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Post by racingteatray on Oct 7, 2019 21:07:33 GMT
Having googled the term, I don't think it is right or accurate to label climate protesters as "snowflakes". Being sensitive and easily offended has bugger all to do caring about the planet.
Personally I'm minded more to support them than criticise them.
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Post by Roadsterstu on Oct 8, 2019 9:43:41 GMT
I don't count them as "Snowflakes". However, Jenny Jones did demonstrate distinct snowflakery after a police officer was "defensive and unhelpful" towards her. Bless.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 8, 2019 9:53:39 GMT
I doubt big business and therefor government, give a crap about the planet other than as a profit margin. Chances of getting industry and government to change let alone the rest of us, nil.
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Post by Roadsterstu on Oct 8, 2019 10:01:14 GMT
Doesn't mean nobody should try, though. I admire the intended cause and the fact that awareness is raised but I don't agree with the tactics. And, frankly, Swampy and his mates having a vegan festival on a closed road achieves little other than resistance to their cause.
I agree with PG about those that have glued themselves to things. Cut around where they are glued and send them packing with a car door or a bit of a lamp post stuck to their hand, head, arse or whatever. Off you trot, remove it yourself.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 8, 2019 10:01:25 GMT
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Post by Bob Sacamano v2.0 on Oct 8, 2019 10:38:09 GMT
Having googled the term, I don't think it is right or accurate to label climate protesters as "snowflakes". Being sensitive and easily offended has bugger all to do caring about the planet. Personally I'm minded more to support them than criticise them. I'm sure they'd welcome the support of someone who's just taken an unnecessary flight to drive a V8 around on an unnecessary route to see an unnecessary sport!  I'm not having a go at you but to achieve their desired carbon reduction by the date they've set would require us all to stop driving cars today (fossil fuel and electric powered), stop flying completely, and turn off all heating in our homes. This might (might) just give us enough breathing space to keep essential services going while we built more renewables, wind and nuclear, (which would incur a temporary CO2 rise). None of this; "oh I'm going to get one of the last V8s before they disappear etc, and then go electric" We'd have to stop driving now. Musicians would also have to stop flying round the world giving huge concerts and lecturing us about climate change. They might argue they carbon offset but they can't offset the carbon produced by thousands of fans travelling to and from their gigs. The future for them will have to be streamed internet concerts from a home studio to the World. The film industry is incredibly carbon intensive so actors will have to give up the big blockbusters and appear in small, local productions, playing to a few hundred. It sounds extreme but that's the World they are advocating, whether or not some of these professional protesters understand it. I did laugh at the last event/school strike, held on a Friday and hailed as a great success - try holding it on a Saturday and see how many kids turn up. |
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Post by racingteatray on Oct 8, 2019 10:52:25 GMT
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Post by johnc on Oct 8, 2019 11:19:38 GMT
Global consensus is where I see all of this falling down and possibly in a worst case scenario, downright refusal by some could lead to global extinction.
How do we stop the Brazilians burning down the rain forest, how do we get the Chinese, Russians and Indians to massively reduce their CO2 and other toxic emissions and how do we get the USA back to the climate change table. I think the only way forward in a global sense is to have a global work together and forget some of the current territorialism that is making countries look inwards instead of looking outwards and seeing that we are all part of a much larger world and ultimately must work together.
