Ah yes, Vegan, a group of people that believe they are evolving faster than everyone else, but they are blind by choice to the fact that they are evolving backwards.
Veganism isn’t inherently better for the environment. You’re looking for sustainable agriculture. End goal would be a hydroponic grow tower, powered by renewables. Perfect growing conditions year round with little to no runoff. Doesn’t work for all crops currently, and takes a ton of power to operate, though.
Veganism IS inherently better for the environment. If everyone went vegan right now, the agricultural industry would use only 25% of the land, and global emissions would reduce by 20-25%.
Ah, I see I didn’t say the silent part out loud. I didn’t mention animals specifically because meat production is stupidly bad for the environment, so incorrectly assumed that was a given. I was specifically saying veganism isn’t inherently better than a vegetarian diet, not eliminating technical animal by-product like honey. I suppose there isn’t a term for “things that vegans won’t eat because technically an animal by-product, but still not terribly bad for the environment, at least not any worst than growing other vegetables on an induatrial scale”. Think things like cricket flour. Not vegan, but not ecologically bad either.
A vegetarian society would be almost worse for the environment unfortunately. Without grinding up male chickens (unneeded for egg production), and without killing male cows at 1 year for meat (unneeded for milk production), we’d be subject to feeding these animals for their whole life rather than what their carcass can provide at young ages. Plus with specific honey bee populations taking pollen away from local indigenous bees, we could see species wiped out in pursuit of it. It’s best for the environment to just stop eating what comes out of animals, and starting eating what we feed to them instead.
Of course, I see your point, and I see the disconnect we have here! To simplify my stance, I wouldn’t want to rule out animal by-products as a food category, as those can be valuable calories to people in places where farming might not be feasible for all their nutrition needs. That said, and to your point, traditional animal by-product might not be included. As you mentioned, industrial egg production, milk production, or honey production (in places that don’t naturally support honeybees) are not likely candidates for sustainable food sources.
How do you vegans know what meat taste like? You have to eat it to know what it tastes like, but if you eat meat, then are you a vegan?
Not to mention vegans keep saying they don’t like eating meat, and yet you go out of their way to attempt to make food look and taste like “meat”. So do you want to eat meat or not? Pick a lane, vegans.
Oh and humans ain’t gonna save or destroy the planet simply by eating meat. The earth doesn’t need us saving it, it’s the human that will go extinct due to our own actions. The planet will live on way after we’re gone, and new life will appear. The earth was able to survive billions of years before us, it WILL continue to survive looooooong after we go extinct.
I wasn’t born a vegan, most vegans aren’t. I ate meat, and I’ve since stopped eating meat. What an unusual argument to make.
Do you think vegans don’t eat meat because they don’t like the taste, and are trying to convince others that meat tastes bad? Vegans don’t eat meat because of the harm it causes to animals and the planet. If I could have meat without that harm, I would eat it. That’s why I eat food that emulates the taste and texture of meat. It sounds like you don’t understand veganism at all, or are a very lazy troll.
Oh and humans ain’t gonna save or destroy the planet simply by eating meat
No but it’s a bloody good start, and why not do it? I’m not worried about the earth, it will go on. But I’m concerned for the literally millions upon millions of people who’ll die from climate change caused by animal agriculture. I know you’re clearly not concerned about needless animal suffering, but are you not concerned for human suffering either?
So other animal races can eat other animals but the human race, which is also animal in case you didn’t know, cannot eat other animals? Talk about literal interspecies racism.
Animals also rape other animals. We shouldn’t look to animals to check our moral compass. Animals eat other animals out of necessity, in order to survive. We as humans no longer need to do that, and have the mental capacity to choose not to.
If you still choose to kill and eat animals, purely to satisfy your tastebuds, then you are immoral. It’s as simple as that.
Ah yes, raping, an activity that is the perfect comparison to eating meat. And yet everyone doesn’t get arrested for eating meat, the justice system is more corrupted than I thought.
And as a species that has been around for 2.5 million years, we just started eating meat recently and definitely not for the last 2.4 million years. It’s a miracle that we evolved instantly from a bunch of apes eating nothing but plants to omnivores with complex history and advanced technology in just a mere 2 thousand years.
