The lights are on, but there’s nobody home

All this mother fucker does is sleep all day and get fat, too lazy to get up for just about anything. Then in the middle night he goes: “Yes I am a hunter of the savanna, just like a cheetah I also can run at 90 miles per hour!” and runs his ass all around the house. But because he’s fat and uncoordinated he bumps into everything and because he’s also an asshole he throws everything he can on the ground.

Then when he’s tired and wants a place to sleep, he decides your fucking face is probably the best to get comfy.

Ugh the life of a cat owner.

Is he sick like he’s not feeling well? Or is he sick like damn boy you sick as hell?

Health bar grows wider than the screen, boss takes the health bar and smashes you to death with it. Fade to black. You died

Must be exhausting to be so cute all the time

This has been looked at and methane pockets are burned sometimes. When extracting oil for example there is often a lot of methane, which is burned to turn it into co2. The problem is, we are talking about a huge area with not many people or infrastructure in them. Sometimes the methane builds up in pockets which then can be burned easily, but most of the time it’s out gassing over a big area with very little methane per square meter. Capturing that methane is not practically possible.

Maybe some combination of sheets which are reflective to reflect sunlight instead of absorbing it and at the same time direct the methane to a place where it can be burned off. But doing this across a large area would be hard and would also have an impact on the environment, so it would be a hard calculation to find out if it’s worth it. And getting funding for something like that is pretty hard. Plus a big chance of failure, what if the sheets crack after a couple of years and get fouled up, then the methane isn’t captured, the sunlight isn’t reflected and a lot of time and energy has been lost. Plus you have a big patch of nature filled with plastics to clean up.

Methane does naturally get destroyed due to uv radiation, so it isn’t long term like co2. But it’s way more potent in terms of greenhouse and we’ve been releasing a lot more than gets broken down. Levels of methane are at a all time high and rising. On a human timescale the methane will take a very long time to get broken down, even if we would stop releasing any right now.

There are satellites specifically made to detect large releases of methane, to identify human sources of methane which could be captured and burned instead of being released. Especially in industrial processes this is often an option.

Large scale meat production is also a large source of methane, which is also hard to capture. Especially when we want the cows to have somewhat of a acceptable state of living, so going outside. The only way to fix this one is for people to eat less meat, however the trend has been for more and more meat consumption instead of less.

Well the principle was sound to begin with. A company has some unavoidable impact on the environment, so instead they fund some carbon capture, which offsets the carbon emitted. Sounds OK on the surface.

However in practice there are major issues with this idea.

• There’s the short carbon cycle (think trees) and the long carbon cycle (think oil). Taking from the long cycle and repaying the short cycle isn’t equivalent at all. The short cycle is just kicking the can down the road. Sure it captures some carbon during the lifetime of the tree, but as soon as the tree dies (which is most likely within 20-30 years) that carbon gets released as the wood is burnt or rots away. Since there is no way to repay to the long cycle at the moment, this should not have been used to offset carbon taken from the long cycle.

• This only works if there is an actual increase in carbon capture. But in the end it turned out almost all of the so called carbon credits sold to companies weren’t based on an increase in capture at all. For example a protected piece of land explicitly only used and only to be used for trees/nature got turned into carbon credits and those credits were sold. Since that piece of land was previously being used and will be used in the future for trees, there isn’t an actual increase in carbon capture and thus the carbon isn’t offset at all.

• The way a piece of land was turned into carbon credits turned out to be not regulated very well at all. A lot of land was sold more than once and for way more offset than physically possible to capture with that piece of nature.

• It turned pieces of nature into a financial interesting product. This attracted the WORST of the worst people in the world. Buying up huge parts of land, claiming to develop it for carbon capture (but not actually doing that) and selling carbon credits up the wazoo. These pieces of land were usually just left to waste away and/or abused for various uses including very polluting uses.

As this became known, companies just looked the other way and continued to greenwash. Consumers who don’t know believe the claims (made by some of the biggest companies in the world, why would you doubt this?) and think they are buying environment friendly. Carbon offsets were also used as a get out of jail free card by companies, choosing to pay off their pollution instead of fixing what can be fixed.

I can recommend this YouTube video which is a good summation of the issues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AW3gaelBypY

There are more feedback mechanisms as well. For example permafrost melting, releasing huge amounts of methane from rotting organics which were previously frozen. Methane is way more powerful a greenhouse gas compared to co2. We are just finding out about a lot of this stuff in the past decade, which is accelerating global warming compared to models from 20+ years ago. Global warming isn’t uniform as well, some parts like for example the arctic and parts of Western Europe are warming a lot faster.

Long story short, we need to be doing a LOT more than we are currently doing. And we seem to be doing very little, except pump all our money in large corporations and rich folks.