Satellite imagery shows Northern California kelp forests have collapsed
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
Even if we ever do manage to come together and fund active carbon capture, it will take decades to reverse the trend. And then possibly centuries for the oceans to de-acidify. Together with active efforts to burn down nature in the places where most biodiversity remains, the mass extinction even is likely to run its course before we get to a stable ecosystem. Sure we can restore most of the biomass, but it will be much fewer species. And letting the nature run its course will, naturally, take millions of years.
Brazil burns down forest mainly because of the United State’s desire for think like soy beans to feed cows.
Poorer countries use coal because it’s cheap and global conditions don’t enrich them enough to get better sources.
The sad truth is we force countries to be poor and exploit their own resources so we don’t have to do it ourselves. And of course then we’ll all pay the price living on a dying planet.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, the other bidder would _also_ prefer to work doing good in the world, but takes the highest paying job instead, so they can outbid me.
It’s like saying “my per hour pay rate went up” and assuming your annual take has also increased. That’s only true if your total hours didn’t drop enough to erode those rate gains.
To your point, GDP and efficiency are both increasing but hours per worker are generally decreasing.
1) the word “tax” In carbon-tax terrifies people, especially in America. So we get a tragedy of the commons situation with the cost of carbon made into an externality.
2) massive FUD and manipulation of media and environmental efforts to stop awareness of climate change for decades.
Fox News destroyed scientists on TV to discredit global warming.
People have made this happen, and they have gleefully lived without any repercussions - which is why the model has been copied around the world.
Hilariously the oil firms are rebranding themselves as eco firms.
Reducing their quality of life and expectations is what terrifies people. People want their vacations to Tahiti, their SUV, their detached single family homes with backyards and front yards, more children etc.
People know the only way out of this is to reduce consumption - of everything. But obviously few want to, especially when they don’t believe others will chip in and reduce also.
Your final point is describing a collective action problem, but that is solved by simply exposing the full cost of a goods to people.
That is what markets do, very very well. Expose costs via pricing, and let people respond to that information.
If your skin care product packaged by X company is 30% more expensive because its cost of carbon is included, then people will buy the less expensive option and go on their merry way.
“People” meaning as a whole, with sufficient cooperation to enact political change, on a global level, such that the cost of pollution can be priced into products.
But that pricing in will also cause the cost of everything we use to go up, causing a decrease in the amount of consumption (which is the intended effect), but that is an immediate and easily visible “loss” to people.
That last part there is very important. I feel much like this, me personally going ascetic, while all my fellow humans don't give a damn, doesn't help anything. This needs to come from the top, the politicians, with rules, regulations, fees and fines. Thus, I vote for the greenest and most ascetic party there is. But I have little hope left.
First, they only track emissions that they can directly tie with consumption. The statement "fifty percent of the world’s carbon emissions are produced by the world’s richest 10%" is not supported by the study because it makes no attempt to track all of the world's carbon emissions.
Second, they assume that income == consumption == carbon emissions, which is a very bad assumption. The world's richest people do not spend their entire income every year, so using that as the basis for consumption is inaccurate. Also, assuming that every dollar spent, no matter where or by whom, has the exact same emissions associated with it is incorrect. Wealthy people are the people who can afford to put solar panels on their roofs and buy new electric cars, but by this study they are penalized for such consumption.
In general, I find that oxfam optimizes their studies for the headlines. When you dig into it, there are so many qualifiers and assumptions made that it seems clear the study was authored with an specific outcome in mind. "The top 10% earn 5x more money than average" is not as outrageous a headline as we are used to seeing. But by multiplying by a carbon emission factor of 1, they get to write "Top 10% emits half of world's carbon", which generates way more clicks.
[1]https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10...
I made no statement one way or the other, _and neither did OP's study_. I'm just pointing out that the linked paper is bogus.
FWIW, your statement is factually correct - rich countries pollute more per capita than poor countries. I think a more useful metric is emissions per dollar GDP[1]. This measure how carbon efficient an economy is.
We could drop carbon emissions to nearly zero by reverting all of human society to be hunter-gatherers who haven't discovered fire yet. Building a more efficient economy lets us get closer to zero emissions without losing all of our modern quality of life improvements.
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PP.GD?most_...
I only meant to say that the reason poor countries have a low per-capita emissions is because they are very poor. It is not a very instructive or useful metric to look at. Per GDP emissions lets us look at a "lifestyle adjusted" carbon emissions. There are countries in all four quadrants of the poor v rich, efficient v inefficient graph. That gives us a lot more insight into how to structure an economy.
The number two exporter? The United States, at 34.1%, the vast majority of this also goes to China, again, for pigs.
You can easily replace that with > Brazil burns down forest mainly because of the Chinese desire for soy beans to feed pigs
and the point still stands. Brazil is planting soy beans because a rich trading partner is paying them more than the ranforests attract with no future foresight, despite this being a devestating blow to the entire world. It's unreasonable to expect Brazil to stand up and say "hey we're done with this" while other powers are encouraging the practices.
I'm not saying America is blameless, or that it is all China's fault. I'm saying putting all of your effort and focus on America while ignoring the growth of the world's largest polluter will not solve the problem.
The exact same argument is true for palm oil in indonesia; blaming indonesia for destroying borneo and sumatra isn't going to fix the problem when it's all being exported to the EU and india.
It is incumbent upon those with the power to stop degrading the environment to do so. Where the Amazon rainforest is concerned, that's Brazil.
Getting every nation which might want cheap soybeans (all of them, to a first approximation) to agree to stop buying from Brazil is a complex coordination problem with rewards for defection. Getting Brazil to stop cutting down the rainforest for the profit of agribusiness is coordinating the policy of a single nation; still difficult, just not completely intractable.
Brazilian soybeans rely on genetic modification to survive in the sweltering climate. Monsanto is perhaps the best target here.
Something I did not know, and definitely a really important consideration here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26464707
The USA can afford to emit less than it did 10 years ago precisely because it has emitted so much in the past and its economy is basically built. Any bemoaning about China or other currently-developing countries that doesn't also talk about how we should also be helping them bootstrap themselves with more advanced systems is just privilege at having gotten there first and pulling the ladder up behind us.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
You can add US for comparison. China's emissions have been plateauing for the past 10 years, while the US is going down. Per-capita, China is still less than half of the US, so it'll take a long time before the US catches up, if ever.
[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/china/co2-emissions-kg-per-ppp-.... [2] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/co2-emissions-kg-....
People have agency, there's no Coca Cola goons with guns to their heads this time.
In the UK at least, we seem to have palm oil in everything, and Indonesia and that part of the world are busily hacking down forests and killing orangutans in the process.
What's the sudden need for palm oil? We hardly used it in the 70s and 80s when I was a kid.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/feb/19/palm-oil-ingred...
Even so called 'ethical palm oil' just means that those that want it, and can't get it from an 'ethical supplier' because Western companies consume the supply, get it from "illegal" suppliers.
And because brazilians voted for president a man clearly hostile to science and environment conservation... with not surprising results. If you vote a man that calls himself Captain chainsaw you obtain exactly the prize what you asked for
"There was a man in the jungle
Trying to make ends meet
Found himself one day with an axe in his hand
When a voice said "Buddy can you spare that tree
We gotta save this world-starting with your land."
It was a rock 'n' roll millionaire from the USA
Doing three to the gallon in a big white car
And he sang and he sang 'till he polluted the air
And he blew a lot of smoke from a Cuban cigar"
There are a lot of caveats to that! Does it get the solar to 95% of the time available at name plate rating? 98%?
