admiralteal

Sounds like a compelling argument for why we need better safety standards for cars and traffic engineering.

In the US? The IRA is a very good model. Hard to overstate what a good piece of legislation it is. Doesn’t go far enough, but it makes some serious strides.

Promote electrification. Renewable energy generation is already cheaper than fossil fuel, so with minimal additional incentives the market is going to wipe out grid fossil energy production over time. Calibrate your incentives and penalties to make it happen as fast as possible – we aren’t there yet, but we’ve taken major strides.

You’ll need to do a LOT of grid enhancement in the process. As more electrification occurs, you’ll need better transmission of that electricity. A lot of the utilities have vastly miscalibrated incentive structures right now, which favor building major capital projects over doing repair and maintenance. Better regulation can fix this, though some of them are so incompetent and corrupt that they long-term probably just need to be nationalized (looking at you Central Maine Power/Versant). Re-conductoring is a good place to start for this because it’s cheap and can increase current grid capacity by something like 2-3x. Large grids with a good mix of wind/solar and dynamic pricing should be largely resistant to any intermittency issues of renewables, by some energy storage sugar on top will take care of that.

Side note: the main thing pumping the breaks on more renewable energy generation facilities is not actually a lack of demand, it’s interconnection queues.

Another prong is urbanization. You massively reduce emissions by reducing vehicle miles traveled (VMT). Good urbanism reduces VMT, creates more financially sustainable towns, and also more pleasant, safe, and healthy environments for the average person to live in. Strong Towns has a lot to say about how you can start pushing for better urbanism right now. There’s little more you can do for total emissions as an individual than helping your city avoid expensive and dehumanizing sprawl; show up to your MPC/city council meetings and advocate for good urban policy.

We can further cut back on emissions by reducing the reliance on interstate trucking for freight. Trains can (and should) be electrically-powered and are FAR cheaper for a society. Delivery “last miles” can be done by various EVs pretty easily. For the US, this pretty much requires nationalization of the right of way/track (and then, ideally, deregulation of the freight operators). That is, make the train network function a lot more like the current highway network. Bonus points: ~80% of microplastics in our water are just tire dust. Let’s do less of that.

Industrial heat is another major pillar. Places like steel and concrete plants need to switch to heat batteries powered by electricity instead of fossil fuels. This tech is ancient and reliable, but still not at scale, but at least some promising pilots are already happening. And the minute any of them work at all, they’ll take over fast. Because renewables + heat batteries ought to be a lot cheaper and more reliable than furnaces + fossil fuels once operating at scale. And the facilities will also be able to make use of aforementioned renewable intermittency to save even more money (e.g., charging their heat battles at nadir hours where energy prices go to near 0 or even negative).

We’ll also need to do some stuff that is politically sketchier. Reducing certain kinds of consumption (industrial beef, fast fashion, tariff-loophole import goods, etc). But those are higher-hanging fruit and it’s ok to procrastinate on them a bit if they’re too politically difficult right now.

This is also related to the ultimate bullshit about any kind of carbon credits.

The only way it makes sense to sell a carbon credit, at least in a world paradigm (such as it is under Paris) where all nations need to get to zero, is to price those credits backwards from the last ton of CO2 you are going to remove. Because all the tons need to be removed. In the most honest, true, legitimate scenario, selling a credit is taking a loan out against yourself which will HAVE to be paid back eventually.

So the cost of a carbon credit, assuming it actually represents the thing it claims to represent (hint: they don’t), should be as expensive as it is per ton of DAC, since DAC is certainly the most expensive way to mitigate emissions.

That means they should be going at something like $500/ton or more in developed nations. Plus the interest on the loan.

In poorer nations, it’s possible that those last tons will be cheaper to remove by nature of their lower costs. Maybe that DAC facility built in Indonesia will have lower operational costs than the one you build in Norway. But in that case, selling the credits from Indonesia to Norway makes even LESS sense because now Indonesia is effectively going to have to pay for that last ton to be removed from Norway… where it’s WAY more expensive.

If we are to actually believe that carbon credits are what they purport to be, they are usury. They are colonialism. I guess we should be glad they’re just regular scams and not that, eh?

Wow, on top of that wild crotch it is also ugly. Wild.

Moving my reply to the comment that wasn’t deleted…

Redefining the counterfactual scenario

Lord please give me the strength to not give this guy a Logic and Critical Thinking 101 lecture… Definitional retreat does not apply to what I said about the counterfactual because that was not an argument about what the term “counterfactual” means. It only applies when people argue about the definition of a word. He and I have the same definition of the word “counterfactual”.

What you MEANT is that you DISAGREE with my assessment of the counterfactual scenario. But instead, you tried to make yourself seem very clever and logical and me very foolish and emotional by misappropriating a term.

Why ignore the case of less beef production out of hand

Why ignore the reality that annual beef demand is growing consistently every year? Especially in the global south, where the environmental effects of raising beef are in fact way worse.

I think you should just say what you actually want to say.

Here, I’ll do my best to do it for you:

Beef production is an environmental disaster. These people working to mitigate the harms of that industry are mopping the decks of a sinking ship. If they really want to say they care about the environment, the only reasonable choice is shutting down their ranches and doing something else, because beef is just hopeless.

