Earth is Getting a Black Box To Record Events that Lead To the Downfall of Civilization (cnet.com) 120
An indestructible "black box" is set to be built upon a granite plain on the west coast of Tasmania, Australia, in early 2022. Its mission: Record "every step we take" toward climate catastrophe, providing a record for future civilizations to understand what caused our demise, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. From a report: The project, led by marketing communications company Clemenger BBDO in collaboration with University of Tasmania researchers, is currently in beta and has already begun collecting information at its website. The structure is designed to be about the size of a city bus, made of 3-inch-thick steel and topped with solar panels. Its interior will be filled with "storage drives" that gather climate change-related data such as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and average temperatures. In addition, using an algorithm, it will scour the web for tweets, posts, news and headlines.
The developers estimate that storage will run out in 30 to 50 years, according to the ABC. There are plans to increase the storage capacity and provide a more long-term solution, but it's unclear how the structure will be maintained -- how its solar panels might be replaced before the end of civilization, how well those drives hold up after decades and how impervious the vault will be to vandalism or sabotage. Its remote location, around four hours from the closest major city, is one deterrent -- but will that be enough?
The developers estimate that storage will run out in 30 to 50 years, according to the ABC. There are plans to increase the storage capacity and provide a more long-term solution, but it's unclear how the structure will be maintained -- how its solar panels might be replaced before the end of civilization, how well those drives hold up after decades and how impervious the vault will be to vandalism or sabotage. Its remote location, around four hours from the closest major city, is one deterrent -- but will that be enough?
Well.... (Score:3)
At least there are indications that some primates are moving into the stone age.
Maybe they will have a better shot at it. We may not be able to avert what's coming.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
And in a couple of million years, the new intelligent breed of apes will go "look, they thought they could send us a message using disc drives, they actually thought those would last millions of years and we would be able to read them, no wonder they went extinct".
Re: (Score:2)
It seems like they will at least have a hard time making the same mistakes. A lot of the resources we used are no longer as easy to get without modern tools.
Re: (Score:2)
Wish I could mod you insightful... This did not immediately occur to me.
Don't forget the Kurt Vonnegut Quote (Score:2)
Carved into the side of this monolith should be the immortal words of Kurt Vonnegut Jr so that visiting aliens would know who we were and what became of us:
"This is the Earth. We could have saved it, but we were too damned cheap."
Basically a remote datacenter (Score:5, Insightful)
Good luck trying to have your hard disks survive 50 years in a solar oven. Which engineer thought of this ... oh a MARKETING company. So it's basically a marketing stunt to leave a ton of e-waste in the middle of the desert.
Re:Basically a remote datacenter (Score:5, Insightful)
Look, anyone with an above room temperature will tell you dumping gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere is going to have consequences. Serious ones, with long term impact. But this isn't helping and will only hurt.
Re: (Score:2)
Correct, it's a marketing stunt. Hence the doom and gloom, "downfall of civilization", etc. To be addressed by a meaningless gesture that will accomplish nothing. Look, anyone with an above room temperature will tell you dumping gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere is going to have consequences. Serious ones, with long term impact. But this isn't helping and will only hurt.
And actual extinction of humans isn't going to be one of them. Yes, there will be migration, yes there will be shortage of food, yes, this will suck in a ton of ways, but no, it will not actually make humans extinct.
Re:Basically a remote datacenter (Score:4, Insightful)
Pretty sure that there will be plenty of clues left all over the planet as to how we met our end and why. A black box in the desert with inoperable hard drives and dead solar panels would just be another pointless one.
Re: (Score:2)
Pretty sure that there will be plenty of clues left all over the planet as to how we met our end and why. A black box in the desert with inoperable hard drives and dead solar panels would just be another pointless one.
Totally. Truth be told, five million two hundred and seventy thousand years in the future, long after we have killed our selves and ended 74% of all living species, a small mammal will emerge as a dominant intelligent species until archeological digs finally recover how our social media worked and someone thought it sounded like a good idea.
Re: (Score:2)
Fcib2: Well yes, apparently... from other sources, though, there's no discernable information here, really. It all became unreadable before their demise..
Fcib1: Are we sure they didn't leave this behind to console us...?
Fcib2: Console us? How so?
Fcib1: Well, as in, never mind us being gone, we weren't really worth any interest anyway...?
Fcib2: Hm, works for me.
Re: (Score:2)
Sneaky ad campaign (Score:2, Insightful)
Good luck trying to have your hard disks survive 50 years in a solar oven. Which engineer thought of this ... oh a MARKETING company.