• solar PV (fixed) - $1060/kW (utility)
• battery storage power - $1380/kW
• coal (with SO2 and NOx controls)- $3500–3800/kW
$(1060+1380) = $2440 < $3500
I get similar results with KWh costs (i.e. energy rather than power), but the sources are more spread out; it’s still more cost effective than coal even when I make conservative estimates about the number of cycles a LiIon can do.
All these prices are computed "when there are enough supplies", which is easier to guarantee with coal/gas/oil/nuclear. On the best case scenario, renewable are cheaper than anything else. The issue is that the price of electricity is driven by the hardest watts to create, not the easiest ones.
And by “most places” I include the UK, which is north of the entire contiguous USA.
We don't absolutely have to hit zero to do enormous good to the environment. Cut power plant emissions 80% and it won't be the long pole in the tent any more. The biggest efforts will be in concrete and transportation and agriculture.
We already have the power plants built. We've got plenty of time for things to evolve as solar and other renewables ramp up, and fossil fuels go offline. It's not some kind of knock against renewables if they can't solve 100% of the problem. 90%, or even 80%, is just fine.
Picture this: It's 9PM on a cold winter day, sun has been down for hours and there was not been a lot of wind today. People are home, watching TV and heating their home. Batteries are now empty (they started depleting at around 5Pm when the sun went out). You now need to produce 100% of the peak electricity consumption of the year, using gas, oil, coal, nuclear or hydro.
This scenario shows that whatever you do with wind and solar, you need to be able to produce 100% of the peak electricity consumption with controllable power plants. The cost of wind and solar is not the cost of the power plants vs the cost of the gas power plant it replaces, but on top of it. For every GW of wind you add to the grid, you need to add an equivalent GW from a controllable source just in case. This backup GW won't be used most of the time, but the cost of it should be taken into account when you compute price per GW.
It is unfair to compare the price per GW between solar/wind and gas/nuclear/coal/hydro, when the feature of both are so different. Solar and wind provide amazing ROI, when they want to, not when you need it to. So the cost needs to include the price of the backup system that's going to stay dormant 80% of the time. Ans that significantly change the math of it all.
The only way to get out of this is to either reduce our total energy consumption, so that the current controllable plants can provide enough, and then build solar and wind, to reduce how often we need to rely on them. Or to find a green and controllable energy source, like hydro (which has other issues).
Nuclear fission power is economically unfeasible and completely incapable of "saving the climate". It's a complete ruse.
Any new reactor type you'd build now would go online the EARLIEST 10-15 years from now. And then they will never be profitable and you still have no actual proper solution to waste management other than some fluffy marketing slides.
> And letting the nature run its course will, naturally, take millions of years.
Yea, letting physics run it's course will take 100,000 years too with a plutonium half-life of 24,000 years. A country like Germany doesn't have vast desert lands to store dangerous materials *reliably* for that long. It's also not willing to just dump it in third world countries or international waters.
Just burn the waste and distribute it from smokestacks. That's how coal handles its radioactive waste, and that seems to be accepted.
I agree however, that it's hard to argue for nuclear when it takes so long to get plants built that the developers die of boredom before grounds is broken.
Let's say I agree to build a modern reactor type today. Planning and construction begin, it doesn't have a host of issues and cost explosions like the "new" Finnish plants [1], problems that are typical for modern large scale engineering projects in Europe.
Then it will go online in 12 years and deliver the megawatts of power as planned. That's 12 years of progress in renewables at the same time. Just look at photovoltaics since 2006: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics and that's just ONE out of many categories of renewables. A decade of progress while monstrous masses of concrete a poured for an 80s power plant design so it doesn't blow up in our faces and make land inhospitable for thousands of years. Is that where we should invest our cognitive energy?
Nuclear waste disposal and upgrading/modernizing the many 1960s reactor designs out there would have been key but it hasn't happened because of cost.
If nuclear was cheap, reliable and environmentally friendly it would have replaced coal a long time ago. But even Western states with tight proliferation control and a strongly embedded infrastructure in the Western security hemisphere are not opting to vastly extend nuclear fission power for a decent number of reasons.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Finland#New_c...
Nuclear isn't the only thing that tends to take longer than planned. I would confidently bet that we'll still be running coal in 12 years' time. Certainly I think it's worth hedging against when the cost is building what, a few dozen power plants that follow existing designs?
Reduce the regs and you could build a new plant in six months for half a billion dollars. Likely while still conforming to a reasonable $60k/QALY.
Nuclear was affordable and effective when countries were building out national programs for nuclear. France was building them at crazy speed, every reactor was identical, safety information and skills were shared.
Then came the age of neoliberalism where public infrastructure for some reason needs to be build with private money for profit. We could have lent government money to the project at 0.1% interest, but instead in UK we built it with private money of 5% interest + profit. On a 50 year project that quadruples your cost. Now ever reactor is a different design with different issues, built by a firm that overpromises and under delivers, mired in contract disputes
And not from financing, although the multidecade stretches do not help that either.
EDIT: And these same delays force operation of 50 year old designs to the failure, just because building some new ones is in fact infeasible. Then those ancient reactors fail, as in Fukushima, and we're onwards on the spiral.
Nuclear is a fairly solved engineering problem (it's problem is public relations and economics). If you start building a reactor today in 10-15 years it will begin producing power consistently and will continue to do so for at least it's design lifetime and probably beyond.
Grid scale battery technology isn't here yet. No one has installed a battery (a grid scale battery is multiple Gwh of storage, the Tesla Australia battery is 194Mwh) with that kind of capacity. Excluding of course pumped hydro which is limited by topological factors.
Also look up a chart of CO2 production per capita and compare Brazil's to your country's before you start talking like you are.
If you want to point fingers then fine, but at least do it properly and be informed.
_Biomass should not count as renewable_
It is not carbon neutral. Monocultures requires petrol based inputs (and petrol reliant for output), and store less than half the c02 of an old growth forest.
Biomass was one of the biggest mistakes in the green movement.
Make of that what you will. I dont think brazil would burn old forrests at the rate they are with US somewhere in the equation. Nor do I think Indonesia would deforrest without the US/EU need for palm oil above all else.
Yes it does. Very little of todays poverty, particularly in a place like Brazil is of the starvation-level variety and the people burning down the forrests are very much NOT the starving poor, they're on the wealthier side even!
Hmm. Growing up in a developed industrial economy must be lovely. So the communities who've lived in or by said forrests are a non issue? You know, the people who've lived there for centuries if not longer. People to whom the forest isn't just a bunch of trees but home.
Because middle class brazilians in Rio or Cruziero can afford Macdonalds, so there are no poor people and woo woo we can burn down the forest to plant soy and make grazing land for cattle? That's it? Were going to burn millenia old forests just so Macdonalds can make more beef burgers. A fucking burger?
Indonesia is losing their forests to Doritoes. A fucking chip. Future generations better make usuable manure of our bones.
Rich countries still burn plenty of coal. The US ranks 11th globally in per-capita coal consumption, burning 1.6 tons of coal annually, over twice the global average. Australia nearly tops the list, burning 2.8 tons per person. And that's not even touching the truly tremendous amounts of gasoline wasted on individual commuters in first world countries, or the historical emissions used by the "rich" countries to establish their economies.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/604946/per-capita-coal-c... https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-consumption-per-capi...
Renewables are nice, but managing and balancing them is a lot more difficult.
Demanding people from poor countries to pay more attention than we did is not fair, not at all.
Meanwhile people who control the global financial markets and industry bear no responsibility
In this case, fairness would probably look like devoting more resources to poor countries so they don't have to go through the same "destroying the environment" cultural growth phase. First world country growth was predicated on the access to energy afforded to us by selling out the environment. We are attempting to cut off that avenue for other cultures. It seems fair to accelerate them past the point of needing to destroy the environment, rather than telling them they just have to deal with being a backwater since they don't have a way to generate the energy needed to become a bleeding edge society.
