The Al Gore private jet thing seemed a little hypocritical on its face, but it really needs to to be observed in context. Guy's an extremely busy dude, doing (ostensibly) a lot of environmental good. The same could be said for a lot of New Yorkers. Many of the firms at the forefront of the green movement are headquartered in major cities like New York due to necessity or practicality. Are they all hypocrites as well?

You'd be surprised how many chiefsplanet posters flat out say they don't believe in Climate Change because they hate Al Gore.

Ok, I don't think you did, but I'll assume you said, "Yes, I have donated at least one penny to charity in my life."

To which, following the ultra-stupid line of reasoning you're backing, I would respond, "Then you're a complete hypocrite if you don't donate your entire salary to charity."

There's a million things you can do to benefit the environment that don't involve uprooting your entire life and inconveniencing yourself as much as humanly possible.

Vegetarianism isn't always as environment friendly as eating meat.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/eart...vironment.html

You need to eat more veggies than you do meat to sustain yourself as well. Also, I have seen an article somewhere that had solid reasons why hunters are more environment friendly(ceteris peribus) than city slicking vegetarians.

Yeah, really beef is a huge problem. Pigs pretty bad. Fish is a problem for different reasons. You can eat chicken or nutria or rabbits and probably have less impact than many vegetarian items. And, you can probably go out of your way to have a vegetarian diet that is particularly destructive if you tried.

Hunting....ok, but that's a super fringe diet there.

Sorry, you can't claim to be an environmentalist unless you're a hunter

Weird in that study that it was comparing processed vegetarian food to unprocessed meat products. Tofu should be compared to sausage or w/e, not to the cow.

Take it to the bad posters thread if you are gonna tard it up.

I'm a bit extreme maybe on the other side, but I think Gore deserves huge credit for getting the debate really going, sticking his neck out, and persevering. The jet plane riding was mostly for the cause. The home lifestyle did use a lot of energy. I guess he could have installed solar earlier and lived a more ascetic lifestyle, but it doesn't bother me too much.

Not really in that case. It's not a 1:1 argument.

I guess it depends on the details. I mean, you don't add the cooking at home most of the time when you consider the impact of beef. It gets pretty complicated. I understand the basic point though that vegetarian is neither always more healthy or low impact on the environment. I would suggest though that on average, at least for the typical American diet, it is both.

That's the logic you've been defending the last two days, so, no u?

While there's nothing wrong with electric cars per se, selling them environmentally friendly is just a scam. If you take into count the generation of the electricity they are worse than gasoline powered cars.

Also cows fart a lot.

This is not even close.

We can certainly get into this deeply, but here's something to consider:

Oil refineries are huge users of electricity. They are the largest industrial users in the state of Cali. The refinery near my house has it's own natural gas power plant and that just meets a small percent of the refinery's electrical needs. This is just refining. Not extraction or transport. And then it does nothing to take the environmental impact of the oil/gas itself into account.

It takes 6kwh to refine one gallon of gasoline. A Tesla, an electric sports car not an economy car, goes 3 miles on a kwh. It goes 18 miles on the electricity used JUST TO REFINE a gallon of gas.

Electric cars have a tiny environmental impact compared to gas cars.

You don't even make arguments outside of "if you make criticize my lifestyle i'll make non-sensical counter arguments."

I don't particularly judge people who wield iPhones and all sorts of modern amenities that aren't natural and who proclaim themselves to be environmental friendly. But I also don't really bother listening to their self-righteous claims either. It's really that simple. If you want to be environment friendly you probably shouldn't use modern amenities and dwellings and go live in a hut and hunt and gather. That's the natural order. But if you want to delude yourself into thinking living in the biggest polluting cities and being worried about the environment isn't adding to the existing problem, lol you.

That's quite extreme.

Why is zero impact the measure of being an environmentalist? Why not sustainability? The earth can certainly sustain a certain impact. Ambitious goals are things like reducing carbon emissions to 1990 levels.

You can't be an environmentalist and have that as a goal?

You can certainly have an iPhone and live in NYC and be consistent with that.

Analogies suck and all, but if you're against slavery but wear a sweatshop shirt or eat some chocolate is it 'lol you'?

