8 ms·

Agreed, but I believe we can act about it. My environmental fingerprint is probably <5% of average first-world countries people, I don't consume much, food mos

Agreed, but I believe we can act about it. My environmental fingerprint is probably <5% of average first-world countries people, I don't consume much, food mostly obviously, and local one, mostly vegs/fruits according to the season. no car, no pets, not a smoker, working remotely, avoiding trips as much as possible. I try to save wild life as much as possible, on every possible occasion, even if it's just moving a dead one off the road, in a better place. At a single person level, these actions looks insignificant, but if everyone does it, it won't be since the major source of pollution is residential pollution, i.e. people, and the other sources of pollution (industry, large-scale transports...) are also driven by consumption. So if people stop over-consuming, this saves dramatically our planet, and our sibling animals. Of course governments need to foster this change

pfisch 8y ago
If everyone did that it would cause an economic collapse. Do you know what happens when there is an economic collapse? Fascists take over. Trump is just a small taste of that, and he is president because white middle class people are facing economic hardships. If it gets worse the leaders we have will become more extreme. I don't understand how none of you environmentalists can realize that if you had your way with your extreme proposals like reducing everyone's environmental footprint by 95% it would backfire incredibly hard and would result in a strong man taking power and possibly a genocide. Do you not realize how delicate our government is? When there is extreme economic hardship it pushes the government to the brink of collapse and people always turn to awful leaders. It has happened throughout history at least dozens of times.
- yardie 8y ago
  So your solution is to simply do nothing. It might offend some voters’ sense of entitlement. That things aren’t the same as they were 30 years ago. We could do it the hard way. When ocean levels rise the coastal house market will collapse. Water will become scarce as aquifers get spoiled by salt. And climate patterns are certainly changing. Places that used to get an abundance of rain are already facing a drought. But some douchebag in a bro-dozer is certainly sticking it to the rich.
  - nf05papsjfVbc 8y ago
    My apologies for going off track, but your last statement reminds me of how "The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy" begins.
  - pfisch 8y ago
    > So your solution is to simply do nothing. I never said that. I said implementing extreme solutions like a 95% cut to everyone's carbon footprint are a terrible idea. Also we are most likely talking about like a 0.5-2 ft rise maybe over the next 30 years. That is not exactly a "day after tomorrow" panic situation. The coastal real estate economy can deflate over 30 years.
- rebuilder 8y ago
  That's a big problem for sure. Unfortunately, the collapse we'll get if we do not rapidly transition to a sustainable economy is likely to be much, much worse. But your point is a good one - how do we manage an orderly transition to a sustainable steady-state* economy when the changes needed to do so in the time we have are likely to be so drastic, they will cause a collapse of any social system that tries to make them? *We can probably eke out some more economic growth while cutting resource consumption, but sooner or later continued growth and finite resources become an impossibility. If nothing else, we'll eventually generate too much waste heat from energy production.
- empath75 8y ago
  If we all suffocate because the phytoplankton died off, I’m sure the history books will note that we freely voted for mass suicide.
  - tzakrajs 8y ago
    There are enough sadists that I wouldn’t rule out a homicide yet.
- nobodyandproud 8y ago
  It doesn't have to be this way. We utilize automation and slave-like labor to produce disposal junk. It would be much better if via policy we encourage repairs, and levy a cost on packaging of any kind. Then the market will sort itself out and there will be work in form of a robust secondary market.
- wmeredith 8y ago
  In the most practical terms, wouldn’t a first-world genocide be good* for the environment? I mean, the problem is us, right? *I am not personally endorsing genocide.
  - quantum_magpie 8y ago
    Yes, world-wide genocide would be amazing for the environment.
- chimprich 8y ago
  It seems to be quite well established that not dealing with climate change is going to be significantly more expensive than taking preventative action. So your arguments about economic hardship and the associated problems are (if valid) really arguments for taking more drastic action against the problem.
  - pfisch 8y ago
    > It seems to be quite well established that not dealing with climate change is going to be significantly more expensive than taking preventative action. Over what time period though? Projections are all over the place, and it is basically impossible to predict where our technology will be 20 years from now. Maybe moderate interdiction now on our part will stave off the worst of it until we discover technologies that will get us out of this jam.
    - chimprich 8y ago
