I feed birds. It's just amazing watching them eating and drinking water.
Everyone demands rights but not many care about the responsibilities like taking care of nature. Sad reality
Everyone demands rights but not many care about the responsibilities like taking care of nature. Sad reality
And if you want to do something good for birds, ideally you do something good for insects.
Otherwise it strongly depends what kinds of birds you feed.
I think a reasonable reading of the first comment understood all that.
Our farming practices (deforestation, pesticide/herbicide use, insect die offs ...) and diet preferences are driving many species, including birds, to extinction.
We could significantly reduce the damage by restructuring our diets; however, not many people seem to care about that.
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26231772/
Biodiversity conservation: The key is reducing meat consumption
https://www.birdlife.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/SOWB2022...
1 in 8 bird species is facing extinction
https://www.salon.com/2020/08/18/the-pesticide-that-caused-b...
The pesticide that caused bee colonies to collapse is killing birds now
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2023/april/almost-half-o...
Almost half of all UK bird species in decline
https://emagazine.com/bird-population-declines/
Bird Populations Declining Fast Across North America
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/2-out-of-3-north-american-...
2 out of 3 North American bird species face extinction
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2216573120
Farmland practices are driving bird population decline across Europe
This avoids having to convince people to deny themselves their preferred foods, and arguably, reduce their quality of life, to protect natural habitats. It's a better strategy for both humanity and nature.
I’m curious what you think of that paper and what it would change about your suggested solution.
At civilizational-scales, it's doable.
So is abolishment of animal agriculture subsidies and large scale afforestation projects.
In the end nothing will get done.
As for convincing governments to protect more forests: that be will be vastly easier if abundant energy and a multitude of vertical farms makes horizontal farms less competitive in the market, and results in a situation where protecting forests won't come at the expense of the income/purchasing-power of citizens.
Without subsidies animal ag is deeply unprofitable. Removing them and taxing the negative externalities "properly" would mean the price of such products would be a multiple of what it's now, so it would be out of reach for most of the population.
> that be will be vastly easier if abundant energy
Yes, it would. But we don't have it at the moment, and it will require a lot of fossil fuels and time to get there.
At the same time EROI of fossil fuels is falling down. It's at 5 IIRC, down from more that 100+ at the start of the previous century - meaning that previously for every 1 barrel of oil invested into extraction you'd get 100-150 barrels back, now it's about 5 barrels. Soon it could become unprofitable to extract more oil, as it would cost more energy to get it out of the ground that what would be gained, no matter how much is still in the ground.
There is no history of consumption being artificially restricted at a global scale. A few socialist countries have managed it, and everyone there wants to escape.
In an era of exponentially expanding abilities, we should be massively increasing clean energy output through technologies like nuclear reactors.
Note that nobody in this conversation has disagreed about the virtues of building more nuclear power. The observation is solely that you’re asking for something that’s substantially harder than anything else humanity has ever done while handwaving everything else away. That just isn’t good argumentation.
>The observation is solely that you’re asking for something that’s substantially harder than anything else humanity has ever done while handwaving everything else away. That just isn’t good argumentation.
I think mass-production of nuclear reactors and vertical farms (to give a couple of examples) is substantially easier and more realistic than coordinating global caps and reductions in consumptions through mandatory limits on private industries and citizens.
No, we're not. We can't increase consumption indefinitely in a finite environment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overshoot_(population)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity#Recent_Warni...
> no history of consumption being artificially restricted at a global scale
There have never been 8 billion people on the planet.
> we should be massively increasing clean energy
Agree, but that alone won't solve it.
We are nowhere near the limits of the finite environnment. Once we reach those limits, growth will naturally slow and stop, with no activism required.
>There have never been 8 billion people on the planet.
With that many people, it's even harder to coordinate a unanimous reduction in meat consumption.
>Agree, but that alone won't solve it.
Why won't an increase clean energy production alone solve it?
