Oh no, not irreparable injury to a completely useless and environmentally damaging industry! Better keep causing irreparable damage to the planet instead then.
I wholeheartedly agree with the end, I am sometimes at odds with the means but it can't be denied that these activists have some of the biggest balls on the planet and I have nothing but respect for them. The message is clear and consistent, garnering huge publicity for the cause is good. I know some people don't like it but you try getting a multi trillion pound industry to cease causing irreparable harm and you probably wouldn't make your local paper.
What should be remembered is that it shouldn't take this type of activism, but what is left when voices are ignored?
Biggest balls? Really? They are actually a large part of why we're still so dependent on fossil fuels. If they had the balls to accept nuclear is in fact the faaaaar lesser evil, we could've ditched fossil fuel for electricity generation completely by now. Instead we have countries ramping up coal usage and building new gas power plants to replace their nuclear plants. And they still see this as a win.
Those nuclear plants will be indispensable once we start having entire fleets of 18-wheelers recharging at night.
Agree with their battle. It's necessary. Just not with what they've pushed the past 30-odd years.
We aren't allowed to spell it out on social media sites, as moderators will remove such language. But we all know what needs to happen to make oppression stop. The problem just comes down to coordinating the efforts among the people willing to do the dirty work.
"For plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, the real-world CO2 emissions were on average 3.5 times higher than the laboratory values, which confirms that these vehicles are currently not realising their potential, largely because they are not being charged and driven fully electrically as frequently as assumed."
This is mostly an infrastructure issue. If these cars had readily available charging points, that wouldn't be the case.
It means exactly what I think it means. The reported emissions are way off those that are actually achieved in real life.
If we assume your assertion is actually correct (the study says nothing about the availability of charging infrastructure), how much do we need to build? And are we sure that once it is built, people will actually use it? Would it not be better to instead invest in infrastructure for other modes of transport that don't involve 2 tons of vehicle to transport one person?
Well, my point was that hybrid cars only will "realize their potential if there's infrastructure to support it".
Your point is good though: We should use pragmatism and review if it's cheaper to build charging points or expand public transportation, especially in non-urban scenarios.
What I often see missing in most places that does exist in Eastern Asia, are services from shops to bring you stuff home relatively cheaply and with better quality than just throwing a package in your lawn.
I'm also not seeing public transportation projects trying to compete with traditional options, which does happen in Eastern Asia.
I'll choose the car unless public transportation is a better option.
In Tokyo, that's almost never the case, but in EU or the US, I've often seen public transportation (except from some selected cities) as an option for people without a car.
I have a plug in Pacifica I use a tank of gas maybe once a month and drive around 1000 miles a month so more than half my driving is full electric. Only time I'm using gas is for heat on really cold days and long trips. All driving around the city is electric.
The Netherlands used to have loads of plug in hybrids. There were more than enough charging points. Most of those hybrids were owned by people where the company would pay to fill them up.
People were lazy and preferred filling them up with gas, most never used anything other than gas. That resulted in the government charging the tax benefit for hybrids.
The Netherlands has a huge amount of chargers. In e.g. Rotterdam there's at least a charging point every 50 meters.
I can't understand that logic: if I can charge for free at work and can charge at home for less than the cost of gas, why on earth would I ever want to use gas?
If I can vote for someone who will actively attempt to improve the working class why would I vote for a party whose only idea in 40 years is culture war?
It's the other way around. Companies in the Netherlands lease cars for their employees here in the Netherlands. Usually for people that travel a lot with for their job or just as a bonus perk that comes with the job instead of salary. And the boss pays for all the gas and maintenance as well.
So either take the effort to charge, or even charge at home and get refunded the electricity costs. Or just fill it up with free gas which only takes a minute. Guess which happens the most?
The only time I saw some of those oversized and really popular Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV use a charge cable was if they wanted to take a good parking spot...
One thing though that is often mentioned against charging points infrastructure is that today can only be used by upper-middle class families, while everyone else can't benefit from it.