      We haven't discovered any major technologies in the last 20 years that would make a significant difference; what makes you think the next 20 years would be any different? I'm confident we will make some gains in things like lower power consumption and better efficiency with renewables, but we're coming up against some hard physical limits; plus we are finding more toys all the time that demand more energy. The best chance of finding technological solutions is to pour money into researching clean technologies, which is not something I would be against, but it doesn't guarantee anything. Hoping for a technological solution in the future is a bit like spending all your money and taking out loans you are unable to pay in the uncertain hope of a windfall in the future.
tejohnso 8y ago
> My environmental fingerprint is probably <5% of average first-world countries people, I don't consume much, food mostly obviously, and local one, mostly vegs/fruits according to the season. no car, no pets, not a smoker, working remotely, avoiding trips as much as possible You forgot to mention the #1 (by far) contributor that is 20 to 50 times more significant than everything else you mentioned. > We recommend four widely applicable high-impact (i.e. low emissions) actions with the potential to contribute to systemic change and substantially reduce annual personal emissions: having one fewer child (an average for developed countries of 58.6 tonnes CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) emission reductions per year), living car-free (2.4 tCO2e saved per year), avoiding airplane travel (1.6 tCO2e saved per roundtrip transatlantic flight) and eating a plant-based diet (0.8 tCO2e saved per year). http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541 http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541
- dmichulke 8y ago
  That's recursive reasoning because a child also eats, travels by car and by airplane. It's also equivalent to saying: Kill yourself because you cause 58.6t CO2 (unless children cause more CO2 than adults which would be absurd because children don't take a lot of emission-relevant decisions)
  - drankula3 8y ago
    Limiting further population increase is in no way equivalent to saying kill yourself. This is a gross exaggeration.
    - dmichulke 8y ago
      I'm just saying it logically follows that killing yourself is likely even better than not having children. I consider it a failure of the study if it says "don't have kids" if (and only if) its original aim was to show how that can be done without drastic measures (such as "kill all humans", "don't have kids", ...). It's like suggesting to not have kids in order to fight cancer. Yes, absolute cancer occurrences will decrease if you don't have kids, yet we have not in any way addressed the underlying problem. EDIT: Previously I said "absolute cancer rates" where I should have said absolute cancer occurrences
Cthulhu_ 8y ago
If everyone does it, at best we'd get a 25% decline in emissions; the vast, VAST majority of emissions, global warming, pollution, etc is caused by industry, which in turn is controlled by governments. Some of them are doing something about it; this morning I heard the Dutch government is proposing a new emissions tax for industry: 45 euros per ton in 2021, raising by 2% annually to 80 euros per ton in 2050. Of course, the problem is that at the same time the government is subsidizing these very industries. But that's just a tiny country that's already doing very well in that regard; right next to us is Germany and the UK with their heavy industries. And the whole emissions of Europe is negligible compared to the US and China. Change won't come from individuals; it comes from politics. If you really care about the environment, you'll have much more influence if you become a politician instead of (or in addition to) a vegan.
- scatters 8y ago
  Industry exists to serve personal consumption. Other than a few percent of GDP spent on defense and national infrastructure, the remainder of emissions is ultimately the responsibility of the individuals whose consumption that activity enables. If everyone took full responsibility for their emissions including those intermediated through industry we could see a much larger reduction in emissions.
  - vharuck 8y ago
    Asking for people to individually change consumption habits, especially when it could put them at a disadvantage if others don't change, has repeatedly proven to be a bad solution. It's often better to use government as a focused effort to change things.
scott_s 8y ago
Local food is not necessarily more environmentally friendly. According to a paper on food transportation and reducing its carbon footprint, about 11% of typical US food consumption's carbon footprint comes from transportation [1]. If the food you're eating from the area you're in is not suited well for growing that kind of food, it's quite possible the local farmers are making more of a carbon impact versus growing it in a more suited area and shipping it. [1] "Food transportation issues and reducing carbon footprint", Wayne Wakeland , Susan Cholette , and Kumar Venkat. http://www.cleanmetrics.com/pages/Ch9_0923.pdf http://www.cleanmetrics.com/pages/Ch9_0923.pdf
- ryanmercer 8y ago
  Transporting food is a lot more than just fuel consumption, the farther you transport a given amount of food the greater your loss potential is to spoilage/contamination/infestation etc. It also promotes unsustainability, the US exports an insane amount of grain and imports nearly half of it's fruit for example, using land in America to feed livestock and people in China, Russia, India etc while eating fruit year round by importing it from Europe, Africa, Asia, South America, Australia, New Zealand etc.
- 11235813213455 8y ago
  local at country scale I meant (France or Italy which is near)

