WWF Report Reveals Staggering Extent of Human Impact on Planet | Hacker News Reader

WWF Report Reveals Staggering Extent of Human Impact on Planet

worldwildlife.org

196 pointspierreneter42 comments

Until we include the cost on the environment within the cost of our goods things will not change. When we do we will encourage a wave of environmentally friendly innovation. It will take a lot of courage for any government to do this.

It can’t be any government that does it, it has to be all governments (and therefore people) that do it.

It will have to start with one

You could probably get pretty far by just instituting such a system in the countries with the highest consumption (USA, EU, China), and additionally having them also institute tariffs on any goods imported from countries that don't bake ecological harm into prices.

Also, eyes.

It's really sad and I think it's especially sad that the core problem - overpopulation - is pretty much never discussed. Everyone talks about drinking straws or plastic or greenhouse gases or air pollution or whatever, but none of those would be big problems if our population was 10 times smaller, and all of them are guaranteed to be problems no matter what we do if our population continues to grow.

I know there are predictions that the population will peak at around 10bn but the variance on that prediction is high. There's nothing really stopping it growing to 20 or 30bn. #thanoswasright

>It's really sad and I think it's especially sad that the core problem - overpopulation - is pretty much never discussed.

Sorry bud, it's not... by a long shot. https://twitter.com/SofiePelsmakers/status/91776466335766118...

"Overpopulation" pushes a problem that is actually caused by the few richest among us onto the poorest.

Those top 10%, that's all of us. I would not want to live like bottom 50% really.

For CO2 emissions US has 2x per capita emissions of EU. Standard of living in EU is higher.

Yet even European lifestyle is anything but sustainable base on IPCC report.

To the original commentor's point, certain people, institutions, & pools of capital have inordinate influence over the policies, politics, & markets that determine how food, energy, & goods are produced & consumed. We have had a surge of global scale projects, such as the green revolution & multi-national corporations, which comes with global issues.

If we had more localized economies, there would be less need to transport all sorts of goods across the world; and there would be more employment. Redundancy would be beneficial to local cultures, as it encourages local autonomy. Instead, we have increasing centralization, which has yielded the same degregation with increasing scale. Maybe we need to rethink some of our presuppositions.

I have a feeling that, even if the ecological costs of transportation were factored into price, centralization of production and globalization would still be more efficient than producing the same goods in many different places.

International trade is also a strong check against war, so that is something to consider.

> globalization would still be more efficient than producing the same goods in many different places.

Not necessarily true in all cases. Globalization is more efficient in transferring wealth, power, & information from small entities to large entities. As far as advocating for, providing value, & enriching local communities, naked Globalization has had a dismal record.

Good fences make good neighbors.

http://necsi.edu/research/social/scienceofpeace.pdf

Re: the check against war, that is also something to be questioned. We have continuous "low intensity" warfare against populations around the world, where modern weapons are used against civilian populations. This includes biomedical technology in favor of traditional food & medicine.

Also consider that the conditions for the major world wars (& the cold war) were created by globalists who operate trans-nationally. Something to consider...

I'm not sure I understand. The chart you link to shows that the top 10% produce ~90% of CO2, but says nothing about the impact of population reduction on that dynamic. Are you assuming those individuals will be untouchable or just saying that reducing lifestyle emissions among that group is more effective?

If you culled randomly, "thanos style" as the original poster describes, you would eliminate about 50% of the population in each subgroup. When only the top 10% subgroup contributes about 50% of the emissions, you will only eliminate 5% of the emissions, with half the population gone.

In reality, eugenics programs cull from the people considered "undesirable" by the elite in a society. The bottom 90% in that chart would likely be targeted and so the impact you'd have on the environmental problem would be even further limited.

The tiny minority that owns almost all the money does not also eat almost all the biomass.

You're right, the tiny minority that owns almost all the money eats animals that eat almost all the biomass.

You vastly underestimate the resources needed to produce beef, pork and chicken.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3876224/

Non-vegans are hardly a tiny minority. Life-long debtors who nonetheless have access to as many two-dollar-burgers as they can stomach far outnumber the few that own almost everything.

I don't think this is the same thing, it's CO2 emissions, which of course are vastly greater in rich northern countries with a majority of the power plants, vehicles, heating, industry.

Biomass loss seems to be largely due to agriculture/fishing. Of course, again rich countries are consuming much more per capita by eating more meat etc, but what are the overall impacts, especially taking into account agricultural practices, polution-control practices, etc, around the world?

