(Part 3) Best environmental economics books according to redditors
We found 959 Reddit comments discussing the best environmental economics books. We ranked the 381 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the products ranked 41-60. You can also go back to the previous section.
Lifetime (31 years) Phoenician here. As already said Tokyo is the complete opposite of urban sprawl. It is one of the biggest, most densly populated metros in the world. I spent a week wandering around Tokyo by myself a couple years ago. After a lifetime in Phoenix I was amazed at just how many people are jammed into the metro and how clean and efficient the place is. I love living in Phoenix (Scottsdale), but hate what it has become. A professor at New York University put out a book last month on Phoenix and how unsustainable it is. Good read.
Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World's Least Sustainable City
http://www.amazon.com/Bird-Fire-Lessons-Worlds-Sustainable/dp/0199828261
>since they refuse to abandon the slavery business model.
I'm in the middle of of reading a book called Tomatoland it turns out that they have really not abandoned the slavery model, as in they still use actual slaves.
>have you not seen the persecution that our ancestors suffered under Islam?
I'm not an expert on the history of Islam in India. Some say the Mughal Empire killed 80,000,000 Hindus through the centuries, others say that this is garbage and that the Mughals had a pretty hands-off approach toward governance, others point out that there were Muslim dynasties in India who fought against the Mughals, others talk about how Islamic rulers and their methods ranged from everything from Akhbar to Aurungazeb. So I'm not sold either way.
>This is a clash of civilizations and the Neville Chamberlain routine against Islam has failed.
See, this is the simplistic and superficial "Them and Us" narrative that I cannot stand. Radical Islam is very much a product of so-called "Western civilization".
The CIA and the State Department funded radical mujahadeen in Afghanistan through the '80s, and former directors of the CIA like William Casey were Christian fundamentalists who wanted to see an alliance between Christians and Muslims against the "godless communists" of the USSR, and Saudi Arabia--the premier source of radical Islamic fundamentalism--has been a key regional ally of the West since World War 1 when the British helped the al-Saud family and the fundamentalist Wahabi clerics gain power over the peninsula. Check out Ghost Wars and Carbon Democracy for good pieces of scholarship on all of this.
Then when this came back and bit the US in the ass on 9/11 the government promptly invaded and occupied Afghanistan and then Iraq, eventually extending the war--undeclared and covert--into Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, and Somalia. Hardly a "Neville Chamberlain" routine.
And even after all this, the US government thought it was a good idea to turn around and once again start arming radical Sunni militants, in order to destabilize and counterbalance Iranian influence in Syria and Lebanon, and increase the influence of the Gulf States (which themselves are the primary source of funding for terrorist activity).
But hey I guess this is all too complicated for some people so I guess we should just stick with a black-and-white fairy tale about Good and Evil so our heads don't hurt too much, right?
"Neomalthusian" is just a catch all phrase for the modern study of resource limits and human ecological overshoot.
It's modern origin is in the Club of Rome's funding of Donella H. Meadows systems dynamics work, which lead to the 1972 Limits to Growth report and regular updates since. Other good resources are Will Cattton's 1980 book Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change,
Joel Cohen's 1996 How Many People Can the Earth Support, and Alan Weisman's 2013 Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth. There's no shortage of books and academic studies which have drawn on these more popular titles (LtG, OS, HMPCtES, CD), but they're a good intro.
Highly recommend this book: The Colder War by Marin Katusa. Great economic review of current energy geopolitics.
It's not the first time that Phoenix has been given that designation.
This book is really well known: Bird On Fire: Lessons from the World's Most Unsustainable City
Most of the people I know get their questions on this subject answered by such scientific experts as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, and the good folks at "fair and balanced" Fox News. However, there are a host of alternative sources of information for those of us who are not quite sure that the right is always right. May I suggest:
Ah! Have I got reading recommendations for you!