Yes, you're true. We're so far behind them we can't see the line anymore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity#Humans (read it)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity#/media/File:...
> Once we reach those limits, growth will naturally slow and stop
It's already stopping. What comes next is the rapid decline of the carrying capacity of the environment and the collapse of the species dependent on that environment.
> With that many people, it's even harder to coordinate a unanimous reduction in meat consumption
No, see my previous comment. Every country on earth has animal ag subsidies, although animal ag is a leading driver of deforestation, biodiversity loss, atmospheric pollution (15-25%), eutrophication, soil erosion, and overfishing, all things that dangerously degrade our likelihood to survive. It's more bad then people usually realize.
There's already 80% less insects (in last 25 years), and 90% of sharks are missing (meaning the collapse of fishing populations is on the horizon). Animal populations experience average decline of almost 70% since 1970.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/13/almost-7...
More losers than winners: investigating Anthropocene defaunation through the diversity of population trends
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/brv.12974
> Why won't an increase clean energy production alone solve it?
The climate crisis and biodiversity crisis can't be approached separately
https://phys.org/news/2023-04-climate-crisis-biodiversity-ap...
UN Report: Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’
https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/natur...
+ thousands of similar studies
Your analysis underestimates the adaptability and technological capabilities of human civilization. We can continue to expand even as the natural ecosystem is destroyed.
So a better way to protect natural environments, than pushing for reductions and caps on consumption, is to provide an alternative path for development that protects the environment while allowing even more economic growth.
And that's supposed to be a good thing?
> We can continue to expand even as the natural ecosystem is destroyed
No, without the ecosystem we're done. Not much of it remains.
> is to provide an alternative path for development that protects the environment while allowing even more economic growth
Not enough time before last pieces are gone.
What's about the economic growth that you find so valuable? Don't you see that money are just stupid tokens in a very stupid game? That the economy is rigged? That healthy environment is much more valuable than ... what? Tons of plastic everywhere and elevator music in a supermarket? Do you have children? How do you explain to them that we don't have forests and wild animals anymore because you've loved burgers and big cars too much? But honey look how rich I got. You'd really rather have blade runner than star trek future?
You win. This I cannot comprehend. Over and out.
It negates the appeal you could make to people that their standard of living will decline unless they accept steep cuts now. If people's consumption can grow in the face of ecological disaster, then there's nothing to suggest it won't continue to grow as the natural environment continued to be paved over.
>>Not enough time before last pieces are gone.
I think it will take less time than convincing all the major economies to institute caps on meat eating.
I'm not saying that the environment should not be protected. I'm arguing that the most effective path for doing that is to go full bore toward expanding the production of clean energy, especially from the source that seem the most capable of fully replacing baseline fossil fuel based power plants, which is nuclear reactors.
It should not be a choice between consumption and the environment. I consider both to be good things, all other things being equal, and I would like to see both maximized. High levels of production/consumption means more enjoyable lives with more opportunity, and lower poverty.
I'm vegan ... my quality of life isn't lower because of it.
When people switch, they realize they've been taking something that wasn't theirs in the first place.
> it will take less time than convincing all the major economies to institute caps on meat eating
We'll see.
> High levels of production/consumption means more enjoyable lives
70% of people in US are on antidepressants.
High consumption != more enjoyable lives
> High levels of production
Production is not just and only energy.
High levels of production = more destruction (mining), more pollution (almost always), more exploitation
> more opportunity, and lower poverty
Degrowth, basic income, free housing & healthcare. Problem solved.
If you're making a reference to the life of the farm animal: that's an entirely different argument.
Right now we're debating whether natural habitats can be protected while current consumption patterns are maintained and ramped up.
>High consumption != more enjoyable lives
1. High consumption means less death. Per capita production/consumption is strongly correlated with life expectancy.
2. People consistently choose high consumption when given a choice, so even if you want to use a definitin of happiness that is not aligned with the way of life people choose, the fact remains that high consumption is the preferred way of life, as expressed by people's choices.
