Extinction Rebellion

[pancreas]

Paul, have you considered that if you stopped smoking and drinking so much, you wouldn't get out of breath carrying your suitcase such a little distance?

[Blumf]

Does anyone know what the carbon footprint of a beer scooter is? Could save Paul a lot of hassle.

[pancreas]

The other thing to do is to sort your hair and clothes out: you're a fucking mess, Paul Calf, and people are laughing at you.

Paul Caff, more like.

[manticore]

I've always associated buses themselves with having a rather negative environmental impact, but it seems this may be beginning to change:

https://greenerjourneys.com/news/clean-bus-revolution-cuts-emissions-55000-tonnes-year/

I'm guessing phes might know more about this.

[Buelligan]

Why don't you find yourself a nice boyfriend?

Bit sexist.

What's wrong with girls.  Anyway, I looked, they're all too small.

[Fambo Number Mive]

Buses also reduce congestion as well, if routes are planned and run properly.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Places with district heating mains don't have inefficient domestic gas central heating, but instead of providing infrastructure lets just massively tax gas and turn it off on Wednesdays to force people onto expensive electric bar heaters or expensive upfront heat pumps.

[Captain Z]

We should also look into weekly sacrifices to Ra. There was no global warming during ancient Egypt, just saying.

[Paul Calf]

Bit sexist.

What's wrong with girls.  Anyway, I looked, they're all too small.

I know. It was terrible advice. I don't know why I bothered giving it when I have absolutely no understanding of your individual circumstances.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Just so I've got this written down right:
Using a combustion engine to make an essential journey that you could've walked if you fancied the inconvenience = bad.
Using a combustion engine to make a completely non-essential journey for entertainment, almost as if it was attached to a toy = fine?

Is that it?

[phes]

I've always associated buses themselves with having a rather negative environmental impact, but it seems this may be beginning to change:

https://greenerjourneys.com/news/clean-bus-revolution-cuts-emissions-55000-tonnes-year/

I'm guessing phes might know more about this.

tbh I'm not really hot on recent tech stuff. I do believe that even just a few years back when diesel buses were much more polluting of NOx and particulates than new Euro 6 standards (and all the various types of hybrid internal combustion/electric engines) that buses still compared favourably with cars. When you look at the fullpicture, the life cycle of sourcing material, producing, transporting, constructing, operating, maintaining, storing and disposing, the potential capacity of the system, the way we develop land around transit systems re. density and use etc, that a decent bus/transit system (in a place that can support it) is going to have the potential to be much more sustainable per passenger kilometer travelled.

Buses have also been subject to in-use/real-time testing of emissions for longer than cars, which until very recently were only required to be laboratory tested, favouring the manufacturer (some of whom still cheated). So i'd trust any historical data from larger commercial vehicles more than that from cars, which is often used for comparisons

[Sebastian Cobb]

I don't really know why trolleybuses aren't more popular; as clean as trams but less disruptive and massively cheaper to implement.

[Buelligan]

I know. It was terrible advice. I don't know why I bothered giving it when I have absolutely no understanding of your individual circumstances.

My choosing not to have a partner doesn't affect anyone though, does it?  My concern was purely that the frequent choice by huge numbers of people not to walk completely walkable distances is seen as perfectly normal.  This is a thread where people are talking about environmental problems, this perfectly normal feeling that it's fine to choose not to walk in most of the developed world is, I'm guessing, a real contribution to those problems.  Just the mindset, the fact that it's seen as perfectly normal does need to change.  Don't you think so?

[New Jack]

Tags: The Bee Gees' lyrics ignored

[phes]

My choosing not to have a partner doesn't affect anyone though, does it?  My concern was purely that the frequent choice by huge numbers of people not to walk completely walkable distances is seen as perfectly normal.  This is a thread where people are talking about environmental problems, this perfectly normal feeling that it's fine to choose not to walk in most of the developed world is, I'm guessing, a real contribution to those problems.  Just the mindset, the fact that it's seen as perfectly normal does need to change.  Don't you think so?

I don't think it's reasonable or realistic to expect someone to walk 3 miles as part of a lengthier journey in this context. Surely the savings are in better land use and transport planning

[New Jack]

I don't think it's reasonable or realistic to expect someone to walk 3 miles as part of a lengthier journey in this context. Surely the savings are in better land use and transport planning

Weird, I just posted about my work day in the Work Cunts thread - I have to do three miles on foot there and again back. Ain't no way around it.

It is very doable and I already feel fitter.

However... It isn't nice. And I'm not sure I'd use it as a yardstick exactly. Maybe just 'well done if you do it'.

[Ferris]

Weird, I just posted about my work day in the Work Cunts thread - I have to do three miles on foot there and again back. Ain't no way around it.

It is very doable and I already feel fitter.

However... It isn't nice. And I'm not sure I'd use it as a yardstick exactly. Maybe just 'well done if you do it'.

Well especially if that takes an hour of your free time that you could spend with your wife and kids, as Paul Calf mentioned. I'd make the same choice.

Flying, eating beef, or using single-use plastics are a far bigger concern than how often Paul Calf goes for a walk I reckon, though it is a societal thing I suppose so I see Buelligan's point (us "Buellers" have to stick together). Then again, I chose not to fly to Montreal for a vacation last week so in terms of carbon saved, I'm golden.

[Kryton]

Man gets taxi.

