part of the problem is they need economic development and that means energy.
If they have to burn dung, they are not going to school.
I’ve been shocked at how the global government organizations have made no qualms about locking people down during the pandemic and causing starvation. Africa gets more money from remittances than all foreign aid combined.
It can be done. Eliminate all power boats used for pleasure. Require people to move within walking distance of empoyment. Prevent more than two children through forced sterilization. Force everyone to go on a plant based diet. Limit the size of homes, and if you have more than one room per family member, require the rooms be devoted to public use to house the homeless, indigents, refugees or whoever the UN designates. No outside grilling. No fertilizing or watering lawns, and limiting lawns to a certain size and everyone to convert excess space to farm land and give a percentage of the surplus crops to the government. I got more ideas. We can do it . . . Together. There are places like that. We’re just spoiled and need to do our fair share, for the planet.
I won’t participate in forced servitude, but you’re welcome to live how you see fit.
How are those ideas working out for China?
The Chinese government loves it. The people less so. The North Koreans manage control by killing anyone who tries to leave. The Russians previously had walls, barbed wire, dogs and machine guns to keep people in, but they were not very good on environmental issues, especially with leaky chemical storage. They seen to have a handle on nuclear. Chernobyl has finallly started to settle in. Its just a matter of how much the public is wiligbto give up and tolerate. Capitalism is evil, right?
You forgot to use the sarcasm font.
Well, it isn’t sarcasm for some people. I personally prefer the waynit is if we can keep the busy-bodies out of our personal life. Most people mean well. They think electric cars are the answer. Nukem announced the mandate for whatever arbitrary year that they’ll ban your internal combustion engine. The next day he asked that people not recharge to prevent crashing the grid. From the day of the ban forward, your investment in any gas powered car is virtually worthless and would probably be considered a bio hazard. How much would it cost to dispose of then. Government subsidies to electric cars will have to stop. China owns the battery and windmill production, so to contol the great satan US only requires that they cut us off. It scares me that an anticipated polar flip could cripple the electric grid, similar to the way a noth eastern city was crippled by a sun spot. To have everything relying on the electric grid is criminally stupid, but I’ll not be critical. A few months ago, i read an article saying the advice to recharge your electric car at night is wrong. It should be charged during the day, when wind and sunlight is at a peak. We’re being bamboozled, but everybody throws nifty statistics out. I think about this from another angle. I dont trust green logic. Its tunnel visioned. The government is not there to help you. Bugs don’t taste better than cows. Al Gore is a huckster. Gretta van Doosle had been tramatized as a child (with arrested development), and I dont think she finished school, not that it matters. Globalist want to enslave the world. It’s too late for green energy advocates to get into the oil business, so they change the agenda. Ban oil and invest in green, whether it works or not. But what do I know. I don’t like talking about things Im not sure about. It’s just rambling thoughts that make me skeptical. Don’t change your ideas based on my ramblings. Good luck. I hope it stays around for another 10 or 15 years. After that, its somebody elses problem. I feel that I’m too cheap to waste resources and I can’t seem to get the Chinese or Indians to pay attention.
From my point of view (being raise in the subtopics) it is a miracle anyone could be happy in Finland. But then that’s the point, happiness isn’t dependent on the amount of fossil carbon you put into the air.
Neither is the standard of living. You seem to discount Europe and their standard of living, which is on par with our own, yet we pump 2.5 times the per capita amount of carbon pollution into the atmosphere. Seems to me we should be able to do at least as well if we try. Of course, they took things more seriously than we did and have almost a two-decade head start in reducing their carbon pollution.
Exactly.
I want to push back on this very gently because I see in this comment the thread of a dangerous idea. There’s no evidence from early human anthropology and archeology that war as we know it existed before the Neolithic Revolution (even the idea of the Neolithic Revolution is now in question as well). Interpersonal violence? Sure. Tribal skirmishes? Almost certainly. But our primary defense mechanism, as some who have studied hunter/gatherer societies have theorized, was not violence but distance. We moved away from trouble.
