This doesn't address the underlying problem, but if this is something you'd like to avoid as a consumer, it's worth noting that sewage sludge is not permitted for use in growing organic produce:
> A very important part of the process-based regulatory framework is the prohibition of certain methods in organic production and handling. Methods like irradiation, sewage sludge, and genetic engineering are all expressly prohibited from being used when growing or processing organic foods.
And it can be used upfield though so the groundwater carries the dirt into organic fields. Many of these "rules" are written like physics stops at some arbitrary line. To be honest "organic" is a bit of a joke in the farming community , as their fields tend to "hug" coventional fields to prevent a fungi overgrowth .
And we all know agrarian traders who get certified "organic" stuff from countries were any seal or certificate is just a bribe away.
All plants i know get fungi, especially late in the dry and ripen stage.It reduces yield, is toxic and carcinogenic. So fungizides are deployed during the plants lifetime to keep the contamination in check and the product healthwise unproblematic. Organic farming does not have that option. So the fungi rate of some organic farms approaches a total loss. So they hug conventional farms to get the fungizide floatsome for a better result.
It’s far from a complete solution, but it works well enough that the future described in the article is much more a dark fantasy than a likely reality.
The "solution" you're showcasing only addresses global warming, not climate change, nor any of the other facets of the environmental crisis (e.g. biodiversity collapse, ocean acidification, soil depletion, fresh water pollution, etc...).
Techno-solutionism at its finest!
I don’t think anyone is arguing that it is a viable alternative to eventual decarbonization of the economy. Or if people are, they aren’t doing so in good faith.
But it does very effectively prevent anything even approaching a “collapse.” Relatively cheaply, even.
I mean it depends on your perspective. Because you could also think that preventing only one of the multiple crisis we are facing won't be enough to perceptively delay the breaking point.
When we willing and trull obey all the laws of Maker of the universe, then we will be prepared for the future crises that is to come. In fact, it already here with us. Climate Change!!! Lets carefully look into the real motive of this phrase
We are talking about technology as such not necessarily economically competitive.
I wouldn't consider the technology of solar engineering mentioned in your link economically competitive either.
Doable but not cheap.
The same is true for the technology to prevent climate change. It exists but it was expensive.
Interestingly, it's still expensive now because even though the basic technology is cheaper, the timeframe is much shorter, so we have to achieve more in less time than if we had started earlier.
Once the effects of climate change become too expensive or inconvenient for the ruling class you mean, which might be never since they are really good at shielding themselves from consequences.
I wholeheartedly agree though am questioning whether shielding will actually work if effects of climate change become dire… not just for the ruling class personally but in the way that made them and keeps them a ruling class.
Keep in mind that 70% of the pollution comes from 100 companies.
We discuss spending more money and taking extreme measures (shall we darken the clouds? bullshit) instead of taxing these fuckers out of existence and calling it a century.
Please expand on the tension between the competing passages of “We have the technology to pause the worst effects..” and “It’s far from a complete solution”.
Back in April of this year, they bought my 5-year-old car for $600 more than I had paid for it new. Anecdotal, sure, but somehow I’m not surprised their business is struggling.
I knew I should have shorted them. One of my biggest investing regrets.
Beyond the MoviePass-like prices they paid for used cars, the core concept of the company makes no sense to me. Who wants to buy a car without looking at it? Without getting inside and feeling how it handles? Cars aren't trivial $10 Amazon purchases.
> Who wants to buy a car without looking at it? Without getting inside and feeling how it handles?
Have you met young adults in the US recently?
I see a surprising number of Carvana license plate bezels on the streets here in CA. The core problem Carvana is facing is they're a predatory lender who happens to use cars as the fodder for the loans. With a recession and high interest rates, there's just not many takers for the loans so their business is coming to a grinding halt.
> The core problem Carvana is facing is they're a predatory lender who happens to use cars as the fodder for the loans.
This is the business model of every used car dealer ever. It’s a sound plan insofar as it is profitable, ethics aside.
Where Carvana went wrong is with trying to make it scale. Independent used auto lots are a thing for a reason. The amount of red tape involved with selling cars is massive, and multiply it by trying to comply with every state and locality in the country, you quickly have an intractable level of complexity. And government agencies can’t be shuffled off to a support email like a SaaS customer. Every single car sold requires hours of high touch work by a real human. And when your margins are so razor thin from all the overhead with an operation like this, a tiny downturn can be ruinous.
