I currently reading "Sapiens: A brief history of Humankind". Through out human history we have destroyed ecosystems. We are responsible for extinction of 1000s of species. Oceans was left out because we didn't have the technology, but not for long.
How could the industrial boom in China or the USA in the late 1800s and early 1900s have happened without emvironmental destruction? How can growth happen in China now without it? Get real about human development and the necessities of human development.
Who said anything about hard to understand?
Are you explaining the observation or justifying it? Because the former might be a fool’s errand; everyone understands, as you so eloquently put it.
In other words: just because I know why something happens, doesn’t mean that I think it’s a good thing, or that it shouldn’t change.
We wreck it at our own peril.
Rapacious destruction may have been an expedient shortcut to our development, but unchecked, it will also end us.
I understand that it _might_ and that that would be a pretty bad thing. So there is a risk, but why do you think it's so certain?
When the dice are that loaded, you throw them at your own peril.
When they're that loaded, you keep throwing them because it's more profitable at everyone's peril.
You don't do something that might kill or maim people to test whether or not doing the thing does kill or maim people — unless you're Mengele or something.
Is it really that hard to extrapolate from the specific case to the general? If we get this one wrong, we're dead. Even the possibility makes it incumbent upon us to tread exceptionally carefully.
EDIT: This, "Hey, now. Let's have a rational, skeptical discussion about this" is a disingenuous tactic, in the first place. If we played that game, we'd still be debating whether or not rising CO₂ levels are dangerous, as they crossed the 500ppm threshold. We know, for practical purposes, that this is coming, unless we change course. We know the consequences of its happening. But we're still somehow dithering, apparently in order to convince trenchant outliers who have identity-level investments in being trenchant outliers, that they're wrong. That ship will never sail.
"Oops. Yeah, I guess that was a bad idea after all," is not an reasonable response to an existential threat.
Have you checked out the self-driving car threads recently?
Your argument is more like, "We're testing this new chemotherapy agent to see how many people it kills", versus, "We're testing this new chemotherapy agent for safety and efficacy" (phase I and II, respectively). We aren't specifically screening for deadliness; we're trying to determine the therapeutic index of the agent, and get a baseline on its side effects (which, yes, may include death).
It's a subtle distinction, but it's a critical one.
All that aside, it's fundamentally disanalogous, anyway, because the populations in chemo clinical trials are already sick, and have given informed consent. Dude walking down the street getting smoked by a Tesla that thought he was a wall, not so much.
Just because we don't know if it causes birth defects doesn't mean every untested chemical certainly does cause birth defects. In fact it's obvious that since we don't know, we don't know! You might save people by telling them that lie but it's still a lie and won't help anyone understand nature.
You're really confusing "We don't know if ignoring the environment will wipe us out" with "Let's ignore the environment and see what happens.". I'm not proposing we conduct that experiment, just pointing out that we don't know what the outcome will be.
If you haven’t tried it to see what happens, you can’t be certain....
You're confusing actually destroying the things we depend on with carelessly using them and not trying to make sure they survive. An obvious counterexample - we do our best to eat as many cows as we can, yet the species is thriving! Maybe fish farms will do that to desirable fish species too. We didn't even wipe out sperm whales despite whalers doing their best to find all they could and having no concern for conservation.
I agree there's a _risk_ of that happening though. We just don't know for sure. My concern is with people who claim to know for sure when actually they're taking a dishonest extreme position to make their political point stronger. Of course we should be careful not to destroy the environment because if we don't, the downside to being wrong is terrible. Somehow most of the people arguing about this seem to be victims of their own extremism and unable to distinguish risk from certainty.
To say that unchecked destruction of the environment won't necessarily destroy us is the same as saying that we'll be able to create closed-loop life support systems that can operate indefinitely without any outside organic input, and that we'll be able to do it fast enough to save ourselves. I'm highly dubious of that.
Something I'm pretty sure of though is that we can never destroy all food-producing life on earth by just eating everything till it's gone. Whatever's left will thrive and can be used to make food. Maybe not as tasty or as cheap, but we won't need a fully artificial life support system. Even in an extreme case of desertification, we can still grow plants indoors, and rain will still fall on our "deserts". And that's the very extreme! In reality, maybe the price of beef will go up a little as farmers have to spend more on feeding them.
Species are currently going extinct at a rate we've previously only seen in the fossil record — from which we've estimated that the current rate of species extinction to be on the order of 10-100 times that of any previous extinction event.
Then, consider that there are key roles in an ecosystem, without which its collapse is more or less a certainty. One of those roles is pollinating.
The collapse of bee and butterfly populations, and our having to resort to commercial pollination (because something on the order of 3/4 of the world's food plants require pollinators, and many of the essential nutrients — things the body can't synthesize itself, and must obtain through diet — come from plants which critically depend on pollinators, while wild bee populations have fallen to alarming levels) is a dangerous leading indicator.
We're well on the path towards a collapse. If we don't avert it, things will not go well for us. When the things we eat all die, they aren't there for us to eat any more. When that happens, we die.
How is this not flashing neon obvious?
I understand the sentiment, but sometimes, a complaint is valid. And making it over and over and over again is also valid. It is the first step towards fixing it. If we stop acknowledging this problem we lose all hope for ever finding a way out.
I would say the litany of woeful clamouring is already driving SOME people to consciously consume , buy electric cars, (or we can focus on conscientious vegetarians, if you don’t like the global warming analogy) etc. Sure , it could be a lot better, but it could also be a lot worse.
If nobody ever complained , I bet there would be a lot fewer vegetarians.
What institutions exist that can make clean energy palatable to all the human societies that require it for their survival—at-scale, that they are all ignoring?