>High levels of production = more destruction (mining), more pollution (almost always), more exploitation
There is asteroid mining and recycling as alternatives to mining the Earth's crust. The damage of mining can also be reduced with precision techniques and through rehabilitation of old mines.
Another possibility is to compensate for the damage done by a mine by artificially enhancing other habitats to make them more vital, e.g. use some of the revenue generated by a mine to create an artificial lake to create more wetlands, to make up for the environmental damage done by the mine.
>Degrowth, basic income, free housing & healthcare. Problem solved.
The world doesn't produce enough to provide every one with a basic income that provides a high quality of life and good housing.
We need far more production for that. And you can see that for yourself by just looking at the global per capita GDP and seeing that it's ~$18,000, and then looking up to see what goods/services that level of income can afford each person.
And innovation to invent new healthcare technologies that can end the scourge of cancer, heart disease and other major illness is proportional to the productivity of human civilization.
Raising productivity is a moral imperative. The degrowth ideological narrative is utterly baseless in its economic rationale.
That's not an argument, that's just a remark.
> Right now we're debating whether natural habitats can be protected while current consumption patterns are maintained and ramped up
Not with animal agriculture in the world we have (population growth, developing regions, overshoot, existing levels of deforestation and biodiversity loss etc.).
> high consumption is the preferred way of life, as expressed by people's choices
I don't think people have much choice to live how they'd like. Their choices are being forced by the system. Many would choose something else if it was possible.
> The world doesn't produce enough to provide every one with a basic income that provides a high quality of life and good housing
> per capita GDP and seeing that it's ~$18,000
If we're discussing UBI and degrowth, we must consider abolishing money as we know it now for various reasons.
Firstly, economics is not what most people think it is; it's a pseudoscience with imprecise models that often ignore negative externalities, such as environmental impacts, GDP is a meaningless metric, and the entire financial system is rigged.
Why is it rigged? A significant portion of the money in the economy is credit/debt, created by banks when someone takes out a loan. There is a premium on this money that must be paid, usually a few percent every year, and this leads to exponential growth. However, exponential growth is unsustainable in a finite environment like ours. While space and other planets might be options in the future, currently, this planet is all we have.
Around 40-70% of people are employed in bullshit jobs. These jobs are unnecessary or even harmful, consuming resources for commuting and job-related needs. People are forced to pretend they contribute just to secure a place to live and food in their fridge.
> to provide every one with a basic income that provides a high quality of life and good housing
Yet (almost) nobody dies of hunger (in our countries, anyway, nor should they) and (almost) everyone has a roof over his head, when the day ends. It's all a matter of distribution. We already produce enough food for 10B people, and e.g. US has enough free flats for every homeless person (and then some).
The problem is distribution, nothing else. Money doesn't work well in this regard.
> innovation to invent new healthcare technologies that can end the scourge of cancer, heart disease and other major illness is proportional to the productivity
Scientists would still work even with UBI. Doctors would too, as well as teachers and artists. They are all motivated by factors other than money. And they would be compensated too.
Currently, only 2% of people are employed in agriculture (and provide food for the 98%). However, even if we needed 6% for a more sustainable plant-based agricultural food production, under UBI, we could find individuals who would be happy to move from meaningless jobs to work in nature. People are not doing this now because they need to sustain themselves, and the current system doesn't allow for it. Money is not an accurate measure of value; we learned this when the COVID-19 pandemic began, and we realized that some sectors are more valuable than their compensation suggests.
Other sectors would also require people to work, and there would be different incentives, such as societal appreciation, travel credits, or the opportunity to switch from an apartment to a house with a bigger garden. We would find suitable motivations for individuals to contribute to these sectors.
> Raising productivity is a moral imperative
Degrowth is a moral imperative. Wait. You've been talking about production/consumption earlier, now about productivity. Those are not the same things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_overshoot#/media/Fi...
