jorgen123

Your bafflement is baffling about the wrong question. People who eat vegetarian may on occasion want to eat a meat replacement product for the flavor of it. They would not make it a major component of their diet.

On the other hand, these products can displace meat consumption in diets that consume unnecessary volumes of meat, which will also be generally beneficial due to less resource use.

But this is measured by cup for many of the items on the list. E.g. Avocado is #3 but I would not eat a cup of Avocado per day. I do eat a banana most days. And I eat half an avocado, which weighs in the order of a 10th of the weight listed for a cup.

This narrative is not bad, but also not quite good.

It is good because it is positive and expresses confidence that we can do this.

It is bad in where it ignores the emissions caused by land use and resource consumption. Those are not addressed with advanced technology. Those are addressed oftentimes by going back from advanced technology - but in a way that does improve life styles and wellbeing of the people providing you with resources. You can play a role by choosing those resources - which does put you in the place of having to do some amount of moral judgement.

Source: https://regeneration.org

No. The heart of the problem is this narrative. Granted, you paint the picture that is the prevalent narrative, but narratives can change.

There are profitable solutions out there today and many have a potential to scale. Paul Hawken has done some great work recently describing them and calculating their contribution potential (https://drawdown.org and https://regeneration.org)

I think this is too narrow a view, covering only the supply side. What about demand? Why does everybody only want to live on the peninsula?

Traffic is a big factor there. We have a total and complete lack of modern/fast public transport reaching out into the outlying areas and unlocking their potential.

Native Dutch here. I agree. I understand some words that are more like numbers in German but nothing much else.

And yet, how many utility poles and wires do you want in front of your house? I don't think we really want anything other than a monopoly doing our distribution.

It would be much better for the perception if there were a clean split in the business of the utilities where the distribution monopoly does just distribution and nothing else. But I'm not sure if that would actually solve any real problems.

To be honest, the GP's post itself reads like a rant and actually does not back up any of its claims. So while I agree that this post did not add value, neither did the GP.

Funny thing with utilities. They are a sort of commons, yet always regarded as evil until proven innocent.

Generalizing/simplifying: Transmission is long distance - high voltage, think steel towers with wires.

Distribution is from a local transformer (substation) where high voltage gets turned to lower voltage (12 kV) and then sent via utility poles to your home. Near your home there will be a utility pole with a transformer that brings the voltage down to 110. You share that transformer with a handful of neighbors.

I often agree with the sentiment, but not in this case. I actually like it better than the mayo I used to eat.

I cannot wait for their test tube chicken.. (https://www.justforall.com/en-us/stories/clean-meat)

I would applaud that choice.

I had a retinal tear 4 weeks ago and then then retina detached and started sagging in front of my lens, blocking half of my field of view. Seriously scary, especially since my mother has lost most of her vision after a similar problem.

I got a pneumatic retinopexy a couple of days later. Amazingly, it only took about 30 minutes in a (nice) back-room of the retina clinic with local anesthesia, and the retina re-attached itself in the course of the next few days. Now I am just waiting for the gas bubble to dissolve while my vision is getting better each day.

> He could be 10 times more expensive than you. Did you consider that?

That is an assumption that may be invalid. Everybody is in their own private situation. Your assumption will be true for many but not for all. Many older folks may not need a top salary anymore and will take an average income for the pleasure of working with other fine people and doing interesting things. At some point in your life the career ladder will be less important than quality of life.

Actually, your question should be: Why use Appalachian coal? And indeed, coal production has shifted to Wyoming where it is cheaper to produce with less labor. So even if coal comes back, it will not likely come back to Appalachia. Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/coal-jobs-i...

Talking about creeping: I just saw a self-driving Chevy Bolt hold up traffic turning left from Franklin onto Lombard. It crawled through the turn like a panicked tourist. Granted that this is not a smooth turn, requiring a sharp adjustment at the end. I think this was a GM test or perhaps Lyft. The car was named "Wombat".

Perhaps it is a case of a number without context. I have been here for nearly 18 years now and have become a citizen. I just wanted to get out of the rain of my homeland and into the California sunshine.

I guess I am part of the 42% but I was never one of the “poor huddled masses yearning to breathe free”. I just consider myself a proud American. 42% says nothing about how long people have been here and whether they are just a next wave building up the country like waves of immigrants from the past.

You could pick a solution area you feel attracted to from the Drawdown book (http://www.drawdown.org) and see how you can contribute. The Drawdown team has spent several years computing and ranking the impact of over 100 solution areas that can combine to reduce CO2 while also providing other benefits (so called no-regret solutions)

You may find that high impact solutions are in areas you may not be thinking about but that energize you, like the fact that educating girls beats out rooftop solar power (which is also a very high ranking solution).

They call it urban tumbleweed.

And where people care about keeping their town clean, tax money gets spent on removing the tumbleweed[1]. Which is why these bag bans are a general good thing.

Source: http://1bagatatime.com/learn/plastic-bag-clean-costs/

One of the differences is that decomposing happens in the form of Methane, which is a potent greenhouse gas (21x as potent as CO2).

Capturing and burning the methane "downgrades" the potency of the emissions, now only emitting CO2.