“No one expected” sounds like they didn’t talk to any coral reef biologists.

It’s been known for a long time that marine invertebrate shells are mostly made of calcium carbonate which dissolves into the water, acting as a pH buffer. Since coral skeletons are also made of calcium carbonate, corals need calcium carbonate rich water to grow.

Ocean acidification is one of the big downstream negative effects of climate change. CO2 in the air dissolves in water and becomes carbonic acid, lowering ocean pH. As the pH drops, coral reefs begin to bleach and die off. By adding large amounts of calcium carbonate rich material to the ocean, ocean acidification can be counteracted and coral reefs protected.

Right but for that you need to grow in different places. The prairies where all the grains are grown are not suitable for much else, besides maybe soybeans. We already grow way more soybeans than humans need and use them as livestock feed.

Feeding everyone just soy and rice is not exactly great. The highly varied diet that vegans eat tends to include a lot of fancy nuts like almonds and cashews, avocados, tropical fruit, wide varieties of greens, olive oils, organic everything.

A lot of that stuff is already quite expensive. There’s a ton of incentive for farmers to grow it because it would be way more profitable for them than corn. They don’t. Why? Because they don’t have the soil quality, access to water, and warm dry climate you need to grow the best stuff.

Those last two are the key, and why California is such a powerhouse. You need the dry climate because a humid climate has too much rain, causing all kinds of diseases (bacteria and fungus) that destroy your expensive crops. But you also need a lot of water for the plants to grow. This means you’re using a lot of irrigation in a place with not much rainfall, so you have to bring in the water from somewhere else (by river or pipeline).

Pretty much all of the North American Midwest and prairies are classified as humid continental climates. This makes these areas (where corn is grown) quite poor for growing a lot of the expensive crops grown in California.

That’s assuming these people were well-intentioned in the first place. Capitalism also incentivizes greenwashing. It’s all about selling people the feeling that they’re making a difference, merely by being a consumer of your products, and getting them to pay a premium for it.

Heck, they may have been targeting a Unilever exit before they started the company! Serial entrepreneurs do this stuff all the time. They think of themselves as freelance marketers.

Terrible idea. Just put a bunch of solar panels in a field. We’re not lacking for space!

People touting the benefits of automated maintenance are missing the fact that solar panels in a field need basically no maintenance at all, whereas railways need constant maintenance and heavy trains are going to do a ton of damage to anything between the tracks.

When a train goes by, the rails literally move up and down, flexing under the heavy load and creating local pressure waves which the ballast (gravel around the tracks) is designed to absorb. Solar panels are made of brittle materials (usually glass) which would shatter if flexed even a small amount. Making special “tough” solar panels to be able to withstand those heavy loads is going to result in very expensive solar panels that produce a lot less electricity because they’re not made of very thin, highly transparent glass.

Well yeah. If it was readily biodegradable under normal conditions then it would biodegrade on the shelf or while in use. We already have materials like that: fruit peels.

The hard part about arguing against renewables is the argument is a very complex, economic one. People love to have a single reason as the explanation for something but reality is far more complex. This makes it very difficult to present in an elevator pitch style.

I used to use electric toothbrushes religiously. Then I had one appointment with a hygienist who specializes in brushing technique (seriously). She used a dye to show where plaque was being left behind on my teeth and gums and taught me correct brushing technique to remove it all.

Now I use a very soft manual brush that I replace regularly (brushes always get stiff over time due to calcium deposits on the bristles). I have no issues with plaque or tartar buildup and no cavities in years. One 4-pack of manual brushes costs about the same as a single replacement brush head from my old electrics.

In my experience, green/metallic beetles are bad news for gardeners. They lay eggs on your plants and the larva destroy them!

The U.S. can’t build like China does. Too many stakeholders to satisfy. Labour too expensive. Too many regulations. The high-speed rail line from San Francisco to LA is going to cost more than all of China’s high-speed rail projects combined!

I’d really be interested to see a comparison between the costs of electrifying the rail network vs using synthetic diesel for freight throughout the US.

Unlike cars or semi trucks, diesel-electric locomotives are extremely efficient. On the other hand, electrifying the many thousands of miles of track that run through large, unpopulated areas of the US seems like a monumental challenge that would yield far fewer benefits over electrifying cars.

It does not evoke child labour to me. My first thought was that they had arrived at the store by tunneling from Africa. The giant iPhones didn’t really register due to their scale incongruity.