There seems to be some confusion around the basis of morals.
Once you are in power and you have things arranged the way you want, you claim that violence is not the answer.
Otherwise, practically speaking might makes right.
So for Greenlanders and those opposed to the US imperialism, it makes sense to say that the rule of existing law must prevail, regardless of the fact that there is no traditional military willing and able to back this up.
However, if you are American and you stand to benefit, what you want to happen is backed up by the most powerful military the world has ever seen.
And I bet a good chunk of people in Greenland know that with no roads and no infrastructure, they can go toe to toe with the US military inland, that is until they stop getting shipments of grain. But can even the vaunted US military blockade this continent sized island, especially with zero allies in tow?
So morally speaking, both parties are in the right. But you can predict what the outcome would eventually be, it is very much David vs Goliath, barring Greenlandic alignment with another foreign power in a proxy war.
Ethically speaking, the chronic under development and under investment in the global North is not beneficial to humanity. Viewed from afar, it does seem that Denmark has not been handling this colonial remnant particularly well.
Depends what you mean by large areas. Most of it is an kce sheet, the interior is uninhabitable and the habitable sections are hundreds of miles apart.
Depends what I mean with large areas? Ever been to Greenland?
Greenland is about 25% of the US excluding Alaska, the ice sheet covers 80% of that.
This means that the ice free area of Greenland is a bit larger than California. Thats the third largest state in the US. I would say that is a large area.
I think what I mean by colonial remnant is "administration and control from afar", not "subjugation of indigenous peoples", and it's concerned with what's happening now, rather than what happened 1000 or more years ago and it's no longer particularly relevant. By remnant, I mean that it's administered by Denmark as a byproduct of a colonial gold rush, not because they are the best entity for that job.
USA had its own legislative assemblies too before the declaration of Independence, look what happened.
The vikings landed there, not Denmark, who were Norse, Erik the Red was from Norway (But was considered by then an Icelander exile?). Before Danish control Greenland was a Norwegian colony, this was the colony that died out.
Norse colonisation tended to reflect their origin e.g. the Norwegians colonised the north west of Scotland and Iceland, which were more similar to Norway; Danes went to England and Normandy which were more southerly, flatter and more fertile, much like Denmark; the Swedes with their long Baltic coastline turned their attentions eastward.
Denmark got the North Atlantic islands through the union with Norway, and retained them after Norway became independent.
I know, but that was much later and had a very different dynamic, due to climatic changes etc.
The earlier Norse colonisation of Greenland seemed to consist of farmers and independent settlers, mostly via Iceland. In some areas, they never interacted with Inuit, or rarely.
The later effort seems more focussed on Christian missions to the natives, and commercial whaling and sealing.
From the 1600s to immediately after WW2, Battleship meant roughly the same thing, not "fast armored ship with big guns", but literally "Ship fit to stand in the line of battle". So yeah it's not a WW2 fast heavily armed and armored Iowa class, but those are obsolete, so we should be happy.
If the guided missile cruiser is now the biggest meanest surface unit, I'm fine with calling it a battleship.
Also, if gun caliber and armor plate thickness and speed, etc are less than the Iowa class battleship, the above still stands. It just means that the state of the art in what the biggest baddest ship is has moved on.
The aircraft carrier in many ways already became the new battleship in 1942, and existing battleships became effectively second rate in the sense that a fleet aircraft carrier smokes a battleship, it still does.
Another way to think about it is that guided missile cruisers are kind of another evolution of the aircraft carrier, they launch large numbers of missiles at much less cost.
Of course, the reality is much more complicated. It's unclear how useful guided missile classes and nuclear powered aircraft carriers will be in a standup full blown major power fight, aircraft carriers have sure been nice for asymmetric warfare in relative peacetime.
I'm not sure if people realize this, but Iran suffered more than any other nation during WW2, including Poland, Japan, the Philippines, China, and that's saying something. As a neutral country, I believe they have had something like 25% fatality rate during the war.
