• 9 Posts
  • 283 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: August 9th, 2023
  • Gsus4@feddit.nlOPtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Butter made from carbon tastes like the real thing, gets backing from Bill GatesEnglish
    2·
    6 days ago

    “Made of” can mean “composed of” or “constructed from”. This is the latter:

    Savor says they take carbon dioxide from the air and hydrogen from water, heat them up, oxidize them and get a final result that looks like candle wax but is in fact fat molecules like those in beef, cheese or vegetable oils.

    The entire process releases zero greenhouse gases, uses no farmland to feed cows, and despite its industrial appearance, has a significantly smaller footprint.

    “In addition to the carbon footprint being much lower for a process like this, right, the land footprint is, like, a thousand times lower than what you need in traditional agriculture,”

    Good example of how choice of words can mislead, particularly when intentional.

  • Gsus4@feddit.nltoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•Are there any green alternatives to asphalt in development?
    7·
    2 years ago

    It’s about return on energy. Fossil fuels return 20x what you invest it’s essentially free energy.

    (edit: roughly, this translates to how many people are free to do things with the work of one, if every person lives alone, it’s 1, if each person has a personal slave/robot, it’s around 2, we want to stay well above 2. Modern society has 19 people doing all sorts of non-survival things for each one farming and collecting resources because fossil is so “cheap”)

    Renewables can reach 5-10 at best, which is not so bad (medieval was around 1.3, pre-industrial with slavery was around 1.8), so you can do it, but it will have to reshape society, which will be fine, if we know what we’re doing or can at least imagine what we are aiming for to avoid disappointment. It’s hard to be utopian going backwards.

    This whole debate started with carbon footprints and carbon pricong, because I believe that creating a market can help the less virtuous among us to use their greed to help solve the problem of public consent in a consumerist society without devolving into a dictatorship.

    But yea, let’s aim for that energy return of say… 7 and try to imagine what such a society would look like. A return to slower shipping by sail again…more solar boilers for all hot water…solar desalination…peak-solar hydrogen for fertilizers and airplanes…more compact cities with mass transit and bikes, lots of working from home, more fixing things DIY…a return from cities to the countryside and decentralisation would help, but only if those communities were more self-sustained and local, with 2x more power to farming, mining and wind/solar communities (meaning potentially smaller countries)…now I could describe all the potential setbacks of all of those points, but I won’t, because this is solarpunk and we need more imagining of what things are going to be like when we succeed…not so much the year 500 :)