Maybe having a brain the size of an orange ain’t so bad, we definitely should evolve backward to that since we were able to survive for 2.498 million years without meat after all.
I’m not suggesting that rape and the act of killing and eating animals are equivalent. You listed the fact that “animals kill animals, we are animals” as justification for doing so. I posit that, using that logic, “animals rape animals, we are animals” is broken justification for rape.
Also the fact we have been doing something for millions of years is not justification to continue doing so. We’ve indiscriminately murdered people for millions of years, you wouldn’t accept that as justification for murder.
Consumption of meat was certainly beneficial to our ancestors, as protein was hard to reliably attain. Now it isn’t, we have access to all kinds of reliable plant protein.
To now make the conscious choice to kill and eat animals, ONLY for ones pleasure, is immoral.
Not only eating meat is the same thing as raping but also murdering people? Maybe PETA should take over the world and throw billions of people in jail then. Our ancestors must be really disappointed to know that they spent millions of years of evolution climbing to the top of the food chain just for you people to jump back down to the bottom.
I recommend you eat at least three times the portion of your precious beans to somewhat match the nutrients of a normal meal for a normal person. And actually season your “food” please, I’m very opening minded about food and try everything before judging, but yours are just so tasteless than even good old water has more flavor. Even a broke colleague student’s meal is nowhere as sad as yours.
Whoa, this certainly got very ad-hominem all of a sudden.
As I’ve said earlier, I’m not drawing a moral equivalence between killing animals and rape, I’m suggesting your faulty “logic”, (the Appeal To Nature Fallacy) can be used to justify anything animals and humans have historically done. And now you suggest you’d eat animals so as not to disappoint cavemen. A very bizarre argument. Although as I’ve said at the top, there is no valid argument against veganism.
Now you surely realise you eat vegan food every day? Fruit is vegan. Vegetables are vegan. Most indian food is at least vegetarian, which I’m sure you’d agree doesn’t “taste like water”. You know what is quite tasteless? Meat. Without all those vegan seasonings and spices, it’s surprisingly bland. As for protein, funnily enough I actually had a seitan steak tonight, cooked it on my BBQ. It’s 75% protein which is literally more than any meat.
It seems as though you’re getting a bit agitated, trying to provoke a bit of flame out of me perhaps. So maybe it’s best left there then.
Hold up, you vegan think everyone else eat nothing but meat? LOL, every heard of something called “a balanced diet”? Don’t tell me you people actually believe you are herbivores and everyone else are pure carnivores. You might wanna google “omnivores”, mate. Fun fact: Human isn’t the only omnivore species on earth, so why don’t you and your beloved PETA go and try to convert all of them to vegans so you can “save the planet”.
Before you go, would you kindly tell which school you went to so I don’t send my kids there?
I was raised pescatarian and started eating a little bit of meat in university, it was pretty good. I could definitely understand the hype, meat was pretty delicious. But for me personally, I just don’t get the craving for it. Eventually I just ended up going back to a near vegan diet because it’s what I like to cook, and it’s so cheap. I’m not vegan, but 99% of what I’ve cooked at home in the last 10 years is.
However, I was craving charcoal chicken for like two weeks straight, so the other day my friends and I rode down to the place everyone goes to. We made a proper day of it with our bikes and picnic blankets. The chicken was cooked perfectly, really moist and falling off the bone. The seasoning on the skin was delicious, I can see why that place is so popular.
But the chicken had no flavour of its own.
Taste wise, it could have been anything cooked with the seasoning rub over the charcoal spit. A block of tofu would have had the same flavour.
Texture is the only unique experience, and I’m sure there will be a brand of meat replacement out there that has nailed the texture (but not nailed the taste) so it really isn’t long now until there are viable alternatives. I haven’t really tried many meat replacement products because I’m allergic to potato and e160c and those two ingredients are in a surprising number of vegan packaged proteins.
I was disappointed with my chicken. I thought maybe I’d over sold it in my mind, as my friends confirmed that yup, this is good chicken, I’m being picky. But when I said “it’s just not as good as I remember from uni” and then my friends did a full 180° and agreed that yes, in the last 10 years since I’ve had chicken like this, meat quality has gone downhill, and chicken isn’t good anymore, but what we were eating was good chicken, and that they all still like chicken, even though it’s disgusting by direct comparison.