It's not true of conventional reactors, but is true of fast reactors. Russia has several in production right now and is building more. The U.S. spent 30 years developing an advanced design called the Integral Fast Reactor, which was canceled by the Clinton administration just prior to completion. GE-Hitachi has a production-ready design based on the IFR, which they're attempting to sell to the U.K. and China.
About 99% of our nuclear waste, and essentially all the long-lived waste, is unfissioned uranium, plutonium, and other transuranics. Fast reactors burn all that up. All they leave is the fission products, which go back to the radioactivity of the original ore in a couple hundred years.
Sources are abundant, it's well-known nuclear physics. Here's a sampling:
Energy For Future Presidents (a book by a Berkeley physics professor)
BraveNewClimate
Wikipedia here and here
World Nuclear
Plentiful Energy (a book by lead engineers on the IFR project)
The IFR also does a good job with safety and proliferation issues. Liquid thorium reactors would have similar advantages but aren't as far along.
There's an ok-ish textbook, Energy and the Wealth of Nations by Hall and Klitgard in BioPhysical Economics that's a good starting point.
Robert Ayres also has a thermodynamical based approach that is very consistent with what you probably know from ecology. The Economic Growth Engine is also a pretty good general introduction to economic concepts that are thermodynamically correct.
Steve Keen's Debunking Economics is a good general critique of current neoclassical thinking from a scientific standpoint. It's sometimes good to read an insider's critique of the paradigm so you know what is problematic.
Doyne Farmer does more complexity stuff but he's involved in a similar space.
Elenor Ostrum is also another great place to start. Her work on sustainability and common pool resources is hugely important in the area.
There is also a huge amount of work being done in complexity economics using ecological models that I've only just started scratching the surface of.
There is a huge amount of work being generated in this area. Sadly very little of it is getting through to the economists.
You could try The National Parks: America's Best Idea. The documentary was great. I'm not sure how the book compares.
If you're interested in all American public lands, you might consider my book Go Outside and Come Back Better, a Book of the Year Finalist in the Nature category by Foreword Reviews magazine. It has 160 photos from 120 parks in 50 states. Their review:
>Inspiring readers to explore the outdoors, this stunning photo journal offers a fresh perspective on the pleasures of nature. Go Outside and Come Back Better doesn’t try to be comprehensive. You won’t find an A-Z listing of national parks in these pages. Instead, [Ron Lizzi] offers a sampler of sorts, with images and words to pique your interest in nature and show how your life might improve by spending more time there.
Thanks! I'll check these out... and maybe I'll reread the Dark Tower series, so friggin' great.
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Edit:
Amazon links:
The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley
Abundance Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler
Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker
Stephen King's Dark Tower Series
Patrick Rothfuss's Name of the Wind (Kingkiller Chronicles)
Scott Lynch's Gentlemen Bastards series
(yeah, these are smile.amazon.com links... if you aren't already supporting some organization with your Amazon purchases, how about my kid's school's PTA?)
Happy City, I think. I'll try to find an Amazon link.
EDIT: Here it is on Amazon.
>What we're going to do is set aside $50 or $100 from our paycheques, then later when we both reach our goal weights we're going to take that money
I think that's their plan. However, I still recommend thrifting to anyone, at any size. You can get some pretty awesome deals, and it cuts down on the amount of clothing waste.
https://www.amazon.com/Colder-War-Global-Slipped-Americas/dp/1118799941
This book helped me better understand Russia's long term offensive.
This, Why We Disagree about Climate Change, might not be quite what you're looking for, but it's an interesting read. It's a combination of science and geography.
Well, there could be a lot of factors determining sub-par mass transit in an urban area. At the most basic level it could be lack of funding. In WA state we dealt with this over ten years ago with Tim Eyman's I-695 which in my area cut mass transit funding 50%. When you have a group of voters who say "fuck it" to funding bus/light rail you're going to have progressively worse service.
