Heat doesn’t go up. Hot air rises because it’s less dense than cold air. You know what’s less dense than hot air though? Vacuum. That’s a good thing, though, because we don’t want to be hemorrhaging atmosphere.

Even if we could build a physical heat sink sticking out of the atmosphere somehow, it would be less protected from solar radiation than anything inside the atmosphere, so if it were facing the sun it probably wouldn’t work.

Even if we had the resources and like, enough readily available materials on Earth to make some sort of retractable heat sink sticking out of the night-side of the planet, it’d probably require more energy consumption to create than would be worth it.

Probably the best way to cool things down is to quit burning so much shit and quit knocking forests down.

I love reading, but the moment an author tries to guilt me into reading their particular viewpoint as though I’m just a slave of the system if I don’t, I check out. I have better things to do, and this person doesn’t have any right to my time.

A fifteen year old version of myself somewhere inside just screamed in iptscrae induced frustration.

You know, there’s a discordian game that seems pretty appropriate right now.

I honestly can’t stand slowly scrolling and waiting for the text to appear. What a terrible design choice.

Can we start archiving stuff somewhere that doesn’t block firefox?

Have you ever experienced actual snow? Like, four feet deep with a frozen crust on top? You’re not plowing that with your feet.

They won’t if you get rid of cars. Good luck plowing with a bike.

Skis would probably be more reasonable at certain times of year, but the terrain between cities isn’t exactly designed for skiing.

I know you want American infrastructure to not necessitate some sort of vehicle bigger than a bike, but it literally just does. Wanting it won’t make the change, and making unrealistic suggestions will remain just as ineffective as making no suggestions at all.

Accessibility is also more or less non-existent with these proposed solutions.

If you tried to bike in heavy snow here your entire tire would literally be buried. Especially if there were no plows.

There are, in fact, places that get real snow.

There’s some good information in this article, but I would have appreciated it being a little less of an ad for a podcast.

The title implies that we’re going to hear from scientists about their opinions, but all we actually get in its body is a single quote from one scientist as the literal tagline. Talk about clickbait.

In some places. But if you’re in a non-metropolitan area somewhere that it gets cold and snowy, you’re going to need a vehicle to bring you directly to your house unless maybe you’re downtown, and it’s going to need to have four wheel drive or at least enough weight to grip the snow.

I just want to, for a moment, shed some light on the mental disconnect here for Ms. Clifford.

This is a person who literally ran CNBC’s climate change desk. She is, then, ostensibly aware of all the same information any of the rest of us have about climate change.

And yet, she seems to think we can somehow have a world where everybody can casually fly to Istanbul or some other place they’ve never been every single year, and that’ll be sustainable. Or if she doesn’t think it’s sustainable, she’s still totally fine using her own financial position to do it anyway.

If this is how people who actually focus their careers on climate change think, we’re pretty fucked.

Have you not seen like, housing projects? High rises? Run down old apartments? Everybody who doesn’t have the kind of money you do doesn’t live like they do anyway. Like, in terms of transportation, I spend my whole work day driving people around who don’t really have the money to spend on a cab but have the money to spend on a car even less.

That doesn’t mean they manage to pretend they’re rich anyway, it means they make sacrifices you’ve probably never once in your life had to think about.

When they do splurge to make themselves briefly comfortable, it’s at the cost of more sacrifices that you don’t have to deal with anymore if you ever did. And then they get to deal with people rolling their eyes about how financially irresponsible they are.

Meanwhile the same people who make six figures are literally relying on people who make minimum wage in order to make their own lives convenient. And yet somehow that’s supposed to end up with everyone magically living like you?

You live in a fantasy world. Not everybody has the time or the money to prioritize spending several hours cooking. Not everybody is left with enough energy by the end of their minimum wage no benefit grind of a day that you expect them to tolerate in order to sustain your hunger for little conveniences like places to go buy fresh food to cook for your family.

Kinda sounds like you’re rich. I’m definitely not.

Wanna help? I can probably make an amount of money that you barely sneeze at go absurdly far.

What game?

I mean, isn’t the point of this article that they won’t stay that way?

Humans alter the landscape, but when nature takes it back why take away what it’s making use of?

Why does everything have to be for us?

The big difference there is that you can make biodiesel from an extremely common waste product (grease) in your back yard. Grease cars are very DIY, whereas oil mining operations really aren’t.

As far as the amount of oil we use currently, a lot of that is going to be related to the unnecessary infrastructure of social hierarchy. Consider, for a moment, remote work. Employers who run offices tend to want their employees to come into the office every day, which leads to millions of people commuting on a daily basis. Not only do they have to burn the fuel required to move their cars from point A to point B, but they’re stuck in traffic so they’re constantly wasting momentum (and thus fuel) by braking and idling.

Pivoting to the office itself, now you’ve got a bunch of people hanging out in a big open space that needs to be climate controlled. Often this space has massive, bare windows, which isn’t fantastic for heating efficiency. Offices aren’t really built for efficient human habitation.

When people refuse to come back to the office, switching jobs or retiring early, they’re helping to make things more efficienct by taking power away from the points where it’s concentrated. Flattening out the hierarchy is better for all of us and better for the planet.

Centralized hierarchies really just take the work that’s being done by much smaller groups of workers and claim credit for it while imposing an unnecessary organizational infrastructure over the top of them and taking the value of their labor. If you work at a corporate restaurant the food you’re selling isn’t prepared by some huge corporate infrastructure, it’s prepared by the people who work in the restaurant. If they weren’t getting their supplies from the company that owns the place, they’d be getting it elsewhere.

These sources of collected power want us to think we need them. They want us to think that because their name or their logo is on the side of a building they’re the reason anything gets done. But the reality is that it’s the people actually doing the work, and they often don’t really need someone telling them how to do it from up on high.

I’d argue that it’s a bigger problem when assholes are able to take over the positions of power they’re typically attracted to and make the lives of others miserable. I’d much rather assholes just be, like, kinda uncooperative but no more influential than anyone else.

I definitely think a lot of the inefficiencies that make people think we ‘need’ capitalism are caused by capitalism itself. People see these huge infrastructures and assume they’re necessary when they may well be so cumbersome that they detract from getting their stated task accomplished more than they contribute to it. Someone made a comment elsewhere about how much unnecessary management we have in our society, and I honestly think that’s a major component.

Work goes so much better when there isn’t someone breathing down your neck. Just a bunch of useless people lording over everyone for no reason and we waste sooo much time, effort, and resources on them.