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  1. #21
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    Quote Originally Posted by Byrthnoth View Post
    http://www.eia.gov/environment/emiss...tate/analysis/

    Texas actually beats California because everything is a 2 hour drive away there.
    Could this be because California has a higher proliferation of lower emission vehicles? Or stronger incentives for low emission vehicles? Or stronger regulations on reducing emissions?

  2. #22
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    Quote Originally Posted by zoobernut View Post
    Could this be because California has a higher proliferation of lower emission vehicles? Or stronger incentives for low emission vehicles? Or stronger regulations on reducing emissions?
    Idk about Texas specifically but here in Cali for a few decades now outside of a couple of counties just to drive a vehicle you have to pass periodic emissions or smog checks. I know a lot of states don't.

    Also really much more than vehicle emission standards though. We have our own air resource board ironically the acronym comes out as CARB. They end up being like a super epa for air "pollutants". I use quotes because their regulations can be rather inclusive... and have odd exceptions. Like in some places you can be fined for raising too much dust. Most areas you aren't allowed to basically burn much of anything more than say a camp fire/fire place. The other areas usually have burn days. Newer trucks here have to be equipped with a feature that shuts it down after 5 minutes of idling and I remember seeing an article that there is law in place for idling any vehicle longer than 5 minutes even if say doing it for AC as say truckers on the road often do... unless you have a pet and it's hot then you have to leave it on to avoid animal cruelty stuff lol. Newer diesels now have to use pee (well not exactly but watered down urea) with a diesel exhaust system. There are also vehicle buy back programs for old vehicles.

    Not sure about other areas but Bay area has really been ramping up public transport. BART has been around forever. We are horribly over budget and time but we decently into the SMART train system which largely got the last support it needed to raise taxes for it because they promised to build a bike/walking path along the whole 70 miles or so which kind of shows how much people like the idea less transportation emissions. Amtrak pretty great. Also amazing bus systems. Across the street from my apartment is a stop that not only do several routes of my cities bus stop at but so do a couple other cities busses and like 3 different counties as well as a bus that shuttles you train stations since we don't have one here yet. And it's not even a major stop in the city lol. And they all use natural gas.

  3. #23
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    Texas has an annual emissions check you have to pass to renew your vehicle registration (Cali is only every 2 years iirc). Per capita emissions aren't really that bad, either. Texas is just a big state.

  4. #24
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    Texas is big sure... but California has a population that is almost 50% higher and according to that link around half the total emissions. Granted part of that is partly because California has one of the lowest per capitas but Texas was in higher than average

  5. #25

    California is full of queers with hybrids and Texas is full of queers-in-denial with overcompensating pickups.

  6. #26
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    It is certainly an interesting case study and if we could determine why they are so different it might help us figure out what changes are effective vs. which ones are not.

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    If that includes all energy i would assume its due to the wide use of AC to need to survive.. most of the year. While it gets hot in parts of CA too more of the state has a reasonable climate.

  8. #28
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    Quote Originally Posted by Niiro View Post
    California is full of queers with hybrids and Texas is full of queers-in-denial with overcompensating pickups.
    This is so true I can't even.

  9. #29

    Quote Originally Posted by thetruepandagod View Post
    At what point does it become a moral imperative to cull the population for the greater good of humanity?
    Joke question, but the real answer is virtually never.
    In terms of capacity, there's no reason the earth couldn't support trillions of people with changes in habits, investments in technology, and more rigorous urban planning. Infact the earth's capacity to support human life(in terms of possible food production and energy capture) extends into the quadrillions, where the only reason we ever truly outgrow our home is so many people exist we can't manage the waste-heat our bodies generate without the equivalent of a planetary radiator to cool it down.

    We're 6 orders of magnitude from even considering that question.

    Therefore, once you establish that the capacity of the earth is that large, the moral imperative lays squarely on us as individuals and societies in order to realize that potential, and there is never a (realistically obtainable) point where we would even morally consider culling the population.
    Biggest part of over-coming this problem is getting the general populace understanding that even 1/10th of the lifestyle we consider normal is so bizarrely wasteful in terms of how we achieve it, that society should be shamed into action.

    But humans being what we are, that'll probably never happen in a time-frame to achieve results, instead we're forced to be technological optimists and hope that we invent ourselves out of this mess.

  10. #30
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    You're going to need to show me something credible that the planet could even support a single (1) trillion people. Most credible sources I've read on the topic is somewhere between 40 billion - 100 billion max population and then everyone is barely eating because we can barely grow enough food to support that many people.

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    Regardless, we can all agree that we're running into climate change problems despite currently not being at the earth's carrying capacity.

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    Food production has always been a problem as population increases. We consistently hit a period where population outgrows production, and it's a change in technology that lets us overcome production inefficiencies. Hydroponics have a high yield per acre compared to other conventional methods specifically related to urban farming. The issue with some of these technologies such as hydroponics is fresh water supply. Unfortunately fresh water isn't the easiest thing to come by. Not only is it used for irrigation, it is withdrawn and consumed extensively for thermo-power plants (by increasing rank: Gas, Coal, Nuclear). We may have to decide on where we pour our production in the future: water for food or water for energy.