I will add that there isn't a great return on scaling a car dealership like this. There aren't sufficient arbitrage opportunities to outweigh the costs of transporting cars around and complying with a hodgepodge of state laws.
I’m pretty sure a friend of mine bought a car from them (could have been a different service, but there aren’t a ton, right?). There was at least a trial drive through the neighborhood.
Even if so, I would feel somewhat guilted into buying a car that I waited for them to drive to me on a flatbed truck. Even if I know that's their trick. Maybe that's just me? It's why I avoid getting into setups like this.
At a dealership I can hop into dozens of different cars and look at different configuration packages. Or walk next door to the other neighboring dealerships. There's not only no contractual commitment, there's no emotional commitment either.
I'd feel exhausted in waiting for Carvana and it would probably make me willing to overlook minor grievances with whatever car they brought. Not so with a dealership.
Looking at it objectively — the delivery guy gets paid either way, right? And the extent to which their business model exploited that feeling of guilt, is the extent to which it is kind of… unethical feels like not quite the right word, but it is bad to expect people to take a worse deal because they feel guilty.
Yeah, sometimes that guilty feeling is pretty obvious too and people will exploit it substantially. The price of people saying no is built into the business model.
Depending on your market it could make them more money even if you don’t buy the car, as the next buyer might pay a premium over what they would have sold it elsewhere? I don’t know how they would do that arbitrage but in theory it could work.
I think one of their key selling points was you could return the car within 30 days - and they'd cover the cost of the return and refund you everything. From a buyer's perspective this is a nice idea, as you often can't tell what's wrong with a car or if you really like it until you start driving it.
>>Who wants to buy a car without looking at it? Without getting inside and feeling how it handles?
Apparently, most people nowadays. I spoke to my Volvo salesguy that I bought my car from just before the pandemic, and he said the biggest change with the market post-pandemic is that customers in general just don't care about test drives. They either ring up and order what they want, they order using an online form, or if they come in they just go "the one like this one here please". It's weird to me too, but apparently that's what happens nowadays.
The distance selling regs with cars in the UK have always been a bit funny. Basically yes, they apply, and yes, you can test the car once you receive it, but put anything more than a dozen miles on it and dealers will argue(sucessfully!) that the car no longer fulfils the "must be in the same condition you received it in" criteria. Also distance selling regs don't apply to custom items, so if yours was built to order, you don't get that at all.
Basically with Cazoo you get 7 days, but also a certain mileage, and they won't ask any questions within that time or distance, they will just accept the return. You could probably try forcing them to take the car back within 14 days based on the distance selling regs, but if you've driven the car at all, in my experience you're going to have a really tough time doing so.
Built to order is not the same as a custom item. You'd probably need to pick a full, specific set of options for it to perhaps be custom. Just picking a colour out of a short list provided to you probably isn't a custom-made order. But yes, many companies try to claim that made to order means no return rights.
Anyway, it seems to me that Cazoo is not abiding by the regs with their 7 day policy [1], which additionally exposes them to more honerous consequences (because it's misleading and not telling customers that they have a 14 day legal period to return goods gives customers 12 months to cancel)
I came across this a while back, and it seems like it might be worth a try:
“LED lighting is improving rapidly. You can install very bright lights for treating seasonal affective disorder (SAD) easily and inexpensively. Common sense says that will be more effective than commercial SAD lights that are much less bright. My experience confirms this.”
I have big LED panels in the basement, some behind curtains. This is my favourite room in the long dark winter. That and vitamin D helps. But is necessary to slow down a bit anyway
How much wiggle room is there in the conclusion that this is level of sea level rise is going to happen “regardless of twenty-first-century climate pathways”?
For example, and setting aside feasibility, if carbon dioxide levels were reduced back down to pre-industrial levels, would that amount of sea level rise still be locked in? Or would the ice stop melting and even gradually re-freeze?
It depends on who you ask, but I've seen estimates that suggest at least 10m of sea level rise is already "priced in", so to speak.
In the climate crisis discussion communities there's a saying that things are happening "faster than expected", which also applies to the fact that most of the accepted climate models are much more conservative than they should be. The IPCC models (for example) largely ignore tipping points and methane emissions, and their contribution to the exponential rate of increase in climate change.
At this point we're not going to do what's needed to make things less bad (i.e., keeping the carbon in the ground) so my suggestion is to plan for the worst and hope for the best.
