temsa1
The only thing for this kind of issue that has proved efficient historically is massive non violent protesting ( that is what Extinction Rebellion, aka XR, does ), with people landing in prison...
As for trying to provide policies, we should, like any problem, have a look at the stats to prioritize, and aim at better rather than worse, we're already at risk of hitting up to +26°C in 2026 if unlucky and not doing something, hard.
Fossil fuel out phasing is not simple to address, so we should limit it as much as possible while scaling alternatives. It also means that anything producing fossil fuels or ( CO2 ) should not be able to give any kind of money or service to any kind of politicians, to avoid conflicts of interests. Scaling alternatives (e.g. solar, wind, energy storage) means a lot of new buildings, and building something using portland concrete does create a lot of CO2.
Portland concrete is already the second more polluting stuff yearly on the planet after fossil fuels. Scalable and carbon negative ( actuaally removing CO2 from air) alternatives do exist to Portland concrete:
- MgO based concrete is carbon dioxide producing at first, but even more carbon dioxide absorbing during the 6 first months. It can be even be made from sea water, and was used by Romans and Egyptians in stuff still standing today. It can be 700 times stronger than usual concrete, dry even in wet climate, and doesn't need metal structure to be mechanically good, you can just use wood or plant fibers instead.
- wood is of course one of the best alternative should it come from actually sustainable and renewable source, and if well integrated with nature, which is a challenge and where there is already a ton of abuse.
So as a politician, the first and best measure that is needed is to phase out Portland concrete as quick as possible ( e.g. in about 2 years ). Carbon Tax ( with NO exception to it) and subvention should help, probably a lot of control is also needed to avoid harming ( too much? ) nature because every massive and quick change we do is likely to harm and destroy nature.
Regarding energy, nothing is simple, yet we have to find solutions to phase out oil/ gas/coal based as quickly as possible
- oil/gas/coal should be forbidden to search for more, as using already what we have access to is more than enough to kill us all.
- ( small ? ) nuclear is one of the best short term option despite all the cons everyone knows about it ( including needing a lot of water to cool down, which is unlikely sustainable. But we need to build a bunch of them, and it is dangerous.
- solar means a lot of concrete, land use and planet albedo change ( except offshore ), plus the solar panels themselves are essentially China based, and using rare earth elements, which is not good for scaling. It also needs to deploy very fast, we should probably deploy 1 every day for dozen of years, or maybe more to be faster and avoid risks. It also means we have to efficiently store the energy to be able to use it during the night.
- offshore wind is not bad, though like solar, it means energy storage. Onshore actually kills birds, which is not good ( plus it uses quite some land )
- Energy storage is also quite a problem:
* Li-ion batteries are not really sustainable, are not really recycled yet, and rely on rare earth element, plus they aren't really safe either.
* Blue solution's (aka Bollore) ones are a lot better, as they provide more cycles and don't use ( much?) rare earth elements, though they are only good to store energy for at most a day
* Nawa ones would also be quite good, as they can be charged and discharged a lot faster than li-ion or BS ones, plus have a lifetime of millions of cycles, plus they are carbon based, which is really great (and they designed that to be great regarding CO2), though can hardly store energy for more than a day. As cells, they should be on the market in a few months, but there is no utility offers around it yet AFAIK.
* multi lake/Dam energy storage ( with an upper and lower lake, and a pump in between) is not that good, as it indirectly produces a lot of Methane and should be improved to avoid that, or phased out.
Ideally to build what is needed regarding energy we should only use carbon negative technologies, and replace phased out plants with something locally integrated, probably something like a Permaculture inspired forest would be good.
Regarding transports:
- we should not allow airports to grow, and only allow flights short term to cross oceans. It also means building new infrastructures everywhere to compensate.
- Train should probably be only electric, and subsidized somehow. Research should go into making it more efficient and faster.
- Electric cars are also a must, though the battery technology has to change, quickly.
- A new generation of Ekranoplans should also be a good solution to replace planes to cross oceans and seas, while using less energy ( and maybe be electric? ), but can't probably be achieved quickly.
Cotton and synthetic fabrics, plus leathet based products should probably be phased out, and you should have a multi year warranty on clothes you buy, or you should 'rent' them to get a good incentive for durability instead of the current fast fashion harming nature, using a lot of water, and producing CO2
All the public research we do worldwide should be focused on the sole problem of climate crisis and survival, or get no funding ( I know it is tough, and maybe reducing but I see no better option )
We should also give people help and incentives to move to more suitable locations regarding climate crisis and new transportation constraints.
We should test and see if the policies are able to provide decorrelation between economic growth and CO2e growth, and if not, look hard at a sustainable way to un-grow economically to save ourselves.
As all of this must be made at an global scale, the biggest economic powers should show the example as fast as possible, and be ready for war with countries not following.
Nothing easy in there, though I see no escape from it
I think (we could actually check Mozilla meetings notes to know for sure) that :
- They saw that mobile web/internet would be where most of the traffic in some years. - They saw most of the mobile internet was webkit prefix specific. - They also saw they would not be able to provide Firefox by default on most phones, and people were unlikely to change the default browser. - They finally saw that internet was moving to use "apps" in walled garden silos platform control by 2 companies (3 if you account for MS) instead of an open specced web.
They started FirefoxOS to provide an alternative option to users when buying a phone that is focussed, streamlined and was fulfilling Mozilla mission in providing a better open web.