This can be seen as the knock on effects from the downfall of the Persian and Ottoman empires, and to a greater extent the destruction of the Persian civilization as the leader in the Middle East, replaced by the British and later American empires.
Water depletion and failure is but one small symptom of their civilizational decline. These issues wouldn't have been circumvented by better planning, it was to some extent written in the sky that this would come to pass. How can they support the needed infrastructure spending and policy goals, not being a leading global power? For example, not being able to control inflows from neighboring countries, or have the USD or trading partners available to pay to import food.
I call this the "judgement day" scenario. I would be interested if there is some science fiction based on this premise.
If you believe in God of a certain kind, you don't think that being judged for your sins is unacceptable or even good or bad in itself, you consider it inevitable. We have already talked it over for 2000 years, people like the idea.
You'll be interested in Clarke's "The Light of Other Days". Basically a wormhole where people can look back at any point in time, ending all notion of privacy.
God is different though. People like God because they believe God is fair and infallible. That is not true for machines nor men. Similarly I do not think people will like this idea. I'm sure there will be some but look at people today and their religious fever. Or look in the past. They'll want it, but it is fleeting. Cults don't last forever, even when they're governments. Sounds like a great way to start wars. Every one will be easily justified
You can tell when someone is a process or chemical engineer, by how they carefully consider each of the system boundaries and the inputs, outputs and processes inside and outside each of these boundaries.
There seems to be a whole series of issues in considering system boundaries and where they can and should be drawn when considering the best course of action.
EVs are a classic case, you draw the system boundary around the vehicle and get a MPG figure, and externalize the remaining costs. Might as well claim infinite MPG. Bill Gates proves himself as a process oriented guy here.
Carbon capture is another funny one. You report that you sequester this amount of carbon, but on the other hand deplete the soil. The amount of carbon in healthy soil is staggering, activities leading to soil erosion and depletion of soil nutrients have to be very carefully considered. How do you draw a system boundary around a volume of soil with biological activity extending down 500 feet and predict the carbon balance over the next 500 years? It's introducing predators into Australia all over again, people thinking they are smart and going for the course of action that is politically favorable in the very short term but ultimately ill considered.
For regulation, this is pretty much why can't we just have regulations that benefit me right now? For people with deep pockets, they ignore the regulations and pay the fines. Problem with these guys is their entire business model revolves around making money off of externalizing costs onto the rest of the economy, via environmental regulatory burden. What is unsaid in the article is the sentiment that regulators should more heavily support the EV business, the carbon capture business, etc, in general which makes sense to those invested, but not to everyone else.
> How do you draw a system boundary around a volume of soil with biological activity extending down 500 feet and predict the carbon balance over the next 500 years?
Are the potential harms in the very worst case scenario more significant than the harms of failing to sequester carbon and stop its production? It’s hard for me to imagine this being so. Mind that the process that created these holes have also created tremendously large biohazards very consistently, yet are normalized by society. We must accelerate the pace we’re on.
> What is unsaid in the article is the sentiment that regulators should more heavily support the EV business, the carbon capture business, etc, in general which makes sense to those invested, but not to everyone else.
Makes a hell of a lot of sense to me? I absolutely think businesses which are working to save millions of lives should receive regulatory support, instead of the oil companies which are still to this day benefiting from price subsidies?
The key point contested is stated like this in the OP:
> A regulatory system that structurally insists on legalistic, ultra-extreme caution is bound to generate a massive negative return for society.
The OP mostly sees the downsides and disregards how hard earned any of those regulatory requirements are. Each requirement is usually the outcome of people being substantially impacted by industry before regulation. For instance the Thalidomide scandal with 10000 children born with deformities.
If OP doesn't grasp the origin and rationale behind regulations, it doesn't mean there aren't any.
It's not like before Thalidomide companies were just cool with putting baby-mutating pills on the market. There were existing regulations, and concerned voices, but those were ignored or silenced. Even after concrete proof of harm was obtained, the medication was continued to be sold in some places.
Diesel is another one of these stories - with dieselgate being Act 2 of the whole diesel scam - diesel was pushed as clean because it performed better on traditional tests of environmental impact gasoline was subjected to.
