your “carbon footprint” doesn’t exist - it’s a fossil fuel industry talking point. eating less meat may be good for you and make you feel better about yourself, but it’s not a climate solution. we need systems change on a societal scale, and that’s the kind of thing that takes coordinated government action, not “voting with your wallet”
It can guide policy decisions (e.g. "Is it more important to subsidize/mandate sustainable meat production or phase it out all together?"), can make voters think differently about topics, which in turn influences politics (in democracies) and can be a simple way to put into perspective the impact of millionaires and billionaires compared to average people.
Also I've heard people justify flying a lot because the "carbon footprint" is made up by the fossil fuel industry, which in my eyes is the same argument as "My country only makes up X% of greenhouse emissions so we shouldn't implement a carbon tax/invest in renewable energy/... until China/the US do".
'Systems change on a societal level’s would mean either ending subsidies for animal agriculture in general, and investing that money into more sustainable food sources, or banning animal agriculture altogether. But every time this is mentioned, people throw a fit and threaten violent action because meat prices will go up and they feel entitled to their cheap burgers, no matter what the cost to the planet.
These pieces are not meant to shame you, they are meant to try to make people demand that these effective changes be made. But for as long as people insist that they shouldn’t have to change a single thing about their lifestyle, no change will ever get made.
And remember, biking or walking is no more environmentally sound - per person-km travelled, using a typical western diet - than a fuel-efficient automobile with a single passenger, but a private jet produces more than 10,000x the CO2 per km. Everyone can do their part to reduce overall CO2, but the rich and powerful are destroying the planet at a rate several orders of magnitude faster than you or I simply because it's convenient for them.
We should probably stop squabbling over who's corporate version of highly-processed, manufactured, plant-based meat and food products we're going to substitute for animal proteins if we really care about worldwide carbon levels.
And remember, biking or walking is no more environmentally sound - per person-km travelled, using a typical western diet - than a fuel-efficient automobile with a single passenger
Because of the extra calories you burn? Do you have a source for that?
Sure. This paper in Nature, estimates walking and cycling to generate 0.26 and 0.14kg CO2, respectively, given the diet in the most economically developed areas (I noted "typical western", not world wide or average) in my post). The EPA calculates gasoline at 8887g CO2 per gallon, so a car which gets 39mpg (note I mentioned fuel efficient - not average) is around 0.14 kg CO2 per km (8887/39mpg/1.628km) and a car which gets 21 MPG is around 0.26 kg CO2/km (which actually is close to the average vehicle).
Nature bases their estimates on full-replacement calories for the energy burned. YkmMV based on style, location, traffic, weather, and a bunch of other factors. Walking and biking is healthier for you and will likely extend your life and increase your resting metabolic rate (=the CO2 you create just lying about), but I'm not counting that against the walkers/bikers in this equation ;-)
Note: I walk quite a bit for fun - logged about 250km on my vacation last fall - and I bike when the weather is nice - often not even to go anywhere I need to; I'm just adding to the carbon problem for personal health and entertainment purposes.
You're comparing apples to oranges. The Nature paper includes all associated emissions for the food (using "air-freighted asparagus" as an example) while the EPA explicitly excludes non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions and emissions from production and distribution of both the fuel and the car. On top of that you compare the most efficient car of 2022 in a mixed (city+highway) environment (yes you mentioned efficiency) to the upper limit of what the Nature paper estimates (if all additional energy expenditure was compensated by additional food intake), while the realistic estimate is 0.15 and 0.08kg CO2 per km for walking and cycling respectively.
So there might well be a factor of 10 between cycling to the supermarket and taking your car in terms of GHG emissions. We just can't tell from the sources you linked. And while it's an edgy position to take "I'm just adding to the carbon problem for personal health and entertainment purposes" your claim might well convince people that moving away from a car based society would not have any impact on CO2 emissions. I also think you could make your point that rich people have a way outsized impact without all choices of normal people being exactly the same.
