Comment on We are helping

• stickly@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Another way to look at it: we’re already over the climate brink. Your future won’t have cheap/stable meat access no matter what. We can either clutch our hotdogs right up until supply chain collapse makes mass meat farming untenable or proactively discard them to make a slight difference (in conjunction with other big changes).

  source

  • Not_mikey@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Same with cars, even if we completely ignore climate change we maybe got a century left of oil before it’s too expensive to drive. By not investing in other transportation now we’re just making it more painful when we finally do rip the bandaid off.

    source

    • themeatbridge@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      The water wars will probably kill us off before we run out of oil.

      source
• missfrizzle@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Why do we pipe natural gas into homes?

  puts on Technology Connections hat

  because heat pumps and green energy weren’t a thing in the US until recently!

  heat efficiency is weird. electric heaters are 100% efficient, but 1) they’re only as efficient as the generator, and 2) transmission losses add up. and until recently, most power was generated by coal and natural gas. turning those into electricity is lossy, since lots of energy is lost as waste heat. so why not send the gas you were going to burn for electricity directly to the customer?

  heat pumps can be 300-400% efficient, since they move heat - from outdoors, into the home - rather than generating it. they can get >100% efficiency even in cold climates! but stupidly the US never bothered make our air conditioners reversible, or every home would have a heat pump by now.

  and with solar/wind (for peak) + nuclear or grid storage (for base) power, we can now get rid of natural gas. …once we give everybody heat pumps. …and shutdown our gas generators. …we should probably get on that.

  source

  • themeatbridge@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    No, I’m sorry, the answe is “profit.” The US has a lot of natural gas, and the people who force it out of the ground bought enough politicians to build pipelines everywherr so we could sell gas to more people. Electric and heat pumps are far more efficient, but the cost per btu of heat is so cheap for natural gas that it doesn’t make sense to switch to electric even when the energy costs are low, and the cost to install a heatpump or geothermal might reduce monthly costs, but it would be decades before it pays for itself. Most people don’t expect to live in a house long enough to reap the benefits of more efficient investments.

    source
• Not_mikey@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  And not littering won’t fix the underlying problems of single use plastics wrapping everything we touch, and the corporations that want to keep it that way. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t litter.

  source
• captainlezbian@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Absolutely true. However, making better personal choices does make these systemic problems easier to solve. When people know vegetarians, meatless meals become more comprehensible. When less people use piped natural gas there’s less justification to keep this utility around and reduces the scramble to buy electric appliances if it does shut down. Taking public transit where available funds further public transit, justifies its existence, incentivises more transit centered development, and lets similar places see that that service is in demand.

  Capitalism and democracy respond to perceived demand. Not what you want, but what they believe that the masses are willing to act on.

  source