If Seeing the World Helps Ruin It, Should We Stay Home?
nytimes.com
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If travel is valuable to you, pay for it.
This seems to be fairly close. The Pipistrel Panthera looks quite promising, for instance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipistrel_Panthera#Specificati... "Hybrid range is 758 mi or 1,220 km; Electric range is 249 mi or 400 km"
> I do not know about you, but to me, a sustainable future simply looks and feels amazing.
I agree. Losing our technological dependence on fossil fuels is very freeing. I can imagine this resulting in a future where energy is also a lot cheaper, as there is a lot of potential for solar and nuclear power to see reductions in cost as the technologies improve and benefit from economies of scale. Conversely oil and gas become scarcer and more expensive.
I would like to append, that meat production is very significant (and probably overlooked) factor of climate change gas emissions and has colossal damage to the global ecosystem at current consumption levels.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_p...
And driving? People could just stay home, I suppose?
Walk. Bicycle. Use public transit. In extremity, buy an electric car (but that has issues, too).
If your question is "what should people who live, heavily subsidized, in suburbs and exurbs, do?", then the answer teases itself out pretty elegantly.
I agree you could do a lot of hiking or road trips and fit within that footprint.
Most people? Sure. It requires re-thinking how we (Americans particularly) structure our cities, and will not be an overnight process, but what is preventing us from doing this generally? Aside from the idea that such re-thinking is impossible, anyway.
The fact that people don't actually want to do that? People are free to live their lives the way they want. There's no reason to pile most people into cities just "because cars"
Or, put more bluntly: why must I and my children pay for them?
Because uh. That's literally sociopathic.
So if you suggest all people living in the countryside should move into cities, you are also taking about a huge economic undertaking that would also produce huge amounts of CO2.
Presumably some people are also needed in the countryside, to do the farming, and support the farmers.
Subsidizing suburbs is of course stupid. But simply rolling everything back is not really feasible.
Even in the past when people moved to the suburbs, presumably they did so because living in the city would have been prohibitively expensive.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight
Cities used to be inexpensive. Not cheap, but not crushing. (We made them less so by letting up on the development of housing.)
Is that seriously your world view? I think then you are too eager to swallow simplistic explanations.
And even if "white flight" were the determining factor, it would be another step to claim the goal was "racial homogeneity". People might simply have wanted to move into nicer neighborhoods. (see checkerboard experiment, described in you linked Wikipedia article). White people might have been more likely to be wealthy enough to afford the "flight" (wasn't that what rich people always did throughout the centuries). Even if they were more wealthy because of racism (which would in itself be worthy of debate), it doesn't imply their flight was driven by desire for racial homogeneity.
I live in a country where such race relations are not an issue, and people moved to the countryside here, too. It was also subsidized or used to be subsidized, for various reasons. Also simply mass availability of cars might have been a factor. Remember, cars were not available to everybody for most of human history.
Cities being inexpensive - a lot of factors play into it, probably. Pollution could have made them unattractive and therefore cheap, in the early days of industrialization. One example. Housing restrictions - OK, but also more people moving there. Better job availability. And so on. Your world view is too simplistic imo.
Drive an electric car, and buy renewable electricity.
Sorry, but I had to lol about that. Yeah alright, go green on your second car.
In the cities in Europe, you don't really need a car, let alone two. From that perspective, pondering going green on a second car looks a bit funny.
https://youtu.be/6RhtiPefVzM -- "Are Electric Cars Worse For The Environment? Myth Busted" -- Engineering Explained
If it were so easy, people would already be doing it.
It's fine to work towards using more renewables, but you can't simply say "just use renewables, problems solved".
What do you mean by this?
Not even mentioning other side effects (destruction of nature).
Heat pumps, powered by sustainable electricity. (nuclear; renewables)
It doesn't seem feasible to convert all housing to passive houses in a short time span, either.
Leading a completely utilitarian life based only on the metric of estimating the emissions produced by your actions (and then, only first-order effects) is not only completely infeasible, but is also not a solution to global warming.
It will not solve the problem when the rich have enough resources to do the ruining themselves no matter what you do.
