* https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995
* https://tomtoro.com/cartoons/
* https://condenaststore.com/featured/the-planet-got-destroyed...
The number of people I personally know who thought the country was going to end on J6 who now call the entire thing a “political hoax” breaks my brain.
Not to mention the endless posts about “where are all the people claiming COVID was so deadly now?” Who literally completely ignore the MILLIONS of deaths caused by COVID…
Until these people have their own son or daughter killed by X - they’ll happily claim it’s not actually a problem. Or find something completely unrelated to blame instead if it doesn’t align with their Twitter feed.
Have you... read the news lately? You say it's not a matter of politics, but the politicians are absolutely trying to roll back the clock, push dirty tech, eliminate all environmental protections and regulations.
real politics are often concerned with survival
I hate this kind of hyperbole because it obscures the real dangers. No one is going to suffocate any time soon. Atmospheric CO2 is around 450ppm. The CO2 in a meeting room of a typical office can easily reach 1500ppm or more[1]. Is everyone in meeting rooms "suffocating"?
[1] https://www.popsci.com/conference-carbon-dioxide-tired-offic...
Clean tech on its own is too slowly to be meaningfully impactful by the time we need it.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Cost_of_Free_Parking
I wonder how long before in-home CO2 extraction becomes a thing.
It turned out the building had been sealed extremely tightly to keep out the winter cold and because it is old, it does not have a proper HVAC system.
They discovered that CO2 levels stayed around 1200 ppm throughout the entire winter, sometimes even higher. This had likely been the case for decades.
It is a school in a small, low‑income town. I cannot help wondering how many kids were labeled as underperforming when they were actually struggling with the effects of chronically elevated CO2 levels.
I think it would be interesting to see what effect, if any, an indoor C02 level of near 0 would have on humans and mammals. Because your blood has to stay in a narrow PH range, and C02 is part of maintaining that, I wouldn't presume it would be good.
I think a small desktop C02 scrubber might have a market in the same demographic that pays for air ionizers, de-ionizers, HEPA filters and incense burners.
This is actually really funny to think about.
Home carbon capture is sort of a thing already: buy more houseplants, keep them alive and healthy.
Though the most common home interventions for now are still "open a window" and/or "run a fan to circulate the air better". I suppose it's neat that we can home automate that, if you are willing to invest in that.
1. He gave up on "plants" because they were nowhere close to offsetting him.
2. Switching to algae, he used a 55 gallon drum of it because the numbers said that would work. He gave up when the CO2 level reached something like 2000 ppm
3. He ended up with something like 3 drums, as well as special mixers to make sure the algae got access to as much CO2 as possible, and he had lights focused on the algae drums to make them as efficient as possible, and he still ended up barely keeping the CO2 at the "dangerous but not completely toxic" level, and it wasn't stable either.
Opening windows is better but if you want a more energy efficient solution you should invest in a HRV/ERV
I frequently send this medium article [1] to friends + family for a basic dive into how CO2 affects our thinking and abilities at various levels in common areas.
The article cites a study [2] which graphs cognitive score for different activities at different CO2 concentrations. Each activity's cognitive score is worse at higher CO2 concentrations, EXCEPT "focused activity" or "Information search" (up to some point)
[1, note it is from 2016] https://medium.com/@joeljean/im-living-in-a-carbon-bubble-li... [2]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26502459/
I find it hard to believe that stat you provide -- seems like a bit of a shiny lure without much merit.
Maybe if CO2 PPM wasn't so high I could make sense of it.
Though I'm not excluding the possibility that indoor CO2 concentration strongly correlates with cognitive underperformance, which may be caused by other compounds emitted by human body.
So currently we're at 428 with 3.5 increase per year, yeah, that's scary if it doesn't slow down soon. Makes you wonder about what indirect health side-effects that could have on us.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9196888/
Essentially, this affects every person and animal on the planet.
As the recovery from aerobic and resistance exercises also increase ventilation, I think we should just train a little more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohr_effect
I think regular exercise can help to offset some of the effects of rising CO2 levels. Clearly not an end game solution but it's something to consider because you do have control over this one.
also is it accurate to say that the blood co2 level is mostly a snapshot of the moment blood is drawn? or is it affected by longterm environment
[1] https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statisti...
(I don't want to shame Brazil, it's a global chain of problems. And other forests are decimated, too, like in Sweden and Estonia, for the demand of produce worldwide.)
But who's laughing now?
I think a lot of people would be surprised at the CO2 level in different indoor environments they spend time in each day.