To be specific, exercise for health reasons increases CO2 levels for no reason other than to extend your life and, very possibly, to increase your muscle mass which increases your resting metabolic rate - you literally are generating CO2 with the effect of increasing your CO2 generation rate and the total duration you'll be producing CO2.
In a way, this hits exactly in my rant about where we worry about CO2 production: Getting out and getting in shape, or walking and biking places for fun is a negative but, like enjoying a reasonably-sized portion of animal protein in our diet, this is not the primary driver in causing Global Climate Change and there's a shit-ton of low hanging fruit (animal meat?) to be had but the people who make policy are the biggest offenders. We're literally banding together in the hundred of thousands to forego a chicken breast or hamburger so some celebrity can wipe out the entire savings by flying between their home and the harbor where their yacht is docked.
And remember, biking or walking is no more environmentally sound - per person-km travelled, using a typical western diet - than a fuel-efficient automobile with a single passenger
That’s not right. This studyabout biking vs driving with different diets. inflates the carbon output for bikers by subtracting the calories for car drivers, but not for bicyclists.
It assumes too much and is so generalized nothing can really be gleaned from the findings.
Walking and biking are more environmentally sound than driving
Not everyone drives a “fuel-efficient” car (25 mpg according to the article), in fact the most popular car being sold are Ford F150s with mpg around 15-20. And even mpg is not a constant if you consider traffic or inclination.
I 100% agree that the wealthy are killing us much much faster.
Also it assumes the increase in consumption from needing more calories will be uniform when my guess is it's not. Most people would have two servings of meat a day as a base augmented by a bunch of starches, sugars and fats to cover most of the calories, and any increases would probably be snacks of those starches and sugars that are way less co2 per calorie. If your diet is a stereotypical cheeseburger and fries, and your still hungry, your probably not gonna order another 1/4 cheeseburger and 1/4 fries, you'll probably just get another order of fries.
These type of things always crack me up because we all know that just living most of us are using 2k calories or so and if you ever used one of these excersise bikes that tracks calories burned it takes tons to do like 100 calories.
Animal products are incredibly harmful to the climate and are inherently wasteful.
Those corporations get their money from people like you.
Yes regulation would be the best to stop them but you know that's not gonna happen any time soon, especially when everyone refuses to change their own habits, politicians aren't gonna force through regulations that get people angry because they want their steaks.
Why do you want to continue to participate in something bad until it's legally not allowed anymore?
Why not do what you can (stop consuming animal products) while also advocating for regulation and political change?
What does holding evil corporations accountable look like if not refusing to give them your money?
this is one of those things that is true but taken to far. If I stop eating meat it will not end the meat industry but if I am I am supporting it and the carbon it uses to produce the meat I eat and buy. The more people who don't buy meat the more it becomes unprofitable versus growing food. That being said I eat meat and I am trying to limit beef as me going from eating beef to chicken/pork has a more massive effect than a person going from chicken to beans. Im surprised at lamb, shrimp, and chesse on the chart though and wonder about goats. I assume cheese assume from cow but given lambs numbers and that cheese is generally from cow, goat, sheep im not sure.
I'd like to add wind to my solar eventually. Multi-modal makes a lot of sense to me. Pretty sure my solar installers don't do that and I have no idea who does do that...if anyone. I'll investigate someday.
Oh man, If I was inclined to dox myself online I’d have a guy for you. A local construction company here has a green energy side company and they do both public and private installations of wind and solar, from large owners of open land, to farmers, to even residential. Hopefully theres something near you like that.
This is always a weird take to me because it always ignores the fact that nuclear has been screwed continuously for decades. If any other tecbology, renewable energy or not, had the same public and private blockers did it would also have no future.
Actually I do. I was a nuclear booster in the 1990’s because it means cheap limitless pollution free power.
Except that they don’t actually deliver on that promise. You can have safe nuclear or cheap nuclear, but if it’s safe it’s not cheap, and the public rightfully won’t accept something that can require evacuating hundreds of square miles for decades.
So wise one, where are those cheap safe nuclear power plants we keep hearing about since 1950?
Those are not at all cheap and are subsidized by enrichment for weapons purposes.
