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How concerned are you about the climate impacts your child will witness or experience?

How concerned are you about the climate impacts your child will witness or experience?

  • Extremely concerned

    Votes: 17 20.5%

  • Very concerned

    Votes: 24 28.9%

  • Somewhat concerned

    Votes: 16 19.3%

  • Not that concerned

    Votes: 18 21.7%

  • Not at all concerned

    Votes: 8 9.6%
  • Total voters
    83
-I don’t think we need people to stop having babies.
-moving around. The automobile is awful. We could have much more developed transit that is free. We can also abolish suburbs and make communities that are walkable, transit friendly.
-consumption. Hmm I’d have to think more about that. Except one thing I’m thinking about is that our personal consumption is impacted heavily by auto lobby, oil and gas lobby, meat and agriculture lobby etc.
Individual choices are not the main driver of climate change. We aren’t going to paper straw our way out of this.
-pollution and emissions. Capitalism is a huge driver of this. Think about all our food waste. Or that we ship peaches to be processed in one country, to another to be canned and then back out to distributed markets.
-then you have the consideration of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism, and that military is one of the largest polluters.

Can go on and on, commodification of housing, commodification of water and other natural resources. I’m in an all day meeting, so will have to keep thinking about this.
 
Good answers, MHB.

Capitalism is a vicious cycle. For example, the US needs heavily processed foods from a fossil fuel burning global supply chain because we work so much to feed capitalist growth and productivity.

Corporate media are helping their overlords rally workers back into long commutes because they’ve paid for too much office space.
 
MHBDemon said:
-I don’t think we need people to stop having babies.
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I mentioned that because our increasing population creates or contributes to so many of the problems we are trying to address - feeding and housing more people requires related manufacturing, transportation, destruction of natural environments, etc.
MHBDemon said:
-moving around. The automobile is awful. We could have much more developed transit that is free. We can also abolish suburbs and make communities that are walkable, transit friendly.
Click to expand...
Well, technically, no type of transit is free - it may be paid for in a different way or by a different entity but it is never going to be free (unless everyone is walking). Automobile emissions are definitely a terrible problem that we haven't really solved yet - it is my understanding that producing and powering electric vehicles creates as much or more of an issue as the old fashioned cars, the emissions and environmental destruction just takes place in a different place (That may not be totally accurate, I am no expert).
MHBDemon said:
-consumption. Hmm I’d have to think more about that. Except one thing I’m thinking about is that our personal consumption is impacted heavily by auto lobby, oil and gas lobby, meat and agriculture lobby etc.
Individual choices are not the main driver of climate change. We aren’t going to paper straw our way out of this.
-pollution and emissions. Capitalism is a huge driver of this. Think about all our food waste. Or that we ship peaches to be processed in one country, to another to be canned and then back out to distributed markets.
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When you say capitalism what do you really mean - the profit motive? If we are really shipping products like peaches multiple times within the supply chain it can only be for one reason - it is more profitable to do it that way. Why is it more profitable to do that? I don't know the answer but it is clearly less efficient so it would have to be massively cheaper to can them in the second place than in the first place in order to make all the shipping worth it. Figure out and address why that is and you solve the problem.

Instead of getting rid of capitalism maybe we harness it - make solving the issues of emissions, pollution, climate change, etc. profitable enough and they will be solved.
MHBDemon said:
-then you have the consideration of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism, and that military is one of the largest polluters.

Can go on and on, commodification of housing, commodification of water and other natural resources. I’m in an all day meeting, so will have to keep thinking about this.
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Just to be clear - I am not being argumentative on this topic - I'm sure our politics are far apart but I enjoy learning about viewpoints I don't understand... Climate is an incredibly complicated issue. The only beef I have ever had with the climate change "movement", if you will, is that I believe they exaggerate the extent to which we (we being the climate science community) really understand all of the causes and effects that factor into the global climate. I have no doubt that our climate is changing and that we should be doing what we can to impact that change in positive ways.
 
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I heard if we get socialism we can’t have bananas
 
scooter, remember he's talking about socialism not capitalism. So "profitability" won't be as much of a priority compared to efficiency. Shipping peaches around the world under capitalism spreads the environmental costs to everyone so Dole execs and investors or whoever can take huge profits. Local canning and shipping operations requires paying people more and may not even be as quick but would have much lower environmental costs and the profits would go back to the people, not executives and nameless faceless investors.

It's a weird example when you think about it. The purpose of canning is to save perishable goods so they're available out of season. But not much is out of season thanks to global supply chains.
 
scooter84 said:
Well, technically, no type of transit is free - it may be paid for in a different way or by a different entity but it is never going to be free (unless everyone is walking). Automobile emissions are definitely a terrible problem that we haven't really solved yet - it is my understanding that producing and powering electric vehicles creates as much or more of an issue as the old fashioned cars, the emissions and environmental destruction just takes place in a different place (That may not be totally accurate, I am no expert).
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it is not accurate at all

the large scale environmental cost devoted to pumping oil out of the grou nd, transporting it to be refined, trucking it all over the world to be distributed to be burned in tiny, inefficient power plants all over our residential neighborhoods just absolutely dwarfs anything that mining minerals for EV batteries does.
 
