It would be quite rich for Greenpeace to position themselves as "enlightened centrists" willing to sell & promote fossil fuels on the VERY flawed assumption that biofuels are a) feasible and b) a meaningful improvement, while on the other hand being uncompromisingly hardline anti-nuclear and being at the heart of the plan to shut down existing power plants based on nothing more than their dogmatic beliefs.
If a rando energy provider sells fossil fuels, I don't care. They're just playing by the byzantine economic incentives set by the EU in an amoral capitalistic way. When Greenpeace does it, it is inherently a political statement and so deeply hypocritical that the only rational explanation is that they are deeply corrupt and/or profoundly stupid. Which would not matter if they weren't, ideologically and politically, strongly influential on European environmentalist activism and policy.
Biogas and hydrogen are both greenwashing products. Neither is better than electric alternatives where they are being sold. They have major major flaws that the fossil fuel industry (y'know, the one selling both of those products) won't advertise to you:
Biogas is derived from agricultural products. All the agricultural waste we produce can't cover a meaningful part of even just our heating needs. This inevitably leads to a major misincentive to grow crops just to turn into methane, like we are doing with bioethanol, which has catastrophic land-use and environmental impacts.
Hydrogen is very inefficient to produce. Most often produced with gas (lol), but even if produced through electrolysis it's less efficient to have a double conversion than just use the electricity directly. It is also very hard to store/transport safely and efficiently.
Regardless of any of the above, heat pumps have a COP of 3-5. A boiler has a COP of 1. I don't care how clean your fuel is, it will always be more efficient to burn it in a regular power plant to power a heat pump than to burn it in a boiler.
And even if the above wasn't true and biogas was awesome (it's awful), the simple fact that they are selling trace amounts in order to promote fossil gas as their main product is an obvious act of greenwashing unto itself.
Greenpeace knows all of the above very well. I can't say for sure that they are corrupt and bought out by the fossil fuel industry. All I can say is that I don't have a better explanation for their stupidity.
Greenpeace Energy sells fossil fuels while fighting nuclear power. After it became a scandal, Greenpeace officially divested and changed the name but they still share the same office building in Hamburg so I think it's more than fair to say they are strongly ideologically aligned.
I'm sure on paper they would rather renewable than fossil, but they clearly are willing to compromise with them, unlike with nuclear. When they combine forces with the openly pro-fossil fuel lobby right wing, you get the exact mess Germany is in: inexcusably high reliance on gas and a consistently worst-in-class CO2 footprint per kWh for Western Europe.
Yes, I'm extremely bitter about this. The environmentalist political class being unyielding on nuclear but soft on gas set us back more than a decade with the green transition.
Oh boohoo. Chocolate will be more expensive for westerners. Cry me a river.
What the discussion was centered on is famine. Actual famine. Which will only affect poor countries and will kill millions. Whether or not individual Canadians stockpile grains in their basement (OP's actual suggestion) has literally no bearing on anyone's food security.
I'm sorry but I just can't equate the economic struggle of a few more percent of inflation for mostly middle-class westerners with that of Global South subsistence farmers who are actually going to have to find out how far they can stretch out a grain silo or a fertilizer bag.
Both your examples are pre Haber-Bosch. Not that it entirely invalidates your point, but daily calorie consumption for a Westerner is orders of magnitude cheaper than it was for a Victorian coal miner. In fact what we generally struggle with nowadays in rich countries is an overabundance of (poor quality) food.
It's not out of the question for poor people to lack calories in rich countries, but that's a monumental policy failure. And critically it happens to socioeconomic classes that have neither the time nor the land area to dedicate to things like doomsday prepping (i.e. poor and marginalized communities in urban areas). The only solution to food insecurity is social programs, not doomsday prepping or grain hoarding.
This will only affect poor countries. Rich, industrialized countries have more than enough capacity to make or buy their own fertilizer. Yes prices will go up again, but it's an economics issue, not anything close to an existential threat. There is simply more than enough calorie production for everyone even with strong perturbations in global shipping. Fertilizer is only a marginal use for methane in terms of volume.