I give this a 90% chance that it is a stealth ad campaign for the Horizon: Forbidden West game coming out soon and that you'll be able to find this archive in-game... or maybe a Fallout title.
Re: (Score:2)
Let's assume for a moment the project is sincere. If by "storage drives" they mean modern hard drives or SSD's, then such an archiving system intended to be read by future, post-apocalyptic generations is essentially useless. It makes broad assumptions that any remaining traces of our modern technology would even exist to be able to read the information from those drives, or that future people/creatures would even be capable of figuring out how any of it works.
It would have to be something directly human-re
Re: (Score:3)
It makes broad assumptions that any remaining traces of our modern technology would even exist to be able to read the information from those drives, or that future people/creatures would even be capable of figuring out how any of it works.
It would have to be something directly human-readable or simple enough from a mechanical point of view that it could be easily reverse-engineered by intelligent-enough beings. Electronic memory is just far too abstracted from the natural world.
I thought the same thing - whoever thought this project was a good idea needed to first show that they could reliably read data off an Iomega ZIP disk from 2004.
That being said, this COULD work, given proper architecture. SSDs in Poweredge servers running Windows Server 2022? Not a prayer. BUT, let's start with a few basics. Burying the unit 10-30 feet underground would be a start to help protect it from the sun. Building from things like a bank of Raspberry Pi computers would help minimize power usage, as
Re: (Score:2)
Your "trivial schematics" are useless to any intelligent beings with either only rocks for tools (the species that would rise in thousands/mil
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah.
I have trouble opening files in obsolete formats only 25 years old. Good luck with hundreds of years.
If they want the future to read it, carve it in stone. And make sure it's not particularly valuable stone, since there's a long history of locals taking good stone and using it for building.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, totally. If they were serious it would be more like the seed vault in... Iceland, I think? And using write-once optical media.
Re: (Score:2)
Even write-once optical media is too fragile, not to mention completely unreadable without any technology. Can you imagine trying to explain binary, then file formats, then text encoding, image file formats, pixels and all to either aliens or post-human beings?
Re: (Score:3)
Not to detract from how much of a publicity stunt this is, Tasmania is not a desert like central Australia. It's much damper, cooler, and forested.
The picture in TFA looked more like a grassy prairie, not desert.
Re: (Score:2)
Tasmania is not a desert like central Australia. It's much damper, cooler, and forested at the moment .
FTFY
Who knows what it's going to be like when this thing is going to be re-discovered (in hundreds if not thousands of years), which is (supposedly) the whole point?
I guess... (Score:2)
...it will also be red like all the other ones?
Re: (Score:2)
What if it's not climate change? (Score:2)
What if it's a global plague that causes irreversible degenerative brain damage from Lewy bodies, even with mild or asymptomatic cases? [biorxiv.org] We're gonna feel pretty stupid if we get write down the wrong cause of human extinction on a granite slab.
Re: (Score:1)
Maybe that's already happened. Modern humans are morons.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: What if it's not climate change? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Which is probably a good thing.
Through most of the planet's existence, it's been hotter than the temps we're supposed to reach under AGW. Only reason we consider our current temps "normal" is that we've evolved during an Ice Age. An Ice Age that's still going on.
Which isn't an excuse to let things heat up, mind you. But it's not actually going to be hotter than the planet has ever been. It probably won't even get up to the pre-Ice Age average (which is quite a bit higher than AGW projections).
Re: (Score:2)
The bleaching of coral reefs is decreasing ocean productivity. Their loss would be the loss of all of the 25% of ocean species that spend at least some part of their life cycle on coral reefs. On land, climate change is squeezing species off the top of mountains and the polewards end of islands and continents. Fires
Re: What if it's not climate change? (Score:2)
No no, the Earth used to be molten lava and volcanoes so a few degrees is fine!
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, Earth used to be gases and dust floating in space, where the temperature is around 2.73 Kelvin (-270.42 Celsius, -454.75 Fahrenheit).
Re: (Score:2)
An argument can be made that the ideal average temperature for life on Earth is actually a few degrees higher.
Only an obviously wrong argument.
Life is adapted to the temperatures that they have been for the past couple of million years. Driven by CO2 concentrations in the 180-300ppm range, which is why we're seeing climate change contribute to the mass extinction that we are observing.
But it's better to keep the populace in a state of perpetual panic. Much easier to control that way.
