I support UBI but I was talking more fundamentally about getting away from fossil fuels, petrochemicals, landfill, and unsustainable farming practices.
Democrats retreat on fossil fuel and clean energy subsidies a day into DNC
- Thread starter Eacaraxe
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The dems to have plans in place for that but part of the issue is that its politically difficult. We have a lot of miners in a couple swing states and they seem less than willing to give up their jobs despite how crap they are.
Hey, the sanitation movement succeeded in lifting the entire city of Chicago 8 feet to accommodate the new sewer system. If our ancestors over a hundred years ago could put up with that headache in the name of no longer having human shit in the streets all the time, what's our excuse?
Also the massive public works necessary to get us into a place where we can live sustainably will cause much fewer problems than, you know, suddenly reaching the point where climate change, resource depletion, soil degradation, and ecological collapse all come up to fuck us at the same time.
Seriously. America has become a land of lotus eaters. Our ancestors invented powered flight, the light bulb, the space shuttle and jazz. Now we're declaring every solution to our problems that doesn't involve more guns as just way too hard to even attempt.
That was also a task that required a lot of effort and sacrifices in the short term for a long term good.
There are temporary tasks and there are continual tasks. I've no doubt we could make a "green" energy world, but the people advocating for it are also pretending that there will be nothing we need to give up to make it happen. Most likely it's because the voting base for the people proposing it are the ones that would be the most immediately effected by it.
Perhaps it's because I'm from the Show-Me state. If people want to make a green world then be upfront about what we need to give up for it and accept the good with the bad.
Which is all very good. But stop avoiding bringing up all the conveniences people will have to give up in exchange for it. I'm all for giving up those conveniences by the way, but all too often these kinds of programs are sold as requiring no changes in how we live, which is both dishonest and leads to not much changing.
So what conveniences do you currently have that hold you back from supporting a green future? I don't want to be so presumptuous as to guess.
Have you considered perhaps listening to them, instead of just assuming they're atavistic bumpkins who need to be spoken over or at?
If you want to know why McConnell keeps winning big in eastern Kentucky, it's because of things like this which isn't just one of the biggest legislative coups that went under-reported, it's also one of the most environmentally proactive pieces of legislation signed during the Trump administration.
I didn't say they are holding me back. But I understand that sacrifices are needed, that's not what's being sold to people though.
Nobody sells you a Ferrari by bringing up how expensive its upkeep is. If we're going to bring up what people are sacrificing for this, it has to be in the context of what they're getting in return. A bad salesman sells features. A good salesman sells effects. A great salesman sells results.
I don't think comparing yourself to a car salesman puts you in a good light...
The amount of energy we can put out will go down. The number of things we can do will go down. The number of jobs will go down (Or at least in the short term). And this is not even getting into the creation, land allocation, and maintenance of the machines used for gathering "green" energy. If that is the road we go down then there will be a cost to it even if, and perhaps especially because, it's the right thing to do.
Nothing worth doing is ever without cost. And this is not unprecedented by any stretch of the imagination. The Industrial Revolution had such a big impact, many historians think we're still not far out enough to appreciate the scale of changes. Jobs eliminated in one sector will be replaced by another. The transition will happen. I don't pretend it will be painless, but anyone who finds inconvenience to be more compelling than wanting to live in a less polluted world, that person was never going to amenable to any pitch for a green future.
How? Despite any political bluster, in reality power is never taken out without a replacement turned on already.
Lack of restraint is the primary sin of people in a capitalistic mindset.
How do you have these statements side by side and not see that the latter takes care of the former?
All actions have cost regardless of morality. What is proposed is that we quit sinking costs into carbon exploitation and instead invest them in other forms of energy. My preference is nuclear. I'd even have the plant in my backyard.
More of a solar/wind guy myself. Less radiation shielding and thorny issues of waste disposal. Tidal power is becoming less viable thanks to sea-level rise, but it's not the only area of infrastructure that particular change is fucking over. Geothermal is limited in the areas it can cover, but where applicable I think it's a great idea. Also I live up in the mountains so it's not like we're in short supply of wind up here.
Certainly a barrier to overcome in public education is that green energy is highly geographically dependent, compared to gas and oil and coal which are just shipped around. Wind farms may work for you, but be a terrible solution for me. Effective green energy infrastructure development is about assessing a given region, and taking a more naturalistic approach to going with what the land is capable of providing, rather than the current prevalent notions of just paving over nature and plopping down whatever suits us.
A subject of fascination to me is that the more I look at (some) of the cultural beliefs of Native Americans and Aboriginal Australians, the more I appreciate the surprisingly far-sighted attitudes they had towards conservation and environmental cooperation which are required to shift the direction of our industrial revolution from ecological damnation.