If you live in a poor country however, things are a lot more dire. The price of fertilizer is indexed on the price of gas, of which there is still enough for everyone; but your country will be competing with AI datacenters for the fucking stuff which means millions will have to die so Musk can continue to jerk it to AI child porn.
It's not a gas pricing issue, it's a wealth hoarding issue compounded by the aimless crusade of a demented manlet commanded by religious fanatics.
Gardening and foraging won't get you anywhere if you live in an urban area. You need an absurd amount of arable land per capita if you want to survive. A vegetable garden is useful in times of war not for raw calorie input but for supplements (either for specific nutrients not commonly found in rationed food supply or for taste).
The good news is that food production is a "solved" issue. Any industrialized country is capable of producing enough calories to feed itself and then some, even without gas imports. Worst case you just stop growing bioethanol and beef to double the amount of available arable land at no tangible human cost.
Those who'll get fucked by Trump's war are not Americans or Europeans, it'll be poor economies that can barely support industrial agriculture in the best of times. Their ability to buy fertilizer is very price-sensitive, which we already saw in 2022, though at the time the US had leadership willing to intercede and guarantee grain shipments.
This time, millions will die, but not in a prepper fantasy kind of way, but in a "they live in a 'shithole country' and we won't care to help because our money finances ICE and bribes now" kind of way.
You seem to be assuming that continents are defined based on plate tectonics? Which they definitely aren't since they predate our understanding of plate tectonics by centuries.
Yes it's a flawed system. In particular it's Europe-centric and kind of breaks down with Asia's borders with Europe and Oceania being relatively arbitrary. But trying to retroactively make it fit some kind of "objective" definition is IMO the wrong approach. We don't need the 5-ish continents to be "fixed" because their definition is unserious and of little consequence. As long as we're cognizant we can just move on with our lives and use more precise descriptors (e.g. "The Middle East") when needed.
As opposed to the traditional catholic values of murdering brown people, burning apostates, progroming Jews, policing every aspect of sexuality, and most importantly enforcing a rigid belief in social hierarchy and the divine rights of nobility?
This is not a humanitarian or ethics question. The rules of nuclear warfare aren't governed by morality but by game theory. From Israel's perspective nuclear weapons are a last resort for the reasons I outlined. Their leadership and military may be genocidal, but they still have a sense of self-preservation and act somewhat rationally – which you will notice is not at all the same thing as acting morally or honestly. Using nuclear weapons is simply not a tactically rational option for them even if when their explicit goal is genocidal imperialism.
What's scary about Trump is that none of this applies to him. He is not a rational actor and he does not have everything to lose were he to launch a nuclear strike against Iran.
In every configuration, every lighting condition, every monitor, every color manipulation, I see that picture as white and gold. Not once have I managed to see the blue dress, except in separate pictures of the same dress.
I understand the actual dress is blue and I understand the color theory, but even with the picture very heavily tinted blue my brain still interprets the dress to be in shadow and therefore white.
So that's making a very critical assumption: that Israel's territory is being existentially threatened. Iran simply does not have the military capability to do that. And Hamas/Hezbollah is not an existential threat to Israel's existence despite propaganda to the contrary. We've already seen the full extent of their military capabilities.
The Samson Option is a one time, last-resort deterrence option for when all other defensive and offensive mechanisms have failed. Israel's small size and geopolitical situation basically requires such deterrence against a neighbor who might decide to blitzkrieg into Tel Aviv. Iran simply does not possess that capability.
If Netanyahu pops a nuke for any other reason, he fundamentally shifts his neighbors' calculus in favor of uniting and attacking Israel because nukes are explicitly not a last resort anymore, therefore Israel becomes an immediate existential threat to all its neighbors that must be dealt with accordingly.
