Discussion
Security Verification
indoordin0saur: This actually has me just as concerned as rising temperatures. And its a pretty hard thing to argue against, no matter your politics. Elon even brought it up when he did that interview with Trump in late 2024 to convince him that we should still care about CO2 levels in the atmosphere, even if you think the threat of a changing climate is overblown. Trump really had no response.
stuaxo: Plants grow faster (but not better) with more Co2 I wonder if this could be related to global obesity ?
gcanyon: Higher carbon dioxide makes us dumber: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7229519/I wonder how long before in-home CO2 extraction becomes a thing.
ThomW: "Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.“
toomuchtodo: Clean tech will save the day (low carbon generation, batteries, electrification trajectories and rate of change, broadly speaking), but the global fossil industry will need to be dismantled faster than some will like. It is a matter of survival, not politics or economics. My hunch is there are not many globally who want to suffocate while trying to exist for shareholder value.
lapcat: > My hunch is there are not many who want to suffocate while trying to exist for shareholder value.Have you... read the news lately? You say it's not a matter of politics, but the politicians are absolutely trying to roll back the clock, push dirty tech, eliminate all environmental protections and regulations.
embedding-shape: > but the politicians are absolutely trying to roll back the clock, push dirty tech, eliminate all environmental protections and regulationsYes, in one country who seems hellbent on destroying itself.But looking globally, more and more countries seems to get it at this point, and at least move in the right direction, compared to others. The others will make themselves irrelevant faster than the others can reach a future without fossil fuels.
lapcat: > Yes, in one country who seems hellbent on destroying itself.One of the largest countries in the world, measured by size, population, economy, and military. If you hadn't noticed, the US can do a lot of damage to the rest of the world all by itself. And pollution does not respect borders. Global warming does not respect borders.
lenerdenator: I'd be willing to bet they go the Spaceballs route and make cans of oxygen a must-have item before they cut the emissions.
kibitzor: CO2 increase of 400ppm decreases cognitive function by >20% [1]I frequently send this medium article [1] to friends + family for a basic dive into how CO2 affects our thinking and abilities at various levels in common areas.The article cites a study [2] which graphs cognitive score for different activities at different CO2 concentrations. Each activity's cognitive score is worse at higher CO2 concentrations, EXCEPT "focused activity" or "Information search" (up to some point)[1, note it is from 2016] https://medium.com/@joeljean/im-living-in-a-carbon-bubble-li... [2]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26502459/
amelius: We'll have AGI not because the AI becomes smarter but because humans become stupider.
tw04: You do us all a disservice by saying “the politicians”. The REPUBLICANS are attempting to ignore reality and burn more fossil fuels. Nobody else in America. Name the problem, otherwise you’re implying it’s a bipartisan effort.
zug_zug: > Humans evolved in an atmosphere containing roughly 280–300 ppm of CO₂. The average annual increase over the past decade has been about 2.6 ppm per year, with 2024 recording a 3.5 ppm rise.So currently we're at 428 with 3.5 increase per year, yeah, that's scary if it doesn't slow down soon. Makes you wonder about what indirect health side-effects that could have on us.
lenerdenator: I'm not a doctor, but I reckon it'd be same as any other case of carbon dioxide poisoning.
davidw: And parking is abundant!
amelius: If you have the money for it.
throawayonthe: i wonder how much specifically indoor co2 levels and levels in dense/industrial affect italso is it accurate to say that the blood co2 level is mostly a snapshot of the moment blood is drawn? or is it affected by longterm environment
tonyedgecombe: If we were only eating plants then there would be no obesity crisis.
zdragnar: You'd be amazed at what you can do to yourself with enough fried potatoes and refined sugar.
beejiu: There is actually a hypothesis around this, but I don't think it's really been investigated: https://www.nature.com/articles/nutd20122
zdragnar: There's an oversimplified assumption here that the plants will be less nutritious, and so people will eat more calories to make up for the deficit.I suspect the presence of protein, fats and sugars influence the hormone production regulating appetite far more than these changes account for. I would expect the same health issues to be affecting other animal species in just as drastic a measure as humans if it were true, and also that global obesity happened at a more uniform pace rather than coinciding with the introduction of modern western eating habits and lifestyles.
davidw: In the US, people bend over backwards to ensure that there is free storage for automobiles. And that housing and businesses are forced to include that expensive (parking spots can run into the 10's of thousands of dollars for some kinds of construction) amenity. Fortunately that's starting to change, but it is a big battle. And meanwhile, CO2 levels keep rising.
slibhb: People say shit like as if fossil fuels aren't the single biggest reason we aren't starving and living in thatched huts.
wat10000: Two things can both be true. Fossil fuels greatly improved quality of life for a large number of people in the past few centuries. And their continued use on a massive scale now threatens to hurt a lot of people.
