COP21 thoughts?

[spdrun]

Blah-blah-blah, yappa-yappa-hey. “Lifestyle limitation.” Our lifestyle will be a hell of a lot more limited by coastal flooding, droughts, damage to crops, disease spread via insects, etc.

Where the US goes technologically, other countries tend to follow.

The “natural changes” argument is frankly rationalizing horseshit. If you want to drink that Kool-Aid, enjoy. Clean energy sources exist with current tech. Nuclear, solar, hydro, etc. No need to limit our lifestyle so much, other than maybe cutting back on air travel and insta-shipping. (Do we really need that iTrinket shipped from China overnight?) This assumes that hydrogen-powered aircraft can’t be made to work.

[FlyerInHi]

I don’t see lifestyle limitations.
I don’t care is we have to mandate 1.5 liter cars or smaller. I will still have a car.
Energywise, inside the home, I love my LED lights. I don’t care if my per unit rate for electricity is more as long my my total bill is the same or less. My lifestyle remains the same.

So much more we can do to conserve and use renewables. Better home efficiency will cause more remodels and activity in the housing sector which is great for the economy.

San Diego is the first major city to commit to reducing carbon. Will we see an exodus of people? I guess we will have to watch the free market at work. If people don’t like it, they will vote with their feet and house values will drop.
http://www.latimes.com/science/la-me-sd-climate-20151218-story.html

[Hobie]

spd: You point out the vicious circle and the obvious skew in all this climate business. I’m all in for nukes and well as hydro ( not to mention the water banking here in Cali, spelled that way for east coasters :)). This is at odds with current environmental politics that won’t allow expansion in these areas and its very too bad.

brian: Lifestyle changes are bigger than your personal light bill. Business or better yet manufacturing use enormous amounts of electricity. Because of higher restrictions on coal the cost of electricity is more thereby increasing cost of products you buy. ie. its harder to see its direct cost but your wallet sees in everyday purchases. Food cost is one example. Wonder why we don’t produce steel any more?

phaster: And one final wrench to throw into these climate talks – Antarctica. Why is the ice pack expanding there? Science can’t answer that either. If I were to bet, I’d look at the oceans. And the arctic wind patterns that don’t readily seem to draw the air down from the population centers where the most C02 is generated. And let’s not forget C02 is measured in trace amounts which again makes it tricky to specifically hang the reason of increasing ice thickness.

Well maybe. There is no plant life down there to convert it to oxygen so there you go, yup we definitely have to fix that pesky C02. Proceed with the Paris Talks. 😉

[FlyerInHi]

My observation from traveling the world is that Americans are wasteful electricity consumers.
We are very careless about using high energy incandescent, and heavy drapes which makes for dark homes that require lighing.

Without affecting lifestyle, I think that we can easily reduce household use by 30% by turning things off and switching to more efficient products. That’s where innovation in smart home technologies come in. Smart thermostats with auto-away features, time of use pricing and smart appliances that take that info into consideration.

I think we need to educate kids in schools so they remind their parents not to be wasteful.

We can also do so much more with building efficiency.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/realestate/a-passive-house-actively-saving-energy/2013/02/21/70b05612-7acc-11e2-a044-676856536b40_story.html

When we look back at the history of environmental consciousness, there were really quaint moments. Like banning smoking indoors, or banning plastic bags, etc… Does anyone care that Ikea doesn’t give free bags anymore. We adjusted and are better for it.

Of course, there is politics (maybe more than science) involved. So what as long as we care about how we live? It’s about quality of life and different views about how we ought to live. The most appealing ideas will win in the free market.

[spdrun]

As long as the smart thermostats or appliances don’t incorporate spyware. They should be smart enough to do their thing without uploading occupancy data to the clown … I mean cloud.

[FlyerInHi]

I moved my nest thermostat to a rental and I now use the Honeywell not-so-smart because I like the color display and the tighter temp control.
I’m pretty good at turning off, but one time i forgot (even though there is an app) for a few days while away. I was remorseful for all the wasted energy.
I think it’s good lifestyle habits not to be wasteful which is destructive and provides you nothing in return.
If the Honeywell thermostat has an auto-away feature, the AC would have been off.

We should converse because we can. Better than being wasteful because we can.

Imagine if we had smart homes that turn things on and off as family members come and go. We’d save a lot energy and support tech businesses instead of big coal and big utilities. Better lifestyles and win, win.

[phaster]

[quote=Hobie]
phaster: And one final wrench to throw into these climate talks – Antarctica. Why is the ice pack expanding there? Science can’t answer that either. If I were to bet, I’d look at the oceans. And the arctic wind patterns that don’t readily seem to draw the air down from the population centers where the most C02 is generated. And let’s not forget C02 is measured in trace amounts which again makes it tricky to specifically hang the reason of increasing ice thickness.

