This is fascinating and I love the part with the mushrooms and the worms if this really works but my favorite part is that we spent decades like “oh no....oil is soaking into fur and feathers....if only we had something that could soak up all this oil”
its so fucking funny that nuclear waste is such a contentious topic. like yeah those damn nuclear advocates need to figure out somewhere reasonable to put that nuclear waste. for now we will be sticking with coal power because it puts its waste products safe and sound In Our Lungs, where they cannot hurt anybody,
you cant just put nuclear waste in the ground it might hurt somebdoy :/ put it in the air that everyone breathes like a responsible power source :/
ohhh noooo :( you can’t just produce three cubic metres of waste per plant per year, that’s so little how will anyone notice :( you have to produce 240,000 tons of toxic waste and emit 3.8 million tons of carbon dioxide per plant per year so everyone knows where the danger is :(
It is where I live, and it's a big city.
we need to be loud about this, have an environmental protest. something, anything. we’re ruining our planet. i want to do something but i don’t know where to start
everyone saying "you can just filter it :)" can wild animals filter it?
YOU CANNOT FILTER IT YOU CANNOT FILTER IT YOU CANNOT FILTER IT
This is the process a person near where an old PFA factory has to do (12:22)
The ways to specifically filter PFAs that work reliably are prohibitively expensive.
GOOD NEWS EVERYONE
According to Scientific American, a new method of breaking down PFAs has just been discovered!
It’s not for every kind of PFA but holy shit it’s a start. Normally these bastards have to be roasted at ~1,000 C/1832 F to even begin to fall apart and even then they leak into the environment, and burying them only - you guessed it! Leaks into the environment.
The new method can break them down at a mere ~100 C/212 F using inexpensive reagents. To quote the article:
“PFASs owe their durability to a series of carbon-fluorine bonds, which are among nature’s strongest chemical bonds. Instead of trying to break this stable bond, Trang and her colleagues targeted a chemical group containing oxygen atoms at one end of the molecule. By heating the compounds in a solvent called DMSO and a common reagent found in cleaners and soaps, the researchers successfully knocked off the oxygen-containing group. This triggered a cascade of reactions that ultimately broke the compounds down into harmless products.”
There are about 12,000 PFAs known to science right now, and the team was able to break down ten of them - including a particularly nasty kind of one called PFOA - and were able to break them down three carbon atoms at a time instead of the presumed one. HOLY SHIT. They recognize using DMSO in wastewater treatment probably isn’t practical on a large scale - right now, anyway - but as John Oliver points out in his video, having a huge filtration system in your home and a guy check it every two weeks sure isn’t going to do much either except mitigate further damage to the owner. The team is also plenty aware this is no final solution, and yet
GUYS WE CAN DO IT. It might be decades, even a century before we fix the rain cycle and get them out of our bloodstreams, but HOLY SHIT WE CAN DO IT
recreational space travel is objectively immoral
i am like. absolutely livid.
CO2 emissions for one ~4 person tourist space trip are 50-100 times higher than the emissions from one long-haul air flight. One SpaceX flight generates the annual carbon footprint of 278 people. Space travel is the equivalent of vomiting greenhouse gases directly into the atmosphere and it is like spitting in the rest of the world’s face.
People literally are getting sick from West Coast wildfire smoke in NYC, Philadelphia, and Toronto right now. Extreme weather has caused flooding in Germany that has killed more than 150 people. The heat wave in the Northwest in June killed hundreds. The entire American West is going through a drought with the some of the most extreme conditions they have seen in 20 years. We are living through a climate crisis that is going to get worse and worse and worse and it is not only evil and cruel to refuse to do anything about it (with your BILLIONS of dollars!) but absolutely morally rotten to continue contributing to climate change that will kill millions.
There is a very specific sort of trauma which comes from being a small child, being told about widespread ecological destruction. Trauma which does not come from that initial fact - but rather the adult response to that child’s inevitable question of “What can we do about it!”
Even in grade school I recognized the inherent absurdity of being told about the massive destruction of rainforests - particularly the amazon - but then being told that if we want to help we can “Recycle Cans” or whatever.
And I think that to a certain extent that trauma has a somewhat malevolent yet subtle intention. When you make small children think that the world is dying because they ate a chocolate bar in plastic wrap - you foster a sense of preexisting damnation which cannot be meaningfully fought.
Alternatively when you make children think that adults have no plan or interest whatsoever to tackle the problem, you foster a worldview in which the children have an actively antagonist relationship to older generations. Given the power dynamics between children and adults however, this is just as likely to produce crushing despair as it might prompt furious rebellion.
Both paths ultimately lead toward learned helplessness and general misanthropy, ensuring that resistance to ecological destruction is minimal. Stifling the emotional ecological connection of every person who was once a child filled with the wonder of a tall tree, a grassy meadow, or the first squirrel they ever saw.
Capitalism sustains itself through mass-trauma, and this is only one small piece to the larger situation. However it is a piece I find personally meaningful to discuss given my focus on environmentalism.
I really wanted to draw a comic about green turtles ;_; they’re facing so many hardships and are classified as endangered. I want this issue to get more attention.
Hey can this artist stop making me cry??? Please???
That’s still a lot of trees #EthicalMemes
Here is the link in case anyone wants to donate some trees!
They’re only about 1.2 million away, and a couple of weeks ago they were 4 million away. There’s a good chance that with a bit of noise made about this, they could rally for that home stretch. This would be a good time to tell your family, friends, co-workers about the project, as there are many people interested in donating to charities at this time of the year. Once you choose a donation amount, you can also select that it is a gift for someone else, if you’re interested in gift ideas.
If nothing else, please help pass on the news here!
It’s dec 17 3:33 am we can still do this
super close!!
We’re less than 200,000 away!
I unfortunately don’t have paypal, but if someone wants to donate- feel free!
If you dare come at me about banning straws, I will throw you into the sun cannon. I’m disabled, I’m crippled, I need disposable plastic straws, and all those pricey ridiculous alternatives aren’t working as well. Plastic straws were invented for the disabled.
Way to shit all over a vital access need because you think straws are worse than corporate greed.
We all care about the turtles, the seals, the oceans, obviously. Notice how the easiest thing to yell about was something that would barely affect anything but appealed heavily to emotional discourse.
The disabled community is huge, and it can be joined by anyone. Most of those As Seen On TV products were invented for us. Society still mocks us and ignores us, and often outright harms us in multiple ways.
Communicate better. Listen better. But stop putting us out in the cold because you are inconvenienced by our simplest needs.
i have an environmental degree and i’ve been saying this since this straw ‘debate’ started: its all a tactic by those in power to distract people’s attention from bigger issues such as fishing waste. don’t fall for it. and don’t be a dick to disabled people who need straws to make their lives easier.
THANK YOU
This is what billionaires can do with their unlawful amount of money
it just boggles my mind that so many people have ungodly amounts of money and absolutely none of them think of doing things like this, it should be the obvious choice. Imagine having the power in your hands to literally save the world like a real-life superhero and instead just deciding to buy a mansion made of gold or some other useless nonsense.
Finally! A decent human being!
Priorities, it’s more important to rebuild some religious relic, than to help save our planet.
Oh, I am angry alright.