France is trying to extend their service lifetime beyond what they were designed for because they can’t face the bill to replace them with newer reactors.
Those are not at all cheap and are subsidized by enrichment for weapons purposes.
they aren't, and the whole anti nuclear power movement is just people who don't understand science not being able to tell the difference between a bomb and a power plant. I mean science education wasn't that great in midcentury america but today we can easily know better
So the user above me actually gave the the answer so kudos to them but to further answer your question, there are no actually cheap reactors because the fight to actually build one is so insanely expensive. Where I live they’d been trying to build a reactor for over a decade. Constant lawsuits and legal battles after already obtaining permits and everything. Its ballooned the cost by tenfold. Why? Because of constant NGO pressure from the likes of greenpeace. So congrats, you win. They aren’t cheap cause of the hell we’ve made for ourselves.
Are you unable to read or are you just ignoring what I’m saying on purpose. I told you why they’re badly over budget and late. This clearly is a dead conversation as you lack either a) reading comprehension or b) the ability to discuss in good faith.
Yeah, that doesn’t scale well at all. Batteries are expensive, dangerous (so lots of safety measures at scale), and consumable, which is why very few places actually try to store energy at any kind of scale.
Until we have a good, cheap way to store energy, solar will be a supplemental power source to help with peak demand in the daytime. So we’ll need something that’s reliable and inexpensive to provide power the rest of the time. For many areas, that’s coal or gas, but it could be nuclear. If people just accepted that nuclear is safe and effective, costs would come down.
Fukushima happened in “smart” Japan because it was cheaper to put the backup generators in the basement than to build a concrete podium taller than the tsunamis that previously hit the site.
Capitalism will always choose cost over safety. Even then nuclear ends up going way over budget.
indeed. also chernobyl and fukushima aren't comparable, really. I'd support a law that all new power reactors need to have passive cooling relying on the laws of physics, not relying on external power, but that's not a high bar and many designs already have it. remember that most currently operating reactors were built all at once in the mid 20th century and even then their safety record has been great. we can do better with new construction
Has there been a scenario where the technology itself is to blame? The contamination aspect of nuclear waste is well known and preventable, if costs are being cut on radioactive waste disposal (or in the case of a certain Japanese power company, ignoring warnings from the government on how to reduce ocean contamination in the event of an earthquake) a nuclear installation’s fate is sealed…
As far as I can see, the only downsides with nuclear IMO is that it takes multiple decades to decommission a single plant, the environmental impact on that plant’s land in the interim, and the initial cost to build the plant.
In comparison to Solar it sounds awful, but before solar, nuclear honestly would have made a lot of sense. I think it may even still be worth it in places that have a high demand for constant power generation, since Solar only generates while the sun’s about, and then you’re looking at overnight energy storage with lithium-based batteries, which have their own environmental and humanitarian challenges
yeah you can do throium, and there are some compelling reasons to, but uranium is fine enough. anti-nuke isn't about actual technical enlargements. the anti nukes hate nuclear fusion too
“Today there are about 440 nuclear power reactors operating in 32 countries plus Taiwan, with a combined capacity of about 390 GWe. In 2022 these provided 2545 TWh, about 10% of the world’s electricity.”
There have been two major reactor accidents in the history of civil nuclear power – Chernobyl and Fukushima Daiichi. Chernobyl involved an intense fire without provision for containment, and Fukushima Daiichi severely tested the containment, allowing some release of radioactivity.
Yes- a track record of one plant failing due to Soviet incompetence and political blunders; and the second failing due to checks notes a 9.0 magnitude almost direct earthquake and ensuing 133 ft tsunami.