Are you under-medicated, or merely trolling?
This device (Score:3)
will be a lasting testament to our failure to resolve the problem of long-term digital preservation, when future generations discover the big steel box full of random data stored on long-forgotten media and encoded in unknown formats, and wonder what the hell we wanted to tell them exactly.
Re: (Score:1)
How many clay tablets would it take to chisel Wikipedia's content into? Just asking...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: This device (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
will be a lasting testament to our failure to resolve the problem of long-term digital preservation, when future generations discover the big steel box full of random data stored on long-forgotten media and encoded in unknown formats, and wonder what the hell we wanted to tell them exactly.
The stored data should be "clay tablet" analog micrography carved into a durable medium like nickel plates, not digital. Figuring out our languages will still be a challenge, but a solvable one.
Re: (Score:2)
The stored data should be "clay tablet" analog micrography carved into a durable medium like nickel plates, not digital. Figuring out our languages will still be a challenge, but a solvable one.
I've heard of something like this. Etched on brass or something. I would imagine that some of the narcissistic billionaires in the world would spin up projects like this. After all, who would be able to marvel at them if there's no record? I haven't looked into it--I do remember hearing a bit here and there, but I don't think they would really publicize it. It would be buried deep somewhere with only a few "monks" with knowledge of the location and the magical incantations needed to access it.
Re: (Score:2)
will be a lasting testament to our failure to resolve the problem of long-term digital preservation, when future generations discover the big steel box full of random data stored on long-forgotten media and encoded in unknown formats, and wonder what the hell we wanted to tell them exactly.
They'll scratch their braincases with their tentacles and chalk it up to religion.
Re: (Score:2)
Assuming Humanity Survives This (Score:5, Insightful)
The biggest misconception is that "we are destroying the planet" or "destroying the environment". Nothing could be further from the truth. We could launch every nuke we have and Planet Earth will be intact, spinning in space, orbiting the Sun and yes, it will have an environment.
Presently however, we are on track for making the planet uninhabitable for Homo-Sapiens and the majority of surface and ocean dwelling species. So it's more than likely there will be no human civilization to learn from this, and any future civilization would emerge in the environmental conditions created by us, and be just fine with how things are and find our "warning" every bit as idiotic as our insane need to drive ourselves extinct just so a few rich assholes can make ever increasing short-term profits
So yeah -- just another big waste of time and effort that will accomplish nothing other than allowing some pointy-headed academics to delude themselves into thinking they are making a difference, when in fact they aren't doing anything meaningful at all
You want to make a difference? Start rounding up the major polluters of our environment across the world be it Coal Plant Operators, Big Oil, or Bitcoin Miners, who actively, openly and purposefully defy international attempts to mitigate Climate Change or who openly deny and lie about the Science and charge them with crimes against humanity, same as Nazis and then lynch their fucking assed live on every TV station around the world
Then and only then might we see some actual change in the course of climate change
Re:Assuming Humanity Survives This (Score:5, Informative)
We could launch every nuke we have and Planet Earth will be intact, spinning in space, orbiting the Sun and yes, it will have an environment.
Very true.
... who openly deny and lie about the Science...
But there you go, veering off the track and crashing to destruction in the valley far below.
Anyone who could write those eight words - and mean them - hasn't the faintest inkling of what science is, or how to do it.
Re: (Score:2)
It's obvious in this context that "openly deny and lie about the Science" means acting selfishly and unethically, and is referring to "Science" as the aggregate current knowledge or working theories based on evidence and reasoning (which are of course subject to change with future discoveries).
The selfish and unethical behavior might include personal attacks, attempting to discredit people instead of addressing their claims, absolute denials without supporting evidence or reasoning, using distractions to av
Science never requires gagging anyone (Score:2)
I tried to clarify this but it took me 3 paragraphs. How would you rephrase that to better describe the people or behaviors that he's referring to, in a concise way?
How about "people who want to have an open, honest, respectful debate based on facts and figures"?
Works for me.
Science (which I capitalise only at the beginning of a sentence) is fundamentally about free, open debate and experiment. Labelling those who try to engage in such debate as "liars" or "deniers" is the very antithesis of science.
Why would anyone want to arrest and gag such people, unless he is afraid that they can defeat his arguments? Your words angered me, as they reminded me vividly of the fate
Re: (Score:2)
A scientist with a contrarian opinion would publish a paper citing evidence, sharing their analysis, etc. That's not denying. A reference to "denying" here is about avoiding the scientific debate completely. It's about creating fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the public to ensure that politicians won't have the public support to make changes regardless of what the scientific community already knows.
