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[Naturegirl1999]

There's a joke here, but I'm a little uncertain how to finish it... So, rather than do it myself, I'll provide you (the audience) with a list of three choices, and you can pick whichever punchline you prefer.

Here are the options (in varying degrees of poor taste):

It's gotta be that roomy trunk space for all them groceries

• Magnum condoms
• High-caliber fully automatic assault freedoms
• Children

As an American, I find

• High-caliber fully automatic assault freedoms

as the funniest punchline

[hector13]

There's a joke here, but I'm a little uncertain how to finish it... So, rather than do it myself, I'll provide you (the audience) with a list of three choices, and you can pick whichever punchline you prefer.

• Magnum condoms
• High-caliber fully automatic assault freedoms
• Children

If number one quit slipping off, they wouldn't have number three.

That’s what number two is for. /winner of the jokes in poor taste competition

[Mephisto]

Why has this thread gone the way it has?

That is one of my many sads for today.

[Doomblade187]

Why has this thread gone the way it has?

That is one of my many sads for today.

Dark humor lightens our days. Don't mean to bum you out, sorry.

[Iduno]

Dark humor lightens our days.

I was pretty much going to say the same thing.

[scourge728]

I simply couldn't live in a mud hut, it's beyond my capabilities, also, would it be theoretically possible to extract carbon dioxide and such from the atmosphere and then do something with it

[Naturegirl1999]

I simply couldn't live in a mud hut, it's beyond my capabilities, also, would it be theoretically possible to extract carbon dioxide and such from the atmosphere and then do something with it

Maybe, we would have to stop burning fossil fuels(the main source of CO2) first for this to be feasible.

[Ulfarr]

would it be theoretically possible to extract carbon dioxide and such from the atmosphere and then do something with it

Trees (plant based life in general) already do it 

CO2 is mostly inert, so most of its industrial applications will use it for "whatever" proccess but won't consume it. The best large scale industrial application (that I know) is biofuel production, with the main idea behind it being, that growing the plants/algae will consume a large part of these gases before releasing them back into the atmosphere when they get burned (zero sum scenario). Biofuels have their share of problems* as well, but so does every (alternative or conventional) source of energy.

*They are too corrosive for the current engines, will require a lot of farming land / sea  to grow them, they lack some of the properties of the fossil fuels etc. This document is a bit old and focuses mostly on marine applications, but it gives a nice overview of each alternative fuel source.

[Naturegirl1999]

would it be theoretically possible to extract carbon dioxide and such from the atmosphere and then do something with it

Trees (plant based life in general) already do it 

CO2 is mostly inert, so most of its industrial applications will use it for "whatever" proccess but won't consume it. The best large scale industrial application (that I know) is biofuel production, with the main idea behind it being, that growing the plants/algae will consume a large part of these gases before releasing them back into the atmosphere when they get burned (zero sum scenario). Biofuels have their share of problems* as well, but so does every (alternative or conventional) source of energy.

*They are too corrosive for the current engines, will require a lot of farming land / sea  to grow them, they lack some of the properties of the fossil fuels etc. This document is a bit old and focuses mostly on marine applications, but it gives a nice overview of each alternative fuel source.

Thank you for this

[Lord Shonus]

There exists a working technology to convert airborne Co2 directly into usable fuel. It isn't used because the energy cost is enormous, but with sufficient clean energy available it might be workable as a decontamination method. You'd probably get better results with algae-bed greenhouses or something, but who knows for sure.

[wierd]

There's a catalytic process that can reduce atmospheric CO2 directly to elemental carbon and oxygen as well.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/carbon-capture-coal-electrolysis-rmit-university-melbourne-dorna-esrafilzadeh-a8798031.html

Oh look, paper is freely available!
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-08824-8

Probably not scalable though. (Liquid metal catalysts tend to be that way, I understand.)


I am more apt to suggest algae as well, because the setup costs are much lower, and sequestration over geological time would be possible with solar sintering. (It would require a multi-step sintering process, but should still be achievable:  Rough-sinter cheap sand or clay powder with concentrated solar, then crush it up into rough smalt. Add the algal powder to the smalt, then sinter again in a closed crucible. The algae will not fully volatilize, because of insufficient oxygen in the crucible, causing a significant portion of the carbon to enter the glass matrix.  you then bury the resulting glass billets. The gasses evolved can be put back through the algae tanks for reprocessing.)

[wierd]

......

Can you even understand what the data you just quoted say?

63% of US's electricity is produced using some form of conventional fuel (coal,oil or natural gas).  63% of the increased demand for electricity, that would result from swapping to electric cars, would have to be covered by those very same power plants. It might be better than burning fuel directly into your car but the pollution is still there, spewing out from each power plant.

If you want to push for something, push for swapping to renewable energy sources.

Yes.  Yes I do.  Do YOU understand it though?

27.4% of the nation's energy is produced at an efficiency comparable to "THE VERY BEST" internal combustion engines inside cars. The other 35% (produced by fossil fuels) is generated at an efficiency comparable to the motherfucking carnot efficiency.  It is also more efficient to transport the fuel in bulk to the power plant, than to distribute it to gas stations. This is further magnified by the fact that the remaining 40% of energy production is carbon neutral.

It is still more efficient to use electric cars than to drive internal combustion engines.  By a pretty significant margin.

[Reelya]

(~4 million people live in Los Angeles, or a little over 1% of the US population total. In ONE city. When you then consider places like NewYork (8.6million, or ~2% of US population, in one city.)

Those are rookie numbers in this business, you gotta pump those up.

Lagos has a population estimated at 21 million in 2016

There's a reason people think Africa is a lot less populated than it is. White colonial powers have been pushing terra nullis "empty land" narratives about Africa for centuries. There really aren't many people in Africa. So it needs to be filled up. By white people. But we should totally hand out contraception to all the black folks too, just in case.

You just don't tend to see any big African cities like Lagos portrayed in Western media that much, they'll show you some dusty village or some wilderness scenes with a few native park rangers, and you're expected to form your view of what all of Africa is like from that.

[wierd]

No, I dont harbor such racist bullshit notions.  Colonialism is always bullshit, and gets spam-binned appropriately.

More, I just neglected to consider north Africa. For some reason, my brain equates sub-Saharan Africa as "Africa".  There are some prosperous nations down there, but their population densities arent nearly as high as the ones on the Mediterranean.  (Though Lagos IS subsaharan...)

[Reelya]

Nobody is saying it's racism. It's about how things are presented, that influence people's assumptions and beliefs.

Also, note you're still kinda doing it. You just said you neglected "north Africa" when considering large cities since you were picturing sub-saharan Africa. You automatically picture Sub-Saharan Africa as empty, right? And you associated big cities with North Africa. Well, the data doesn't really support that association, it does seem like you've been influenced, unaware, by the same narratives that black parts of Africa are "empty" that have been spread for several centuries.

 Here's a list of the biggest cities in Africa

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_urban_agglomerations_in_Africa

1) Cairo, Egypt 18 million
2) Lagos, Nigeria, 13 million
3) Kinshasa-Brazzaville, DR Congo, 13 million
4) Johannesburg, South Africa 9 million
5) Luanda, Angola 6 million

Most of the big cities are in fact Sub-Saharan, not North African (two out of the top 10 are in Egypt, all the rest are in Sub-Saharan Africa), and the implicit assumption that Sub-Saharan Africa is automatically empty is part of the narrative I was talking about.