That's the thing with nuclear deterrence: it works, but only if your enemies are clear on the lines they can't cross. Otherwise you're just a threat to be eliminated. And ultimately there's only so much that propaganda can help with there. Israel may have convinced a majority of their citizens that genocide is good, but they can't propagandize their enemies into believing that preemptive nuclear strikes are necessary. Netanyahu can whine about Iran's nuclear program all he wants, none of his enemies seriously believe they are close to having nukes.
Using nuclear weapons as anything but a last resort is therefore an awful gamble that very significantly (if not entirely) weakens nuclear deterrence... All for relatively little military gain. There's very little a nuke would do that Israel can't do to Iran with conventional weapons. While there's a whole lot that nukes don't do to a prepared enemy with spread out military and command infrastructure.
Didn't independent analysis show that they had awful LODs and such on release, causing massive performance loss? Maybe Unity was supposed to automagically take care of that, but if it didn't work, doing the work manually was always an option. They just chose not to.
If your game's broke, don't release it. That's like a carpenter blaming his tools for a slanted kitchen cabinet. I don't care if your saw blade had a manufacturing defect, take it back and fix it!
It'd be a case study in what not to do if publishers didn't make that same mistake over and over again. There is such a thing as unacceptably poor performance and fixing it cannot possibly be more expensive than lost sales revenue.
That's the point, I can't see how it would help Netanyahu with self-preservation. Going nuclear would be unpopular and ineffective as Israelis understand that their arsenal is more effective in a "will they won't they" deterrence capacity. He wants constant war and doesn't need nukes to get it.
Now what he might do is convince Trump to send nukes and pretend he had nothing to do with it. It's not like Trump is hard to manipulate and Miller probably loves the idea to begin with.
Nuclear weapons are great at leveling cities, but not so great at destroying military infrastructure. On a per-dollar basis they actually kind of suck as weapons of war. From a purely rational strategic perspective, they're most useful as a deterrent (which is how Israel has been using them). Netanyahu is an imperialist genocidal maniac but he's not dumb.
Whereas if and when Trump does get his wish to pop a nuke, it won't be for strategic gain but because he just couldn't be restrained anymore. This absolute moron wanted to nuke a fucking hurricane FFS. It's only a matter of time before he gets his wish since the US military has lost all ability to tell him no.
Thinning hair is fine and mocking someone for it is mean and unhelpful, and body positivity is being cool if someone decides to stick with it. However it's not contradictory to say "given your situation you would look better bald tho".
A white lie is good when it's about something one can't (easily) change or when criticism is uncalled for. This is the opposite situation where the criticism is called for and the straightforward advice to go for it is cheap&easy to implement.
In fact if someone is actively seeking advice, I would argue that unconditionally saying "you look great don't change anything" is a form of toxic positivity.
It's way worse. They don't ban you and they don't delete your content. TikTok ads don't pay enough that demonetization is a concern either.
The algorithm just silently (!) deranks your content. They don't have guidelines, they don't have feedback, they will never communicate on what is and is not okay to post about. You'll just say "Fuck ICE" in a video once and notice it is doing suspiciously worse than the rest, but then again, you're never quite sure why some of your videos "make it" and some don't. So maybe you're being paranoid? You can't tell.
So on top of the very real algorithmic censorship from these platforms, you've got very frequent bouts of mass psychosis where everyone self-censors for no other reason that other people are doing it and they don't want to risk it. Is the word "dead" de-ranked? Quite likely not even, but who's to say, and it doesn't cost anything to farm a little engagement in the comments by self-censoring...
Every EV can just hook up with a (mostly) passive adapter to any outlet and get a charge. It won't be fast (especially if you are cursed with a 110V outlet), but even in the boonies an overnight trickle charge will get you to the nearest fast charger. Just get the relevant adapters for your car.
This is basically what your generator would do except you want to lug it around instead of leveraging the cables that we pulled within driving distance of everywhere but the most remote trails? The whole point of electricity is its versatility and ubiquity!
FYI using a wall plug to charge an EV is a perfectly normal thing to do. For a small(ish) commute, regular 220V@10A is way more than enough to get back to full overnight. It won't give you 500 km of range, but only freaks and truckers drive 500 km every day.