So adding an additional line of buses and closing car lanes (at rush hour) to dedicate to them can be cheaper (considering impact per person), lower emissions and be accessible to everyone, but it needs to be treated not as welfare but as a competitive service. (IMO)
Ok, but if charging port infrastructure is the issue, then if you solve that, you don't need hybrids at all, just electric vehicles. So hyrids are still not the answer and need to be phased out. So it's still a hybrid issue.
"range anxiety". You're literally adding "well Joe schmo might not be able to drive 300+ miles and that makes him nervous" as a reason not to fight emissions lmfao.
The average driver doesn't need a hybrid. They want one because they are lazy and will mostly still fill them with gas, as this article showed.
No? The main reason I would consider taking a car over bike or bus is if I am going long travel with family or have multiple passengers. Either way if a car can't be of use when I need it the most then it's pointless to me. Might change if the tech and infra improves here but for another few years it is not even an option for me.
So you need a gas car for that one time you might drive 300+ miles. The multiple people part is bullshit since we're comparing hybrids to full EVs, not hybrids to a bicycle.
So, the one time you might need to drive really far, instead of taking a train, you want to own an hybrid 24/7.
Perfectly proving my point that it's not a logical argument, it's an emotional one.
Yeah?? Don't assume things about others. My mom and grandma has serious motion sickness and we have to stop multiple times and take rest when they are with us. If a car that I paid a heavy price for doesn't satisfy my need then I don't buy it.
When the average car price is greater than $48,000 in the US now, one doesn't have the luxury of choosing something for eco aspirations. Many US states are huge sprawling affairs, and many people have to drive large distances with frequency for work, life, errands.
Example: I can't even make it to my state's border in the longest-range currently-available electric car, and would end up in the middle of nowhere with no services, no charging stations, no infrastructure. In winter, it would be half that distance or less.
I am also probably the perfect demographic for a plug-in hybrid, and could utilize the plug-in aspect for shorter trips frequently. However, there's no reason to replace a perfectly functional vehicle in good mechanical shape with an expensive fiscal debt as well as the carbon debt that new vehicle would also create.
If one does not understand the scale and size of places, one can't comprehend how range anxiety (more like range reality) truly fits in.
However, if America was truly forward-thinking, they'd nationalize the railroads and put a focus on rebuilding the old rail infrastructure that existed over a century ago to entirely eliminate the necessity of long-distance personal vehicles.
Try figuring out to drive 120 miles vs 700. Try an 8 hour drive-day. Try being in a situation when your family has a problem and you have 1,700 miles to drive. Do you spend almost fifty grand on an electric car and plotting charge points that may or may not exist, or a vehicle that can let you cross multiple states without stopping? I hate gas. I would love a Toyota Mirai. Leaving home to get one US state over is a larger distance than the entire width of Germany. It's a reality response, not emotional.
Did they just dump sand in a big pile? Sand dunes are pretty well-understood ecosystems that require something underneath to anchor to as well as plants on top to stabilize them.
But also, the ocean is going to continue to rise, so any effort is likely futile. Sorry about that dude's tennis court getting ruined
No, you misread. They said you need something underneath the sand dunes to stabilize them. So they need to dump a bunch of sand on top of the guy's tennis court and that'll do the trick.
He doesn't want his party to fight against climate change, he wants to have his cake and eat it, too. The whole article is about coal and oil jobs, thinly veiled threats that anyone who isn't a conservative wants those jobs gone.
You know what?
He's fucking right.