When asked about the birth of “civilization,” Margaret Mead responded by pointing to the first healed femur in the early human fossil record. It’s the birth of human empathy, which by the way, psychologists and neurologists believe is partly responsible for our brain size.
Secondarily, this view of humanity as inherently violent is also a cornerstone of repressive governments and religions, against which the Enlightenment and the related American notion of liberty evolved. Liberty is the opposite of confinement, and early American print history is littered with texts about confinement: popular narratives of captivity, impressment, isolation, and slavery. Those early Americans, many of whom were immigrants or the sons and daughters of immigrants, remembered quite well the repressive societies they fled in Europe and elsewhere.
There’s a lot here I agree with, as you seem to infer that it’s not human nature but our “current system” which, again I agree, makes it very difficult for us to be saints. Once again back to hunter/gatherer societies, most often, greed is seen an anti-social evil and can result in loss of status or isolation. We lived in those societies for probably 300,000 years; I’d say that’s closer to answering the question of “what makes us human?” than anything we’ve got so far. For all his faults, Rousseau offered a good corrective to our current idea of civilization as a “fall” from what we already were.
I recently saw a documentary about chimps. Turns out they wage war. They sometimes even eat the vanquished. Given that genetically we humans are very chimp-like I’d say there’s very strong evidence that we’re inherently aggressive and war-loving.
I keep harping back to cognitive dissonance. We deal with it all the time. I think a lot of the ‘green’ dissonance goes something like this:
“I know gas engines are messing up our air… but I LOVE fast, loud cars.”
“I know my natural gas furnace is polluting… but DAMN, it’s gonna cost me to change over.”
“I know the planet is overpopulated … but I sure like that unprotected sex and she actually WANTS a baby!”
Everybody worries about climate change. It’s the dominant topic. Each person has the power to tale steps to lower the impact. Advocates tell us what we need to do, then violate everything they say. There are millions who agree, but the loudest voices seem to be telling me what I need to do. I’m supposed to drive an electric car made in China where they spew filth and my tax dollars are channeled there so they can spew more, and the leading climate change advocates are good with it. Hypocrites. If you want change, start at home. Then the millions of like minded people will have an impact.
We all abhore war, yet the world sat back while Adolf Hitler amassed power and control then went on an extermination campaign. It’s chic to condemn war then kill a baby because the planet is overcrowded. The hypocracy is mind blowing.
If your primary concern is about overcrowding, the answer is simple - die. Rather than worrying about how to stop bears and coyotes from eating you when go into their environment, just don’t go into their home or simply visit while they sleep. Better still, there are too many people, so just let them eat you and save the planet. Hard choices.
That’s a good point, Rex, but also remember that chimps aren’t precursors to humankind. They’ve continually evolved, just like we have. A species doesn’t just “stop” evolving because we share DNA with them.
A good example of this is knuckle-walking in apes, which we’ve thought for a while was an innate behavior and a mode of ambulation that pre-humans must have “passed through” as they ascended an evolutionary ladder. Turns out, the fossil record is beginning to correct that assumption, and knuckle-walking is now viewed by some early human behavioralists as well as primatologists as a recent adaptation. Turns out, there is no “ladder,” too, but that’s a larger discussion.
Your examples of cognitive dissonance are oversimplifications, e.g. strawmen, of peoples’ objections, so your premise of “green dissonance” doesn’t hold water.
I don’t know anyone, and there are no examples in this thread that people want to keep their “polluting” gas engines because they “LOVE fast, loud cars”.
Admittedly, some would want to keep a gas furnace because of cost. However, have you ever considered that their financial concerns are legitimate and not due to “cognitive dissonance”? Perhaps they simply can’t afford it. Additionally, depending on where you live natural gas may actually be less “polluting” depending on what the source of electricity is.
