subtenante

Not to be pedantic, but Stoics do not attach to health either. Only virtue.

Markets won't solve anything. We are talking about the see "contaminating" very large areas of arable land with brackish water, lowering fresh water supplies and preventing to cultivate a lot of what is currently done.

We have picked ourselves up, precisely, by using fossil energies, the ones that are causing the current troubles, and the ones that are getting less and less available. What will happen in the future can not be inferred by how we managed in the past to get where we are ; I have no doubt that humanity will survive the collapse of our societies, but there is no possible way to know where the equilibrium will be restored in terms of number of individuals on the planet once the stress on fossil fuels is too big. It may be anywhere between where we are now and the hundred millions, combined to a dramatic lowering of the life expectancy.

So, electricity. So, coal?

You can paste snapshots / screenshots. With mezer tools, I can do a quick Win S, two clicks, one paste, copy/paste the URL and you get https://ctxt.io/2/AAAA4MNyFw .

I am trying to provide context regarding the whole problem. Besides, the guy I talked about uses heavy technology whenever he can (he needs special equipment to take macro pictures of bugs, he needs social interaction with other people in local vicinity spotting larvae of a pest, he needs way to statistically test land lots, he needs ways to measure sun exposition and time, etc.) ; the last thing he needs is robots doing his job though.

And every question is as loaded with philosophy as any of its answers. :)

Agriculture in our age must shift from productivity first to sustainability first, because we are running out of fossil energy allowing to produce most of the fertilizers, and we have already killed our soil with it. A farm involving a lot of machines (i.e. a lot of need for energy) might not be the way to go in order to keep the agricultural system stable. The most you ask from the soil, the poorer it gets, and then you have to dump fertilizer to keep some level productivity.

We have created flawed models of what was good for productivity. I work with a guy very invested in research on olive growing (here in the south of France), he's achieving results believed to be impossible by many agricultural researchers. His method is entirely organic, shifted towards correct use of pollination, cross breeding and a lot of care, the kind of which automated sensors remain lacking of. From what he told me, he's able to develop the root system of an olive tree ~4 times as fast as researchers using what is believed to be optimal conditions.

We already have excellent robots able to take care of farms, they're called humans. Farming is a very noble activity and instead of less farmers, we need more, with more time to study the impact of pollinizers on their crops, how to deal with the new pollinizers they'll get due to climate change, etc. All of which can't be done unless we re-humanize farm work.

Hydrocarbons are useless without an oxydant.

Forrester was himself very involved in the Meadows report. Forrester wrote "World dynamics" which is the system dynamics basis for the Meadows report.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World3

> As wonderful as they are, the fact that languages like Python, Perl, Ruby, JavaScript, etc. require having the runtime bundled up with them makes just shipping a tool a lot harder

Not true for js on Windows, though. Windows runs JScript natively (same language as JavaScript, only a different name).

I'm glad I encountered a honesty oracle!

Sure, it does not cost much to say that. Cost and risks are a relative thing, and 'through the roof' is subjective. You have to compare with the other possibilities. No energy is clean. With PV, the cost of treatment of wastes (silicon tetrachoride for instance[1]) and the risks associated with their pollution if not treated are also a problem, especially if we want to make PV substantially more used than it is now in proportion.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03...

There are other designs. Molten salts for instances, still promising.

> Cost

I'm interested in seeing data backing this. It is taking real wind turbines/PV panels lifetime and real production? Nuclear reactors have a lifetime of 60 years, wind turbines/PV panels less than that.

> Security

Some GenIV reactor designs also should be helping with that.

No no no. She's not freaked at by the rats at all, but by the kids! That's why she lets the rats pick them up.

> "They totally freak me out," says Courtney Bledsoe, as she sees a rat dart across the street while picking up her son at a Lincoln Park preschool.

And we're having rats picking up children at school, now.

Previously:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11608100

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11588698

Not sure. PV generated electricity is around one percent worldwide. CH4 and coal thermal stations have the lowest investment price per kW, so booming economies won't invest massively in PV until CH4 and coal get very expensive. Add to that that PV is very dependent on geography and does not work at night, to make it more than a day peak adjustment you have to also invest in batteries that cost even more carbon-wise.

True, that depends on the country where the PV panel is installed. The original argument was probably made for France where electricity is very low on carbon.

Don't have the details of the study, it was from an informal evaluation from Jean-Marc Jancovici, a well known (in France) climate/energy specialist. A similar argument is made here:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/solar/solar-energy-isnt-...

Related quote: "If the photovoltaic panels made in China were installed in China, the high carbon intensity of the energy used and that of the energy saved would cancel each other out, and the time needed to counterbalance greenhouse-gas emissions during manufacture would be the same as the energy-payback time. But that’s not what’s been happening lately. The manufacturing is mostly located in China, and the panels are often installed in Europe or the United States. At double the carbon intensity, it takes twice as long to compensate for the greenhouse-gas emissions as it does to pay back the energy investments."

Chinese PV are made in a country where electrcity is mainly produced with coal. All construction carbon emission taken into acount, they need around 30 years of use to get carbon neutral, generally more than their expected life time. This is not sustainable at all yet.

> The only solution to this problem is technology.

Or taxes.