FirefoxOS 1.0 was a basic smartphone OS really great for a grandpa moving to a smartphone. I could not tell such a thing for the Samsung Galaxy S3 The latter the versions, the better the features. Last FFOS version before being killed was actually fcking awesome (not perfect yet but it was close to be able to,some more month and that would be it) thanks to the webextensions being implemented OS wide. This puts the (power) user in control, really.
I found this enough appealing ( also after I've done some small web apps and deployed them to my FFOS phone, it was just sooooo simple) to look for a big and hopefully powerful phone (I just had this toy FFOS for less than 50EUR) with the latest FFOS on it, instead of my android phones I had since the G1. But they killed FFOS right when I was searching for this next phone. I was ready to pave the way and really write the apps (and/or webextensions) I was not finding yet to my tastes for a primary phone, it was not that hard, actually really easy for a web developer compared to even any webview based app. I was even OK to write my own keyboard for matching my expectations regarding it( not that the original was really bad, but it was no great either, but for the multiple keyboard switch system). I was eager to try to write the code (and waiting for the API on bluetooth was complete enough ) for conversing with my bluetooth devices ( including my Pebble ), and I was happy any website could actually do it once a simple JS lib published on npm would do the hard part of the job.
But when they saw the market for small priced device was invaded by Android devices because the cheap phones spec became good enough, they knew their inteneded market was never getting grounds, so they stopped it. In fact, once at this point they should have IMO switched and target the middle-high end power user, which would have gave them a new kind of influence, and access to actual hacker needing apps and able to write them.
But this was not that much an option as they wanted to get rid of the way they were financed at 90% by Google, in order not to be locked by it, notably to be able to focus on privacy like they did since (and containers are fcking awesome, thanks guys :), I have my own walled garden for you, web, I the user ! ), and they would likely lack of money to do this switch and the needed deals to achieve that.
My usage of tabs is pretty intensive, I guess. I use them like temporary bookmarks I have to have a look at, and/or to find things very quickly (thanks to the tab search).
The week before Christmas, before I decided to nuke all my tabs for the holidays, my work computer's Firefox Nightly was handling more than 500 tabs (despite regular cleaning). Just even try to get 100 random page tabs in Chrome, if you can. If you are just able to, I'd say you have a pretty good amount of RAM.
After a few days back to work, and still careful cleaning, I currently hold 61 tabs on this browser on macos, more than 400 on my own linux laptop, more than 50 on my mobile nightly (and a dozen of addons on it at least, where do I get that on Chrome ?).
Oh and well Firefox containers are also pretty awesome, I currently use in this browser 4 browsing context together in just this serie of 30 tabs (I use a panorama-like addon to have it back to manage more tabs)
I generally avoid apps if I can (not only for some obvious reason, but moreover because my current cheap motorola android phone only allows to install new apps if I uninstall other ones, because you know I only have 200MB free, even if this is a small app...) and I stay on the web version of the mobile service, currently the "install my app" on every website (often on every page of it, despite having addons to nuke those banners) is pretty terrible, and it bothers me quite a lot, enough for me to drop visiting/using some service apps
I have a weekly hangouts for my work, and google decides it needs a dedicated plugin for FF, not for Chrome. If I go instead on talky.io for example for the same call, I actually have a better video experience than hangouts on both firefox+plugin (which can be sluggish, hello stupid plugin !) and Chrome.
When I do any search on Google ( rarely happens now, partly because of this, I'm using most of the time duckduckgo ) Google tells me to install Chrome to have a better experience...
When I open Gmail, it tells me in FF that it needs a plugin for running hangouts text discussion ( but behaves ok without it). Did google have no engineer in the last 10 years for needing a plugin for IM ? Seriously ?
When I click on the call button of Slack (the website, not the app, hello Slack, you cost me 10 time less memory for my 5 Slacks if I'm using FF tabs instead of your dedicated Chrome based app !!), it tells me "Please switch to Chrome".
Yes this 2014 post is fcking right, we're back to IE6 stage, but know your true OS (the web) is controlled (not totally, but still a lot) by Google, whereas Microsoft could never make it with MSN ( I mean before MSN was an IM service, at the start it was an alternative web owned by Microsoft), so at some point IE6 was still better than current situation
Oh, BTW, My ZTE open C using latest version of FirefoxOS was fcking awesome (despite its bad screen and its worse camera), came from ok to good to awesome when I decided to updated regularly to the latest version of FirefoxOS. Performance was so great with this bad hardware I was just baffled(even webgl games worked pretty well). Some little stalls apart, really understandable given the hardware, it was almost as good as my 10 time more expensive Samsung with 10 time more memory, lot better cpu and gpu. This little phone became awesome only when Mozilla implemented the Webextensions standard in FFOS : you could easily write OS-wide extensions ( like ad-blocking... yes OS wide adblocking would have been really easy, but in general it was meaning total user control over the phone thanks to third party developers).
When they announced they'll stop working on FirefoxOS (for phones at the time) -- and they had reasons to do it -- I was having at least 40 tabs open to try finding a better phone I could buy with FFOS, or at least on which I could deploy FFOS on it with an actually good hardware ( notably a better camera, better screen and bigger, and some more CPU/ram to see where it could compare to my android with the same kind of hardware ). I never bought that first power user phone I dreamt of, and I really think it would have become my main phone, not a secondary one like my "toy" ZTE open C