Meanwhile that same Suncor facility that is keeping gas prices low is also routinely and continually violating EPA and Colorado air quality standards. [0]
It is so bad that the state has implemented fence line monitoring. [1]
As someone who lives in Colorado, I'd be happy to see Suncor go. Especially now that I just learned the oil they're refining is Canadian tar sand oil.
No, no they're not. I would much rather people are warned about the guidelines and adhere to them going forward than the opposite and we then just let violations run rampant.
What really reinforced this for me was learning to what lengths some hedge funds are willing to go to get an edge. Case in point: buying GIS data on major retailer's parking lots to get a feel for holiday earnings. No retail investor is ever going to be able to match that kind of Intel, ever.
I buy index funds and leave the majority of my money there but allow myself to make small bets on trends in the market that I think will play over long periods. Sometimes it works, like buying lithium stocks in the 2010s and other times it sucks and doesn't, like buying solar stocks in the 2010s and watching the entire industry get shredded to pieces in the last 5 years.
Small speculators do have an advantage in that the market is much more liquid for them. If your position is $1k you can buy and sell without moving the market noticeably. If it's $1bn, not so much.
yeah vast majority is just index funds but I just had to prove to myself than I'm an idiot, so there's a separate account with a tiny bit of money in it that I get to play with. Sometimes you buy GME, sometimes you buy SVB.
>I’d say under 10% of junior résumés I look at give me confidence that they’d show up and know how to write real systems instead of just gluing things together
They're juniors. With that kind of mentality, I'm not sure you're looking for juniors, but instead are looking for someone with a few years in industry that is apparently masquerading as a junior. But perhaps my expectation of "real systems" is different than yours.
To put this into perspective, I mentor and have mentored lots of juniors from code schools and traditional, four year university computer science majors in web dev. Having some concept of both the web stack/language and a basic understanding of good coding practices is about the most I'd expect. All thing things that sit on top of it, like scaling the stack, performance optimizations and the like are things I wouldn't even come close to expecting a junior to know. Those are things I'd expect to have to coach on.
> They're juniors. With that kind of mentality, I'm not sure you're looking for juniors, but instead are looking for someone with a few years in industry that is apparently masquerading as a junior.
This is just how the junior job market seems to operate now. Barely anyone wants some open-ended, curious recent graduate who's eager to expand their technical knowledge with new skills that are taught to them at the job. Everyone wants juniors to punch well above their weight - to even have a chance of an interview, ideally your resume should indicate that you're already an expert at every required skill in the job listing. They fish out the top 1-5% of all graduates and the really desperate people who are willing to go work a junior job despite extensive work experience - everyone else is welcome to keep putting in hundreds of applications elsewhere. Of course, it makes sense that you'd want the best - but it feels like there's active pressure now to hire as few people as possible regardless of circumstance. Companies will keep searching for the miracle candidate - if they don't find one, they'll just repost the listing until one shows up. Everyone else has locked the doors on hiring altogether. We're probably going to see a push on juicing more value out of existing workers than paying new ones, so the average graduates will continue having nowhere to go.
Indeed, real systems is a lower bar than you imply. In this case it’s unclear from the CV that I’d be getting someone that has ever written more than a 50 line one-off Python script.
You mention mentoring people in undergrad. Sure, by a year-3 course I’d expect to have to coach beyond basic understanding. To say that basic understanding of performance optimization is out of scope for a BS graduate is not supported by my experience, however. We’re not talking about boot camp grads here.
My father just retired as a lab analyst looking at builder samples for both modern and historical construction, specifically for asbestos.
The day I moved into the college dorms he looked at me and said "Don't move the floor tiles, ceilings tiles or the touch the large ventilation pipe outside my door in the hallway." A lot of the buildings at my university were built with asbestos, so much so that the university had a 30 year contract with the lab he worked at to analyze samples.
And it isn't only historical buildings that have asbestos. A very well known mall that was built in the 2000s had incurred some severe hail damage and while the repairs were ongoing samples were taken and found to be hot. Someone had introduced asbestos contaminated materials into the original build and rather than extensive repairs the mall had to do extensive remediation first, before continuing repairs.
Apparently there is still a large stock of "hot" building material that are sitting in warehouses and every once in a while they make it into the supply chain.
I'm currently working as a PCM analyst looking at samples to identify asbestos. There is a lot out there still, we are busy every week. (technically PCM doesn't identify asbestos, just the number of fibers during abatement, PLM will identify asbestos but that takes a lot longer to process).
Interesting, I had some vermiculite removed recently and got a response from the ZAI trust that the samples had fibers but they couldn't say specifically that it was asbestos. I assumed that was a legal distinction, it didn't occur to me that it might be from different test methods.
