“In 2050, everyone will be carbon literate”
read2050.substack.com
read2050.substack.com
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/the-passionate-eye/recyclin...
Weirdest thing in my opinions is how much of educated people also fall in the scam as well
It appears that their one child policy - something that would not fly in the west - prevented a major crisis here.
That being said I think countries should deal with their population issues on their own instead of relying this heavily on imported workforce.
France was largely successful at keeping their fertility rate only slightly under replacement, so it is possible.
Edit: Can't confirm if the referendum was ultimately scheduled.
I realize covid-mandates were perceived differently from country to country.
Where I live, we first had a push for a general vaccination mandate, which was later more or less silently abolished because it turned out the promised efficientcy of the vaccines turned out to be not that high, and politicians silent, without explaining why, let the mandate plans slip back into their hiding place. As a result, we have pretty much destroyed any remaining trust in politics and so-called "experts" in the general population.
You can be farming carrots and live like a hermit and still be funding the CO2 industry.
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2022-india-plastic-recycl...
It doesn't seem to be paywalled, but just in case:
Does europeans drivers are more sad than the American ones ?
Does vegan enjoy less their meal ?
Does Japanese feels poor to live in a 30m2 appartement ?
Hiding behind culture, habits and society is not enough to dumb their responsibility, especially for rich and smart people.
Don’t forget 30 days is often what it gets to form a new habit like dropping beef off your meal.
I've been vegan for years and yeah, it was less enjoyable and empirically less healthy for me than the more normal diet I have now.
I have lived in a small flat, and now I own a house, and yeah, the house is better. I can't imagine ever moving back into a flat unless I become impoverished.
The entire movement you propose is simply "be poorer".
The movement I describe is “sobriety”. It’s similar to being poor of something (big car) but you’re not lacking it, instead you choose to do without. This difference is a big deal in a psychology point of view and that’s probably why you feel “less fun”.
Totally agree with your point of healthiness of vegan diet, the case was more on quantity than beef/no beef.
I grew up poor in the UK. Poor people in the UK generally have houses and cars unless they're in big cities.
The majority of the people in the society I live in drive cars, live in houses and eat meat.
I could choose to do without these things. I don't because like, I don't need to.
Climate change will not be solved by me moving into a tiny flat. It will be solved by the UK figuring out how not to use natural gas to heat my house.
In 40 years my kids will likely own houses and drive cars too. Unless they choose not to. I'd love them regardless, but would be a bit upset if they were to turn out to be far-left extremists.
Figuring out how to heat a country without gaz will be easier when there’s less volume to heat, and energy crisis in EU drive more non-far-left-extremist to see sobriety as an asset within the solution.
From my own country president (and he his quite right/liberal):
> We are living the end of abundance. […] Our system based on freedom in which we have become used to living, sometimes when we need to defend it, it can entail making sacrifices. [0]
[0] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/politics/article/2022/08/24/macron...
Macron is famously not doing any of this.
Is this really the kind of question you expect people to be asking themselves? Especially if they need to drive from London to Brighton and are really hungry?
Sure, if some kind of governmental oversight rationing your carbon output is introduced, where you must ask yourself these questions or else, then yes. But that would be such a bleak future...
Alternatively the government could just tax carbon emissions and let people make their own decisions about how to spend their money.
Then, I am sure, those taxes would just be part of the price tag. Just as tobacco duties are. In which case one wouldn't need to exercise their carbon literacy before buying a product, just as no-one needs to give a thought about tobacco duties before deciding whether to buy a pack of cigarettes.
And that means that ecology must be the top priority... just after personal comfort!
Which costs more, driving to Brighton or eating a steak?
Almost everyone in the UK could intuit this, they might have to look up the distance.
The thing is that the answer doesn't result in a person choosing one or the other unless they're really, really poor.
On a nice summers' day I might drive to Brighton and then eat a steak whilst I'm there.
Actually, probably I'd get the train so that I can have a few pints. Hey, there's a thought.
Oh, I agree with that; that's very relatable; but then, that's what being poor always has been like — prioritize, economize, save, think about whether you can afford that ride or that dinner... We didn't have to compound those basic arithmetics with an ethical dimension :-)
If you still want to eat that $40 steak and can pay up for it, go for it. There's no need to curtail individual freedom when there's a simple and easy solution out there: Just make everyone pay for not just their consumption, but also for the damage it is causing on top. Problem solved.
More like problem stated. Determining true ecological impact is not trivial even if you ignore all the perverse incentives.
The figure in this study sums it up pretty well, discussing what percentage of money and how much goes into each agricultural sector: https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/blog/meat-and-dairy-gobble...
To be frank, every country's subsidy ratio should look like India's in my eyes.
