Carbon Footprint - Do you care?

Nah i recycle to an extent, put whatever into the green bin etc, but its nothing i will lose sleep over.

Country is fuc*ed, more important things to be worrying about!

In a recession, it's hard to care

1) My amount of CO2 is insignificant in the grand scheme of things
2) I think anthropogenic climate change is a load of kack

I do like saving money and energy though, so i endeavour to make things low cost and efficient in that regard

noxqs wrote: »

Ireland is fairly windy. Where is all the windmills? Denmark gets about 30% of their energy from it and I dare say Ireland might one-up them in the wind department.

You need backup power for when it's not windy - the only solution is to have this online or to be interconnected into a europe-wide grid, where we can (theoretically at least anyway) sell wind power to the UK and others when it's windy and buy nuclear power from them when its not.

This would be inordinately expensive.

Plus wind turbines are expensive and **** and are only commercially viable because they are subsidised

The sun will kill us all when it decides to go supernova.
Anyways, we've had many periods of global warming and cooling since the earth was formed, so since there is nothing i can do about the earth's natural cycles, i'm not going to waste time worrying about it.

Danish windpower, according to the wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Denmark

Was subsidized in the early yeards - but is currently 0. Yet installed capacity has grown yearly since 1979. Maybe because of dramatic improvements in windmill design allowing better generation ?

Anyways - like I said. We have the technology but too many naysayers. What about nuclear then ? Breeder reactors, thorium reactors and graphite sphere reactors are pretty damn safe.

Edit: The island is not big enough for windpower? whiskey tango foxtrot - its larger than denmark with less people and is surrounded by water where offshore windparks is perfect. Also we don't need 100% renewables coverage - yet. Theres tons of options to switch in the next 50 years gradually. Solar, tidal, wind, nuclear, and pray for fusion to happen someday.

there is plenty of stuff out there that could destroy the planet alot quicker than global warming its just no one can make money off them, asteroids for one

Physics professor Philip Walton from NUI Galway is always going on about how nuclear power is really the only way forward, he's often interviewed on the radio. Interesting guy.

I am 110% for Nuclear power. There has been only two level 7 nuclear disasters in history; Chernobyl and fukushima. Both very old plants - fukushima core 1 from 1976 and Chernobyl from 1977. Both old generation plants which is no where near the modern reactor designs.

Thorium/Breeder and Pebble bed reactors are generation 4 reactor cores which - albeit never 100% safe - has built in designs which will stop run-away reactions as a feature of the fuel cycle itself. Which is pretty novel.

It can be done safely. Chernobyl was a human error overriding the security of the reactor willingly. And fukushima was Murphy's law - if a 9.5 earthquake and tsunami can happen, it will. And it wasn't designed for it fully (but almost).

But can you imagine anyone in Ireland accepting a nuclear power plant anywhere near 'their children oh my god my radiactive children'.

I have no feet so I'm grand.

Winter is coming.

Yeah, tbh, I do care about our impact on the planet - but, having no children, I have no personal investment in our collective future. The majority of the human race are either too preoccupied with survival on a day to day basis, or preoccupied with the lives of 'celebrities' ditto, or the state of their investments ditto, that I prefer to opt out of the entire thing and spend my entire life in online MMORPGs.

Caring is an exercise in frustration.