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Comments
I was gonna post this in the Silly Geographic Comments thread, but it's not really "silly", aside from perhaps the fact that a good number of the introduced lizards are escaped pets and so the domain name is ironic for this topic.
Seriously, so many of these are introduced.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/90910326
just found this; the video seems informative/useful
since it's not really that much about sustainability and mostly about "biking doesn't need to suck and it's a shame that north american cities are built obnoxiously so that everyone needs cars to get anywhere"
By the way, you remind me we have it, gotta post something here one day.
One of them is a Net-dwelling kid with a soft spot for images of wind turbines amidst lush greenery and Art Nouveau, posting commie memes and describing themselves as "solarpunk", though all the punk they do is set up a vegetable garden in their suburban backyard, or even less if they are at an academic campus. Capitalism bad, socialism good, Aral Sea drying out has nothing to do with socialism. Surprisingly fine with coal as long as it's a sprawling open-pit mine in Germany. Don't ask where the rare earths used for photovoltaic units are mined, or how.
The other is a rightie politico and/or a business owner who has latched onto biomass in a weird sort of interaction between their own pocket and ideas such as energy independence and carbon neutrality. Because hey, if you cut down this forest and turn it into wood pellets for your stove, it'll only release as much carbon oxide as it took while growing, ain't it? It's carbon-neutral! Plant a few new ones and it's sustainable! (Also, coal used to be forests. Take a long enough time-scale, and it's a renewable resource too!) You're totally justified in presenting the sales of your pellet stoves or running your heat pump on a diesel generator as pro-ecological, wind turbines only work when it's windy anyway.
Ugh.
Biomass burning is pretty much complete bullshit. It doesn't scale enough to actually provide energy en masse, unless maybe one uses huge amounts of land just to produce wood chips for burning. Also funny you said "carbon oxide" rather than "carbon dioxide", because burning biomass can indeed produce carbon monoxide, a well-known local air pollutant. People stopped using biomass and turned to fossil fuels back in the day for a reason. I suspect that this option may be attractive on one hand to some end users who think less techy stuff and simpler lifestyles are "closer to nature" or somesuch -- the same thing that drives the "druids don't like metal" trope I guess -- as well as some entrepreneurs who want to exploit some weird loopholes with renewable energy designations.
Frankly, I'd recommend properly controlled burning of trash if you have to burn some sort of biomass. At least you got something out of what you're burning, before you burn it, like it's paper or something that you got to use. But if you've just got organic waste material lying around, I'd honestly prefer finding some way to compost it instead and using the result to help grow stuff.
The resurgence of coal (or more generally, fossil fuel) burning in Germany is, from what I understand, a result of an earlier and rather stupid backlash to nuclear energy. If I recall correctly, this was in the aftermath of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami which caused the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, though I think more generally you do have some environmentalists, especially some older generations, disapproving of nuclear. To be fair, they have some legit reasons -- long-term waste storage is tricky and nuclear disasters are very nasty things, along with some other concerns. But these concerns should also be weighed alongside the advantages -- extremely high energy density, reliable baseload power, and also carbon neutrality. And sure, nuclear waste is nasty stuff, but fossil fuel burning getting to "throw away" its products (most notably carbon dioxide) willy nilly (i.e. into the atmosphere) is how we got into the problem of climate change in the first place.
The lot of folks who post commie memes strikes me as probably more interested in hating on the "company" part of "oil company". That said, I guess solar panels appeal to the idea of distributed energy generation, since they can be viable to some extent at small scales, which would fit in with the community garden thing. Incidentally, the off-grid viability of solar panels I've heard makes it also appeal to, um, "liberty-concerned" anti-government types. Meanwhile, yeah, there's some...nasty stuff in the supply chain for solar panels. Honestly, this is arguably the result of us (at least in the United States, dunno as much about Europe, though I'd guess that this problem is similar to some extent) not developing robust recycling infrastructure to recapture the material components of used products. I don't know as much about the history of the recycling industry but I'm guessing it's just been underinvested in domestically because recyclables have traditionally been shipped off to China or wherever where they'll take the stuff off our hands for cheaper than we'd be willing to take care of it ourselves -- a thing that's no longer working because they're just...not gonna buy our crap anymore lol. Though that may be more about stuff like paper and plastics recycling rather than recycling of critical metal components. I know there's been a ton of recent investment in battery recycling here in the U.S., because there's very much a demand for lithium and a desire to not need to rely on digging it out of the ground from wherever but instead use what we already have lying around. The industry isn't yet mature though.
Sidenote, now that I think about it, community gardens are nice for various reasons (locally-grown produce, less transportation to market, serving underserved communities/"food deserts", urban revitalization, and factory farms do have some issues), I'm not sure they have much carbon impact advantage over large-scale farming. They create more green space in urban areas and reduce transportation, which helps, but large-scale farming also has economies of scale in terms of resource use and provisioning.
Anyhow..."solarpunk", I think I've heard that term before but I can't quite picture what that aesthetic is like in my head yet. Haven't run into it enough I guess.
'Zactly.
Incidentally, I went there with a poster on properties of trash as fuel. Could've been worse, could've been a proctologist.
Yeah, how they came to have this issue is probably some deeper sort of stuff that deserves a good write-up by an actual German or someone like that.
My personal beef with nuclear fuel is that it's non-renewable (even breeder reactors ain't gonna just conjure up uranium or thorium or whatever's there at the beginning of the reaction chain), and that it still needs to come from somewhere. Not every place has uranium mines on its own territory.
Yeah, when you go out into the seedier parts of the internet to look for their gathering places, then what doesn't give you cancer tends to be stuff like reliable off-grid energy and homestead recipes. (The stuff that does give you cancer tends to be a lot more common there though.)
Hard for me to speak out about the rest.
I don't know whether or not to encourage you. You may like it, but on the other hand, at this point I vaguely feel like I should have never looked for it.
An important point this article makes: Recycling alone ain't gonna cut it; reductions in production/usage will need to be a thing.
On the other hand, we're probably going to need 3x the harvest-ready trees to make that work long-term.
Specifically not that, which I felt was obvious.
As a guy who believes in Japanese Supremacy, I think packaging of dolls and such in printed cardboard boxes is great (though most of those boxes have the plastic overcoat stuff you're talking about, but you can get around that with treating the paper I guess).
Well yeah I can't wait until I get the new LEGO paper bags but I actually mean other more normal things.
tl;dr, kudzu is evil
Kudzu is iconic
(Turned out to be a pretty swell lady, too. As long as you didn't say you aren't into coal as a power source. Or that you don't really buy the concept of clean coal. Or you don't think we really need so many coal mines. Or that the time scale of three hundred million years probably doesn't qualify as sustainable. But I digress.)
From what I gathered it was mostly about various takes on heat pumps and geothermal energy, often involving local geology.
(Edit: turns out I brought up the previous time in Updates, but this time I'm focusing more on the sustainability and related issues side of things.)
This is sustainability-related and the last post in Images is mine, so I'm posting it here.