Germany: just do what the rest of the west (and China) does and bribe the Canadian government to hand over raw resources to you.

Exactly what we’re doing. Also Namibia, besides having (as Canada) excellent conditions for renewable energy, being (as Canada) a proper democracy, they’re also an ex-colony so we’re using the opportunity to help bootstrap their local energy infrastructure to industrialised levels (it’s currently hit and miss), also, they’ll have absolute energy independence. Also stuff like Africa’s first hydrogen-based steel furnance. Which would make Namibia a more developed economy than Australia who somehow are still exporting raw ore.

In reality, Germany became entirely dependent on Russian gas, oil and coal.

For all that talk of dependency preciously little happened when Russia closed the valves. There’s press reports about BASF going into gas saving mode but that’s a bit misleading – actual gas saving mode would be to change their processes on a fundamental level (they have plans and infrastructure for that), what they did do is to use the flexibility in their standard processes to not rely on gas as precursor where there’s more readily available options – as they’ve been doing for literal decades, depending on market prices they’re using more of this, or more of that. They pulled a lever over to one side, they didn’t build a whole new set of levers to pull.

Germany ended up having more gas reserves at the end of the winter than usual because people were quite mindful when heating their homes, mindful as in “it doesn’t need to be t-shirt temperature in here, 20C suffices”, not as in “let’s heat our homes like English pensioners”. Gas prices actually sunk, presumably due to lower demand companies invested in things like waste heat recycling.

The whole concept of Wandel durch Handel relied on the assumption that economical entanglement makes war ruinous, and thus states are heavily disincentivised to be belligerent. You can now interpret that in two ways: a) It didn’t stop Russia, therefore, it failed or b) it succeeded in ruining Russia’s economy because all their what ball bearing companies went belly-up during entanglement, German ball bearings being cheaper (not necessarily unit price, you also have to take lifetime, service costs etc. into account) and now they have severe shortages (that’s simplifying quite a bit but that’s the net effect).

In the end there’s only one thing to take away: Policy can’t influence non-rational actors. All you can ensure is that if an actor becomes irrational they’re shooting themselves in the foot.

Not really, they’d need to triple their numbers.

Numbers on the far left are misleading as Die Linke is bleeding members to the BSW but the BSW is taking their sweet time handing out membership cards, double-checking every single applicant. Reportedly they have a backlog of at least 8000 applicants or such and at least 20k people generally interested. Wagenknecht is at least 70% tankie so it doesn’t surprise that they’re doing a vanguard thing.

Avoiding other plants to take root, in particular ones with deep roots as they would form weak points in the dense felt-like root system grass has. Also ease of inspection.

There’s about a millennium of engineering experience in those dikes… and plenty of historical compromises. Like, we knew back in the middle ages that flat profiles secured by grass are the most stable and secure but they require massive amounts of material so it was necessary to use inferior dikes with vertical faces made of wood planks. Most recent notable innovation is sand cores and ditches behind the dike to manage seepage water (behind meaning on the land side, always confuses them tourists), and some minor alterations to geometry to improve the way waves hit it.

We probably knew that sheep were good for dikes before we built them as, at least in principle, dikes are nothing but a warft with a hole in the middle and we’ve built those since time immemorial.

And in case you’re wondering yes we’re raising them quite a bit higher in anticipation of sea levels rising. Completely uncontroversial decision, only question was whether to rise the dikes very high, or use the same budget to raise them not as high, but wider, so that they can easily be made even very higher in the future. We went with the latter option, which is kinda optimistic and pessimistic at the same time.

Jutland in general. And really it’s less about the meat being good or bad, it is good, but we really rather have our sheep patrol the dikes and keep them healthy than eat them. Eating lamb while you’re wading in water leaves a nasty aftertaste.

Look, a stock photo!

Sheep are really as if made for that purpose: Unlike cows they cut the grass off clean instead of half ripping it out, and unlike horses their hooves don’t dig up the ground, but rather firm it up. Net result is healthy and short grass and thus a well-secured dike.

Forget specifics just test for psychological patterns supporting pauschalisierende Ablehnungskonstruktionen. Which run counter to human dignity anyway so in principle, no change in law is needed.

…it also has fuckall to do with states, though. States don’t have human rights.

