For what it’s worth, my kids are impressed by The Voice, as we like to say of Greta Thunberg’s speeches. Sure, my raving has helped them develop an appreciation of a kid speaking up to adults, who happen to represent the actions of people all over the entire world. Following our replay of her talk at the United Nations Climate Action Summit, the expression “How dare you!” has been applied to family discussions, adding weight to defensive positions. Oh, and as for me? I count Sweden, along with nearly every other Nordic country, among my family’s heritage, whereas my kids can trace their heritage to the indigenous peoples of North America. That’s right, Sweden.
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I’m a white guy without a whole lot of privilege. Maybe that’s why I’m more than willing to give up the little I have in order for everyone to be truly equal. I’m still searching for meaning in life, and so far all I’ve come to is deciding that we all need to be as good to each other as possible. Then there’s the fact that the original person that started this whole blow up was only saying that the people saying bad things about Greta are majorly old and white. I don’t see how that can be argued against.
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Yeah, I don’t know about NewAtlas InterestingEngineering and a paywalled site like IEEE Spectrum managing to cover multiple common-element CO2 reduction catalysts per year, or Carbon Corp. leaking spinoffs fast enough yet to let us care less about how long Microsoft Update takes (at customer sites, as it were,) but the papers are coming out and often…oft. without much need for the Total Bummer announcement that it can’t be reproduced. It’s not like they have a colophon yet where they scale things from 10mg to 10,000 and throw their hands up in despair of the scaling hurdles, though. Fails sites only live so long so far?
Joule (Wiley, 200 Euro or so a year) has a good bunch, but there are also good bunches in Open Access (as in 100%) journals. 200 journal RSS feeds of so and you’re looking at a good cross section even though missing a bunch of varietal algae schema (or the special issues on’t.)
BoJo convinced on militant support of the petroleum reversal industry though, or better…too tough to read. Is it television writers that have to be in there for the conversion? [Hello, telepresence!]
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Like I said…
You can lower the financial cost, but not really the energetic cost.
Burn fuel-> recapture co2 → re-burn fuel. → recapture co2
It could work. if the capturing of co2 and reducting it to fuel is more energy efficient than a battery or hydrogen. I somehow doubt that, but it could be a way.
The energy has to come from somewhere. Only 3 options: the sun, nuclear or earth warmth. All three have their technical/logistical problems when you want to scale it to the energy needs of the current world economy. even sand has become a scarce good. and solar panels are not really recyclable at the moment, so with the lifespan of about 20 years there’s a still unsolved problem there. Nuclear has it’s own set of problems. Earth warmth is a possibility in some locations. It is probably harmless to harvest. Though it is largely unproven technology and there are some concerns with causing earthquakes. And it’s expensive.
There are loads of possibilities, but no proven easy to implement answer. All options are way more expensive than using fossil fuels. Hence the need for the western societies to lower their standard of living. You can only spend that money once.
Or in the case of the U.S., divert a significant portion of its military budget to such things? (Oh hey, maybe a lot of what amounts to its meat budget too!)
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It doesn’t have to be more efficient, it only has to be more convenient for some applications (like aviation). There’s no need for one prefect solution, several specialized ones will probably be better.
And that’s because there’s not enough funding for research and large scale implementation.
As an example of how research looks like with proper funding, I recommend “Ignition” by John D. Clark. The book is about rocket propellants (for military applications of course) in 1950’s and shows how many things have to be tried and how fast progress goes when there’s political will.
If the renewable projects create more jobs and decrease economic disparity, the median standard of living would increase, even if average standard decreases. Most of us probably wouldn’t mind if billionaires had fewer mega yachts and private jets or smaller mansions.
Investing in things like public transport could also improve standard of living while also decreasing CO2 emissions. For example daily commute in cars is both insanely wasteful and unnecessarily stressful. When on Monday evening I see people stuck in their cars due to traffic congestion, with all the honking and unhappiness, it doesn’t look like high standard of living, even if some of the cars are expensive.
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You mean to say that there are those who don’t (think of her as a rock star)?
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See “greedy old white men”, above.
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And your first instinct is to be divisive, derail the topic and the real problem remains the same.
Touched a nerve, did I? Maybe hit a little too close to home? 
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11 billion lost from the books here, 72 billion mismanaged gone in mideast area improvement funds, there’s no reason to step and repeat that right away. 
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My guess is the Sun Toughs have been to you, letting you know about their cloud cover enforcement’s awful timing, and how takeaway can only ever get more intensive as far as kiln-firing more little sauce dishes and insulated cozzies and salad trays for 20 and the things to ship the shards back out in. That big ag. is after that sunlight coming into your breakfast nook. And you can only ever be satisfied by fuels intensification.
Hey, where were uh, you gonna put the hydrogen fuels anyhow? Glass fiber tanks of mellowing? I uh…I don’t want to lose any more yoga balls, OK?
I think we could use a bunch of 3D fabbing feedstocks rather than just fuel, but mellowing out sun cover ought to handle the energy needs fine, and photosynthetic pathways are…well, not very racemic. [Hey nobody look, there’s a charged word just festering! Freakin’ words, think they all that.]
So you could be ‘what about all the racemic products we can only expect to have in excess like plastic bags? They cannot all be consumed in spill mitigation loops and products.’ But you’ll improve it first! Likewise saying industrial 8000 K temperatures are just a question of moving 10 miles down sometimes or cohering with heavy baryon matter at that temperature, or the having of safe fast breeder reactors in every state. Hey, don’t make that face…?
You can only spend that money once.
Okay, now you’re making that face while posing in A18z’s lobby and I have no idea what’s going on.
ETA: Jacobinmag.com not Jacobean.org or whatever.
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I return the favour. I didn’t understand a word of your post. 
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Just smile at the wonder of the post and don’t try to understand it.
And worry when they start to make sense.
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