AlexandrB: > My hunch is there are not many globally who want to suffocate while trying to exist for shareholder value.I hate this kind of hyperbole because it obscures the real dangers. No one is going to suffocate any time soon. Atmospheric CO2 is around 450ppm. The CO2 in a meeting room of a typical office can easily reach 1500ppm or more[1]. Is everyone in meeting rooms "suffocating"?[1] https://www.popsci.com/conference-carbon-dioxide-tired-offic...
johnboiles: Yes in one way or another
lapcat: Obama takes credit for U.S. oil-and-gas boom: ‘That was me, people’ https://apnews.com/article/business-5dfbc1aa17701ae219239caa...You have to be born yesterday to believe that Democratic leaders haven't merely hand-waved and virtue-signaled about global warming for decades. I realized this back in the 1990s.Democrats have superior rhetoric, and they are less openly hostile, but their long record of doing nothing to help is unsurpassed. They will fiddle while Republicans burn Rome. And don't forget that Joe Manchin for example was a Democrat, one who dominated Democratic policy during the Biden administration.
knowaveragejoe: You do the people causing this problem a great service with false equivocations like this. It is clear one group would prefer us to ignore the problem and do nothing at all - in fact encourage the problematic behavior - and the other would very much like to take action on the issue if they had the political power.
goodpoint: I think you are being downvoted because people only skim "Clean tech will save the day" without reading the whole text.
Karawebnetwork: The high school my friend's kids attend installed CO2 sensors during the pandemic as an indirect way to measure airflow.It turned out the building had been sealed extremely tightly to keep out the winter cold and because it is old, it does not have a proper HVAC system.They discovered that CO2 levels stayed around 1200 ppm throughout the entire winter, sometimes even higher. This had likely been the case for decades.It is a school in a small, low‑income town. I cannot help wondering how many kids were labeled as underperforming when they were actually struggling with the effects of chronically elevated CO2 levels.
throw0101a: For those unaware, this is the dialogue/caption in Tom Toro's 2012 New Yorker cartoon:* https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995* https://tomtoro.com/cartoons/* https://condenaststore.com/featured/the-planet-got-destroyed...
RobGR: I've thought about making a C02 scrubber for indoor use. The simplest way, using commercial lime, would mean replenishing a consumable to keep it going. The C02 scrubbers that acquarium owners use also don't seem to be able to be regenerated.I think it would be interesting to see what effect, if any, an indoor C02 level of near 0 would have on humans and mammals. Because your blood has to stay in a narrow PH range, and C02 is part of maintaining that, I wouldn't presume it would be good.I think a small desktop C02 scrubber might have a market in the same demographic that pays for air ionizers, de-ionizers, HEPA filters and incense burners.
bob1029: [delayed]
tw04: I think you’re grossly underestimating how much the average American can deny with the assistance of social media.The number of people I personally know who thought the country was going to end on J6 who now call the entire thing a “political hoax” breaks my brain.Not to mention the endless posts about “where are all the people claiming COVID was so deadly now?” Who literally completely ignore the MILLIONS of deaths caused by COVID…Until these people have their own son or daughter killed by X - they’ll happily claim it’s not actually a problem. Or find something completely unrelated to blame instead if it doesn’t align with their Twitter feed.
toomuchtodo: https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/27/solar-powers-newest...https://www.pewresearch.org/2025/11/05/impact-of-climate-cha...https://www.pewresearch.org/2025/08/19/global-climate-change...https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2024/12/09/how-americans...https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/08/09/what-the-...
embedding-shape: Right, but again, it'll matter less and less as the US hegemony is dying and other countries will pick up the torch, and the ones who are taking over seem to be a bit more willing to both commit and execute on plans to reduce pollution and global warming in general.
api: This is honestly much, much scarier than climate change. We can adapt to a changing climate but not if we're losing IQ and focus.
microsoftedging: Op was referencing a comic [0]Furthermore, yes, getting to the point where we're no longer starving and in thatched huts did require fossil fuels, but now we know what they do, and that they're actively having an effect on the environment, and clearly us, are we so stuck in our ways we can't change our actions to secure a life for those that come after?[0] https://www.bureauofinternetculture.art/memes/shareholder-va...
slibhb: What difference does it make what they're referencing?I'm glad we agree that fossil fuels were necessary. It has nothing to do with "shareholder value" -- it has to do with minimizing human suffering.Also, it's noteworthy that US emissions peaked in 2007. We're down ~20% since then. The world is absolutely addressing climate change, and the worst case scenarios have already been avoided. Faster would be better but we're moving reasonably fast.
