Apparently it is so slow and expensive to build nuclear power so no commercial entities are interested without extreme government subsidies and guarantees.
One thing that has struck me with our own solar panels is that they have to be very dirty before I notice any significant degradation in efficiency. And when they do get completely covered in pollen or leaves, a brief rain is usually enough to clean them.
I don't say we shouldn't do research. What I do say is that we do have all the technology we need. And more importantly, we don't have the time to wait for some future technology that potentially could solve all our problems. The climate disaster has already started (and this [0] is not "the new normal", this is just the beginning, a hint of what we should expect).
The only reason we are in this shithole is because of the lack of political will. It would have been comparable trivial to solve if we just had started 30 years ago when scientists started to yell about that it was getting urgent.
We don’t need any new and untested technology to solve to stop spewing out greenhouse gases. We just need to scale up current green tech. It’s not know how and technology that is lacking, it is political will.
You clearly have some hangups. Of course I know I am very lucky. The only people I judge are the even more lucky people who think they are entitled to destroy our planet just because they have the financial means to do so on a larger scale than most.
I don’t know what your point is. Of course some people have more choices than others.
(And btw, I’m faster with my cargo bike than the car drivers. I never get stuck in traffic chaos outside school and I never get stuck in traffic jams, and I don’t have look for parking. I hate the days when I have to use a car.)
No, I don't mean life satisfaction, I mean exactly what I wrote. Our material standards are unimaginable high compared to a few hundred years ago. I've never imagined kings to be particularly happy.
I am convinced there will be a point where humans will find other ways to compete than buying expensive goods. I thought the whole "humans are slaves to their genes" became quite out of fashion already 30 years or so.
What a miserable world view. What do you need a yacht to when you have two weeks of holiday every year?
While I agree that many people are status seekers, that can be different things. Where I live, a yacht is vulgar. Even a bigger car is looked down on if it isn't for some specific utility. Status is showing your care for the climate by leaving your kids in daycare with a cargo bike. Status is being able to leave work early to be able to spend time in the afternoon with your family, or do so some garden work. No one wants to be the one with an expensive car but not knowing your own kids.
If you instead imagine the perspective of anyone from 16th century, you’d realise we are already living as kings. We have way more food and clothes than we can eat and use, we have self driving carriages, magic devices with entertainment in our pockets, not to mention that almost all our kids live to adulthood.
At what point do we say that we don’t need to waste more of earth’s resources and instead find time to enjoy our current enormous wealth?
I think part of the point is that Einstein’s genius was only partially the brain. It was also a unique upbringing in a specific point in time that made it possible. We would have many more geniuses if we game more people the opportunities.
Exactly. It's just that they mix up the steps. The last step, the assembly, is highly automated and usually very fast in software production, since it is done by a compiler (and the aptly named, assembler). The people involved are doing engineering and design, which is much harder to control.
The advantage would be that I know beforehand, and have the opportunity to test and, possibly, reject, what the advertiser want me to send to someone’s browser.
My meaning clearly got lost when I droppen an r. Will you still be happy when they sell youR software, that is, the software you wrote, and make a lot of money while you get nothing.
I would be in the second to last group if we actually did something when there still was time, and more was done to actually do something now. Yes, there's a lot of energy efficiency measures that could be done, and much more clean energy could be build, and we will be forced to adopt whether we want to or not. (Carbon capture from the atmosphere is a fucking joke though, which should be to everyone when you know that CO2 in the atmosphere is measured in parts per million!)
But we didn't start when we had to, and we are still doing only a fraction of what must be done. So, we are screwing ourselves over majorly. And this is not some fringe hysteria, this is the scientific consensus and has been for a long time. You can almost hear screams of frustration and desperation through the lines if you pick ut the latest IPCC report.