I repeat and will continue to repeat the only way to step off the path of destruction is the immediate reduction of all energy use, and resource use. The equation that you and I get told repeatedly is a false one..
Renewables come with a permanently destructive permanently, toxic permanently, life ending legacy.
In order to build it, we have to kill the planet.
@GhostOnTheHalfShell @blogdiva
this is the trap of perfectionism
there is nothing wrong with your argument, but you've decided to make another argument your enemy. even though that argument is a good thing, it is not a perfect thing, so you think you can complain
you can't
is it good we reduce our reliance on fossil fuels?
yes
is it good to reduce resource use, your agenda?
also yes
but why make enemies of these fine goals
applaud both, push both
don't make them enemies. that is a lie
And when I am saying is the trade-off between one versus the other, has been the product of greenwashing.
Renewables destroy the planet in their manufacture.
And all you or I or the rest of society is doing is continuing to butcher down the planet while we’re being told we are saving it.
This is not an argument of the perfect being the enemy of the good, this is the argument that the alternative is not what it’s been sold as, and the only real solution is reduction
@benroyce @blogdiva @GhostOnTheHalfShell just to note, your take's logical conclusion is nihilism. If humanity didn't exist there wouldn't be any footprint. If the universe didn't exist there wouldn't be any problems. but that's just not how it works.
by all means, reuse, reduce, recycle. But it has been widely disproven that e.g electric cars "are not worth it", or that solar panels have a limited lifespan. That's propaganda from the fossil fuel industry that defeats your own point if anything
@GhostOnTheHalfShell @benroyce @blogdiva Unalloyed bollocks.
@bjn @GhostOnTheHalfShell @blogdiva
i thought he was a confused perfectionist, but more and more i think GhostOnTheHalfShell is an outright fossil fuel industry apologist
at the very least, the fool should consider that that is the only effect of their mental vomit in the real world
but some people only concern themselves with their ridiculous perfect mind castles, and fuck reality
they're utterly clueless and embarrassing. they help nothing but their grandiose egos
@benroyce @GhostOnTheHalfShell @blogdiva He’s basically asking for most of humanity to just curl up and die. Without intensive energy we can’t make the fertilisers that feed us, or the machinery to farm, or the transporation to get it to us, or the means to keep ourselves warm, or the refigeration to keep foods and medicines fresh, etc... I’m all in for reducing fossil fuels and using energy efficiently, but the picture he paints of RE is straight out of the FF apologists’ playbook.
Then you’re into outright defamation territory at this point. You transform the argument to minimize the use of fossil fuel or all energy in the first place into something completely different.
Consider that in the 1950s before cars were in right wide use cities had a completely different structure, and you want to tell me that somehow getting rid of cars and using all of our knowledge now to minimize the global supply chain is working for big oil
@bjn @GhostOnTheHalfShell @blogdiva
they are the kind of person who will stand with peter thiel when the order goes out from him to machine gun us because the plutocrats don't need excess labor anymore in their perfect ai compounds and we represent only a threat
well they will be machine gunned too. but they will agree with the decision
I remember that MBS the guy that had that journalist chopped up insisted that without oil everyone would be living in caves.
Y’all should go look up Rio Tinto the company that mines and refined aluminum and copper and nickel.
You are defending big mineral and you are defending a company that murders people and the environment.
Before the 1950s, cities were designed around people instead of cars. And you all are having a psychotic breakdown over the concept
Oh right because the mining industry, and the solar panel manufacturing industry is being completely honest with you.
Think about the supply chain necessary to build any piece of technology and understand that the dirtiest most criminal economic sectors are telling you that everything is really green.
Who’s worse big oil or big mining?
@GhostOnTheHalfShell @benroyce @blogdiva Think about the supply chain to breathe. Think about the supply chain for 10 billion people to exist.
The logical conclusion to your take is Nihilism.
That's all I'm going to say on this subject because I've talked about this and I've been down that road and I know exactly where it leads.