Well maybe. There is no plant life down there to convert it to oxygen so there you go, yup we definitely have to fix that pesky C02. Proceed with the Paris Talks. ;)[/quote]

In years ahead (perhaps after its much too late) what is happening to the ice cap in Antarctica is going to become very apparent.

One has to understand that part of the world is isolated because of open oceans, the amount of ice is a magnitude larger than what in ice land/green land AND that there are two types of ice (part of it is sea ice and the other part is over land)

The NOVA program “earth from space” is very good IMHO because it takes lots of data and turns it into pretty animated pictures and a story line

otherwise one would have to read individual articles and then try to integrate everything into a big picture:

http://phys.org/news/2015-11-ross-ice-shelf-radar.html
http://phys.org/news/2015-12-sea-ice-arctic-precipitation-complicates.html

Since you now know about the Aral sea, what you might find surprising is that is not the only large body of water to disappear because of farming mis-managment, in Iran here is another news video that shows what is happening….

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wj_kd36lDUQ

If you think its just a problem over there, there was a 60 minutes news story that shows the same short sighted water mismanagement is happening here in the central valley of california

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQ0X_O-uRQ0

[yipla]

I will note for Hobie, that we should not forget the main reason China’s emissions are so high is that all of US manufacturing has been moved there. They make all our products for us. If we internalized that environmental cost, all our iphones and christmas presents would be a lot more expensive.

So, maybe instead of all Americans blaming China for emissions, we should all stop buying Chinese products and see where that gets us… The results would be painful, I assure you. The blame for Chinese emissions is largely on US consumers, making our per capita emissions THAT much higher than they already are. It would be fair for the US to take on more responsibility given this situation.

[scaredyclassic]

[quote=yipla]I will note for Hobie, that we should not forget the main reason China’s emissions are so high is that all of US manufacturing has been moved there. They make all our products for us. If we internalized that environmental cost, all our iphones and christmas presents would be a lot more expensive.

So, maybe instead of all Americans blaming China for emissions, we should all stop buying Chinese products and see where that gets us… The results would be painful, I assure you. The blame for Chinese emissions is largely on US consumers, making our per capita emissions THAT much higher than they already are. It would be fair for the US to take on more responsibility given this situation.[/quote]

Do we blame the drug dealer or the drug/consumer addict more harshly. In general, we go after dealers. People are helpless once they’re in the apple store. I heard some guy trying to buy an iPhone the other day that his cards were maxed out but he thought he could scrape together some cash. Sounded like a drug deal… if we really wanted to lower emissions, we’d have to get serious about our intense need to consume. My kids think it’s crazy that I’ve had the same smartphone FOR OVER TWO YEARS!!! Antique.

[spdrun]

And perhaps mandate some level of durability and repairability in our devices. The fact that Apple makes it a huge PITA to install software on an iPad that’s only four years old is annoying. They basically hide the old app versions in App Store, and only permit download if they’ve been previously downloaded. There’s a workaround involving iTunes, but that shouldn’t need to exist.

[phaster]

[quote=scaredyclassic][quote=yipla]I will note for Hobie, that we should not forget the main reason China’s emissions are so high is that all of US manufacturing has been moved there. They make all our products for us. If we internalized that environmental cost, all our iphones and christmas presents would be a lot more expensive.

So, maybe instead of all Americans blaming China for emissions, we should all stop buying Chinese products and see where that gets us… The results would be painful, I assure you. The blame for Chinese emissions is largely on US consumers, making our per capita emissions THAT much higher than they already are. It would be fair for the US to take on more responsibility given this situation.[/quote]

Do we blame the drug dealer or the drug/consumer addict more harshly. In general, we go after dealers. People are helpless once they’re in the apple store. I heard some guy trying to buy an iPhone the other day that his cards were maxed out but he thought he could scrape together some cash. Sounded like a drug deal… if we really wanted to lower emissions, we’d have to get serious about our intense need to consume. My kids think it’s crazy that I’ve had the same smartphone FOR OVER TWO YEARS!!! Antique.[/quote]

people don’t realize more TOTAL energy is used in the USA is for housing than is associated w/ transportation

http://needtoknow.nas.edu/energy/energy-use/

so FWIW I’d guess the environmental cost associated with producing consumer products for the USA isn’t as high as the CHINA embodied energy requirements for housing and utility operating costs because over there heating buildings is done w/ coal and the middle class population of china guesstimate being 300 million is about the total population of the the USA

so don’t we in the USA can still blame those darn people in china who aspire to a USA middle class life style

in any case it seems santa’s home (at the north pole) won’t need to use as much energy for heating because this year its much warmer than normal

BTW have you beat, I still don’t have a smartphone (I’m waiting for the release of an iPhone that will run one week “web surfing,” have 1Tb of memory, be water and shock proof ALL in the current 5s form factor)

[Author]

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