there are actual people out there who want to genetically modify carnivores so they no longer eat other animals
im going to fly away from this planet goodbye
yeah let’s just fuck up the entire ecosystem because i’m uncomfortable with the fact that nature doesn’t conform to my world-views.
Oh. For. Fuck’s. SAKE!!!!
Even if you discount the fact that listening nut-job orgs like PETA are about as “factual” as the Weekly World News (for Christ’s sake, they think dairy causes autism and that a monkey taking a selfie counts as “animal cruelty”)…
…vegetarianism and veganism are CHOICES. Do it or don’t, but don’t knock anyone else for their choice.
“As climate change shifts things in new and unpredictable ways, I have no doubt that planet Earth will survive, and that various aspects of the biological world will adapt and evolve accordingly. Change will happen, as it always does, and those changes are not necessarily ‘good’ or 'bad’ in a nonhuman sense; is it better or worse to have a predominance of mammals versus dinosaurs? Neither–these are just different outcomes. What gives climate change its most terrifying charge is the very real possibility that we will not survive it–although agin, better or worse to have people around? From our perspective, better, but otherwise it’s just another possible outcome on an ever-shifting planet.”
-Laura Watt, environmental scholar on climate change
“As a problem gets harder to solve, ignoring it becomes all the more tempting. Ignore it long enough, and eventually it becomes unsolvable. Giving up can then seem to deliver a measure of relief, in that it appears, at least for a moment, to liberate us from the agonies of our failing efforts. But such relief cannot last, as the unsolved problem will continue to create problems and cause suffering. This suffering rarely feels like freedom.”
-Maggie Nelson, from On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
“For better or worse, the question of what we tell each other–and what we tell ourselves–has become a staple in the discourse on global warming. The field is teeming with narrative concerns, be they about genre (Are we living in an apocalypse? a horror story? a tragedy? a fable? a farce? a typology?), origin stories ("It was April 1784, when James Watt patented the steam engine”), the problem of not knowing how the story ends or develops (climate scientists do not disagree on warming, but they do debate questions of “tempo and mode”), even the value of storytelling itself (Are stories still worth telling or recording if the likelihood of a future human audience for them is diminishing? What can the stories of much earlier humans tell us about our current crisis? What is the relationship between storytelling and adaptation, or storytelling and evolution?), and so on.“
-Maggie Nelson, from On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
Nuclear power is our best long-term reliable clean energy source. Many peoplw would like to argue otherwise, but it stands today that a single nuclear reactor can power ten times as many homes as solar panels in the same space or wind turbines in the same space. nuclear energy is often misrepresented as dangerous because the reactor could melt down or otherwise release radiation into the environment. This is false. These people will often cite the Chernobyl disaster as evidence that nuclear energy is unsafe and that solar/wind is the only way to go. The Chernobyl disaster was caused by improper maintenance of the facilities and improper training of personell responsible for preventing it from shutting down. those two factors are both caused by human error and not a direct result of the nuclear reactors being nuclear reactors. As a bonus, with the advancing technology of fusion reactors, nuclear power is safer than ever because fusion reactors will simply shut down in the event of failure as opposed to fission reactors which can overheat and melt down. Nuclear energy is currently the best option available to us to help slow down climate change. If you’re still not convinced that nuclear energy is safe, consider this: nuclear powered submarines (submarines with nuclear reactors inside them) and nuclear powered ships have been in active service for the US Navy for over 30 years without a single failure due to strict maintenance and training. Even nuclear reactors, as a whole, have a pretty clean record considering only 100 incidents where even just tiny amounts of radiation leaked out of 441 confirmed operating nuclear reactors worldwide, and over the course of 80 years (the first nuclear reactor was built in 1941 for the manhattan project.) The two most well known disasters, Chernobyl and Fukushima, were both caused by external influences and not because they were nucleae. In the case of Fukushima, a category 8 earthquake and subsequent tsunami devastated the facility and there was very little that could be done to prevent the disaster. Keep in mind that category 8 earthquakes are very rare and that this is not likely to happen again due to new advancements in earthquake-proof structures. As a whole, nuclear energy has proven to be very safe and reliable over the years and has the capacity to completely phase out fossil fuels (coal, gas, and oil power plants) where solar and wind cannot.
I may have gotten some details in this statement wrong, feel free to correct me or start discussions because this is an important matter that should be open to discussion and debate. If you for whatever reason believe my statement to be mostly or entirely false or otherwise disagree with me on teh topic of nuclear energy feel free to state why in a reblog or the comments.