Another aspect is urban congestion. If you are running a bus line without dedicated lanes in a dense downtown region (or the center of an auto-centric sprawl city like Atlanta) it's going to back up and cause delayed routes, more gas consumption, and longer rides. Light rail, commuter rail, and BRT can move faster in most locations but require a larger investment (more money per mile of service, which won't happen if voters turn down taxes and bonds for it). Also factor in the continued sprawling out of cities like Phoenix, which requires more money to service fewer riders due to low density.
It's funny now because many cities are opting to re-implement the trolley lines they so quickly tore up in the 40's/50's/60's, albeit at a cost. When you had cities growing organically with an urban core that included housing followed by streetcar neighborhoods, the transportation system was integrated into the environment (you walked in downtown, took a streetcar to home/visit in the peripheral neighborhoods). The streetcars were tracked and had the right of way. When the cities tore the tracks up and placed their buses within the street traffic, which would become more congested than we could have ever imagined, in many cases we see them giving up a dedicated right of way for transit and forcing their vehicles right into the shark tank, so to say.
The post-war boom that fueled auto production/purchase coupled with the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 swelled the streets with cars and kicked off the suburban sprawl that still persists today (although the numbers have lowered significantly since the 1990's and took a sharp decline since 2008). A few good books on these subjects include: Suburban Nation, The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000, and How Cities Work : Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken Here are a few about specific cities with high amounts of sprawl that go into what factors caused this and the problems faced today: The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles and Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World's Least Sustainable City (which I am reading right now and can say so far is a really interesting history of the city).
Climate Casino by Nordhaus is probably the best introduction.
For internet resources, Berkley's econ department has a very good blog and the non-partisan environmental economics think-tank Resources for the Future frequently writes good stuff.
I completely get where the article is coming from. There's a book I read not too long ago that focuses on fast fashion (Overdressed), and one of the observations the author makes is how it's almost impossible to buy good, quality clothing now that a middle-income family could afford - and how this didn't use to be the case before fast fashion. A typical everyday dress from Sears used to be over $100 in today's money, but it would be tailored well and made of good materials. Now it's either buy complete crap that's not meant to be worn past a season, or pay for designer luxury that few people could afford. That middle Goldilocks zone of price to quality doesn't really exist much anymore, either in fashion or other markets.
I don't have the answers on how to solve this (other than buy the highest quality you can afford), but yeah. I agree that there's a whole lot of low-quality junk in the world, and it has a high environmental and social cost.
For one of my classes, we are currently reading Who Speaks for the Climate - Boykoff and Why We Disagree About Climate Change - Hulme
They are great books, gives good insights to the topic and how it's portrayed in the public. I'm sure you can find cheaper editions as well, or PDF files.
Also, both definitely lean towards the idea of it, the authors are not really skeptics
Here's one I'm reading right now that is really great!
What You Should Know About Politics . . . But Don't: A Nonpartisan Guide to the Issues That Matter - Jessamyn Conrad
It's great for anyone who wants to gain a deeper understanding of our political system and the things included in it along with a bit of history.
Amazon Link
The Big Thirst
It's a great look at some of the biggest modern water crises, what the causes are, what steps have been taken to solve them, and what more needs to be done.
Hmm.. The only other two I can think of is:
**edit: Ah! Looks like you figured it out! :)
And let us also not forget that slave labor still thrives in the US on fruit and vegetable farms. Slave laborers in US tomato fields work at gun point, are held in chains, and are paid as little as a penny per pound for the fruit they pick. As long as slavery is tolerated in the first world it will never end in the third. The book Tomatoland touches on this.
Edit: Added source
As an addendum, the closest political party to my views is the Green Party, and you'll notice their single biggest issue is political and voter reform.
My major point of disagreement with the party is over nuclear power. Greens are just wrong on that. Nukes are much safer by far than coal and oil plants, and must continue to be part of the energy generating mix for the foreseeable future. I live ~10 miles from a nuke plant, and I wouldn't even consider living 10 miles from a coal plant. For more on why, see Stewart Brand's excellent book.
