Wow. I... I didn't know you were this dumb.
Again, we can literally light up the country using solar from unused land in the desert. I've already linked it. We can light up the entire planet with the Sahara desert WITHOUT mining for new resources. If people don't want to use batteries to store it, again, deep cells that, by their nature have to be made from recycled materials and have to then be recycled themselves into new batteries for everything but the nickle, then yeah, we'd have to occasionally supplement with something like nucular. But overall it really is a, "Green energy ready to go whenever," situation. It's weird how when I break it down all people have is, "nuh-uh" and when I give proof all they say is, "Well then why aren't we doing it?" We're not doing it because of massive lobbying from the oil and coal industries. Full stop. It's not a "it doesn't scale" or "we can't do it" thing, it's a money thing.
Like talking about, "We ain't got the uranium to run the world on nuclear" when there's an untapped uranium vein the size of the entire US just sitting under a block of ice being guarded by a 100 nation army is disingenuous. It's not that we don't have it, it's that 1: In a universe of infinite starlight that we can harness with silicone, the second most abundant element after fucking oxygen it's unnecessary and 2: Oil and coal industries are literally bribing politicians and holding certain areas, like my region, hostage because late-stage capitalism is an incomprehensible hellscape where they fuck up the ground water so bad you have to buy water from the city. This is not a real problem, this is a made up problem that only exists because 100 people, in particular, are greedy. I'll link to them if you keep reading. We know exactly what the problem is and who's causing it.
Humans are unquestionably causing climate change at a rate that will kill us if we do nothing. Of course the climate always changes, but it shouldn't be changing this fast, it's doing that because of the weakening of the ozone layer (which you called a scam?? For some reason?? That's a real thing, it's the reason the sun is a deadly laser.) The planet will be fine. But this will cause an extinction event that we won't survive. Humans couldn't even survive if it was natural and should be scrambling to fix it. Humans evolved in an ice age, and can only survive in an ice age. We need the polar caps to regulate the environmental temperatures worldwide to prevent the plethora of chaotic natural disasters that happen if we lose them. Yes, there have been times in the earth's history when it was not an ice age, and when that happens, we see massive extinction events. And we should have MILLENIA to get ready for this if climate was just changing at the normal, natural rate. Like Mars is heating slower than us and Mars is a hellhole. But humans evolved in and can only survive in, an ice age the way we are right now. Maybe if we hadn't fucked ourselves and we had time to evolve to a changing planet we would have been fine, but we are in the middle of a major extinction event when it's nowhere near time for it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
https://nsidc.org/cryosphere/glaciers/questions/climate.html
So it's actually not just humans that are getting fucked over by this. Us speeding this up has already resulted in an extinction even rivaling the KT event. The biodiversity on this planet is dying and we are doing it. Which is a dick move.
Americans are doing a full fifth of that and we could cut it in half without noticing, like I did. If just rural areas would do what I'm doing we'd slow our contribution to a crawl.
100 businesses are causing 71% of global emissions: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10/100-fossil-fuel-companies-investors-responsible-71-global-emissions-cdp-study-climate-change Like... it's not just humans, it's these 100 CEOs in particular. We know exactly who is doing it and why.
We wouldn't actually have to change our lifestyles like... at all... to stop this. We would just have to stop subsidizing those companies in particular and then maybe switch to greener energy sources if we wanted to. That's it. Literally the only reason we haven't already done this is because money and evil. I know that's hard to wrap your head around, that people want major problems not to have fairly easy-to-implement solutions because then it seems like, "Well then why don't we just do that. Surely I would have to sacrifice my quality-of-life! I can't cut my energy use by 75% without living in the forest cooking over a campfire!"
Literally everyone in Europe does that, though. Europeans use a quarter to half the energy of Americans. Again, I already linked the stats. And they're fine. They're using climate control in their houses. Yeah, nobody in Europe lives in death valley California where it got up to 125 last August but I genuinely don't know why Americans are living there. That place is a monument to humanity's hubris. I get that y'all gonna run the air more than a European but you don't fucking need golf resorts so let's quit growing grass in the desert for no goddamn reason. Your tourist attractions can be those desert tours, because people do show up just because it's the hottest place on the planet. Like that's a shitty reason to go anywhere, but there is a thriving tourism industry around it. What do those tours even do? Is anybody from there? Because I can't wrap my head around that. It seems like the tour guide would just get off the bus and be like, "Hot as hell out here, ain't it?" -pause- "Welp. That's it folks. That's the tour. Hottest place on earth. Let's head to the gift shop." Like good for you Death Valley, it's fucking hot. This state has Disneyland why the fuck is this a tourism thing? Why would you go watch it be hot when you could go to Disneyland? People do weird shit that I want no part of.
