34
Why California's favorite bagel shop is defending fossil fuels
(www.latimes.com)
Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
TLDR: they would have to pay to replace natural gas related equipment in their bakeries.
I fucking hate when small businesses do this. Why not push for transition funding instead?
A local coffee shop in my city is telling everyone that upzoning is bad across the board because if their neighborhood gets upzoned, their landlord would sell. They'll happily try to tank massive progress instead of trying to work with it.
In the article they mention that there's specialty ovens that are apparently only available to work with natural gas for making the perfect bagel.
The article also summarizes my opinion that if natural gas is making people sick and contributing to their displacement, then it's pretty easy to do without bagels.
I also kind of refuse to believe that it would be impossible to make an electric bagel oven. Innovate or die, you know?
Not saying this was a better solution for emissions - but the best bagel I had came from a wood fired oven. I can't imagine there would be a significant difference in quality between electric and gas. It's not about quality.
I can imagine that they would need to expend $$ on purchasing new equipment.
Here's a neat detail about burning hydrocarbons - the oxygen burns carbon and releases CO2, but also H2O (and other things that don't seem great)
There is a real difference for things like baking - I'm not saying it's impossible to compensate with electric, but you'd have to adjust your process to get the same result
Don't let perfect become the enemy of good enough. If electric ovens can make good enough bagels, then there's no argument against not using them.