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Grimm (Member Profile)

Zifnab (Member Profile)

brycewi19 (Member Profile)

Grimm (Member Profile)

lol horse fart

StukaFox says...

As a long-time NPR listener, I applaud Iv_hunter for bringing an air of class and maturity to Videosift with this submission. Too often, Sift is plagued by such low-brow topics as TED talks and the ever-rancorous Neil deGrasse Tyson. By exposing the Sift audience to masterpieces such as "lol horse fart", one is reassured that erudite viewing will never go out of style. Salute', Iv_hunter!

How To Tell You Picked The Wrong Car

ant (Member Profile)

Bill Nye makes fun of Neil deGrasse Tyson's reply to Dawkins

siftbot says...

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Bill Nye, makes, making, made, fun, Neil deGrasse Tyson, response, reply, Dawkins, funny' to 'Bill Nye, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, consciousness, asu' - edited by xxovercastxx

ant (Member Profile)

Neil deGrasse Tyson explains meaning of life to 6 year old

Young Jack->Neil deGrasse Tyson:What's the Meaning of Life?

Young Jack->Neil deGrasse Tyson:What's the Meaning of Life?

Young Jack->Neil deGrasse Tyson:What's the Meaning of Life?

blahpook (Member Profile)

Climate Change - Veritasium

MilkmanDan says...

I used to be a pretty strong "doubter", if not a denier. I made a gradual shift away from that, but one strong instance of shift was when Neil Degrasse Tyson presented it as a (relatively) simple physics problem in his new Cosmos series. Before we started burning fossil fuels, x% of the sun's energy was reflected back into space. Now, with a higher concentration of CO2, x is a smaller number. That energy has to go somewhere, and at least some of that is going to be heat energy.

Still, I don't think that anything on the level of "average individual citizen/household of an industrial country" is really where anything needs to happen. Yes, collectively, normal people in their daily lives contribute to Climate Change. But the vast majority of us, even as a collective single unit, contribute less than industrial / government / infrastructure sources.

Fossil fuels have been a great source of energy that has massively contributed to global advances in the past century. BUT, although we didn't know it in the beginning, they have this associated cost/downside. Fossil fuels also have a weakness in that they are not by any means inexhaustible, and costs rise as that becomes more and more obvious. In turn, that tends to favor the status quo in terms of the hierarchy of industrial nations versus developing or 3rd world countries -- we've already got the money and infrastructure in place to use fossil fuels, developing countries can't afford the costs.

All of this makes me think that 2 things need to happen:
A) Governments need to encourage the development of energy sources etc. that move us away from using fossil fuels. Tax breaks to Tesla Motors, tax incentives to buyers of solar cells for their homes, etc. etc.
B) If scientists/pundits/whoever really want people to stop using fossil fuels (or just cut down), they need to develop realistic alternatives. I'll bring up Tesla Motors again for deserving huge kudos in this area. Americans (and in general citizens of developed countries) have certain expectations about how a car should perform. Electric cars have traditionally been greatly inferior to a car burning fossil fuels in terms of living up to those expectations, but Tesla threw all that out the window and made a car that car people actually like to drive. It isn't just "vaguely functional if you really want to brag about how green you are", it is actually competitive with or superior to a gas-engine car for most users/consumers (some caveats for people who need to drive long distances in a single day).

We need to get more companies / inventors / whoever developing superior, functional alternatives to fossil fuel technologies. We need governments to encourage and enable those developments, NOT to cave to lobbyist pressure from big oil etc. and do the opposite. Prices will start high (like Tesla), but if you really are making a superior product, economy of scale will eventually kick in and normalize that out.

Outside of the consumer level, the same thing goes for actual power production. Even if we did nothing (which I would certainly not advocate), eventually scarcity and increased difficulty in obtaining fossil fuels (kinda sad that the past 2 decades of pointless wars 95% driven by oil haven't taught us this lesson yet, but there it is) will make the more "green" alternatives (solar, wind, tidal, nuclear, whatever) more economically practical. That tipping point will be when we see the real change begin.



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