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Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

This won't work unless we, as a species, cut out on meat (beaf+pork) consumption and also smaller houses/apartments would help (that would mean less need for furniture, i.e. less need for cutting down trees). No-one is going down in the Amazon to cut down trees just for the heck of it or because they are Bolsonaro's croons, they're doing it because there are very strong economic incentives to do it.

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I always find funny how first world citizens don't want the Amazon being (ab)used, or dislike the palm oil industry, but still want to keep and develop their own agricultural lands AND their living standards.

I'm a reasonably hardcore environmentalist but this is true. There will be many armchair experts here suggesting that stuff should be done in Brazil but they never propose things like "let's shut down New York for two months per year", or "let's impose mileage quotas on North American vehicles" or "let's reduce German manufacturing by 50%".

Because none of those things are going to happen and it would hurt a lot of people in a lot of ways if they would.

Living in an economically underdeveloped country also hurts a lot of people in a lot of ways. Why not buffer this suffering with the whole world?

Brazil has a population of 200 million people. Is that a lot of people?

Because for many "first-worlders" people in the third world are little better than exotic animals. They dont want to go to Mexico, Thailand or Kenya and find modern malls, hustling executives and last generation cars, no, they want pristine nature, exotic animals and smiling natives who treat them as gods and provide them with service for 1 dollar tips ("Dont give them more, you will spoil them").

Some first world citizens.

Personally I want to reduce road traffic in favor of electric public transit, heavily reduce meat consumption, ban fast fashion and all but eliminate single use plastics, completely stop fossil fuel extraction and use.

And I think the way forward is for the globally privileged elite (that's primarily us in Europe and the US) to lead by example and use the greater resources available to us to make a difference first, improve our spotty record instead of leaning back and just dictating to others what we think they should do. Historically, we've already done that more than plenty already.

I want to ask a serious question, what's a reasonable response? Every youtube channel and nearly every podcast I listen that brings up climate change also has frivolous merch they push and commercials for wasteful things.

I know that at some level their merch and maybe the wasteful things are not a major sources of climate change but ... the attitude is. Each individual youtuber/podcaster is taking the attitude "My income is more important than the environment" which is basically the attitude almost everyone takes and arguably in the exact same category as fast fashion etc.

Do you really need a Kurzgesagt calendar/poster/plushy shipped across the world to you? Flash Forward Podcast is always advertising you should subscribe to have gourmet beers shipped to you on subscription. Sean Carroll's Mindscape podcast shills for Bespoke Post to send you boxes of stuff you don't need every month. Isn't there some kind of disconnect between these shows telling us we should do more about climate change and then pushing exactly the kind of consumerism that brought us here?

It was sad to watch VOX try to justify traveling by plane 10-20 times a year.

IMO "My income is more important than the environment" is not the correct summary. The actual situation is this:

1) A youtuber needs a certain amount of income to be able to afford the time to create their content. 2) Selling merch works way better than asking for donations 3) The positive impact of having the informational videos far outweighs the negative impact of creating and shipping the merch.

You can of course criticize the viewers for (2) and if you think spreading information has a low impact, you can question (3).

So basically "my message is important so I'll burn the world to spread it but your message, probably not so don't copy me" .. Okay.

I mean you can make that same argument about almost anything "My 50k miles of air travel a year is important, yours isn't". "I need my giant house because I'm an influencer and invite lots of people over so I can convince them to save the environment". "If I don't look my best I'll never get the best opportunities which will make me rich and I can spend all my rich money on charity therefore I need all this fashion", etc...

Unfortunately, the way we've structured our economies and societies in the western world depend on continually greater consumption. It demands a constant upwards curve of resource consumption, otherwise it breaks down.

The first thought in most people's minds when they hear of a crisis is "what can I buy to help?", and many others go straight to "what can I sell?"

At the very least, they could sell something that is actually useful, instead of crap merch that serves no other purpose than to sit on a shelf for a while before being thrown in the trash.

Even better, start using Patreon to fund their media content directly, and offer non-physical bonuses for higher tiers, like early access and exclusive content.

It's hard to break out of the current consumerist paradigm, especially for the average content creator. But they should as least try to do the least possible damage within that paradigm, while advocating for a better way.

Just remember that there are billions of people moving towards the "developed" country lifestyle - people who will all want houses, cars, furniture, meat 3 times a day, etc etc. Yes, we should reduce our consumption if you already live that lifestyle, but I'm really not sure what are we going to do about billions of people who are about to get there.

There is absolutely no way that China, India, Brazil, etc. are going to limit their growth before their population's standard of living matches ours. Reducing our consumption is a prerequisite for capping their consumption at a sustainable level. Of course, even if we do that nothing is guaranteed.

Why would capping/reducing our standard of living have any influence on their choices? Is there any evidence to suggest they'd say "Americans gave up meat in favor of BeyondMeat/tofu/crickets, so we will too" and if so where can I read about that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di... does not agree with the claim that Americans are the biggest per capita polluters on the planet, if pollution is measured by carbon emissions.

I replied in the other comment - cumulatively Americans have polluted more than any other country.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/01/climate/us-bi...

Well, it's not that it would influence their choices, it's that Americans are by far the biggest polluters and consumers on the planet - any reduction by them has the highest impact purely because of how off the scale they are. It's like when rich people say "oh when we gave some benefits to a poor person, they just used it on cigarettes. That means we shouldn't give anything to them at all ever". Like.....there's a very clear problem there.