Every time they add the feature, half of the product breaks. The other half start using twice as much memory and compute, somehow.
They've got a pile of technical debt disguised as a product and the development velocity of the snail as a consequence. Very typical. The real question is "why hasn't the competition eaten their lunch already".
It would be quite rich for Greenpeace to position themselves as "enlightened centrists" willing to sell & promote fossil fuels on the VERY flawed assumption that biofuels are a) feasible and b) a meaningful improvement, while on the other hand being uncompromisingly hardline anti-nuclear and being at the heart of the plan to shut down existing power plants based on nothing more than their dogmatic beliefs.
If a rando energy provider sells fossil fuels, I don't care. They're just playing by the byzantine economic incentives set by the EU in an amoral capitalistic way. When Greenpeace does it, it is inherently a political statement and so deeply hypocritical that the only rational explanation is that they are deeply corrupt and/or profoundly stupid. Which would not matter if they weren't, ideologically and politically, strongly influential on European environmentalist activism and policy.
Biogas and hydrogen are both greenwashing products. Neither is better than electric alternatives where they are being sold. They have major major flaws that the fossil fuel industry (y'know, the one selling both of those products) won't advertise to you:
And even if the above wasn't true and biogas was awesome (it's awful), the simple fact that they are selling trace amounts in order to promote fossil gas as their main product is an obvious act of greenwashing unto itself.
Greenpeace knows all of the above very well. I can't say for sure that they are corrupt and bought out by the fossil fuel industry. All I can say is that I don't have a better explanation for their stupidity.
Greenpeace Energy sells fossil fuels while fighting nuclear power. After it became a scandal, Greenpeace officially divested and changed the name but they still share the same office building in Hamburg so I think it's more than fair to say they are strongly ideologically aligned.
I'm sure on paper they would rather renewable than fossil, but they clearly are willing to compromise with them, unlike with nuclear. When they combine forces with the openly pro-fossil fuel lobby right wing, you get the exact mess Germany is in: inexcusably high reliance on gas and a consistently worst-in-class CO2 footprint per kWh for Western Europe.
Yes, I'm extremely bitter about this. The environmentalist political class being unyielding on nuclear but soft on gas set us back more than a decade with the green transition.
Oh boohoo. Chocolate will be more expensive for westerners. Cry me a river.
What the discussion was centered on is famine. Actual famine. Which will only affect poor countries and will kill millions. Whether or not individual Canadians stockpile grains in their basement (OP's actual suggestion) has literally no bearing on anyone's food security.
I'm sorry but I just can't equate the economic struggle of a few more percent of inflation for mostly middle-class westerners with that of Global South subsistence farmers who are actually going to have to find out how far they can stretch out a grain silo or a fertilizer bag.
Both your examples are pre Haber-Bosch. Not that it entirely invalidates your point, but daily calorie consumption for a Westerner is orders of magnitude cheaper than it was for a Victorian coal miner. In fact what we generally struggle with nowadays in rich countries is an overabundance of (poor quality) food.
It's not out of the question for poor people to lack calories in rich countries, but that's a monumental policy failure. And critically it happens to socioeconomic classes that have neither the time nor the land area to dedicate to things like doomsday prepping (i.e. poor and marginalized communities in urban areas). The only solution to food insecurity is social programs, not doomsday prepping or grain hoarding.
This will only affect poor countries. Rich, industrialized countries have more than enough capacity to make or buy their own fertilizer. Yes prices will go up again, but it's an economics issue, not anything close to an existential threat. There is simply more than enough calorie production for everyone even with strong perturbations in global shipping. Fertilizer is only a marginal use for methane in terms of volume.
If you live in a poor country however, things are a lot more dire. The price of fertilizer is indexed on the price of gas, of which there is still enough for everyone; but your country will be competing with AI datacenters for the fucking stuff which means millions will have to die so Musk can continue to jerk it to AI child porn.
