Cleaning New York's harbor with one billion oysters
cnn.com
cnn.com
https://www.platteoester.nl/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Overv...
It's amazing how much of an oyster mecca new york used to be...
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Big-Oyster-History-Half-Shell/dp/0345...
This is the right way to do it, deal with the problems you see and can deal with.
Climate change is not a problem, it is a phenomena which have consequences. Some of them we see today some are 100 years into the future.
We don't know what the right solution for the consequences in the future is as we don't even know what the consequences are and we don't even know what the problems are going to be.
We can speculate but we can be wrong and so its much better to solve the problems we have today in ways we know how to solve and then invest in R&D to develop better solutions than to chase a future that might or might not be here.
Alternatively I fear the current scenario were people have panicked and spend more time arguing on the internet than actually doing anything constructive about the problems right in front of them.
We’ve completely and utterly destroyed nature, seas are empty, air was unbreathsble at some point, all oyster banks completely gone, most wildlife going extinct and people are asking “what problem”?
Thank you for proving my point.
So the question still is what is the actual problem and how do you know it's correctly defined?
As I wrote in the top comment, I'm often surprised when reading articles which compare our current state with the past, the amount of life we've destroyed, the amount of pollution we're producing. So yes, subject to the same problem, but open to learning the facts...
You sound like the person that gets invited to a party, brings 100s of uninvited friends, completely trashes the house, kills a lot of the other invitees, and then is surprised when somebody thinks it's a problem:" you still have something resembling a roof, you can still sort of live here, what is the problem?"
I know the facts, thats why i am not concerned.
You do. Everybody wants clean air, clean water, etc. The Captain-Planet-Villain model of somebody literally cackling about how much pollution they're going to release into the world today is nonsense.
The problem is people who see a short-term gain of their own, standing against the environmental problems they cause. They may not even believe the environmental problems exist.
Sometimes they're even right; just because someone labeling themselves an "environmentalist" claims some environmental problem exists doesn't mean they are correct. These people are probably as dangerous to the environment as the actual polluters. We don't actually have complete and correct information about the effect of things, and if we did, there's a lot of people who wouldn't want to hear it, on both "sides".
But you gotta solve the right problems. Probably a non-trivial component of the environmental movement's semi-effectiveness is how much of the movement wants to fight alongside Captain Planet against essentially non-existent threats, rather than working out how to address the mismatched incentive issue. But I say "semi-effective" because they're far from ineffective, and there are certainly people directly addressing the mismatched incentive issue. For instance, people discussing "carbon taxes" are definitely on a more effective path.
They’re not evil overlords cackling, but rather they’re in mass denial over a zero sum scientific equation, and have created a cult around their disbelief that’s as strong as any environmental group. If you understand science, from that sense, they’re definitely acting like tragic villains.
I wish it were so easy, that all environmentalists would need to do is admit they’ve overreached sometimes and been alarmist on the timeline etc, and people will see the reason in ideas like carbon taxes.
That’s not the experience I see out there. People are treating carbon taxes as the equivalent of communist invasion and an immoral affront to free society, rather than a conservative policy idea. (Similar to the healthcare debate)
I suppose there will always be people in the middle that could swing either way, they’re our main hope.
But I think it’s not helpful to scold “both sides” as you do above, equating over-eager environmentalists with those that want to accelerate our pollution and use of fossil fuels for short term gain. One is a misdemeanour, the other is quite literally contributing to global destabilization. Global warming in the next 75 years is leading to a wave of refugee immigration the world has never seen before (that a large segment of the populace also currently would reject and let starve). Germany has been poltically destabilized by 2 million Syrians. What happens when 1 billion or more are knocking on Europe and the US’s doors? I only wish I was overstating this for effect.
"Green New Deal" is a bunch of hysterics going nowhere fast, and the counter point are a bunch of idiots that think a snowstorm is proof global warming doesn't exist.
We've lost the boring middle ground solution that works, just like so many other areas of policy.
In other words, it absolutely is a money grab. That's the point!
Would it be better if that money went to useful programs? Absolutely! Same as the rest of our tax dollars.
Which is generally what Democrats don't want to do b/c its not raising taxes, and Republicans don't want to do b/c its not lowering taxes… but it'd sure go a long way to actually incentivizing heavy CO2 producers to change their ways that multilateral, international agreements have so far failed terribly at actually accomplishing anything about.