Now I’m curious how different the quality is between home raised chickens vs store bought chicken meat. Because it’s got to be insane, even if both birds are the same species of heart attacks on legs.
My brother raised chickens and we went to his place for a dinner with one of the chickens he raised. It was probably the best chicken I have ever had. The store chicken barely holds a candle.
Now this was probably over 10 years ago, and I know the farm chickens have “improved” but the improvements are more… for production. Not for quality and taste.
There has been some research to make products that are compatible with veganism e.g. lab-grown meat. The latest technological discovery in the news was ‘meaty rice’
Disclaimer: I also eat meat since I don’t trust my intestines to fully rely on plant-based nutrients. I do, however, think there is merit to how the industrialization of farming has been destroying the environment, especially with the excess of methane from cattle.
I have a better solution to get a meaty taste that is 100% practical and actually being used for millions of years, even before humans existed: Just eat meat.
It’s not necessarily the meaty “taste”. Many people have health complications with their digestive systems (one example I can think of is Celiac’s) that can make it near-impossible to get nutrients from plant-based food. If you can grow meat in the lab, you can get animal-sourced nutrients without hurting animals (for vegans) nor large resources that are typically used for climate-damaging meat industries (for everyone)
I know a medicine for diseases like that and you can get it pretty much everywhere, it’s called “Just eat meat”, it’s been working for millions of years.
The biggest technology needed is actually excavators so we can dig ditches everywhere to soak up rain water and refill aquifers. Also building retaining walls, terraces and swales using permaculture style water management to reforest degraded grazing lands.
By “the 50s,” do you mean the 1850s, when Eunice Newton Foote discovered the greenhouse effect, and calculated that CO2 emissions would change the climate? And when John Tyndall published the same thing, because the scientific community ignored her because she was a woman? Yeah, we could have started 170 years ago, but people just aren’t wise enough to do anything about climate change until it’s too late.
20 years ago a few key technologies were still missing, like grid storage battery technology. But there are multiple promising ways now. Unfortunately lack of massive funding for research and development and patents means we’ll have to wait another 20 years to produce them really cheaply on the free market. Otherwise it would be unfair to the poor inventor! /s
The main grid storage tech I’ve heard about recently relies on decade-old Nissan Leaf EV batteries that can be purchased second hand pretty cheaply (in comparison to brand new cells). Pretty neat way to repurpose them IMO.
It’s profitable, so I’m assuming it should be reasonably affordable for utility companies or local municipalities to build and own grid storage facilities in the near future
No, flywheel is not cheap enough and too complicated. Pumped hydro is cheapest, but only available at very few location. Lithium batteries are a waste or misappropriation (lithium should be recycled for mobile use) and there aren’t enough.
The two battery types that seem to work are liquid metal batteries that are made out of dirt cheap and abundant materials (although there might be problems there still), and flow batteries. Kite power also seems to provide more energy for less material costs (no huge foundations and towers needed).
The gravity energy system would be able to store 2MW of power and integrate into the local energy grid. … Scientists from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) found that the world’s abandoned mine shafts could store up to 70TWh of power - roughly the equivalent of global daily electricity consumption.
Finnish researchers have installed the world’s first fully working “sand battery” which can store green power for months at a time.
The developers say this could solve the problem of year-round supply, a major issue for green energy.
Using low-grade sand, the device is charged up with heat made from cheap electricity from solar or wind. The sand stores the heat at around 500C, which can then warm homes in winter when energy is more expensive.
There are different options, not each one is suitable for every place, but seams possible that combination can help us achieve needed reduction in fossil fuel usage when sun is down and no wind.
Thanks for the links, sand sounds interesting. I believe gravity batteries outside of pumped hydro just need too much “structure” to store energy and then just have too little capacity. Unfortunately there is sometimes a little bit too much hype about cool ideas that don’t pan out. There is also an idea I think for an electric train / rail cars full of ballast being driven up a rail on a hill and then moving down to release electricity. Just a lot of effort.
And yeah thermal batteries should solve one of the biggest consumers, heating. Lots of possibilities. Molten salt works also. I think if you just use water to store heat for the winter you need about the size of a big Olympic swimming pool under your house. But with wind instead of solar you don’t even need to store that much.
