Climate/ecological breakdown

Very true, lots of virtue signallers around.
Sadly the cheap food is also often convenience food. Is anyone taught to cook at school anymore?

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Interesting post on new French house building/renovation energy standards in another thread:

This, however, is pretty scary…

America is the sickest nation on planet earth so do the exact 180 degree. Corn and soy will make you ill avoid like the plague.
Fortunately there are good Americans who know this and are prepared to show the evidence.
Dont eat crap to make yourself ill and then try to fix yourself with pharmaceuticals because that is the American model. Eat good stuff dont get ill!

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“Fossil fuel exports are a key enabler of Putin’s regime, and many other rogue states.”

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I think that’s about to stop.

Why Billy? Some European countries can’t stop energy imports from Russia without serious economic and social disruption - and most of the world (South America, Africa, Asia) have not joined the sanctions anyway.

Don’t throw away those masks and passes…

As the planet heats up, many animal species will be forced to move into new areas to find suitable conditions. They will bring their parasites and pathogens with them, causing them to spread between species that haven’t interacted before. This will heighten the risk of what is called ‘zoonotic spillover’, where viruses transfer from animals to people, potentially triggering another pandemic of the magnitude of Covid-19.

“As the world changes, the face of disease will change too,” said Gregory Albery, an expert in disease ecology at Georgetown University and co-author of the paper, published in Nature. “This work provides more incontrovertible evidence that the coming decades will not only be hotter, but sicker.

Covid was not a ‘black swan’ event - just another aspect of climate/ecological breakdown.

OK, maybe not stop but Russia has stopped supplying Poland and Germany has vowed to reduce Russian gas imports to zero.

I suspect that the economic impact of Russia finding it has fewer customers for its fossil fuels will hurt.

It will also push nations like Germany to accelerate renewables projects - which can’t be a bad thing.

Hmmm… I can’t see a way the sanctions will work myself - the reductions in volume would have to be absolutely massive and pretty immediate to have much impact on Russian income - to date they have actually doubled Russia’s take.

But I agree the answer to this and many other problems is to move as quickly as possible to renewables, generated as locally as possible. The tragedy is - once again - governments have ignored campaigners that have been saying precisely this since the 1960s!

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I thought that the sanctions were having an effect - that’s one of the reasons that Russia is demanding payment in Roubles - its banks can’t freely convert currency any more.

I think David Quammen’s book Spillover was quite prescient. I saved it in my Amazon list in 2012 and didn’t buy it till 2020. Haven’t yet dared read it in full. Am considering using an Audible trial offer to scare myself when out and about in the car by listening to it instead for free.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B009EQG794/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1651149037&sr=1-3

Oh well, so much for that theory. :frowning:

I really don’t think they have any choice Billy. Put yourself in their place: you would be facing being laid off your job, nothing to heat or cook with at home, only intermittent electricity, thousands on the streets protesting - and ultimately debt, riots, etc.

Western leaders are simply not facing the reality that Russia is the key energy supplier to the world - and number one supplier of a whole range of other commodities (including, incidentally, fertiliser ingredients).
And - as @John_Scully has recently posted elsewhere - number one ostrich in the world seems to be Liz Truss!

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There’s a curiously perverse defense of bitcoin mining going on in the US right now:

Even more perverse is the US company that’s reopened an uneconomic coal powered fire station, using the power generated solely to generate bitcoin. Because, that is economic.

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I think that was mentioned in the article.

We might also want to think about how we manage our communications, entertainment and data infrastructure in the future. Datacentres in Ireland consume more electricity as a proportion of total capacity that the rural population, despite Ireland having a larger proportion of it’s population living rurally than the EU average.