In more practical terms, and avoiding the concept of fairness, lesser developed countries aren't going to simply acquiesce and stop. They have no reason to. Cutting off their access to large amounts of energy is going to fling them back into the 1700-1800s. Have you seen The 1% on Netflix? It'll look like that. A small number of highly advanced countries with access to plentiful energy and all the technology that brings, and then a large number of countries that are dirt poor. I would be surprised if you could even manufacture modern medicine without access to large amounts of power.
It will create a global power struggle, and first world nations are going to have to police basically the entire world to ensure there aren't any revolts or nations that are refusing to willingly go back in time.
If it's practicality you care about, the USA is perfectly capable of unilaterally forcing Brazil to stop destroying rainforests via threat of sanctions or blockades.
Also, just like how rape isn't fair to Sally, nor is rain forest burning fair to the year 2100 Brazilians.
Do people in US have twice better life? They don't, its just that the policy doesnt give a flying fuck about environment. The government spends more on military programs to defend from hypothetical weapons that dont exist yet, than it does on dealing with the certainty of climate change.
People here bitching about brazil removing forest, forest cover of UK is like 12%, one of the lowest in thw world. The 'ambition' is to plant like 2% more trees in 30 years. We just cut it down years ago, and so are off the hook.
You know what the wealthy countries should have done? Funded development of fusion properly, actually invested in renewables and shared technology with developing nations, had electric vehicles in mass production by 2010. Then you could do around and point at aome poor farmer fuck knows where trying to feed his family.
As things stand China has 10x more electric buses than the rest of the world combined, a couple Nordic countries have shown leadership in Wind. But most of western world is not just complicit, but a partner in crime, has actively enabled and protected their oil firms to commit literal crimes.
It's closer to 3x: USA 15.7 vs France 5.2 tonnes of CO2 per capita per year (2017, not accounting for other gasses that contribute to warming) [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
I.e., if the US had the same per capita nuclear power generation as France, what would the numbers look like?
US emissions are ~29% transportation and ~27% electricty generation [1]. The US uses ~13x as much oil [2].
Natural Gas isn't particularly dirty. Coal and petroleum only make up 24% of power generation in the US [3]. Fossil fuels make up ~9% of electricity production in France [4].
[1] https://images.app.goo.gl/9YFsuN9vjkiiZnek9
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_consu...
[3] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-....
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France#:...).
Just a small nit but the OP was referencing CO2. Natural gas is cleaner than other fossil fuels. “Clean” != low carbon (although it’s lower than other fossil fuels)
Phytoplankton are responsible for between 50 and 80% of the oxygen in the atmosphere https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/ocean-oxygen.html
Phytoplankton population has declines almost 40% since the 50's. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/phytoplankton-pop...
As the oceans warm and more fresh water is released into the ocean from melting ice it caused the ocean to become more acidic, which is causing the phytoplankton population to decline further. Also as the water warms different types of phytoplankton increase and not all as economics at converting CO2 into oxygen, and some create other problems.
https://theweek.com/articles/747106/climate-change-putting-o...
Phytoplankton are the basis for the marine food chain
https://www.nationalgeographic.org/media/plankton-revealed/
Over 3 Billion people rely on the oceans as their main source of protein.
https://www.worldwildlife.org/industries/sustainable-seafood
There is nothing we can do as a "stop gap" solution for the oceans, and phytoplankton, just like any natural system in decline the phytoplankton population will continue a slow decrease and then when it hits a tipping point it will crash.
When the phytoplankton population crashes, and it will, the impact will be catastrophic. Short of inventing a technology to capture and sequester 45 Billion metric tonnes of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere each and every year, there is nothing we can do to stop or even slow down what's happening to the oceans.
While I am glad that we have done some progress, there is a large caveat to it. The enthusiasm was great until the grid hit 100% capacity, at which point investment to build more dropped quickly. At the same time the average production rate per day is around 40-50%, which remained is mostly produced through heavily subsidized fossil fuels. It is a leadership of a kind, but it is too early to say if it can produce a solution long term.
The car model of a city is what is destroying our environment. North America needs better urban planning if we have any chance at all in making a dent in global climate change.
And yes, China and India are now large, significant sources of CO2 emissions and both those countries need to do more. There is no solution to global climate change without China and India. If you look at CO2 emissions in the US since 2000 we've dropped -- the trend lines are good, the US is doing its part.
India and China need to do theirs.
And I will just ignore the population bomb that is going off in Africa at the moment.
https://www.forestresearch.gov.uk/tools-and-resources/statis...
The biggest driver of loss of woodland, I assume, has been the same as in the Amazon today - farming and logging.
Wikipedia tells me estimates put the 14th century population of England at somewhere between 3.7 and 7 million. The table suggests a downward trend of woodland over time, which I assume would be driven by industry and therefore related to population. Today, urban and industrial land use must be massively higher than it was then, meaning that in relative trends the loss of woodland was even more profound.
How could people in medieval times have required the same footprint of de-wooded land as a population 14 times larger today (even accounting for more efficient farms, move to fossil fuels and nuclear, etc)? What would the natural woodland cover be with no human inhabitants - surely at least 50%?
The US is one of the largest contributors of CO2 in the world. The per capita argument is silly: They're a single, centralised source of pollution. Just regulate it already. The impact would be phenomenal.
As for the poorer countries: How about the wealthier nations that outright stole the mineral resources from us start paying that money back in the form of a solution rather than having their denizens pointing obese fingers at us?
I'm not saying give the money back (would be nice though), but how about spending that ill-gotten gain on progress for a change?
Europeans systematically killed their fauna and their flora to live a better life and would now like to deny others the same. Well, undo your harm first.
Take the beam out of your eye.
If nature is anything, it's most certainly resilient! Mt. Saint Helens erupting caused more pollution than the entire industrial revolution combined, and a year of worldwide lockdown cleared up metric shedloads of air pollution.
Why trust what so-called experts say about 20 years out when their models suck for the next few years?
I don’t mean to be fatalistic, but I’m realistic. One of my closest friends in the world is a marine biologist studying red abalone on the CA coast. We’ve been discussing this problem for years as it has caused the closure of the fishery, thus eliminating one of our favorite shared pastimes. We WANT to dive for abs again, but all the evidence is pointing to towards an ecosystem where that won’t be possible anytime soon.
We know if the disasters because we see them go wrong more often than not.
Survivorship bias applies more to things like CEO success stories, startup success stories and sports personalities.
A tiny fraction make it big, and these get studied/reported on.
We need more experts and more resources in ecology to detect the main problems, otherwise we could be like a dog chasing its own tail. The problem can be predation, but also could be contamination, or just two degrees more in water temperature blocking the settlement of the tiny "kelpings".
When I was a kid in the 90s, and starting to dive in the 2000s, sea stars were everywhere on the ocean floor, even really close to the city center of Vancouver. They were so ubiquitous that they were completely uninteresting to us locals. We would hear that BC was considered world-renowned for scuba diving quality, and think "How dull, it's just a shit ton of sea stars"
(Of course, we were young, stupid, and also called them starfish not sea stars then)
Me and some friends would go camping at an oceanfront spot on Vancouver Island every year, and go crabbing with mixed results. Half of the irritation was sometimes you'd be pulling up what felt like a really heavy crab trap full of goodness (We were always responsible and only kept the males over the legal size), only to find it full of sea stars who chased away the crabs and ate our bait.
Then, about six or seven years ago, the sea stars just...disappeared. And they didn't come back.
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/sunflower-se...
Many divers in the area (mostly from out of town) think they can help the kelp forests by smashing them with whatever tools they can. I have even found a lost hammer while diving a popular site in Monterey.
