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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You're blatantly conflating the sudden energy supply crisis in Europe with the overall concept of humanity weaning itself off of fossil fuel use (read:
burning fossil fuels) over the next 30 years. In the very article you posted it LITERALLY SAYS that Moscow cutting off supply to Europe is what's causing the sudden supply crunch.
Germany's decision to shut down its nuclear plants was silly, I'll agree with you there. But I shake my head at your attempt to use what's happening in Europe as some kind of smoking gun example of why environmentalists are wrong, or why we shouldn't be moving as quickly as we feasibly can toward a clean energy future.
The idea here is to stop burning fossil fuels
when we are ready to do so. We obviously aren't at this particular moment. That day will eventually come, and we ought to do what we can to make that day come as soon as possible.
So to answer your question, I'd be happy to see carbon pricing implemented in every G20 country, and increased in places where it's already implemented, including here in Canada. I already live a low consumption lifestyle compared to most middle class people. I avoid restaurants except for very rare occassions, and I avoid buying new things except when absolutely necessary. My vehicle trips are limited to very short trips to the grocery store about twice a month.
Being a fan of the local sports teams makes me a hypocrite, sure. But the day will come, hopefully soon, when airplanes are powered by non-fossil-fuel energy sources.