It's not a gas pricing issue, it's a wealth hoarding issue compounded by the aimless crusade of a demented manlet commanded by religious fanatics.
Gardening and foraging won't get you anywhere if you live in an urban area. You need an absurd amount of arable land per capita if you want to survive. A vegetable garden is useful in times of war not for raw calorie input but for supplements (either for specific nutrients not commonly found in rationed food supply or for taste).
The good news is that food production is a "solved" issue. Any industrialized country is capable of producing enough calories to feed itself and then some, even without gas imports. Worst case you just stop growing bioethanol and beef to double the amount of available arable land at no tangible human cost.
Those who'll get fucked by Trump's war are not Americans or Europeans, it'll be poor economies that can barely support industrial agriculture in the best of times. Their ability to buy fertilizer is very price-sensitive, which we already saw in 2022, though at the time the US had leadership willing to intercede and guarantee grain shipments.
This time, millions will die, but not in a prepper fantasy kind of way, but in a "they live in a 'shithole country' and we won't care to help because our money finances ICE and bribes now" kind of way.
You seem to be assuming that continents are defined based on plate tectonics? Which they definitely aren't since they predate our understanding of plate tectonics by centuries.
Yes it's a flawed system. In particular it's Europe-centric and kind of breaks down with Asia's borders with Europe and Oceania being relatively arbitrary. But trying to retroactively make it fit some kind of "objective" definition is IMO the wrong approach. We don't need the 5-ish continents to be "fixed" because their definition is unserious and of little consequence. As long as we're cognizant we can just move on with our lives and use more precise descriptors (e.g. "The Middle East") when needed.
As opposed to the traditional catholic values of murdering brown people, burning apostates, progroming Jews, policing every aspect of sexuality, and most importantly enforcing a rigid belief in social hierarchy and the divine rights of nobility?
This is not a humanitarian or ethics question. The rules of nuclear warfare aren't governed by morality but by game theory. From Israel's perspective nuclear weapons are a last resort for the reasons I outlined. Their leadership and military may be genocidal, but they still have a sense of self-preservation and act somewhat rationally – which you will notice is not at all the same thing as acting morally or honestly. Using nuclear weapons is simply not a tactically rational option for them even if when their explicit goal is genocidal imperialism.
What's scary about Trump is that none of this applies to him. He is not a rational actor and he does not have everything to lose were he to launch a nuclear strike against Iran.
In every configuration, every lighting condition, every monitor, every color manipulation, I see that picture as white and gold. Not once have I managed to see the blue dress, except in separate pictures of the same dress.
I understand the actual dress is blue and I understand the color theory, but even with the picture very heavily tinted blue my brain still interprets the dress to be in shadow and therefore white.
So that's making a very critical assumption: that Israel's territory is being existentially threatened. Iran simply does not have the military capability to do that. And Hamas/Hezbollah is not an existential threat to Israel's existence despite propaganda to the contrary. We've already seen the full extent of their military capabilities.
The Samson Option is a one time, last-resort deterrence option for when all other defensive and offensive mechanisms have failed. Israel's small size and geopolitical situation basically requires such deterrence against a neighbor who might decide to blitzkrieg into Tel Aviv. Iran simply does not possess that capability.
If Netanyahu pops a nuke for any other reason, he fundamentally shifts his neighbors' calculus in favor of uniting and attacking Israel because nukes are explicitly not a last resort anymore, therefore Israel becomes an immediate existential threat to all its neighbors that must be dealt with accordingly.
That's the thing with nuclear deterrence: it works, but only if your enemies are clear on the lines they can't cross. Otherwise you're just a threat to be eliminated. And ultimately there's only so much that propaganda can help with there. Israel may have convinced a majority of their citizens that genocide is good, but they can't propagandize their enemies into believing that preemptive nuclear strikes are necessary. Netanyahu can whine about Iran's nuclear program all he wants, none of his enemies seriously believe they are close to having nukes.