While smashing effectively ends the life of the urchins, it also releases their spawn and can cause a even worse environmental disaster. It is also not an effective solution for the whole coast and will only work to clear areas frequented by divers.
Wouldn't the spawn be released anyway? I can see how this strategy would be ineffective, but how is it worse?
Although it's very hard to get them off their spot and handling them.
Unfortunately, according to OPs article:
Others have suggested bringing in another kelp forest predator, the sea otter, to help fight back the urchins. The problem with this appears to be that sea otters aren’t so interested in the skinny, starved urchins occupying the most barren areas, reports Anuradha Varanasi for Inverse. A separate study published this week in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests the otters do eat urchins but that they prefer the more well-fed residents of the coast’s remaining kelp forests to the so-called “zombie urchins” clinging to life in the denuded barrens.
[0] - https://oregonwild.org/about/blog/lost-sea-otters-oregon-par...
The reason this is critical is that purple urchins can effectively starve themselves and go into hibernation with a virtually empty body. This virtually empty body is not desirable for either (a) traditional fisherman or (b) any predators (e.g. even fish that eat urchin know to not eat the urchins that have overgrazed a kelp forest as they know they are empty.
If Urchinomics can get the unit economics to work out such that there is a financial incentive to catch a significant number of these urchin, that could change this situation.
[1] https://www.urchinomics.com/
[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/09/09/756929657/sa...
The state had been horrible at allowing ANY action to combat the kelp forest collapse.
A blight wiped out the sea stars. The lack of sea stars caused a 100x jump in urchin population.
Urchins eat kelp. Worst yet, they only eat the bottom part, and then 99% of the kelp floats away.
The state banned even the most modest actions.
You need a fishing license to harvest urchins.
You could only harvest 20 per day. Recently it’s upped to unlimited though.
You had to harvest the urchin, which is way more involved than simply smashing them with a hammer. Smashing in NorCal is only allowed in a spot in Monterey and Fort Bragg. The myth that smashing leads to spawning was laid to rest long ago and yet the authorities were still paralyzed. The paralysis lasted so long that everything is just a barren desert.
Sea urchins can live 100 years in a semi dormant starvation state. This isn’t some case where letting them starve out for a season will bring back the kelp.
https://gimletmedia.com/shows/howtosaveaplanet/94h3rvm/kelp-...
I stopped buying anything "new" unless I absolutely cannot live without it.
Not all at once, but one thing at a time, I looked for alternatives and pulled the trigger.
At this point we need hard societal pressure via laws to make any kind of statistical difference. I’d prefer someone be a hypocrite pushing for legislation to reduce emissions (e.g. Al Gore on a private jet) than someone who reduces locally and calls it good.
There are just too many people that don’t care for “local action” to stop the impending doom.
There is grace in fighting against impending doom.
Life can be measured by how we approach things. Never lose hope. :)
Some situations are like a jiu-jitsu match where an opponent can pin you down. In a subset of these situations and unlike in a jiu-jitsu match—you can’t tap out.
Say you’re in one of these situation.
Don’t avoid the feeling provoked by this impending doom. You can’t tap out. You cant restart the match.
In such an encounter, grace might mean to keep fighting. Keep thinking. Keep struggling. Recognize your prison.
Fortune favors the prepared mind. :)
This in no way detracts from your point - unlike the Titanic, steering away from ecological disaster too late will never make things worse, it just won't be enough - but the metaphor isn't quite apt.
The earth has 200 million square-miles of area, so your portion of the 7.6 billion people equates to 0.0263 square miles. Do your part to keep that virtual area as clean as possible!
The collective shift in mindset of half of the US didn’t do shit and we’re already past the point of irrevocable damage. Hard decisions need to be made (pressure all countries in the world extremely) and you using the iPhone for a few extra years is just placation to avoid real change.
If I tell ten people about my strategy and they buy ten fewer Widgets, that's ten fewer Widgets' worth of carbon footprint.
If you factor in material mining, transportation, production, transportation, storage, transportation, and packaging trash, that's a lot of reduction.
Not only that, my life is simpler, I spend more time making meaning rather than consuming, and am overall happier.
Or... I can waste my time trying to affect the political system, which I will never move a nanometer with all my effort, or affecting the corporations, whom I will also not move a nanometer with all my life's effort, etc.
But that’s fucking useless. It is simple math and the math is that you’ve moved the needle on carbon output from one company by 0.0000001%.
An advertising campaign that associates that widget with Devil worshippers probably moves the needle two orders of magnitude more than that.
Solving climate change is a global numbers game. If you’re not changing more than your own behavior, you are effectively complicit and not doing anything to stop it.
> If I tell ten people about my strategy and they buy ten fewer Widgets, that's ten fewer Widgets' worth of carbon footprint.
See, but this is the only bit that has any meaningful effect. This is you being political and affecting change.
You’ll quickly realize that your individual reduction is completely irrelevant in total harm you’ve reduced.
Not only that, but I'm eliminating all the materials mining, shipping, re-shipping, packaging, re-packaging, and so on, which adds up to quite a bit per Widget.
I think you are grossly underestimating the impact of one un-ordered Widget.
But we will be shamed for this change in creative ways, nevertheless. A good crisis must not be wasted, unlike starfish.
On the other hand, by just not ordering one Widget off Amazon, I am making a huge impact, if you count all the materials mining, shipping and re-shipping, packaging and re-packaging, and so on.
The difference is that (on this topic) our government has showed real leadership. We haven't left health policy in the hands of millions of individuals. We put health policy in the hands of experts, and then implemented strict policies to get us to 0. Change didn't happen from individuals independently figuring out what to do. Change happened from the country as a whole picking a direction and moving in that direction together.
In comparison, Australia has been utterly appalling with climate change. Its a national embarrassment. I don't eat meat and I don't have a car - but I don't think thats going to matter much in the long run. What we need is to do the same thing for the planet that we did for covid - we need effective leadership on climate change. We need to do it together.
For the record, I think of democracy as a strictly positive thing even when it seems like democratic societies have erred.
Thats a surprising thing to think without justification. To hold up a mirror, imagine if someone said the same thing about china's communism:
> For the record, I think of China's communist system as a strictly positive thing even when it seems like the CCP has erred.
There was a great quote by Bill Clinton - "The problem with ideology is that it gives you the answer before you've asked the question."
It's more like both my spouse and I and my kids are each over-spending on a daily basis, and I tell them that we all have to cut our spending, and start doing it first, leading by example, and not buying two lattes per day.
I'm not picking pennies in the parking lot, I'm not spending dollars on things, literally! I am amazed at the level of inaccuracy in your metaphor, thank you for that.
It’ll be at least another 8 years until the US does that (unless Biden ends up changing course), and that’s way past the point of no return for the planet.
Even if Biden isn’t reelected in 4 years, it will just mean we end up with an even more climate hostile president.
In the very short term, people should be protesting in the streets to end the filibuster, and then immediately fund primary challenges to any democrat the stands in the way of the green new deal.
Biden has said he is not going to stand for reelection.
If everyone takes an item from the park there's no park left for future generations anyways. Kelp forest or no kelp forest ...
https://www.vcstar.com/story/news/local/2018/02/03/eco-tip-c...
https://wildlife.ca.gov/Conservation/Laboratories/Shellfish-...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-021-01827-6
and there's a Github repo available:
Marine pathology is not easy, invertebrate viruses are practically unexplored, and you need to allow a resources to study that (Hint: Will not happen, because... hum, would be embarrasing)
No more. :-(
https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2021-02-27/tasmania-gian...
Temperature raised a few degrees, recruitment stopped, and most laminaria submarine forests vanished.