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Post by Bob Sacamano v2.0 on Oct 8, 2019 11:21:39 GMT
I'd introduce a catch and release program for these protesters. Set up temporary courts in the north of Scotland. Arrest them and ship north. Charge and bail them up there, letting them make their own way back south. And repeat.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 8, 2019 11:24:17 GMT
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Post by johnc on Oct 8, 2019 11:43:30 GMT
but you can't tax that, can you. ......all you need is a Chancellor with a bit of vision. You pay the Government £5,000 for your first child (helps pay for the midwives and hospital care), £10,000 for the 2nd child but you get a jumbo pack of condoms in return and £20,000 for the 3rd child and every one thereafter. There would need to be a good bit of anti-avoidance legislation to stop people going abroad and coming back with children to avoid the charge! |
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Post by PG on Oct 8, 2019 11:46:18 GMT
They were chained up inside the car which looked like it was illegally parked. So my suspicion is that they brought the car with themAm I the only one seeing the cruel twist here? Snowflakes? Nah, just dole poncing veggie twats. Indeed. They clearly have no sense of irony. If they are not snowflakes then a lot of them most certainly look like crusties - the sort of people who chained themselves to trees to stop motorways being built in earlier generations. Their hero is probably Swampy from the 1990's. I'm all in favour of doing good things for the environment, but the right to protest should not trump (no pun intended) the right of others to go about their lawful business. Blockading roads and buildings is not "the right to peaceful protest", it is well beyond that. I have not seen XR put forward any sensible proposals to achieve their net-zero by 2025 target. As bob says, the changes that would need to be made are draconian and impossible to see any democratic country ever agreeing to. I think the nearest model that has been tried is Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge and that went awfully well. Or maybe China in the early years of Mao when life was cheap. After all, I suppose you don't need mechanical excavators or anything industrial (and especially not the internet or mobile phones) when you have millions of peasants who live in hovels who are willing work for a loaf of bread. Because to go to net-zero by 2025 that is the sort of change we are looking at. It is an utterly bonkers aspiration. And I'd like to see some politicians and celebrities call that out rather than seem to be in part-awe of what they demand. I see that shadow Chancellor John McDowell is a fan of XR, so maybe Maoist China is the best model to follow. |
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Post by PG on Oct 8, 2019 12:01:31 GMT
The irony with that last bit is that it's people spunking out kids left right and centre that's causing the world to be overpopulated with allegedly greenhouse gas emitting humans in the first place. I think that climate change is a natural phenomenon and there's fuck all we can do about it. Sea levels are rising because we're covering every bit of water absorbing soil with houses to put all these mini protesters in. What needs to be curbed is population, not cars and aeroplanes, but you can't tax that, can you. I totally agree about the population issue. Everybody seems to be in awe of David Attenborough on the environment and he has a simple three step approach. Do less harmful stuff Do more good stuff Have a lot less people But all we ever hear about from the UN, governments, activists, celebrities and protesters are the first one or two. This site is worth a look at. According to them, the world's sustainable population is about 2 billion people (if we all aspire to a European standard of living). One can argue the assumptions, but the key point is that the sustainable population is not 7 billion and rising. Unless we address that, we are just pissing about with everything else. www.worldpopulationbalance.org/ www.worldpopulationbalance.org/3_times_sustainable |
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Post by Ben on Oct 8, 2019 12:39:53 GMT
The problem is that the current rate of population growth is imbalanced. Most of it is happening in impoverished countries where basic education are lacking, while developed countries are seeing shrinking population figures.
I myself am not intending to have children for my own personal reasons. But in any case my feeling is that we're all gonna die anyway. So I enjoy the V8s and V12s while I still can.
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Post by ChrisM on Oct 8, 2019 12:52:00 GMT
Hey, let's all go back to the stone age.... no houses built of "bricks" that consume a load of energy to make, no building huge power stations, no digging up the ground to run pipes for electricity, gas and sewage......
There is a price to pay for "progress"; whose job is it to draw the line at the side-effects of providing benefits to humankind as a whole?
I still reckon that felling large areas of the rainforest has a greater effect on the climate than cars with big V8 engines rather than 1 litre 4-pots
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Post by racingteatray on Oct 8, 2019 13:14:22 GMT
I think that climate change is a natural phenomenon and there's fuck all we can do about it. Sea levels are rising because we're covering every bit of water absorbing soil with houses to put all these mini protesters in. What needs to be curbed is population, not cars and aeroplanes, but you can't tax that, can you. Climate change is only a "natural phenomenon" in the sense that it is phenomenon and it is happening in and to the natural world. And besides how can you claim it is natural and then go on to claim that sea levels are rising because of human activity? Rising sea levels in and of themselves will cause climate change. And it's the unimagineable trillions and trillions of tonnes of ice lost over the last few decades from the world's ice-caps and glaciers that's really causing sea level rise.
I'm sorry but the scientic evidence is irrefutable by anyone who is looking at it dispassionately. It just is. This is not new science or fake news. I studied this stuff at university 20 years ago and the message has only got clearer and starker since then. On climate patterns, I had to study these through history and pre-history.
Our planet is actually currently in an ice age (known as the Quaternary Period, which is itself the third period of the Cenozoic Era, which is the third era of geological time since our planet formed). It's just that ice ages are then themselves made up of a series of alternating glacial and interglacial periods, and we happen to be living in one of the interglacial periods, known as the Holocene epoch (although some suggest we are moving into a new age - the Anthropocene epoch).
