SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by turgid on Saturday March 18 2017, @09:31PM (6 children)
I'm going to build a house that can withstand high winds and rains, a good 25 metres above current sea level in a place with enough land to grow my own potatoes and somewhere to store water.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Funny) by mhajicek on Saturday March 18 2017, @10:31PM
Extremist prepper! Git'im boys!
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 18 2017, @10:52PM (4 children)
Good luck with that.
If civilization goes you are fucked anyway.
All it will take are a group of people stronger than you to take it and kick you out.
If you don't want to die, you should contribute to the solution rather than run away and wait for the problem to find you.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 19 2017, @07:35AM
Ah, where is "violently imposed monopoly" guy when you need him??! This will be the libertarian utopia he's dreaming of.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Sunday March 19 2017, @11:38AM
How can I contribute to the solution when most people appear to want to believe that there isn't even a problem? A few lowly individuals can't fix this. It requires organisation, a consensus of the majority, funding, research...
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Sunday March 19 2017, @12:44PM (1 child)
Basically he described the 99% of the USA landmass that voted for Trump. Its actually kinda funny when viewed that way. As a percentage of USA surface area roughly 1% of the acres of land voted for Hillary.
The problem with the "roving gang" theory is its always assumed a multicultural multilingual anti-gun group of coastie leftists will somehow be more organized than the rural unicultural farmers, after walking 1000 miles on foot all the way to Minnesota during the 90% of the year that its above 90F or below 0F outside, with a side dish of sure the odds of survival are merely 1e6 times higher for one group than the other but anything less than 100% means they shouldn't even try it, kinda like people shouldn't wear bicycle helmets because sometimes people wearing bicycle helmets die anyway so they should just not try at all.
Pragmatically voting by snout seems to give very poor results on long term average and voting by owned acre of land is an interesting idea to contemplate. That would likely be an enormously more successful civilization were it tried, all the virtues seem to align.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 19 2017, @10:14PM
> Pragmatically voting by snout seems to give very poor results on long term average and voting by owned acre of land is an interesting idea to contemplate.
Yeah, voting by only the land-owning gentry is the totally the best way to go.
Maybe you should just permanently move to that alternate universe you keep describing and leave reality to those equipped to deal with it.