Worth noting that the Fukushima disaster would have been prevented if they heeded warnings in a 2008 report that said their sea walls were too short, so again incompetence.
the earthquake didn't even damage the plant, they thought of that. the tsunami knocked out the power lines and bad generator placement led to loss of power for cooling. build reactors to passively cool themselves (which should just be a mandatory safety feature on new reactors tbh, it's not a big ask and improves safety a lot) and fukushima type accidents become impossible. that plant was so old that the original operating license was going to expire a week after the quake and the only guy who died had a heart attack. fukushima-sized death tolls happen in the rooftop solar installation industry every year, totally unreported.
you mean the part where it generated a shit ton of carbon free reliable power while killing fewer people per watt-hour what any other method? with outdated 60's technology too? yeah sure sounds like a failure
it always ignores the fact that nuclear has been screwed continuously for decades
On the contrary: I’d say it implicitly relies on that fact, which is why the argument that it takes 15 years to build is valid. Because nuclear has been screwed, there’s no pipeline of under-construction plants coming online any sooner than that.
It may not be fair that nuclear’s been screwed, but that doesn’t change history. The only thing that matters is what’s better when construction is starting in 2023.
And it is always a question how they calculated handling of nuclear waste.
There are options, we can use coal and natural gas for on demand power to fill the gaps in renewables, we don’t have to quit all at once. New ideas for energy storage and comming around, some of them might be useful for small towns, others for remote places.
I was considering whether this is just a shitpost, but your other comments suggest that you’re completely serious. It does not go away. Radioactive decay causes multiple transitions between radioactive elements until it ends up as lead, which does not decay further.
Of course, it should also be said that it’s better to have no waste than waste that eventually turns into lead.
And that it’s still better to have waste than waste which also happens to be toxic.
Waste from solar and wind is significantly more environmentally problematic than nuclear waste, which is safely stored in missile-proof caskets above ground. Solar panels cause all sorts of toxic compounds and heavy metals to be leeched into groundwater, and wind turbine blades have short lifespans before being buried or piled in heaps.
right, but when it lands at lead it's no longer radioactive waste, which is the part everyone's scared of. chemical waste doesn't just go away like that.
there is very very very little nuclear waste.this is complete handwringing. it can be buried and forgotten.
Bigger issue is the carbon costs and pay back periods. Nuclear (unless you’ve got sources otherwise stating) is green in it’s planning phase but not as often in execution. A shit ton of concrete is used, and the plants rarely operate at the capacity they are expected to (or have in the past). Open to revision but that’s my current understanding.
They are a massive upfront carbon cost and only become carbon neutral or negative relative to fossil fuels 20+ years down the line.
Do you have data on that? A modern nuclear power plant is going to be in the 500-1000+ MW range. I have a hard time imagining that even operating at half capacity that they do not offset the carbon used for concrete within a relatively short order. But if that is in fact the case I’d love to see data saying so, so that I can correct my thinking.
I think that’s too simplistic of a view. Part of the high cost of nuclear is because of the somewhat niche use. As with everything, economies of scale makes things cheaper. Supporting one nuclear plant with specialized labor, parts, fuel, etc is much more expensive then supporting 100 plants, per Watt.
I can’t say more plants would drastically reduce costs. But it would definitely help.
The source article actually talks about this and measured data suggests nuclear cost actually went up, despite more capacity being built.
This is the first time, I’ve read this anywhere. More sources/studies would be really important. And there is lots of interpretations to be had on the why, but assuming the article isn’t completely off the mark, that’s cold, hard data suggesting that your (perfectly reasonable) assumption is actually wrong, after all.
Interesting, I’ll have to look at the source article.
But as far as I’m aware the total amount of nuclear power has been decreasing in recent years. This might change with China’s future plants.
I’ve also read about small modular reactor designs gaining traction, which would help alleviate the heavy costs of one off plants we currently design and build.
Not saying the source is wrong, just saying that’s what I used to form my opinion.
bullshit regulatory costs can increase infinitely without nay change to the underlying engineering or economics. that's 100% the cause of the price increses
Possible. But well, whether these regulations actually are bullshit or not, kind of doesn’t matter. A dumb solar panel won’t ever need to be regulated as much. If that’s what makes it cheaper, it still is cheaper.
If you are hired to do a task and then overrun the budget by 14B$ I wouldn’t exactly call it furthering the cause. More like incompetence and/or trying to detail the project.
