Quote:
Originally Posted by Leondros
So as a bit of a side discussion - what is a reasonable level of sacrifice we should accept in order to get emissions down?
North Americans have the highest environmental impact of anywhere else in the world. This is driven by the requirement to fly across the country, requirement to drive given the layout of our cities, the requirement to road trip to get anywhere, the use of huge SUVs to carry our stuff, and our infrastructure is by far the largest. Hell, even look at our sports, we artificially create ice in warm climates, we have grass for sports like baseball and football, and we have air conditioning in huge arenas, and stadiums - not to mention our conference spaces.
Today the WSJ posted an article covering the huge protests going on in France right now.
Now, MathGod seems to want to use the argument that the Ukraine/Russia war is the culprit. Which according to every energy expert I have listened to is rubish. The Ukraine/Russia war may have accelerated some of the energy issues by 2 - 3 years however we were going to face this problem regardless. You cannot take down your base load power such as nuclear, and restrict the associated capital required to keep natural gas out of the ground and not face these issues. The supply crunch was inevitable and was almost entirely due to the ESG movement. We had activist investors changing company's capital plans from within, we had regulatory hamstringing development projects, and we had capital dry up for the industry as a whole restricting production. Just look at what happened to the US, a few years ago they were a net energy exporter, now they are back to an importer. This is what happens when you stop spending money!
Assuming this spending is not replaced and supply is capped for the next decade there will continue to be a deficit. The only other controllable variable will be demand. So that's back to the question - what are you willing to give up to curtail your demand? Especially being in North America where your footprint is already the worst percentile. Or do you refuse to give anything up that impacts your quality of life and end up protesting like 100,000 French who just realized how important Energy is to their daily lives?
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Speaking for myself, I eat a relatively local, mostly vegetarian diet. We cook the majority of our own meals and go out to restaurants once every other month. I live within walking or biking distance to any store that I need to sustain myself and as a result, I drive my car like once a month. If I travel internationally, its once every 5-10 years. My hobbies and activities are generally free and carbon neutral once you have the things for it (cycling, reading books from the library, playing guitar/painting)
It's probably not a lifestyle most of western society would feel comfortable with, but it satisfies me and makes me fulfilled. Even the relatively simple life I try to lead is still orders of magnitude more luxurious than the vast majority of humans who have ever lived, going back hundreds of thousands of years. I did have to drive my car last night to take my wife to an appointment at the hospital, and while driving on deerfoot I saw a gigantic flames logo on the side of a building downtown from glenmore and couldn't help but think: why is this necessary? When we talk about reducing our carbon footprint as a species, how many giant displays of the flames logo on the side of a skyscraper for a few hours are there out there that artificially drive up our energy consumption as a species? People need electricity to their homes, but stuff like that is not really required for the human experience and that's just one thing that's innocuous but adds to the problem