(not to be mean or condescending, I just had this conversation one too many times it feels like)
@GhostOnTheHalfShell @anthropy @blogdiva
you're a toxic idealist
a whiny useless perfectionist
of course mining for solar and batteries sucks
*and* a smaller footprint than fossil fuel extraction
*and* far better for climate change
you fucking purists are an enemy of the real left as bad as MAGA
ALL YOU GET IN THIS WORLD IS BETTER
PERFECT IS NOT ON THE MENU
are you shilling for the fossil fuel industry or are you just that fucking stupid and blind?
stop following me, you stupid asshole
@GhostOnTheHalfShell
Let’s actually talk about the supply chain for renewables with facts. PV panels are made from silicon, glass, and aluminum. None of these are terrible to mine, all are recyclable, we can even recycle old PVs into new ones.
Let’s talk about batteries. We already recycle acid batteries and 99% of people return them for the up front fee. You can take spent batteries and break them down into component chemistry and make new batteries from them… because they are not consumed or combusted, just decharged. Yes, there are rare earth elements. We mine them once and can reuse forever. The atoms aren’t being converted into different atoms. The only reason we don’t have significant EV battery recycling operations now is there aren’t enough spent batteries for that to be a thing, but people ARE currently buying batteries from wrecked EVe and using them for other applications.
Anyway, watch the whole video because it completely dispels all the objections I’ve ever seen spread about EVs, renewables, batteries, etc.
We need to deal with the real problems we have, not the imaginary ones that don’t exist.
I’m not gonna let you slide on this idea that I am being a perfectionist. I’m telling you that you have to revisit what you’ve been told effectively by the worst polluting industries in the most destructive industries on the planet, the mining sector, and to bring the same level of realism to their own statements that you bring to big oil or big tobacco
@benroyce @GhostOnTheHalfShell @anthropy @blogdiva completely absent from the discussion is that the PV panels and batteries are - with existing technology - nearly entirely recyclable back into service as improved-efficiency versions of the same general products. Fossil fuels, hydroelectric, nuclear... no one's making any new uranium or petroleum, but the sun will keep shining for another couple billion years
@benroyce @GhostOnTheHalfShell @anthropy @blogdiva As to the battery issue, the good news is that lithium batteries are recyclable so over time lithium mining can get greatly reduced once we reach “peak battery.” Recycling batteries could provide a majority of the lithium needed, though there would always be a need for lithium mines.
Compare to oil which isn't recyclable and always needs to be replaced as we use it.
@paneerakbari @benroyce @anthropy @blogdiva
If we look at the actual recycling of PV, they turned out to be about as bad as general plastic recycling.
Recycling is contingent on cost structure. It's cheaper to throw the stuff away and build from scratch that it is to recycle. Economically you know how that ends up.
But in addition to this, you can't 100% recover anything and often if you try to recover one thing, it concludes the possibility of recovering the other materials.
These things exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor
You can make more fuel than you use (I know it sounds like fiction but it's actually scientifically sound and has been demonstrated at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and elsewhere)
@ChuckMcManis @benroyce @GhostOnTheHalfShell @anthropy @blogdiva Breeder reactors don't output more uranium than what is fed into the system, they make more *fissible* material than they are supplied with
"Orange juice from concentrate" isn't more oranges than it took to produce
Our world's matter-system is all but a closed loop, we're not getting - or making - more of it. But our is bombarded by all the energy we could use and we let it just slip away because there's no gold-pressed latinum
Yes, but the point of the Oak Ridge demonstration was a nuclear fuel cycle that ran "forever." Not trying to divert this wonderful discussion, just noting that 'nuclear' can be 'renewable' 😃. I too rage against folks who just want to go back to living in caves with 99% of the current population gone.
@ChuckMcManis @paneerakbari @GhostOnTheHalfShell @anthropy @blogdiva
while i generally like breeder reactors you have to admit the teensy tiny problem that this is how we make plutonium for bombs
this is why breeder reactors are downplayed
otherwise i agree
Yeah there is that downside. When my kids were younger we talked about how as technology became more sophisticated, it also becomes more capable. And capability has both good and bad vectors associated with it.