But it wasn't taxes that squashed cigarettes usage. Cigarettes were already taxed heavily, but that didn't put people off. What squashed it was marginalising it. It was banned from indoor places and many public spaces. They were no longer allowed to advertise, even to the extent that they can't display fancy logos and colours on the boxes. It was essentially stripped of all glamorous elements and was laid bare as the unhealthy, disgusting and archaic habit that it is.
Advertising and marketing are extremely powerful and therefore can be extremely evil. Cigarettes were the most perfectly marketable product of the tobacco industry. The way they looked and felt was so perfectly appealing. It's easy to look back and see the marketing as evil now. What's not so easy is looking forward.
I want to see the same treatment applied to other harmful things. Why are fast food companies allowed to advertise everywhere? Obesity is essentially food addiction. Nobody wants to be obese. They are obese because they are addicted to food. But we still allow fast food advertising everywhere. It's nothing short of exploitative.
Car companies are allowed to market their vehicles as an extension of one's self. So they can produce ridiculously overweight and overpowered vehicles by appealing to the insecure male part of the population with names like "Ram", "Viper" and "Raptor". Large vehicles need to be strictly utilitarian. Need a large vehicle? Fine, but it's going to look like a white box and be called something like "Cargo Master" or maybe just "Van size 2". Also they should be banned from car parks and smaller roads that are designed for cars or smaller vehicles.
I mean, in a vox pop interview sense the average bloke on the street might not.
But I'd just figure - ok, the fuel to drive to Brighton and back is about £15 (and there's a ton of fuel duty on that), a steak is about £5-15 depending on quality, they're probably both about the same order of magnitude on carbon, and splitting hairs further than that doesn't make sense.
If I knew that a steak had 5x the emissions of the drive or vice versa, what would I do differently?
If the idea is that people should sit down and think "do I really need to go to Brighton" or "do I really need to eat that steak", then that's not about a numerical comparison, it's about adopting a lifestyle of ascetism.
edit: looked it up, 1kg of beef is about 50-100kg co2 equiv so a 250g steak is about 12.5-25kg, most cars get about 100g/km so a Brighton round trip is approx 15kg equiv.
With all of the uncertainty involved (probably should include production and maintenance on the car) they're about the same, which is intuitively reasonable.
Drink for though.
As for the US military polluting too much, that's a political issue and the US citizens obligation to fix. If you don't think you should do something because someone else is worse, I'll remind you that there's almost always a bigger fish. The US military pollution itself is a mere fraction of what China's power grid is using, so why should they bother to change anything until China improves it's own power production either?
That would be a very wise conclusion too, given the sham that modern "represenative" democracy has been...
There have been entire eras without democracy when being gay was acceptable or even consider just fine (at different city-states in ancient Greece for one). And there have been democracies were gays have been repressed.
All the examples you gave are about small minorities too, which is not the thing that democracy focuses on in the first place. Those more about changing cultural norms and morals, which can then be encoded into policy, with or without a democratic vote. The same things can happen under any sham democracy or even dictatorship. In the latter it can also just be a official decree. For example, as for "access to gender reassignment surgery" you know that has been a thing in Iran for decades, for example, right?
A lot of these policy changes can also be used as a cultural side show (the "culture wars") to mask the lack of democratic policy in areas that affect everybody, and were those in power have actual interests, such as the economy, foreign policy, surveillance, police brutality, jobs, and so on.
I agree with you here. But do you really want to reach for the economy and police systems to justify how ineffective representative democracies have been since their mass adoption over a century ago?
And in many ways we're in a more police-heavy system today than over a century ago.
I get that you don't want to do anything, but you can just choose to do that, you know? You don't need to justify it at all, you have every right to simply do as you wish, at least for the moment.
So that means that my small country of 10 million people is completely free to burn diesel and gasoline and coal as it wishes, but anyone living in China must be severely restricted to only use renewables just because they happen to live in a country with a large population, despite the fact that who put all the current carbon in the atmosphere which is causing the crisis were the small European countries like my own, over more than a century, together with the big brother the USA and its oil thirsty economies? Even today we're still the largest emitters, but feel arrogant enough to tell developing countries they must contribute as much as we do to fix our own freaking mess?! This dumb ass view of the world needs to stop.
That one is easy: because the USA (and Europe) have been the ones who pumped nearly all of the carbon that's screwing us up now for the last 100 years or so. If you take the accumulated amount of carbon emissions, I am sure you'll arrive at the conclusion that China must not be blamed for the current crisis (you can only accuse China of not helping solve the mess caused by others - which is valid but something else altogether).
