
climate defeatism has become a religion
Going outside to 90⁰ weather in October is a religion?
No. Climate defeatism is.
If the sum total of “Say no to climate defeatism” is “Don’t feel bad during the latest in a series of historic heat waves”, then you’re not arguing against defeatism. You’re arguing for denialism.
Don’t feel bad during the latest in a series of historic heat waves
Good thing nobody actually said that, then.
A few folks I know switched smoothly from “climate change is fake” to “maybe it’s real but there’s nothing we can do about it at this point. Might as well live it up.” Basically anything to avoid change at any level.
I think that’s the defeatism they’re talking about here, not people pointing out the issues.
A few folks I know switched
All of that is just cope, though. Speed running denialism to acceptance. The bottom line is that - individually - there’s nothing any one of us is going to do to stop Indonesia from building a new coal plant or end fracking in West Texas or stop whatever the fuck this is…
These are large scale socio-economic problems stemming from an industrial system that does not need to account for its waste byproducts. “Well, you should just believe that climate change is real but also believe its fixable” is the correct sentiment. But simple sentiment has no impact on policy.
I think that’s the defeatism they’re talking about here
I have spent my entire life hearing people in positions of authority talk about climate change and watching the institutions they lead ignore the impacts whenever a change in policy might detrimentally affect domestic economic growth rates.
That’s why my heart is filled with doomerism. Even when we know, and even when we (superficially) acknowledge we can change the policy, the folks at the controls… don’t do it.
Almost as if the people in charge of oil and coal and such want us to be fighting about this type of shit…
Things just shifted instantly from “nothing needs to be done” to “nothing can be done.”
The Climate Denier’s prayer:
The climate isn’t changing,
and even if it was,
It’s not humans that are causing it,
and even if we are,
It’s better for the economy if we ignore it,
and even if that’s not true,
There’s nothing we can do about it anyways.
It’s not always up to us, but also countries like China that open a new coal plant every week.
Per capita energy use in China is under the threshold for sustainable usage, and they’re hitting their climate goals a decade early.
Meanwhile, Europe remains a dumpster fire of emissions, while heavily consuming from China’s surplus manufacturing.
Pointing to the other side of the ocean and saying “You guys need to fix it” has been an American remedy for too long. Now we’re eating hurricane after hurricane as recompense.
Gotta power the factory that has to send garbage to america
i don’t think china is the example you want to point to on that…
Ah yes I also forgot India.
But yes, China:
https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-worlds-coal-power-plants/
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/02/27/energy/china-new-coal-plants-climate-report-intl-hnk/index.html/
https://www.carbonbrief.org/china-responsible-for-95-of-new-coal-power-construction-in-2023-report-says/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/10/climate/coal-plants-china.html
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-six-times-more-new-coal-plants-than-other-countries-report-finRenewable energy means nothing if you’re also poisoning the planet now does it?
none of these seem to factor in co2 per capita.
https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-per-capita/
The Eastern Block states simply aren’t to blame here. They have low per capita emissions and large populations.
China, in particular, is right on target thanks to its all-options energy growth strategy.
China is one of the world’s largest producers of nuclear power. The country ranks third in the world both in total nuclear power capacity installed and electricity generated, accounting for around one tenth of global nuclear power generated.
Why perchance has the interest in a self-sustaining life skyrocketed you think? Could it be because people can barely afford food anymore?
Not just that, it’s a combination of factors. Sustainable thinking, independence, a connection to the world and self and much more.
One day I will die, and sooner than I wish. Maybe some effects of climate change will do me in. At least nobody can say I haven’t done what I could to stop it. It’s what I do for a living.
thank you.
I approve of the overall message but indoor farming is kind of insane in the present day. It uses incredible amounts of energy and our scarce building materials to do something we can do much more easily outside.
Long term it might be important but I don’t think it makes sense until we solve the current energy crisis.
I think it’s outweighed by the possibilities of hydroponic farming to reduce overall land (and therefore fossil fuel) use for agriculture.
Do hydroponic plants have fewer nutrients compared to soil grown plants?
No worries for pesticides or water use, as well.
