Personally, I take everything he says and does seriously. I advise non-citizens visiting to turn their social media to private and bring a burner phone to immigration checkpoints. For citizens, turning off your phone should be enough.
I think a lot of us outside the US will go further and simply never visit the US ever again. That certainly applies to me despite having spent quite a lot of time in the US and having ex-colleagues who I regard as friends there.
There is no reason not to use propane or butane, they have low global warming potential and is cheap. The fire risk is overstated, no one thinks twice about carrying a lighter in their pocket.
Skin cancer may be less deadly than other types of cancer, but it is still far more deadly than not having cancer. Rattlesnake bites in the US have a lower mortality rate than skin cancer, are you gonna go trying to handle rattlesnakes without protection or safety measures?
One could also add positive mental health effects, and benefits of morning sunlight for maintaining a healthy circadian rhythm.
Sure, you can always come back that you can take anti-depressants, and try to use some sort of sun-mimicking light, but then we're really going to extremes to avoid the sun altogether.
So is exposure to the sun, at the right times, in moderation, with appropriate but not extreme protection okay?
> So is exposure to the sun, at the right times, in moderation, with appropriate but not extreme protection okay?
Depends on your personal risk tolerance. For majority of people, probably yes: the benefits (especially the mental ones) would outweight the small risks.
Sadly I am a bit hopeless about climate change. Even if every person on earth dropped everything and started making biochar to be buried it would not sequester enough carbon to make a difference.
Hi! I work a lot with carbon dioxide removal systems. If every person on Earth dropped everything and started making biochar, it would definitely make a huge difference. Yes, we add a lot of carbon dioxide to the air of a year, but it’s doable to remove it. Humanity has taken on much bigger challenges before and succeeded. Now that’s not to say that it’s likely. I think it’s entirely unlikely that we avert the worst impacts of climate change unless something big changes. Thankfully, we get to choose what to work on every day, and I get to choose to work on that alongside inspiring people.
(and yes, this isn’t what the article is about, but it seems like it’s what everyone is responding to)
> Humanity has taken on much bigger challenges before and succeeded.
Feel free to list them, we're basically reverse terra forming ourselves out of existence at that point, I don't think we've done anything even remotely close to that scale in such time frame
During World War II, the United States spent 40% of its GDP on the war. So we can spend big on things when we decide to.
That would be the equivalent of $12 trillion per year today, and we would clean up the climate in a jiffy with that. It would be a huge opportunity for job creation, manufacturing, innovation. It’s wild as a society we’ve convinced ourselves that stabilizing the climate is a cost instead of a massive opportunity.
> During World War II, the United States spent 40% of its GDP on the war. So we can spend big on things when we decide to.
The United States wasn’t the only one spending that much on war, that’s why we were able to do so. What incentive do countries have to spend money on carbon capture? Any money spent on that is money not being invested in generating more wealth, so there is zero incentive to move first, you’ll just fall behind and become economically and potentially physically vulnerable.
If we could convince all major powers to all spend money on carbon capture, it would work great. That’s a simple ask but an almost impossible thing to negotiate.
Otherwise, there’s no incentive to act first, there’s actually great incentive to not act first.
I desperately wish the world could work together on this problem, but I don’t see why we would given the situation.
Just as a pedantic aside, people often use Venn diagram when they mean Euler diagram. A Venn diagram always has the overlapping circles and use shading or labeling describe the set relation. Euler diagrams let the circles describe the relation so two non intersecting sets in a Venn diagram might share the left circle green, the right blue and leave the intersection blank or grey. An Euler diagram will have two disjoint circles.
I learned the correct pronunciation when someone laughed at me at a TeX conference in the 80s when I made a reference to the You-ler fonts. In my single semester of high school German I was either never taught or ignored the teacher when the pronunciation of eu was given (or perhaps I just never connected it with Euler).
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