Is the planet overpopulated? Many are not convinced of this “fact”, so there is no cognitive dissonance.
I have Toyota’s most efficient hybrid as my daily, an Aqua (Prius C) that gets 77mpg (33km/l) in dense Japan stop-and-go traffic, as well as a 2-ton Lexus hybrid crossover that gets 44mpg (19km/l).
Here’s a pic of my garage with my most resent addition to the stable, a 2023 Toyota GR Yaris RZ High Performance. A hyper-impractical car, with no purpose other than to establish a limited run of what’s pretty much a race car for the street, so that Toyota can homologate the car to run it in the World Rally Championship (WRC homologation special). Turbocharged all-wheel-drive with a manual transmission. It gets about 28mpg (12km/l) in the same traffic as my Aqua…unless you drive it in anger.
What you can’t see in the pic (to the right) is a stack of fiberglass, carbon, and foam surfboards, SUPs, sea kayaks, etc. All equally toxic to the environment, unnecessary, and worthless in the eyes of many.
I love fast, loud cars. So now we have one example in the thread 
In my lifetime, I’ve also converted countless old Toyotas and Nissans to modern engine management with exhaust after-treatment, giving them much better fuel economy and emissions than they had when new. So there’s also that 
Ok, it’s fast, but is it loud? I no longer ride motorcycles, but those bikes were the fastest and loudest vehicles I’ve owned, and the best gas mileage. Of course all of this just emphasizes the point that why people don’t drive electric cars is much more complicated than portrayed.
Not yet. But it’s gonna be…
I’m not particularly opposed to CO2 as a byproduct of burning fuels in vehicles just like I don’t care about some H2O coming from the process. I do care about some of the other byproducts that are much more toxic and are for the most part now being controlled when combustion is complete. Old vehicles or improperly tuned vehicles give me more cause for worry.
I also understand oil, coal and natural gas are a limited resource and are not free of cost to produce and refine. Like electricity is not free or without some risk or byproducts to produce.
I am a proponent of efficiency and a consequence of efficiency is cost savings.
We have an enormous investment in infrastructure in the modernized world into the status quo of power sources and also distribution. To think about a rapid change away from that is plagued with chaos both in practical terms as well as financial.
When I look at the future of personal transportation the technology that stands out strongest to me is something that isn’t being pushed that much.
That technology is the (plug in hybrid).
What is out there is first off way over priced to make a serious offset in the way we do things and IMO is way light on the EV end and heavy on the fuel end. They are mostly an hybrid that you can top off the charge at home. Many of the ones available so far have an EV range of 25 miles between charges and can run unlimited ranges as a hybrid. Most people if they had a normal daily range off batteries say of what they may drive in 1.5 days would just plug it in every night and never buy gas unless you went on a longer than normal drive or a trip. Between the fleets of just gas vehicles still around that are IC only or hybrid and the occasional fueling of the plug in hybrids and those that never venture long distances or have a full on EV and another car as backup.
I would buy a plug in hybrid if the cost was say 1/3 higher than an IC car and I could travel 100 miles on electric only. I wouldn’t have the worry of running out of juice 5 miles from home or sitting in a pay charging station for hours when trying to go on a trip. I would want to use a tank of fuel likely about 10 gallons within a month or two of when I bought it to avoid spoiling. Being able to force fuel in the winter months where the waste heat of an IC could heat the cabin would be nice. It would also be nice in winter months when plugged it to preheat the cabin electrically a set time before being driven. Living up north it is ridicules how many people with large IC cars have remote start and fire their engines a half hour before leaving for work to warm and de-ice.
I would conceder an EV as a second car and something IC or hybrid for longer travel. It also seems a waste for one person to own two cars when a plug in hybrid would do the job.
I understand change as a good thing as long as the direction it takes is based in logic. Rapid change is seldom good and it should follow a logical path that is clearly easy for people to understand based around personal economics.
