I like the term “emissions-free”.
It keeps our eyes on the target - not emitting CO2 and other gasses to the atmosphere.
Other qualities like “renewablility” or “greenness” are cherries in the top. Nice to haves!
It keeps our eyes on the target - not emitting CO2 and other gasses to the atmosphere.
Other qualities like “renewablility” or “greenness” are cherries in the top. Nice to haves!
The only path forward is a drastic reduction in overall consumption. Even if we reach 100% emissions-free electricity, we'll end up with an unlivable planet anyway if we don't focus on the other issues too. If we limit warming to 1,5°C — which isn't even realistic anymore — what good will it do to us if our water and arable land are contaminated beyond repair?
Seems physically possible to me.
Maybe you mean "we need to consume to live," which I agree with a whole lot more. Even then, there's no reason we need to maximize consumption. Food is definitely critical to our existence, but pre-peeled oranges in individual plastic packaging are not.
There is no way 80% of the planet is willing to give up any comfort to stave off future ecological problems they cannot feel yet. We saw how much effort it took with global warming, and I doubt that will have made subsequent changes for the better easier. In fact, I suspect a lot of 'what, there is another thing wrong according to the scientific bozo's even though I can't see it' that will make people more resistant.
Actually reducing consumption globally won't happen. Not until it is too late. The best we can do is slow down consumption, and make consumption better. We have seen decent improvements in plastic free packaging. And power draw of devices is also getting much more attention. One big point here is pricing in externalities. That will push people into the less damaging choices.
Not to say that we should give up, nor to say that we should be quiet about other issues, nor even to say that people shouldn't reduce their consumption. My point is that a global reduction of consumption isn't going to happen voluntarily, and therefore shouldn't be the solution we pursue.
I do feel there needs to be space to discuss what kinds of reductions of consumption make sense, esp for rich countries.
Now, your turn: what are you doing to help avoid global ecological catastrophe, even a little bit?
Alright, so it goes by several names but it's sold to consumers as "Natural Gas". I'm not sure if it was green washing, but obviously the marketers were going for the most palatable name for consumers.
Predicated upon what?
Natural gas was merely a name to differentiate between 'gasoline', short form 'gas' for many english speaking countries. And the name is valid, it's mostly in its natural form, compared to 'gasoline aka gas', which required loads of processing to create it from oil.
And the name comes from a time before most of the population had even heard of global warming, at a time before people cared about using fossil fuels. There was in no way any attempt to greenwash, because absolutely no one cared one iota back then!
And the same is true for being palatable. It was just fuel. There was no reason to make it sound better. This was the age when most homes were heated by heating oil, or wood, or coal even!
People didn't get "triggered" back then, not in the 1950s or whatever. No one really cared except in the most extreme of cases. The earliest marketing concern over a name I know of, is "canola" oil, created by Canadian research programs, first on market I believe in the 70s, which is rapeseed oil.
(Rapeseed oil was added to cattle feed before this, but was considered too bitter for people until processing improvements were developed.)
It was thought that women would associate rapeseed with rape, and not buy it. This was in North America, the rest of the world generally, at the time, just called it rapeseed oil.
also toxic
No, it has absolutely nothing to do with gasoline. Other languages, e.g. Russian, which don’t use the word gasoline also call it natural gas (coming from nature). This extra confusion is a late American thing.
I tend to agree with this - there is a dichotomy here, but it is "natural" vs. "supernatural" - not "natural" vs "synthetic". I think it would be fine if for most cases we simply said "man-made" vs "not man-made" as it succinctly describes the dichotomy we're aiming for.
The "greenwashing" here is that you _could_ call anything that's not a ghost or a god "natural" by a certain definition...
Sure, if you completely disregard the context. “Natural” when talking in the context of humans is “nature vs man”.
A beaver dam is nature. The Hoover dam is man-made. If you want to red herring you could say “but man is part of nature” - there’s no point to doing so other than to argue semantics, but you could.
"Naturally occurring gas" does not magically transform itself into energy. The process along the way from being a resource to being usable as energy is usually anything other than "natural" and "green."
Greenwashing is an intentional effort to portray greenhouse gas emissions as safe by relativizing their contribution to the climate change. Calling natural gas natural according to an old tradition is not the same.
Anyway, if you would do it today, it is really hard to justify, not least because there exist new meanings of the words now and there exist already sufficiently good classifications. Context does matter.
Education does not change how these sorts of tricks affect our brains. Research has shown that using the term "Natural Gas" creates false impressions of the its environmental impact.
Assumption about my personality doesn’t make your statement right or make sense. Of course it was intentional, just not the way you suggest here. The name “natural gas” exists in many languages, literally means “coming from nature” and is being used for centuries. Major suppliers outside USA use this name in contracts etc. Nobody is going to rename it just because American education system is so bad that people are getting confused.
>Education does not change how these sorts of tricks affect our brains. Research has shown that using the term "Natural Gas" creates false impressions of the its environmental impact.
Proof link? What factors were controlled in that research?
Not exactly hard to find, but here you go. https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/should-it...
Do you have proof that this association or this type of association is correlated with education?