I want those jobs gone. I want a homeless crisis of hundreds of thousands of coal miners without jobs. You know why? Because in 100 years the world will be healthier for future generations. I'm sorry that your job of choice is killing the planet, but I'm not willing to sacrifice the world for your fucking paycheck. Even though the bit about Biden telling miners to learn to code was twisted, I agree with the twisted message, too. Fucking find something better to do with your lives. I really don't give a shit what it is, just fucking do it. Suck it up, sacrifice and learn a new trade, and maybe your grandkids won't die of lung cancer at 45. I'm tired of waiting around for someone to have the stones to take action. I don't really give a shit any more, and if that makes me an asshole, I'll live with it, but fuck, this shit is getting old. If we move towards annihilation at 1mph or 100, it doesn't matter, we'll get there eventually. It's time to stop the ride. The warning signs have been there for decades. Your blessed Grand Ol' Party obscured the facts, and if you want to blame someone for you not having a job when the mine shuts down, blame them. They lied to you and told you that it was a hoax. The democrats just need to rip the bandaid off.
You know what really irks me though? Even if we didn't go green. Those 40,000 jobs are going to vanish. Coal doesn't grow like trees. That mine will empty one day and it's going to get shut down without warning, without any severance packages, the company is just going to run. There will even still be coal in the mine, it's just no longer cheap enough to mine it.
Historically, that's how it happens. Even in this day and age the moment a better mine opportunity is found, they're gone. They make the town dependent on them, they use the town in every way they can, they donate to the schools and municipal water supply, and then they vanish without warning leaving the town in the lurch. Happens with copper, happens with gas, happens with silver and it happens with coal.
At least the green movement will give you a date, a head start, and at least an iota of sympathy.
In US, more people line up for the employment queue every week simply by turning old enough to work than those 36000 employed in the coal industry. Coal jobs is a total non issue.
3 million children are being born every year. We never hear anyone complaining about that?
A lot of them will need to work 2 jobs, so that's 6 million jobs missing every year!
The coal jobs is not even one percentage of that.
If only there were a Kingdom whom we could engage, one that naturally and enthusiastically removes carbon dioxide from the air. There must be an answer, maybe if we plant a seed, metaphorically speaking, a long standing solution will grow to fruition.
The tricky part is keeping the carbon in the plants. My grass clippings will decompose back into CO2 if you just dump it in a pile. A better option would be to dehydrate the clippings and bury it in a cave or something.
I also understand that there would be better plants than grass as well.
What if your grasses decomposed and were put under pressure by rocks inside said cave, slowly transforming into a rich, dark to jet black liquid hydrocarbon substance or something like that?
That would be pretty strange. Millions of years of stored sunlight and carbon, just liquefied and pumped underground on purpose.
"A bit". Do you realize the sheer number of trees you would have to plant to offset our carbon? And then, eventually, those trees die and the carbon is reintroduced. Trees never have been and never will be the answer to CO2 that was previously sequestered underground over millenia.
"“Planting trees where they've been lost is often a good idea, and that will take up CO2,” Harvey says. “But a much more efficient thing to do, to have a larger effect for the same effort, is to stop cutting down trees. It's almost silly to think about planting a huge number of new trees while we're just burning and destroying them everywhere, releasing carbon at rates that are much higher than what new growth would take up.”"
And as other's have observed, it needn't only be trees.
I'm a solarpunk who lives in a tiny apartment and bikes everywhere and has 100% renewable energy'l production and heating. Vegetarian also, but lots of dairy
The calculator still said I needed 1.8 earths to offset my lifestyle.
What do they want me to do, keel over and die? My carbon impact is almost zero, and is actually negative with my research and contributions into 3D photovoltaics.
I don't think "planting 200 trees per year per person" is tenable. I think slapping a huge fuck-off fine on a major polluter is a much easier and effective strategy.
My personal yearly CO² impact is dwarfed by a single container ship travelling just 8 miles burning bunker oil.
Personal responsibility in this case isn't the answer, social responsibility is. No one human being alone could damage the environment to this extent.
Thanks for what you do. Most anyone on this thread, except the trolls, are not the problem. All I'm suggesting is using the plant kingdom to fix carbon out of the air. No solely that, of course, but at least some of that.
I'm trying to understand what exactly solar punk means. My main transport, a surly ogre is sitting in view not 10 feet from where I sit. I put solar panels on my roof last year, something I've been meaning to do for decades. I eat from my garden and local farmers as much as I can. I haven't flown in a plane since 2019, and may not ever again. I've never been on a cruise ship, probably never will. But yeah, one container ship, one private jet, adds up to a lot of carbon real fast.
