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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday March 18 2017, @07:53PM   Printer-friendly
from the your-phone-is-ringing dept.

Discussion around limiting climate change primarily focusses on whether the best results can be gained by individuals changing how they act, or governments introducing new legislation.

Now though, University of Leeds academics Dr Rob Lawlor and Dr Helen Morley from the Inter-Disciplinary Ethics Applied Centre suggest engineering professionals could also play a pivotal role, and could provide a co-ordinated response helping to mitigate climate change.

Writing in the journal Science and Engineering Ethics, they say engineering professional institutions could take a stand in tackling climate change by developing a declaration imposing restrictions and requirements on members.

"A strong and coordinated action by the engineering profession could itself make a significant difference in how we respond to climate change," they said.

"We know many engineers and firms make great efforts to be as environmentally friendly as possible, and research is carried out and supported by the sector to help reduce its impact on the world. We're suggesting that concerted action could improve this process further."

Quoting 2014 research by Richard Heede from the Climate Accountability Institute, they say nearly two-thirds of historic carbon dioxide and methane emissions could be attributed to crude oil and natural gas producers, coal extractors, and cement producers. These are industries typically enabled by the engineering profession.

They're looking at you, VW engineers.


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  • (Score: 2, Funny) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday March 18 2017, @09:13PM (4 children)

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Saturday March 18 2017, @09:13PM (#480921) Homepage

    What was especially annoying was that the article proposed nothing that isn't already law -- if you engineer to the laws (say, emissions or structural integrity) and you cheat those laws, then you get busted and put your career in jeopardy or get fined or arrested.

    Taking some kind of silly oath doesn't mean a goddamn thing, for example, look at all those "health professionals" who were involved in crafting and maintaining our torture programs.

    Engineering is all about designing to cost, and that is often at odds with quality, so of course you're gonna keep get corners cut or product shipped before its fully-functional. Shit like this is why Dilbert is funny, and if you don't think Dilbert is funny then you're not one of us.

    Instead of putting it on the engineers with feelgood bullshit buzzwords, they should make management agree to take an ethics course to spend the extra pennies to make a decent product as well as not be so goddamn pushy and make bullshit promises to customers.

    Some motherfucker came up to me with a stack of "climate change responsibility" papers to sign I'd grab that stack and smack them in the mouth with it, then tell them to get the fuck out of my face and let me do my damn job.

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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Saturday March 18 2017, @09:27PM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Saturday March 18 2017, @09:27PM (#480929) Journal

    Modded "funny" because you used "management" and "ethics" in the same sentence. I HOPE you weren't serious! I'd hate to think that EF were losing it!

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by c0lo on Saturday March 18 2017, @10:56PM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Saturday March 18 2017, @10:56PM (#480965) Journal

    Instead of putting it on the engineers with feelgood bullshit buzzwords, they should make management agree to take an ethics course to spend the extra pennies to make a decent product as well as not be so goddamn pushy and make bullshit promises to customers.

    What word in planned obsolescence don't you understand, old man?

    I will not be surprised when they'll start doing it for civil works. The most prone to "short cycle planned obsolescence" would be roadworks - the moment the Agent Orange decide to quickly create jobs in infrastructure and allocate budget for it, expect to see "rolling" highway repairs every one or two years in the same place (you don't expect the "flyover country" will be all fed from the "Great Wall of Mexico" project, do you?)

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
  • (Score: 0, Flamebait) by VLM on Sunday March 19 2017, @12:27PM (1 child)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Sunday March 19 2017, @12:27PM (#481112)

    Some motherfucker came up to me with a stack of "climate change responsibility" papers to sign

    Oh ethanol fueled, never change ... however ... consider that diversity hires need something to do, and if they stop doing meaningless feel good stuff like "climate change responsibility" papers, they'll inevitably find something important to actively screw up. Do you want them changing the sign on the coffee maker from "black coffee" to "people of color coffee"? You know some shitlord will put up a sign "white coffee" next to the "people of color coffee" so at least its not all bad. Or changing hiring policy to only hire more folks like themselves, in other words useless? "I don't think a modern electrical engineering company would tolerate bias in the workplace, not even in their transistor circuits, so you're gonna have to reimplement that amplifier as a class D instead of class A topology." "Let me get this straight, this company is so racist that they wire every power outlet with the black color insulated wires that do all the real work and the white insulation color wires do nothing, why don't you racists issue us some fucking cotton to pick while you're at it, let me guess you pretend brown insulation color wires don't even exist, but I bet if you took all the brown insulation color wires out of the wall for a day the whole company would grind to a halt" "We have TRANS istors in our circuit schematics why can't we have TRANS bathrooms, I mean even if we don't have any trans employees its important to signal our progressiveness on facebook by posting pictures of our new bathroom sign for TRANS people" "When the bench techs in the VFD group talk about replacing 'blown transistors' I think they're sexually harassing trans employees because it implies being a blow-er is problematic and/or being trans(istor) is problematic or a combination, even though we don't have any trans employees, we all still need to post to twitter about how progressive we are, so we need to post signs around the company to make using the phrase 'blown transistor' a firing offense"

    I never fail to be amazed at the wisdom of the ancients and stuff like "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin" is a useful war fighting technology in that you can moth-to-the-flame use it to attract the useless and weak to really stupid intellectual arguments, then deposit them in a nursery with padded walls where they can't hurt anyone, which means the village blacksmith can uninterrupted sharpen swords and the local artificer can work on greek fire and cannons without interruptions from the useless eaters.

    This is an unfortunate outcome of the agricultural / green revolution combined with the automation and industrial production revolutions in that we have way too many people for way too few real jobs, and the fake jobs tend to get in the way an awful lot. Millennia ago useless eaters would have rightly starved to death and now they form an entire huge cultural group. Fictionally there were ways to deal with the problem involving the "B Ark" and the number 42 and so forth.

    The good news is some day all the petroleum will be burned and the uranium will be fissioned and the useless eaters will, um, not be fed anymore. That world of the future a couple months later without useless eaters is a paradise we can all look forward to.

    • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 19 2017, @04:30PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 19 2017, @04:30PM (#481194)

      I guess you totally missed Douglas Adams' follow up to the B ark. Everyone on the A ark ended up dying from a virus contracted from a dirty phone headset... I guess you're the type of idiot that would cheer on Rorschach from "Watchmen" too when in reality the author meant for him to be an absurd characterization that would make people recoil in horror from such a black and white application of "justice".

      You're a closet fascist who is apparently pro-eugenics / genocide. Get a grip, if anyone is going to be thrown into confinement it will be the asshats that want to harm the rest of society because they think they're soooo smart. You deniers are blowing up this article in the most insane ways! I think the reason people accuse others of beings shills is because statements such as yours are just so far from reality that they hope it is due to an agenda and not an actual human opinion.