An important thing I believe is that we have nearly unlimited access to energy with solar and wind turbines / kite power. It requires massive production efforts but you can extract so much energy from sunshine that efficiencies of batteries aren’t even that important. Just that you can use cheap and sustainable materials, can recycle them, and can have enough energy density.
So the possibilities are definitely there, but we really neglected to push R&D and massively fund multiple startups for each technology. And we need to suspend patents or drastically shorten their lifespan to like 4 years or so.
“We need new technologies that can be controlled by a megacorporation to make a select few rich, not things that individuals can do or use that can break the hold of existing monopolies”
Is nuclear a bad option? Only downsides I’ve heard are basically optics problems. Barring facilities that catastrophically failed on top of horrid safety policy negligence, they seem perfectly suited for baseline power production.
Cost. The reality is nuclear is not just more expensive than every other option, it’s a lot more. I remember seeing something like ten times the cost of solar, per whatever unit of energy
I think Veganism is just silly though. To completely disregard animal husbandry, forgo chickens laying eggs, cows making milk, all the things animals produce just seems like purposefully hindering ourselves when we still haven’t figured out how to feed everyone.
Start by replacing meat so we don’t needlessly slaughter animals, sure, got me there, but I can’t understand veganism as a practical solution to anything. It’ll help climate change, sure, but it won’t significantly impact it enough to solve it and we have better alternatives to doing that.
Veganism can not only help with climate change, but also total land use, species extinction, deforestation, ocean eutrophication, antibiotic resistant bacteria, zoonotic diseases and soil erosion. Also, keep in mind that over 90% of worldwide livestock and 99% in the US are factory farmed. And we still needlessly slaughter egg-laying chickens and dairy cows once they’ve been overworked to the point of no longer being profitable enough to keep alive.
I get your perspective on it and if we had 1:1 alternatives for all these products like we’ve done with Beyond meat or Impossible burger I’d probably be more willing to consider Veganism, but I also think that chicken and cows who can no longer produce should be turned into food. I get that the idea of ending a life short isn’t morally appealing especially when I just pointed to plant based replacements but in the interest of cheaper and more available food I think it would be more harmful to us (in spite of the issues you listed) than it would be beneficial for the climate.
Veganism can work I just don’t think we have any of the development into replacements that we need to commit to that. Butter, yogurt, dairy as a whole is such a massive industry. Eggs for cakes, butter for baked goods, we’d need to replace all of it and figure out how to keep the things we’ve normalized without destabilizing it all.
Those alternatives exist already. Instead of eggs, you can bake with apple sauce, banana, chia, flax or non dairy yogurt and get great results. Oil and margarine serve great in place of butter. You can make cheese sauce from nuts/cashews and nutritional yeast. Also, depending on where you live, there’s a wealth of commercially produced dairy and egg alternatives.
Just this past week I made amazing blueberry lemon muffins with coconut yoghurt and lemon bars with corn starch in place of eggs.
In terms of price, vegan options can be substantially cheaper than animal products, and if we (in the US anyway) started subsiding vegetables instead of meat and dairy, they could be even cheaper.
I’m curious about your stance. You mentioned it’s needless to kill animals for meat, but you also think we should use animals for milk and eggs and then kill them after they’ve become too exhausted to keep producing?
The morality of raising animals to slaughter them in their prime for meat seems bankrupt at best and repugnant to me personally. An animal that has lived it’s life, produced products for us naturally, and has done so humanely I see no problems with whatsoever. If a bird wants to use the hair I cut off my head for their nest, I wouldn’t consider them morally wrong for using what I produce to benefit themselves.
Animals who get too old and are past their prime will stop producing and are near their natural death. They’ve lived their lives, hopefully in humane conditions, but are on the way out. Using them for meat at this point, to me, feels like giving them one final purpose rather than just allowing them to become fertilizer.
I get that doesn’t sound morally pure and it probably isn’t, but I would rather old animals be turned into food than allow humans to go hungry out of pretentious moral aspirations. If we can afford to be moral we should be but if we can’t, we can’t. I won’t lose sleep knowing a family gets to eat because we didn’t allow that animal to either away naturally.
