if the state is suing the company for the sale of its *legal*, I mind you, product, it stands to reason the state doesn't want the product to be sold there, so is going to get its wish. Certainly the state must be fully prepared to run on something that is not producing CO2, like nuclear power, right? I wish them the best, they should absolutely stick to their guns and show all how this is done. Of course I wonder, how exactly can anyone legitimately expect to win such a case? The oil companies put out *some* CO2, but most of their product is delivered in a form that is very stable if unused - petrol, kerosene, diesel, plastics and such. It is the end customer, who has the tendency of turning a perfectly good liquid into heat and CO2 by burning it

I am unclear on what you want, isn't the goal to stop them from selling you oil products? Looks like you want that and so you will get that, why the complaining?

oil companies don't burn oil, they sell it. YOU burn oil.

however if a base aerosol is used instead, we can then not only block some of the sunlight but also reduce ocean acidity, which we have increased because oceans absorb near half of the CO2 we create.

https://slashdot.org/comments.... - my comment, when I state that these carbon credits are nonsense, designed to do nothing but to pretend that something is done or is it all of these world governments, corporations, who are only too happy to participate in this charade?

I tried using it and it is so politically correct and so constrained by its authors that it is completely uninteresting. Maybe I will spin off my own to have fun with because the ones that are widely available are not giving me answers to subjects that are unsanitized and I don't enjoy talking to anything that is politically correct.

Just to clarify what is otherwise a valid point: Uyghurs are less than 1% of China's population, about 11 million in total. So while stuff you buy from China *may* have been partly made with Uyghur slave labor, it probably isn't.

But what it is *very* likely to have contributed to making something you buy from China is labor from ethnic Han (Chinese) internal migrants. There's 295 million of *them* and their working and living conditions are horrific. They are a permanent, hereditary legal underclass that cannot receive government protections and benefits where they work because of laws from the 1950s intended to keep peasants and their descendents in rural areas growing food. They can't protest or organize to improve working conditions because the Communist Party is supposed to represent workers.

You are right of course, I have been deservedly marked as both, insightful and troll, which makes perfect sense, doesn't it?

these offsets provide incentive for many to create waste that later gets disposed of to gain these credits, then there are credits handed out for not doing something, even though this something wasn't going to happen in the first place (we will totally not burn down this forest to turn this land into another field, even though this piece of land was not going to be turned into a crop field, etc.) It's just a bunch of nonsense.

We need nuclear power to replace all coal, oil and gas power plants. Also we will geo engineer, there is no way to avoid it, we've been geo engineering for thousands of years on this planet, this time we will have to use aerosols to block some of the sunlight and to deacidify the oceans that we turned into acid baths because half of the new CO2 that we generate per year (50 billions of tons) is absorbed by the oceans.

whatever you mean, we are experimenting on this planet every day for millenia. We move earth, change river flows, create channels between oceans, move species between continents, remove billions of tons of metals, coal, oil, gas from where we find it, we burn 50 billions of tons of oil, gas, coal and wood per year, we release billions of tons of particular matter into the air, ground and water, we destroy billions of tons of insects, millions of tons of fish per year, we grow cultures by billions of tons, we turn night into day in our cities and towns, displace species, pollute waters. We do all of this and we actually know exactly that we already stopped global dimming once, in the seventies, when we cleaned up sulphur and lead from some of the aerosols.

What I said we will have to do soon will happen, in out lifetimes (well in some of our lifetimes), we will use base aerosols to block 1-2 % of the Sun light and to deacidify the ocean water (which we have acidified).

I am certain that the Sun blocking aerosols will be used in the next decades to cool down the planet by a couple of degrees, this doesn't change the CO2 levels in the atmosphere, it doesn't reduce CO2 production, so the oceans will keep getting more and more acidic. If we use aerosols that have some base (Sodium, for example) ingredients, we could reduce this acidity as well. Given that people are not switching to nuclear energy production away from coal, oil and gas, this is what will have to happen for us to survive.

Well, no. In this case the popular fad came from people jumping on research results, albeit rather early.

Shelf stable, sure. Ultra-palatable, no. The way manufacturers make ultrapalatable is by putting copious amounts of fat, sugar and salt into them, all of which are fine in *moderation* but bad for health in excess. Ultrapalatable doesn't even mean nice to eat. Think "Cheet-Ohs"; you might enjoy a few, but way past the point you're enjoying them you continue to eat them compulsively, without any real pleasure. Real food doesn't work that way. Even if it's incredible, when you've consumed a modest quantity of it you don't want to eat any more. That's a *good* thing.

