#Old ways to build solar panels released silver or platinum oxide in the atmosphere which you can guess isn't a fun thing

[grandpriestofthealpaca]

I once had the luck of going to a conference by 2 of the people that worked for the GIEC (I think in English it's the IPCC), after their conference where they told us how important it was to use solar panels and renewable energy instead of nuclear or coal, I asked where and how we could get the materials to build solar panels, because of we have to destroy the Amazonian Forest to save the Amazonian Forest, it's a bit pointless

They had no idea how to answer, I'm sure somewhere in the rapports there was some degree of answer to that but neither of the two speakers knew about it... The lack of communication makes big institutions release contradictory statements or just ideas that only work from one point of view, greatly reducing the credibility of the institution in question

Studying sustainability has taught me that the answer to things like “is it better to use paper or plastic bags?” always ends up being something like “we would need to perform an extremely in depth study on the entire life cycle of both types of bags from virgin material collection to product recollection, compare things like amount of product each type of bag can carry, material usage per bag, how frequently double-bagging is occurring, and take into account a ridiculous number of factors down to the fuel efficiency of the trucks that transport them and even after all that we would have to try to find a way to compare whether the higher carbon emissions of producing and transporting paper bags is better than the fact that the plastic bags will be plastic bags for the next thousand years. And at the end of the day all this research would ultimately not be particularly useful because our waste collection streams in the US are so fucking bad it’s depressing.”

And then someone will ask about reusable bags and you’d have to do the study again only to reveal that you need to use the reusable bag like a couple thousand times to offset the carbon emissions it takes to make the reusable bag and make it worth it over disposable bags and that’s not taking into consideration bags breaking before then or being forgotten about completely.

The answer always leads to “it’s incredibly complicated but our current practices are so terrible we would need a full scale restructuring of our economy and practices to such a degree that can literally never happen because our government is lobbied by the people who make money off of said unsustainable practices.”

So the answer to “paper bags or plastic bags?” is that we need to destroy capitalism