This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.
These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.
We also had the problem with the database earlier this month, so some of these comments aren't available in their original context. However I am reposting the comments themselves below; it's not a perfect solution, but in various ways it beats the alternatives I could think of. That said, if you find any errors in need of correction (misattributed comments, for example) please feel free to @ me. The number of copy/paste errors I made in the process of trying to put this together is... not small.
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Notes -
@RandomRanger's original comment:
Have they read the IPCC reports? The planet is going to get marginally warmer over a century which is harmful but not a major problem. I ctrl-Fed 'existential' and there's no such risk in the reports, except to low-lying islands and even then it's manageable. See the Netherlands and their erosion of the North Sea. At any rate, there used to be jungles in Antarctica, we're still in an ice age.
Everything we do makes the planet less habitable from a certain point of view. More habitable from another. Mining rare earths uses toxic acids, releases radioactive materials, industry requires pollution. Drilling oil means oil leaking. But without oil and without mining we're going to starve in enormous numbers, we need fertilizers, mechanized transport and industrial agriculture to survive. If we suddenly lost access to fossil fuels tomorrow, that would be an existential threat to civilization, perhaps even humanity.
Team Blue's responses have not been very helpful either, there are a bunch of these phoney climate conferences where billionaires, celebrities and world leaders fly their private jets to places like Dubai, where the poor countries ask the rich countries for free money and everyone clever acknowledges that they're not going to cut emissions to reach a 1.5 or 2 degree target because it spells death for national prosperity. Blue's been sabotaging nuclear for decades now along with geoengineering, these people apparently won't accept the efficient, progress-based solutions. The harm is not serious enough to justify the cost of preventing it in this particularly silly way, just like how fertilizer runoff into rivers isn't severe enough for us to not use fertilizers.
Anyway, why should A give up coal when B will just burn more and take the profits instead? Team Red may not know what Nash Equilibria means but they at least understand the concept. Calls for unilateral nuclear disarmament also only come from the left wing of politics, something about competitive game theory escapes them.
Defending Saudi Arabia /= invading Iraq or Iran. America is a rich country, a diet of meat and V8 engines can be sustained on American resources, especially if they were competently managed. America's post-91 foreign entanglements make the price of energy rise, they're supremely counterproductive - sanctioning Russian, Venezuelan and Iranian energy exports, sanctioning and invading Iraq and creating a giant mess, bombing Libya into chaos, now this Israel-Yemen farce in the Red Sea. States naturally want to sell their oil, if the US just wanted cheap energy all they'd need to do is prevent anyone monopolizing energy supplies by invading other countries.
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