Even if you eat a tomato. Many of those are picked by people who are literally imprisoned during the picking season.

I'm sure you've had some tomato lately. Are you telling me that you can't claim to be anti-slavery?

https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/appeal-to-nature

Obsession with ethanol
Anti-nuclear
Obsession with dead end technologies (solar and wind immediately come to mind)

Investing in and mandating cleaner fossil fuels will do a lot more to keep carbon emissions in check than telling Africans to leapfrog to renewable (but unscalable and more expensive) energy sources like the UN is pushing

1. Ethanol

I don't know any environmentalist who has ever been obsessed with ethanol. It's big agribusiness that's obsessed with it and it's something that anti-environmentalists like to represent as something dumb that environmentalists support.

2. I'm ambivalent. I don't think nuclear is generally a good choice because I think there are better options.

3. I have AMA threads on Solar on OOT and STTF and a lot about solar in the Climate Change thread as well. I'm not sure whether I should go into detail on solar ITT or not or start a thread on it in Politics. So, keeping it short:

No, solar is where it's at. Prices continue to drop massively, grid parity is being achieved more and more broadly, manufacturing and total installations are increasing at an incredible pace. Replacing 100 years of fossil fuel growth is not something that happens overnight and perhaps it won't happen fast enough, but it is very far from a dead technology.

Wind, I don't know as nearly as much about. It has very large capacity in some areas. It's more intermittent than solar, but is widely available and often in places where solar resources are lower (cloudy northern areas).

Energy solutions for Africa are interesting and definitely worth a separate post at least, but energy use per capita in the US is 4 times the average in China, 7 times the average in Nigeria, and 14 times the average in The Congo. I understand that that's the demand that coming down the road, but for a while it's not even going to be a huge part of new demand.

Ok, I guess there's no harm in posting a couple graphs. An indication of what has and is continuing to happen and a caution to use very very recent data and even that's too old.





(yes, I know the y-axis doesn't go down to zero)

What is the cost of generating the electricity used by the Tesla? Electricity is mostly generated by burning coal or natural gas, or via nuclear power, depending on the country. One gallon of gasoline gets most cars many miles, let's say 25. 25 miles on 6kwh (according to your numbers, which I don't believe) sounds a lot better than 3 miles on 1 kwh. Of course you lose something burning the gasoline, but in general gasoline motors are more efficient than electrical motors.

All I'm saying is you are comparing two dissimilar things, using questionable numbers, and taking into account only a small part of the question. Where does the electricity come from and how was it generated?

This can't be true globally. They are comparing it for people living in the UK and there it might be true because the UK doesn't produce some core ingredients for vegetarian dishes and it does produce some of the relatively environmental friendly meats. So they add the transport costs to the tofu and have the meat eater live on local food.

But if a country can produce both locally then the vegetarian will always be more environmental friendly even if they need to eat more veggies and the tofu needs to be processed. It is still nothing compared to first growing the livestock feed and then feed it to the animal.

Both vegetarians and meat eaters could do a lot for the environment if they would eat local food as much as possible and would accept not eating fruits and vegetables that are basically out of season. The transport and storage costs from that are much bigger than the difference between eating meat or being a vegetarian.

But most people are like me and not willing to give up their meat and their tropical fruits all year round.

It's true environmentalists (informed ones anyway) are waking up to the disaster but ethanol was their baby in the name of "Renewable Fuel". Gore pushed it. Environmental groups endorsed it. EPA made rules for it.

Solar, wind, and really nothing but coal can be scaled to match what nuclear can do.

Nobody has solved the inconsistent sunshine and power storage issues that keep solar from becoming a viable replacement for fossil fuels.

Solar can be part of a stop gap solution, especially in places where demand tends to correlate with sunshine (Arizona for example) but it's just not scalable enough to replace conventional fossil fuels. To replace a 1gwh nuclear plant, you need like 12 square miles of nothing but solar panels. That much land use has significant environmental impact and still produces at higher marginal cost than nuclear plants (but lower than natural gas when sun is shining).

PS: storage issues wouldn't make solar viable overnight either. It would make solar viable vs. natural gas but storage also means excess cheap baseline capacity won't go to waste, making nuclear plants all that much more economical.