Not a solution in the US, but virtually all of Europe and Asia is connected by a dense, largely inexpensive, rail network which is increasingly being electrified. That puts the onus on the grid, but there is a trend towards lower carbon electricity so emissions should lower over time. You can walk and cycle the rest of the way.
The reason we fly is because its cheap, fast and convenient.
In many areas (such as delicate alpine areas) that's managed through permitting and restrictions on the numbers of people, though of course it still requires those permitted people to follow best practices and attempt to minimize their impact.
But if those future people are two Americans (or similar in terms of pollution), that saves four future people, doesn't it?
That was a ridiculous assumption of course, but if we're going to go utilitarian, let's go all the way.
And realistically, that's the best thing you can do for the environment until such time as literally everyone on earth agrees to not use it (which is staggeringly unlikely). Because by burning on its own in the middle of nowhere, the ecosystem is can handle it without fuss. Whereas burning it on land (in a power plant presumably), you merely help overload that ecosystem since it is already having to handle everything else.
Upd: apart from the carbon tax, of course.
Individualistic solutions to climate change are unfair, dilute, and primitivist.
Consumerism and conspicuous consumption include travel and other services.
You can instead stay home and read a book. Perhaps on a slow, eco-friendly journey every few years.
My kids read books, too.
The theory that growth slows with economic improvements is nice, but it is not a law of nature. Besides even with no more growth, we still have billions of people who want to raise their lifestyle to Western levels, increasing their CO2 footprint by orders of magnitude.
And another way to look at it: if there were only 10000 humans on earth, they would probably have a difficult time trying to move CO2 levels by a significant amount, or producing significant amounts of plastic, and so on. So clearly population size is a part of the problem.
So what happens? The drop in birth rates happens concurrently with an increase in lifespans, due to eliminating disease, increasing food security, etc. This leads to an overhang of a couple of generations on old-world birthrates but new-world life expectancy - hence, population growth, even while the birth rate plummets. But give those countries a couple more generations for this hump to age out, and their population growth will level off, just like it has in older developed countries that saw their birth rates drop in the first half of the 20th century. That's just math.
And for example birth rates dropping off could still mean more births than, say, 50 years ago, because overall there are more people. (I'm too lazy to look up the numbers, because as I said, there already are a lot of people).
So if it all evens out eventually - what population size will we have reached by then?
And once again - birth rates dropping off is not actually a law of nature. For how long has that effect been noticed, anyway? Industrial revolution, and good contraceptives, have not been available for very long. There may well be other phenomena emerging that counteract it.
Edit: here is a chart showing that while birth rates are falling in most places, absolute number of births has been steadily increasing in the last 65 years: https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#births-globally
Absolute number of births increased 40% since 1950, from 100 Million to 140 Million per year.
And I don't think your chart proves your point. While the absolute number of births has increased, it has increased far less than the population as a whole (the population has tripled since 1951 - the increase in number of births is less than half the increase in number of people). Keep scrolling down the page of your link, and you see massive, massive declines in birthrates worldwide, with an extensive list of reasons why.
So why would you think "there may be other phenomena emerging that counteract it"? Like what? Are you sure you aren't just clinging to a belief in population spiraling out of control that is at odds with observed facts? Because what you believe is what most people believe. And it's wrong.
A richer lifestyle means more CO2.
I don't even know where you get your beliefs from, that CO2 neutral life would be easy and cheap.
As for counteracting phenomena: again, it is not a law of nature that birth rates drop as people get wealthier. Even now for example there are subgroups in wealthy nations that still have high birth rates. I'm not saying it WILL happen, just that it can. And 50 years are not a very long timespan to observe to be assured about the effect of dropping birth rates.
That way, local producers aren't competing against cheap, dirty, manufacturing overseas, and other countries are encouraged to assess their own carbon tax to avoid the import duties.
It's a very fair system that allows countries to onboard one at a time, instead of all together. Unfortunately it would probably be considered illegal under the WTO.
"If another country has a similar tax, their goods can be imported without extra duties. If they don't, you assess the goods imported and charge the equivalent duty."