I think agricultural technology, especially factory farming (hydroponics etc), lab-grown-meat, on-land fish farming, etc, could play a big role in future reduction of our footprint - along with more responsible population growth, healthier eating habits/more vegetarian diets, worldwide ecological regulation/certification/enforcement etc.

I think a better source of information for your point is the actual article linked to in the twitter feed:

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/9/26/1635652...

It has great stigma since WWII for obvious reasons (desirables vs non-desirables). But I agree. I always wonder why we are trying to revert decline of amount of people in Europe, where in many countries we would have famine just if food import would stop. That does not look like good long-term solution.

But we are just putting plasters on economy by trying to increase human population, because more people means higher GDP, more workers and having ability to pay for debt and future liabilities such as pensions.

Worst of all, if we do not act (and by acting I mean having less kids, not killing anyone), population decrease will likely come in other, more violent ways (wars for resources, famine and disease).

Probably because Europe as a supposed shining beacon of enlightenment is the absolute last place that should diminish its influence in the world by producing less offspring.

Why? Do you think that shining beacon of enlightenment is encoded in DNA, rather than culturally defined?

You could decrease population just by removing perverse incentives associated with population growth (e.g. religious and economic power being two big examples - but fat chance of those going away).

Overpopulation is not the problem, the problem is that we cannot have 10billion people with Western life standards of consumerism. We will have 10billion people, that's granted. What we need is mass education and lifestyle changes, that have to start by looking at what impact we cause in our actions. Maybe you don't need to eat meat in absolutely every meal. Maybe you don't need a new phone. Maybe you don't need more clothes. And so on...

All the environmentalist non-profits focus on problems by ignoring the impact that the individual has on the problems. It is better to get money if you don't tell the donor that the problem is caused by him, but by an abstract collective that is being really irresponsible with the planet. We need to start looking to ourselves.

Do you want tuna? Good, keep in mind that an important part of the plastic in the ocean is fishing gear. Do you want some beef? Good, keep in mind that what is deforestating the Amazonia is cattle crops and farms, not exotic wood.

Be the change that you want to see in the world. - Mahatma Ghandi.

All of the things that you listed though would be solved with a vastly reduced population. Our population growth in the last 150 years alone is just absurd[0]. I agree, 10billion is just a matter of time but even if these 10 billion people lived as sustainably as possible, the lower economic countries will develop and begin requiring more and more resources. Even a fully vegan lifestyle for 10 billion people would cause a huge amount of damage in order to deforest and irrigate produce - far more damage than if world population was 500 million and living with our current western values

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_overpopulation#/media/Fi...

'Absurd' population growth stops when the population leaves poverty as families start having less children and the sex education improves. So we will hit the mark, the question is what to do about it.

Many of the population that lives in our 7b planet are not living according Western standards, and if they do, we will be in trouble.

Just as an example, you can take this test to see how many Earths we would need if we lived like you: https://www.footprintcalculator.org/

In my case is2.1 Earths, but I understand that for many people it would me much more. So there is the quid of the question, how many Earths we would need per person, not how many persons we have on Earth because that is a number that is irremediably going to grow up to a certain, fixed point and then stop.

There are many things we could fix before encouraging a fully vegan lifestyle.

*Gandhi. (It seemed pedantic to correct it, but no, I thought, be the change etc)

Hahahaha superb thinking.

>Overpopulation is not the problem

http://www.kimnicholas.com/uploads/2/5/7/6/25766487/fig1full...

Part of the problem is that capitalism seems to require perpetual growth. The "economy" is only "good" when things are growing and expanding, which means more people, more consumption. We need a way to maintain equilibrium.

The concept of Steady-state Economy is rather interesting to me, though it seems the topic doesn't get much attention.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_economy#Capitalis...

You can't aim for steady state when you've priced in 8% annual growth for the next 30 to 60 years by borrowing from the future.

Exactly

As well as having ecosystem needs, each person has potential to be a supplier of ecosystem services. Each person can be inspiring, inventive, remediative and helpful when enabled and when not diverted by conflicts, economic and so on.

It is incorrect to approximate individuals as necessarily being a drain on the situation. There is little limit how much harm we can do - there is also little limit how much benefit we can do. Humanities gross drain on the system owes to dynamic behaviour and activity, more than its number which is relatively static. Our number changes slowly and with more difficulty than our interest and activity - our culture.

Political efforts to reduce people, to put hardships on family making, to tell people that fellow people are their problem - are damage to culture. The idea this could be solvent and even necessary is a symptom of damaged culture, of bad ideas about what humans are and can be.

>As well as having ecosystem needs, each person has potential to be a supplier of ecosystem services.

What does "ecosystem services" actually mean?

