The only technology that should be on that list, since using it would enable all the others to thrive: UwU hungry guillotine
We have the technologies. The list goes on and on and on. We just need to employ them instead of waiting further for magical fixes.
Posting and liking memes is great, but real change comes from actions. If you are as concerned as we are about climate change, please consider joining or supporting climate activists near you.
We don't need new technologies to overcome the issue of global warming itself; we need them to overcome the issue of human nature. People (in the population level sense, not individually) are not good at long term thinking. Solving global warming with current technologies will require a change in lifestyle from just about everyone. It's the kind of change that will have no perceivable reward to most people. That's why a lot of those solutions like biking, veganism, etc, will never catch on.
We have seen, that people and societies are extremely adaptable to changes in lifestyle. The transformation of the Netherlands to a cycling -friendly country for example. Car free city centers. People were very opposed to them before. But once the changes were made, people were happy with them and adapted to the new options. There's also negative examples where people adapted to new negative lifestyles such as car centric cities. Or smog, pollution, garbage landfills, or rivers that one is not allowed to swim in due to pollution. People are surprisingly adaptable to new conditions. We just have to do it.
I am vegan btw but the amount of people who say apathetic shit like 'one person can't make a difference, it's all the corporations fault, wah' is honestly depressing. We get the society we ask for and until people start asking for something different nothing changes.
"No not that! I want to do EXACTLY as I did before but YOU do something about it. Can't you like build a technology to suck the CO2 out of the atmosphere or something?"
"We need new technologies that can be controlled by a megacorporation to make a select few rich, not things that individuals can do or use that can break the hold of existing monopolies"
Yeah we already have the technology needed, we have to implement them.
And much of the tech is actually very old. Electric trains are like a century old. So for a lot of things, we have to re-implement technology we foolishly removed.
Oil was just a bad technology path. Gotta get back on the right path.
The technology path is fine, the adoption isn't.
Path: plastics are miracle materials. Lots of great uses for it.
Adoption: mass producing single use throwaway shit everything.
Long term plastic aren't as big of an issue as one time use plastics are. Wax paper and aluminum containers can both replace consumable bottles for instance.
Veganism isn't better for the environment than significantly reducing the total amount of consumed meat. Animals play an important, difficult-to-replace role in making agriculture sustainable. Animals can be herded on land that's difficult to farm on, animals can consume parts of farmed plants that humans cannot, and animals produce products that humans cannot replicate without significantly more work.
Edit: I see a bunch of vegans who aren't really engaging with the argument. To be clear, anyone who makes statements about how things are right now to try to disprove this is probably arguing in bad faith. I'm not responding to comments anymore because, while it's entirely possible that I'm wrong, y'all aren't making any good points.
Furthermore, I'm not anti-vegan, but now I'm tempted to be. So many people I've engaged with have displayed all of the worst vegan stereotypes I've heard about. I've always assumed it was chuds making shit up, but no I just hadn't met any of the terminally online creeps in the vegan community yet OMFG.
Yes, we need to significantly reduce the amount of consumed meat (maybe not insects, if we consider them meat). A step towards more vegan and vegetarian food would definitely be necessary. Yes, not everyone needs to be vegan. But we need to consume way more vegan and vegetarian food.
Veganism is good for climate, biodiversity, health and animal welfare. We really don't need to eat animals or animal products to have good meal and live a happy life. The good thing is that humans are omnivores, with a free choice of what to eat. Please choose wisely, not only for your own mental and physical health, but also for others, living now as well as in years to come.
I don't really care. Abusing (using) animals for food and work is cruel anyway, if me not doing that because I think it's wrong is good for the environment, great! If it's not, fine, but it's not why I do it.
That's the thing. Ethics and impact on the environment can be two different things. If you decide to go that way, you're fine. Do it. However we need animals for stated reasons. We have to eat less meat/generally consume less animal products.
We also need to stop overproducing everything. America makes far too much corn, because/and the industry is heavily subsidized.
The amount of food waste in North America is astounding. Completely unnecessary.
We don't need animals to consume plants we can't, because plant food is soooo goddamn more efficient on every metric. We can drastically reduce land, water and energy usage AND still feed way more people with plant foods. We simply do not need to eat animals.
Any form of "sustainable" animal farming I've read up on end up being still less resource efficient than plant foods, AND obviously massively reduced output. So we're truly talking about vegan vs. an ounce of meat a week. That's not a difference worth defending, considering the other obvious ethical issues.
Finally, why do you feel that it's important to argue for "99%" veganism? Do you genuinely believe people don't understand that less is better, but none is best? Do you apply the same argument to other ethical issues, like feminism? Being 99% feminist is a big improvement, but constantly arguing for it in favor of feminism (aka 100%) would obviously look ridiculous. Finally, don't you realize the humongous difference between "we should abuse animals for our pleasure less" vs. "we shouldn't do that"? A whole class of racism disappears if we get rid of the association between "animal" and "lesser moral consideration".
I already have a second hand and telling people to grow a second hand just feels ableist to those who can't. /j
nuclear power should definitely be one of those technologies listed
The Problem with nuclear Power is, that there isn't a guarantee for reasonable pricing. There simply isn't any experience on how much it really costs to build new power plants.
If you want to take a deeper look into the topic: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/05/what-does-nuclear-power-really-cost/
20 years ago a few key technologies were still missing, like grid storage battery technology. But there are multiple promising ways now. Unfortunately lack of massive funding for research and development and patents means we'll have to wait another 20 years to produce them really cheaply on the free market. Otherwise it would be unfair to the poor inventor! /s
To be fair, a lot of the new technologies people talk about regarding this are some of these things, but improved. For instance, better batteries or solar cells, recent improvement to which has already had a pretty notable impact (for instance, better solar panels making solar energy cheaper, which makes even entities concerned only with profit more likely to adopt it.)
Usually it's just an excuse to do nothing, hoping for a magical technology that saves us from all our problems
The biggest technology needed is actually excavators so we can dig ditches everywhere to soak up rain water and refill aquifers. Also building retaining walls, terraces and swales using permaculture style water management to reforest degraded grazing lands.
I think we need those excavators do dig our own graves, because this will probably not happen.
HEMP
The climate of the memes of the climate!
Planet is on fire!
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