You made a reference to Giordano Bruno... in that story, he was the scientist, and the religious leaders perse
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Going to Mars makes zero sense in our current bodies. I would be shocked if someone (Elon Musk) was not funding research into cylons. My watery skin bag is useless for space travel. Especially if the universes' speed limit is hard coded. In that case we can't get anywhere without being able to hibernate for centuries without issue.
There are no speed limits when it comes to space travel. 1g of constant acceleration is more than sufficient to visit any system in the galaxy and return to earth within a typical persons lifetime.
Re: (Score:2)
Boy are you in for a surprise when the space police arrests your ass for going over the limit!
Re: (Score:2)
Boy are you in for a surprise when the space police arrests your ass for going over the limit!
Just tell them time is relative and you'll be fine. A few decades for the star sailor would end up being a few hundred millennia for earth dwellers.
Re: (Score:2)
Except for the speed of light as specified by known physics embodied in the Special Theory of Relativity, one of the two most successful theories in physics (the other being Quantum Mechanics). The only way out of that limit is to discover new physics. Until you have done that, you are blowing smoke (the galaxy is 100,000 light years across).
Re: (Score:2)
Except for the speed of light as specified by known physics embodied in the Special Theory of Relativity, one of the two most successful theories in physics (the other being Quantum Mechanics). The only way out of that limit is to discover new physics. Until you have done that, you are blowing smoke (the galaxy is 100,000 light years across).
There is effectively no speed limit in the accelerating reference frame. No matter how fast the sky sailor measures their velocity people on earth in the non-accelerating frame will always measure the sky sailors speed to have a value below C.
There are two simultaneous things one has to understand about constant acceleration on this scale.
First the 1c per year rule of thumb. If you travel for 10 years at 1g constant acceleration your apparent velocity will be about 10c at year 10... 5c at year 5..etc... w
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, you're argument is predicated upon science fiction. You can do whatever you want then.
If you bothered to even try to understand the explanation or provided reference you would know the argument is predicated on nothing more than basic arithmetic and SR.
Re: (Score:2)
Don't worry. Smartphones are only step one of the global Borg-ification master plan.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
You want to make a difference? Start rounding up the major polluters of our environment across the world be it Coal Plant Operators, Big Oil, or Bitcoin Miners, who actively, openly and purposefully defy international attempts to mitigate Climate Change or who openly deny and lie about the Science and charge them with crimes against humanity, same as Nazis and then lynch their fucking assed live on every TV station around the world
Tree hugging is a pointless fruitless enterprise. No government is going to act in contravention of its short term interests. No society is going to tolerate a few tree huggers with big mouths pushing them around for the sake of Gaia.
If you want to get rid of remaining coal operators and 2/3 of big oil then all you need to do is make the cost of your preferred energy less than theirs. You don't need to lobby the public or government for new laws and regulations or twist any arms. All you have to do is de
Re: (Score:2)
We could televise the executions from Nuremburg, to show the world that we have come full circle.
Re: (Score:2)
Presently however, we are on track for making the planet uninhabitable for Homo-Sapiens
Given that humans seem to be the most adaptable (and lightning fast at it) species ever, I find that difficult to believe.
Enormously disruptive? Sure. Genocidal if it involves the premature deaths of billions? Perhaps.
Will there be humans somewhere on the planet in 100 years? A virtual certainty. In fact, I'd wager there will be more of us in 2121 than today. We'll "just" live much further north and south.
it's a marketing company (Score:3)
Moreover, it's a marketing company that couldn't even be arsed to deploy the Photoshop skills of a 12 year old for the promo picture.
Think about that.
To say nothing of just announcing the word "indestructible" in 2021 will no doubt trigger a vast array of "challenge accepted". My guess is that within a few hours, its solar panels will be overwhelmed by the Pepe the Frog stickers.
They never see it coming (Score:3)
'Its mission: Record "every step we take" toward climate catastrophe...'
An "indestructible black box", eh? Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha! It may last a couple of years before being obliterated by thermonuclear war. I well remember how, as a boy, I used to regard toys stamped "Unbreakable" as an irresistible challenge. Nothing is indestructible.
Incidentally, there is no "climate catastrophe". There is not even any "global warming". On a time scale of less than centuries, the climate is just fine for humans.