Yeah, for a PCM test we only count 100 fields, and identify the number of fiber end points (upto 2) which with math can give an approx number of fibers/cc2 - helps determine approx how much potential can be in the air (this is usually done during abatement - when it's being cleaned up).
A PLM analyst will use multiple methods to determine if the sample has asbestos, and takes a much longer time.
There are even more expensive tests that can be performed but I'm not so familiar with those.
> Apparently there is still a large stock of "hot" building material that are sitting in warehouses and every once in a while they make it into the supply chain.
Not working in the industry, what do they actually do with asbestos that has been removed? I presume it can't be 'destroyed', so it needs to be stored indefinitely somewhere where it doesn't cause harm? Dump it in an unused mine shaft and seal the entrance?
Few months ago I called local company that specializes in utilizing asbestos. He explained me on the phone that there are concrete bunkers/boxes in the ground and they just store it there. At least that's how I understood what he was telling me. Eastern Europe.
> Apparently there is still a large stock of "hot" building material that are sitting in warehouses and every once in a while they make it into the supply chain.
I wonder how much of this is because folks in the supply chain might not be aware of what asbestos looks like.
It took them 67 days to disclose that their premier product, which is used heavily in the industry, had been compromised. Does anyone know why it seems like we're seeing disclosures like this take longer and longer to be disclosed? I would think the adage "Bad news travels fast" would apply more often in these cases, if only to limit the scope of the damage.
I can't help thinking that a part of it is that the supreme court has proactively & progressively been watering down the threat of class actions (in general, not specific to tech) since the early 2010s.
Sony & many others have proved pretty comprehensively that brand reputation isn't really impacted by breaches, even in high profile consumer facing businesses. That trickles down to B2B: if your clients don't care, why should you.
That leaves legal risk as the only other motivating factor. If that's been effectively neutered, it doesn't make economic sense for companies to do due diligence with breaches.
As far as I'm aware, Yahoo were the last company to suffer any significant impact from the US legal system due to a breach.
Their customer base are enterprise, so the issue can be addressed in private channels. There's little to be gained from making this particular breach public, from their point view. If anything, it's F5 customers who should advise their own customers downstream about the risks, when risks apply. Disclosure: I'm affected by this breach downstream at several sites and we have not been informed of risks by anyone but have been fighting fires where F5 was involved, but not necessarily blamed for anything.
But you are right, at F5's size and moneys, incentives for public disclosure are not aligned in the public's favor. Damage control, in all its meanings, has taken priority lately over transparency.
Just to be clear, the attackers had access to the systems well before this date.
Sometimes when a company engages law enforcement, law enforcement can request that they not divulge that the company knows about the problem so that forensics can begin tracking the problem.
I won't speak how often or how competent law enforcement are though, but it can happen.
My understading is that the hackers had a copy of the source code for their app so they had to patch all their outstanding CVE that they where sitting on so the DOJ let them hold back until that was ready. It's not ideal but I suppose there is at least something people can do right now. Feels like they could have been a bit quicker with some of the information though.
This reminded me to go look up what Japan was doing with their space junk net. Turns out it failed to deploy in 2017, and nothing has really been done with the idea since. :|
That it isn't sustainable. As Eating the Earth points out, by growing trees to then cut them down again we're not accounting for the cost of using that same forested land for anything else, like a forest which is a great carbon sink. Instead burning wood pellets is considered renewable until you consider the cost of using that land for something else in which case it isn't a renewal resource.
The word renewable has a specific meaning (the source renews). Just because something is renewable, doesn't mean it's climate-friendly and/or sustainable.
Burning pellets as Bioenergy is renewable - it's just not sustainable[1] or climate-friendly.
Burning wood pellets is carbon neutral. Any forrest is a great carbon sink until it matures and it saturates, i.e. growth reaches replacement equilibrium and old trees/growth decay, releasing the CO2.
This is not taking in to account the fossil fuel usage for growing wood, transporting it and processing it to pellets.
Biofuels rarely make sense, unless we can get the biomass as a side-flow from some other process. And that kind of flows are quite limited compared to our energy needs.
The soil is degraded, washed away on clear-cut forests, and even old-growth protected forests are being relabeled unprotected to provide energy for the industry all over Eastern-Europe. The resulting flash floods, the water of which is harder to retain on the lowlands are worsening the droughts and the effects of climate change.
Ah, end eventually trees will not regrow, because they need soil for that. And water. Modern forestry is far from renewable. Only externalities having a longer time-frame to kick in are conveniently ignored by the decision makers and the masses willing to see only the upsides.
In the US that is not how it has been done in a very, very long time. At this point all US timberland is multi-generation new growth; and is doing just fine.
