Man, I sure wish cybertrucks had been around to deflect when I spent 7 years driving a Fiat Panda.

I think that’s a really good point to be fair. Would be interested to see what it was on a consumption basis - like other people are pointing out, the lifestyle of the ultra rich is definitely pretty carbon intensive.

I think there’s a lot of focus on minimizing individual’s impact, and don’t get me wrong, that’s a great thing to do, but it puts burden and guilt on people for things that are out of their control

If your government (wherever you are) held fossil fuel companies and the agro-industrial complex to account and encouraged investment in renewables, public transport and ground sourced heating, you would be living a low impact lifestyle just by going to work, buying your groceries and living normally.

If you have the money to invest in solar panels, EVs etc, that’s fantastic, but don’t feel guilt for not being priviledged!

The most impactful thing you can do is put pressure on your government to recognise the impact we’re having on our ecology. Sign petitions, write to your representative, fund and/or join activist groups.

Importantly, try not to feel shamed, as an individual you didn’t cause the situation (unless maybe you are a fossil fuel lobbyist, or oilcompany CEO) - go easy on yourself and just do what you can.

This is the dumbest bet you can make and more or less the definition of lose/lose- if we fail to move off greenhouse gasses, what kind of mad max style future are you hoping to be rich in?

Does anyone have link to some more information on the science of why this is happening?

The article references a bunch of causes, like deforestation, ocean poisening affecting the ocean carbon pump, extreme heat etc. Are there any studies/data that try to break down where the impact comes from?

Gonna skirt right round the serious discussion about oil company based misinformation here and point out that his suit is an extreme act of terror on the seeing.

How much CO2 does AI use compared to other industries? I know it’s a horrific use compared to all other software, but have no idea how it factors in global carbon emmissions?

Also, just to be clear, I’m genuinely curious and not defending burning huge amounts of carbon for profit if the AI sector is comparatively small. That kind of backwards “but it just a small amount of everything else” logic would be a great way to accelerate our already too fast death spiral.

Yeah, hopefully this is some genuinely good news, but it’s hard not to see it as an unbelievably positive spin on the fact that this year we’ll emit more CO2 than any year in record.

Yes, for sure!! I hope my call for policitcal action didn’t come across as “don’t do anything and wait for politicians to sort it out!”.

I was trying to get at the need for collective discussion and action, over the idea of a climate change fix that’s based on people’s feeling superior for their individual actions, especially because without political change, a lot of even the individual changes we need to make (more heatpumps, EVs over ICEs, etc) are only accessible to those with sufficient wealth.

Oh boy, have fun! CTEs have pretty wide support, so you might be in luck (well at least in that respect, in all other cases you’re still using saleforce amd my commiserations are with you)

Honestly moral superiority needs to get taken out of climate change as a whole. It’s a global issue that needs political solutions. Nobody’s individual actions are gonna change their nation’s heating systems from gas, grids energy make up to solar, or billionaires to climate activists.

I have advice that you didn’t ask for at all!

SQL’s declarative ordering annoys me too. In most languages you order things based on when you want them to happen, SQL doesn’t work like that- you need to order query dyntax based on where that bit goes according to the rules of SQL. It’s meant to aid readability, some people like it a lot,but for me it’s just a bunch of extra rules to remember.

Anyway, for nested expressions, I think CTEs make stuff a lot easier, and SQL query optimisers mean you probably shouldn’t have to worry about performance.

I.e. instead of:

SELECT
  one.col_a,
  two.col_b
FROM one
LEFT JOIN
    (SELECT * FROM somewhere WHERE something) as two
    ON one.x = two.x

you can do this:

WITH two as (
     SELECT * FROM somewhere
     WHERE something
)

SELECT
  one.col_a,
  two.col_b
FROM one
LEFT JOIN two
ON one.x = two.x

Especially when things are a little gnarly with lots of nested CTEs, this style makes stuff a tonne easier to reason with.

I know your comment is satirical so I don’t really want to take it in bad faith, but all the same. . . .

Lots of people are working reeaaally hard at changing society for the better, and reducing environmental catastrophe, the studies from the 80s sparked soneof the biggest environmental groups we have today (the likes of Green Peace and Friends of the Earth).

Lots of other people, often with money, are cynically blocking the protection of the human race for their own gain. And the majority of people are caught between these groups, often feeling despondent.