The problem isn't the loss of some services. Humans who aren't willing to live like animals require an unnatural environment. By definition. Unless you construct that environment in a way that's 100% isolated from anything on Earth, it disrupts something in nature. Again, by definition.

Multiply this by 7.7 billion.

Now, factor in that humans are ultra-social and create global networks. This results in emergent world-wide phenomena.

> Unless you construct that environment in a way that's 100% isolated from anything on Earth, it disrupts something in nature. Again, by definition.

You limit your outlook by reading simplistic language such as "live like animals" - as definitive. Language is not truely definitive in this respect - reality is definitive and it is not simple. Humans are to a large extent animals and do live to extents like animals. There are many ways to live less like animals (humans can design and compute) some are helpful to other animals and some are harmful. Humans can be helpful or harmful. Be like one animal or another or like no animal yet seen. Definition is symbolic.

Ecosystem services[1]

> Humankind benefits in a multitude of ways from ecosystems. Collectively, these benefits are known as ecosystem services. Ecosystem services are regularly involved in the provisioning of clean drinking water and the decomposition of wastes. While scientists and environmentalists have discussed ecosystem services implicitly for decades, the ecosystem services concept itself was popularized by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment in the early 2000s. This grouped ecosystem services into four broad categories: provisioning, such as the production of food and water; regulating, such as the control of climate and disease; supporting, such as nutrient cycles and crop pollination; and cultural, such as spiritual and recreational benefits. To help inform decision-makers, many ecosystem services are being assigned economic values.

[1] - https://duckduckgo.com/?q=What+does+%22ecosystem+services%22...

I've felt the impact. When I was a kid going up North for the summers meant hiding out from the blackfly swarms, battling horse flies, catching pollywogs, and watching out for moose. There are no pollywogs anymore, I haven't seen a horse fly in years and frogs are pretty rare to see. You can find polar bears digging in the trash where you'd never see them before.

I don't know if changing our eating habits will help regenerate biodiversity or at least slow down the reduction of it but there are some easy things we can do, that if we all do them, that could have a big impact on the world in a positive way:

1. Go veggie. Or at least try going veggie one or two days a week. Many commodity crops are grown for cattle feed which leads to deforestation and reduction in biodiversity and is a factor in anthropological climate change.

2. Reduce your reliance on biofuels and fuels in general. Palm and canola oil lead to deforestation, monocrops, pesticides, herbicides, etc. The economic incentives and numbers of scale have decimated entire ecosystems for these crops. If able and it makes sense try asking about remote working, use car sharing, demand transportation and cycling infrastructure. Check the provenance of your chocolate, beauty products, for canola, palm, etc oils and buy alternatives without those ingredients.

3. Support philanthropic efforts to protect and restore wildlife and land. Support indigenous rights: there are plenty of corporations exploiting indigenous land and betting on the local governments and people turning a blind eye.

So, rely on OPEC and domestic facking for fuel? At best, biofuels from canola & palm make up <10% of diesel fuel blend.

I'd like to see a reduction in all sources, impractical as that may seem right now. Palm oil extraction, along with soy crops, has led to massive deforestation in many regions which contribute directly to threatening biodiversity and climate change[0].

It seems unrealistic right now to stop using any source of fuel but I don't really see nature waiting for us to figure it all out. So yes.. reducing fuel use in general is good, palm oil based products are easy to avoid and don't need to be so massively subsidized.

[0] https://www.transportenvironment.org/what-we-do/biofuels/why...

Yeah, I also haven’t seen a horse fly in quite a while

Arguably population decline without local or global species extinction isn't the same as loss of biodiversity.

That said, here's a summary of a study with a few statistics to get more of a feel for the scale of human agriculture versus remaining wild animal population:

https://www.ecowatch.com/biomass-humans-animals-2571413930.h...

> while humans account for 0.01 percent of the planet's biomass, our activity has reduced the biomass of wild marine and terrestrial mammals by six times and the biomass of plant matter by half.

> Humans account for about 36 percent of the biomass of all mammals. Domesticated livestock, mostly cows and pigs, account for 60 percent, and wild mammals for only 4 percent.

> The biomass of poultry is about three times higher than that of wild birds.

> Overall, animals have nothing on the other other kingdoms. Plants dominate, accounting for about 80 percent of all of the earth's biomass, followed by bacteria at about 15 percent.

> Since most plants are terrestrial, the study found that most of earth's biomass is found on land, but most animal biomass is found in the oceans.

visualized: https://m.xkcd.com/1338/

Can anyone suggest reading that explores the impact of biodiversity loss on ecosystems?

Ideally something that is semi understandable to someone with no background in ecology or biology.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com