A single study will not tell you everything about everything. No, ruminants will not just magically appear in the landscape, we’re living in a causal universe, after all.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that all ruminants indeed all grazers (also deer, giraffes, whatever) are extinct. Plants will flourish, not being eaten by them, then individual plants, or parts of them (falling leaves etc) will die as part of their normal life/reproduction cycle – and get eaten by fungi, bacteria, etc. Which will burp CO2 and probably other greenhouse gases.

The condition for nature to produce CO2 are simple: The presence of carbon in a form that can be oxidised, such as sugar and starches of which plants produce plenty, the presence of oxygen, and a critter, any critter, that can do it. Even if it’s just a single species, it’s going to eat the whole thing and release all the carbon back into the atmosphere. Consuming available energy to reproduce itself is literally what life is all about.

If there’s energy around that can be used, nature will use it. Have a look at the most biodiverse and productive ecosystem in the world, the Amazon rain forest: It has very poor soil because as soon as something dies, its remains are recycled by something else. Destroying the Amazon rain forest releases CO2, again planting stuff there re-captures it, but reconstituted forest doesn’t continue to sequester carbon indefinitely: Only until it has accumulated the amount of carbon that it needs to sustain itself, after that it’s going to be carbon-neutral.

You may be asking “but then how did all that oil and coal end up in the soil”: Highly specific circumstances: Plants were producing stuff that critters couldn’t eat. But we’re currently not in that situation and in fact critters seem to be ludicrously efficient at evolving to break up new compounds. PET was first synthesised 1941, in 2016 scientists found critters which can eat it – producing CO2 in the process, of course. That’s exactly what’s going to happen to all that herbivore-free land you envision. If we want to sequester carbon, care has to be taken that nature won’t dig it up again.

anyone can host an email service

Eh, no. You could in the 2000s, nowadays spam protection is so tight, and necessarily that tight, that you need at least a full-time position actively managing the server or you’re getting blacklisted for some reason or the other. Other servers will simply not accept emails sent by you if you don’t look legit and professional.

Definitely possible for a company with IT department, as a small company you want to outsource it (emails being on your domain doesn’t mean you’re managing the server), as a hobbyist, well you might be really into it but generally also no. Send protonmail or posteo or whoever a buck or something a month.

There’s a reason pretty much no culture or religion bans consumption of goats or sheep; they are critical.

Not the baseline poor people staple over here either, though, that’d be chickens, as well as one or two pigs, as scrap eaters: One to sell, one to turn into bacon by hanging it into the chimney. Sheep have a crucial role but as lawn mowers and soil compactors on dikes, also wool in the past but nowadays (non-merino) wool is basically worthless, as in often not even recouping the costs of shearing. The meat is certainly eaten but as said it’s neither a staple, or crucial ingredient of some classic dish. Eating game is more common. Heck horse overall might be more common. Goats really aren’t a thing at all.

Factory farms have hundreds of cows per hectare.

Surrounded by vast supporting fields which have none. Please, try to get a whole-picture view of anything before you post, don’t accost me with over-reductive narrow-focus BS, this is almost “The US has more people per capita” type of comical. Also, don’t just knee-jerk dismiss a link to a paper in Nature, of all journals.

So if the total population of cows would go down to 0-1% of todays farmed amount, that would reduce the GHG emission impact down to a negligible amount.

No. And if you read the paper, you’d understand why.

You are inventing a problem that doesn’t exist to justify the continuation of factory farming.

I’m opposed to factory farming. For other reasons. Biodiversity, for one.

sigh

citation. Things differ a bit depending on exactly what kind of environment you’re looking at but that’s still the rough ballpark. Yes, non-pasture farming looks different – but the area used to grow soy now would still sequester carbon, and it’d still be released back into the atmosphere by animals that eat it. Forests etc. aren’t bottomless CO2 sinks.

The intensity of dairy and beef farming is magnitudes beyond what any natural population of cattle would look like.

I don’t think you have a proper picture of what a natural ruminant population looks like. To give you a proper sense, Imagine a galloping Bison herd stretching, in a not exactly thin line, from horizon to horizon.

There’s green stuff to be eaten. As long as that’s there, the population of animals eating green stuff increases. Simple as that. It’s part of the natural CO2 cycle, to go ahead and say “let’s ‘fix’ the natural CO2 cycle so we don’t have to fix the man-made one” is ecologically naive.

EDIT: source. You may not like it but I’m not pulling this out of my ass.