Using nuclear weapons as anything but a last resort is therefore an awful gamble that very significantly (if not entirely) weakens nuclear deterrence... All for relatively little military gain. There's very little a nuke would do that Israel can't do to Iran with conventional weapons. While there's a whole lot that nukes don't do to a prepared enemy with spread out military and command infrastructure.
Didn't independent analysis show that they had awful LODs and such on release, causing massive performance loss? Maybe Unity was supposed to automagically take care of that, but if it didn't work, doing the work manually was always an option. They just chose not to.
If your game's broke, don't release it. That's like a carpenter blaming his tools for a slanted kitchen cabinet. I don't care if your saw blade had a manufacturing defect, take it back and fix it!
It'd be a case study in what not to do if publishers didn't make that same mistake over and over again. There is such a thing as unacceptably poor performance and fixing it cannot possibly be more expensive than lost sales revenue.
That's the point, I can't see how it would help Netanyahu with self-preservation. Going nuclear would be unpopular and ineffective as Israelis understand that their arsenal is more effective in a "will they won't they" deterrence capacity. He wants constant war and doesn't need nukes to get it.
Now what he might do is convince Trump to send nukes and pretend he had nothing to do with it. It's not like Trump is hard to manipulate and Miller probably loves the idea to begin with.
Nuclear weapons are great at leveling cities, but not so great at destroying military infrastructure. On a per-dollar basis they actually kind of suck as weapons of war. From a purely rational strategic perspective, they're most useful as a deterrent (which is how Israel has been using them). Netanyahu is an imperialist genocidal maniac but he's not dumb.
Whereas if and when Trump does get his wish to pop a nuke, it won't be for strategic gain but because he just couldn't be restrained anymore. This absolute moron wanted to nuke a fucking hurricane FFS. It's only a matter of time before he gets his wish since the US military has lost all ability to tell him no.
Thinning hair is fine and mocking someone for it is mean and unhelpful, and body positivity is being cool if someone decides to stick with it. However it's not contradictory to say "given your situation you would look better bald tho".
A white lie is good when it's about something one can't (easily) change or when criticism is uncalled for. This is the opposite situation where the criticism is called for and the straightforward advice to go for it is cheap&easy to implement.
In fact if someone is actively seeking advice, I would argue that unconditionally saying "you look great don't change anything" is a form of toxic positivity.
It's way worse. They don't ban you and they don't delete your content. TikTok ads don't pay enough that demonetization is a concern either.
The algorithm just silently (!) deranks your content. They don't have guidelines, they don't have feedback, they will never communicate on what is and is not okay to post about. You'll just say "Fuck ICE" in a video once and notice it is doing suspiciously worse than the rest, but then again, you're never quite sure why some of your videos "make it" and some don't. So maybe you're being paranoid? You can't tell.
So on top of the very real algorithmic censorship from these platforms, you've got very frequent bouts of mass psychosis where everyone self-censors for no other reason that other people are doing it and they don't want to risk it. Is the word "dead" de-ranked? Quite likely not even, but who's to say, and it doesn't cost anything to farm a little engagement in the comments by self-censoring...
Isn't the future bright?
Every EV can just hook up with a (mostly) passive adapter to any outlet and get a charge. It won't be fast (especially if you are cursed with a 110V outlet), but even in the boonies an overnight trickle charge will get you to the nearest fast charger. Just get the relevant adapters for your car.
This is basically what your generator would do except you want to lug it around instead of leveraging the cables that we pulled within driving distance of everywhere but the most remote trails? The whole point of electricity is its versatility and ubiquity!
FYI using a wall plug to charge an EV is a perfectly normal thing to do. For a small(ish) commute, regular 220V@10A is way more than enough to get back to full overnight. It won't give you 500 km of range, but only freaks and truckers drive 500 km every day.
Every time they add the feature, half of the product breaks. The other half start using twice as much memory and compute, somehow.
They've got a pile of technical debt disguised as a product and the development velocity of the snail as a consequence. Very typical. The real question is "why hasn't the competition eaten their lunch already".