To which I’ll respond in mostly the same way I have. That’s nice and all, but beef demand is still growing. I’d rather farmers that do their best to mitigate harms raising the beef than the ones who only care about making the most short-term profit possible, damn sustainability. Keep going out there and preaching for veganism. I hope you succeed. Don’t make enemies out of your allies along the way.

You really, really need to read up more on the world of regenerative ag. It’s not typically touted as being “zero emissions” or anything like that outside of this op-ed writer’s strawman argument.

It’s almost entirely sold as a way to avoid having to buy expensive feed and fertilizers through better land management. Do you really think the average farmer gives a fuck about the climate? They have bills to pay. They like that there’s sustainability benefits to the practices, don’t get me wrong, and and being able to advertise the better practices that went into producing the beef is part the pitch, but this is all about cost-savings and improving product quality almost entirely through thoughtful field rotation and reduced/eliminated tilling.

And it does work. Small farmers who have enough land and patience to adopt these practices can almost entirely eliminate their needs for buying fertilizers and feed. Which I’ll remind you, outside of transportation, is the main source of carbon emissions for most farms. Methane from cellulose digestion is another battle that is being waged separately.

Moreover, the more farmers prove that it CAN be done in a financially sustainable way, the easier it becomes to get rid of the worse environmental practices, both on friendly soil and abroad.

deleted by creator

What word are you accusing me of redefining and what moderation am I suggesting?

The argument of this article can apply to literally all of agriculture, not just animal produce. It applies to fucking backyard tomatoes. Increasing sustainability and reducing emissions should be seen as a good thing. Even when you don’t get directly to 0 from the beginning.

Starting with the lowest-hanging fruit isn’t capitulation, it’s progress. If your position is completely undoing all of a global capitalist system tomorrow or bust, you’re getting bust and likely taking others with you.

The argument for drive-by-wire in personal automobiles is basically that it’s safe enough for airplanes, so it should be safe enough for cars.

I mostly buy that. But there’s a glaring omission in the reasoning.

In airplanes, there’s a full incident investigation for EVERYTHING that goes wrong. Even near misses. It’s an industry that (mostly lol boeing) has a history of prioritizing safety. Even at its worst, the safety standards the airline industry and air transportation engineering are orders magnitude more strict than those of the automotive industry and road engineering.

In real terms, automobile incidents should be taken just as seriously. Even near misses should have reporting and analysis. Crashes should absolutely have full investigations. Nearly all automobile deaths are completely avoidable through better engineering of the road systems and cars, but there is mostly no serious culture of safety among automobiles. We chose carnage and have been so immured by it that we don’t even think it’s weird. We don’t think it’s weird that essentially everyone, at least in the US, knows someone who died or was seriously injured in a car accident.

So yeah, we should have drive-by-wire. But it should also include other aspects of that safety culture as part of the deal. “Black box” equivalents, for example, and the accompanying post-accident review process that comes with it. A process that focuses not on establishing liability, but preventing future incidents, because establishing liability is mostly a thought-killer when it comes to safety.

…of course, if we actually took road safety that seriously it’d be devastation to the entire car industrial complex. Because much of that industry is focused on design patterns that, in fact, cannot be done safely or sustainably.

More importantly, the counterfactual scenario went unmentioned: if his cattle were removed from the land and it was allowed to rewild, far more carbon would accumulate, both above and below ground, and this would not be counteracted by the farm’s emissions

That’s not the counterfactual, though.

The ACTUAL counterfactual is that the demand for beef continues to skyrocket worldwide and that if we do not embrace regenerative agriculture practices, we must instead continue to endlessly fertilize soils and buy feedstocks to keep the beef growing. The actual counterfactual to having this guy pushing his farm towards more sustainable practice is that he’ll continue to operate the farm with less sustainable practice. Or even more likely, become financially unsustainable and have to sell out to a larger industrial farm who will operate the land in the least sustainable way possible to extract the most quarterly profits possible because they don’t give any damn about the long term.

And the ACTUAL counterfactual is that if western markets abandon beef production, there’s plenty of farmers happy to raze the Amazon and other even-more-critical ecosystems to do it there instead. Because the demand will be there regardless.

It’s utter fantasy to pretend that everyone is just going to wake up vegan tomorrow. It’s not going to happen. This author clearly is arguing that we need to… I don’t know, outlaw beef, I guess? Just ban it entirely? And then take all the farmland and convert it to protected wildlife habitats instead? Including a staff of rangers who will oversee and protect the land to make sure it stays healthy, safe, and sustainable? Because that’s the only way the ‘counterfactual’ he made up makes one lick of sense.

It’s a good strategy for environmentalists to take… if they want to ensure they lose elections and doom us all.

It is disingenuous to claim that regenerative agriculture practices can even hope to be a functional carbon sink. But they can hugely reduce the emissions and mitigate the other externalities of an incredibly polluting industry. And do it in a way that simultaneously increases animal welfare, reduces spread of disease, and increases profits progressively (because these practices are actually easier and more effective at smaller sizes rather than at huge industrial operations).

