Reddit Reddit reviews Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

We found 1 Reddit comments about Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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1 Reddit comment about Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet:

u/Zelaphas ยท 3 pointsr/Economics

Time out; Why are you so angry in each of your replies? There's zero reason to put the burden of proof on me, here. And you're not denying that disastrous climate change is happening, but you're clearly not on board with changing our habits to help mitigate the damage. You either have your head in the sand or you're selfishly too invested in your current, wasteful lifestyle and don't have loved ones or children you care about that this is even an issue to you.

> Reduce your standard of living to third world poverty levels and then I'll believe you.

This is 100% not necessary. I encourage you to read Bill McKibben's Eaarth where he describes societies today using sustainable practices to have fresh food, waste disposal, electricity, fresh water, transit, and more. Solar, wind, hydro and geothermal energy are a lot more powerful than people give credit for, and with advances like concentrated solar globes (they also come in mini-form for powering smaller things like smart phones), we can learn to harvest as much as we need and more, just like we continued to refine the internal combustion engine and car/factory/appliance designs over the years to be more efficient.

We put a gawd damned human being on the Moon, for fuck's sake. I refuse to accept that humanity is incapable of discovering how to harness the free energy of the sun (or water, or algae, or anything else) to do damned near anything. As always, monied interests are the primary thing holding us back.

> You want environmental regulations that will reduce economic growth and therefore keep people in poverty who would have otherwise been able to work themselves out of poverty.

I'd put the burden of proof on you for this one. To throw our hands up and just give up on trying to wean ourselves off oil doesn't solve this issue, either. Long-term, when enough drinking water has been contaminated and land has been torn up to frack or harvest tar sands from whatever economic growth occurred won't mean shit for whomever's left. But if that's too extreme a scenario for you, consider the fact that employment in the solar sector in the US, not just in Europe and elsewhere, is on the rise all over the country, and projects like coastal wind turbines would also generate jobs and provide other benefits to costal communities like lowering energy prices.

No one is saying it's easy or an overnight change, but it's beyond time to invest in clean energy and the technology behind it.