I recommend this book
https://www.amazon.com/Abundance-Future-Better-Than-Think/dp/145161683X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1481161851&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=abundance
Disclaimer: This is a bit rambling. I'm at work and my brain is completely fried at the moment...
Yeah, I gave you an upvote. Most people just aren't following proper etiquette.
I thought that Muller had a book out on the topic, but I may have been wrong. You may be interested in this one, but I don't think it's the book I was looking for. He has also done some recent interviews on NPR which might reference his book, but are also good interviews in their own right.
In terms of more interesting material, I have plenty, I just have to find some of it. The IPCC report is a good assessment, but is quite long and sometimes comes off a little biased in my opinion.
Personally, even though there is significant evidence to make me believe that humans are impacting global temperature through emissions, there are still questions in my mind about it. For one, after seeing what is under the hood of the current climate models, I am a little less confident of their results. On the other hand, after seeing the amount of research that has gone into the topic including laboratory results and raw data from satellites, etc, I have become much less skeptical.
That said, ignoring the problem isn't going to get us anywhere. Until we fully understand the issue I believe that we need to take a careful approach to what we put into our atmosphere. Think about this, though. Compared the amount of CO2 we pump into the atmosphere daily, a very small amount of CFCs were able to deplete a large section of the ozone layer through chemical reaction. The argument that I hear now and then that "there just aren't enough humans to make such an impact" is ridiculous.
Lastly, if you are really interested in the topic, my adviser from when I was in grad school is much more fluent in climate research than I am. I can ask him for some good, unbiased resources.
Further more... for fun or food for thought.
https://www.amazon.com/Tribe-Homecoming-Belonging-Sebastian-Junger/dp/1455566381
https://www.amazon.com/Sex-Dawn-Stray-Modern-Relationships/dp/0061707813/ref=pd_aw_fbt_14_img_3/142-5728848-3469104?_encoding=UTF8&amp;pd_rd_i=0061707813&amp;pd_rd_r=9533ee40-3006-416a-9497-bce791e1c24d&amp;pd_rd_w=r8koV&amp;pd_rd_wg=qKPNg&amp;pf_rd_p=6e6afc8a-fbbd-4649-97cf-4e08f5113612&amp;pf_rd_r=M1ZJKQDJ3QVCEFFVSQV9&amp;psc=1&amp;refRID=M1ZJKQDJ3QVCEFFVSQV9
https://www.amazon.com/Civilized-Death-What-Lost-Modernity/dp/1451659105/ref=pd_aw_fbt_14_img_2/142-5728848-3469104?_encoding=UTF8&amp;pd_rd_i=1451659105&amp;pd_rd_r=e030bc0f-f8ae-471c-9ca7-f847e7eaf38d&amp;pd_rd_w=2G4uW&amp;pd_rd_wg=ssT2m&amp;pf_rd_p=6e6afc8a-fbbd-4649-97cf-4e08f5113612&amp;pf_rd_r=MKKB2P33TB0A4HYAJVMQ&amp;psc=1&amp;refRID=MKKB2P33TB0A4HYAJVMQ
https://bigthink.com/think-tank/how-to-make-love-like-a-caveman
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.allure.com/story/gang-bang-sex-fantasy/amp
http://upriser.com/posts/in-the-wodaabe-tribe-women-can-have-any-many-sexual-partners-as-they-wish-and-they-celebrate-an-annual-wife-stealing-festival
You are wrong. I encourage you to read this book which specifies in no uncertain terms why nuclear power is both the safest option and the ONLY option that will scale with future energy needs.
Maybe a National Geographic Map for an area she likes to hike nearby? They are pricey but wonderful.
A book on the National Parks.
Anything from this store dedicated to rustin cabin decor.
Some flannel pajamas for curling up in front of the fire.
For an alternate explanation outside the usual scope of neoclassical economics is the resource / physical / biophysical economics explanation. This treats an economy at the macro level not as households and firms (or same plus governments), and as labor + capital, but as a set of inputs:
Where energy is a very significant factor in governing the total level of economic activity.
