Climate Change and the Environment

I would like to read more about this subject and feel like I have only a surface understanding. Can anyone suggest good books or blogs or anything else to take a deeper dive?

3 tons of CO2/year is ones share of a sustainable carbon footprint. Average in the US is 17.

Reading stuff like this it makes it hard for me not to conclude the most sensible thing for me to do is quit my job and just travel to all the natural places I want to see before they are completely destroyed or society crumbles and it becomes impossible to visit them. I mean, the overwhelming amount of my work hours are spent doing work related to one of the largest ecological restoration projects in the world, the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, and it seems completely pointless when you think about what a foot or two of sea level rise will do to the Everglades.

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Out of curiousity, is this still the case with suburban areas that are built now?

It’s incredibly depressing. I’m almost there with you dude. I can’t see any potential way out given how humans work and the political climate in the world. Here’s praying that Elon Tusk saves us all somehow.

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I’m not much of a traveler myself but it definitely crossed my mind that I should see more of the world before it’s too late. Covid has taught us that there are lots of humans willing to make big sacrifices but there are also way too many that don’t even want to do the bare minimum. I agree that it looks like a huge scientific achievement is needed.

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One international round trip flight is about 2 tons of CO2 emissions. If you’re hitchhiking, sleeping rough and dumpster diving you can still be on the sustainable side.

Yes. It is profit maximizing for developers to create tightly packed homes with nothing in between but box stores.

There are an absurd number of natural wonders in the continental US. You could easily spend a couple of years camping out of a low-footprint electric car and not run out of things to see.

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Also if you travel slow you’re not doing that many miles.

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i am waiting for an electric truck or camper van to do the cross country trips in. if it had the range of tesla, i’d get one now. just got a hardshell rooftop tent for a three day trek through idaho and wyoming. it’s kinda amazing how comfortable that felt on first night, even in pretty torrential rain at night.

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You could do biodiesel. It’s gotten harder to find though.

Its insane the IPCC came out today and I have to scroll very long on some german news sites to even find an article about it.

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Those 2022 Ford F150 electrics look pretty interesting to me and might meet your requirement. Range is 230/300 miles depending on which model, but that is only an estimate and we’ll see if that is true once they get closer to market. Certainly has more interior space and add a rooftop tent, damn near palatial compared to a Tesla car.

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nah, i like the low maintenance of electric cars. less noise, more room inside.

i am positively torn on lithium batteries. i do appreciate how well they perform, but i feel like committing to li-ion chemistry is a mistake given how they tend to overheat and get damaged. no idea on the promise of fuel cells, although gut feeling is they will also find an application, likely in higher capacity range. fuel cells in a commercially available car might throw the market for some potentially hilarious corrections.

what i mean is, 300mi range is getting close to practical limits for a car on lithium batteries, but at the same time it is likely the minimum range for a car to gain significant share of consumer minds. so, are we going to get stuck with everyone on li-ions, or will there be a breakthrough? really hoping for a breakthrough. especially for trucks. range depends a lot on the road and load. i am not getting a truck to stick to highways iykwim

Prius batteries have vastly outperformed expectations. I’m pretty confident that lithium/lifepo4 is the winner for a while and there are some chemistries that are safer coming along (not that lifepo4 isn’t safe).

Hybrid is probably going to be the nuts for cross-country driving for a while. Until charging stations become more common.

we are at a point where we need to massively upgrade the effort being put into forests management. climate civilian core is great, but it needs to be at least doubling for the next few years. at this point relying on private contractors, prison labor, and immigrants, isn’t really paying off.

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