Bro just ignoring all the ships we'll need to carry all that wind and sunlight
this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2024
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Another way to look at it: the shipping industry will take a beating while everyone transitions.
If anyone is left wondering why there's so much institutional resistance to changing our energy diet, its institutions like this that are lobbying and generating the propaganda behind it. Energy companies are just one faction.
the biggest resistance is coming from the owner class. the great fear is that we could enter into an age where human labor isn't needed and it becomes feasible to have a society where resources just get distributed for free because everything* is* practically free.
Or they'd just ship something else? They'd lose some money and scrap a few ships, but the drop in costs would make it more economical to ship whatever else people want, like lumber and funko pops.
Good lord I hate Funko Pops. Them and Minions™ are are the false idols of consumerism.
Look, let me tell you something. A Minion died for you. A Minion paid the price of sin for you and me that we deserve. Why? Because they love you. And if you think Minions are a false idol, then keep on scrolling. But if you know that a Minion died for your sins, type 'wonderful savior' and smash that upvote button
Minions can eat my fucking ass
Funko Pops are just Precious Moments for millennials.
Why don't we just have one or two very big ships, powered by nuclear reactors. Like, 40-50 kilometers long each, with hydrofoils, top speed just under mach one. Zip around and deliver everyone's shit with big deck-mounted gauss guns that fire packages right to your doorstep as the ship screams past the nearest coastline.
Thats exactly how I want my buttplug delivered - shot via a rail gun directly at it's destination.
What if I live in the geographic center of a continent? How do I know which coastline cannon to order from?
They're the same company. Do you pick which courier dropkicks you Faberge eggs into the gutter in front of your house? It'll get delivered and you'll be none the wiser which cannon fired.
Depends on prevailing winds.
I see no setting where this could go horribly wrong.
Im gonna need some concept art first. for research puposes
Currently seeking angel investors for 500m buy-in, or I'll take a 200kg of plutonium, if you've got that.
Good god, the stress that would be on the hydrofoil's connecting pieces makes my meager mind whimper.
Honestly this does sound fucking awesome. It could be sold to the ‘murica crowd.
You have me thinking of like.... A ring around the equator with space elevators on it (with stations at the top), and "rail" tracks, with trains traveling between all the stations. Gaussian launchers sending packages to your nearest delivery depot.
Believe it or not, that's a feasible (ish) plan for a space elevator we could build right now. Instead of having a counterweight at GEO that's pulling on a carbon nanotube rope, you have a ring spinning inside another ring in LEO. The outer ring could be made of Kevlar, and IIRC, it would take something like a year or two of all current Kevlar production. You then need four stations approximately equidistant apart around the equator to act as counterweights.
The station for the Pacific would itself be quite the engineering challenge. Not a lot of land you can use at the place you need.
Just anchor one of the garbage patches and use that.
Bill McKibben is based.
Inaccurate statement.
https://qz.com/2113243/forty-percent-of-all-shipping-cargo-consists-of-fossil-fuels
40% of traffic is for petrochemicals, which according to this article is coal, oil, gas, and things derived from them, which would include fertilizer and plastics and probably some other stuff too like industrial lubricants, asphalt etc. Not just fossil fuels, so not all that 40% would be affected by a switch to renewable energy. It's also worth noting that building out renewable energy generation involves shipping a lot of hardware around the globe as well.
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Joke's on you when we get even more ships sending the sun and wind around the world, idiot.
The delivery mechanism for sunlight keeps burning me while the delivery mechanism for wind keeps knocking things over. Someone help me, I need a lawyer!
Fuckin demolished that snowflake. With climate change
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Fun vaguely related fact: the 1800s are often hailed as the century of steamships, but in reality steamships had pretty short range and required frequent re-coaling in order to get anywhere and back. The coaling stations around the world were mostly stocked by sailing ships since there was no way to economically transport coal by using vessels that burned coal for their propulsion. So it's more accurate to say that the worldwide transportation revolution of the 1800s was a steam/wind power hybrid.
If we switched to renewable energy, the cost of coal and oil would crash, but it wouldn't drop to zero. Wealthier countries would stop producing oil locally and shipments would still circle the globe from countries desperate enough to keep producing at lower profits, to countries that cannot affort the more expensive renewable infrastructure.
That's not a reason not to switch. We just need to be prepared for the reality that no single solution will resolve all our problems. Conservatives and energy barons will fight tooth and nail, and will point to the new problems as evidence that we never should have switched. was
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