good video but a rather important thing he missed is, that many governments DO pay brasil to maintain the rainforest-

"Norway has followed Germany in suspending donations to the Brazilian government’s Amazon Fund after a surge in deforestation in the South American rainforest. The move has triggered a caustic attack from the country’s rightwing president.


Bolsonaro rejects 'Captain Chainsaw' label as data shows deforestation 'exploded'
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Jair Bolsonaro, whose move to meddle in the environmental organisation’s governance led to Norway’s decision, reacted by suggesting that Europe was not in a position to lecture his administration.

“Isn’t Norway that country that kills whales up there in the north pole?”, the Brazilian president said. “Take that money and help Angela Merkel reforest Germany.”

After weeks of tense negotiations with Norway and Germany, the Bolsonaro government unilaterally closed the Amazon Fund’s steering committee on Thursday. The fund has been central to international efforts to curb deforestation although its impact is contested.

Brazil’s environment minister, Ricardo Salles, said the Amazon Fund had been suspended while its rules were under discussion.

In response, Ola Elvestuen, his Norwegian counterpart, said an expected payment of about $33.27m (£27.36m) would not take place as Brazil had, in effect, broken the terms of its deal. Norway has been the fund’s biggest donor, and has given about $1.2bn (£985m) over the past decade.

“He cannot do that without Norway and Germany’s agreement,” Elvestuen said. “What Brazil has shown is that it no longer wants to stop deforestation.”

This week Berlin had said it would withhold an expected payment of about $39m. Norway and Germany questioned an initial proposal from the Brazilian government for the fund’s steering committee to be reduced in size, and had warned against any weakening of the structures of the fund.

Grave concerns about the rate of deforestation since Bolsonaro took power have been repeatedly voiced by the Norwegian government and others.

According to Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, the government agency that monitors deforestation, the rate increased by 278% in the year to July, resulting in the destruction of about 870 square miles."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/16/norway-halts-amazon-fund-donation-dispute-brazil-deforestation-jair-bolsonaro


while I do agree that for 3rd world ex colonies it is extremely tiresome to hear lectures about ecology from the US and Europe, who tore up the planet to achieve their status and continue to consume far more than 3rd world people do, Bolsonaro is dead wrong here and sadly it has to be said this is what the democracy and capitalism produce: shortsighted win-now, defer the costs decisions.

No one comes here to find capitalism, they come from capitalist countries (except those few fleeing Cuba and Venezuela).

The masses come fleeing danger, poverty, and oppression...from capitalist countries....often caused by capitalist drug cartels. Even those fleeing socialist countries aren't fleeing socialism, they're fleeing poverty caused largely by our sanctions and embargoes of their nations.

Venezuela is poor today largely because of sanctions/embargoes (not being allowed to sell their main resource and export, oil), poor planning (basing the entire economy on one resource, oil), and corruption.... in that order.

Atrocities?! We don't have time to list the atrocities caused by capitalism. They are greater in number and detriment.

Public schools, public police, roads, medicine, food subsidies, public housing, a state (not private) military, ecological regulations, etc. These are all socialist, and are the exact reasons these same people claim the immigrants are coming.

Once again Bob misuses the channels, this is absolutely not history, not educational, not a debunking, and no one was destroyed. Just more right wing nonsense *political propaganda that ignores the salient points to make baseless claims.

Injenueity?! They're coming for our unsophisticated young women?! Now I get why the right is terrified.

What about me? I do all those things and more. I didn't just change my own brakes, I swapped my own motor. I don't just plow my field, I sow, weed, and harvest that field. I've not only repaired a roof, I've built a few. I know hard work, I was a one man desert racing crew. Now that's hard work, being mechanic, transporter, driver, and pit crew....all at 112 degrees.

So, why don't I love Trump? Because I'm a real conservative....ecologically conservative, fiscally conservative, fact based, socially liberal (the government has no place in my bedroom or my body), and insistent on honesty.

Republicans abandoned conservatism before I could vote.

THEY fear us now like one fears the 100lb ranting sore ridden meth head at the bus stop, not for our strength and resolve, but our dangerous unpredictability and diseases.

It's an awesome machine.

Seriously though, is this the best we can do with that engine? What's with the ecological disaster every time it's started?

Maybe we could replace the engine with a forest fire.
It would be less polluting if they just ran it with an oil spill.
If only they can figure out how to start it by clubbing baby seals.
Instead of a pony engine can we just inject children with cancer?

Nikola*

Due to software glitches? Are you sure it's not mechanical issues due to the fact that batteries in general still fking SUUUUCK after centuries of remaining fundamentally unchanged?

Until we can come up with a method of storing energy in a safer and more ecologically responsible manner than batteries in their current form, making everything electric can never fully take off.

But I digress.