The worst I saw was mangroves around the Gulf of Carpentaria, and my immediate assumption was the dirty lead mine nearby, but then people around the country started connecting dots to other intertidal and coastal failures that started to all line up until the entire northern coast was implicated.
The broad impact, coupled with records, suggested that this was a response to a season of low rainfall in the context of sustained elevated sea temperatures. recovery has been very gradual, as predicted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_lakeshores_an...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papahānaumokuākea_Marine_Natio...
A couple of observations.
We were constantly reminded to maintain distance from endangered Sea Otters.
The Sea Otters were pretty cool, but it quickly became annoying at trying to avoid and maintain distance from them as they seemed to be as common as cockroaches.
And the kelp.
Trying to avoid the aforementioned Sea Otters required kayaking thru massive kelp beds, which was like kayaking thru spaghetti.
This was along Cannery Row and the local Marine Reserve.
I certainly hope it’s as frustratingly awesome full of sea otters and kelp like it was 5 years ago.
Super cool, and long may it continue.
I only wish I could have dived it.
It was a very sad day.
https://www.usgs.gov/centers/werc/science/california-sea-ott...
You can't have all the modern day luxuries (cars, airplanes, electricity 24/7) and somehow expect everything to just "hum" along.
I think news reports like these will become more common, more frequent and a natural byproduct of how things are now, regardless as to whether human activity/climate change is the cause.
I am uncertain about this whole "2030" neutrality thing, why not 2025? Why not next year? We're not very good at setting ambitious targets nor making people suffer for the benefit of nature (I'm sure somewhere there is a "link" between this event and the devastating impact humans are having on the natural world as we know it)
Even a pandemic didn't have much effect whereas in previous times tens of millions would've been expected to die.
Cue another attenborough documentary telling us how everything is basically screwed...Somehow he would convince us about how fossil fuels is directly responsible for this activity taking place...
It’s not possible.
Why not. You can live like a millionaire and not have kids. Having a kid is many factors worse than living a millionaire.
It seems logical to direct efforts to control damage toward the places where they are occurring.
The global economy doesn't allow for simple answers to the sources of trash and waste. China (and India) are massive exporters of goods, only a fraction of their manufacturing is consumed internally. And of course, the biggest importers are the US and Europe.
Your population can be stable, but the economy is not.
I get what you are saying but I would need to see this sustained before I believe that we have finally broken the back of GDP to Ecological Footprint linkage. I'm not optimistic about mankind's ability to keep its footprint under control.
"Sure, we can run the world down for a bit -- all we have to do is sacrifice the opportunity of future generations to experience the world"
Before the pandemic I didn't work from home at all. Now after working from home 100% for a year I'm looking forward to being able to see my coworkers in person again when things open up, but I'll probably work from home a few days a week. Not a huge change, but every little bit helps, especially when hundreds of millions or billions of other people start working from home a few days a week who wouldn't before.
I think I need to be forced into changes, such as having to buy an electric car, or being made to walk due to driving being made illegal. If I can enhance my life whilst I get the chance to do so during my time on earth I will, unless I am prevented from doing so. I always opt for what is beneficial to me (and, judging by the sheer number of cars on the road, I am not alone in this).
Otherwise, I freely admit I have little desire to put effort into pretending I can somehow help the planet - that's the job of governments to set the policies society needs to accept, we either do it together or not at all.
I want to be as anti-carbon-neutrality as possible until it's illegal for me to cause pollution in any way (due to a shift in opinion and generating harmful emissions being 100% illegal and punishable by jail).
Electric cars are better for families (even in Japan), but having car-shaped cars is still pretty polluting due to road and tire dust, so encouraging micromobility + mass transit would be a better move for the individual.
Let’s say you go buy a Tesla or Volt. The cost to charge it at a station or even your house isn’t carbon neutral. It depends on how your local power is generated. In my gas that’s primarily natural gas.
Is the $0.11/kWh truly, not to mention the cost of the battery and all the lithium/magnesium/nickel mining it requires, more “carbon neutral” than a 35 mpg petrol vehicle with all the catalytic converters and whatnot.
In reality the combustion engine pollutants contributors seem to be more shipping related. Diesel boats, diesel trains, diesel 18 wheelers etc.
Yes. My power company gives me a green energy certificate, which means that all the money I pay for energy goes to green producers.
> the catalytic converters and whatnot.
You're conflating pollution with carbon emissions. The only thing that matters to carbon emissions is mass of fuel burnt.
> In reality the combustion engine pollutants contributors seem to be more shipping related. Diesel boats, diesel trains, diesel 18 wheelers etc.
Same here.
Of course we seem to be going for using batteries instead, but this will likely be needed for energy-dense uses like heating and aircraft.
The above is but a short list of things to attack if you in favor of trains. Note that the above cuts at a lot of things that Democrats - who claim to be in favor of trains hold dear. You will discover that fighting to make trains a better option than cars is harder as a democrat where everyone agrees but wants to put their finger in the pie, than as a republican where everyone isn't interested in trains but might let you get by with a small amount just to keep you quiet (this won't be enough to build a useful system, but it might be enough to prove it can be cost effective)
> You will discover that fighting to make trains a better option than cars is harder as a democrat where everyone agrees but wants to put their finger in the pie, than as a republican where everyone isn't interested in trains but might let you get by with a small amount just to keep you quiet (this won't be enough to build a useful system, but it might be enough to prove it can be cost effective)
And where is train hush money being handed out in the last four years? Pretty sure that's out of the frying pan into the fire.
This is perfectly exemplified by UTA Trax, which had a humble start in slightly blue SLC, but has expanded outward at an incredibly rapid pace, with approval votes coming from some of the reddest counties in the nation. Building efficiently and cost effectively is quite possibly the best vote-switcher on transit that we could make.
This sort of transit just allows for further sub-urbanization and car culture when the highways fill up. It doesn't promote cross-sector density (just larger central business districts), and it doesn't reduce the externalities of the American way of living.
To be fair, this is by no means a mistake exclusive to red states. The WMATA in DC, and LIRR and Metro North in NYC all commit the same sin.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bc/Salt_Lak... Guess the mountains hem it in one some sides; that gives me some hope. Maybe someday it will look more like https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/659/32455034626_dc15a3023b_o.j...
It should also be noted that Calgary faced similar challenges to SLC, and they optimized for it in similar ways: optimizing for total system length and highest frequencies per dollar spent, and often developing suburban park and ride stations. And over the last 40 years, Calgary has become more dense as a result. It has become one of the highest ridership per mile systems in north america, better than any in the US, besting even a 125 year old line with significant subterranean sections right through the dense core of Boston.
I will hand it to Calgary though. Reading around, it does look like the job density is in the central business district is exceptionally good for such a late-developed North American city. The park and rides don't dent housing sprawl at all, but at least they allow people to commute to the same place. Hopefully that does create demand for dense housing around the central business district eventually.
I think at this point we also need to massively raise the gas tax, pay it back as a universal dividend to avoid right-wing revolution. And simultaneously, we need to build a bunch of transit so people trying to win the gas-tax-dividend arbitrage have a valid strategy. Make the demand, make the supply.
Our political situation doesn't allow for that, but I don't really see the choice? Trying to electrify all the cars is perhaps easier on the American psyche, but much less efficient, and will not help with all the non-global-warming major externalities we need to fix nearly as urgently.
Offsetting ones carbon footprint is cheap and easy. The fact that few people want to take any action individually undermines collective action.
The obvious path forward is for the most passionate people to lead by example.
The idea that somehow government will serve to overrule the self interest of the majority isn’t realistic.
If the majority doesn’t want change, the government can’t help.