ChromaticPanic: Consumerism is the problem. If fossil fuels were used on necessities sure. Single use plastics, individually packaged consumables, planned obsolescence are examples of things that are not necessary. These examples have all to do with shareholder value.
slibhb: Consumerism is not the problem. Human beings don't stop wanting to improve their lives once they have the bare necessities and there is nothing wrong with this.We can have our cake and eat it, we just need to transition to cleaner forms of energy. Which we are doing.
lapcat: > the other would very much like to take action on the issue if they had the political power.They had political power! During the Biden administration, during the Obama administration, during the Clinton administration.Al Gore is a famous environmentalist... for making a movie after he was out of power. What the hell did he do for the environment when he was literally in the Oval Office, at the side of the President?
ceejayoz: > What the hell did he do for the environment when he was literally in the Oval Office, at the side of the President?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_activism_of_Al_G...Guy tried.
api: This was true until the advent of nuclear energy, and became orders of magnitude less true after the addition of solar PV and Li-Ion (and now Na-Ion) batteries.I'd say this statement has been almost entirely false since 2020. The only areas where fossil fuels aren't readily replaceable are long-haul aviation (only a few percent of global emissions) and long-haul shipping (also a few percent). So we can probably cut emissions by 80-90% with no meaningful impact to standard of living.
mrguyorama: >During the Biden administration, during the Obama administration, during the Clinton administrationThe president doesn't actually control much in the USA, despite the nonsensical shit republican congresses let them get away with. Obama, Biden, and Clinton could not do anything that wasn't approved by congress.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_divisions_of_United_Stat...Democrats have not really held enough power to do anything at all in like 40 years. A 1 or 2 vote "majority" in a chamber is not really meant to allow you to do anything.Hell, that very first graph makes it pretty clear why shit is so bad in the US, we used to actually fire congress and replace them with different people.
lapcat: > A 1 or 2 vote "majority" in a chamber is not really meant to allow you to do anything.1) Democrats had a filibuster-proof super-majority during Obama's first term.2) The filibuster is not in the Constitution. It can be abolished at any time by a simple majority vote.The Democrats don't do anything because they don't want to do anything. There's always a convenient excuse. You can blame Manchin or Sinema or whomever, but they're Democrats too.
myaccountonhn: No, just cleaner energy is not enough.
gamerdonkey: > and the worst case scenarios have already been avoided.Do you have a source on this?
lapcat: > Guy tried.Give him a sticker.
fullstop: I went to a Catholic school and had to attend services. I thought that I was just bored, but I'm pretty sure that my yawning had more to do with elevated CO2 levels.
chucksta: There was democratic control of the presidency and congress during Biden's term
OutOfHere: A rise in blood bicarbonate, even if in the normal range, particularly at the upper end of normal, is still dangerous at times. The problem is that it has an effect of diminishing extracellular potassium which leads to spikes in heart rate, risking a cardiac emergency. I have witnessed it first hand.
WorldMaker: I have friends that fell down air monitoring rabbit holes in the situation of the early 2020s and one of the things they have remained obsessed about is home CO2 levels and have active monitoring equipment and "pager alerts" and other things setup.Home carbon capture is sort of a thing already: buy more houseplants, keep them alive and healthy.Though the most common home interventions for now are still "open a window" and/or "run a fan to circulate the air better". I suppose it's neat that we can home automate that, if you are willing to invest in that.