> Americans are by far the biggest polluters and consumers on the planet

How do you figure ? By what metric ?

By total emissions:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/01/climate/us-bi...

good quote:

"The New York Times asked Climate Interactive to calculate when Americans would have run out of fossil fuel if the nation’s population had somehow, at the beginning of the industrial era, been allocated a share equal to those of the rest of the world’s people. The calculation was premised on limiting emissions enough to meet international climate goals.

The answer: Americans would have used up their quota in 1944, the year the Allied armies stormed the beaches of Normandy."

China is emitting more than US right now. But that doesn't change the fact that US has polluted more overal.

How are the current generation Americans bound by what their ancestors did ? They can't do anything about it. Aren't they entitled to a good living standard as much as any other person ?

Like...is this an actual question? Of course people are bound by the actions of their predecessors - that's why Americans are still apologizing and making things right to native Americans, that's why things like affirmative action action exists to put things right for how people were treated half a century ago, that's why Germans still apologize and pay reparations for WW2....we can keep on going. Of course you have to take responsibility for the things you've done to the world. Otherwise you've reaped the benefit at the expense of others but hey, it was in the past so it's fine?

>> They can't do anything about it.

Of course they can. If not them, then who?

>Of course you have to take responsibility for the things you've done to the world.

The living didn't do it and the dead can't do anything about it anymore.

Peak beef [1]: the US beef cattle headcount peaked at about 45 million in the late '70s and is now at about 31 million as of 2020.

Globally [2] the beef cattle inventory has been basically stable since 1985 at between 200 and 220 million heads. One can say maybe the cows have gotten heavier, but no, the total beef production in tons has been flat too [3].

[1] https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Cattle/bcow.php

[2] https://beef2live.com/story-world-beef-cow-inventory-year-13...

[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/263992/beef-production-w...

That's because we're using agricultural products to make cows get heavier, quicker than we did in the `70s. Going back to 1970s model where we had more cows which developed more slowly because they got their energy from grazing would require more labor than the system we have now but it would be much better for the environment. From an environmental and animal welfare prospective I don't have much of a problem with grazing cattle. It's the feedlots where cows now spend the last phase of their lives being stuffed with soy and high energy feed that's the problem.

I don't know if my solution is elegant or short sighted. It's hard to know because there is so much politics involved that it's hard to get a good read on my opinion.

Tax all meat, especially beef, based on the amount of "pollution"(carbon,water usage in low water areas, etc.) each "unit" of that meat takes.

At the same time, invest in nuclear. It works. There are now small nuclear stations being developed that are allegedly fallout proof.

Move to electric cars and as much electric power as we possibly can, powered by the nuclear(and to whatever extent we can, wind, hydro, solar).

We need to tax bad industries that are clearly causing us harm overall and use those taxes to fund startup costs for viable good industries like renewable energy. No reason it can't be competitive IIRC, it's just so behind in capital compared to fossil fuel.

This is a sane proposal, but honestly an across the board ‘carbon tax’ would probably be easier to implement and have the desired effect. That’s essentially what you’re proposing on meat — with the inclusion of some other negative externalities.

And that's why I'm vegetarian, buy the few non-vegan products I eat entirely locally, buy produce in season, mostly locally, don't have a car, have never flown, instead take the train or my bicycle everywhere, refuse to use cabs/taxis, try to keep my consumption down, and focus extremely on energy efficiency in stuff I buy (our new apartment uses a total of only 32W total for all lighting, plus 20W for all christmas decoration, we don't leave any devices on standby, etc, and we're in the process of switching the power company to a green one).

But the extreme choices I made aren't necessary to fix the world: If every person in the top 10% globally (that means you, the reader of this comment) would cut down their meat consumption by half, we'd already have saved the rainforests, and significantly reduced climate change

"Me as a vegan" https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2w4ggh

If you'd have actually read my comment til the end, you would understand why diet is actually important if we're talking about deforestation and climate change, and can't just be ignored.

There's two ways this story goes, humanity decides to consume less meat in the future, or climate change forces humanity to eat less meat in the future. There's no other option out of this, the current situation is absolutely unsustainable.

If your burn down chart says you'll be broke in 5 months, then you can either spend less, or you'll be forced to spend less once you're insolvent. There's no way to continue down that path forever.

You are assuming too much, IMO. That's just too many people on Earth. So people will still burn forests if humans need to eat or if there is any chance of profit doing that.

Never understood why I need wood from the Amazon forest for my computer desk or other furniture.

Wood is likely the most sustainable material you could use for furniture - most of it is not from tropical rainforests. There's FSC (https://fsc.org/) certification for sustainable wood materials.

Yes, I really prefer wooden furniture too but some really like wood from the rainforest.

You can by sustainably produced tropical hardwood furniture. What sort of person prefers to have the non-sustainable option, if quality is the same? Well, I suppose it's cheaper.

True true. I prefer to furniture made from local wood than tropical hardwood but its not always easy to find out if it has been locally sourced.

It's largely for export, so those of us in countries who import Brazilian meat could put tariffs on it until we're no longer incentivising the destruction of the rainforest/planet.

Consumers will soon adapt to higher meat prices by either accepting them or using the countless (traditional + modern) recipes which require less or no meat.

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