These don't map entirely cleanly onto the K-L model. Materials, technology, and plant capital are components of capital. Labor is, well, labor. Energy is treated as capital in the K-L model but substitutes for labor (in the form of muscle power).
Earlier proponents of this view include Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, and more recently Charles A. S. Hall with his textbook Energy and the Wealth of Nations. I haven't found a review within the economics literature though Michael Jefferson's Energy Policy review is pretty good.
Hall is not an economist, he's an ecologist, though he's studied some economics (and largely found it wanting). I studied both physics and economics (my undergrad degree), as well as growing up in an ecologically-conscious atmosphere and studying environmental and geography in college. I spent a great deal of time beating my head against the wall in college trying to reconcile my views of how the economy seemed to actually work with what was being taught in my econ classes. And though I've come to appreciate some of neoclassical econ, I still see a lot wanting.
The upshot of Hall's view, though, is that energy flows, EROEI (energy returned on energy invested, he's the originator of the term), and price-stability of energy have a vastly greater impact on economies than the neoclassical literature would suggest.
What Hall discounts or omits from his treatment is the interaction between this and fiscal and monetary dynamics, whether as cause or result. I'm increasingly coming to see such interactions (the primary focus of neoclassical macro) as ways of influencing flows of physical resources and labor in the short term, but as ultimately subservient to the greater picture of the physical economy -- they can tweak the environment, but cannot ultimately change it.
It's one of several significant refinements to neoclassical economics which would greatly help in providing a better fit between theory, observations, predictions, and policy.
I used to follow him on his channel and around the time he was writing his book, which he welcomed pre-publication critique of on the (now defunct) manpollo.org forums. Ah, those were the days...
There is no doubt in my mind that he put a tremendous amount of effort in to those projects, along with teaching his classes and raising his children, and did get burned out at one or multiple points. Later, I saw that he had moved on from making CC videos to other kinds of progressive videos, and figured that was a good thing for his health and sanity. For a few years there he was something of a one man army, furiously working on all his projects, appearing in multiple national news profiles, and I suspect that all got to be a bit much after a while.
Myself, I am deeply grateful for all his good work, and certainly hope he and his family are doing well. He has earned in triplicate every little bit of good karma that can come his way IMO.
It's something I've adapted from a few sources on urban planning/design. It's something I never thought about until recently, but the way we build places can have a huge effect on the people who live in them. Personally, I noticed that I was always happier in cities where I could walk around and see other people walking around, versus when I was in small towns where I had to drive to get to anything. I couldn't put my finger on what it was, exactly, until I was in college and got to read Jane Jacobs's Death and Life of Great American Cities. Suddenly it all started to make sense.
If you're interested in learning more, check out New Urbanism, r/urbanplanning, and maybe a good book on the subject, like Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design. This is a great place to start, it highlights some common problems in our current building patterns and pulls examples from all over the world to show ways that work better and help build happier places.
Some other good reads:
Here are some books by William D Nordhaus who won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his writing on the topic ...
https://www.amazon.com/Managing-Global-Commons-Economics-Climate/dp/026253746X/
https://www.amazon.com/Question-Balance-Weighing-Options-Policies/dp/0300137486
https://www.amazon.com/Climate-Casino-Uncertainty-Economics-Warming/dp/030021264X
Predictions of world population vary quite a bit. Just imagine how hard it would have been to predict the population of 2018 back in 1918: that was before widespread effective birth control, before the Green Revolution, before World War II, the Cold War...