Tade0: USA (along with the rest of the western world) is a huge cumulative emitter:https://ourworldindata.org/contributed-most-global-co2But a distant second in per year emissions:https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by...The EU, not listed here, sits between the US and India at about 3.05 billion tonnes.It's all up to China, which took over a huge chunk of the world's manufacturing. And all up to us, buying Chinese products.
triceratops: The cumulative emissions represent the PPM increase today. So that's a very relevant statistic. I don't know why you're ignoring it.China also reduced their emissions last year while the US increased them. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45108292Stop pointing fingers. Start working.
bethekidyouwant: How do you unconfound this from being inside in better sealed environments for longer periods now? Not even mentioned?
chneu: Reminder that an individual can cut their emissions by a staggering amount by just not eating meat/dairy.Depending on how much you consume, you can cut your emissions by 50%!Regenerative ranching is a lie and is more based in "vibes" and "energies" than science. Making beef production 0.01% more efficient then increasing consumption does not help. Meat is a "status symbol" food based in excess, grass fed beef is just another excuse to use more resources on a good to show how much of a status symbol it is. Grass fed beef is not good for environment. That's nonsense. It's less efficient beef called green. It's more expensive so people can claim superiority for buying it.Our ego, pride, heritage, and machismo are used to manipulate us into beating our chests and consuming more protein, cuz winners eat 1.2g protein per kg and go to the gym. See how our health is used to manipulate us and justify excessive consumption in the form of "health and fitness"? Our colonist/conquerer society is dead set on us consuming more and more. We gotta buy more funco pops to keep up with social media influencers.At the current point, the ONLY thing that makes sense is to cut your excessive consumption. We arent removing anything from the environment at this point and "recycling" and "regeneration" are meaningless.We've blown past every milestone of destruction we have. We consistently increase our emissions and consumption. We are not doing anything to stop this.Reduce and sacrifice is all that matters right now. Soon, a lot of this won't be an option for people, it'll be forced on them because of our selfishness today.Our kids and grandkids have every reason to blame us. We are finding, creating and using every excuse we can for why this isn't our fault as we bite into a cheap burger.
WorldMaker: Reminder that corporations spent a ton of money on propaganda to make us all believe individual sacrifices can have a noticeable impact when the largest offenders are all corporate. Even if everyone reduced their personal carbon footprint by avoiding meat/dairy and the industrial cattle farms mysteriously disappeared overnight, that's still a drop in the overall greenhouse gas emission problem. Also note that "everyone" is doing a lot of work in that sentence and also means collective effort is required to make the change noticeable/effective rather than individual efforts.Collective action is what matters. Corporate regulation is what matters. An enhanced EPA with real enforcement powers (not just fines, but the ability to shut down companies and/or outright murder them; which is also a larger debate because right now Americans generally don't believe in corporate murder and think corporations have a right to indefinitely exist) is what is necessary.It is because of our selfishness, but also our selfishness extends to not working together in enough solidarity and instead fingerpointing at individuals to "do their part, alone, and without support systems and systemic change". That's pretty selfish, too. We need systemic change. We need support systems. We need a government that prioritizes the environment and our collective health and well-being. We need companies to understand that ethics matter as much as profits and if they cannot find profits that are ethical, including and especially in relationship to their externalities like greenhouse gas emissions, then they do not deserve to make those profits and may not deserve to continue operation as a company.
boringg: Nuclear will save the day in combination with clean tech.Clean tech on its own is too slowly to be meaningfully impactful by the time we need it.
toomuchtodo: It takes ~ten years to build a nuclear generator. In that time, 10TW of solar PV will be deployed at current deployment rates (1TW/year), a bit higher than total global electricity generation capacity currently (~9TW).Fusion is solved, at a distance, with solar, wind, and batteries. Half an hour of sunlight on Earth can power humanity for a year. Long duration storage remains to be solved for, but look how far we’ve come in 1-2 decades.(at this time, short duration storage will likely be LFP, sodium, and other stationary friendly chemistries, but this could change as the state of the art advances rapidly and the commodities market fluctuates)
boringg: Fusion isn't in our lifetimes. Its been 10 years away since the 50s - only to get more R&D grant funding for budget building.If it happened it would be a huge game changer for our economies but it is far away from deployment let along lab proven. It still requires more energy to start/maintain the reaction then it can produce - which is fundamental to success.
toomuchtodo: Solar and wind are fusion generated energy from the sun. “Fusion at a distance.” Fossil fuels are ancient sunlight, ancient fusion.
