I have a Fairphone 4 and would definitely give them the biggest recommendation I could.

Any part can be replaced with a screwdriver which is an order of magnitude better than I’ve seen with other brands. I dropped and broke my phone screen and although I had to buy a new screen, after that I had a phone working as if it was brand new.

I also got mortar into my usb charging socket and was able to replace the charging socket.

You might be able to tell that I’m not the best at looking after things, I’m working on this but in the meantime, fairphone have saved me at least two situations where I’d normally need to buy a new phone. Can’t recommend them enough.

Man, I sure wish cybertrucks had been around to deflect when I spent 7 years driving a Fiat Panda.

I think that’s a really good point to be fair. Would be interested to see what it was on a consumption basis - like other people are pointing out, the lifestyle of the ultra rich is definitely pretty carbon intensive.

I think there’s a lot of focus on minimizing individual’s impact, and don’t get me wrong, that’s a great thing to do, but it puts burden and guilt on people for things that are out of their control

If your government (wherever you are) held fossil fuel companies and the agro-industrial complex to account and encouraged investment in renewables, public transport and ground sourced heating, you would be living a low impact lifestyle just by going to work, buying your groceries and living normally.

If you have the money to invest in solar panels, EVs etc, that’s fantastic, but don’t feel guilt for not being priviledged!

The most impactful thing you can do is put pressure on your government to recognise the impact we’re having on our ecology. Sign petitions, write to your representative, fund and/or join activist groups.

Importantly, try not to feel shamed, as an individual you didn’t cause the situation (unless maybe you are a fossil fuel lobbyist, or oilcompany CEO) - go easy on yourself and just do what you can.

This is the dumbest bet you can make and more or less the definition of lose/lose- if we fail to move off greenhouse gasses, what kind of mad max style future are you hoping to be rich in?

By the power invested in me by, well, nobody whatsoever, can I just take a minute to say, let’s all cool down a little in the comments!

There’s a lot of arguing against:

• The idea that acknowledging the tragic reality of climate change makes you defeatist
• The idea that because we have had some great advantages in green tech we can sit back and let climate change fix itself

I don’t see anyone making those arguments here though! Just lots of people concerned about climate change with different skews of how positive/negative we should feel.

Personally, I swing between powerful optimism and waking in terror at 3:00am for the future we’re hurtling towards. I’m sure other people are the same, so let’s just be friendly to the fact that other people are in different vibes to us.

There are some people working together very well right now to dismantle the climate, so let’s all remember that when we’re talking with each other.

Peace and love!

A lot of the comments here are, pretty fairly, sceptical of whether this is a viable idea.

My question is, what’s the advantage meant to be over just having an electrical railway and seperately some solar panels plugged into the grid? Especially since the article mentions the solar railway would be grid connected?

Does anyone have link to some more information on the science of why this is happening?

The article references a bunch of causes, like deforestation, ocean poisening affecting the ocean carbon pump, extreme heat etc. Are there any studies/data that try to break down where the impact comes from?

Gonna skirt right round the serious discussion about oil company based misinformation here and point out that his suit is an extreme act of terror on the seeing.

How much CO2 does AI use compared to other industries? I know it’s a horrific use compared to all other software, but have no idea how it factors in global carbon emmissions?

Also, just to be clear, I’m genuinely curious and not defending burning huge amounts of carbon for profit if the AI sector is comparatively small. That kind of backwards “but it just a small amount of everything else” logic would be a great way to accelerate our already too fast death spiral.

Yeah, hopefully this is some genuinely good news, but it’s hard not to see it as an unbelievably positive spin on the fact that this year we’ll emit more CO2 than any year in record.

I don’t know specifics on this battery farm, but almost all are essentially fleets of shipping containers filled with smaller batteries, rather than some super-cool-mega-battery, so it’s probably a safe assumption that this is a landmark project in scale, rather than in technology specifics.

Yes, for sure!! I hope my call for policitcal action didn’t come across as “don’t do anything and wait for politicians to sort it out!”.

I was trying to get at the need for collective discussion and action, over the idea of a climate change fix that’s based on people’s feeling superior for their individual actions, especially because without political change, a lot of even the individual changes we need to make (more heatpumps, EVs over ICEs, etc) are only accessible to those with sufficient wealth.

Oh boy, have fun! CTEs have pretty wide support, so you might be in luck (well at least in that respect, in all other cases you’re still using saleforce amd my commiserations are with you)

Honestly moral superiority needs to get taken out of climate change as a whole. It’s a global issue that needs political solutions. Nobody’s individual actions are gonna change their nation’s heating systems from gas, grids energy make up to solar, or billionaires to climate activists.

I have advice that you didn’t ask for at all!

SQL’s declarative ordering annoys me too. In most languages you order things based on when you want them to happen, SQL doesn’t work like that- you need to order query dyntax based on where that bit goes according to the rules of SQL. It’s meant to aid readability, some people like it a lot,but for me it’s just a bunch of extra rules to remember.

Anyway, for nested expressions, I think CTEs make stuff a lot easier, and SQL query optimisers mean you probably shouldn’t have to worry about performance.

I.e. instead of:

SELECT
  one.col_a,
  two.col_b
FROM one
LEFT JOIN
    (SELECT * FROM somewhere WHERE something) as two
    ON one.x = two.x

you can do this:

WITH two as (
     SELECT * FROM somewhere
     WHERE something
)

SELECT
  one.col_a,
  two.col_b
FROM one
LEFT JOIN two
ON one.x = two.x

Especially when things are a little gnarly with lots of nested CTEs, this style makes stuff a tonne easier to reason with.

I know your comment is satirical so I don’t really want to take it in bad faith, but all the same. . . .

Lots of people are working reeaaally hard at changing society for the better, and reducing environmental catastrophe, the studies from the 80s sparked soneof the biggest environmental groups we have today (the likes of Green Peace and Friends of the Earth).

Lots of other people, often with money, are cynically blocking the protection of the human race for their own gain. And the majority of people are caught between these groups, often feeling despondent.

My point is, don’t get despondent, get involved! You can join the first groups efforts today, and it you do, you’ll be concretely helping the survival of our planet and society.

If you’re interested in specifics, both Green Peace and Just Stop Oil hold regular monthly/weekly welcome to all sessions (if you know about others, post them here!)

This is really beautiful! I think it’s pretty common if you’re switched on to the damage we’re doing to our world to feel very anxious and negative, but it’s important to remember that reducing climate change is not just about avoiding disaster, but building a utopia too. Thanks @NafiTheBear@pawb.social !

• Am driving into a wall
• Turning or breaking in time sounds tricky
• Might as well accelerate, maybe car will take off and fly over wall?
• Woops, I died!

Thanks for such a well reasoned response 😁 My knee jerk “public transport good” response did miss a lot of the subtlety you’ve captured here!