This is how we're utilizing earth resources now. We're currently consuming 1.7 earth resources every year (overshootday.org). And you'd like to step on the gas?
> The degrowth ideological narrative is utterly baseless in its economic rationale
No, it's the current system that is broken and wrong.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...
Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist
https://libcom.org/article/phenomenon-bullshit-jobs-david-gr...
On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs - David Graeber
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income
Not this very instant of course, but nothing on that scale—including your plan of capping/reducing meat consumption—can be done in an instant.
A transition to mass-nuclear-power and vertical farms would dramatically reduce the damage human civilization does to natural habitats while enabling massively more consumption.
>I don't think people have much choice to live how they'd like.
People having a choice between more consumption and less consumption is ubiquitous, and people almost always choose the former, because it almost always confers a higher standard of living.
This idea that you have that a higher standard of living is possible with less consumption shows your ideas are removed from reality.
>If we're discussing UBI and degrowth, we must consider abolishing money as we know it now for various reasons.
I was using money as a yardstick for the value of economic resources consumed by each individual. If we eliminated money and moved to the Communism that it is now apparent you support, the economy would collapse, and we'd see mass-impoverishment.
Money enables far more sophisticated economic coordination than would otherwise be possible. It is one of the important innovations in human history:
https://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/rob/Courses/InformationInSpeech/C...
>Firstly, economics is not what most people think it is; it's a pseudoscience with imprecise models that often ignore negative externalities, such as environmental impacts, GDP is a meaningless metric, and the entire financial system is rigged.
Conspiracy theories like this form the basis of any fringe movement.
>Why is it rigged? A significant portion of the money in the economy is credit/debt, created by banks when someone takes out a loan.
This is a misguided trope. Money is created by issuing credit against real world assets, like houses. This enables larger-scale economic coordination as people with surplus resources are able to invest those resources in enterprises in need of resources that raise future productivity.
>Around 40-70% of people are employed in bullshit jobs. These jobs are unnecessary or even harmful, consuming resources for commuting and job-related needs.
These are speculative theories, and on the basis of this speculation, you're making massive leaps of logic about how the world works.
Next time you advocate a reduction in meat eating, you should disclose the fact that your advocacy is premised on conspiracy theories and radical social plans, like economics being a pseudoscience used to legitimize exploitation, and eliminating money and substituting it with central economic planning bureaus being the best way forward, respectively.
People deserve to know that the basis of the changes you advocate are fringe theories utterly rejected by mainstream Economics.
>Yet (almost) nobody dies of hunger (in our countries, anyway, nor should they) and (almost) everyone has a roof over his head, when the day ends. It's all a matter of distribution.
People die from the daily grind associated with privation, in the form of non-existent or sub-standard housing, processed low-nutrition food, or the long-commutes and physically punishing jobs needed to avoid that privation.
>The problem is distribution, nothing else.
A portion of goods produced will always be lost to waste. Your solution of nationalizing all production in the name of better distribution would still have sources of waste, and it would destroy the complex interconnected web of private arrangements that incentivize and sustain both production and the investment needed to maintain and expand the capital stock that enables current productivity levels.
>>>innovation to invent new healthcare technologies that can end the scourge of cancer, heart disease and other major illness is proportional to the productivity
>>Scientists would still work even with UBI. Doctors would too, as well as teachers and artists. They are all motivated by factors other than money. And they would be compensated too.
You need to learn basic economics. The reason we have a much larger population, and a much higher proportion of the population able to work in non-primary-production, in pursuits like medicine and scientific research, today, than we did 5,000 years ago, is higher levels of production, and higher levels of per capita productivity.
Productivity maps directly to the resources expended on innovation
>Currently, only 2% of people are employed in agriculture (and provide food for the 98%). However, even if we needed 6% for a more sustainable plant-based agricultural food production, under UBI, we could find individuals who would be happy to move from meaningless jobs to work in nature.