Forest are only carbon sinks if they stay as a forest. The second you cut one down it goes from being a sink to source. Searchinger's argument states that more forests will be grown to be cut down if burning wood pellets (that are shipped from North America to the EU) is considered renewable and that means you're now cutting down even more forests to clear land for growing more trees. The land used is not free; it could have instead stayed a forest and remained a carbon sink. When you compare wood pellets using for generating energy and compare it to other forms of energy generation it no longer holds up as a renewable resource after you take into account the land that could have been kept instead as a forest and carbon sink.
Forests are not long term carbon sinks. They flatline rather quickly.
This is obvious to anyone who has spent much time in a forest, because if this wasn’t the case, forests would be sitting on thousands of feet of sequestered carbon. Instead of a few feet (typically) of non-mineral soil.
Forests also (typically) go through cycles of burning.
The highest rate of carbon sequestration is when a forest is in the 3-25 year old range, because that is when the bulk of the actual growth is occurring.
Renewable doesn’t mean ‘indefinite carbon sink’. Renewable means ‘renews’.
Look dude, read the papers or read the book. I don't have much more to offer you. This isn't just about the forest itself but about the land used to grow the forest.
"In the Carbon Costs of Global Wood Harvests, published in Nature in 2023, WRI researchers using a biophysical model estimated that annual wood harvests over the next few decades will emit 3.5-4.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year. That is more than 3 times the world’s current annual average aviation emissions. These wood-harvest emissions occur because the great majority of carbon stored in trees is released to the atmosphere after harvest when roots and slash decompose; as most wood is burned directly for heat or electricity or for energy at sawmills or paper mills; and when discarded paper products, furniture and other wood products decompose or burn. Another recent paper in Nature found that the word’s remaining forests have lost even more carbon, primarily due to harvesting wood, than was lost historically by converting forests to agriculture (other studies have found similar results1). Based on these analyses, a natural climate solution would involve harvesting less wood and letting more forests regrow. This would store more carbon as well as enhance forest biodiversity."[0]
So I see what you’re saying. You’re talking about the whole system. Take land and then plant trees, the trees sequester carbon as they grow, some of them fall to the forest floor continuing to sequester carbon. But, I think the issue with your argument is, this process isn’t indefinite. The natural cycle is that these trees will decay, fall, rot (releasing carbon naturally) or natural forest fires will burn them anyways (releasing carbon naturally). Then more trees will take their places and sequester carbon, ad infinitum in the cycle that has taken place for the last 2 billion years since the Paleoproterozoic era.
But I see no difference between humans speeding this cycle by planting quick growth trees, cutting them down, releasing their stored carbon, planting more. It’s the same thing being sequestered and released continuously.
The planet isn't infinite: by running the cycle more quickly, you knock the "baseline" atmospheric carbon up a few more ppm. This has knock-on effects.
Even if we converted all arable land in the United States to forest, best case we would take many years to sequester even a single years fossil carbon emissions. And we’d all starve to death in the process.
Any co2 released by harvesting a forest, is very shortly taken back up again by the forest regrowing. Within a lifetime for sure.
Trees are nice, I get it. But this is all in the noise.
USFS studies, and US data on overall arable land. I broke it out in a prior thread exhaustively, but it’s been covered in other areas too. Here is one [https://www.nrs.fs.usda.gov/pubs/gtr/gtr_wo059.pdf]
The US emits a truly massive amount of fossil carbon. [https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...], “Total emissions in 2022 are 6,343.2 Million Metric Tons of CO₂ equivalent”. Yes, that is 6 billion metric tons of co2 equivalent a year. 6 trillion kg. Or about 20,000 kg per person in the US, every year.
Currently (since ~ 1990), US forested land is estimated to offset ~ 13% of fossil co2 emissions. Forests cover 36% (!) of US land area, and have been slowly increasing since ~ 2000.
Pretty much all the rest is either 1) waterways, 2) cities, 3) non-arable land like steep mountains and deserts with no ready source of water.
So even with a back of the envelope, easy math, if we changed all our farmland to grow forests, we’d roughly double the amount of carbon we could sequester - which would still be ~ 25% of the amount of fossil carbon we’re emitting, every year.
And then we would still need to DO something with all that wood, because burning it or letting it rot just releases all it’s co2 back into the atmosphere.
Modeling a forest like a spring is a better model than a petrochemical reservoir. (Though a water reservoir is not a terrible analogy if forest fires == a dam breaking! And overflows or evaporation == rotting.)
The (very common) thinking that forests are ‘sinks’ (aka it goes in one way and stays) or like a petrochemical reservoir (we can put it in, or take it out - but it stays there once in, or out) are a big part of the confusion.
On a geological timescale, carbon being stored in a forest is a temporary and rather rare circumstance. Some global percentage will always be in vegetation (see carbon cycle), but any given atom will move around a lot.
Harvesting forests and burning them, takes carbon that was in the atmosphere, then in wood, then puts it back in the atmosphere. Total carbon in the atmosphere was only temporarily out of it in this situation.