Yep, that was my original point. Trees just can't cut it. They have such a little impact they're almost not worth even discussing. Far larger gains can be found elsewhere.
I didn't say you can't do both. The real danger is the green washing. In fact, it's not a danger, it's currently already used to subvert carbon cap and trade regulations. Scams of companies that sell carbon credits for protecting forestry that aren't endangered to begin with. There is little to no oversight of this and is hurting our progress to fixing the issue.
Yeah, like I said, a ridiculous amount of trees according to that calculator. That calculator said I'm in the top 5% and would take just over 200 trees a year. If we make the assumption that all of the top 5% also need 200 trees a year (it'smuch more likely that number sky rockets as the percentage gets lower), that's 70,000,000,000 trees a year. To put some scale to that it looks like 14m hectares were lost to deforestation in 2010 and from what I see the most generous number is about 900 trees per hectare. That's 12,600,000,000 trees. Stopping all deforestation won't even come close to covering 5% of the CO2. Again, trees never will be enough to make up for the CO2 being pumped out of the ground and into the air.
Ok, so you don't like trees. I get it. I still think they are part of the larger solution. And, what do you like? How are we going to solve this? Cuz, we are going to solve it, dancing joyously all the way.
I didn't say I don't like trees, just they aren't the solution. They're often used as green washing and delay actually effective things like carbon cap and trade. I don't know what the solution will be. If it were simple enough for me to solve it, it wouldn't be a problem we're facing.
Tree planting has been the most popular nature-based tactic so far — to little success. A growing body of research and investigations has found that offsetting emissions with forestry projects has largely failed. The trees often don’t survive long enough to make a meaningful dent in atmospheric CO2, for example, and then there’s double counting when more than one group claims the carbon credits.
Far be it from me to tell a Lemmy mob not to eat an oil exec, but wow that's not even close to what the article says.
“So we’ve got to find a way to get the cost down to grow the utility of the solution, and make it more available and more affordable so that you can begin the [clean energy] transition.”
As per the article, this exec is saying the exact opposite of "it's too late to transition to clean energy so we might as well not bother." He's saying "it's taking too long because it's too expensive, so we need to focus on making it cheaper so we can get there faster."
Is he lying about wanting to hasten the transition to clean energy? Maybe.
Are there other reasons that he is a fiend that must be eaten by the working class? Likely. Article hints at some of them.
But wow this take is off base. These guys do a good enough job making themselves look bad, we don't have to also make stuff up.
Lol, thanks. Sometimes I'm the one skimming the comments and skipping the article, so I'm glad I cold be helpful this time. I was expecting to get downvoted to hell based on the rest of the comments, but I'm happy to see that the response has been mostly positive.
How many statements out of the mouths of oil execs have been 'true' in the last 50 years, hm?
If they can weaponize dishonesty and factor in the asymmetrical nature of bullshit vs truth (it takes little effort to say bullshit, it takes massive effort to correct bullshit), then every time we take the high road, all we are doing is making our fight harder on ourselves.
And we don't have the people or resources that billionaire CEOs do.
You really don't need to defend billionaires, unless you enjoy being a class traitor.
Awh I've never been called a class traitor or a corporate boot licker before 😂 good to know that we're willing to throw the truth under the bus, I always thought that being better than our enemies was the way but I see now that petty things like the truth are the real enemy. Thank you for opening my eyes.
Being better than our enemies is what got us into this world economic catastrophe to begin with.
Look up the asymmetry of bullshit, it is literally a losing tactic to waste energy.
The rancid opposition makes a single soundbite sentence that riles the base, we spend 2 days carefully detailing why that single soundbite is wrong and harmful to the discourse, and by that time they've made seven new soundbites to debunk.
THEY know this, THEY WEAPONIZE THIS. So its time we stop pretending humans are rational, thoughtful beings and accept the fact that unless we want the same decades of failure for the future, we need to radically change our tactics.
