Yeah, all correct. If sandbags wouldn’t work for what you’re firing, don’t do that there. Somehow, it happened, though. According to Global, anyway.

I’d be surprised if, just, casual pockets of natural gas still exist near the surface, like that. Those are the first places wells get put in, historically, and a lot of wells are over a kilometer deep now.

Honestly, existing alternatives and frontends get surprisingly close.

Public service announcement that, once split up, this would be a significant but not life-changing amount of money. At least in the West.

In what way?

Linux might be a bit hacked together and monolithic, but I don’t know about fucked. Some hardware is shitty and locked down, but probably still not the majority.

It feels like a bit of an oversight to not have all of those sandbagged right up. Unless, I guess, it was something ground penetrating.

I would guess it has a significantly better track record than gasoline. Probably better than electricity, too - that stuff is invisible death.

Not green, sure. Probably dangerous in a target range, sure.

You really should include more expensive as a consumer inconvenience. Given the same budget, that means something gets cut out. (If you don’t like money, that all works in terms of raw resources or labour, too)

Unnecessary single-use packaging is a point that could be improved for the same (overall) price, and policies about that are gradually coming in where I live. The thing is that reusable packaging tends to be a lot more emission producing, and many people don’t actually reuse it properly. It solves waste footprint, more than carbon footprint.

There are other things that would solve the problem for a similar or smaller price, and that hopefully will happen, but they amount to a significant change of lifestyle. Mass transit instead of cars, denser cities, plant-centric diets, long-lasting, repairable, but fewer and less impulse-buyable household goods and clothes. You end up with people living a lifestyle that, while still fine, is a bit more like they would have in the past, or in middle-income countries.

Ah, right, the drying. Green wood is, like, mostly water. You can season wood outdoors, but it takes many months, so then you have the cost of the space as well. Usually they just use a drying kiln for lumber, in modern practice.

I think about this stuff fairly often, so I was pretty sure about the chemistry. I wasn’t trying to argue, or undermine you, there. Sorry if it came across that way.

Without sacrificing consumer convenience? Well, that seems pretty ambitious. The typical Western lifestyle is just quite carbon-intensive.

But yes, everyone trying to solve it on their own isn’t really fair. Policy would be needed. Unfortunately, that seems to be hard to set up, as well. (There just isn’t much uplifting to say here, unfortunately)

Okay, so how do you meaningfully do that IRL?

It sounds great, but you get one inch towards the practical end of things, and all the sudden there seems to be not a lot on offer.

It’s also not quite right. If you’re burning wood thoroughly for power you get pure ash, which is just carbon neutral. You get charcoal in campfires because they’re inefficient, and even then it’s mostly ash. Carbon neutral is still better than fossil fuels, though!

I think the most discouraging about this for me is that even though I’ve seen countless headlines about climate change, I’ve never really bothered to be curious about it until now. Now I wish I knew how to tell this to other people without sounding like alarmist.

FWIW, it makes me feel better that there’s people like you out there, who just didn’t know the whole story yet, and who could still change and improve. Way too many people don’t want to know inconvenient things.

It’s also energy intensive to make; you need a heat source that’s not going to produce CO2, ideally, and cut into the benefit that you’d get by sequestering carbon in the first place

Wait, isn’t charcoalisation an exothermic process? Am I remembering that wrong?

OP’s figure would include their share all the industry that exists to make them things.

Biochar is a totally valid way to fix carbon, yeah. There’s not enough trees in cities to make a dent, but if you think bigger, there’s potential.

However, nobody wants to personally pay for that, so there’s no way to employ people doing it. It’s kind of the same answer to every climate change inaction question.

It’s not even a money problem. In whatever non-market economy, there still wouldn’t be the will to divert resources to it, because 90% of people just don’t care that much.

I’m sure Japan would prefer that. Of course, we have priorities besides satisfying Japan.

I’m guessing OP has thought of that.

Like, it’s not wrong, if learning guitar really will fill that hole. But, it’s not really much of a tool, to actually build the habits to make that happen.

OP’s background makes me think they’re not really a likely recruit, anyway. Projecting weird things onto poor countries doesn’t work if you actually know them, and so those guys are almost completely aggressively white, and mostly American.

(OP mentioned getting an English competency certification)

Well, why does that make you feel like a loser? You’ve listed things you do, and things you don’t do, but nothing about your values or worldview.

Your emotions come less from what’s happening, itself, and more from your thoughts about what’s happening. Those are individual to a person, so what advice would work, depends very strongly on it.

A whole lot of normal, popular media ends up having pretty disturbing messages and biases baked in.

For example, most historical fiction is going to whitewash the past in order to have likeable (to a modern audience) characters. Another one: movies about authority figures tend to have them causally doing crimes, or war crimes.

It’s not even a deliberate propaganda thing (with a few notable exceptions). Entertainment and pandering is the main business, whatever message comes second. And, producers come from a certain background with certain biases, which is why realistic depictions of poverty, or even lower middle class life, are super rare.

Evil is banal. And, actually, good tends to be quiet, as well.