With that said, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change uses future population estimates as an important part of predicting future climate change. They expect that world population will reach a maximum of somewhere between 9 and 12 billion, sometime between 2070 and the early 2100s, before declining. Improved global wealth and better access to birth control are the main factors that are expected to end the exponential growth we've seen for the past couple centuries.
https://skepticalscience.com/rcp.php?t=3#popgdp
https://static.skepticalscience.com/pics/population-gdp-vanvuuren.PNG
As for the theoretical maximum, I'll direct you to this book:
"How Many People can the Earth Support?", by Joel Cohen
https://www.amazon.com/How-Many-People-Earth-Support/dp/0393314952
It's probably the definitive work on the subject, though it doesn't really give a definite answer (and I won't either), because it really depends on the quality of life you want to give people, and how much impact on the environment you're willing to allow.
Good companion piece is Carbon Democracy by Timothy Mitchell.
https://www.amazon.ca/Carbon-Democracy-Political-Power-Age/dp/1781681163
I am currently reading about water and so far it seems like Australia does not really have a water system that can adapt well to scarcity. Neither does any other developed country for that matter.
There was a pretty interesting political issue regarding re using filtered waste water for drinking purposes in the town of Toowoomba. The lack of understanding of the science and technology that goes into treating wastewater led locals to fiercely oppose the project in 2010. The need for new sources of water led the city to build a $187 million water pipeline to get water from other regions. The irony is that the South East Queensland Water Grid which currently pumps water to Toowoomba sends treated waste water.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Big-Thirst-Secret-Turbulent/dp/1439102082/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1409059076&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=the+big+thirst
I'd recommend Energy and the Wealth of Nations. https://www.amazon.com/Energy-Wealth-Nations-Understanding-Biophysical/dp/1441993975
You can also find an understanding of his work on youtube. Basically the claim is that energy is the real basis of the economy - with all the implications you'd imagine for oil, environment and geopolitics.
Also, ourfiniteworld.com is a frequent read for me.
Check this book out, it's the book version of your comment
Here are three to get you started:
https://www.amazon.com/Prophets-Moguls-Rangers-Rogues-Bison/dp/1594858888/ref=sr_1_3_twi_pap_2?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1524464344&amp;sr=1-3&amp;keywords=national+park+service
https://www.amazon.com/National-Parks-Americas-Best-Idea/dp/0307268969/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1524463756&amp;sr=8-3&amp;keywords=national+parks
https://www.amazon.com/National-Parks-American-Experience-4th/dp/1589794753/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;qid=1524464233&amp;sr=1-33
Horace Albright, 2nd director of the NPS, also wrote a great memoir about helping to create the NPS.
Buy a subscription your largest State Newspaper and read it every day. Every once in a while, go sit in on a local political event.
You'll be more up-to-date on local, national, and global politics than 90% of folks within a month.
Also, I've seen this book recommended by many people - even by Barack Obama. I haven't read it, so I can't comment personally.
Ignore all the people telling you to read Howard Zinn. Ignore Reddit, YouTube, and Twitter, and obviously don't trust documentaries - they are mostly bogus and conspiratorial.
To your last point on the ignoring of ethnography because of your preference towards the inner, you may be interested in more contemporary ethnographic pieces that address your concerns about how we situate subjectivity alongside the study of others. In particular, I am think of Kim Fortun's book, Advocacy after Bhopal (perhaps you have read it already). Fortun is an anthropologist that thinks through the issues of subjectivity and activism.
Some somewhat less anthropological, but still potentially useful resources.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standpoint_theory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernist_anthropology
For anyone who wants to learn more about the effects on workers and other people before and after the event, I highly recommend reading Advocacy After Bhopal by Kim Fortun.
http://www.amazon.com/Carbon-Democracy-Political-Power-Age/dp/1781681163
I just read Energy for Future Presidents. Despite the somewhat odd format it was one of the best thought out books out there.
While I didn't expect it from the title, Green Metropolis is another book which should be required reading on energy.
What proportion of people, regardless of whether they believe there was a global flood or not, do you think have taken the time to educate themselves in those fields of study to a degree where they can adequately assess those studies for themselves?
That's your answer. People for the most part base there views on authority figures, and different people in different social contexts invest different people with that authority.
