We can’t beat the climate crisis without rethinking land use
brookings.edu
brookings.edu
We use 50% of the habitable land on earth for agriculture, and 77% thereof is used to produce meat and dairy. At the same time, meat and dairy only make up 18% of the world's calory supply, and 36% of the protein supply.
It's crystal clear that the best thing we can do to free up land is to reduce livestock agriculture. This also has some more advantages, for example increasing biodiversity, decreasing zoonotic diseases like the current shitshow we're in, decreasing antibiotics resistance (the next shitshow we're about to enjoy), increasing the number of parks for recreation (which has a positive psychological impact on people). Oh yes, and animal welfare.
Source: https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food
I haven't seen any info that clearly states "this land is exclusively used to plant x squared miles of grain that will be only fed to livestock".
Also, from your link, it is clear that livestock AND fisheries produce 31% of the agricultural greenhouse gasses, while crops produce 27%, so not that big a difference.
> Also, from your link, it is clear that livestock AND fisheries produce 31% of the agricultural greenhouse gasses, while crops produce 27%, so not that big a difference.
I'm not sure which part you're referring to. But a big chunk of crop that we grow is directly used as animal feed.
Or is it just that the parts of soy that we can't eat (stalk, leaves, husks, discarded beans after processing into tofu/milk/etc.) that comprise 80% of the plant, while the rest we consume ourselves?
The tl;dr is that while pastures and agroforestry can be more sustainable, natural forests are still nearly impossible to beat in terms of carbon sequestration.
What is a problem: unsustainable farming of grain/wheat to use as feed (or even feeding processed dead animals). Lumping these together is a harmful simplification.
People change jobs without changing where they live. It won't matter what kind of neighborhood a person lives in if the person still commutes a long distance.
Transaction costs are high. For a dense city, moving to a different apartment means losing rent control. Elsewhere, the process of selling and buying a house will eat up about 10% the value of the house. Switching kids to different school districts is often unacceptable.
The typical modern two-income household makes this far worse. Moving close to one employer just means moving away from the other employer. Cutting one person's commute just lengthens the other person's commute. Why bother?
The harder problems are social - propinquity (you lose your neighbors) and schools (kids lose their friends).
And it gets more complicated in two-income households. Both parties could work in completely different directions/areas
I am thinking, couldn't we consume less energy for transportation just by making lighter vehicles? 95% of the energy used by a car is expended just to move the vehicle itself, not for its ultimate purpose, which is moving a human.
This will not only reduce the energy cost of transportation but also make cities attractive again
https://unevenearth.org/2018/08/the-social-ideology-of-the-m...
Unfortunately they often cost as much as cheap highway-capable cars and the fuel consumption, while better, isn't amazing.
EVs fare better regarding the latter, but they're even more expensive.
Personally I was close to getting a Renault Twizy, but after I started working remotely the need for a commuter vehicle disappeared.
This is a problem at both ends of journeys - shops/workplaces, but also homes for some. Not everyone has a practical way to store a bike - e.g. if you're living in and apartment only accessible by one or more flights of stairs.
Subways do that. Centuries old technology
Like bikes?
But who actually wants to live like that? To live in a tiny property in a noisy city, to save a planet that you then have far less ability to explore and enjoy?
One way to answer that is "demand." People demonstrably do want to live in a lot of dense noisy cities, with cramped living quarters, high costs, etc. They put up with a lot in order to do so. NY, SF, London, Beijing, Etc. The old "no one goes there, too crowded" quip.
The counterargument (IMO) is that people want to live where be jobs, power, cultural elites, etc. Those can exist in suburban city plans, ancient city centres, etc. Some are nice. Many are not.
I would say that people are adaptable. The operative question probably isn't who wants to live like that broadly. It's who will choose to move there. That'll depend on issues that are usually outside the scope of planning. Proximity. Culture. Jobs. Finance... How WFH develops is highly relevant, for example.
Some things are not very amenable to "start small" approaches. Are tools in a planners realistic toolbox sufficient for doing any of these things?
I think we're currently in a moment of opportunity. That means some underlying limitations are in flux. That doesn't mean planners have unlimited powers though. Ideas that require everything to change the way a planner wants them to are wishy washy.
Living in a city doesn't prevent you from getting a train, riding a bike, or (even) hiring a car to get out into nature. The only thing in the way is getting out through the suburbs and sprawl.
And cities are usually the worst place to be during any sort of crisis (e.g. pandemic, riots, shortages/panic buying)
(Maybe it's the pricing that's all wrong. Maybe living in a city should be the cheaper option, and living in a more rural area should be an expensive luxury? But that's not what the market has given us)
Resource extraction, highways and wind turbines have to exist somewhere - so aren’t the more sparsely populated areas the obvious choice?