It all depends on how long you want to wait. Last time CO2 levels were as high as today was the mid-Pliocene, with temperatures estimated 2-3C higher than today and sea levels estimated 16 meters higher than today. A slow steady melt of Greenland and West Antarctica would take hundreds or thousands of years:
> "We acknowledge that this sea-level rise would not happen overnight. It would take hundreds to thousands of years to melt such large amounts of ice. Another important finding of our study is that, under temperatures ~4 °C higher than pre-industrial values and elevated CO2 during Pliocene Climatic Optimum, the global mean sea level reached 23.5 m (with an uncertainty range of 9.0-26.7 m) higher than present. This indicates that significantly more ice will melt if temperatures stabilize at this level. This estimate can serve as a target for future ice sheet model calibrations."
This particular article seems to point to 2-3 meter sea level rise by 2100, which looks to be on the higher end of what NOAA puts on their website as the 'observed trend', which looks more like a 1-3 ft sea level rise estimate by 2100. According to their graphics, by 2030 or 2040 it should be more clear which way things are really going, real-world evidence wise.
While I can see the logic behind how long it would take to melt all this ice, what about the risk that it will suddenly (in the long view) slide off and start floating around? That will raise sea level by the same amount without needing to melt.
It's worth noting, the last time there was this much CO2 in the atmosphere (>400ppm), sea levels were significantly higher. Estimates are all over the map, but most of them put global sea at least 10m above our current levels.
I mean, if you waved a magic wand and CO2 levels were back at 280ppm? Maybe you'd expect sea levels to stabilize at their current levels?
There's at least four pieces of inertia here that make preventing sea-level rise hard absent such a magic wand:
1. We're not at equilibrium temperature for our current CO2 levels; if you stopped generating CO2 at an industrial scale and we kept the atmosphere to 420ppm CO2, you'd still expect to see the mean global temperature rise.
2. Even absent increases in CO2, the ice that continues to melt until the new equilibrium is reached decreases the reflectivity of the Earth.
3. The ice that's already melted has decreased the weight on the continental places upon which it rested; the plates are still rebounding, and it can be easier for ice to fall off as they raise.
4. Once we reverse course and ice is no longer melting, it will take a long time for the ice to re-form and the water to be removed from the oceans, lowering sea-levels (and storm surges). Some of the places the ice is disappearing from is effectively a desert, with very low rates of precipitation.
> We're not at equilibrium temperature for our current CO2 levels; if you stopped generating CO2 at an industrial scale and we kept the atmosphere to 420ppm CO2, you'd still expect to see the mean global temperature rise
Exactly.
We're really in uncharted territory. The IPCC et al can show the results of models etc but nobody really knows how bad things are going to get, even if a miracle happened and we reached zero emissions today.
Last time the Earth was above 400ppm of CO2 was during the Pliocene Epoch (2-5 million years ago). Temps were 2-3ºC higher and sea level was about 30 feet higher. We're now at about 420ppm and rising.
>How much wiggle room is there in the conclusion that this is level of sea level rise is going to happen “regardless of twenty-first-century climate pathways”?
20,000 years ago we had the last glacial maximum aka ice age. Water levels increased 130 metres since. Your cities like "atlantis" were coastal cities gobbled up by rising water. Noah's ark was just this. When graphs are showing sea level rise over the last 200 years, they are illegtimately trying to imply the industrial age caused it. It has been a process that started 20,000 years ago. In fact, sea level rise hasn't changed at all during industrial age. Same rate nonstop.
So it's not really part of the 'excess carbon' problem but rather a natural process we cant stop.
Therefore you better not be a rich person living on the coast.
Global trend is higher population in cities. So the actual big scale problem is placing cities on shores, in historical flood zones, not minding historical records & ancestral wisdom, then blaming climate for own short-sightedness. Not changes in general but the inertia & radical fast-fixes with ability to create new problems never before existing.
Humanity can adapt to anything. But building non-durable way, consuming wastefully, getting away from nature & living in virtual "civilised" bubbles far from material reality is only asking for troubles when Earth & Sun reminds who truly rules here..
A geothermal plant running on full capacity may deplete its geothermal well in 50 years. It may take 1000 years before the geothermal system becomes a resource again [1]. Is that human timescale?
This is probably true at the level of corporations, but not clearly the case at the level of countries. An interesting paper on the economics of geoengineering, if you’re curious: https://www.nber.org/papers/w18622
> A very important part of the process-based regulatory framework is the prohibition of certain methods in organic production and handling. Methods like irradiation, sewage sludge, and genetic engineering are all expressly prohibited from being used when growing or processing organic foods.
https://www.usda.gov/about-usda/news/blog/organic-101-what-o...