Also wild ruminants cause similar, almost identical, CO2 emissions compared to pasture cattle. And if you’re re-wilding all those areas wild ruminants will be exactly who’s going to live on there, burping all that carbon plants sequestered right back up into the atmosphere.

There’s plenty of levers to pull when it comes to climate change, this isn’t one of it. On the contrary, it’s likely to be better to continue managing those ruminants because then we can feed them stuff that makes them burp straight CO2 instead of methane.

The actually big topics are transportation and heating, both should be (almost) completely electrified and electricity production switched to renewables (or nuclear, don’t wanna fight with you guys right now you’re free to pay more for your electricity if you want), and then further on industrial processes. Not doing things like waste heat capture nowadays is plain silly (though we need better district heating infrastructure to enable full penetration), chemical feedstock and things like steel smelting will require a proper supply of green hydrogen. “Muh there won’t be hydrogen cars” I don’t care. We still need the infrastructure.

Oh that’s easy (and probably disappointing): None. Not really a hobby of mine, more of an extension to doing the laundry and being a cheapskate who can’t fathom buying something new when you can fix it in the time it takes to listen to a podcast episode.

The other really valid reason is linen. Kinda unrelated to sewing itself and it’s not about stopping the stuff from crinkling (that’s right-out impossible), but to make sure that crinkles don’t always appear in the same place so the fabric has a chance of wearing down evenly.

Found this out the hard way because my linen duvet covers are oversized – nominal size is correct, but they’re made for down blankets, not flat ones. Blanket slides inside, generally towards the bottom, leaving a fabric flap on the top that really tends to crinkle as you sleep, wash, hang up, the crinkles don’t straighten out, exact same crinkles appear in the exact same spot and get chafed while sleeping, rinse and repeat for two years the first hole starts appearing, a month later there’s more than you can be bothered to patch.

Luckily it was a simple matter of running a stitch down the length of the thing to shorten it a bit, but given that an iron and ironing mat (not a full table, mat is completely sufficient) is significantly cheaper than linen covers or just the material for them, definitely worth the investment and time.

Oh and yes linen covers are definitely worth it because moisture regulation. It’s also nice and soft – not in the silky smooth sense, it has definitive grip to it. So are linen kitchen towels because they actually dry stuff instead of spreading water around. Half-linen is already a massive upgrade over cotton in that area and it’s much cheaper (the main reason why full linen is so expensive is because it’s a bugger to weave, not because the yarn is that much more expensive. Weaving linen wefts into cotton warps OTOH is pretty uncomplicated).

Coulda went with murder trains or something less racist, really. Pretty fucked up dude.

I don’t think having trains specialised to murder people in makes much difference to using cattle wagons to transport people to camps specialised to murder people in. In the grand scheme of things, in both cases you’re still constructing something specifically to murder people in.

Btw fucking wild you’d say “animal trains,” of course they also compared Jewish people to animals so I shouldn’t be surprised,

Maybe because they actually used animal trains. Cattle wagons. Something like that it’s not like I’m a native speaker. The type of train carriage built for purposes of transporting livestock.

What did you expect, 1st class accommodations to Auschwitz?

…and no, Mussolini didn’t get the trains running on time, either. The Swiss and Japanese do, though.

And wait I thought we could only talk shit and pretend our countries are the best, which the US is and it’s perfect, there are no problems.

Who do you mean with “we”, here? US and China? Oh, Bavaria. Bavaria also definitely qualifies.

For someone who claims to be able to complain about their own country you’re doing awfully little of it.

Also, no, the Nazis didn’t make the trains run on time. Unless you count animal wagons, that is.

I know I know the US totally compares well in terms of police violence and prisoners per capita. To North Korea. It also compares well in terms of gang violence – to Haiti or Mexico.

Meanwhile, Germans consider it a national embarrassment that the Swiss and Japanese have better train systems. All a matter of perspective.

We get like that around Americans, trying to teach you how to complain about your own country. For some reason, you’re not receptive to that kindness.

the germanic honor-culture has survived here and we value doing the right/honorable thing more than anything else.

If you were the Swedish kind of neutral I’d accept that, but you’re the Swiss kind of neutral. You may have stopped selling weapons to both sides of a conflict, you may have even stopped providing offshore accounts for both sides of the conflict, but the overall attitude of “eh it’s not in Switzerland it doesn’t matter” is still around. Heck, you still harbour Nestle. At least you had the sense to go after Steinmetz, though.