@GhostOnTheHalfShell @benroyce @anthropy @blogdiva ok sure thing bud
maybe your soapbox of "everyone needs to go without" could kick off with us being deprived of your unicorn-hunting nihilism and foreclosed doom
This is just as much why we can't have nice things as the economic bogeyman
@GhostOnTheHalfShell @anthropy @blogdiva
unread
uninterested
all you do is help the fossil fuel industry
i will force you to unfollow me now
and fuck you and your stupid fucking toxic idealism that only helps fossil fuels
you're either an agent provocateur shill or too stupid to see the only real effect of your perfectionist bullshit
You’re arguing that because I am pointing out the ecological consequences of what’s called renewables that I’m being a Nihilist?
How exactly are you squaring that circle?
@GhostOnTheHalfShell @benroyce @blogdiva .... you're saying "we just need less", which is not possible with a growing population. Even the logistics of food and shelter are unattainable in our current methods.
Again, by all means; reuse, reduce, recycle. That's a great start. But you're not going to triple-R yourself towards a healthy planet. And by dissing renewables you're arguing for the current methods, for consumables, for fossil fuels, etc.
You need triple-R AND renewables, for start.
@GhostOnTheHalfShell @benroyce @blogdiva and if your instinct here is "we need to shrink the population" you're starting to understand exactly what I mean by nihilism.
Again, no offense. I get the idealism that's behind all this. But the version you picked up is the one that came from the fossil industry, that argues we just need to e.g recycle plastic or whatever. But you're not going to recycle towards sustainable systems. Renewables however, are, and are also recycle-able on top of that.
@anthropy @GhostOnTheHalfShell @benroyce @blogdiva I've been ruminating as of late on how close Malthusian nihilism is to racism. This is not to cast aspersions or make accusations regarding thread participants; it's just a thought.
Malthusian math (which is disproven, or at least, claims to prove more than it can because several of its assumptions were upended by new technological breakthroughs) indicates some people have to die or the entire population dies.
But then you're left with the problem that nobody wants to die, and racism steps in to provide a framework that lets people rank the quality of other human beings to let them square that cognitive dissonance off.
It may be an interesting dynamic, but I haven't done nearly enough thinking or research on the subject to endorse it as anything more than a thought.
@mark @anthropy @GhostOnTheHalfShell @blogdiva
nihilists on the left are the same as sadists on the right. in the intentional or unintentional effects of their arguments
if not merely their arguments being slight tweaks on the arguments racist mass murderers make on the right, when you examine the substance of their arguments
which makes you wonder about such empty turds supposedly "on the left"
malthusianism is eugenics which is always founded on racism.
if you agree with anything malthusian, i would suggest going into cult deprogramming therapy.
malthusianism ―like eugenics, like racism, like capitalism― is a death cult.
@blogdiva I don't usually go for absolutes, but this one I'm fairly certain proves true in practice. @mark @anthropy @GhostOnTheHalfShell @benroyce
@blogdiva We all know it , but I need to spell it out: Trumps fixation on "Winners" and "Losers" comes from this view that the riches of the world is a fixed cache. If somebody gets more, it means that he is the loser, and losers are the worst. On the other hand if somebody else loses, it means that he is winning (even when he is objectively worse off himself). 1/2 @mark @anthropy @GhostOnTheHalfShell @benroyce
@blogdiva
That's a twisted take on Malthus, but Malthus' world-view will lead you pretty close to Trumps. Actually *adding* value is a foreign concept to that guy. Malthus of course was not *that* stupid, but he was closer to Trump than to the sane view, which is that we can create more out of what we have, by working *together*, and we can practice and learn (together!), and get better at it as time passes. @mark @anthropy @GhostOnTheHalfShell @benroyce
@hakona @blogdiva @mark @anthropy @GhostOnTheHalfShell
there's a better agument:
fuck malthus and avoid any pathetic snake who makes even mathus-adjacent arguments
they are essentially the same as the worst of the far right, but don't know it, don't care, or are evolving into that and are on their way to becoming a far right goon
@benroyce @mark @anthropy @GhostOnTheHalfShell @blogdiva
Here I am
Stuck in the middle with you.
I think I prefer clowns and Jokers...