As far as replacements go, that’s genuinely fantastic. I hope we scale that up and don’t let meat farmers lobby to destroy it. Like I said if we can replace products to the degree we don’t suffer by insisting on morality, we should. Full stop.
I think we have fundamentally different outlooks on animal agriculture. It seems like your position is based on the idea that animals used for milk and eggs are treated well, live long natural lives and are killed at the end of their lives when they would have died naturally.
An animal that has lived it’s life,
Animals used for milk and egg production live a small percentage of their potential lifespan. The effects on dairy cows of repeatedly being impregnated, giving birth, producing enormous quantities of milk, and going through the cycle again takes a harsh toll on their bodies. It’s normal for a dairy cow to only endure 4 or 5 cycles of this before they literally cannot physically continue, at which point they’re no longer profitable and are sold for slaughter. Similarly for egg-laying hens, the stress and mineral demand of ovulating multiple times a day means that they rarely live past two years. For the males of these breeds, it’s even worse. Male chickens of the egg-laying breeds are mostly useless to the industry, so they are killed immediately after hatching, usually by way of an industrial macerator or gas chamber. Male calves might live to 8 months to be slaughtered for veal, but if there’s no market for veal they are frequently killed immediately after birth.
Modern egg laying chickens and dairy cows are man-made breeds far removed from their natural wild counterparts. Hens trace their lineage to red jungle fowls, who naturally ovulate at a similar rate to humans, about once a month. Selective breeding has increased this amount to once a day, sometimes even more. The extreme pressure on their reproductive system frequently causes health issues like egg yolk peritonitis, cloacal prolapse, and osteoporosis. Similarly with modern dairy cows, bovine mastitis, udder sores and infections are common due to our selective breeding to maximize milk yields. Even otherwise healthy animals face grueling lives because they’re part of a species that was engineered for one purpose: profit.
has done so humanely
Modern animal agriculture is overwhelmingly inhumane, which is why livestock animals are almost always excluded from animal abuse legislation. Ignoring the above points about how they’ve been selectively bred and are worked to exhaustion, investigations into egg and dairy farms have found absolutely shocking treatment. If you have the stomach for it, they’re worth watching to understand the scope of animal abuse that is commonplace in our society.
Best way to reduce consumption is preventing rich people from obscene over consumption. Do you know how many average children could grow up and life a lifetime on the emissions of Tylor Swifts private jet tours? (Arbitrary example, because it has lots of attention right now. Goes for the lifestyle of most rich and super rich people)
What if i told you with renewable energy, public transit mobility, an end to the 9to5 and consume excess hamster wheel, proper recycling and sustainable products everyone could life a good life, many americans even a better life?
The world has enough ressources to sustain a larger human population and give everyone the means to a decent life. It is solely in the way things are done right now, in particular the obscenely rich, that are unsustainable.
It suggest as meanings to maintain, to provide, to encourage… In the meaning of provide and maintain there is no limit to current conditions.
I have laid out the conditions under which the world can sustain such a human population. I find it linguistically wrong to limit it in such a way, that only the current situation is permissable. This is directly contradictorary to any use in relation to future like planning.
E.g. “we plan the building to sustain a 6.5 earthquake” would be wrong under your criteria, as neither the building, nor the earthquake exist at the point of that statement…
Some people don’t care about having kids, others have an innate desire to do so, a biological contact that yearns for fulfilment.
Maybe it’s a lame appeal to emotion but one of the defining characteristics of life is the ability to reproduce.
If you’re not into kids, it’s pretty easy to say “people should stop having kids”, but that assertion is a bit of a kick in the guts to those that feel that drive.
It’s a bit of a moot point for people in developed countries anyway. As in we can all congratulate ourselves on being enlightened enough to realise that we’re overpopulated, but there’s billions of people having as many children as possible to support them in their retirement.
Unachievable though it may be, I think global universal education, healthcare, and UBI is the solution to over population.
I agree that if you don’t feel the need to have children, it is very easy to argue that its a good move, compared to if you have the biological desire to have them. On the other hand, you can argue that this is what environmental movements are all about. Controlling our desires, in order to avoid exploiting the ecosystem.