In general, it's a repeating 100,000 year cycle, with the planet freezing up over 90,000 yrs (the glacial period) and then warming over the remaining 10,000 yrs (the interglacial period). The current interglacial period started around 11-12,000 years ago at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, so right now the planet is supposed to have stopped warming and now be gradually cooling again as we head back into a glacial period. That it is not, but rather warming fast and warming suddenly, is what is so alarming.
So, no, it isn't due to long-period underlying climatic patterns.
And besides none of this is actually about saving the planet. It's about saving the planet in its current form which suits us (see discussions around the Goldilocks Principle).
People aver that life will go on just as it always has. And yes it will. In some form or other. Life has survived each of the previous five mass extinction events (the last 65m years ago) to date that we can see in the geological records. But, do we really want to risk triggering another, particularly if it takes us with it?
None of this negates the fact that unrestricted human population growth is highly problematic - because it amplifies the impact we have on climate change and wars over resources are frankly only a matter of time. But even if the world's population stops growing tomorrow, that would not solve the issue.
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Post by racingteatray on Oct 8, 2019 13:25:19 GMT
I myself am not intending to have children for my own personal reasons. But in any case my feeling is that we're all gonna die anyway. So I enjoy the V8s and V12s while I still can. I don't have children either. Not by choice - just not been lucky in that regard.
So I could, theoretically, not give a shit.
Except that I'm just not wired that way.
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Post by Bob Sacamano v2.0 on Oct 8, 2019 14:09:22 GMT
The irony with that last bit is that it's people spunking out kids left right and centre that's causing the world to be overpopulated with allegedly greenhouse gas emitting humans in the first place. I think that climate change is a natural phenomenon and there's fuck all we can do about it. Sea levels are rising because we're covering every bit of water absorbing soil with houses to put all these mini protesters in. What needs to be curbed is population, not cars and aeroplanes, but you can't tax that, can you. I totally agree about the population issue. Everybody seems to be in awe of David Attenborough on the environment and he has a simple three step approach. Do less harmful stuff Do more good stuff Have a lot less people But all we ever hear about from the UN, governments, activists, celebrities and protesters are the first one or two. This site is worth a look at. According to them, the world's sustainable population is about 2 billion people (if we all aspire to a European standard of living). One can argue the assumptions, but the key point is that the sustainable population is not 7 billion and rising. Unless we address that, we are just pissing about with everything else. www.worldpopulationbalance.org/ www.worldpopulationbalance.org/3_times_sustainableThe world's sustainable population has increased throughout history, from about 100 million to X billion today. It's a red herring - population numbers are not the issue, it's the consumption of finite resources. Assuming we all aspire to a European standard of living (whatever that is now and in the future), 2 billion may be the limit - but 20 billion may be the limit of we all have the resource footprint of a Cambodian. In my mind, CO2 is a proven greenhouse gas and while we can't be sure how much impact our contribution has compared to the natural rises and falls of CO2 emissions, it would seem prudent to err on the side of caution. History also suggests that in 50 years time we will be worrying about something else, probably lack of clean water. |
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Post by Deleted on Oct 8, 2019 14:45:22 GMT
Looking at the polution of the planet, there is only one species that does that, and it is no the whales. Ho wmuch plastic and oil dumped into our oceans? How much chemical waste among which is female hormones discharged via urine into the waste systems and then the sea? How many ships at sea washing out fuel tanks with sea water and dumping the waste, into the sea/ocean? We apparently have fires underground in tyre and other waste dumps that have been burning for decades but apparently it is not worth the trouble to put thees fires out. We are apparently the smartest species on the planet but I see no evidence of that thus far, the old adage of "Even a dog knows that when it hurts you stop" would seem to be in play but we seem not to be willing to stop.
I already reduce driving to a minimum, heating to a minimum and have reduced water usage. Unless we all do that there will be no improvement but people who can afford to pay still will use whatever they want whenever they want. Ten holidays? Sure why not........?
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Post by Bob Sacamano v2.0 on Oct 8, 2019 15:18:07 GMT
Looking at the polution of the planet, there is only one species that does that, and it is no the whales. Ho wmuch plastic and oil dumped into our oceans? How much chemical waste among which is female hormones discharged via urine into the waste systems Are you growing breasts as well? Glad it's not just me. |
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Post by Deleted on Oct 8, 2019 16:57:01 GMT
Actually the breasts do not bother me much but the crop of piles nearly reaches the front door and I keep tripping over them.