I suspect the presence of protein, fats and sugars influence the hormone production regulating appetite far more than these changes account for. I would expect the same health issues to be affecting other animal species in just as drastic a measure as humans if it were true, and also that global obesity happened at a more uniform pace rather than coinciding with the introduction of modern western eating habits and lifestyles.
For example: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/as-co2-levels-ris...
More specifically, yes, protein content decreases with rising CO2 levels. Maybe not enough to cause obesity on its own, but enough to be a compounding factor. Especially when your staple is, say, rice -- which is what the paper linked above looks at.
I'm sure there's other papers out there, but this is the first one for this post: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036013232...
Anyway, CO2 levels rise on planet earth, which cause indoor levels to rise too. As it turns out, because of ventilation and such, indoor levels are always a bit higher than outdoor levels. We cross some critical threshold and it gets really hard for us to take on complex cognitive tasks and make good decisions. This effects everyone equally more or less a bit worse at planning, a bit worse at solving problems, a bit worse and making critical decisions.
In the long run, planners make worse decisions, governments make work decisions, voters make worse decisions, students perform more poorly... you get the picture. Over 20 or 30 years these bad decisions start to ramp up into meaningful impacts on the world. At risk of "post hoc ergo proctor hoc"-ing myself, the tipping point for this being somewhere close to 400ppm would make a lot of sense, because people seem to be noticeably dumber some time after 2014 ish? Hard to really pin it down though, but once CO2 levels started to routinely crest over that 1000ppm it seems to me that the world started to get a lot crazier.
Like, we can blame it on one politician we don't like or another, or on bad economic forecasting, or on the schools, or on latent racism / sexism / whatever-ism. To be clear, those are all legitimate concerns, but at the end of the day we're just animals more or less stuck on this orb zipping through the cosmos and if we're suddenly unable to do high level reasoning as well wouldn't you expect to see an increase in "dumb ideas" being accepted?
https://ourworldindata.org/contributed-most-global-co2
But a distant second in per year emissions:
https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by...
The EU, not listed here, sits between the US and India at about 3.05 billion tonnes.
It's all up to China, which took over a huge chunk of the world's manufacturing. And all up to us, buying Chinese products.
China also reduced their emissions last year while the US increased them. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45108292
Stop pointing fingers. Start working.
Sorting the table by "per capita" is much more interesting IMHO.
Depending on how much you consume, you can cut your emissions by 50%!
Regenerative ranching is a lie and is more based in "vibes" and "energies" than science. Making beef production 0.01% more efficient then increasing consumption does not help. Meat is a "status symbol" food based in excess, grass fed beef is just another excuse to use more resources on a good to show how much of a status symbol it is. Grass fed beef is not good for environment. That's nonsense. It's less efficient beef called green. It's more expensive so people can claim superiority for buying it.
Our ego, pride, heritage, and machismo are used to manipulate us into beating our chests and consuming more protein, cuz winners eat 1.2g protein per kg and go to the gym. See how our health is used to manipulate us and justify excessive consumption in the form of "health and fitness"? Our colonist/conquerer society is dead set on us consuming more and more. We gotta buy more funco pops to keep up with social media influencers.
At the current point, the ONLY thing that makes sense is to cut your excessive consumption. We arent removing anything from the environment at this point and "recycling" and "regeneration" are meaningless.
We've blown past every milestone of destruction we have. We consistently increase our emissions and consumption. We are not doing anything to stop this.
Reduce and sacrifice is all that matters right now. Soon, a lot of this won't be an option for people, it'll be forced on them because of our selfishness today.
Our kids and grandkids have every reason to blame us. We are finding, creating and using every excuse we can for why this isn't our fault as we bite into a cheap burger.
Collective action is what matters. Corporate regulation is what matters. An enhanced EPA with real enforcement powers (not just fines, but the ability to shut down companies and/or outright murder them; which is also a larger debate because right now Americans generally don't believe in corporate murder and think corporations have a right to indefinitely exist) is what is necessary.
It is because of our selfishness, but also our selfishness extends to not working together in enough solidarity and instead fingerpointing at individuals to "do their part, alone, and without support systems and systemic change". That's pretty selfish, too. We need systemic change. We need support systems. We need a government that prioritizes the environment and our collective health and well-being. We need companies to understand that ethics matter as much as profits and if they cannot find profits that are ethical, including and especially in relationship to their externalities like greenhouse gas emissions, then they do not deserve to make those profits and may not deserve to continue operation as a company.
Me in USA: insert John Travolta looking around meme consumer recycling is practically unheard of in large parts of the country.