Alaska's Juneau orders evacuations as record glacier flood looms | Hacker News Reader

Alaska's Juneau orders evacuations as record glacier flood looms

theguardian.com

39 pointsc42016 comments

Somone scarily reminded me recently that Alaskan oil pipelines are anchored into "permafrost". Which you'd think if anyone would have realized wouldn't remain so perma frosted would have been the oil companies. What else do you do, I guess?

Built in the 70’s. We could have shut off the pipeline by now but instead shut down nuclear green energy.

Nuclear was never an option

1) cost is too high compared to other options

2) corpos can’t be trusted to run it safely

I love nuclear tech but it’s not commercializable anymore. I’ll happily change my opinion once a nuclear company solves those issues, but it’ll never happen.

True. The most likely reason it won’t happen is just because solar power is on a massive hockey stick growth pattern. Global solar power capacity grew 2.5x from 2020 to 2024. From 2023-2024, we added the equivalent of the total global solar capacity in 2017.

Why? Solar is extremely modular, relatively simple and standardized to set up & maintain, which eliminates huge amounts of risk as an infrastructure project. (The less bespoke a project, the less likely it’ll have a severe cost overrun.)

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-energy-consumption

Reminder that eating less meat is the single largest thing an individual can do to combat climate change, on a personal level.

Not sure how this could possibly be true. Agriculture is only 10% of greenhouse gas emissions. Electricity, heating, and transportation are each far larger. Switch your electricity to renewables, then change your heating and cooling to that electricity, and stop driving your fossil fuel powered vehicle everywhere. Buy local when you can.

I thought it was to have one less child

Reminder that over 70% of greenhouse emissions are from about 100 companies. https://www.activesustainability.com/climate-change/100-comp...

A couple notes about that release:

* It focuses on "industrial emissions", which in their analysis doesn't seem to include agriculture

* It's largely indirect emissions, e.g. if someone uses gas in their car from a gas station which was refined from crude oil purchased from Saudi Aramco.

Even more shocking, customers are responsible for 100% of those emissions!

Funny, I don't remember asking them to emit anything.

We vote for their behavior with our dollars. We outsource our emissions to them.

You burned their gas in your car.

This is a cop out that capitalism LOVES. It relinquishes the individual of any blame and encourages more consumption.

We need to consume less and vote for climate policy. This begins with the individual.

Those companies only get away with it because of our complacency. Your logic encourages that complacency and corporations LOVE that. They're happy to take the blame because they know people will still buy their product.

It starts with the individual. Nothing changes until the individual cares enough.

There are always excuses and others to blame while we destroy the livable environment.

Funny, the line I hear more often is that blaming consumers instead of corporations is the capitalist copout. The point being, we need political change that regulates the corporations more than we need individual behavior change, and corporations would rather have any other outcome. That version makes more sense to me.

"A society that solves problems at an individual level will collapse when there's a problem at a societal level."

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