The Sixth Great Mass Extinction
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@AyGeePlus said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
IRRS that it's a function of the value of labor.
Yes. Productivity, skill required, etc.
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@AyGeePlus said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
IRRS that it's a function of the value of labor.
That's part. So are education levels and social attitudes. Yes, they can't be disentangled from each other.
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@flabdablet said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
the problem of relentless human destruction of our own living spaces
I love reading shit by ignoramuses who don't know that, for example, the US has more forested land than it did a hundred years ago. Who pollutes the most these days? By far, the totalitarian governments of Russia and China that so many liberals want to emulate. Meanwhile the US gets cleaner every year, to where we're approaching overdoing it.
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@FrostCat said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
the US gets cleaner every year
That's mainly due to having offshored most of your manufacturing industries. The US remains the largest market for consumer goods in the world, which makes the US population responsible for more industrial pollution and land degradation than any other.
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@flabdablet said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
The US remains the largest market for consumer goods in the world, which makes the US population responsible for more industrial pollution and land degradation than any other.
Nonsense. Nobody's forcing the Chinese (for example) to make stuff in such polluting ways.
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@FrostCat said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
Nobody's forcing the Chinese (for example) to make stuff in such polluting ways.
And they're cleaning up their act. Long way to go there still I'd guess, but they do seem to be trying to sort their stuff out.
Electricity generation from low-grade coal is a big source of pollution in many countries (including both the US and China as well as quite a bit of the EU still) but that's changing. Another big source of pollution is transport; again that's improving on a per vehicle basis worldwide though I expect China to continue to have problems there for a while because of the demographic shift they're undergoing (lots of urbanisation).
Also, you've got several different types of pollution. Stuff like soot works differently on a global level to SO2 and NOx, and those are different again from CO2 and CH4…
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@dkf said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
Electricity generation from low-grade coal is a big source of pollution in many countries
The surprising thing is how fast the environment recovers. A day or so after the great Northeast blackout of 2003, air pollution levels dropped about 90%. Every time a coal plant's replaced with a gas one, the atmosphere gets cleaner.
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@FrostCat said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
The surprising thing is how fast the environment recovers.
That's mostly the truth. The only real problem with CO2 is that it takes quite a long time to absorb it and convert it into carbonate rocks. That's its eventual destination, but it will hang around a long time before then. Heavy metals pollution can also be a problem; they really are that toxic…
For everything else, it's very close to just a matter of GTFO of the way of nature and stop making the crap and things will sort themselves out in a few decades.