Which can be abbreviated to: the term “carbon footprint” was invented by a BP marketing campaign.

Just as “reduce, reuse, recycle” and the halo of campaigns around it were a response to the earth day movement in which single use plastics almost got banned back in the 1970s. But the industry managed to transfer blame from themselves – for intentionally making and marketing disposable trash products – to the consumers for using those products as intended.

The petroleum and plastics industries are responsible for every spec of waste, pollution, and emissions they produce. Every spec of them. Individualization campaigns are just a way to get away with being the deadbeats they are.

deleted by creator

Constituency building is absolutely crucial to all of this and often underlooked. It’s a virtuous cycle. If you build useful and good infrastructure, people will use it, and the more people who use it the more people who will vote for it and demand it. It’s a big part of how car-centric urban design grew so fast and became so sticky in North America, and that same constituency-building is the best way to take streets back for people.

Seeing people on bikes makes people think about biking. Even without the bike paths, being out and about your city on a bike is doing your part to build just a little more constituency for it. On top of it being good for your wallet, the climate, and likely your health.

Now if only I could get the average local bike shop worker to stop being such a colossal gatekeeping prick about ebikes…

They won’t, though.

The instability and chaos will hurt the poorest and most vulnerable first. In their communities. Always does.

The ReAct stuff isn’t new. For a more industrial example of this, check out CarbonCure. It’s not yet economical, though once you include external factors like carbon credits or other tools that financially punish emissions / reward sequestration it theoretically can be. As the the tech scales up, there’s every reason to think the cost of this kind of carbon-enriched concrete will at least be priced in the same league as traditional PCC.

So it’s CCS. Just another version of carbon capture. Yawn.

Way more interesting is e.g., the projects with Rondo and Titan Cement, where they are using industrial heat batteries powered by regular electricity instead of fossil fuels. With this kind of technology, you can not only reduce/eliminate emissions, but can even theoretically turn concrete production into a carbon sink through CO2 injection/mineralization (which can even improve the performance of the concrete, though current regulations don’t permit pushing this to its limit in real construction yet).

That is, use use renewable energy along with CO2 gathered from any source (not limited to just CCS – even DAC) to build stronger, better, cheaper, more environmentally-friendly concrete that creates fairly durable carbon sinks.

Seems like this whole “ReAct” thing is just trying to claim/trademark a concrete technology as their own when it really isn’t.

So the truth is, it’s not even a gas range you care about. It’s a completely different specialty appliance. Which kind of goes back to my point that electric ranges are flat better than gas ranges – you, a self-avowed gas-lover, still needed to design a custom appliance to cook the way you wanted to because your gas range couldn’t do it.

And that’s the short of it. Electric ranges are hugely easier to clean, have better temperature stability, heat pans hotter and do it faster, and don’t heat the room or fuck with air quality. And that’s not even getting into the unequivocal superiority of electric ovens over gas ones.

Still, you should try an induction wok hob if you get the chance. Sounds a lot safer than your solution.

Yeah, I hear people say this all the time. And maybe before I actually was forced to use electric for a year or two, I also would’ve said the same. But no, I would never go back at this point. The electric experience is plain better. Literally the only downside is you have to use the broiler to char a pepper or warm a tortilla rather than doing it directly on the fire, and that’s hardly a sacrifice – the broiler does a better job evenly charring stuff anyway.

Highly encourage you to try a dedicated induction wok burner appliance. The type with a concave base. They’re wildly more popular in wok-loving parts of the world for home cooking over gas for good reason.

You aren’t getting wok hei with a gas range, period. They also simply cannot get the wok hot enough, and they distribute the heat in a crown midway up the pan instead of in the bottom where it belongs. Using a wok on a traditional gas range is just an over-complicated saute pan. And I agree, no typical electric range can do it either. Nothing gets a pan hotter than induction, but a typical induction range doesn’t interface properly with a wok to make it happen. Only a dedicated wok cooker does the job. That means either one of those insane commercial jet engine 120k BTU cookers like they have in the serious wok restaurants, a backyard stovepipe-style coal wok cooker, or a dedicated wok appliance.

Better, they aren’t that expensive. If you really enjoy using a wok, one of them will change your life. They actually apply the heat the correct way: extreme heat concentrated in the bottom of the pan.

Wind’s not doing terribly, but in the last decade solar has seen something like a 7fold increase in prevalence while wind has only seen closer to a doubling.

There’s a chicken and egg problem here. These products are on learning curves. The more you sell, the cheaper they get, the more they sell. Solar has a killer feature – it’s ridiculous modularity. It scales from facilities that are acres and acres large all the way down to the roof of a van. That scalability has been a big part of driving demand for PVs beyond anyone’s predictions.

Wind needs some help. Again, these energy sources are ridiculously complementary and we need both for the future. I want to see wind keeping pace with solar PV. If it can do that, natural gas is going to be wiped out by them.

Code requires you install all kinds of outlets you may have no plan on using. Every 4’ on the walls, last I checked, just because a house without proper electrical supply is unusable.

You’re only whining about this oven outlet, though, so methinks you are not being entirely honest about your outrage.