In the case of the flood, it's a thoroughly unimportant issue. But it's an important point to make given its practical consequences elsewhere; I'd recommend the excellent Why We Disagree About Climate Change by Mike Hulme as a starting point. It's simply no good feeling superior or believing that one's opponents are uniquely stupid on the issue, that's an approach that prevents action on the issue.
> The Democrats ought to seek better education in climate science and Engineering and then propose pragmatic solutions that are incrementally better for both the environment and America's GDP. And not fuck up foreign relations with above mentioned countries
Agreed, from the right. Texas Republicans are working on increasing carbon capture plants, for example. Republicans also generally support nuclear power.
And on the left you have things like Gates' carbon scrubbing tech. The point is there are people on both sides taking the issue seriously between the right-wing "climate change deniers" and the left-wing "eliminate air travel, cows, and straws" factions which are basically worthless.
>Its bad optics having a poster child barely old enough to have a drivers license, and a Young New York Representative lead the charge ignorant what it would cost in our future.
Agreed. Democrats should be putting up climate scientists on panels, not hypocritical teens. The problem is that scientists are going to be specific...and the specifics are very complicated and involve lots of costs vs. benefits. An economist attempted this analysis and it's not an easy question to solve.
The most uncomfortable truth is that it's a problem that might not even be solvable. It's possible we've already reached the point of no return. Or maybe future generations will find a technological solution that reverses nearly everything. We can barely predict the weather...trying to predict future climates a hundred years in the future is hard.
We'll adapt or we won't. There are things we can do that may have an impact; support better carbon capture, especially of natural gas, improve nuclear tech, and find ways to pull emissions out of the atmosphere. And there are things that accomplish practically nothing; driving electric cars (usually charged from a nearby gas or coal power plant), solar/wind (produced using gas powered mining operations in Africa), banning meat (we'd still need lots of farming and meat agriculture is a small percentage of overall emissions), and banning straws (all consumer plastics are a tiny fraction of plastic waste).
What do we focus on? Cars, solar panels, meat, and straws. Those are things we can judge our neighbors on and do personally. They won't solve climate change, but they are things we can do to make ourselves feel better.
While nicely put the statistic is misleading. When talking about pops and feeding those pops you can't brand agricultural products like "Food", more so if he latter say "a susbtantial portion of the food (cereals) is diverted to produce food(meat)". So let me rephrase it, there is enough food (cereals+meats) produced in the earth right now (so w/o increasing the burden of agriculture on natural lands) to feed 11 billion, yet this amount of food is reached because "a substantial amount of what consititutes food is used to produce the other constituent...."? so X = 11 billions, but X = (m+c) while m = (c-s)xlivestock ??? so C =/= C or m doesn't exist or m does but c doesn't.
So no even if the food were heavenly distributed to every one, it would'nt be possible to feed 11 billions, not a "normal level". In fact studies have show that for every single one to have an acceptable diet (not as fancy as the US or Europe, but acceptable) while still living in a decent environnement, with should be only 5 billions.
a must read : http://www.amazon.fr/How-Many-People-Earth-Support/dp/0393314952/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1343120899&amp;sr=1-1-catcorr
>Så vær så snill, ikke forenkle dette
Her; En artikkel fra noen år siden som spådde gass ned både i etterspørsel og pris.
Has gas demand in Europe peaked?
Her har du realiteten noen år seinere;
Norge slo alle salgsrekorder av gass ut til Europa i sommer. Med skyhøye priser selges nå gass for nesten en milliard kroner i døgnet.
Skal man se på historien, vi etterspørsel bare øke. Ja, sol kommer nok til å øke, men det tar ca 100år fra en energikilde er på 1% til den er standard. Sol er på rundt der. Eneste unntaket er atomkraft, men det stoppet opp på 70-tallet av politiske grunner
Sjekk ut denne;
Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning author Richard Rhodes reveals the fascinating history behind energy transitions over time—wood to coal to oil to electricity and beyond.