I love Lil Dicky, and fully support being ecologically active, but I just don't like the song a bit. It seems to be nothing more than a vehicle for pop stars to label themselves as ecologically involved with minimal effort and nearly zero message. I mean, dry humping the planet is how we got into the mess we're in, not how we're going to solve it.

It's a proposal, but at $3 billion price tag (meaning more like > $4.5 billion when finished), the plan to pump water 20 miles back up river into the already silting over lake Mead isn't likely to be adopted....at least I hope not. For one thing, it would mean the river would often end at the new pump station, which no one downstream would agree to and likely would be opposed on ecological grounds too.

Pumzi (2009) / ecological sci-fi short has been added as a related post - related requested by Eklek on that post.

Um...but, again, before Ford made internal combustion viable, the electric car was center stage, almost alone on the stage....even with the horrible batteries they had in the 1800's. Granted, there weren't many other options besides steam.

It's well past time for it to return imo.

It's not just sad it's criminal that before it got a second shot it had to prove it could beat combustion engine vehicles in every way, not just ecologically and economically, but in every performance metric as well. Now that it has, I still expect major pushback from both car and oil companies and their lackeys. Fingers crossed that they fail this time to rig the system again.

PS, are you using speech to text, is there a problem with the Russian to English translation program you've been issued, or should we be worried about Wernicke's aphasia? ;-)

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/18/warning-of-ecological-armageddon-after-dramatic-plunge-in-insect-numbers

Well... fuck.

No Netflix for me, and no luck on a quick search of torrents, but I'll keep my eye out for that show/series.

Many metrics to compare. Ecologically, that system sounds great for static locations with enough of an elevation gradient and reservoir areas to make it work. On the other hand it seems like the ecological damage done by constructing batteries, factories, and disposing of them is likely quite small compared to many other alternatives, particularly fossil fuels (which also have long-term scarcity concerns on top of plenty of other issues).

A major advantage of battery tech over hydro storage would be mobility. If the thing consuming energy doesn't sit in one place, hydro storage won't work. Another somewhat less significant advantage is the ability to install anywhere -- a battery farm recharged by mains and/or a solar/wind farm could be installed in places where hydro storage couldn't. And for one more item in favor of batteries, I'd wager that the land area footprint required for batteries is much smaller per kWH stored, although that might be wrong for extremely large reservoirs (ie. a hydroelectric dam, pretty much). But by the time you're getting to that large scale, the location requirements and ecological disruption are also much more extreme.

Anyway, I don't mean to pooh-pooh the idea of hydro storage -- it really does seem like a very good and ingenious idea where it would be applicable. But there's certainly room for improved battery tech, too. I don't think that we're going to get fully or even significantly weaned off of fossil fuels quite as fast as the video would have us hope for, either. Fossil fuels were the primary tool in our toolbox for a LONG time. And as the saying goes, since all we've had is that "hammer", we've started to think of everything as a nail.

There was a show, islands of the future, on Netflix now, that had a large scale demonstration and explanation of it, used to store wind energy and power an island.
Unfortunately, I don't know of a comparison with batteries with concrete numbers.
I think you hit the nail on the head with what you said about efficiency, but for large scale storage, it has to be better when you factor in the energy costs of making, replacing, and disposing batteries, even including the cost of replacing the turbines.
...and all that ignores the ecological issues, where ponds beat battery factories hands down.

Ok....they start with a few mistaken premises.
Most importantly, the premise that energy is best stored in a chemical battery. It sounds good, but it's simply wrong. The best way to store large amounts of energy is in a hydro/gravity storage system. This is a two basin system, with two basins at different heights with a pump/generator linking them. When you have excess power, you pump water uphill. When you need more power, you let it flow back down. It's ecologically friendly, cheap, and effectively never wears out like batteries all do, it can work on any scale, and unlike most hydro doesn't impact a living river system. It's proven technology that's head and shoulders above battery banks.

Good thing his "wall" is now, at most, a planned bollard fence. These still interfere with larger animals, but smaller ones can just pass through.
Trump's wall as he describes it will never be built for a myriad of reasons. Sadly, ecological damage is pretty far down that list, but it's on there.

You say that jokingly, but I'm actually at that point after decades of trying to minimize my ecological footprint.
I see no chance that humanity will get it's shit together to even slow climate change, much less avoid it being disastrous. I think we passed the point of no return decades ago, and I now feel foolish for trying to be responsible instead of going for my own maximum enjoyment/payoff. No longer will I deny myself things I want in an effort to try to save the planet, because I don't even think it's possible anymore, nor do I think the majority of humans will do the same. Now I just feel like a sucker for not getting mine while the getting was good, because that's what nearly everybody else did, so my small sacrifices meant nothing....and now we're doubling down on that mindset by backing out of the Paris agreement, which was already too weak and slow to help anything, but too much for Trump.

We're doomed!