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Post by ChrisM on Oct 8, 2019 19:27:49 GMT
Actually the breasts do not bother me much but the crop of piles nearly reaches the front door and I keep tripping over them. Who's been cropping their Farmer Giles and leaving them by your door ?? |
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Post by Deleted on Oct 8, 2019 19:47:40 GMT
Shhhhh. I'm hoping she will come back and be rich..........
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Post by chipbutty on Oct 9, 2019 6:14:03 GMT
If we are talking about actions or changes that will have little impact on the overall problem, then consider this. From what I have read, if we stopped the world tomorrow (turn off absolutely everything and just sit in the dark), it still wouldn’t arrest the warming of the planet as we are beyond the point of reversal.
If this is true, then the collective hand wringing, placard waving and middle class hair shirtism is little more than the rearrangement of pubes in the urinals of the Titanic (never mind the bloody deck chairs).
The global economy is built on consumption and movement (goods, services, workforce, etc), the two absolute worst activities in terms of producing co2. Which by extension means the suggested reductions are completely unachievable and completely pointless.
Racing, you make an interesting comment with regard to giving up noisy gas guzzlers in due course, but what exactly are you going to replace it with ?, because it’s clear from the numbers that on a total lifetime basis, PHEV and BEV produce more co2 than equivalent petrols and diesels. So, unless you are proposing to give up your cars completely and walk everywhere, then you aren’t going to make the slightest difference by swapping a petrol six for anything else. In fact, the most environmentally friendly action you could take is to keep what you have and never buy a new car again because the tonnage of co2 generated by making a shiny new anything will outweigh the co2 you “save” ten thousand fold.
Also (and I am not picking on you), as a person with family abroad, how are you going to reconcile all the trips you make there and back with the need to do your bit. Even if you give up your cars, you will still be regularly flying and generating huge amounts of co2, whereas I might decide to never fly again, but keep an aged V8 in the garage for shits and gigs.
In summary, the problem is extremely complex and muddied by half truths, bullshit and self interest whilst being the biggest gift to tax happy governments and mental case socialists who want to put everyone under the boot of the state.
XR are fantasist wasters who couldn’t construct a rational argument if their lives depended on it, instead of highlighting the cause, they are turning people off who are pig sick of the hypocrisy and the nonsense.
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Post by Alex on Oct 9, 2019 12:27:32 GMT
I myself am not intending to have children for my own personal reasons. But in any case my feeling is that we're all gonna die anyway. So I enjoy the V8s and V12s while I still can. I don't have children either. Not by choice - just not been lucky in that regard.
So I could, theoretically, not give a shit.
Except that I'm just not wired that way.
An inability to have children is certainly more of a 'western' problem and goes with our approach of settling into a career before starting a family (that goes for men and women) and so a lot of couples are waiting until their mid 30's before trying. But in a lot of developing countries populations are rising as they still go by the more traditional model of women having children in their late teens when and early 20s when they are much more fertile. In particularly impoverished countries big families are still the norm due to the possibility of infant mortality being so much higher, but western intervention (such as through the like of UNICEF, Bill Gates, Comic Relief etc) has seen infant mortality drop, which is great in and of itself but doesn't appear to be going hand in hand in educating people to have less children to compensate. So keeping population growth on a global scale is going to be very difficult unless it is much more enforced or we start letting disease act as a natural buffer, neither of which comes across as ethical. The world still has wars but not on the scale of WW1&2 and recent disease outbreaks such as Ebola have had nothing on the Black Death. Sadly I think the next mass reduction in human population size will be due to environmental disasters. |
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Post by racingteatray on Oct 9, 2019 12:35:30 GMT
If we are talking about actions or changes that will have little impact on the overall problem, then consider this. From what I have read, if we stopped the world tomorrow (turn off absolutely everything and just sit in the dark), it still wouldn’t arrest the warming of the planet as we are beyond the point of reversal. If this is true, then the collective hand wringing, placard waving and middle class hair shirtism is little more than the rearrangement of pubes in the urinals of the Titanic (never mind the bloody deck chairs). The global economy is built on consumption and movement (goods, services, workforce, etc), the two absolute worst activities in terms of producing co2. Which by extension means the suggested reductions are completely unachievable and completely pointless. [...] In summary, the problem is extremely complex and muddied by half truths, bullshit and self interest whilst being the biggest gift to tax happy governments and mental case socialists who want to put everyone under the boot of the state. XR are fantasist