_DeadFred_: But society needs to progress. We left thatched huts and moved to cities with streets full of human sewage. Humans living together as a society was progress. And then we progressed further and lived together AND removed dumping sewage onto our streets.
deeg: I remember when I first saw an oxygen bar at a mall and thinking how stupid it was. Fools and their money...But who's laughing now?
triceratops: I think you have that backwards. Building nuclear is slow slow slow. I can have new solar on my rooftop this year.
boringg: While that is true that there is a lag time to deploy nuclear - that is a vestige of the last 40 years of regulating it out of existence. That has changed - technology has improved and regulatory is under scrutiny. The difference is that once nuclear starts to roll out, as it will in the next 3-5 years, we will be seeing large deployments of clean dedicated load ripple through our electrical system in a product assembly line.Solar and storage are great assets - and will continue to grow but they have other sets of constraints and deploy at small scale (relatively). The large scale deployments have long time horizons.
triceratops: The regulatory regime also affects large scale deployments of solar.
throw0101a: A few years old now, but still worth checking out:* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Cost_of_Free_Parking
davidw: Grabar's book that I linked below is probably more accessible to most people, but Shoup is of course the OG.
qingcharles: Me in Europe: 5 different bins on 5 days of the week for all the different types of recycling.Me in USA: insert John Travolta looking around meme consumer recycling is practically unheard of in large parts of the country.
embedding-shape: To be fair, looking from the outside, democrats don't seem to be very eager to do anything about it either, most politicians in the US seems to be playing for the same team; the rich and wealthy.
tw04: Huh??? Did you just miss Biden's entire term? Democrats literally passed a massive bill that included $783 billion in funds for renewable energy to fight greenhouse gas emissions. Exactly what else do you want them to do?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_Reduction_Act
tt24: Thank god for that. I can’t imagine spending more of my limited lifespan doing more busy work
tt24: Why do the corporations pollute so much? Is it just for the love of the game?
specialist: Are you familiar with the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics?https://gwern.net/doc/philosophy/ethics/2015-06-24-jai-theco...And Murc's Law?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murc%27s_law
specialist: I'm old enough to remember the Obama Admin's support for the nascent battery and PV industries.Ditto Biden Admin's support for our transition to renewables (IIJA, IRA). Unprecedented. The type of Keynesian investment in the USA (industrial policy, pro-labor) unseen since FDR's New Deal.> don't forget that Joe ManchinNo one on the left ever will.That said, it's important to note that the Democratic (center-left) coalition is wicked hard to hold together.Have you read Caro's (epic) biographies of LBJ? It's amazing how much skill, subterfuge, and manipulation was required to pass progressive legislation over the objections of the die-hard reactionaries.Everything about politics sucks. Chaos, apathy, nihilism, grifting are the default. It's absolutely amazing that anything gets done at all. So we should celebrate, and learn from, the occasional success.
lapcat: > So we should celebrate, and learn from, the occasional success.What success? It's too late. The time for decisive action was decades ago. The worst case scenario is occurring now. Humanity totally failed to avert a disaster. We've already blown past the global temperature thresholds that scientists warned about. Now we're going to have to deal with the consequences. There's no going back in time to prevent it.
WorldMaker: To some extent, yes, it is deeply for the love of the game: planned obsolescence, single use products, nothing built to last, "razor blades and ink cartridges" where worse user experiences sell more products, intentional over-production to drive over-consumption through consequent demand for artificially low priced goods ("the Wal-Mart effect"), and so forth.If we don't find ways to price in externalities into the markets and/or the regulations, companies find ways to push things to externalities to cut corners and artificially increase sales and/or profits or have easy ways to market "cheaper" products versus better quality products.You may want to point fingers at the demand side, but even the most basic, simplified micro-economics is all about how supply-and-demand is a complex dance, supply has more tools up its sleeve than it seems, and a lot more control than demand. Consumers can demand more durable, more reliable products until they are blue in the face, but suppliers are free to just not supply them because cutting corners makes more profits and somewhat happy return customers are more profitable than a very satisfied one-and-done-for-life customer.
specialist: Methinks our current path has been determined since ~1980, with ~2000 probably being the last chance we had to stay under 1.5C.So, well, whaddya gonna do?The trick is deluding oneself that we can somehow muddle thru this. (Humanity has in fact survived worse.) Otherwise I wouldn't get out of bed in the morning. Is that reasonable? If not, then I might as well soldier on.