This is what I suggested is the extreme limit of what is politically possible, but it's not going to be easy. It's not close to how it works today. Additives are declared GRAS (generally recognized as safe), not by the FDA, but buy the manufacturers, and the FDA vetoes that if it has a problem with the data submitted by the maker. In any case anything in use before 1958 is grandfathered as presumptively safe. This includes many additives such as carageenan which are now looking like a problem.

Even if there were independent scientific review in the approval process, which there is not, the problems with UPFs are cutting edge science and wouldn't be grounds for rejecting an additive yet. There needs to be funding for new science to zero in on the problem additives, and that's not going to be popular with industry because many profitable products are going to get banned.

So the bottom line on UPFs is that if you can afford to do so, you should avoid them. But we have to recognize that not everyone can do this.

It's more indifference than malice. And the effect of regulating UPFs on the poor is going to be complex, with no outcomes that are both happy and easy to achieve.

What we're talking about is the product of technology that allows businesses to take cheap (and indeed federally subsidized) ingredients and transform them into ultra-palatable, shelf stable edible products on an *industrial scale*. This makes them really, really inexpensive and available to people who live in areas with low availability of fresh food.

If you calculated food inflation simply based on the foods that mainstream medicine and nutrition want you to eat, it'd be a lot worse. A diet of fresh, whole, minimally processed foods is expensive -- especially vegetables and fruits which are federally classed as "specialty crops" and don't receive significant government subsidies like corn or soy. Even meat is indirectly subsidized; it comes from animals mostly grown on subsidized crops. A recent study out of Oxford concluded that vegetarian diets are more affordable than omnivore diets, but to arrive at this conclusion the study included the impact of diet on medical costs. This kind of long term orientation is something you can't expect of someone who has to buy his food in a dollar store with very little money in his pocket.

The problem with visionary public policies is the unintended consequences. In this case in the name of improving everyone's health, some people are going to pay for that worthy goal by going hungry. To ban UPFs without providing for replacements that will be available to those people is just as indifferent to their welfare as leaving them to have to subsist on that junk. We'd need a moon shot scale program to make high quality real food available to people who are dependent upon UPFs to make ends meet. That's not a bad idea, but it won't happen in the US.

Since an outright ban on UPFs without such a program would likely be catastrophic, what we need now is a lot more research into exactly what it is about UPFs that is problematic. At present the science is convincing, but highly imprecise, starting with the definition of UPFs itself. Take emulsifiers, one of the most common class of UPF ingredients and important making industrial edible products ultrapalatable. They all pass FDA tests for being acutely toxic and carcinogenic of course, but it's beginning to look like many of the common ones, like maltodextrin, carboxymethylcellulose and polysorbate 80, may be harmful to the gut microbiome health, which is believed to be a key factor driving increasing rates of obesity and diabetes. Others, like lecithins and diglycerides don't seem to be harmful, so if the science pans out it would make sense to ban *some* emulsifiers but not *all* of them.

Accelerated research, followed by surgical strikes against specific problematic additives is an achievable and worthwhile goal, because it benefits all consumers and doesn't harm politically powerful agribusinesses as much. Similarly efforts to subsidize the production and distribution of high quality food is something that could conceivably be achieved for similar reasons (it'll put money in the pockets of agribusiness), although there will be opposition to efforts to get that food into low-income areas.

Because that's what we ask of them. We want them to tell us whether a thing is good -- how many stars? Thumbs up or down? Seondarily, we really want them validate *our* opinions about a thing and get mad at them when they don't.

It's pointless. If you like something an expert's feelings about it shouldn't change that. And it's hopeless. A movie you can spend a tolerably entertaining mindless hour and a half on isn't going to land the same with someone who isn't allowed to turn off his brain. Imagine having to watch hundreds of movies like that a year and have to pay attention because it's your job. You'd be cranky about it too.

But there's another role a critic can play besides handing out stars for works of art. He can increase your enjoyment and appreciation of something, even it's something that you didn't personally enjoy. Maybe he can convince you a movie you didn't like is at least interesting. A competent critic can also help you understand why you like a movie, or see why it might not work for other people.

In other words, a great critic doesn't just validate or invalidate our opinions, he helps us make our opinions better informed and more nuanced.