Edit: Part of why I favor nuclear is that it has fewer issues with geography, but it is true that a strength that green energy has over nuclear is that green energy typically does not rely on a supply for fuel, which could cause havoc if disrupted for nuclear.
If only people paid attention to that more consistently, the world would be a very different place. Consider all those trade deals the US signed from the 70s onwards, which ensured the evaporation of so much of its manufacturing industry. I doubt this was explained to the American people as "Kiss your jobs and the communities that depend on them goodbye, guys."
Herein lies a message. Everything costs someone. The question is more about who has the political power to make a big stink about it. We're asking that question so hard about green power mostly because the people who would pay the most costs (e.g. the oil indistry) are extremely rich and politically powerful, when a thousand other things aren't queried because there's no one to push us to ask the questions. Let's not pretend they're protecting society: they're protecting themselves.
The reality is that society as a whole will probably not pay a noticeable cost. Things will change: wind turbines in the landscape, electric not combustion cars, and so on. Some people will lose jobs, some people will gain them. But what really makes this change any different from many other changes that pass without much comment or attention?
How many parts of the country can have solar or wind farms? How do those areas keep up with the energy needed for what we do now in our daily lives when an area has no sun for the night or the wind isn't blowing enough? Not all places are viable for all energy sources or will have access at all times which means we will have to cut back on our energy use at all levels of society.
Lack of restraint is a human mindset. There is no end to examples of lack of restraint before capitalism.
The maintenance, land allocation, and creation of those machines will require methods that are not green was my point.
Fair enough, I wasn't saying otherwise.
Large changes effect everyone, but my point is that no one sells these as hard choices. We just recently even had an ad campaign of "saving the planet by doing nothing". My issue is this being sold to people as something easy and that once we actually have to start making cuts to our lifestyles that these people will revolt against the changes because they thought they could continue on like before. The people that push back against these forms of energy use these things against it. We must accept the costs and be upfront with them rather than downplaying or hiding them.
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No disagreement. I just see nuclear as a last resort of renewables, what you do when there is no other practical solution without continuing to rely on fossil fuels. The maintenance, security and waste disposal issues with nuclear are an elephant in the room and most nuclear advocates I've talked to are reluctant to address it. Not all. But enough to raise an eyebrow, you know?
I think I speak for all of us when I say that trading out coal and oil barons for uranium barons would be at best a lateral move. And given how thoroughly the Chicago school has taken over Western economic thinking, we really have to watch out. Case in point: weed is getting legalized, but all the big growers got in earlier and locked out the competition from the smaller growers and distributors, effectively setting themselves up for a monopoly once pot is legalized at the federal level.
People already do that and have been since we first started talking about climate science. They're called conservatives. In fact, part of the anti-climate propaganda has been making it sound as if the status quo is perfect and requires no sacrifice. That because of American Exceptionalism TM our continued power and prosperity is a sure thing. And the propaganda machine has been doing this job effectively for decades. Seriously, what have we done for us lately?
0.1% of the mass of spent nuclear fuel are long-lived heavy actinides that have no spin-off research, medical, commercial, or industrial use. One big problem associated with how we discuss "nuclear waste" is how wasteful "nuclear waste" actually is, especially in terms of manufacture of necessary fission products as measured against the real-world hazards of it. And that 0.1% can be used as fuel itself in fast and high-temp reactors, being fissioned into shorter-lived and less-dangerous elements.
Case in point, if you have smoke detectors, you literally have "nuclear waste" in your home and don't realize it. Am-241 is a critical component of it, smoke detectors can't function without it. Am-241 is a fission byproduct, totally safe (unless you eat it or shoot it up) because it's an alpha emitter.
Or, here's another one: the US is 100% reliant on out-of-country vendors for Mo-99 production, in fact there's a global shortage of it. Little bit important for nuclear medicine, that isotope.
Sure, plutonium manufacture represents a big proliferation problem, but the flip side of that is we need the shit for space exploration. We basically just sent the last of what NASA had at its disposal to Mars last month, and we'd actually been buying it from Russia of all countries for twenty years. Now basically our space program's on hold except for what devices can be powered by solar until ORNL can manufacture enough plutonium for NASA. And we have metric tons of the shit sitting inside spent nuclear fuel rods across the country, we can't access because we don't reprocess.
If we reprocessed and started building gen-4 reactors, "nuclear waste" actually wouldn't be a problem. We could reprocess spent nuclear fuel, sequester the byproducts with commercial, research, and industrial use, and recycle the long-lived heavy actinides. The biggest barrier to it is public understanding of what nuclear power is and what options are available for it never evolved past the 1940's, and overcoming that fear is what matters.
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