Initial upfront costs are heavy but you would be saving all of the transport and logistics costs for the lifetime of the facility. Aeroponics are also a lot less resource intense than growing in the dirt.
Especially for some crops, like leafy greens. Having a semi-sterile environment can also mean pesticide-free crops. (Or at least, that’s my understanding).
Way less water use and transport costs for a superior (fresher, postcode free) product.
It only makes sense for some crops, though. Ain’t nobody growing watermelons or carrots in urban vertical farms.
Has anyone broken down the difference in energy between artificially creating growing conditions in the middle of cities compared to just transporting the food from where it grows easily? Trains and ships which transport most food are incredibly energy efficient per ton transported
Trains can transport one ton of goods 470 miles on one gallon of fuel and ships can transport one ton of goods 600 miles on one gallon of fuel. If a urban farm can produce one ton of food it needs to consume less than a few gallons of fuel’s worth of energy in lighting and other city-specific infrastructure in order to come out ahead of growing food where it grows best
Not in energy requirements when the sun is free and electricity and lightbulbs are not.
Transporting food halfway across the world ain’t free either.
Absolutely. Doesn’t change my point. Just brings up a different one.
It does change your point because you need to look at the total energy cost, not just a single part.
Transport costs are enormous. The land you’re talking about using could be used to generate even more power with renewables.
Using solar panels to power artificial lighting so you can vertically stack farms directly inside cities doesn’t make any sense from a sustainability perspective.
But greenhouses in the suburbs that are tied into the city’s thermal grid and seasonal thermal energy store is the future of agriculture IMO.
By enclosing fields in greenhouses you decrease the land, water, pesticide, and fertilizer requirements, while also eliminating fertilizer runoff and the possibility of soil depletion from tilling. By tying a greenhouse into a thermal grid the greenhouse can act as a solar thermal collector in the summer while maybe even condensing the water that evaporates through the plants for reuse. Then you can use that same heat to heat homes during the winter or extend the growing season in the greenhouse even further.
https://www.renewableenergymagazine.com/storage/world-s-largest-thermal-energy-storage-to-20240409
https://ag.umass.edu/greenhouse-floriculture/fact-sheets/heat-storage-for-greenhouses
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/152874/a-greenhouse-boom-in-china
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/150070/almerias-sea-of-greenhouses
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2022/netherlands-agriculture-technology/ (Yes I know they use artificial lighting in a lot of these, and yes I know a lot of the value of their agricultural exports comes from flowers, but the point is it’s another example of large scale greenhouse use. Also they do still produce quite a bit of food in a small area, in addition to the flowers.)
Don’t forget the huge investments by cities to build public and active transit. My city has invested over $1B into rail expansion projects and $500M into BRT. They’re currently tearing up half of downtown to build bike lanes and bus lines. Things are changing more quickly than they seem. My city also advocated for a state law that was passed to fund passenger rail between 2 large nearby cities
Acknowledging reality is not the same thing as defeatism or “not doing anything.” I’d argue that putting your head in the sand and ignoring news/information you don’t like is more damaging and closely related to the majority of the world’s efforts over the past 50+ years.
Yep.
One could also show the same meme template with stats where every bad development is even accelerating, spikes in co2-rise, record new numbers of consumption and pollution, the Amazon and other carbon sinks getting razed at growing speeds, a lot of carbon sinks turning into carbon emitters, nations voting for extremists who don’t care for ecology, glaciers and sea ice melting, all sorts of storms getting stronger and more destructive, the speed with which we are approaching or already have reached tipping points globally and locally…
Yeah, but let’s soothe ourselves with… cosmetics? I’m not denying that there’s some positive changes but that’s like trying to extinguish a house burning to the ground and engulfed in flames with one bucket of water.
My take is: People want to have a better world without changing their lifestyle - simply leave everything as it is and make it in some magical way non destructive and non polluting. EVs are a shining example of that - still ridiculous use of resources, but somehow they are “better”.
If you think that way you are part of the problem and part of its denial.