That's not really how it works. The only way humanity is at 7 billion and counting is due to advances in engineering, farming, etc.
Look for example at two extremes, starting with the CHAZ farm. You remember, the cardboard boxes with potting soil thrown on top by kids who had no idea what they were doing? Imagine if the entire planet was full of these sort of primitive smooth brains. You'd be back to hunter gatherers and a global population of ~20,000 or so rather quickly. Now look at the opposite end of the spectrum, Hokkaido rice farmers.
https://www.hokkaido-kome.gr.jp/english/about/
Despite having a less favorable climate for rice growing, Hokkaido farmers of the frozen north produce some of the highest yields and highest quality rice in Japan. When you look outside of Japan, it's even more impressive as Hokkaido consistently has higher yields than SE Asian countries with warmer humid climates more suited for rice growing.
This is a small number of people in Hokkaido, with power to change their entire world around them. They do so through science and engineering. Access to irrigation, farm equipment, and fertilizer is far more important than climate.
People who want laws to restrict CO2 would choose to destroy Hokkaido farmers. Farm equipment after all releases CO2. So does fertilizer production and transportation. So does tillage. These people seek to make us all hunter gatherers again.
Solving problems is not about squeezing yourself into the limits of your current system, it is about changing the limits of the system with science and engineering. Said more eloquently,
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw
That's ... bizarre.
Upshot is I'm doing way more to improve the environment than you are, because I'm an adult who doesn't need be compelled to be perfect before doing anything positive.
[Citation needed]
It is worth noting that the collapse had nothing to do with over harvest of sea life.
It would be very surprising, to me at least, to find ultimately humans did not contribute to this chain of events. Whether it's something like microplastics causing the lesions on the star fish or water temperature/chemical concentration leading to some fungal spore growing, I suspect ancient kelp forests aren't vanishing without our help.
It is entirely possible it is in some way related to human activity. It is also possible that it is completely unrelated. Booms, busts, and radical ecosystem changes do happen all the time in nature.
Nature isn't gradual, it's catastropic. The Younger Drayas caused a 7° to 10° C drop worldwide in a matter of decades.
Volcanic eruptions, sudden drought, earthquakes, asteroid impacts, abrupt population crashes: sudden change is normal.
Yes, a lot of the change we see now is human impact. But this could easily be a virus that hit the sea stars out of the blue. We just don't know.
If you've been watching the changes in the aquatic habitat and the sea life populations they becoming simple / basic and more homogeneous as a function of changing water temperatures (and harvesting of sea life without the ability to replenish).
I won't disagree that it is possible virus or range of other possibility - I am not providing an answer. However it's a very high probability that the natural ability for that ecosystem to defend against the virus (if it was) was likely impeded by human impacts which change the water temperature and the species of life that live in that area.
We could posit many different theories, the fact is that nature is changing rapidly under our watch and to insinuate that it is a natural occurrence is disengeinuine and irresponsible at best and seems to be the push of a false narrative to undermine the consensus in the scientific community.
That being said, it's almost definitely due to humans, I just wanted to be pedantic.
We have to understand the connection between a seemingly "innocent" event such as throwing trash in a random place and something else happening thousands of miles away - the events can be interconnected and the various documentaries have been trying to make us think about that.
If our activity causes warming that causes more storms that causes species to migrate earlier to different parts of the globe than usual that causes unpredictable food for other animals which they were relying on and have done for years, which in turn means they can't reproduce or sustain their cubs meaning other animals might suffer as a result and suddenly the entire chain is broken, disjointed and collapses.
Humans have no idea how fragile the ecosystem is or how resilient it may be (since we've never had this many humans living at once, consuming at the rates we are and causing the warming we've been witnessing).
The sea star wasting may be tied to global warming or not and there are some plausible hypothesis. That said, there is no credible theory which ties it to overfishing.
I also pretty regularly collect urchins in that kelp forest, purple and red in that area, and the ones the otter were taking were smaller than the ones I would have chosen. So, at the least, there's at least one sea otter that particularly cares to each some sea urchins, and one human that cares to each the others.
Here's another, if you're curious
https://www.nwnewsnetwork.org/post/hey-seals-and-sea-lions-q...
Yes, the disease may have been caused or spread by human activity, and yes, the warm marine weather may have been caused by human-created global warming, but you're jumping the gun to say that this is because we have 8 billion people who want a certain standard of living.
It is, and we keep hearing this argument for situations across the entire plant. There is a clear trend.
I'm still feeling this argument out a bit, but... what can an individual actually do about it? Even if you look beyond how little any individual family contributes to pollution, in comparison to even some of the simplest industrial ventures.
I can't do without electricity 24x7, because I live in the north. I'd freeze to death. Think the recent crap Texas had to go through, for around 8 months of the year.
I can't do without a car because my commute is around 20 miles one way. I - quite literally - can't afford to live closer to work; the prices are on par with the bay area ($600,000 1,000 sqft condos), despite living in a very sparsely populated state with "competitive" wages in the $80k range for experienced software developers.
I could (and have) done without airplanes, but the alternative (if I want to keep my job) is to drive for around 18 hours. Not terribly friendly. The bus is closer to 48 hours, with prices on par with the airlines.
It is, for all intents and purposes, impossible for me (for a vast majority of people, I'd posit) to live without a job, without electricity, and without a car. And, realistically, I have very little control over my house, my car, my food, etc; these are instead largely based on my salary.
I get what's been made available by the market to me at a price that I can afford. It's not as if the market will change to less profitable products just because they're a bit better for the world. And it's not as if I can suddenly afford more expensive products just because they're better for the world.
Get politically engaged with organisations that are demanding systemic change
EDIT: I don't see what is negative or controversial about this suggestion. The commenter says they cannot do the right thing because of how the system works and what options it makes available to them and at what price. So in that case we must all do work to change the system. The market is currently dictated by many different policies and legislation, causing most things you buy to be artificially cheap or expensive in one way or another. We can change this through policy or other means to make carbon products more expensive -- driving more expensive while clean transit is cheap, inner city housing cheaper than suburban sprawl, etc.
Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number--
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you--
Ye are many -- they are few.The good news is that this is already happening in most places. The bad news is that population growth is still out of control in Africa and parts of Asia, and may lead to a environmental crisis before population growth gets under control.
Have children. Not too many. Raise them well.
Raw population numbers are not the biggest concern. Consumption and excessive luxury, wasteful production practices and burying all of these under the rug are the root of all these problems
What's the forcing function? It's already been proven that a global climate crisis is not enough to move society. It's not profitable enough to convince corporations to do it. The 0.1% have no cause to do it; even the humanitarians among that group have much better investments they can make.
EDIT: Also, in the past, living in the north without electricity was managed by burning wood and coal. Given the significant increase in population the impact to the environment of burning all that would be irrecoverable on its own.
Can policy not make it profitable? It seems like regulation can be a means of creating market incentives. It worked well for leaded gas, I tend to think a carbon tax/market may work
At worst, there is no way that anything approaching that sort of regulation will ever fly in today's political system. Period.
[0] https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2021/02/24/p...
Unless you live near a hot springs, electricity is actually the best we've got for staying warm in the north with the least carbon emissions. Nuclear, wind, hydro, or geothermal are all valid options for producing this electricity in the North. Probably in combination and probably with some storage (batteries plus occasional hydrogen?) and heatpumps to increase the efficiency. So in fact, USE electricity.
In the Global South, solar reigns supreme as far as the least expensive energy source.
Never buy another car. Fix what you have when you need to.
Eat less meat. Live principled- not that you don't but doing these things is almost contagious. I notice friends and family following my lead. Consuming less, buying less.