Sea level is rising, at about the rate of fingernails growing. It has been rising for at least 22,000 years, as we move through the present interglacial period. At any time, the glaciers might come back - and fairly briskly too.
If the project is done right, it might conceivably be helpful to intelligent aliens searching for a solution to Fermi's paradox. They will land on Earth, take a quick look around, and say, "Yup! Yet another case of a species just beginning to discover technology that immediately used it to destroy itself".
Re: (Score:2)
Surely you mean the Xi'ktrazo'umlas paradox.
Fake news for the future (Score:1)
Tweets, posts, news and headlines (Score:2)
I cannot think of anything less valuable than "tweets, posts, news and headlines" unless your aim is to bullshit future generations into catastrophe and/or make us all look very bad. Even if you want to take a very charitable stance on, "news" nothing from twitter should ever be looked at, taken seriously, read, viewed, considered, acknowledged, or archived by anyone, ever. It is the epitome of our chronic oversimplification of our many complex problems.
Scientific studies and a very closely curated versio
Vandals (Score:2)
were a civilization too.
Doomer talk (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
They are all wrong so far! But one day, they will be right!
And on that day, there won't be anyone to recognize that they were right all along, so... meh.
Put it orbit (Score:2)
Wasn't that the anti-nukers big complaint on nuclear waste?
Even if you put nuke waste in a subduction zone it will still resurface millions of years in the future ( long after we're all destroyed by climate change)
Most obviously (Score:1)
Given how many warm and cold ages humanity went... (Score:2, Interesting)
Points and laughs (Score:2)
Yeah, by the time the climate collapses, the solar panels will have had to be replaced a few dozen times and the "storage drives" will have failed multiple times over. This is nothing more than a marketing stunt. I'm surprised that they didn't laser-etch Greta on the sides.
Come on, Slashdot (Score:2)
"Facts are stupid things." -- President Ronald Reagan (a blooper from his speeach at the '88 GOP convention)
"speeach", really?
Though we already had the Idiocracy movie? (Score:2)
Precisely documenting the downfall of human kind.
Can I have a Brawndo now?
Electronic storage? Really? (Score:2)
At least half of the facility should be recording to some sort of archival optical film,
cataloged, stacked, and sealed. I realize that it wouldn't have the bandwidth
and capacity that they are talking about, but just store the significant stuff.
Front pages of significant publications and web sites. Just the top page of
Google news, as slanted as it may be, would provide more than enough insight
to our encroaching downfall. They don't need the sports scores and cat videos.
It's a worthless idea anyway, except fo
Several orders of magnitude short on storage (Score:2)
(This happened, a factor of "several" slower than we're doing it, around 55 million years ago. The faunal record shows a major transition with the extinction of Palaeocene-series organisms, and the evolution of a new Eocene flora and fauna (on land and in the oceans, microscopic to macroscopic sizes), about the 6th or 6th biggest mass extinction in terrestrial history
Overreaction (Score:2)
We're not going extinct, civilization as a whole is not going to fall. Human society will evolve and change as it always has, of course, but some minor climactic changes won't do us in. This is nothing more than an over-engineered time capsule, a vanity project for some attention-seeking activists.
Believing things to be "indestructible" (Score:2)
Substituting belief and hope for thought and reality is what can cause a societal downfall.
It would be like if instead of this they decided to design a superior human, one that could survive an ecological disaster, and the collapse of civilization.
We already have that. (Score:2)
We already have a black box that records everything. It's called The Internet:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
We solved global warming. (Score:2)
What are the lowest cost energy sources? Let's take a look at the numbers from studies by IPCC, IRENA, and IEA/NEA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Bottom of the list is hydro. Nest to the bottom is keeping existing nuclear power plants running. This appears to include new reactors on the same sites where old reactors are decommissioned.
Next on the list is onshore wind, utility scale solar, onshore wind, and geothermal. The order of those varies some depending on the study.
Then comes new nuclear fission
Note the drift to the extreme (Score:2)
What's happening is the drift to the extreme that characterizes all radical political or religious movements.
In the present case, no mainstream opinion expects global warming to lead to the vanishing of human civilization on earth. The IPCC forecasts fairly unpleasant scenarios (though the more extreme ones are increasingly being downplayed). But they fall well short of catastrophe.
However, the activists and alarmed adopt more and more extreme positions, which go way beyond the least likely scenarios of t
Re: (Score:2)
Don't worry. There will be plenty of accessible fossil fuels on which to build another civilization. The difference is the amount will be more clearly identifiable as finite.