That is a good point about not wanting anything to change. We can not continue to live how we’ve lived if this will be solved. Reductions in population should help reduce demand and land use (enforced with law, of course), but some things people enjoy will have to go. You don’t need to eat foods grown thousands of miles away or to eat beef every day. You may have to endure temperature discomfort, lose personal transportation options, etc. Even these things are small, government (especially militaries) and business will need to be held to account and have their emissions massively reduced.
Thinking everything is fine leads to apathy. Thinking there’s nothing we can do leads to apathy. The correct thought is that it’s bad, but we can fix it.
The correct thought… Wow, you solved the climate.
Sorry for being sarcastic. This take has been proven wrong for… forever? Humankind will not fix anything - we will do too little too late and suffer through the consequences as we always did.
I’m not saying it’s not worth a try. I’m saying it won’t work because not everyone is trying. By far not everyone.
Not everyone is as clever as you. Most people need hope in order to get motivated to take action. Being able to try your hardest without any hope based motivation is the sign of an iron will. It’s very rare. You should tell all the less exceptional people to have hope, because that’s how you get them to do things.
Those less exceptional people can fuck off. I have watched them mindlessly destroying our ecosphere for over 40 years now, and they are unstoppable in doing so (at least unstoppable by other humans; nature and physics will bite their ass, that’s for sure).
The reason why I don’t believe anything relevant will change: I’ve seen it. I’m a lifelong ecological activist (started in my early teens in the wake of Club of Rome; I’m nearing 60 now). Did a lot of activist stuff, always voted or volunteered for the green(er) parties, lead a local committee promoting preservation of nature and wildlife, tried to introduce carsharing in my community in the early 90s (boy, were they unready for that), live and promote a frugal lifestyle, no flights, no car, small flat, go around on my bike and on public transport, keep meat consumption low, wear out my stuff, etc.
And yes, there were changes in public, too. The people knew and know everything about those problems, the talk is all over the media, they get it crammed in their faces, ecology is a huge part of education and it even became a part of the lifestyle.
So I had hope, and I believed in solutions and in a change. And you know what? It all kept getting worse, and worse: It all KEEPS getting worse. Humans are not thinking ahead, they consume mindlessly. They are idiots, and when they will realise that we did too little too late then it really will be too late. It already is too late for most of humankind. (It’s in the physics of the problem, closed system etc.)
And you know what? I’m fine with that. They want it, they get it.
Sorry for drowning you in my rant. I’m bitter about the kids. We could have had it all and given them a nice working world, and instead we opted for the SUV and the cheap flights to be more important.
Those less exceptional people can fuck off. They can so fuck off.
If you’re convinced they’re so inferior, then how does letting them die make more sense than manipulating them into doing what you want? You know what they should be doing. They should be saving the world. If you’re better than them, then be a leader. Tell them what they need to hear to do the right thing. Genocide is much less fun than domination.
Is it defeatist to face the facts that we have released more carbon in 2023 than any other year? Is it defeatist to realize not only are we polluting non-stop, we are also destroying the oceans, we are destroying ecosystems and we are destroying ourselves at a rate that we can’t control? That a majority of people are content living their lives this way if it means they don’t have to make the hard choice of having and using less? We’re already well past 1°C and are not going to slowdown it seems until its too late.
CO2 emissions of the world excluding China have declined. Chinas emissions did fall in Q2 of this year.
Seriously China has economic trouble, which slows down energy demand growth. The US has run the massive inflation reduction act, which seems to be working somewhat well and Europe was hit hard by the energy crisis reducing emissions in the EU through lower consumption and faster green roll out and Russia as its fossil fuel exports fall. On top of that green technologies like solar panels, wind trubines, electric vehicles, heat pumps and so forth become cheaper all the time. It is certainly possible that we can achieve peak emissions soon.
I think it won’t matter. We have enough heat in the pipeline to wipe the surface of the Earth. Here’s a crisis report from Richard Crim saying, in essense, we done fucked up
This is MY OPINION, not “science”.
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
🤨
You forgot the first bit
Warning, it’s not “good news”. I think we fucked up so badly that quiet literally a “Dark Age” is coming. This is a rough “first pass” of how some new papers are coming together for me.
Followed by
Short Takes: The evidence accumulates that the “Climate Sensitivity” estimate in our models is BADLY off.