Not possible to do myself, and it's not feasible to pay someone to do it. I don't have the tools, the electronics, nor the replacement parts (not to mention knowledge or time) to keep a modern car going for the remaining 30-50 years of my lifetime. Attempting to fix it at the point where everything is falling apart becomes impractical (as I keep trying to tell my dad when he's spending even more money to make a '79 truck run).
Not to mention that getting those parts custom made or shipped to you from across the country incurs its own environmental penalty.
> Eat less meat.
I've found that, to keep a balanced diet without meat, it's quite a bit more expensive, and exceptionally more time consuming. Then there's the health issues (like those outlined in the scar study featured on HN a week or so ago).
I absolutely could compromise my health and lifespan for the sake of the world, but I'm not going to.
> Consuming less, buying less.
There's a lower limit to how much less you can do and still remain as a healthy, productive adult, but I agree that it's a good thing to do for many reasons; it's something I try and do.
Even if I took every step outlined, it would have, effectively, no impact on the environment.
I was a little facetious when suggesting to keep your car forever. Just don't ditch it merely for being "old". That really goes for anything.
You can also accept the fact that you are but one human among billions. Tend your garden.
And, if you have ample means, have as many kids as you can support in your chosen lifestyle, so they will grow up to invent more and better policies and technologies to make the future a place we actually want to live in again.
How ironic considering that the very source of earths problems are because of humans. Somehow, the solution is more. Never a better response from, a human.
That's a pretty big thing to ask, though, as children are pretty central to most people's lives.
It's an interesting point, though: is it better long term for environmentally-conscious people to have fewer or more children? If they have fewer, then most of the children born will be to parents who are not environmentally-conscious, and will likely grow up without an ethos of reducing their consumption, which will negatively affect public policy. But if environmentally-conscious people have more children, they will add to the drain on the planet, but raise kids who hopefully will grow up to influence public policy in the direction of less consumption. Not sure which choice will be a net benefit, but I suspect the kind of person who would make their child-bearing choices primarily on the basis of environmental impact is uncommon enough that it wouldn't make much of a difference either way.
Earth has produced a grand total of one species that even has the potential to be effective stewards. That's us. Earth is already on the far backside of how much longer it will be habitable due to the Sun. And I see no reason to think that any other intelligence that did evolve here wouldn't be beset by the same problems we have now.
So (IMO) intelligent, conscientious people having fewer children helps nothing. We (humans) are the best thing our biosphere has got, by a long shot, in terms of long-term preservation of life, which is something that I personally think is of great importance.
When you say the source of earth’s problems are because of humans, I believe you’re right but not for the reason you think. Earth doesn’t have problems. Earth simply abides. Humans on earth, they have belief systems that consider certain changes to the planet problems. In that sense humans are the cause of the problems. Without humans to care about it, it’s just a change, not a problem.
Be honest: the entire species isn’t going to be persuaded to stop reproducing to save kelp forests. You know this is true as well as I do. Nor is everyone going to get rid of all their possessions and return to preindustrial life. Only a few people want to do this, and since it doesn’t scale, it doesn’t work.
Fifty years of this moral pleading to reduce consumption and reproduction has done jack shit to help the environment. Eight billion people want a developed-world affluent lifestyle and each and every one of them will personally guillotine you if you try to deny it to them. Preventing this desire is a lost cause.
Given that humanity stubbornly will not listen to you, and given that your odds of establishing a totalitarian state to force them to do so are long, it is time to look for other solutions. If humans are going to be here and are going to demand affluence, we desperately need to find ways to deliver that without destroying the biosphere. And having fewer kids will not help with that—in fact it’ll hurt. The more minds we can focus on the problem, the better.
It will not be easy and there is no promise of success, but it is better than a cause that is already lost.
I’d be interested in what you consider “balanced”. I’ve found that when my diet is almost exclusively plants my grocery bill was nearly halved. I’ve even found it’s cheaper to by from higher end organic grocery stores than Walmart supercenters when I exclude meat. The scales tip the other way when I buy processed or boxed vegetarian/vegan food.
I couldn't have a balanced and nutritionally complete diet without mean, if I stuck to what I can obtain from local sources or what's available at the same or lower price than meat. Also, most of the stuff that is available seems to be based on Soy produced abroad, and then shipped here.
With that taken into account, I'll stick to having some meat in my diet and keeping both costs and the CO2 footprint down. After all, simply reducing the meat consumption would probably have a large effect on it's own.
This makes me think you may have been falling into the mindset that you either need to eat equivalent protein as a meat diet or were biasing towards processed foods which tend to rely heavily on soy. Personally, I don’t like the taste of those and I found they tend to be more expensive. Trying to make a facsimile of one diet with another is difficult.
I can’t speak more to the OPs geography without specifics but for the vast amount of the “north” in the US, it’s not much of a problem. Of course, it’s all relative to personal goals.
Regardless, I think you’re right in just reducing meat consumption is a more pragmatic approach for most. I think both issues speak to the need to adjust what the “norm” is, both for health and environmental reasons.
Mass produced meat is cheap because you don't pay it in $ but in pollution and animal suffering.
I was a "ah whatever they're just animals" guy for a long time, but once you do your research it's basically impossible to eat cheap meat again. It's jot even a question of polluting less, it repulses me now
Nsfl, this is a video from one of the supposedly "best" slaughterhouse in France: https://youtu.be/KWbgZQxd6J4
Do you just gnaw on raw steak from the dumpster? I have been a vegetarian since 2009 mostly because it is so quick and convenient. Other than fruit and shelled nuts, I cannot think of anything faster and simpler than opening a can of beans. Frozen vegetables come pre-chopped, you just put them in a frying pan. If you are concerned about your health and lifespan, you should become vegan, like I did in 2017. It is the fastest, easiest way to lower your cholesterol and improve your cardiovascular function. I did not expect my exercise performance or subjective feeling to improve as much as it did. Anyway, here is a good source for ideas: https://nutritionfacts.org/
In my country most cars are bought used, imported from another country (usually Germany, sometimes the US) after they've deemed them not worth fixing (i.e. salvage). Whatever is broken is fixed up, tested for safety and emissions (we are an EU country), and sold to someone here. Labour costs are quite low (compared to Western EU & US), there's a great availability and parts, and people are quite skilled here, so pretty much anything can be done.
It used to be common to import cars from the UK (for some reason, much cheaper 2nd hand than the rest of Europe), and convert them from right to left hand drive - but a few years ago the government said they wouldn't allow those cars to be re-registered, which put an end to that.
Recently a friend had to fix the Webasto unit (diesel pre-heater) on his car and found someone who admitted his 'hobby' was fixing them. €100 later and what he thought he needed to replace was as good as new.
When the cars come here they often already have multiple hundreds of thousands of kilometers on the clock, but they are usually 'fixed' so who knows how much they've really done. Said friend's odometer says it has done 350k, but we assume it's closer to 500k.
Once cars are deemed salvage here (usually at the point where the floor is rusting out, or the frame has been damaged in an accident), parts are stripped and resold on the 2nd+ hand market, or the cars are shipped to Central Asian countries where the same all happens again.
Anyway, I'm not really sure what my point is, but it seems relevant to this. If you really want to you can keep an old car running, whether it's economical is a different story (I imagine in the US with higher labour costs and lower availability of spare parts, maybe not). But you also need to consider how things are used after your life, cars for sure do not just get melted down when you declare them worthless (one man's trash, is another man's treasure definitely applies here). I'd imagine consumer electronics and appliances are much worse for the environment in this regard than cars.
People just are not going to use less stuff. In fact, they're going to use more. There are billions of people in the developing world who use a lot less energy and stuff than people in the developed world - but they are developing and will come to use and consume more and more. We won't impoverish ourselves, we can't ask the developing world to stay poor, and the population is growing all the time.