Is this what we've reduced ourselves to? Arguing about a man getting a taxi with a suitcase? Unless the suitcase was made from ivory and the contents were radioactive and he chose some taxi from the 1970's spurting out lead and he was getting that taxi to say hijack  and take the bewildered taxi driver on a harrowing police chase culminating into a fucking mad crash into the giraffe pen at the zoo, then I don't know why it's an issue.

Maybe he was tired? Our just couldn't be fucking arsed after a long day? Maybe he had people he needed to see or a family to get home to?

[garbed_attic]

Stop arguing about this damn taxi so you can start agreeing on going to these protests, all!

[Sebastian Cobb]

Everywhere's walking distance if your time is of no value.

[Ferris]

Everywhere's walking distance if your time is of no value.

Yeah but I didn't actually fly on vacation so I have shitloads of virtue points to flaunt in everyone else's face. QED.

[Paul Calf]

Weird, I just posted about my work day in the Work Cunts thread - I have to do three miles on foot there and again back. Ain't no way around it.

It is very doable and I already feel fitter.

However... It isn't nice. And I'm not sure I'd use it as a yardstick exactly. Maybe just 'well done if you do it'.

I'd love to be able to walk three miles to work - I used to walk two miles each way in London - but on top of a three-hour (minimum, if no connections are missed) train journey, it just feels like a huge bite out of my home time.

[Buelligan]

And that's the problem, everyone thinks those perfectly reasonable things and each individual decision to just have one cheeky chocolate is practially nothing.  It's just there are so many of us.

[MoonDust]

Well Extinction Rebellion themselves say they're not here to play the blame game. However I think there are people to blame: not the average person but the people in charge of oil giants, pesticide giants, government officials etc. We should be pointing our fingers at them, not people getting taxis to train stations, no matter how many are doing it.

It's like in war, you don't pin the blame on the normal foot soldier, even though there's thousands of them doing the same thing. They're not to blame. You blame the politicians and generals executing the war. It's just been the centenary of WW1 and most people now agree how pointless it was and how much of a tragedy it was. But do we blame the thousands of young British men who joined up in 1914 during the wave of patriotic fever? Or the thousands of young German men who had no choice and were drafted into the trenches from the start? No. We blame the leaders of the imperial powers at the time who were squabbling amongst themselves and sending poor young men across the world to the meat grinder to fight for them.

Same in this situation. All these campaigns about "remember to turn off your lights when you leave the room!" (I do do this anyway, by the way) isn't going to stop global warming. It's a means of politicians to shift responsibility on to the people whose fault it isn't so they can feel that as politicians they're being responsible, whilst we the people think we're helping. But such token gestures don't help. And won't. What would help is actually outright banning fossil fuels and moving to clean energy. And to do that within the next decade.

Go after the big fish. We're all little fish and in the same boat.

[Buelligan]

IMO, it's not about blame, blame is not an end in itself.  It's about change and moving towards change (with all speed, for that's what's needed) means thinking about what's happening and making choices to change.  We can wait for the high-ups to change if we want or we can make them change by changing the society in which they operate. 

Imagine what might have happened if society, in Europe, had changed and said to itself, I don't think war is a good idea, in the beginning of the last century, off you go dear Kaiser, dear Tsar, off you go Haig and Kitchener, make war yourselves and on your own if you want, we're staying home today.

[MoonDust]

IMO, it's not about blame, blame is not an end in itself.  It's about change and moving towards change (with all speed, for that's what's needed) means thinking about what's happening and making choices to change.  We can wait for the high-ups to change if we want or we can make them change by changing the society in which they operate. 

Imagine what might have happened if society, in Europe, had changed and said to itself, I don't think war is a good idea, in the beginning of the last century, off you go dear Kaiser, dear Tsar, off you go Haig and Kitchener, make war yourselves, we're staying home today.

I definitely agree with making the higher ups change.

And as a bit of pedantry on your last point. That did happen. A revolution in Russia - over the war - got Russia out of it. And a year later a revolution in Germany that deposed the Kaiser brought an end to the war for everyone.

Germany surrendered not because of military inferiority. It surrendered because the German people themselves were sick to death of it and turned their guns on their own leaders instead.

[MoonDust]

Bit of a sidetrack sorry. I'm just pointing out that people's collective consciousness can and does change, which can lead to a complete overturn and change in society.

That fact alone gives me hope that perhaps we can save ourselves and do all these things we're saying we should be doing.

We're not there yet of course, but I do have hope.

[Sin Agog]

Bit of a sidetrack sorry. I'm just pointing out that people's collective consciousness can and does change, which can lead to a complete overturn and change in society.

That fact alone gives me hope that perhaps we can save ourselves and do all these things we're saying we should be doing.

We're not there yet of course, but I do have hope.

I was talking to my mum about personal environmental responsibility recently, and she started spouting some nebulous shit about 'the scientists fault.' Environmentalism has got to kick the door down and storm its way into people's homes.  It's come at a weird time when ease and comfort is a bigger selling point than ever, with people talking into little round speakers to switch on the oven for them, but it's possible.  That paying for plastic bags thing got people all het-up in anticipation of it, but then we got over it almost instantly.  People's adaptability is one of the reason's why we fucked over all the other genuses of homos knocking about tens of thousands of years ago.  Maybe it does require government mandates as we're too feckless to just suddenly make the change ourselves, but sacrificing a few comforts will be a doddle once we've actually done it.

[Dex Sawash]

Would europe be far more congested/polluted/sprawly without the last 2 big wars?

[Blumf]

Would europe be far more congested/polluted/sprawly without the last 2 big wars?

And the 1914 flu pandemic.