PhDeac said:
scooter, remember he's talking about socialism not capitalism. So "profitability" won't be as much of a priority compared to efficiency. Shipping peaches around the world under capitalism spreads the environmental costs to everyone so Dole execs and investors or whoever can take huge profits. Local canning and shipping operations requires paying people more and may not even be as quick but would have much lower environmental costs and the profits would go back to the people, not executives and nameless faceless investors.
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I understand - I was just saying that you don't necessary have to get rid of capitalism to fix that problem - you just have to figure out why greater profits are created by a system that appears to be inefficient and address those factors.
 
BeachBumDeac said:
it is not accurate at all

the large scale environmental cost devoted to pumping oil out of the grou nd, transporting it to be refined, trucking it all over the world to be distributed to be burned in tiny, inefficient power plants all over our residential neighborhoods just absolutely dwarfs anything that mining minerals for EV batteries does.
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But you have not accounted for the power production and distribution needed to charge those EV batteries. Those tiny, inefficient power plants will just be working that much harder and longer to produce the power the EVs are going to need - in fact, we will need more of them and more power distribution infrastructure.
 
scooter84 said:
I understand - I was just saying that you don't necessary have to get rid of capitalism to fix that problem - you just have to figure out why greater profits are created by a system that appears to be inefficient and address those factors.
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I guess technically that's correct. But a system that seeks to maximize profit first won't use resources to reduce inefficiency and address those factors. If you're making $100 with the current system, are you going to spend $10 to figure out how to make $100 more efficiently? Probably not.
 
Townie says socialism...bananas.



My magic wand...

Get rid of internal combustion engines. Massive build up of clean energy generation (electricity). Develop mass transit so that it's clean/efficient/available and tax the shit out of personal transportation. Require all industry and business to be carbon neutral. Develop immediately technology to take carbon out of the atmosphere and to variably shield the atmosphere from the sun's solar energy.

Not my area of expertise, but those things come to mind.
 
scooter84 said:
But you have not accounted for the power production and distribution needed to charge those EV batteries. Those tiny, inefficient power plants will just be working that much harder and longer to produce the power the EVs are going to need - in fact, we will need more of them and more power distribution infrastructure.
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the tiny inefficient power plants are gas cars. The power plants that power EVs are large and much more tighly regulated from an emissions standpoint than cars are

EVs are energy neutral. They can be powered by coal, natural gas, solar, wind. Gas cars can only be powered by gas
 
scooter84 said:
But you have not accounted for the power production and distribution needed to charge those EV batteries. Those tiny, inefficient power plants will just be working that much harder and longer to produce the power the EVs are going to need - in fact, we will need more of them and more power distribution infrastructure.
Click to expand...

The tiny inefficient power plants are the car engines. As opposed to the orders of magnitude more environmentally efficient electrical grid power plants and transmission.
 
Every time I hear about oil companies convincing citizens that we need gas guzzling cars and that EV's aren't practical, I think of a horse and buggy salesman telling people not to buy cars.
 
scooter84 said:
I understand - I was just saying that you don't necessary have to get rid of capitalism to fix that problem - you just have to figure out why greater profits are created by a system that appears to be inefficient and address those factors.
Click to expand...

What does “address those factors” mean. It sounds simple when you put it that way but I think we all know if there was a way to address them to make the process more efficient while costing as much or less, it’d have been done already.
 
06deacon said:
The tiny inefficient power plants are the car engines. As opposed to the orders of magnitude more environmentally efficient electrical grid power plants and transmission.
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Duh - I was thinking of inefficient power plants as in the local/regional plants where the power is produced.

I still think the problem is much more complicated than just 'drive an EV'. In addition to all the environmental problems associated with manufacturing the batteries, the power used to charge the EVs is largely generated by fossil fuels - so increasing the use of EVs by an order of magnitude is going to increase the need for power generation and distribution which, while more efficient than a car, is still creating all the environmental issues we know and love. So generate power using renewable energy you say? Sure - but those all have their own issues that need solving. The tremendous land needs of both solar and wind are problematic, as well as all the fossil fuels and minerals that go into the production of solar panels - along with their basic inefficiencies.
All problems that I believe will be solved either partially or completely over the next couple of generations.
 
PhDeac said:
I guess technically that's correct. But a system that seeks to maximize profit first won't use resources to reduce inefficiency and address those factors. If you're making $100 with the current system, are you going to spend $10 to figure out how to make $100 more efficiently? Probably not.
Click to expand...
Maybe not, but you WILL spend $10 to figure out how to make $120 - or even how to make $100 more quickly so you can make $100 more often over time.
 
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