The equivalent duty meaning same as carbon taxers or less? (asuming non carbon taxers have less duty)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_movement
When I first heard about it, I thought it was a movement which is not caring about the environment. That 1 million French are vocally opposed to the environment. It's more complex than that but taxing carbon would lead to protests of the masses.
if you take a step back & see you'll notice these type of arguments are designed to evoke an emotional response in a casual observer so they dont feel the need/desire to further engage in the (admittedly) marginally interesting topic.
It's more of an observation about how even people who are vocally pushing for renewables/sustainable energy aren't personally following what they preach (while seemingly not feeling guilty about it).
Is this observation wrong?
He does all the calculations, is more informed than the average person, and still decides to just go for it.
This is why the battle against global warming is pointless. Human population explosion (triggered by the invention of agriculture) will simply run its course, and we'll just have to live with whatever world we'll be left with in the end.
Yes, he is buying "offsets" for his family, but most of them are clearly a scam, and he also seems to be aware of that.
Trees take years to grow, and capture carbon in the ground, not in the higher atmosphere. Methane would probably be burned anyway, nice for the operators that the can make some extra bucks selling the "offsets".
As for travel: buy a big TV. There are movies from beautiful places all over the world. Then go swimming in a lake nearby. No need to travel thousands of miles for that.
What is so important about visiting Greece? I live in Europe and I have never been to Greece. Nevertheless, I have some ideas about its culture. I've seen photographs, read the Iliad, talked to Greek people, and so on.
What's so important about experiencing anything? Just watch TV.
>Local cultures are diluted everywhere, and when they are preserved in touristy places it's artificial.
There are plenty of things to do when traveling that don't involve bothering local people. I don't see how just looking at the nature, for example, is any less "meaningful".
>Tourism nowadays is largely escapism
Protip: all entertainment is escapism.
- There is definitely some value to traveling, but it is greatly inflated by social pressure, the media, and the fact that most tourist destinations are cheap to westerners.
- Yeah, but some escapism is more eco-friendly than others
Yes - but not all entertainment produces the same amount of carbon dioxide. That's the point.
If you say you need to travel to Greece for entertainment, it seems even less justifiable.
At most you could say it is educational and opens your mind about different cultures and so on. But even for that, I'd say the costs are not warranted, and there are many other ways to learn.
I didn't say you should just watch TV. Instead of swimming in the Mediterranean sea in Greece, you can go swimming in the nearest lake or ocean. That is what I mean. The food, also you can experience in a local Greek restaurant.
But for seeing the Acropolis, yes, I'll claim that watching it on TV will be sufficient. Let's face it, you'll probably watch it through your camera lens while you are there, anyway, and then watch it on TV at home.
If you want the grand feeling of being on a hill, go hiking in the nearest mountains.
Again: why exactly do you need to go to Greece?
Not sure how much that contributes though.
Those picture-like analogies may be very effective, but I immediately call bullshit. I want to know a percentage. Let's say 100% of air travel was removed, how much CO2 is that in savings, percentage-wise?
It's two percent[1]. If you just told people it was two percent, they would immediately proceed to not give a damn. Only the most dogmatic of people would be giving up a major freedom in their life just to save a theoretical two percent on CO2.
Will it solve our Problem? No. Will it help solve our Problem? Yes, because it is one of the things we can get easily ride of.
Nobody says you can't travel anymore, just take the train.
Instead of giving up on liberties and wasting money on tiny gains on CO2 savings, the UK should be using it towards developing technologies for the rest of the world to thrive on - without emitting so much CO2.
That's not what people want to hear though. They want to feel significant. They want to feel good about themselves because they're eating vegan or riding a bike to work, even though that contribution is utterly negligible.
At some point it begs the question: Is the world you are preserving worth living?
Sure, there are billions of people that don't have any of these amenities in life, but it is mostly by necessity and they can't afford any better...
So, is travel necessary? No. Is traveling something you should feel guilty about, probably not.
Future generations would like to exist.
Perhaps in people year 5000 will put 2019 in the same bucket with the dark ages.
Pollution and climate change are not an existential crisis for humanity. We're just not that powerful (yet). Humans have survived, and thrived, in far worse conditions than we are experiencing today, or that climate change is likely to cause, and it was done without the benefits of modern technology. (Really, conditions are better now because of modern technology.)