If you’re not into kids, it’s pretty easy to say “people should stop having kids”, but that assertion is a bit of a kick in the guts to those that feel that drive
I understand that not everyone can accept not having children, especially if the reason is be to help the climate. On the other hand, we don’t recognize the same “kick in the gut” to someone who feels the need to eat red meat, explore the world or own a big house.
To me, stopping a line of expanding consumerism is a very strong move, as a long term climate action. I can’t compare them to short term actions, but not putting more human in the world, who will keep consuming, and will keep adding even more consumers in the world, feels better to me than turning vegan. I can help the itch, of needing children, by caring for the children in my closest family or even help local organisations setup to match adults to children (a sort of freelance parent/mentor)
Imagine thinking that telling people on the internet to not have kids is an effective strategy against climate change, while downplaying the importance of going vegan. Continuing to be an animal abuser is also more than a kick in the gut to all the animals who are born in extreme captivity, live a life of constant torture and rape, only to be slaughtered (usually in childhood) just so people can satiate their gluttony for a little sensory pleasure and delude themselves into thinking they need to do that because they’ve been trained by unscientific marketing teams into thinking it’s the only way they can get protein.
On the other hand there are a lot of antinatalists in the vegan communities. So if you went vegan, you’d be in good company.
I blame advertising. We should pass laws that every second ad needs to be designed to reduce the amount of shit people buy and cancel out whatever other ads are playing
Don’t blame consumers for consuming what’s placed in front of them. Blame the producers for producing collectively more shit than the entire population will ever need or want.
I agree it’s both but they can do it without the other. Remember when all those copies of the ET videogame were dumped in a whole? It’s a weird example but they often create a lot of product that’s never sold. Likewise consumers will be extremely wasteful and fickle. Like how people won’t buy ugly fruits and veggies so instead ugly carrots are cut into baby carrots.
Not claiming they aren’t producing more than people need just that people seem to want more. There is a sure conversation around the psychology of enticing people to constantly buy buy buy and how lots of products are ‘disposable’ though
Yeah we already have the technology needed, we have to implement them.
And much of the tech is actually very old. Electric trains are like a century old. So for a lot of things, we have to re-implement technology we foolishly removed.
Oil was just a bad technology path. Gotta get back on the right path.
Long term plastic aren’t as big of an issue as one time use plastics are. Wax paper and aluminum containers can both replace consumable bottles for instance.
Nuclear trains and cargo ships might actually be necessary, even. In North America and over oceans, getting the vehicle weights, the weights of cargo and the distances between cities to work under any reasonable system means not just DC but even AC are insufficient in transmission range on land (and of course useless in the middle of an ocean), and companies like Amazon and AliExpress account for a lot of direct climate-disrupting emissions and a good chunk of the wealth letting assholes like Bezos live like kings at everyone else’s detriment.
While nuclear container ships would be very useful for reducing emissions I’m not sure I want to trust shipping companies with nuclear reactors given the track record of ship accidents and noncompliance with environmental regulations. Feels like they’d just dump the nuclear waste into the ocean.
Nuclear trains, WTF? There have been electric trains for over a century. In fact most Diesel trains actually have electric motors powering the wheels with a diesel generator powering the electric motors. Instead of having to think about repercussions of what happens when a nuclear powered train derails in a populated area, why not just run some overhead wires over the tracks like people have been doing for a century?
One of the problems with hydrogen is the lack of density means there’s a need for larger fuel tanks. This is less of a problem for cargo ships and trains than it is for most other vehicles. And again less worry of nuclear materials being hauled around population centers or in areas where there’s pirate activity.
The main problem with hydrogen is distribution. You’d have to build pipelines to a lot of train terminals to refuel the trains. So it seems to me running overhead wires for electric trains would be the better options for most cases. Yeah it’s a century old technology there’s nothing sexy about it, but since it’s old tech it’s well tested and will be reliable. The thing with technology is that you usually have to have a transitional phase that’s viable. Many “diesel” trains actually have electric motors that drive the wheels, they just haul around a diesel generator to power those electric motors. So you could use the overhead wires where available and run the diesel generators on parts of the track that don’t have that in place yet while transitioning. Then when there’s complete electric coverage, do away with the diesel generators entirely.
I think hydrogen for ships makes sense because a port could have a hydrogen terminal similar to present day LNG terminals. LNG is transported by ship so hydrogen could also be transported to the terminals similarly. Eventually hydrogen pipelines can be built from there, but pipelines take time to build.