Leaving energy aside, what other powerful means of doing good to ecosystems as a whole, are they simply ignoring? Is there any quantification of the damage?
I am most certainly not trying to attack your position. I pretty much believe the same things you said. But we should have these answers documented. Is there a single source for these things on the web?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nLKHYHmPbo
Notes:
He reframes "sustainable" as the midpoint of a spectrum with "degenerative" on one side and "regenerative" on the other and emphasizes regenerative systems.
He talks about the length of time we (humans) have been doing "culture" (group activities, pottery, art, singing and music, etc.) and points out that it's roughly a million (1,000,000) years-- and that agriculture has only been happening for about ten thousand years, about 1% of that time.
Five culture types based on food getting technology: 1 Foraging; 2 Hunter-gatherer; 3 Agricultural (cities); 5 Pastoral (Animal herding); 5 Industrial
Then follows a great deal of the "dirt" on agriculture. Old hat to those who know it, horrifying and challenging to those who don't. Hemenway sums it up, "Agriculture... ...converts ecosystems into people."
(Oil => Food => People) x (Peak Oil) = Hoshit! i.e. we made people out of oil for the last few generations and now we are running out of oil. Could be trouble...
Holmgrin's scenarios:
1 Techno-fantasy (technology saves the day and we pack ourselves in like sardines until something else gives, or spew forth and colonize the galaxy until we reach the expansion limits of our space-drives... Technology doesn't solve the problem, only postpones it.)
2 Green-tech stable - stabilize population (match growth and death rates) and live within the Solar energy budget while regenerating the Earth.
3 Graceful decline - (growth rate less than death rate for awhile...) "Earth Stewardship" "Permaculture" I don't know where the people are supposed to have gone.
4 "Atlantis" - i.e. doom. Personally I think this is the most likely, but I'm okay with being proven wrong on that.
"Peak Wood" - no kidding. Peak Oil seems to have happened before with wood instead of oil, and could be responsible for bringing the Bronze Age to a close. Wow.
Last but not least, Horticulture to the rescue! All the great things about Permaculture and a Neo-Horticultural society.
The video is excellent and I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in these subjects.
Ok, we have something like 450 nuclear reactors globally. IIRC bumping that number up 10 times would give us roughly two times our current global energy usage (ie fuels and electricity).
That's a margin that could reasonably address energy requirements for synthetic fuel production & delivery, sustain the additional energy we want to use for cleaner but energy demanding electrical processes in industry, and arguably put us on footing to end global poverty. Atomic process heat is wicked-good for desalination, critical to avoid water-related wars. "Next gen" tech (from the 70s...), conceivably could let us think about replenishing continental aquifers, and all round have enough energy to continue exploring space. All without any social engineering or major lifestyle or geopolitical reshaping.
I'm a big fan of solar, but our global solar energy budget has some tricky hurdles before we get to 200% current global energy usage. And I'm not enthused about anything that requires a centrally managed government (that doesn't exist today), managing life and death. It sounds scary and ripe for dystopian outcomes.
The basic argument is that increasing the education of women leads to fewer children. You can already see this in developed countries which are actually starting to exhibit negative population growth (e.g. Japan).
One simple place to start is placing large taxes on the most harfmul activities (e.g. generating co2). This should incentive increased investment in safer energy sources.
Ideally, this should be a multi-national effort led by all the wealthy countries. They should also create investment funds to help more quickly developing nations move past lower tech, harfmul energy sources (need a lot oversight here to make sure there isn't any economic exploitation).
I'm not super well-researched, but there does seem to be a lot of effective, actionable solutions that we can start today. The above are just a small sample.
This was the basis for the Kyoto Protocol [1] in 1997, which sought to limit greenhouse gas emissions by making organizations pay for a license to emit greenhouse gases. It even put most of the burden on developed nations, as you suggest.
Now, you may argue that the costs for licenses were not steep enough, or that the resulting emissions trading market diluted the effectiveness of the regulation, or that the US' refusal to ratify it makes effectively a failed attempt -- but what you propose has been tried before.
Just for starters: Why is "the Industrial Revolution happened" an argument against trying to do better in the future?
Not all of that environmental and human damage was necessary. Much of it was out of ignorance, and more was out greed, combined with a callous disregard for human life.
Possibly if they had used solar-thermal power generation and focused on battery tech instead of exploiting petroleum so heavily.
Also, mining the easy stocks (at that point) is a low tech affair too. Which was powered by... combustion of fuel and human labor.
We still can’t make solar panels with 100% efficiency, what hope did they have?
With glass you can build a lens to concentrate light. With a metal you can build a concentrating mirror.
Worthwhile electric generators really weren't that far behind worthwhile steam engines. Without any fossil fuels, I think we would've just built lots of hydro and wind.
Although I suppose the animals are getting the worst of it since we actively go after many of them.
This assumes there can be an 'us' without a 'them'.
Only violence can protect this planet from the most violent creature.
HN is not a good place to tilt at windmills.
I do understand what that idiom means - I’m failing to understand how acknowledging that specific actor to be a powerful source of violence is to imagine an enemy.
> The phrase is sometimes used to describe either confrontations where adversaries are incorrectly perceived, or courses of action that are based on misinterpreted or misapplied heroic, romantic, or idealistic justifications. It may also connote an importune, unfounded, and vain effort against adversaries real or imagined for a vain goal.
People who incessantly complain about the evils of all governments -- a key clue here is referring to "the state" as a singular platonic entity -- as if they know of some better solution, when they clearly don't, remind me of the above.
Thank you for the detailed explanation- while I don’t agree with your position for the reason stated, I fully understand where you are coming from.
I still am smarting from the downvotes on my innocuous request for an explanation though.