And yet we have idiots in diesel trucks modded to "roll coal" cackling as they "own the libs" when they spew out soot.
He claims that he likes spewing this out onto people he doesn’t like. He’s never mentioned how awesome it is to pollute or anything. It’s the equivalent of spy hunter smokescreen.
Actually it's totally sensible and compatible with the actual actions of the various actors involved.
Companies continue to plunder the ecosystem in ways that knowingly damage it (fracking, rainforest depletion, etc), we have cheaper air fares than ever, every major company does only token moves while continuing the damages, and so on.
And of course for decades important agreements weren't signed because of financial interests...
E.g. people wanting plastic bags, even if they have to pay $0.20 for them, over the hassle of bringing their own hard bags to the supermarket?
Or people preferring more polluting ways to commute (e.g. car with one passenger over metro/bus) because of the convenience for them?
Though sometimes it can be both, or hard to tell.
The current US president* appears to want more coal to be burned and has denied climate change, as well as effected complete regulatory capture of the agency created to protect the environment.
Have they? I think it's what societies does as a group that shows whether we're "freaking out", and judging by our collective response, it seems like we could not care less...
Plus that's kind of the opposite of what you're talking about, as most of the women are infertile.
That's probably the way we'll have it, but there will be artificial-natural habitat, eg. "reservations", that could grow to even be country-sized or half-continent-sized if we manage resources right. (Though probably they'll be smaller since we're going to have to some pretty large scale heavily-engineered-and-very-unnatural-agriculture to prevent famine in the face of climate degradation.)
The second option sounds somewhat enticing... but it would likely severely diminish speed of technological progress, hence diminish our even-longer-term changes of survival (think encounter and warfare with alien civs etc. - the universe is huge and if we/our-mostly-artificial-descendants survive long enough we'll have to compete with strains of life much more virulent than ourselves today).
Also, the kind of technological delay you're talking about there would be a couple of decades at most, when it looks like you're talking about thinking in terms of centuries. If anything, we're slowing down necessary technological advances to maintain the status quo long past the point where it's tenable.
The object of power is power and any claims of a cause are illusions and deceptions. React accordingly.
There are potential forms of alternative or third position government structures that allow for just as much or more personal freedom than current democracies, and yet can preserve our natural ecology. It just requires an accounting of destruction of commons, where untouched biodiversity is valued by the people of the state.
If we have the power to absolutely destroy the natural environment, we also have the power to protect its beauty for future generations rather than selfishly destroy the earth.
"Climate change" is a red herring; we can "fix" the increasing temperature problem and yet deforestation, pollution, and overpopulation will still destroy every natural ecosystem on the planet.
"3. In the wild, oysters set on (or attach to) old oyster shells. When oysters grow in the wild in oyster reefs, they typically attach to old oyster shells (for the calcium carbonate — see above). Because of this they tend to grow in clusters and one on top of the other. This is also why wild oysters typically have “gnarly shapes,” says Chris, instead of the nice round shape and deep cup you associate with farmed oysters."
https://www.thekitchn.com/island-creek-oysters-grower-tour-1...
https://www.ted.com/talks/kate_orff_oysters_as_architecture/...
It seems unclear to me whether their deal with restaurants is limited to collecting shells from restaurants or includes distributing oysters to restaurants as well. Hopefully it's only the former. One hopes the oysters being served are not local.
Whether you're consuming the local waste or waste from somewhere else doesn't make much of a difference.
They collect the shells of edible oysters grown in less polluted areas. These are cleaned and used to jumpstart the NYC oyster colony, which are not yet edible.
Smoke detector radiological sources, teflon pans, noble gases and refridgerants, cadmium paints and pigments, dioxins, kepone, BPA, hydrazine, sulfur mustards, medication, depleted uranium. The list goes on.
I would imagine this is a good start, people can identify with oysters and they can then start to use funding to diversify the biosphere down the line.
I assumed that these oysters were grown by locating a rare wild oyster, or two, and having them spawn in captivity, producing huge numbers of offspring in a generation or two.
So they would be "wild oysters" genetically speaking. Although less genetically diverse than the whole wild population.