It is not a label, it is scientifically established and accurate name that nobody except some woke and poorly educated Americans wants to change.
The associations of the name with other terms are not correlated with education, they are caused by it, ergo the only proof needed is logical. If you know what it is, you describe it exactly as it really is — clean when burning if compared to coal, producing even stronger greenhouse effect when directly released to atmosphere.
Not all all. To someone who only understands the meanings of the individual words, the term is extremely ambigous. "Natural gas" could simply mean "air" or could refer to any gas that is naturally occuring in our atmosphere.
The reason why "natural gas" has the meaning that it does is purely convention and has no scientific basis or justification.
> The associations of the name with other terms are not correlated with education, they are caused by it
Education is not how we learn language. We learn language primarily contextually based on experience. While learning additional languages can be assisted by education, contextual experiencea are required for mastery.
> ergo the only proof needed is logical.
That's not how logic works...at all
> nobody except some woke and poorly educated Americans wants to change.
Scientists at Yale are "poorly educated"...? Throwing that accusation out pair with the word 'woke' exposes you as a partisan who has no intrest in learning or constructive discussion
That's not how logic works. Go learn about how logic and science are used together.
This person probably has a communication disability if they are not able to use language properly. We are not speaking in individual words, we use sentences and grammar, metaphors and homonyms, we have a lot of context even in low-context cultures. All of this can be learned and this is what education is for.
> Scientists at Yale are "poorly educated"...?
Maybe. Ivy League university or scientific degree is not a seal of quality. When you design such research only to control for political affiliation, that’s a bad science.
Gas can be created by many other means (combustion, chemistry, etc). Natural gas means it's gas that is found "as is" without any kind of synthesis.
Having a few terms like “natural gas” as a way to counteract people’s perceptions of the niceness of “natural” isn’t so bad.
It would be far better if we called it methane, but that's not really accurate either. It might contain ethane, propane, butane pentane and hexane. A lot of that stuff is condensed out before use, but not all.
One affects the entire environment with air pollution, and the other affects a localized area by modifying terrain.
I say might, because there is no way of knowing how many deaths will occur (or even statistically should be expected to occur) simply because we don't know what will happen to the nuclear waste.
I favor nuclear, but I'd love to see hard numbers on the 'headroom' nuclear has on deaths/GWH compared to dams, with some argument about whether long-term nuclear waste storage is likely to be less deadly than that headroom.
If we refuse to choose the lesser of two evils, we will be fucked.
Because it's false? Nothing is emissions-free: making solar panels and wind turbines create emissions, and since they are all made in China, just transporting them around the world where they are used cause emissions as well. And when they become garbage they are shipped once more around the world to be disposed (and not recycled). So it's only "emissions-free" if you ignore the whole supply chain.
High grade bullshit stated with confidence.
Based on cursory checks of https://ourworldindata.org/energy, https://www.statista.com/statistics/668749/regional-distribu..., whatever sources they use.
Actually, burning natural gas does result in emissions of nearly all types of air pollutants and carbon dioxide (CO2).
About 117 pounds of CO2 are produced per million British thermal units (MMBtu) equivalent of natural gas compared with more than 200 pounds of CO2 per MMBtu of coal and more than 160 pounds per MMBtu of distillate fuel oil.
Source: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/natural-gas/natural-gas-...
The article also specifically says that natural gas is not emissions-free: "The explosive growth of natural gas in the US has been a big environmental win, since it creates the least particulate pollution of all the fossil fuels, as well as the lowest carbon emissions per unit of electricity. But its use is going to need to start dropping soon if the US is to meet its climate goals, so it will be critical to see whether its growth flat lines over the next few years."
Everybody (one would hope) understands that about coal, oil, and natural gas.
Many people (it seems) overlook that for wind, solar, and battery technology.
It's akin to ignoring | being wilfully ignorant of what happens to material in the recycle bin.
Think of it more as a plea to remember that all this clean energy comes with a boatload of waste that needs addressing, that is often in other people's backyards, and the you don't get $64 billion US worth of copper without the digging up of what some consider to be sacred ground.
What is the action this realization is supposed to help us come to though? Should we stop the transition to cleaner energy until we find a 100% clean energy source throughout its life cycle before we begin the transition? It is simple really. Wind, solar, and so on are cleaner than fossil fuel sources of energy, so we should gradually transition to them. Cleaner mining and responsible recycling and reuse of the infra we build can be worked on over time.
In another 50 years we will have a pile of toxic waste as a direct result of scaling solar and wind up from the sliver it is now to enough to replace fossil fuels in world electricty production and replace fossil fuels in transport and build out enough batteries to ride out at least 10 hours of global demand.
> Cleaner mining and responsible recycling and reuse of the infra we build can be worked on over time.
How's that going so far - I can point to a few examples of mine reclaimation .. these are dwarfed by the majority that are left as problems for later on.
It's simple really, high consumers should consume less and as resources are used there should be focus on remediation and harm reduction from the outset.
Typically the worst offenders greenwash the nasty away and tut-tut about waste piling up in third world | southernn economies.