Not to mention that, on a per-capita basis which is what matters when you want to blame people for using too much carbon, China is still much lower than the USA... in fact the USA is off the charts per-capita compared to even the most modern other economies.
If you don't want to do anything then don't, as far as I care that's entirely within your rights, just don't justify it by pointing to other people or organizations that are worse then you, because they can inevitably do the same to someone else. I really don't care about people doing nothing to solve an issue, but I certainly won't play defence for people who do nothing about the problem while feeling good about because they pinned it all on someone else. Either work on the problem or move on to something else, listening to you whine about how terrible other people you have no impact on are isn't doing anything for anyone.
The contribution of several million people making big sacrifices to reduce their output pales compared with just one of such rich actors.
1) Carbon accounting is extremely challenging even for teams of experts who dedicate a lot of time and effort to it, and even then the results are often contested.
2) If we're not at net negative carbon emissions by 2050 we're in deep trouble, and no amount of personal piety will fix things.
That's not a given. Considering we can predict the havoc climate change will wreak, smart people will have adapted in times, while idiots will have been crying around about the world refusing to go back to pre-industrial age.
Progress is not about limiting consumption of energy, it's finding better sources of energy. It's not reducing consumption of material, it's exploiting materials better, and finding better materials.
Progress is not about driving shame, guilt and morals into peoples head, it's driving it out and have honest and open discussions.
If someone who bought a $300 steak bought a $10 steak, then someone else can't burn as much energy to sustain their lifestyle. Of course, the energy would be reallocated to someone else - but at the end of the day we do get a rough proxy of where the energy is going from the price of things.
It is something of a tautology. Prices represent resource allocation, and the major resource we have is energy which comes from fossil fuel. Prices all but have to reflect where the energy goes.
In 2020 we expect our 2050 fellows to be bean counting.
How is that solar shade coming along?
Take that, sinful consumption!
Case in point: air conditioning in cities. One would think that with enough units and energy everyone would be comfortable.
But what about those who are outside? They get blasted with all that heat. We could build pipes or enormous fans to transfer it out, but that is also not ideal.
Ultimately where there's energy, there's also waste energy and too much of it in one place is bad, so it makes sense to use less of it for the sake of avoiding such issues.
(All of this probably assumes too much business as usual in 2050. It looks increasingly unlikely we will get there without inventing recursively self-improving artificial intelligence, abandoning the pre-AI course of history.)
In additions, the recent revelations about how USA's ecological norms led to ever larger, power- and fuel-hungry vehicles effectively multiplies the USA's claims of ecological awareness by zero.
Inevitably humanity will settle back down into a sustainable consumer cycle that does not squander virgin materials or wrappings which persist beyond the consumer’s lifetime. Perhaps when they are made to.
In the meanwhile, too big to fail, we lumber on. Plundering what remains unguarded by modern complicity.
Use what you need, don’t be a waste.
CO2 is the least worrying chemical we release into the air. From environmental point of view, plants prefer higher CO2, and rising CO2 is actually likely to do more good than harm to ecosystems.
It's not out of love to nature that this climate movement is driven, it is out of hatred to other fellow humans. If the environment was really the main concern, CO2 wouldn't be viewed as a negative. If humans were the main concern, the movement wouldn't do so much harm to humans and consistently suggest depopulation. The only conclusion is that the true motive behind it is human hatred.
The same elite hatred of the common people. The hatred that they must have to live without being ashamed for their actions and lack of compassion.
Make sure you put that plastic bottle in the recycling (never mind that the vast majority of it isn't going to be recycled anyway). Oh, ignore those new coal power plants, ignore us restricting green investments, ignore us lobbying to keep fossil fuels around for longer.
The climate change movement is good for humanity. Corporate media are, and have always been, trying to co-opt it.
Correct.
>rising CO2 is actually likely to do more good than harm to ecosystems.
Incorrect. There's many cases where this clearly outweights the benefits, such as the acidification of the ocean, but also general disruptions of the ecosystems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CO2_Coalition
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fer...
The reason we care about CO2 really is for our own long term comfort. Humanity as a specie will be fine too, but the people who will have to live through the consequence of climate change certainly won't enjoy that. Depopulation, for its supporters, is just a way to achieve the inevitable in a way that is not as bad as through famine and war for limited resources.
The answer the author expects is eating steak, because growing 1kg of beef makes the most carbon footprint in comparison to 1kg of other meats. But counting beef footprint in that way is not fair because most beef on the market had provided milk for some time before getting to market as meat.
Where did you get this data ? In my own experience this is not the case and a quick search seems to show the opposite [0] :
> 21 percent of the commercial beef supply in the US comes from dairy cows.
That being said cows are grown for meat here - just not for domestic consumption.