If we wanted to permanently take it out of the atmosphere, we’d need to bury all those trees (deep enough where they won’t decompose and/or the decomposition products won’t make it into the atmosphere!). Turning it into furniture or building products is a more useful, but shorter term solution.
One idea-logically most pure solution would be to puree them and inject them into old depleted oil fields, eh?
Because otherwise those trees will just burn, die and decompose, etc. - it’s inevitable.
Ideally they would be replaced in a shortish timeframe by new trees or growth, roughly locking up the same amount of carbon. But that doesn’t always happen.
And people aren’t allowed to clear cut forests in the US (generally) anymore. Most (all?) US timberland is multi-generational new growth now at this point, and is harvested using as realistically healthy a process as possible. If we had battery powered industrial equipment, it would be even better.
I’ve read the papers, and I’ve done the math many times.
The amount of carbon being released by burning the trees, is roughly the same amount as was taken out by them growing. That’s the nature of it. When they regrow,they’ll take more out.
That is the nature of being renewable. Unlike fossil fuels, where chances are no more will replace it naturally.
Complaining about someone cutting down the trees, specifically from a ‘renewable’/‘total carbon’ perspective is silly in this context. The carbon released isn’t even fossil carbon, and will be back in the trees soon enough - less than a lifetime!
And I’ve done the math - even if we turned all of the arable land in North America into forests, based on the USDA data from National Forests, it would take 4-10ish years worth of growth to temporary store 1 years worth of fossil carbon being released just by the US right now.
Every year.
And to even try that, we’d all starve, because we turned all our crop land into forests too.
Worry about the massive quantities of fossil carbon still getting sucked out of the ground. That is what is feeding the impending disaster.
Unless people are salting the earth and stopping further growth (which generally is already forbidden in the US!), cutting down and burning a forest is a temporary nudge in the accounting that will self correct.
Generally most of it will get used in lumber though, which means it should net decrease atmospheric carbon until it rots or burns in a fire. If landfilled, it could go thousands of years.
In summary - the math doesn’t actually check out when you look at it over realistic timescales, and this is more an ideological thing than an actual real thing. I love trees. But they aren’t going to save us from this mess, no matter how hard core we go.
Sinks is about flows. The question is about reservoirs. Forests are a long term carbon reservoir. Yes, it's possible to regrow it and let it stay that way. But we don't do that if we regularly chop it down for wood pellets. If we regularly do that, then the carbon in it will spend more of its time in the atmosphere and cause trouble, even if it wasn't pumped from a fossil reservoir.
This is why you can't ignore land use changes in carbon budgets. It's a sound argument, it's not ridiculous at all.
I disagree, wood pellets are more expensive than oil for energy, especially if only counting the production cost of oil w/o the tax. So even the first time an old forest is cut, when the land changes, it already displaces oil use. At greater expense even, so demand would be reduce the amount energy produced further.
Furthermore Europe can also choose to replant non-forest land or replant permanently afterwards.
The soil they create, if they stay alive and are able to retain the soil layer, is gradually washed away (and locally replenished) and is fertilizing the lowlands.
The challenge is that old growth forests, while retaining carbon, don’t pull much net carbon from the atmosphere. Their ‘spring’ is nearly fully compressed.
They are really beautiful and important, but they aren’t doing much when it comes to reducing atmospheric carbon anymore.
As ugly as it is, chopping them down (as long as we can stop the wood from rotting/burning/etc) and then having new trees grow in their place does more actual atmospheric carbon reduction.
In practice we want forest soil not eroded away after clear cut logging, but also not depleted nutrients like phosphorus, nor prone to wildfires[note], nor trees damaged by acid rain etc. Definition of "sustainable" in the law alone is not sufficient to cover all this and never will be, some discretion and responsibility is required.
[note] depends on the biome, part of said discretion
This is an excerpt from Eating the Earth. The entire point of the book is that when we consider land use, we're not accounting for other uses for that same land (or how other land would be used) because the land, prior to Searchinger's work in the field all calculations did not consider this factor. Even after Searchinger published their work showing the flaws on land use, it was often ignored.
If you find the excerpt underwhelming, go read the book. I will warn you that in some ways it feels more like a memoir of Searchinger's life than a book on land use considerations, but, despite that, it still does a great job of showing how land use is still not being accounted for in all situations.
I finished Eating the Earth last week and found it rather interesting to read.
It is so bad that the state has implemented fence line monitoring. [1]
As someone who lives in Colorado, I'd be happy to see Suncor go. Especially now that I just learned the oil they're refining is Canadian tar sand oil.
[0] https://coloradosun.com/2024/02/05/colorado-suncor-air-pollu... [1] https://cdphe.colorado.gov/public-information/air-quality-an...