Inheritance or gambling.

I wonder how many prehistoric humans would fail a survival test. Given they rarely lived in tribes smaller than 50 people, there’s got to have been quite a few that just didn’t bother to learn every survival skill.

People can adapt, things just aren’t bad enough yet to get them to. There’s still the illusion many people convince themselves of that everything is fine. When that illusion is incompatible with survival, people will change.

If the weather isn’t survivable for long periods, we can build underground shelters. If there are shortages of food and water and home gardens die, we can build storerooms and greenhouses (perhaps underground with artificial lighting) and wastewater recycling. Use wind power (or solar, if the panels can withstand the weather) for electricity to grow the food, recycle as much as you can, and spend any excess labor doing what you can to improve the chances for life on the surface to recover. It sounds terrible compared to our current luxury, but societies have lived (and had kids) through worse.

If you don’t want to bring children into a world comparable in quality of life to a 13th century medieval European city, okay. But know that if there is a future, it will be because some people did have children. (Alongside lots of other important reasons).

Economic sustainability has almost nothing to do with population size. The vast amount of unsustainability comes from wasteful consumerism. Furniture that lasts years instead of centuries, clothes that last months instead of decades, holidays 10,000 km away instead of 1 km away, single-use plastics for every single thing, etc.

People that live within an ecosystem have net negative emissions if they care to put in the effort. Every person that exists can live and work to make things better, so how can it be a disadvantage to have more of them?

There is a point when every bit of nature has a steward tending to its development/survival/recovery closely enough that another person won’t be a net ecological benefit, but with a global population density of one person per two hectares we’re not there yet.

Ah, that’s fair. I meant you were complaining about people that had kids in general.

You’re right that we need to fight, but we will grow old and die before we’ve returned the world to a state our children deserve to live in. I don’t mean to diminish our duty, but to say that creating the next generation of people to continue that fight is part of that duty. Not for our children’s sake, but hopefully for our great grandchildren and every generation afterwards.

Despite what capitalism would have you believe, humans are part of nature. With the same effort that has allowed us to destroy nature faster than any other species, we can maintain or restore balance better than any other species. It makes as much sense to argue against the next generation of humans to “restore the ecosystem” as it makes sense to argue against the next generation of bees.

Let them call us, those born in the 20th century, the worst people to have ever existed. It’s not far from the truth. But why let that stop us from doing the right thing: giving birth to them so they can fix this mess for future generations or die trying? Why let our shame deny the ecosystem the best chance at recovery?

This is unlikely to be sufficient to explain the spike in global sea surface temperature in recent weeks, which is around 0.2C above the prior record for this time of year.

- the article

According to the article, the drop in SO2 emissions may explain 0.02-0.035 degrees of warming in 2023, and even when it has all phased out of the atmosphere it’ll be 0.03-0.06 degrees of warming.

As the representative of the ethics committee that gave the advice that was summarised into the headline we’re discussing was quoted as saying in the OOP article:

These technologies do show some promise, but they are far from mature. Research must continue, but the opinion of the European Group on Ethics shows research must be rigorous and ethical, and it must take full account of the possible range of direct and indirect effects. It is also important that the scientific evidence on risks and opportunities of solar radiation modification research and deployment is periodically assessed.

No, but it will increase the fraction of total global capital that is owned by the shareholders, and isn’t that what really matters?

So what you want is that all a fossil fuel company needs to do to sabotage a climate movement is to endorse someone in it?

Wasting money on bad solutions is not the same as fucking it up completely.

Also, I don’t know if you’re being unrealistically optimistic or unrealistically pessimistic, but there are still deeper depths to sink to than just fucking up the climate. That still has a whole range from reducing the carrying capacity of the earth to 5 billion or to 5 million or 5 thousand or zero, and there are more or less horrifying ways to handle that drop too.

Annoying that western charity is so self-aggrandizing that such an addendum is necessary, but fair. Ideally “send X” just *means *“send X and the systems to make good use of X”.

Damn, this one of the big pushes of Extinction Rebellion Netherlands. Glad to see that unauthorized disruptive protest works.

They say that, but there are people out there deliberately breeding humans to keep the population up so human hunting remains justified, and these wild humans do terrible damage to the environment by over-foraging.

I fear for induced demand. If electricity is cheap, why build more efficiently? Why not do bitcoin mining or AI training?

It wouldn’t be so bad if there weren’t plenty of places around the world that could desperately use solar panels, that are building fossil fuel infrastructure instead. Climate change is a global problem, so the obsession with getting your individual emissions down to zero is selfish and sometimes even detrimental to the climate if “your emissions” don’t include the cost of manufacturing and limited availability.

We should be sending solar panels to the developing world as fast as humanly possible, not making electricity so cheap in California that multinationals can open up a couple more data centers.

They’re using hydrogen to de-rust iron, and later let the iron rust again. I don’t have a degree in chemistry, but that sounds like a scam.

There are basically two sources of hydrogen that matter at an industrial scale: fossil fuel cracking (not clean energy) and electrolysing water. In the first case, if you want power it’s more green to burn the fossil fuel directly.

And if you’re electrolysing water and then using the hydrogen to chemically derust iron, it would (as far as i understand with high school chemistry) be strictly more efficient to electrolyse rust directly. The oxygen can dissipate into the environment or be reintroduced as necessary, like with a sacrificial metal for ship’s hulls.

It’s undoubtedly innovative that they have a relatively efficient way to store the latent chemical energy of hydrogen given an excess of hydrogen, but in terms of energy storage that is putting the cart before the horse.

before riots

- the post title

Glad to see their talking points focus on food security rather than agricultural companies’ interests like the EU. Though I wonder if they’ll come to the sensible conclusion and cut down on the meat industry.

Latest*

It’s not even a particularly bad one, compared to Dole coups, Coca Cola assassination, and Uniroyal napalming civilians.

People have survived “deadly” wet bulb temperatures long before electric refrigeration. Air conditioning is a patch for colonial societies and those that emulate them that have stupidly built western European style (Cfb climate optimized) housing in tropical climates.

Universal solidarity doesn’t just mean solidarity with the poorest US citizens, it means solidarity with the billions of people who don’t have AC or a car. Giving US citizens who already have AC and a car free electricity will probably be less effective and less equitable than a more egalitarian degrowth-based distribution of resources.The OOP mentions electric cars, which are simply a luxury when public transit and utility vehicles (kei trucks, vans) exist. Air conditioning likewise can be a luxury when passive design exists. Cisterns, shade, plant respiration, air flow management, high roofs, large communal spaces that reduce outer surface area, etc.

People have a right to live a cool and comfortable life, but that does not mean the right to live in a nuclear family suburban home with paper-thin walls and not a tree in sight, basking in full sunlight, with AC on full blast, using your electric SUV to drive half an hour to the grocery store or school. A tropical longhouse shared with your community, a natural or artificial cave system, or living somewhere that isn’t trying to kill you (as badly) can serve that purpose just as well.

So instead of pushing for free electricity for American citizens, I would much rather push for degrowth of the American economy, with smarter designs that simply need less electricity.