Cool, so you’re either going to have to completely get rid of all the nimbys and people that don’t understand nuclear, then build a massive population of qualified workers to build them and staff them and then fund them in the hundreds of billions for at least 2 decades to build up the knowledge base required to be able to build them quickly and efficiently.
Or accept the reality that nuclear is dead in the water.
So Russia’s death rate was pretty much unchanged from 1930 to 1935 to 1945, and then things got way better in 1950?
Maybe I could see, they are counting only Russia (not the USSR), so the holomodor is largely absent from 1930, and then Russia advances in living standards meant that there was a huge underlying boost that masked the unprecedented deaths during WW2, and then after WW2 the apparent life expectancy shot up because a lot of the vulnerable or old people were already dead. But I don’t buy it. Idk what's going on with their data, but China looks fine and Russia looks simply wrong; it is missing some big dips that it should have.
Edit: Hm, I guess there is a 6-year divot in 1932… I guess I just expected the Holomodor to show up bigger and less spread out over surrounding years. But yeah maybe it is showing up.
Edit 2: Okay, I looked more and I am confident that this isn’t exactly right. It says “the remaining average lifespan for a hypothetical group of people, if they experienced the same age-specific death rates throughout the rest of their lives as the age-specific death rates seen in that particular year.” There’s no possible way that extrapolating out the death rates people were experiencing in the middle of a famine or war would lead to these gentle dips and small divots.
I suspect that by combining data from different sources, they wound up using cohort LEB for the distant past and period LEB for the more recent past. That would explain why e.g. the dip in Russian life expectancy because of the Ukraine war shows as the same size as the dip for WW2. If they were doing the calculations the same for both, the WW2 dip would take away half the chart or more. So maybe it’s not really wrong per se but just mismatching their metrics in a way that makes it hard to draw anything of precision from the chart beyond “things getting better”.
That one looks right to me (or, “right” meaning consistently using period LEB) - it’s a little hard to compare because of the difference in granularity but it shows about a 20-year drop for WW2 which is what I would expect.
I edited my comment above; I think what’s happening is that the OP article is mixing different metrics for different parts of the chart. I think this one you’re sending is consistently using period LEB which is why the size of the dips is different.
Mao decreed that efforts to multiply grain yields and bring industry to the countryside should be increased. Local officials were fearful of Anti-Rightist Campaigns and they competed to fulfill or over-fulfill quotas which were based on Mao's exaggerated claims, collecting non-existent "surpluses" and leaving farmers to starve to death. Higher officials did not dare to report the economic disaster which was being caused by these policies, and national officials, blaming bad weather for the decline in food output, took little or no action.
The government took what food there was from the farmers because they were trying to swing their dicks around and impress the boss. It's like the Irish potato famine, but with rice.
That doesn’t account for population increases, but that still looks like per-capita increase nevertheless, which is embarrassing in a developed country. Especially if you compare that with other similarly developed countries with comparable populations, which mostly have a line declining to double digit totals.
EDIT: Here’s data looking at the maternal mortality rate, over the same period, with a few comparable countries.
Reminds me of Dianne’s line from Bojack Horseman: “I can’t believe this country hates women more than it loves guns”
In an episode where there’s a huge uptick in women carrying firearms, instead of helping to make society a better place for women, they just decide to ban guns instead.
God I love that episode and that line. It’s so sad how that observation somehow became even more relevant today than it was back when that episode released.
What good is getting a diagnosis if you can’t pay for the treatment. I’m stuck in this position right now. American health insurance is nothing but a glorified discount plan/coupon book scam.
I drive a Civic and we give away all our cans and bottles to the local peeps that collect them for the $0.05. I stopped recycling because I know it’s completely bullshit.
Instead, we burn almost every scrap of paper and cardboard when we have a fire pit.
That’s it. Let the actual Corp/wealthy fuckers do something.
Yeah that’s never not been the case. It’s been forty years of people obviously voting against their interests. Which has obviously been spreading around the world as propaganda machines have become so lightweight, portable, affordable, ubiquitous, and shiny.
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