(But they are a freshwater species)
Sometime around 2001, zebra mussels were accidentally introduced (the common theory I've read is by attaching to a boat that had been docked in Lake Erie prior to being brought back to Portage Lakes). The zebra mussels spread very fast and the lake noticeably changed. The water became much clearer. As a result, more sunlight could penetrate the water, and it could penetrate deeper, so much more seaweed grew.
Personally, I hated them because they made swimming at our local park more dangerous. Their shells are sharp and will cut human feet pretty easily.
That being said, in hindsight they did appear to clean up the water a lot. I wonder if they actually made the lake healthier for humans to swim in and live near as a result?
The $4.5 million is money New York has to spend out of revenue. Spending it lowers the amount of money New York has.
Neither of those is true of $5 billion in tax incentives. Look at the cash flow.
All these corporations do with their profits and tax-incentives is hoard them overseas and spend them on stock buy-backs.
https://www.barrons.com/articles/2018-record-stock-buybacks-...
You do realize NYC is not collecting less taxes because Amazon came? If Amazon goes to another city, they collect 0. if Amazon gets a tax break, they collect 0. now you could argue that Amazon provides some sort of extra burden on city resources, though they would also collect more taxes from the employees and other services rendered.
You pick your preferred baseline, fair enough. But since we're talking about a discriminatory tax break here, it's perfectly reasonable to choose as baseline a world without discrimination. And in that comparison, NY de facto pays the 5 billion or whatever it is. Of course, this is also choosing an ultimately arbitrary baseline for comparison.
You can ping pong this discussion indefinitely because there is no absolute, divine baseline to compare against.
NYC is not PAYING 5 billion dollars. they are simply not taxing it, therefor you can not say 'what else could they have used this money on instead'.
Its like me hosting a website for many charging 100$, and one person comes to me and says they will pay me 0$ but do other stuff, but otherwise they will not use my services. I can not say 'gee, if I charged them 100$ I could do these other things with the money', because I am not paying them 100$ to use my site.
Argue as much as you want about corporate motives (and I agree with you on incentives being not ideal, even though Amazon doesn’t “do” profits), it has no bearing on how tax write-offs work.
Short of implementing a federal law against it, there is no scenario where cities were not going to compete to lure Amazon. Fortunately no such federal law exists, which enables cities great leeway to compete for both citizens and businesses, through tax and regulatory structure, incentives, zoning laws, et al.
If I'm Detroit and I want to rebuild my collaped city, one great way to do that is to forgo some purely theoretical new near-term taxes - which you're not actually getting anyway because businesses don't want to move there - and offer up incentives such as tax breaks for businesses to go there instead of somewhere else. For a place like Detroit, that also means jobs, luring population to rebuild the tax base, rebuilding the housing stock, rebuilding the small business base that services that population, and so on.
i would say that's unfortunate rather than fortunate.
Cities competing for businesses is a net loss to the tax payer. If a business is to build a new HQ or invest, they should do it on the merits of their business needs and general condition applicable to all businesses.
If a particular company gets an unfairly good treatment, then it's very anti-competitive for other businesses. Why should tax payer shoulder any burden for a private business specifically, rather than building general infrastructure that benefits all businesses?
> If I'm Detroit and I want to rebuild my collaped city ... offer up incentives such as tax breaks for businesses
that would be great - if it was a general tax break, rather than a tax break targeted at specific companies that others can't gain access to.
Sure, if the taxpayer exists as an abstract concept. Not when the Taxpayer is a sandwich seller near the new company’s office. Or when the Taxpayer is given a new job at the company. Or when the Taxpayer is the family that can now rent out its mother in-law unit more easily
these are not tax payers - these a private individuals.
Why should the sandwich seller from the bronx not be able to benefit from the city's policies, where as the sandwich seller from jersey does under these policies?
The EU does this better. EU courts can deem a tax break state aid and require the company to pay back taxes. This disincentives states competing against each other on tax revenue.
The city gave away $5 billion in tax breaks to ensure billions more in tax revenues. The deal was tax-positive. What those extra billions get spent on is up to us.
The Amazon thing is a massive red herring. Yes, it’s distasteful. But it’s also tiny. Giant political deals are being struck in Albany right now—Amazon is a distraction.
i'd like to see evidence of that. Amazon could've have still chosen new york for the HQ building. There's plenty of incentives already.
Therefore, only if there's reason to believe that amazon won't have built it in NY would the 5 billion tax break have been worth it.