Jobs exist because they are needed. You over-simplify how an economy works and assume you could just eliminate entire categories of jobs that a naive observer might assume are useless—like say insurance brokers—without dire consequences for the economy.
People are not going to pursue the plans you envision. They have their own interests that they pursue. When governments prohibit gambling, illicit gambling emerges with corrupt government officials and organized crime controlling it, and that new substitute systems generates far more negative externalities that siphon off resources from pursuits that improve human civilization, like science and engineering.
This kind of unintended consequence from utopianist social re-engineering plans is the rule, and the reason socialist/communist economies so under-performed relative to ones based on people being free in the market secure in their ownership over their private property.
UBI funded out of an income tax is an overly simplistic formula that not only adversely affects incentives, but also becomes increasingly better gamed over time, leading to competitive energies being diverted to economically wasteful activities like tax avoidance (which is an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars per year now).
>People are not doing this now because they need to sustain themselves, and the current system doesn't allow for it.
The "current system" is just the physical reality that people need to produce economic resources in order to be able to consume economic resources.
The alternative to people coordinating through voluntary contracts that leverage commodities like money to achieve production is everyone being subordinated to a simplistic plan imposed on every one, where incentives to manage resources carefully due to private ownership are eliminated, and have to be substituted with people's supposed altruism.
There's a reason why a significant fraction of the food generated in the USSR came from the small portion of land the government set aside for private ownership. Private ownership lends to a vastly more effective economy than any other paradigm.
Our civilization is an extemely complex system.
I appreciate it as much as you do, but its negative externalities endanger both our continued existence and the health of our environment.
The system's rules also harbor numerous inefficiencies and injustices.
You might not agree, but I believe we should address as many of these issues as we can, and do so urgently.
You might feel that minor adjustments to the system are sufficient or that technological progress will eventually provide solutions.
I'm genuinely concerned that such an approach isn't feasible. From my perspective, we need to overhaul the system's rules and reboot it.
Anything less is superficial and inadequate. It might postpone the inevitable decline, but eventually, it will crumble, much like Rome or a Jenga tower.
If you can move beyond the beliefs like the "current system is an immutable physical reality and best possible version" and "anything other than capitalism equals communism," and start to consider even a fraction of the challenges we face — delving deeper and aiming for the system's ideal state (while being wary of local optima) — you'll realize that transformative changes are crucial.
I studied economics in college long time ago and now view much of it as a safeguard, an upholder of status quo, as overly simplistic, even naive. I've lived in both socialism and capitalism, and each of those systems has its own, serious problems. I don't claim to have all the answers, but I'm convinced that addressing the systemic issues is the key to resolving our problems.
I wish I had the time to write a more concise or refined comment. I'm sorry, but unfortunately, I don't. Thank you for the discussion.
Report: https://www.unep.org/resources/emissions-gap-report-2022
As growing climate change impacts are experienced across the globe, the message that greenhouse gas emissions must fall is unambiguous. Yet the Emissions Gap Report (EGR) 2022: The Closing Window – Climate crisis calls for rapid transformation of societies finds that the international community is falling far short of the Paris goals, with no credible pathway to 1.5°C in place. Only an urgent system-wide transformation can avoid climate disaster.
Those (if you want the latter at a survivable level, without some kind of coercion for the able to work with UBI removing the normal financial coercion of capitalist economy) are mutually incompatible.
If you want a viable strong safety net, especially with UBI, you can’t have degrowth.
You mean vertical farms like this one (or soon two)?
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/25/chinas-2...
> We could raise consumption while expanding the area of protected wetlands
There are many more problems with animal ag, not just the area.
Climate change, resource depletion, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, pollution, overpopulation, soil erosion, and overfishing are all symptoms of ecological overshoot. Agriculture is a key culprit in 5 out of 7 of those symptoms, and animal ag accounts for 80% of all agriculture.
