realreality

Climate change is just one aspect of the problem of ecological overshoot. The biodiversity crisis is a bigger deal, but it receives very little attention.

Global industrial civilization is driving the sixth mass extinction on earth. Every species that goes extinct is gone, forever. If you’re a member of one of those species (or depend on them for your survival), it’s an existential problem.

Journalists with cushy jobs and comfortable urban lifestyles are grappling with cognitive dissonance.

They know that proper mitigation would spell the end of their comforts (no more flying, for instance), but they can’t bring themselves to admit it to the public.

It's relevant where the resources come from. If a city depends on importing from nearby or distant fields (as well as distant mines and factories), what happens if the people who live in those places do not want their land exploited for the benefit of city dwellers? That is why civilization is based on violence: https://derrickjensen.org/endgame/premises/

I don’t see how 2 people living in a 500 square foot house in the mountains would have significant cooling needs.

If you’re talking about high density in a concrete city, then cooling is a problem.

Cities have never been and will never be sustainable. You can cram 100 people into an apartment building, but you’re never going to be able to grow all of their food in a rooftop garden.

Although high density can be more energy efficient, it’s not the only metric to consider. Apartment dwellers are completely dependent on importing resources, while rural people at least have a chance at breaking the dependency.

The easiest way to go lower is to live in a smaller house. Two people don't need 2,400 square feet.

And if you factor in the embodied energy from building the car, you wouldn't be able to drive it, at all.

Don’t try to emulate entrepreneurs; they are sociopaths.

Congress actually made it more difficult to receive compensation for a COVID vaccine injury.

Despite thousands of reports of injuries, including death, I don’t think anybody has been compensated.

https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/LSB/LSB10584

I think it's folly to try to essentialize "the Buddha", when it's likely that Siddhartha Gautama never even existed.

My point in bringing up Ugra was to show that many/most sects of Buddhism have been predominantly focused on monasticism. In the sutras, advanced lay people are the exception, not the rule. And the surrounding societies understand that there's a difference. But in the west, lay people have higher expectations for spiritual attainment...

> It gets rid of all the bad stuff.

That’s laughable. Who decided what “the bad stuff” was? The early adopters were people who rejected western religions but projected western, individualistic culture onto eastern traditions.

Part of the problem is that Buddhist institutions in the west are organized like non-profits or social clubs. They have hierarchies of lay people and boards of directors. They have to appeal to rich people for fundraising, and they become embedded in a sort of upperclass culture.

They don’t “stink of zen”; they stink of capitalism.

If you read the “Inquiry of Ugra”, you’ll see that the ideal layperson is nothing like the average American Buddhist. The layperson is supposed to live like a monk and hope to be reborn as a proper monastic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugraparipṛcchā_Sūtra

Lead acid batteries are commonly used for solar storage. They require more physical maintenance than lithium ion, and they have more specific charging requirements.

According to Oxfam, if you earn more than $30,000 per year, you're in the top 10% of the world's wealthiest.

It's right on the wikipedia page, under "Operations":

> In 2018, the US airlines had a fuel consumption of 58 mpg‑US (4.06 L/100 km) per revenue passenger for domestic flights

We should take a system-wide view. The relative efficiency of any particular plane is irrelevant if the entire system depends on other, wasteful aspects. Let's consider the energy required to run an airport, including the infrastructure leading to the airport.

Seems like the “ghost flights” were a more recent issue: https://www.wired.com/story/airplanes-empty-slots-covid/

As for the fuel efficiency, this says 58mpg. Business class or first class are much worse, of course. And private jets simply shouldn’t exist…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft

Yes, the United States military is the biggest institutional carbon emitter in the world.

If we're not doing anything to eliminate the military industrial complex, we're not serious about climate change, either.

VS Code obviously contributes more to climate change than Vim.

Yes, I think airlines should go extinct. They're inherently unsustainable.

The problem is, I don't have any say in the matter, while corporations have a lot of power, and rich people depend on airlines.

So, it's unlikely that the beneficiaries of an unsustainable industry will voluntarily decide to drive it to extinction.

Airlines are not efficient. The carbon footprint per passenger is about the same as driving a car for the same distance.

And airlines have been flying empty planes during the pandemic. That's ridiculously wasteful.

$100/tonne is bogus. Overall emissions need to drop more than 10% per year [1]. There is no sustainable scenario where airlines continue to operate.

That's why I said an appropriately high tax. Any tax that can easily be absorbed by consumers, will not reduce emissions fast enough.

[1] https://www.showyourbudgets.org/?country=united_states_of_am...

An appropriately high tax on jet fuel would price the airline industry out of business.

Obviously they’re going to resist that, so what’s the solution?

Climate migration isn’t the only problem.

We’re locked in for: topsoil depletion, desertification, peak mineral extraction, biodiversity collapse, complete melting of the arctic, wildfires, ocean acidification, uncontrollable methane releases from thawing permafrost, etc.

You keep mentioning Bangladesh, but there’s a whole world to consider. We’ve seen what happens when global supply chains experience a brief disruption. Things are not going to get easier as natural disasters continue compounding.

I never say “trust the experts” when the experts are economists talking about climate change.

When there are tens of millions of climate refugees, widespread drought, and compounding natural disasters (as predicted by actual climate scientists), we’re not talking about a minor setback in GDP growth. It’s civilizational collapse.

Any calculation of GDP losses due to climate change is based on completely flawed reasoning. Steve Keen has thoroughly debunked this nonsense, which has mislead many people into complacency: https://www.patreon.com/posts/climate-change-26594935

> Soon, the focus will shift from weaning ourselves off fossil fuels, and into, "What can we do with all this cheap energy to make life better?".

That's not going to happen. People basically don't understand where energy comes from, or what's entailed with an "energy transition". See this lecture for a good overview: https://jancovici.com/en/video/can-we-save-energy-jobs-and-g...

> Looks like the vaccine creates a broader set of antibody responses than natural infection does.

That's not true. It's narrowly targeted at the S-protein, whereas natural infection will result in antibodies to the S and N proteins.

For Chicken Pox, they will accept a positive anti-body test. If a student had Chicken Pox as a child, they'd be exempt.

But if a student had COVID last semester, they still must receive a booster shot (against a strain of SARS-CoV2 that no longer exists).

How does that make sense?

There's one important difference: not everybody who's exposed to SARS-CoV2 will become infected and replicate a large amount of viral proteins. But everybody injected with mRNA will become a spike protein factory.