Plans or hopes that involve consuming less are unrealistic. The only way to save the environment is better technology and geo-engineering.
ever-growing consumption on a finite planet is unrealistic.
While infinite growth is obviously not possible I think we are a long way from the population that we could reasonably support on a still healthy planet if we had the technology to do so. I also think that in a hundred years or maybe a little less we'll start to get big opportunities for growth in space, both in the form of doing manufacturing off world and creating new population centers.
However I feel there are also choices that align with all the goals. Such as spending less on cheap disposable shit (which is so hard to do in our current environmenr) and using the materials in higher quality durable things that also offer a better experience. Not to mention shifting some consumption to services like amazing food and culture.
There’s no physical law that says we must put CO2 in the air to unlock these resources. With the right incentives people will figure it out.
House planning could require far less electricity, but it's not required by building codes, and the market doesn't acknowledge its value.
Urban planning puts workplaces far away from residential areas because they used to be heavy polluters, but never stopped doing it when workplaces improved.
My workplace office is 1km away from my residence. Someone had the smarts to put a small amount of office buildings in an otherwise residential neighborhood (as well as a few shops). I moved here for the job - it was the obvious choice.
Mixed use zoning has made it so I don't just not need a car, I don't even use public transit often.
I sympathize with you because the environmentally minded are telling you to do the impossible and claiming that electric cars are a cop out or whatever. They aren't. It's actually easy.
I forget exactly what I found, but if I where to guess it would be something like our imports of certain resources might have peaked, but that doesn't account to things that are manufactured in part/whole outside the US. If I buy an inflatable Kayak made in China, then how is that oil/rubber accounted for? US oil/rubber imports maybe have gone down, but have our inflatable Kayak imports gone down and is it tracked?
But we use x% more containers every year. This is exactly like plane engines getting x% more efficient, it doesn't matter if you double the number of flights over the same period.
You can always make micro adjustments here and there but it won't do much in the long run, they just give us excuses to stay collectively lazy. If your house is on fire, throwing water at it with a table spoon instead of a tea spoon won't do much of a difference.
It's much easier to pat ourselves on the back than look at the harsh truth... there is no more room for being optimistically stupid
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"In recent years we’ve seen a different pattern emerge: the pattern of more from less. In America—a large, rich country that accounts for about 25 percent of the global economy—we’re now generally using less of most resources year after year, even as our economy and population continue to grow. What’s more, we’re also polluting the air and water less, emitting fewer greenhouse gases, and seeing population increases in many animals that had almost vanished. America, in short, is post-peak in its exploitation of the earth. The situation is similar in many other rich countries, and even developing countries such as China are now taking better care of the planet in important ways."
It's easy to save a few grams of metal here and there and ban plastic straw when we already live like kings while the rest of the world is barely starting to access the lifestyles we had in the 60s.
It's not bad per say but it's a drop in the bucket, they import and export more than every before, which means insane amount of pollution due to the shipping industry, this alone would defeat everything else they attempt: https://container-xchange.com/blog/shipping-emissions/
Out of sight out of mind I guess...
Zoom out, look at the big picture, we shouldn't stop at borders but look at the global scale. France banning plastic bags when China builds so many coal power plants is no more than virtue signalling. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-coal-idUSKBN2A308U
> I am uncertain about this whole "2030" neutrality thing, why not 2025? Why not next year?
"next year" for a politician is "right now". "in 2030" is "never" since they'll be long retired.
There is a funny thing happening right now in France, most politicians from the 70s, 80s,&c. are coming out saying we should focus on climate change, the very same people who actively participated in worsening the situation back in the days. They only wake up now because their life is basically over and they want to rip some last minute karma points. Short term individual goals will always defeat long term global ones
It's not even that hard. We spent like $2 trillion on a coronavirus stimulus bill. $2 trillion on clean electricity infrastructure would be enough to clean up the electric grid to like 90-95% fossil free.
Another $2 trillion of incentives and mandates would allow most transportation in the US to be fossil free (pure electric cars and trucks, with plug-in hybrid cars and trucks as an interim measure) and charged by our 90-95% fossil free grid. (Electricity and transport are the two biggest things, followed by heating and industry... which ALSO have fairly straightforward solutions to becoming almost entirely carbonfree.)
I'm convinced that a HUGE reason we don't just pull the trigger and do this now is because a huge swath of the environmental activist community is deadset on demanding a reduction in consumption and "modern day luxuries" even when not strictly necessary. That means that it's a political dead end and literally every other goal becomes a higher priority. Any climate action that doesn't "reduce consumption" is seen as not being "real."
We should just see it like solving the Ozone Hole (which is now healing, BTW). Instead of giving up refrigeration and air conditioning, we developed non-ozone-depleting refrigerants.
I'm sorry that Attenborough probably won't be satisfied with that answer, but we really can have 8 billion humans with modern day luxuries provided we're responsible about it. And it's not even hard. I have two (used) electric cars that I bought for $10k apiece, and they mostly charge using nuclear electricity. With a heat pump (air source with ground-source backup), and I'll be set for heating my house as well.
But I agree with everything else. Personally I recently used some calculators to see what my carbon footprint is and found a plausible offset for it (certified program through my utility company that goes to buying/building more green energy). And it was pretty darn cheap, less than 15/mo for myself in a 1 bedroom apt, a SUV, and multiple flights a year. Now a larger family increases that number, but nothing the middle-class can't handle. (I Also donate a ton to Wildlife Conservation Network)
I'm trying to do my part, but it seems meaningless without appropriate political decisions that would have real impact by costing our externalities.
Our children will never forgive us for destroying their inheritance.
Outside of mechanical damage and over fishing, it's hard to know what could help, you can't really adjust ocean conditions, it's just too vast - for example something fundamental in relation to temperature and water acidity has changed meaning you can't just replant, it'd just suffer the same fate. It kind of implies to save the oceans climate change needs to be improved globally.
Kina are considered a delicacy here, but as mentioned here the kina in the barrens are underfed and not worth eating
The article did mention that the starfish predator of the urchin died from a mystery disease. I wonder if that starfish was reintroduced into the area if it would be able to survive again or simply die from the disease again.
I think the key to fixing this issue is to figure out the reason the starfish died of the disease. Then it might be possible to mitigate for that.
I hope a network of volunteers in Northern California can have some success rebuilding the kelp ecosystem.
The book titles itself based on what it is, which is the same thing as hundreds of other books peddling cherry picked facts to say that the "establishment" is wrong on climate change. These books take whatever micro-divergence from climate models is currently being observed and trump it up as a refutation of all climate models and of the entire macro-trend.
15 years ago it was the lack of deep ocean warming which has now been observed. I'm sure that in 2021 there are innumerable discrepancies and poorly understood phenomena which could be used for this purpose.
Is this Lomborg you're saying is a denier? What are you basing that on?
I can believe that he is encouraging others who want to do nothing about climate change, but I didn't think he was objectively a denier. People calling him one may be playing into his shtick.
vs something like "Analysis and review of historical climates data and indicators of human impact"
> DCSD made its decision in January 2003. In it, DCSD found that, by customary scientific standards, the defendant had acted at odds with good scientific practice in his systematically one-sided choice of data and in his arguments. If the book was intended to be evaluated as science and not as a contribution to the general debate, then in addition the scientific message had been so distorted that the objective criteria for establishing scientific dishonesty had been met. > DCSD did not find a sufficient basis, however, on which to establish that the defendant had misled his readers with intent or gross negligence. DCSDnoted, in this context, that in the preface to the book the defendant had himself drawn attention to the fact that he was no expert in environmental issues.
https://ufm.dk/en/publications/2004/files-2004/annual-report...