Fuck CEOs, billionaires shouldn't exist and I don't care what needs to be said or done to make this happen.
Just shut the fuck up. That's not even the point. OP was simply clarifying what the article said, without outside editorializing.
I am in favor of making CEOs accountable, but all you're doing is staining the cause with an irrelevant conversation. Wait... is that your goal? Are you a fucking Russian disinformation agent or something?
Pay no attention to that troll, friend. I'm all for makeing CEOs/billionaires accountable. But what you did was good, and you don't need to explain yourself to a troll.
What the fuck, what kind of bullshit is this? This is not how a sane discourse works. This is the worst case of ad-hominem/strawman I've seen in a while.
"Yes, OP, you're right that the CEO didn't say that. But do we need the truth prevailing here? He's a CEO!!!! Why are you defending him?!"
Fuck CEOs, Fuck Billionaires, I wouldn't piss on one to put out a fire.
I'm done playing fair, I'm done spending 3 hours making well-cited thoughtful responses just to have it make no difference other than inviting 20 other bored internet randos to show off their wikipedia degree for attention.
You don't do that for the poster. You do that for other readers.
When someone makes a completely stupid comment, like "Drink bleach to kill viruses," I won't go and reply "no you wrong!" I'll reply "For anyone reading, that's a dangerous advice and here's why [citations]." I don't care if the poster then replies with "nuh uh, fake nooz."
I mean he also blames the people using electricity and says they need to pay more to cover the carbon offset costs which sounds a lot like he's looking for an excuse to raise prices and push governmental fees on consumers more directly in this same speech.
I read through the article and think him saying it's too late is like the barely visible take when he's flashing a neon sign of "I'm not cutting down production and you fuckers are gonna pay for it!" And blaming governments for not wanting to pay for company infrastructure changes is hilarious when they lobby to make it so there is no more government insight anywhere else but covering the costs they don't want to pay.
He's definitely on the list but yeah title and thing OP tried to pull from this is so not the worst part of it.
Yeah, exactly-- There's plenty of oil exec bullshit right there in the article, but I was surprised to learn that he was actually talking about clean energy as an important thing to hurry toward, and investing large sums in carbon capture and stuff. A far cry from cartoonish climate denialism and trying to stop decarbonization.
I saw another post on the same article that had a title like "oil exec tells the public that it's their responsibility to foot the bill for clean energy..." And while I think that's lacking a little nuance, it's at least one area (of several!) that represents an actual claim that deserves criticism.
Is it? Solar, for example, is getting cheaper, and as it gets cheaper, more people adopt it, which broadens its impact. Electric cars were prohibitively expensive until companies put R&D money into building cars that people could afford, and now they're starting to gain traction.
Not to say that companies producing solar cells and EVs aren't also trying to profit... But both things can be true.
It's taking too long because the fossil fuel industry is heavily subsidized creating the appearance of a stronger cost advantage for fossil fuels than actually exists
"So we’ve got to find a way to get the cost down to grow the utility of the solution"
As if they don't have a significant sum of all the worlds money. If its too expensive they should be eating all the cost, since they are the ones that put us in this mess, knowingly. They shouldn't be complaining that it costs too much. Maybe instead of wasting all that money lobbying against climate science, they could have put all that money into decarb and renewables. We are lightyears behind where we could be and why? Because they lied about what they knew and had to keep lying about it and maintaining the narrative that there is no problem. Can't get anybody to believe that anymore so now they say they need more time and money and its just too hard guys. No excuses for these vampires.
This kinda lines up with propaganda I've been seeing the past couple years (from the likes of Peter Theil and Alex Epstein). They argue that we should be extracting and using fossil fuels as fast as possible. The (stupid, fucked up, wishful thinking) idea is that cheap energy drives human development and technological solutions to climate change.
Good luck...we can't even get companies to stop poisoning drinking water for entire cities..you won't stop Elon from doing whatever he wants when he and his buddies can just buy new laws.
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