My point is that the climate in the states is different than in Europe in some places, but it's hot as hell in the African deserts too and they also use half the power we do, so we're doing something wrong. Like Dallol is constantly fighting with Death Valley over the 'hottest place on Earth' title but folks in Dallol use a LOT less energy than folks in Death Valley.
https://nsidc.org/cryosphere/glaciers/questions/climate.html
"Renewable energies include wind, solar, biomass and geothermal energy sources. This means all energy sources that renew themselves within a short time or are permanently available. Energy from hydropower is only partly a renewable energy. This is certainly the case with river or tidal power plants. Otherwise, numerous dams or reservoirs also produce mixed forms, e.g. by pumping water into their reservoirs at night and recovering energy from them during the day when there is an increased demand for electricity. Since it is not possible to clearly determine the amount of generated energy, all energies from hydropower are displayed separately.
In 2015, renewable energies accounted for around 92.2 percent of actual total consumption in Ethiopia."
So, yeah, maybe there are arguments to be made for, "I have to run the AC, it's literally a flesh melting 125 outside, the plastic parts of cars melted. Cars are melting on the street."
But y'all live in a desert so... solar. Like... again, hot as fuck in Dallol and they run the air, but they power it through solar because they don't have big companies lobbying for them to use the dumbest possible method of generating electricity.
A big part of it is that we should not need to have an impending apocalypse to know that we ought not do things the dumbest fucking possible way. Like our current system is the shittiest, least efficient way to do this. Coal is not a renewable resource and we're running out, so even if it wasn't bad for us we've about milked that as far as it's gonna go. It's drying up. I get that y'all don't live among miners, but we're talking about people who are grasping at straws driving several states away because somebody found a hint of vein in West Virginia and there's no coal left in Ky so you need to apply and you need to drive, and you will sleep in the bed of your truck if you have to to send some money to your family. We're just out. With our current reserves, even if the planet wasn't dying around us, we will be out of coal in the Appalachian mountain range, the current place we get it from, in 40 years. We don't have it. We can't magically produce it.
And because we're running out, our community, which has been a producer for the past century, is being abandoned. Those coal companies used us up, and as soon as the veins dried up and they couldn't get anything else, they abandoned us. And they'll tell you, "Well, your land is dry, so fuck you," to your face. And then you can go sit on a bus for days to tell Mitch McConnel that you're dying of black lung and all you want is jobs for your kids but when the coal dried up the company told you to go fuck yourself and left and there's literally no other job in the area that pays a living wage- and he won't give you more than a minute of his time.
Because we are doing this as ass-backwards, as shittily, as we possibly can.
So even if Climate Change was a made up scare tactic, which it's obviously not, we still can't keep doing what we're doing. There's a finite amount. We're out. We've been using it since the industrial revolution in the 1800s and we used it up. There is no more of it. It really is that simple.
The surveyors have been out since I've been in the world, trying to find more. You see them all the time out by the side of the road, because we're literally getting desperate enough that we'll tear roads up. But it's just not there. They can't magically make more of them.
So the people who want to deny reality are going to just keep going strong until 2060 when we throw in the last block, and then... what? What happens then? If people really want to be that stupid and shortsighted, what do they do at that point?
Ky's been more or less dry since 2009. And in the past decade we have fallen the fuck apart. That's why we're broke as shit. There is no more coal here. And that means there are no more jobs here. Without some kind of green energy plant, we will die a horrible death.
And like I said, the entire mountain range only has, at best, if we conserve the shit out of it, about 40 years left. Then we'll be out. That's all she wrote.
So acting like this is viable is fucking ridiculous. Come to my community and tell the people driving to West Virginia and sleeping in the back of trucks on the fucking HOPE that there will be a mining job left by the time they get there and that vein hasn't dried up that this is an acceptable way to do this.
Yes, humans are causing climate change. But even if we weren't, the current system of "use a place for all their nonrenewable resources then throw it and all the people there away" is the shittiest possible way to do it. Literally any alternative would be better than this. Only being rationed a quarter of current consumption would be better than this. By a lot.
I don't think that people who don't live here understand how bad it is. There are parts of rural Appalachia that look like a goddamn third world country because y'all wanna suck the dick of these corporations. Ky ran out first and we're seeing those effects. The whole fucking mountain range is gonna be this broke, hemorrhaging money- we need $10 in for every dollar we earn to keep our heads above water.
This is not fake bullshit to be debated on the internet to me. My community is dying. We were held hostage for a century with this threat, and now the threat is here and they did exactly what they threatened to do. We NEED an influx of green energy or this region is going to die and this kind of denial bullshit is putting the nails in our coffins.
That's WHY there are so many preppers. That's WHY so many people have solar and 'homesteads'. Because this community is DYING over this shit. This is my real fucking life. And nobody is willing to fix it because they want to pretend it would be hard.
Lay on a couch lately? Maybe seek some help. Your fucking nuts
