A wild idea to protect the Great Barrier Reef

Don’t forget increases in microplastics from heavier EVs (usually they’re about 1500-2000# heavier than ICE equivalents) ending up in the ocean https://www.plasticstoday.com/medical/tire-wear-major-source...

Also, with heavier vehicles, you aren’t going to magically be able to use less overall power to drive them. ICEs aren’t as efficient as larger power factories, but they also don’t have dozens or hundreds of miles of transmission losses and transformers to run through. All renewables combined just surpassed coal in the US (report date Feb 2023) but that’s still only about half as much as comes from natural gas: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3

You can use this tool to look up the numbers for your state for total cradle-to-grave emissions for EVs vs hybrids vs ICE https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric_emissions.html

Public transit would still be an order of magnitude or two better. Bikeable / walkable cities would be better still.

I’m not saying EVs bad, but I am saying that EVs won’t solve climate change. We need to do a whole lot more, and I have zero confidence that we will. It’s just a matter of how bad and how soon. As someone in my 30s, I very much doubt that we’ll get to enjoy retirement with the same standards of living as the previous couple of generations, and as for our children and their children…I don’t think a Mad Max scenario is more than a hundred years away.

Your comment might be more insightful if you clarified why. Because they didn’t come fast enough? Or because you were hoping to politicize the climate crisis as an opportunity to kill the automobile?

This isn’t just engineering, it’s mainly an emotional issue

Ah, what you want to say is you only care for the fast death of coral reefs and don't care for things that ensure its death but will take maybe a decade or two?

pH does not fluctuate much, true, but it drops steadily which is just as deadly to coral.

Awful compared to a healthy vibrant natural jungle. Wonderful compared to a lifeless hot ball like Venus.

I don't think a planet of mostly natural wilderness is an option in the long run.

I also don't think we'll pave the whole thing over.

The stubborn refusal to slightly inconvenience ourselves by foregoing inessential consumption is much more telling of our lack of ambition. Fucking up the planet and the non-human life on it is simply too convenient.

I do think that energy can be shifted much more rapidly to low-carbon forms such as solar and wind. That can be done. And I don't view it as "degrowth" to stop wasting so much energy on pointless endeavours such as e.g. oversized single-occupant petrol-engine vehicles for a daily urban commute to an office.

But even if we achieve that tomorrow, that just one of the needed wins, e.g. the seas would still be full of plastic debris and fertiliser run-off. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458

We’ve already accidentally geoengineered the whole planet. We might as well understand what we're doing and steer it better. As well as, not instead of.

No doubt that will be seen across many ecosystems in decades ahead.

The set of species that thrives in a changed or fast-changing ecosystem, is (usually) less diverse than the one thriving under slow-changing conditions.

That isn't a problem either. It is tautologically true that if corals experience a natural die-off, and then you look at it soon after, the species you mostly see will be the ones that grow the fastest. The other slower growing species will appear more later.

The actual problem here is that reef scientists didn't predict the current levels of the GBR. They strongly predicted the opposite, saying that after the last bleaching in ~2020 it could take a decade to recover.

Nor is ocean acidification a thing anymore. That theory was debunked years ago, by the founder of Greenpeace no less:

https://www.climatedepot.com/2015/06/24/greenpeace-co-founde...

That's why you hardly hear about it anymore. Better understanding of corals made it clear there's no real problem there.

The reefs are millions of years old. Academic study of them is only about 40 years old. They have no clue what they're talking about and this was just proven in the most dramatic way possible: a prediction with near 100% confidence that was proven utterly wrong within <2 years of it being made. You can see why they have been making such predictions when you look at a graph of their dataset:

https://dailysceptic.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/coral.pn...

Up until about 2010 the level of coral cover was in slow decline. But 1980-2010 is a tiny slice of the history of the corals, and when growth suddenly reversed in 2015 and 2020, reaching record levels, they were taken entirely by surprise. This is what happens when academics extrapolate from tiny datasets in order to drum up funding.

Allowing these people to screw with the Earth via geo-engineering, to solve problems that only exist in their minds, would take climate extremism to a whole other level and make the culture war surrounding it way, way hotter. It's just not worth it. They should leave the reefs to do their thing.

Nothing is simple when it comes to climate and human economy, unfortunately.

Well, it's your mindset, so you answer that question, don't pin it on me. If the GBR truly had no impact on the wider ecosystem, would you choose to let it die. What level of impact would it take to care, its minimum usefulness to you. The status quo environment is the only one we know civilization to flourish in, as it was a remarkably stable period, so it's self-evident to me that we should be keeping as much the same as it was around the time the Industrial Revolution took off if we want to preserve as much of the climate as possible. Would you raze the Louvre and replace it with a server farm if someone said that space would be more useful that way.