wasters who couldn’t construct a rational argument if their lives depended on it, instead of highlighting the cause, they are turning people off who are pig sick of the hypocrisy and the nonsense. Whether we are beyond the point of no return is contentious. What is not contentious is that actions we take can slow that change, giving us more time to adapt. I also strongly suspect people who are turned off by the hypocrisy are turned off because they don't really buy into the underlying arguments in the first place. I can perfectly well see the hypocrisy and the unachievable exaggerated goals, but I applaud the fact that it raises awareness and at least they are doing something. As to the rest of your points, that’s an entirely defeatist approach. I’m not advocating banning V8s – I never would. Plus, nobody can be perfect in all aspects but if we all take steps to reduce our polluting activities in the ways that we can, then that would be a start and we’d all be better off. Ignoring choice and use of car, that includes little daily things like not having unnecessary business travel, not going on frequent long-haul holidays, bothering to insulate your house properly, recycling, not wasting food, being local produce where possible, taking care to avoid single-use plastics, remembering to take shopping bags with you when going shopping, etc. If everybody does what they can within reason, then I think it would make a difference. Not just globally, but to our local environments and our personal health. |
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Post by racingteatray on Oct 9, 2019 12:44:03 GMT
Racing, you make an interesting comment with regard to giving up noisy gas guzzlers in due course, but what exactly are you going to replace it with ?, because it’s clear from the numbers that on a total lifetime basis, PHEV and BEV produce more co2 than equivalent petrols and diesels. So, unless you are proposing to give up your cars completely and walk everywhere, then you aren’t going to make the slightest difference by swapping a petrol six for anything else. In fact, the most environmentally friendly action you could take is to keep what you have and never buy a new car again because the tonnage of co2 generated by making a shiny new anything will outweigh the co2 you “save” ten thousand fold. Also (and I am not picking on you), as a person with family abroad, how are you going to reconcile all the trips you make there and back with the need to do your bit. Even if you give up your cars, you will still be regularly flying and generating huge amounts of co2, whereas I might decide to never fly again, but keep an aged V8 in the garage for shits and gigs. Car-wise, we aren't currently planning to replace either of ours at the moment because they remain fit for purpose. Yes, both of them were bought new (2013 and 2016) but that's unrepresentative as in fact I’ve only bought three new cars in my entire life and my wife has only bought the one. We probably wouldn't buy new next time around. In town, we mostly use the 500, which has low enough emissions to qualify for free road tax, and mostly only use the BMW for longer trips out of London. And in any event, neither of us commutes daily by car. Almost nobody does in London - they walk, bicycle or take public transport. A fact demonstrated by the fact we did literally no more than 1,000 miles in the 500 in the past year and barely 4,000 in the BMW (which included a trip to France and a trip to Scotland). Flights-wise, given both my family and my wife's family live there, I can’t do much about the fact that we fly to Italy around 4 times a year on average, short of moving to live there. However, it's worth noting that's a journey of approximately 1,400 miles return each time, or a total of around 6,000 miles or 1.44 tonnes of CO2 per year. That’s less than one return trip to New York (around 7,000 miles / 1.66 tonnes of CO2) or Barbados (8,400 miles), half a single trip to Thailand (12,000 miles) and three and half times less than one trip to Sydney (21,000 miles). Plus that's pretty much all we do in terms of foreign holidays - we aren't globe-trotters. The last time we took a holiday anywhere outside Europe, let alone long-haul, was seven years ago. |
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Post by Bob Sacamano v2.0 on Oct 9, 2019 12:53:21 GMT
From a CO2 point of view I think XR would advocate importing 100 or so Ladyboys to a hotel in a central point in the UK so instead of thousands of trips to Thailand men could just get a train ride to a station just outside of Birmingham.
We need to think outside the box if we're really going to tackle climate change.
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Post by racingteatray on Oct 9, 2019 13:32:40 GMT
From a CO2 point of view I think XR would advocate importing 100 or so Ladyboys to a hotel in a central point in the UK so instead of thousands of trips to Thailand men could just get a train ride to a station just outside of Birmingham. We need to think outside the box if we're really going to tackle climate change. That's definitely thinking outside the box.
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Post by Bob Sacamano v2.0 on Oct 9, 2019 14:35:30 GMT
From a CO2 point of view I think XR would advocate importing 100 or so Ladyboys to a hotel in a central point in the UK so instead of thousands of trips to Thailand men could just get a train ride to a station just outside of Birmingham. We need to think outside the box if we're really going to tackle climate change. That's definitely thinking outside the box.
Well these are the sort of sacrifices we'd have to make. |
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