Good on you. We were 'one and done'. Two sounds more than 100% more difficult, if only just because the number of edges in the relationship graph going up.
My parents managed four kids, albeit for most of that time there were only 3 living in the home at a time (13 years between the oldest and youngest).
A friend of mine had eleven (!!!) siblings. That horrifies me. Cliques could form in that size population! Utter craziness.
Then what is the point? If what I'm doing can be done by Claude, as operated by someone who "doesn't need to get up to speed", then I really need to look at another career.
A significant source of electricty is generated from waste-to-power plants in the Nordics. Several of those countries import rubbish by the shipload to turn into power.
For that matter, it's probably a net positive to put most plastic "recycling" into such schemes, as we're just turning plastic products into lower and lower grade pieces, with the associated generation of microplastics.
Yes that's the best use of waste (next to not producing the waste in the first place). Also, those powerplants are usually combined type of powerplants which make them highly effective, i.e. they are producing both heat and electricity.
Nordics countries generally need lot of heating because of cold climate, which in cities is typically district heating, i.e. delivering the heat as hot water from big heating plants. Heat pumps are also very popular (air-to-air, air-to-water, geothermal).
For example, my house is entirely heated with 3 heat pumps, even in -25°C. From April to September 10 kW solar panels provide the most of energy, also charging my Tesla.
Combustion with energy recovery is slightly lower down the "Waste hierarchy" than recycling. Nordics get even more bonus points if they use the waste heat for district heating after generating electricity but I think it still comes out as a bit worse than recycling overall.
There's complicated interactions though, removing the plastics can affect the makeup of the fuel and the post combustion products can free recyclable metal from other materials they were combined with. Recycling processes often have an unrecyclable fraction which can be burned etc.
> Nordics get even more bonus points if they use the waste heat for district heating after generating electricity.
Waste -> district heating is definitely happening in Sweden. Probably more so than waste -> electricity. There are better ways to generate electricity and we need heating anyway big part of the season.
And people wonder why I laugh when they say "non-mechanical devices are more reliable." Sure mechanical devices need pieces to stay moving in the same way over and over again, but electronic devices need a huge number of very precisely-placed atoms to not move in any way, including chemically.
There's a question about the right units here. Your CPU performs more operations in its first millisecond* than most mechanical devices do in their entire lifetime. So in per operation units, they are staggeringly reliable.
Actual operating life is often determined by the economic feedback loop which causes manufacturers to cut costs until basically all consumer products have roughly the same expected lifetime, regardless of the potential of the underlying technology.
* Or at least, the first millisecond after it starts using its normal operating clock, which might not be the very first millisecond
> Actual operating life is often determined by the economic feedback loop which causes manufacturers to cut costs until basically all consumer products have roughly the same expected lifetime, regardless of the potential of the underlying technology.
Which is why, despite being a huge BEV proponent, laugh when I hear people say things as "BEV are inherently more reliable due to having no transmission and less moving parts that could break". It might have been true in the early stage, that we're currently at the end of, but we already know that the reliability of a second-hand mid-range ICE car is what market has been bearing for decades, so we can be certain BEVs will be "value-optimized" until they are just as unreliable.
Yes. Cars have fixed cost ranges for people so the end result is pretty much predetermined - electric cars settling at the same price and quality points as ICE cars are today.
You can easily make it more reliable just by making larger features, and then no mechanical thing can even come close to compare to how reliable digital circuits are. There is a reason 40 year old NES consoles still works today, they are very reliable because the circuits are so large. To break those old machines you have to essentially melt them.
I know quite a few people who've had SNESes with failing ICs in recent years (mainly PPU and APU chips). That's pretty annoying because the only way to get replacement parts is from a donor console.
Ok, but how are you going to make a billion mechanical transistors? Even if you could, latency would be limited by the speed of sound in whatever materials you use.
In what context are people saying this? I’ve never heard anyone proclaim that electronic devices are more reliable than mechanical devices. See for example how people desire cars with “no computers”.
Anyone that has had to deal with a carbureted engine, or old school hydraulic ‘computer’ based automatic transmission is never going to extol their reliability or ease of repair.
Those also are doing 1/10th of the work (for things like automatic engine tuning, wear adjustment, on the fly power band adjustment, altitude adjustment, anti-pollution adjustment, etc).