    Thus the American Lawn will have to go extinct in order to preserve enough water to feed crops. Coal plants will need to be converted/dismantled for natural gas (nuclear, while extremely clean and great for air quality, withdraws and consumes an extravagant amount of fresh water). Desalination is a possibility but consumes massive amounts of power...which requires fresh water without a solar/wind farm to generate the power.

  13. #33

    Concepts like farming towers seemed interesting when I saw the idea however many years back. Just kinda think of them as greenhouses built on one another. Of course, they have their own power/water needs, but it'd technically be an option if acreage for people to live on is ever a concern.

    Anyway, while viruses growing resistant to various medicines is worrisome in their own way, I hold more concern that one day someone will unleash a sort of designer virus that targets specific people based on whatever genetic factor like race. And judging by how Trump is stacking DC, they may very well RND it themselves. :/

  14. #34
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    Quote Originally Posted by Darus Grey View Post
    Joke question, but the real answer is virtually never.
    In terms of capacity, there's no reason the earth couldn't support trillions of people with changes in habits
    Biggest part of over-coming this problem is getting the general populace understanding that even 1/10th of the lifestyle we consider normal is so bizarrely wasteful in terms of how we achieve it, that society should be shamed into action.
    Yea the earth could probably support trillions if we lived in cubes and were fed with cricket paste. Why is there a push to make people live shittier lives by your own argument instead of just limiting/reversing population growth. Why do we need all these extra people? I can't even imagine the logistics of let's say, education for "trillions", or things like air travel and what level of mobility people would have. What would public transit look like for 3 trillion people?

    And the question was in response to the notion that we are soon approaching an irreversible point from whence there is no coming back, if there truly is a no turning back point where we start a global collapse where extinctions happen at 100x rate and food/water sources dwindle, then a cull seems rational.

    Quote Originally Posted by arus2001 View Post
    Concepts like farming towers seemed interesting when I saw the idea however many years back. Just kinda think of them as greenhouses built on one another. Of course, they have their own power/water needs, but it'd technically be an option if acreage for people to live on is ever a concern.
    Acreage is far more benefical for food to be grown on as opposed to people living on it. Farming towers are a net loss when compared to the farms we have now, the most efficient form we have is to stack as many people as possible in one place and turn everything else into food production that get's transported there, stuff like Urban farms are a wash currently.

  15. #35
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    Culling would just be a temporary fix. The stigma of a culling would degrade our society into a dystopian nightmare where you can no longer trust science or the government in fear that you or your family might be culled when the next pandemic comes around because clearly we exhausted our solutions by then.

  16. #36
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    Quote Originally Posted by Jaybar View Post
    Culling would just be a temporary fix. The stigma of a culling would degrade our society into a dystopian nightmare where you can no longer trust science or the government in fear that you or your family might be culled when the next pandemic comes around because clearly we exhausted our solutions by then.
    One cull, followed by strict reproductive rules.

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    Well:

    Quote Originally Posted by Byrthnoth View Post
    https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sou...-gas-emissions

    Electricity: 30% (all other categories exclude electricity)
    Transportation: 26%
    Industry: 21%
    Commercial/Residential: 12% (burning wood/coal/gas for heat)
    Agriculture: 9% (probably includes people driving their tractors around)
    Between culling people and coming up with carbon-neutral fuel sources, it's pretty obvious that carbon neutral fuel sources would have a larger impact on our emissions. Electricity's new cost would be 0, which means that Transportation's new cost would be ~0 if we switched to electric cars, and we could switch to electric heating and negate a lot of the commercial/residential emissions. You're looking at a >60% reduction in emissions purely through an energy policy.

    Assuming that culling the population causes a linear drop in greenhouse gas emissions emissions, which it probably doesn't, you'd still have to kill more than half of the people in the US to get a similar effect.



    So no, culling is stupid.

  18. #38
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    Quote Originally Posted by Byrthnoth View Post
    Well:



    Between culling people and coming up with carbon-neutral fuel sources, it's pretty obvious that carbon neutral fuel sources would have a larger impact on our emissions. Electricity's new cost would be 0, which means that Transportation's new cost would be ~0 if we switched to electric cars, and we could switch to electric heating and negate a lot of the commercial/residential emissions. You're looking at a >60% reduction in emissions purely through an energy policy.

    Assuming that culling the population causes a linear drop in greenhouse gas emissions emissions, which it probably doesn't, you'd still have to kill more than half of the people in the US to get a similar effect.



    So no, culling is stupid.
    I was thinkin far more than half famalam. Global population shouldn't even be a billion

  19. #39

    Yeah, I'd say any of us entertaining doomsday culling are looking at global wipe out tier. And the initial starting points would probably be more likely China, India, or Africa.

  20. #40

    The people in India and Africa are not the ones contributing massively to global warming, we are.

    It's not about the number of people, it's about how much energy those people use, and we use a fuckton.

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