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/917471
Feeding 10 billion people by 2050 within planetary limits may be achievable
A global shift towards healthy and more plant-based diets, halving food loss and waste, and improving farming practices and technologies are required to feed 10 billion people sustainably by 2050, a new study finds.
Most of those are area-related. If we didn't need to cover so much of the planet with crops grown to be feedstock for farm animals, those problems would vanish.
We don't need to cover ...
We could switch to plant based diets and free upto 80% of all agriculture lands, some 35% of habitable earth, the area a size of Africa, and reforest/rewild that.
That's probably the only feasible option we have at this moment to stop us from environmental collapse.
Your solution is technological in nature. While theoretically possible, it doesn't meet the timescale and amount required.
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectare. This large reduction of agricultural land use would be possible thanks to a reduction in land used for grazing and a smaller need for land to grow crops.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26231772/
Biodiversity conservation: The key is reducing meat consumption
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-63657-6
Calculations show that, maintaining the actual rate of population growth and resource consumption, in particular forest consumption, we have a few decades left before an irreversible collapse of our civilisation. Making the situation even worse, we stress once again that it is unrealistic to think that the decline of the population in a situation of strong environmental degradation would be a non-chaotic and well-ordered decline. This consideration leads to an even shorter remaining time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overshoot_(population)
Climate change, resource depletion, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, pollution, overpopulation, soil erosion, and overfishing are all symptoms of ecological overshoot.
Soil erosion -> agriculture
Pollution -> farm runoff, eutrophication, pesticides/herbicides, greenhouse gases ...
Climate change -> CO2 + methane + N20 -> 15-26% from agriculture
Overfishing -> Empty seas in 2040's -> veganism
Deforestation & biodiversity loss -> mainly driven by agriculture -> 80% of agriculture is animal ag (pastures) -> veganism
Mass-production is something human civilization has proven adept at, and mass-deployment of nuclear power plants and vertical farms requires only that.
This could easily be solved by removing animal ag subsidies and with taxing of negative externalities.
That's one law, the market (= higher prices) will take care of the rest.
> people in the developing world are consuming more meat as their incomes rise
I'm aware :) However, that made sense when there were 1 B of humans, not when our needs overshoot the environmental capacity of our environment. If everyone ate like we westerners do (and they will want to, when we still do) then we'd need something like 4-5 earths to sustain everyone.
> mass-deployment of nuclear power plants and vertical farms requires only that
Sure, but that means a lot of resources (oil, for example) and further destruction of the environment (mining, built-up areas), and a large timescale.
Abolishment of animal ag subsidies is a piece of paper and few signatures.
Considering how strong people's preference for meat are, you could raise prices and inevitably demand will start growing again when incomes rise sufficiently.
>>Sure, but that means a lot of resources (oil, for example) and further destruction of the environment (mining, built-up areas), and a large timescale.
The resources needed to build those out will be more than made up for by the resources saved from switching to an abundant non-CO2/pollutant emitting energy system.
We could just stop massively subsidizing things like corn and meat.
The easiest way is to just freeze them and let inflation remove them; nobody will intentionally start farming corn if the subsidy remained at the original dollar amount.
How so??
To prevent that, the government tries to convince farmers NOT to grow whatever crop they think there will be too much of, and pays them to fallow fields.
It's memed as "paid not to farm" but it's much more complicated than that, and it's not a guaranteed money-maker (seen by the absolute demise of the small farm over the last 50 years).
Why would we do that instead of buy the soybeans at market rates and then send them to countries as aid?
The latter is done for some products in various ways but that's a more fine-grained solution (which destroys poor countries agriculture entirely, which is another horror story).
Government Cheese™ literally comes from the government buying up milk and having to do SOMETHING with it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_cheese
When food is scarce (winter) it may be a different story, though. And water fountains in the summer are good not only for the birds, but for other wildlife as well.