I am not Jim West.
Do you know of a way to efficiently produce the infrastructure needed for solar, wind, etc using energy from solar, wind, etc such that the energy return on energy (ERoE) is high enough? That seemed like the crux of the argument made in the article, and I’d be interested to read a rebuttal.
It would seem that scaling back the use of many modern technologies is both necessary and inevitable. When hydrocarbon-based energy sources run out, it’s back to old-fashioned carbohydrates…
Accessible texts with substance point towards some activity people can do in real life, some change they can bring about by doing a specific thing.
For example:
Can you define “non exploitation”?
I probably could, but I cannot say what Donald Watson or Leslie Cross or anyone else meant.
My understanding is that leather is a waste byproduct of the meat industry
It is a co-product, and it directly supports the industry.
so much in the same way that gas is from dinosaurs that are already dead, the cows that provide leather are “already dead” due to their use as meat.
Dinosaurs did not die as a result of humans exploiting them in order to consume their bodies. Cows live and die solely for the sake of exploitation.
It is not possible to exploit today someone who died millions of years ago.
As for what humans do to each other, I’m not the one to ask. I don’t think that “animals” in the original definition of veganism was intended to include humans, but I don’t know that for sure. I doubt that the linked article considers exploitation of humans in determining which cars to feature.
Shit. I use uBlock Origin and block all javascript by default, so I didn’t even see that. I’ll add a warning to the post.
I’d say so, at least in theory. Veganism is about non-exploitation, not ecological impact. That said, there are plenty of other reasons to avoid gasoline.
Remove all of the grass, let it bake in the sun until it dies, and then mulch with the dead grass. Living grass will suck your garden dry of nutrients in a time short compared to 20-30 years.
Wait, what? What did I miss?
Yes, I would like to moderate.
Perhaps it’s worth mentioning that carnists looking to debate/discuss veganism could try /c/discusswithvegans instead.
I also suggest adding these rules:
/c/food.Great! Do you still intend to expand to other parts of Europe?
While that sounds like an interesting project, I’m not trying to invest a lot of time and effort into this. The grass won’t stop growing back while I figure it out.
Even Trump already did, sort of.
Do you know if there is already a theme like darkly for Piefed?
This strong upward trend in the imbalance is difficult to reconcile with climate models: even if the increase in anthropogenic radiative forcing and associated climate response are accounted for, state-of-the-art global climate models can only barely reproduce the rate of change up to 2020 within the observational uncertainty (Raghuraman et al., 2021).
Hansen et al (2025) seemed to account pretty cleanly for the extra warming in recent years.
That would be nice.
I haven’t eaten it, but my friend says that it tastes savoury and funky almost like durian.
Is your summer long enough for that? It needs very warm, like coastal SE Asia warm. Otherwise it doesn’t grow much, so as a leaf crop, it isn’t worth it. (I grew it years ago, and though I live in a place warm enough for durian, this never did very well.)
Water spinach as in Ipomoea aquatica?
I don’t doubt that the return on investment for solar and wind will continue to improve relative to fossil fuels when used for electricity generation, but the problem seems to be, again, the manufacture of infrastructure such as wind turbines, photovoltaic panels, and so on, which require energy-intensive mining and refining of minerals. Unless every stage of the manufacturing process can be electrified, the efficiency of generating electricity using wind and solar won’t matter in the slightest, as there will be no way to use that electricity to eventually recycle/replace the existing wind/solar infrastructure, let alone to deploy more of it or to do either of these while maintaining the high energy return on energy invested.
To be clear, I don’t want solar/wind/etc to be dependent on fossil fuels at all, and so I would be interested to read an explanation of how these (or other) clean energy technologies can be deployed without using fossil fuels at any stage of the process. The problem presented in the article seems to be that such technologies currently do depend upon the use of coal, and I posted the article here with the idea that it might get people to start thinking about potential solutions to this problem, not to suggest that the deployment of clean energy technologies is not worthwhile.
Realistically, even if photovoltaic panels and wind turbines can be recycled 100% efficiently, the supply of energy from these sources at any given time will still have an upper limit based on the finite supply of the minerals required for these technologies, so people cannot continue to increase their energy consumption indefinitely even from “renewable” sources. But that’s a separate problem.