The reason why people complain about modern cars is because computers have made it exceptionally easy to add massive amounts of new (and poorly tested, in many cases) functionality.
And even the equivalent of DRM.
If if you used current tech to implement the old feature set, and spent even a little effort making it open instead of DRM-ish, it could be even simpler and more reliable. But no one is doing that. Because it’s more profitable using it ‘for evil’, as it were.
The problem is not that modern cars are somehow less reliable than old cars. They are much more reliable. But they’re also much less repairable without specialized equipment. You can with somewhat accessible technology repair almost all defects on a purely mechanical car. You cannot do the same for a modern car unless you happen to have a chip fab.
Somewhat tangential question - for the "Just Stop Oil" folks - is it the extraction of oil that is the problem, or the burning of it? If the former, then we have an opportunity to investigate more renewable sources.
Because that's still geological carbon entering the overall cycle on the surface. The air and ocean are giant buffers of it. When it's needed it needs to be pulled from there somehow (such as by felling trees or directly extracting CO2). Unfortunately that's not economical when it's legal to tap the giant lakes of it sitting underground.
Many of the other things (plastics esp) are byproducts after refining for fuel. If the fuel isn't consumed, the byproducts would become cost ineffective.
Don't "worry" though. Oil consumption is going up not down.
Okay, but while technically correct, it does nothing to change the situation. They are punching holes in the ground to extract the sweet sweet nectar. They have to store what has been extracted. When that storage is full, what does one do? Stop the input into the storage.
The amount of activity required for helium is insubstantial compared to the amount of natural gas being extracted globally. And the amount of natural gas extracted pales in comparison to total combined gas, oil, and coal.
Helium extraction doesn't pose a notable environmental issue on its own.
Well primarily the goal is to ensure that we don't build any homes for people or any clean energy. There's a reason a group of people funded by an oil heir are anti-nuclear.
With a correspondingly smaller decrease in CO2 output. We're in a Climate Catastrophe on the edge of Global Tipping Points, remember!
Sarcasm aside, I think this is why people have generally stopped caring as much. What we are being asked to do (buy new shiny things for some estimated small percentage decrease in lifecycle CO2 output) does not match the messaging.
The messaging on "global tipping points" was over-done, and also many people are now aware that enforcing low-carbon policies is costing Western economies a huge amount of money while resulting in very little net reduction in global CO2 output.
Why care when we're already over the edge and there isn't anything we can do about it?
I suggest it’s easier to leave to carbon in the ground in the first place. Carbon capture promises are unrealistic. But if you want to go with charcoal it’s probably best to get wood from coppicing.
I don't think it's necessarily unreasonable. As I understand it, the lumber industry has optimized the ability to grow massive amounts of fast growing pine as quickly as possible. So this isn't suggesting that we start clearcutting forests, it's suggesting that we start growing massive amounts of lumber with the explicit purpose of converting it to charcoal and burrying it.
it actually is a bad idea if you look into the details
trees aren't just carbon, they are bio mass/nutrition
and if you constantly remove bio mass you sooner or later run into issues
(Which we already do in some places, e.g. when over using fields (see US dust storms), or with some managed Forrest getting increasingly more unstable not just because of warmed climate but also because of removing dead treas leading to an interruption of the natural nutrient recycling (and insect habitats) leading to Nutrition deficiency in the long run.)
but we do have working carbon removal technologies, they are just not cheap
hence why you want companies to pay for them, it gives them a huge reason to reduce emissions instead
The point of turning the trees into Charcoal is to return all the non-carbon elements to the environment and remove any metabolic activity from releasing that carbon.
The USA currently produces about 70 million tons of paper per year, which is about half carbon by weight. We produce about 2 gigatons of lumber per year, which is again about half carbon, all absorbed from the atmosphere.
Unfortunately, we produce like 40 gigatons of CO2 per year. So we would have to scale lumber work dramatically. It's also not a clean industry itself, reliant on heavy machinery running on gasoline or diesel, and turning that wood into charcoal would require massive refineries.