lapcat: > Methinks our current path has been determined since ~1980, with ~2000 probably being the last chance we had to stay under 1.5C.That's why I said "I realized this back in the 1990s" and was later complaining about Al Gore.> Otherwise I wouldn't get out of bed in the morning. Is that reasonable?This is not like nuclear war—which could still happen, because we still have the weapons, and the madmen to use them—where we're all going to die tomorrow. We're already seeing the effects—as the submitted article shows—but the worst is yet to come. We're cursing our descendants with a world much more hostile than the one we were born into, for no other reason than greed and selfishness. It's the ultimate betrayal of the future. (By the way, I'm a human and deliberately chose to use em dashes, because I felt like it.)The best thing to happen for global warming in recent years was not the Biden administration but actually the pandemic, because it significantly cut industrial output for an extended time.
pluralmonad: Never heard this take before. Care to elaborate? It seems like crop failure and disease are the typical causes of food shortages, if not outright human logistical failures. Sounds like saying pouring gasoline on a tiny fire is the only reason we aren't cold (ignoring that more firewood would be the solution). An unsustainable solution is not in-fact a good solution. So if your assertion is correct, then we should all prepare for our thatched huts in which we will starve.
slibhb: You clearly haven't given a lot of thought to questions like "where does all this cheap food/housing/heating come from?"The fact that fossil fuels -- since their mass adoption in the late 19th century -- are the single largest cause of improved living conditions is standard economic history.> An unsustainable solution is not in-fact a good solution.It was a perfectly good solution. It replaced wood fires which are clearly worse. Coal was great until natural gas became available. As solar/wind/nuclear become abundant, they are conintuing to displace fossil fuels.
pluralmonad: This all seems very confused. I would say you clearly have not thought this through, but that would be fairly rude given the tiny scope of this comment thread. If your definition of better (or perfectly good) is: makes me more comfortable in the short term then I can understand that perspective.
slibhb: So your opinion is that humanity should not have burned fossil fuels, we should have kept burning wood, until solar/wind/nuclear were invented? Seems obviously wrong.
gcanyon: I can't find it now, but I saw a video where a guy was trying to offset just the CO2 he produced himself with plants. 1. He gave up on "plants" because they were nowhere close to offsetting him. 2. Switching to algae, he used a 55 gallon drum of it because the numbers said that would work. He gave up when the CO2 level reached something like 2000 ppm 3. He ended up with something like 3 drums, as well as special mixers to make sure the algae got access to as much CO2 as possible, and he had lights focused on the algae drums to make them as efficient as possible, and he still ended up barely keeping the CO2 at the "dangerous but not completely toxic" level, and it wasn't stable either. Plants are a terrible way to try to manage CO2.
beeforpork: And while we pump CO2 into the atmosphere, we also shrink the engines that could get it out again, like the rainforest in Brazil. Perfect optimisation!(I don't want to shame Brazil, it's a global chain of problems. And other forests are decimated, too, like in Sweden and Estonia, for the demand of produce worldwide.)
CursedSilicon: I mean. At least we'd still be living as a species
slibhb: Oh we're not living? Am I a ghost typing this? Are you?
CursedSilicon: Sorry. Did you miss the term "still" ?
slibhb: You used the world still wrong and the space before punctuation makes me wonder if English isn't your first language
tonyedgecombe: [delayed]
boringg: A step to far my friend. If we abstract away everything then nothing matters.
boringg: 100%
knowaveragejoe: I'm sorry but if you are trying to both-sides this issue then you are either woefully uninformed or just being contrarian for the sake of it.
pluralmonad: Almost anything is better than the destruction of the biomes that support human life. I'm not really sure how there is even a discussion to be had about that. But anyone who claims "coal was great" either doesn't understand or doesn't care.
tt24: > planned obsolescence, single use products, nothing built to lastPlanned obsolescence is a conspiracy theory and there’s no evidence of it occurring at any kind of broad scale.Consumers generally prefer cheaper, less durable products, which is why the market adapted to better fit that preference.
highview: It's like the ending for the Dinosaur TV series.
piloto_ciego: figuring out who to blame is not the problem here, we need to figure out how to fix it.
chneu: When the wildfires during COVID hit some folks did some work to figure out how much of a cognitive effect wildfire smoke has on the brain. Its pretty staggering.https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9196888/Essentially, this affects every person and animal on the planet.
piloto_ciego: Literally said this down below and got downvoted... but it's a big deal and nobody is talking about it really - indoor levels are much higher.
pocksuppet: Chronic exposure to CO2 levels above normal but below acute toxicity makes us dumber and more irritable.
piloto_ciego: I literally said this down below and got down voted. This has been my theory for a few years now. It's not the only thing, but the flynn effect has certainly reversed.