Or maybe letting future generations have an environment that they'd actually be able to explore and enjoy?
people seem to accept all sorts of indignities the world over and throughout history in order to continue living and also keeping their children alive.
Which city are you thinking of that you have such a negative feeling about them?
I just couldn't live somewhere so busy - trains/tube at peak times are a grim enough experience just doing it on occasional visits - couldn't deal with it every day, let alone during a pandemic. And then there's the insane cost of housing, and the noise.
The good news is cities don’t need to be like that.
I'm talking about something like Clathrate Gun Hypothesis [1], not increased hurricane activity or Miami slowly sinking. A runaway heating event or worse.
Humans mostly don't want to invest in things that don't have immediate payoff, where "immediate" <= one human lifespan. (Typically we want things even faster than this.)
I doubt lecturing a generation of kids will change policies. Those kids will still consume economic products that cause carbon emissions. Nobody -- and I mean nobody -- is willing to do a shutdown to the level that would be required to stop warming.
This article that proposes more dense cities. Nobody is going to do that for the climate. Think about how many stakeholders in reaching an 80% population vaccination rate didn't show up. These people are wasting their breath.
The human species cannot solve this problem unless we manage to kill off all the plants and stop having oxygen.
Humanity will die off and thats good - looking at the world we built, we deserve it.
I fell thankful for being here to witness final moments of mankind. Its goong to be a fun ride.
Even the IPCC, the biggest authority on climate change says that temperatures might increase 2C in the next 50 years, reducing the GROWTH in GDP in the world by 6% (NOT actual GDP). This might have some bad consequences, but it's a far cry from the doomsday scenario of humanity dying within 12 years that people like AOC have talked about.
(btw, global temperatures rose about 2C in the last 50 years. We survived. In fact humanity is doing fairly well on most metrics)
Sure, but almost every other species on this planet with is is not doing that great. And even though we think we're so smart, a collapse in population of any species might have more impact on us than we now think.
“Life on Earth can recover from a drastic climate shift by evolving into new species and creating new ecosystems,” it says. “Humans cannot.”
Seems odd. Humans live or can live anywhere on Earth, but we're uniquely incapable of handling new ecosystems?
I'd like to see the new report.
With survival I mean not survival of everyone of course.
I wonder if a moratorium could be issued to freeze all land zoning changes beyond the border of all cities, stop cities from growing outwards. This would force growth to turn inwards, and improve neighborhood density.
Much of what the article seems to suggest are things that would increase property prices.
Not neccersarilly. There's a cap on rent, that being what people are willing and able to pay.
Until supply massively increases, price does not reduce.
Artificial changes like government subsidised rent schemes allow distribution of housing on non-financial means. This allows wages for people like teachers, shop clerks, security guards etc to stay low, and that's not good.
Building outward does not increase supply in the city centre, increasing density does. Nothing encourages increasing density like charging. Imagine a $300/year/square foot charge. Not many people would be buying a low density 1000 square-foot house with $450k/year tax, instead there would be a massive demand to build 150 apartments on that lot instead, which would cost $2k a year each.
There are currently plenty of places to live cheaply. There are not plenty of places to live where people want to live (central cities), so prices are higher there. The only solution to that is to increase availability where people want to live.
Instead one might mandate density: minimum 4 stories, maximum so-and-so land for parking, maximum half a mile from a public transportation stop, etc.
That would be interesting as well!
I think the most important aspect here is that this is a well-known city and the policy is uncontroversial to the point of being unknown. People who live there take it for granted, people who don't haven't heard of it.
The city is in the rich world, close to a million people live there if you include the suburbs, it's had this policy for almost ninety years, you (the reader) consider yourself knowledgeable about the world, and you don't know which city it is unless I tell you (rot13: Bfyb). That's how uncontroversial such a rule is, once it's in place.
It means that old people bought a house working 10 years with just one person working and now both couples working can not afford to buy(or rent) a house working for 30 years because the land use is regulated.
It will probably end in a violent revolution.
You can't tell people to get a vaccination, so you're definitely not going to tell them how they can use their land at scale. Land owners have more money to fight being told what to do, too.
A nontrivial percentage of the population hates urban living and density. And over half the population wouldn't even agree with the thesis of this piece.
So no, nobody is burning political capital on this.
Nor should they to be honest. This would help property owners massively, because their capital in holdings would skyrocket.
The largest cities on the planet have severe ecological problems. It is just not a good idea, but people will tell you that this is the way of science to combat climate change.