My point is, don’t get despondent, get involved! You can join the first groups efforts today, and it you do, you’ll be concretely helping the survival of our planet and society.

If you’re interested in specifics, both Green Peace and Just Stop Oil hold regular monthly/weekly welcome to all sessions (if you know about others, post them here!)

• Am driving into a wall
• Turning or breaking in time sounds tricky
• Might as well accelerate, maybe car will take off and fly over wall?
• Woops, I died!

Thanks for such a well reasoned response 😁 My knee jerk “public transport good” response did miss a lot of the subtlety you’ve captured here!

AI: “Have you tried funding public transport and regulating the carbon industry?”

Ok, now we need to make a new AI so that AI can solve global warming but without using an existing solution that might marginally inconvenience the mega rich.

Public transport would be a much more effective and cheaper solution, but we’re all looking at EVs because it means not having to change anything about the status quo.

I don’t agree they’re looking at all areas at once, solar, wind and the net zero per mw by 2030 goal only relate to energy, not things like gas heating reduction, or public transport etc. Energy is also one of the few areas where as a country we’ve already made quite a bit of progress. There are points where only 10% of the UK’s energy comes from fossil fuels.

In fairness, I did share the wrong article, sorry! Here’s the actual opinion piece it’s referring to (which was written in the Sun, I agree it’s a shit rag, but Kier Starmer chose to publish in it, so here we are): https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/30853358/keir-starmer-great-british-industry-net-zero/

Specifically, the bits I’m referring to are:

This ground-breaking technology, known as Carbon Capture Usage and Storage, is a game-changer in our efforts to fulfil our legal obligations to reach Net Zero by 2050 in a sensible way, while supporting jobs and industry.

Shifting focus onto onto bare minimum meeting of legal obligations and positioning carbon capture as a central part of that strategy.

To those drum-banging, finger-wagging extremists I say: I will never sacrifice Great British industry.

Said in opposition to people wanting regulation of carbon emissions over carbon capture investment.

But this is a third way that brings industry with us on our path to Net Zero

Again, in opposition to regulating emissions more strictly.

To be 100% clear, this is speculation from Labours messaging that implies they’re gearing up for a massive backslide, we won’t know for sure until their budget is announced over the next few weeks. I think this is where a lot of objection comes fron though. If we see large investment in public transport and heat pumps, and regulation of emissions, then I’ll be extremely happy to be proved wrong.

I 100% agree with you! But I think you’re missing some key context on why people are angry about this:

• The new UK government is from the center left Labour party, who were elected under the promise (amongst others) that they would do more about carbon change that the previous government

• They recently announced funding for carbon capture as the central part of their climate change plan

• Their plan to achieve the UK’s legally obligated net zero targets (they no longer plan to reduce emissions by anything more than international law mandates) depends on the success of this very unproven technology

• The UK prime minister referred to critics of this scheme (which should include pretty much anyone who wants climate policy to be based on scientific evidence rather than lobbying) “finger wagging extremists” in an opinion piece[1]

So, although I’d support investing into climate capture research as part of a much broader carbon reduction plan, this policy is really an incredible backslide and a massive betrayal of anyone who voted for the party on the basis of their climate change policies.

Edit: spelling!

[1] https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/30855560/keir-starmer-ignore-climate-extremists/

Ok really tangential rant here!

I find societal attitudes to art and morality really crazy.

I don’t necessarily disagree with the idea that art and morality should be linked, but it only ever seems to happen in a negative capacity of “don’t listen to x because they did y”.

There’s a whole strain of:

• Artists who are not necessarily bad people, but whose art is aggresively immoral (I guess an obvious example would be Biggie Smalls or someone who frequently raps about sexual assault and violence in a positive way, but also the ammount of mainstream pop or country that has sexist or racist undertones)
• Artists who try hard to inject their morality into their work (such as Becky Chambers’ climate positive fiction, or Giancinto Scelsi’s anti-facist music)

On the whole, I don’t see anyone care very much about the above two points, people just “like what they like”, which is as if we think morality and art are two seperate things.

That makes sense, but then there’s this wierd category where “oh that person did this bad thing, so now their art is invalid”.

So, what’s the overall attitude? Like, art isn’t related to morality generally, but there’s some mysterious line where if it’s crossed art moves into the “forbidden zone”?

I’m all for calling bad people to account for their moral behaviour, but the way we do it in art is so jumbled and inconsistent.