Any chemist with half a brain would've told you that's because it produces different combustion products, which are in turn, not measured.
Dieselgate was merely an attempt to continue the scam which shouldn't have been started in the first place.
And strict regulation more often than not, favors the established players who don't have to comply with it - example is housing, where construction of new housing is subject to rules old houses are not needed to comply with - artificially limiting the ability to solve the housing crisis while pushing up prices.
Various emissions and safety regulations in the auto industry were also basically straight up scams - they drove buyers towards more complex and less reliable, but more expensive to repair cars, and unfairly favored large vehicles which had an easier time complying with them.
The various driver assist safety systems were also found to not lower accident rates to justify their existence - and are universally hated by drivers everywhere.
Many people nowadays express the sentiment that they'd rather keep their old car around and drive it into the ground before purchasing a new one for these reasons.
And now that we have these strict safety regulations after the Thalidomide fuck up, drugs are more expensive than ever due to the extreme cost of going through the approval process, but at least they're safer. Except, of course, that whole episode where people somehow forgot that opiates were addictive. What are we paying for again?
> Are the potential harms in the very worst case scenario more significant than the harms of failing to sequester carbon and stop its production? It’s hard for me to imagine this being so.
What percentage risk of it being worse would you draw the "we need regulators to take a careful look at this at? A 20% chance that they destroy up a local ecosystem or something else catastrophic? 5%? 1%?
Now what if their operations were local to you? What does it become then?
Carbon capture is a waste of time. You essentially have to suck the entire atmosphere through capture facilities.
It's completely infeasible in practice, the largest plant we have right now is called mammoth and in order to offset our current emissions we would need a million mammoths. A million of these large, expensive facilities that take years to build.
The oil companies are generally working on carbon capture that produces CO2 that can be sequestered with the equipment and know-how they already have (i.e. pumping pressurised CO2 back into underground reservoirs). Growing crops is one of their focuses (and it's not a very good form of carbon capture, anyhow).
To be honest they should be forced to actually work on it. The rule should be, if you want to be allowed to sell X amount of carbon as fuel on a given market, you have to capture k*X amount of CO2.
Waiting 4 years until regulator even decides which regulation you fall under is "regulations that benefit me right now?" There is a lot of similar sentiment ITT. Speedy resolution by government is essential. They get too much slack from being slow, from regulators to court.
> what kind of injection well is this? Should it be permitted as a Class I disposal, Class II oilfield disposal, or Class V experimental? This question on permitting path took four years to answer. Four years to decide which path to use, not even the actual permit! It took this long because regulators are structurally faced with no upside, only downside legal risk in taking a formal position on something new.
Oil companies routinely flared off natural gas that came up with oil because it wasn’t economically worthwhile build the infrastructure to capture it. It was expensive and it was just easier to flare it off and let it go to waste. North Dakota changed the calculus by implementing strict regulations that limited how much gas companies could flare in the state set a target that companies could only flare 10% of a natural gas production and if you exceeded that you would get a fine this regulatory pressure made previously un economical infrastructure investment suddenly worthwhile, and suddenly, they managed to build pipelines.
Doesn't carbon get pulled out of the air through photosynthesis? That's why people plant trees to address global warming, no?
Your arguments seem very handwavey and not very well thought through. Do you really believe that EV business owners are the only ones who benefit from more widespread EV usage?
In any case, even if you're flagging real issues, there is no evidence that existing regulators identified those issues in the case of the OP? So it could still be the case that the existing regulatory scheme is useless overburden.
But if we own real estate, we see the limitation and destruction of housing stock as value creation benefiting own personal assets. From that perspective, reducing this sort of low cost housing makes perfect sense.
Generations of young people have embraced this by joining em, not beating them, but this is becoming more and more difficult. It's unclear what prevents any one municipality from going vertical with young people buying, rezoning and building, I think it's related to the lack of income opportunities in some areas, as well as the built in and entrenched voter base. But as soon as any group gets in, they are pulling up the ladder, that's always going to be the case.