One of the things that stuck in my head was the finding that there was an apparent pattern of +8°C temperature increase for each doubling of atmospheric CO2 (2XCO2).
Very alarming if accurate.
Maybe these are just the transition costs
At least partly. No one seems to take into account the carbon costs of manufacturing things like solar cells, stuff like that.
Whoa, whoa, street-preacher.
No, it’s not defeatist to state facts. It’s what you do or say immediately after that makes the difference.
Now, we’re all feeling the same kinds of stress that would make any of us rattle on like that, and you must know you’re not alone or even in the minority with your concern. The majority of people - polls show - want to avoid or to blunt that fate we worry is coming. And with the world swinging a little conservative for a while, it’ll be even harder to make the changes now we had to make 20 years ago.
But trust in your fellow person instead of cursing them for indolents when you don’t know their situation. If you go off like this at people on the edge of moving from subsistence to again having the opportunity to join you at the protests, you may risk losing them as an ally.
Softly, softly.
I am cursing myself for being too weak to do the necessary, to give up on the unnecessary plastic junk, to give up on driving and all the industrial products that are slowly killing us in one way or another. If I can’t do it how can I preach doing what is necessary to others? I feel like a hypocrit, caught between a fossil fuel filled life of comfort and a future of hardship that I feel fully unprepared to even talk about, never mind living through
Interest in solar panels has skyrocketed, and yet at least 50% of the world population won’t stop driving ICE cars to work every day any time soon. While the ocean surface temperatures are on an exponential trajectory.
A climate catastrophy with mass deaths is inevitable. I’d be preparing instead of sugar-coating.
And after a few billion humans die, we can deploy solar panels and start living sustainably.
It’s like praising all the cabin cars getting repainted with eco-friendly paint while the train has already gone off the cliff and is plunging toward the ground.
Try looking at facts. Data. Or, rather, don’t if you don’t want to become depressed.
Defeatists are just lazy. Call them out for being unwilling to actually do something about the climate.
One could argue that people who soothe themselves with cosmetics are the ones who are unwilling to really tackle the problem. See my other comment for details.
Solar is cheaper than ever? I mean sure, but you still have to pay for it upfront, and by the time you got your money back you need some new panels. Also i like solar power and everything, but i’m not at home during the day, so i would produce energy for no one. Or i’d get a big ass battery, which is super expensive and doesn’t last as long as the panels. And no, where i live, you don’t get any money anymore for the extra power you produce.
It’s also cool that the ocean is being cleaned, but we’ll just produce more garbage in shorter time. So far we did plastic straws, which was a big thing that a lot of people are still mad about. And it was just basically a marketing campaign because a turtle had a straw in it’s nose. The garbage that is being fished out of the ocean doesn’t just disappear. It’s better than chilling in the ocean i guess, but it’s still garbage twice the size of texas that has to be delt with.
As to solar, payback is usually 7-15 years depending on overhead costs, while most panels are still at 80% output in 20 to 25 years. Batteries don’t last as long as panels when being used to near capacity, but they’ll still do about half the lifespan of the panels. Batteries prices are also falling about as quickly as panel prices, with us now being in the neighborhood of 100 dollars per kwh of storage.
I also think it’s a bit of a misnomer, especially on this instance, to consider these things completely dead and worthless at 80% effectiveness, especially when that is still far more effective than a brand new top of the line one a decade ago. I think that there are a lot of people in the world who wouldn’t mind the system taking up 25% more space if they could get them much cheaper, it’s just that much like EV battery range, a lot of people are finding that they don’t really need to replace the thing away at 80% capacity in the first place.
For your first point, sure let’s consider that the case, then the old panels can be recycled and you get more efficient ones, not a bad trade.
Also, share with your neighbour the extra energy? Or contact your municipal office to pass a tax cut/payback? There’s so much opportunity there! (Just imagine if your city passes such an initiative and others adopt too! Less reliance on fossil fuels!)
On your second point, yeah, we need more innovation in recycling technology. Hopefully we get there too 😊
Also the US is at about 40% carbon free energy production (renewables + nuclear), which is pretty swag.