IMO more effective bets are figuring out how to artificially induce massive blooms of algae and plankton in parts of the ocean to essentially recreate the conditions that lead to the hydrocarbon deposits in the first place. There's some work on this right now, but like any massive engineering and ecological tampering, there will be tradeoffs and downsides. I also don't know how you prevent the dead plant matter from decomposing and releasing the carbon.
Algae blooms are typically the sign of something very wrong with an aquatic ecosystem (usually human-induced). This is in addition to the issues it causes in the rest of the local ecosystem by drastically reducing the light, nutrients, and oxygen available to other aquatic life.
I can't believe these ideas are being seriously suggested. Is it a win if we reduce CO2 but make the planet uninhabitable for other reasons?
You would have to do it basically "out to sea", far enough away from humans that whatever negative effects are able to diffuse throughout the entire oceans.
Maybe then the negative effects won't be life ending.
But how else do we sequester bulk carbon dioxide? You probably aren't going to engineer something more effective than plant matter. So yes, you seed a gigantic algae bloom out in the ocean, it does a lot of bad stuff to a part of the ocean, and maybe it nets out positive.
But hey, don't worry, nobody lets me make important decisions, so not exactly "seriously suggested". Smarter people than I will have a clear list of pros and cons to this plan, and will make a much smarter decision, which might be followed by politicians maybe.
But there's no carbon capture option that doesn't do something dramatic and somehow damaging. Any plan will be industrially the inverse of burning all that oil. Pulling it out of the air will be the largest industrial project we have ever done and require more electricity than extracted from all the oil we burnt ever. To grow trees to do it would require 1000x the lumber industry we have now. Sun shades can keep us cool but not take the carbon out of the air. Aerosol injection is going to have it's own externalities. "Crush a bunch of rock and let it chemically absorb the CO2" is extremely limited.
There's no clean option out of this anymore. There's no magic button. We could stop all carbon production today and we will still have significant impact.
> do it basically "out to sea", far enough away from humans that whatever negative effects are able to diffuse throughout the entire oceans
this is not how it works, like at all
pretty much all oceans are already at risk of ecologically collapsing even without climate change, and will be majorly affected by it (both directly and indirectly)
just because they are big doesn't mean thy can just compensate whatever you throw at them.
A huge problem being damage being not very visible to the average human until catastrophic (so humans are prone to not take actions). Like we already have gigantic dead zones all over the oceans.
Many effects of climate change fall into the "live will get very shitty but still survivable category".
But an ocean dying can lead to a chain reaction leading to a mass extinction event. Like not just a lot of animal dying, but a something like noticeable more then 50% of species going extinct. That includes most to all of humanities food supply.
Theoretically humans might be able to survive this, practically we are still speaking about a non negligible 2 digit chance for human extinction (not necessary directly by that, but other catastrophes like volcanoes, plagues or meteors still happen)
this are the kind of solutions with a high potential of having worse outcomes then not doing them
It is such an unreasonable idea! Ignoring the loss of biomass (and the fact that there would be no way to implement this scheme without providing a very unwelcome financial incentive to cut down trees wherever they are found), you'd use as much CO2 in the machinery required to cut the trees down and dig a big hole! Unless you're suggesting we do it all by hand? In which case, the picture of a crazed, doomsday cult is complete. I suppose at least it involves less murder than the Aztecs and their sacrifices.
completely ignoring all existing technologies related to that topic to spout obvious nonsense about "cutting down trees and burying them" (which would bind active bio mass which isn't a grate idea, also that won't produce oil anyway not that this is relevant for the discussion)
various ways to reduce the carbon in the air do exist (and without trees)
and the carbon can be both recycled for other usage and literally placed in the earth, too
it is not rally a solution for climate change as it's very expensive to do. But this also makes it a good idea to "make companies pay for it" (at least if their carbon-equivalent output goes above a certain threshold). Because if they have the choice between very expensive carbon removal or reducing carbon output for a much cheaper price they will do the later; But in emergency/outlier situations they still can do the former, just at a very high price.).
It's too controversial now, but one day we will recognise the current narrow-minded obsession with CO2 as the Western civilisation-wide doomsday cult that it is.
Quite the opposite - I'm asking people to take a wider view of the changes that humankind is making to the planet. Given those changes, a viewpoint that concludes with people asking for vast numbers of trees to be cut down, burned (or charred, at least), and buried has some fundamental problems.
We were the same ;-)
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