Re: (Score:2)
Egyptians and Rome used slave labor to accomplish their empires/civilizations. It would be conceivable that future persons resort to the same tactics.
Note:
My comment is not intended as an endorsement of such behavior, but deem it very likely to occur when there is a lack of fuel available.
Re: (Score:2)
The Great Pyramids: the original welfare program. While slaves were typically generated from warfare (and also from mating), I believe that current research has shown large amounts of craftsmen and farmers (in between sowing and harvesting) were used. Beer and food provided to come and do something holy for your fav deities appeared to be quite a draw for the farmers, and may not have needed much force applied for compliance, if any. And for the craftsmen, they got a steady gig.
The conditions that allowed t
Re: (Score:2)
How would you build a civilization from scratch without easily accessible fossil fuels?
One metric for the economic value of an energy source is EROEI, energy return on energy invested. Something with an EROEI of 1 is something that gives as much energy out as put it. Imagine taking a bunch of wood to fire a boiler, which runs a steam engine, to a generator, then to an electric heat pump. This is a Rube Goldberg contraption that takes heat from wood and ends up with heat in my hovel. Not helpful really because the conversion loses were just made up by the coefficient of performance on the
Re: (Score:2)
Interestingly, the Chinese may have recently seen the lunar obelisk [msn.com].
Re: (Score:1)
It's Kardashian's bootie
Re: (Score:2)
It's kind of ironic to a see a conservative make a hobby out of insulting the marines in every thread, every day.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That works until it doesn't work. See Carthage. Wait a few centuries, then see Rome.
I've seen some commentary describing our current all-volunteer military to be mercenary.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I would say late stage Roman Republic. We haven't gone through the emperor stage yet, though we've gotten close.
I'll grant that we might skip that period. The Western Roman empire died, amongst a host of other things, due to nothing but mercs (citizens did not want to join military) and anti-immigrant sentiment due to said citizens wondering why they were declining.
Re: (Score:3)
Those silly Monks who hid the dead sea scrolls. Rome wouldn't rewrite thousands of years of history.
I can see in 500 years, historians looking back at our time, figured that we were just too scientifically primitive to realize what we were doing was so bad, or no one cared at all. Or perhaps it may be that North Korea was the loan country fighting climate change, due to revisionist history.
So when rediscovered in the future, we can see that the world knew about the problem, but they were forces making it m
Re: LOL (Score:1)
Most of todays gross GHG tonnage comes from China India Russia and Brazil. If you want to have a shot at saving civilization then immediately stop buying goods from these 4 countries.
Re: LOL (Score:2)
Im not sure that would entirely solve the problem, or really be feasible.
Not buying products from a few countries wouldnt remove the demand, and they would have to be manufactured somewhere. As weve seen, at least here in canada with vaccines, it takes time and a lot of money to create manufacturing infastructre, in that case weve been helplessly dependant on other countries like india.
That, and as long as westen companies move to offshore resources and labor to be more economical, basically other countri
Re: (Score:3)
The only thing that could monetarily fix all of that is a worldwide currency with fixed wages in all countries, so that manufacturing anything in far away countries just isn't financially feasible and local manufacturing has to happen much closer just because of transport costs.
Re: LOL (Score:5, Interesting)
Per head, the #1 producer is the USA.
It's a bit rich for the developed world to put the blame on the developing world for following in our footsteps. "I'm sorry, we fucked things up so much that you're going to have to grow slower. We're pulling up the drawbridge!"
It'd be an extremely unpopular policy, however I think the fairest way of dealing with this is the developed world ploughing some of their earned riches into helping the developing world become more efficient.
Should South America & Asia be encouraged to preserve their forests? Yes.
Is it fair that they've been left holding the cheque because Europe & North America have already burnt through their forests? No.
This isn't their problem, it's our problem.
Re: LOL (Score:2)
The per head tonnage argument assumes that cars with pollution control technology (like western countries have) are somehow worse than factories and coal power plants without pollution control technology (like China and India have). In other words it is an irrelevant metric. China and India have almost 3 billion people between them - you can reduce the emissions in western countries to 0 and the global net of emission will continue to rise in a dangerous manner because youâ(TM)ve given half the worlds
Re: LOL (Score:2)
PS - western countries did not pillage and burn down their rain forests. These countries did that themselves to make a quick buck. Their leaders made deals or issues permits that allowed businesses to do something in response to consumer demand for more cheap crap. The first step in sustainability is to buy locally made goods or do without.