[llamajams]

I get the impression that some people think there is a silver bullet that we are not using because the big bad corporations are keeping us down. But...there's isn't one, and there are no free lunches, you always have to break the egg to make the the omelette.

[chongli]

The perfect is the enemy of the good.

We can’t have solar because it shades the desert. We can’t have wind power because it makes noise and strikes birds. We can’t have hydro power because it creates a floodplain. We can’t have nuclear power because burying the waste under a mountain is bad.

Now, I recognize that it’s not all the same person or group making all of these arguments. Still, it’s pretty frustrating because it seems like we have no solutions. We’re speeding down the road toward a cliff and any attempt to steer or apply the brakes is getting blocked.

[mdekkers]

That’s how the big oil industry operates, trying to make all the alternatives even less appealing.

[chongli]

I’m not so sure about that. Maybe, but they also operate much more directly, by buying up tons of renewable energy technology patents and sitting on them.

[wkat4242]

Yes, in the end continuing with fossil fuel will result in much more wildlife destruction though. I think it's always important to consider the alternative which in this case is really bad.

[jstarfish]

Oil spills, fracking and nuclear drama seem far more ruinous than shading an otherwise-inhospitable biome on track to get even hotter. Or putting up fans, or building dams.

Your point goes overlooked too often! We're destroying all ecosystems under the status quo.

[kjkjadksj]

We are distrupting ecosystems but you cant destroy ecosystems. The most urbanized or polluted place on earth is still an ecosystem. It takes time for an abundance of species to emerge that can take advantage of this ecosystem, but it will emerge. Consider the rock dove, evolved to roost in the very specific environment of a rock cliff. Today, however, ecosystems have changed, cities are more or less giant artificial rock cliffs, and pigeon populations are massive in cities as a result.

[transcriptase]

Or consider the fact that most of North America was under a thick sheet of ice only 10,000 years ago.

[wkat4242]

But now we're changing climates over the course of hundreds of years, not tens of thousands. We're not giving nature time to adapt (nor ourselves, for that matter)

Climate change is "normal" on our planet, yes. But it's not normal at the speed at which we are causing it now.

[kjkjadksj]

Theres been plenty of extinction events that were far faster and vastly more destructive than even climate change from us humans. These events serve as opportunities to expose ecological niches to new species. Its all part of life on earth.

[kjkjadksj]

For now, sure. But consider the earth as a system and not a place where humans live for their one lifetime. Burning more fuel means converting long buried organic material into material that exists on the surface. The fact there are issues with this is that the processes to deal with this great excess haven’t yet organically evolved on their own, but given time taking advantage of the excess carbon in the atmosphere and a more energetic earth from greenhouse effect should see things like rapid evolution of microbial photosynthetic life, even extending to favor rapid evolution of macroscopic photosynthetic life as well.