This is and has been happening everywhere in the US except for the expensive coastal metros and maybe Chicago. What you're asking for comprises the vast majority of house that's been built in the last 10 years in my city. Dozens of 5-10 story apartment complexes with nothing bigger than a 2BR.
HN and people like the guy that wrote this article live in a bubble. There's plenty of cheap housing available in most of the country. It's people renting out rooms for $5-700 a month in a suburban house.
1000%. The good solution is Georgism (perhaps with rolling leases, which are hard to manipulate, rather than LVT, which is easy to manipulate) but obviously everyone who bought into the ponzi will fight you tooth and nail so probably the best we can hope for is to slap the Nth bandaid on the problem with some NIMBY busting.
We should have federal legislation requiring tugboat assist adequate to recover from complete loss of power and steering, through shipping channels that go under bridges supported by mid span support columns. The mechanism should be that if the Coast Guard catches you without a tug, the ship is permanently banned from the port under threat of seizure and repossession by the US federal government, or your vessel just gets immediately seized and held in port under bond.
Insurance providers insuring ships in US waters should also be required to permanently deny insurance coverage to vessels found to be out of compliance, though I doubt the insurance companies would want to play ball.
Algal blooms with limited mixing sounds like a pretty good carbon capture mechanism!
I wonder if there is oil and gas at the bottom of any of these deep lakes? /s
It would be interesting to know the gas balances for these lakes, in particular how reduced mixing affects methanotrophy and methanogenesis. If its talking about climate change, this article really should discuss methane, I think that's a bigger deal.
This is a mechanism by which some oil deposits are thought to have formed, and by which a large quantity of biospheric carbon was sequestered during earlier warm spells, refered to as the Eocene Azolla Event.
Essentially: arctic seas formed fresh-water "lenses" through meltwater, which promoted plant growth (in particular azolla, though likely also algae and plankton). This growth then sank to the sea-floor, depositing as oils (and much ultimately undergoing keroginisation to form petroleum).
Similar mechanisms have been proposed for addressing carbon sequestration goals in the present, e.g., "CO2 sequestration by propagation of the fast-growing Azolla spp. " <https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8520330/>.
It could also be the opposite of a carbon capture mechanism is the detritus if those algal blooms are broken down by archaea and turned into methane, which could then return to the atmosphere. Methane is about 30 times more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2.
The cartwheel fails are pretty brutal, it never learned how to catch itself and break its own fall. Cartwheel is a remarkable demo, I initially thought it was a joke and fake until I saw the blooper reel. Now I half believe it.
Those bots never learn by themselves. It's same as how animations on beautiful LPs don't write themselves. They're all "fake" in that sense, but also "real" in the sense that they would not be just gifs or mp4s but callbacks would be firing and running on customer browsers.
Figuring out the meaning of the acronym "LP"s will be for the archeologists to decipher, I suppose.
EDIT: Future archeologist here (3 minutes after posting). It stands for "Live Performance", which is an unnecessarily obscure way of saying something that isn't obvious from the context alone.
Once you are in power and you have things arranged the way you want, you claim that violence is not the answer.
Otherwise, practically speaking might makes right.
So for Greenlanders and those opposed to the US imperialism, it makes sense to say that the rule of existing law must prevail, regardless of the fact that there is no traditional military willing and able to back this up.
However, if you are American and you stand to benefit, what you want to happen is backed up by the most powerful military the world has ever seen.
And I bet a good chunk of people in Greenland know that with no roads and no infrastructure, they can go toe to toe with the US military inland, that is until they stop getting shipments of grain. But can even the vaunted US military blockade this continent sized island, especially with zero allies in tow?
So morally speaking, both parties are in the right. But you can predict what the outcome would eventually be, it is very much David vs Goliath, barring Greenlandic alignment with another foreign power in a proxy war.
Ethically speaking, the chronic under development and under investment in the global North is not beneficial to humanity. Viewed from afar, it does seem that Denmark has not been handling this colonial remnant particularly well.