Scott Adams needs to read this book: https://www.amazon.com/Whats-Worst-That-Could-Happen/dp/0399535012/
and listen to this podcast:
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/consilience-powers-the-big-scientific-ideas/5111610
Okay, how about production and disposal of Lead Acid batteries? None of the large scale battery technologies are environmentally friendly. Environmentally friendly batteries are just like Cold Fusion, perpetually 10 years into the future.
What countries in South America produce that Lithium and what kind of environmental impact does that cause? Where are all of these other batteries produced and where do they go when they hit their life expectancy?
The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) does a terrible job of protecting the environment most of the time but they do enough to make things like batteries and PV panels to expensive to produce in the US at the scale other countries with no protection can.
My assertation isn't should we make the shift to "renewable" energy but rather how quickly and in what way should we make the transition. History is always the best determiner of the future and history tells these transitions are never quick or complete. I suggest reading Energy and Civilization, A history or Energy, A Human History.
Yea only reason it's so concrete in my mind is this book. Otherwise before whenever I heard 'petro dollar' all it would summon was fuzzy/wrong explanations from a shitty YouTube video
Edit: took out unnecessary word
Oh trust me it gets a whole lot more complicated the closer you look. People in the west think they have it better but its somewhat of a myth. This is an interesting book on modern society.
Ok, now it's pretty obvious you're just being a smug contrarian that doesn't know anything about the subject matter at all. California farms are some the least water efficient farms in the nation. Take a look at this. One of the most common methods is the crazy inefficient FLOOD irrigation where they just dump a bunch of water into the field where some of it returns to aquifers, but a large portion just evaporates.
The alfalfa we're exporting to China goes to feed cattle. Chinese cattle isn't exactly feeding the poor and bettering their society or anyone else's. In fact, the Chinese cattle industry that California exports feed is actually competing with sustainable crop production that COULD prevent people from going hungry. Not to mention shipping metric tons of feed to an unsustainable farm on the other side of the planet isn't exactly going to leave a great environment for our poor grandchildren.
On top of all this, not only is residential water usage a tiny amount of our water usage, but the major urban watersheds in California are almost entirely downstream of farms; we don't affect their usage in the any way, shape, or form. If every single Californian within 50 miles of the coast turned their faucets on full blast 24/7 no one would go hungry, we're downstream.
The 1.8gpm rule is just political nonsense to make people feel like their politicians are doing something for the environment; it's total BS. And for what it's worth, I am a bit of a green lib tree hugger, which is why I'm educated on this stuff. I highly recommend you read The Big Thirst which goes into a good amount of detail about our modern water issues.
I read about a scenario like this in the book Happy City. A person realized that they spent ~20% of their income on their car. They lived four or five miles from work. They went to their boss and asked if he'd be willing to let the person only work Mon - Thurs at 80% of his current pay. The boss was good with that setup, so the man sold his car and had every Friday off for the rest of his time working there. He also became much more fit as he rode his bike to work four days a week and walked in his neighborhood otherwise.
Out of the box thinking from that gentleman.
This is a really good book about it.
This is a rabbit hole of wrong think. Nuclear weapons were invented for war. In the broader scope, dropping two nuclear bombs on Japan probably saved the lives of both the Japanese and Americans. Also, the world was on the cusp of creating nuclear weapons anyway. Humans have always been good at killing each other and finding more efficient ways to do so.
However, the nuclear weapon project wasn't purely for nuclear weapons. It's far too complicated to explain in a reddit post, but I strongly suggest you read Energy: A Human History and The Making of the Atomic Bomb. It's a far more complex and nuanced issue than we simply created nuclear weapons.
tl;dr - your argument is a logical fallacy and ignores all nuance and complexities.
Capitalism is the solution, not the problem. Density will save us, [but zoning prevents dense construction] (http://www.amazon.com/Whole-Earth-Discipline-RestoredWildlands-Geoengineering/dp/0143118285). Economic growth will also lead to smaller families in the third world.