The smart ones use this to influence the rest.
Climate change is driven by carbon/greenhouse emissions, which are generated by productivity/industry, which is created by our economic paradigm namely capitalism.
Capitalism is great imo, except when its unconstrained - it then becomes cancerous and a positive feedback loop. Feedback loops are exponential by their implicit mathematical nature. Either this loop is going to go vertical and explode, or we temper the exponentiation rate to buy more time.
A carbon tax will temper the growth rate by treating emissions as a cost and not a willie nillie economic “externality”. But this will make a country uncompetitive in the short term - which makes it politically tenuous and even unviable to those who can only think in the short term. It would likely need to be paired with incentives for other industries and trade agreements/sanctions to force other nations to cooperate.
So all this to say our solutions are become tree hugging hippies, techno optimism (new efficient technology will save us!), or capital controls (carbon tax, etc). I don’t know about everyone else, but the first one is a pipe dream, the second is an existential gamble, and the third one actually seems manageable.
I hope everyone once visits the 3 countries listed and visits the cities with the most industries or even the rivers where the waste from leather tanneries get dumped. Carbon is the last thing they care about.
> No one knows how high a carbon tariff would be but it seems likely it would be imposed at the rate of our own federal carbon tax. A back-of-the-envelope approximation using the example of imports of Chinese and Indian steel shows that the impact would be significant. In 2019, Canada imported 612,000 metric tons of steel from India and China. The emissions associated with those imports are around 1,132,200 tonnes of carbon dioxide, using McKinsey’s estimate of 1.85 tons of carbon dioxide per metric ton of steel produced.
> Chinese and Indian steel presumably wouldn’t have to pay the full weight of the carbon tax on every ton of CO2, because we exempt 80-90 per cent of emissions from our domestic industry, and, to be non-discriminatory, the adjustment rate would have to match how we treat domestic producers. That said, even with an exemption rate of 85 per cent a carbon tariff would be costly. At that rate, 169,830 tons of CO2 related to these imports would be subject to the tax, which is currently $40/ton. That gives a cost of more than $6.7 million. At the 2030 rate of $170/ton, it balloons to more than $28.8 million. Apply this technique across a long list of other products from these and other high-emitters and the costs become substantial.
https://financialpost.com/opinion/opinion-carbon-tariffs-are...
>we have a problem with giant cities where you cannot even see the sky anymore...
Our problem is, that we externalize cost to much. Moral people take care of their waste/byproducts and side effects -- unless they can't see it. Like invisible CO2, overseas exploitation or paramounting debt. We have build our society and lifeforms on top of these externalities and some day will be pay day, so it is reasonable to either limit consumption or pay for sustainable disposal now. Compact cities reduce metabolic cost of our processes and you can't really bring the luxury argument while looking at the current over all decline.
My country has introduced a carbon tax to control consumer behavior. We already have the highest energy prices and have problems with skyrocketing prices for property. Our finance minister is probably delighted and my state will start to save nature tomorrow.
This is senseless activism. There won't be a change in consumer behavior, because people already try to minimize energy usage obviously.
Our energy tax already covers that. To connect that to CO2 emissions has some advantages, but also some disadvantage, because there a lot of other factors that threaten the environment. What is clear that it won't have an effect on consumption.
You can do that for all I care. I can live with increased property prices. But don't complain about lacking equity or equality afterwards. You wanted that yourself.
Noise and stress levels are also higher living in a city. This might be interesting for a religious ascetic and city planners invested in property prices or people jealous of people living where they want to.
Shifting the tax burden to coal plants in the form of CO2 taxes would result in a much lower electricity price and would allow the abolishment of the EEG surcharge. Not to mention all the GDP growth that you get for free by increasing the domestic investment rate.
The EEG is bad, I agree. Photovoltaics are perhaps helpful, but they should be placed in a region > 1000 sun hours. Otherwise their eco-budget isn't that good. I think this is why the EEG doesn't include them anymore.
We pay ~30c/kwh. The power itself is at about 4c. Infrastructure and taxes are the largest cost factors here. A tax won't change anything for the better. Things are like they are.
With more gas we might get a better CO2 budget, but that again takes time. Coal is bad but it is also demonized. South Korea has nuclear power, thermal energy and exports liquified gas. They still have a worse CO2 budget per capita. Coal is a problem and you can panic because of climate change, but it is not the decisive factor.
I wrote this comment before reading the article because there are indeed articles that aren't worth reading and you know the content.
I think in this case, it is good to not read the article for once. The headline supplies enough information to extrapolate the data.