The main problem with electric is also distribution. 95% of all North American heavy rail lines are unelectrified.
I can see taking a risk on hydrogen trains might not pan out, just saying electric is something that draws from the electrical grid (which is at capacity in the Pacific, Texan and Atlantic grids) and there’s no easy/single solution. If only for avoiding pirates by staying far from shore indefinitely, ships should at least have the option to be nuclear but require a US Navy-certified team at the port to inspect it and do needed maintenance/repairs before each time it sets sail.
As for nuclear trains, at the very least you have to admit that it’s not as simple as “just transmit power along the rail line from LA to NY”.
Everything is going to have issues, but electrifying rail is proven technology and doesn’t require the infrastructure to be 100% complete before it can be used. Building pipelines is far more expensive than power lines and you’d need to have hydrogen distribution across the country before rolling out hydrogen trains. Green hydrogen generation requires electricity too, so there’s no difference in terms of the need for electricity.
There will always be problems with environmental catastrophes from nuclear materials on vehicles so it should be limited to only military naval vessels that need it. Using US naval personnel doesn’t really solve the problem of inspections and maintenance, it’s just shifting responsibility. The Navy would need to train more people to do these inspections and there’s nothing about a Navy that makes that free.
As for nuclear trains, at the very least you have to admit that it’s not as simple as “just transmit power along the rail line from LA to NY”.
There are no simple solutions, but electrified rail is the simplest solution from all available options. Electrified rail is a century old technology and is implemented around the world already. As fun as it may be to come up with outside the box type solutions, we actually already have most of the technology needed to solve global warming, we’re only lacking a willingness to implement it.
Plant-based plastic replacements. Everyone fails to create a universal kind but plastic in your shopping bag is different from plastic in a PET bottle.
Yeah plastic is next to impossible to recycle because there after so many kinds. We need to fully remove this shit from ALL packaging. I want biodegradable packaging for literally everything, AND hemp based materials for industrial.
Heat pumps really shouldn’t be on this list. They’re no magic bullet for heating. They require electricity to run. As it gets colder outside the heat pump loses efficiency until you’re somewhere in the teens and you’d just be better off using straight electric heat strips in your air handler. Most electricity generation still creates carbon emissions. High efficiency gas furnaces create very low carbon emissions. I have an open-air natural gas fireplace insert that can run unvented (probably shouldn’t, but it can) do to how well it combusts it’s fuel leaving virtually no CO.
We seem to be having a lot of success with heat pumps here in Canada.
Yeah it’s not going to work on the coldest of days. Yes you need to have a secondary source of heat for those days. Yes it uses electricity.
But there many days that you need heating which aren’t the coldest of days. And a heat pump will save you lots of money on your heating bill. Electricity can be generated without fossil fuels. The percentage of electricity generated by fossil fuels is dropping.
You need to actually plant and manage the forest. Letting fields go to fallow wont be enough. I’m talking about selecting tree species that grow fast and intake carbon at a higher rate then others and then cutting, processing, and replanting in a rotation pattern(so wild life and move from section to section).
Also, many people are vegans because of animal ethics or because it’s trendy, but aren’t really thinking about larger issues. Think of all the celebrities that are vegan, but fly private jets.
I’d like to see effort put into restoring the land back to how it was before our initial interventions. But I do think after that’s done, leaving it alone to allow wild animals to repopulate the area is probably right. That land was doing just fine before we came along.
Also, many people are vegans because of animal ethics or because it’s trendy, but aren’t really thinking about larger issues.
Most vegans would say they’re doing it for animal rights, yes. This doesn’t preclude vegans from caring about the other good reasons for going plant-based. At very least, carrying animal rights further, it makes sense that it would help animal welfare to repair some of the damage we’ve done.
I was just using them as a high visibility, well known example. No where did I say they represent the majority. Personally, I know many people who actually think plastic recycling works, so they don’t do anything to curb their plastic use. Many, many people take on one or two positive actions and are hyper proud of it. I know someone who’s super proud that his car gets above average mpg, but is constantly accelerating and braking and ruining his mpg. Covid response of people taking half measures and being proud of it.
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