pfisch 8y ago

If everyone did that it would cause an economic collapse. Do you know what happens when there is an economic collapse? Fascists take over. Trump is just a small taste of that, and he is president because white middle class people are facing economic hardships. If it gets worse the leaders we have will become more extreme. I don't understand how none of you environmentalists can realize that if you had your way with your extreme proposals like reducing everyone's environmental footprint by 95% it would backfire incredibly hard and would result in a strong man taking power and possibly a genocide. Do you not realize how delicate our government is? When there is extreme economic hardship it pushes the government to the brink of collapse and people always turn to awful leaders. It has happened throughout history at least dozens of times.

yardie 8y ago
So your solution is to simply do nothing. It might offend some voters’ sense of entitlement. That things aren’t the same as they were 30 years ago. We could do it the hard way. When ocean levels rise the coastal house market will collapse. Water will become scarce as aquifers get spoiled by salt. And climate patterns are certainly changing. Places that used to get an abundance of rain are already facing a drought. But some douchebag in a bro-dozer is certainly sticking it to the rich.
- nf05papsjfVbc 8y ago
  My apologies for going off track, but your last statement reminds me of how "The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy" begins.
- pfisch 8y ago
  > So your solution is to simply do nothing. I never said that. I said implementing extreme solutions like a 95% cut to everyone's carbon footprint are a terrible idea. Also we are most likely talking about like a 0.5-2 ft rise maybe over the next 30 years. That is not exactly a "day after tomorrow" panic situation. The coastal real estate economy can deflate over 30 years.
rebuilder 8y ago
That's a big problem for sure. Unfortunately, the collapse we'll get if we do not rapidly transition to a sustainable economy is likely to be much, much worse. But your point is a good one - how do we manage an orderly transition to a sustainable steady-state* economy when the changes needed to do so in the time we have are likely to be so drastic, they will cause a collapse of any social system that tries to make them? *We can probably eke out some more economic growth while cutting resource consumption, but sooner or later continued growth and finite resources become an impossibility. If nothing else, we'll eventually generate too much waste heat from energy production.
empath75 8y ago
If we all suffocate because the phytoplankton died off, I’m sure the history books will note that we freely voted for mass suicide.
- tzakrajs 8y ago
  There are enough sadists that I wouldn’t rule out a homicide yet.
nobodyandproud 8y ago
It doesn't have to be this way. We utilize automation and slave-like labor to produce disposal junk. It would be much better if via policy we encourage repairs, and levy a cost on packaging of any kind. Then the market will sort itself out and there will be work in form of a robust secondary market.
wmeredith 8y ago
In the most practical terms, wouldn’t a first-world genocide be good* for the environment? I mean, the problem is us, right? *I am not personally endorsing genocide.
- quantum_magpie 8y ago
  Yes, world-wide genocide would be amazing for the environment.
chimprich 8y ago
It seems to be quite well established that not dealing with climate change is going to be significantly more expensive than taking preventative action. So your arguments about economic hardship and the associated problems are (if valid) really arguments for taking more drastic action against the problem.
- pfisch 8y ago
  > It seems to be quite well established that not dealing with climate change is going to be significantly more expensive than taking preventative action. Over what time period though? Projections are all over the place, and it is basically impossible to predict where our technology will be 20 years from now. Maybe moderate interdiction now on our part will stave off the worst of it until we discover technologies that will get us out of this jam.
  - chimprich 8y ago
    We haven't discovered any major technologies in the last 20 years that would make a significant difference; what makes you think the next 20 years would be any different? I'm confident we will make some gains in things like lower power consumption and better efficiency with renewables, but we're coming up against some hard physical limits; plus we are finding more toys all the time that demand more energy. The best chance of finding technological solutions is to pour money into researching clean technologies, which is not something I would be against, but it doesn't guarantee anything. Hoping for a technological solution in the future is a bit like spending all your money and taking out loans you are unable to pay in the uncertain hope of a windfall in the future.

tejohnso 8y ago

> My environmental fingerprint is probably <5% of average first-world countries people, I don't consume much, food mostly obviously, and local one, mostly vegs/fruits according to the season. no car, no pets, not a smoker, working remotely, avoiding trips as much as possible You forgot to mention the #1 (by far) contributor that is 20 to 50 times more significant than everything else you mentioned. > We recommend four widely applicable high-impact (i.e. low emissions) actions with the potential to contribute to systemic change and substantially reduce annual personal emissions: having one fewer child (an average for developed countries of 58.6 tonnes CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) emission reductions per year), living car-free (2.4 tCO2e saved per year), avoiding airplane travel (1.6 tCO2e saved per roundtrip transatlantic flight) and eating a plant-based diet (0.8 tCO2e saved per year). http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541 http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541

dmichulke 8y ago
That's recursive reasoning because a child also eats, travels by car and by airplane. It's also equivalent to saying: Kill yourself because you cause 58.6t CO2 (unless children cause more CO2 than adults which would be absurd because children don't take a lot of emission-relevant decisions)
- drankula3 8y ago
  Limiting further population increase is in no way equivalent to saying kill yourself. This is a gross exaggeration.
  - dmichulke 8y ago
    I'm just saying it logically follows that killing yourself is likely even better than not having children. I consider it a failure of the study if it says "don't have kids" if (and only if) its original aim was to show how that can be done without drastic measures (such as "kill all humans", "don't have kids", ...). It's like suggesting to not have kids in order to fight cancer. Yes, absolute cancer occurrences will decrease if you don't have kids, yet we have not in any way addressed the underlying problem. EDIT: Previously I said "absolute cancer rates" where I should have said absolute cancer occurrences

Cthulhu_ 8y ago

If everyone does it, at best we'd get a 25% decline in emissions; the vast, VAST majority of emissions, global warming, pollution, etc is caused by industry, which in turn is controlled by governments. Some of them are doing something about it; this morning I heard the Dutch government is proposing a new emissions tax for industry: 45 euros per ton in 2021, raising by 2% annually to 80 euros per ton in 2050. Of course, the problem is that at the same time the government is subsidizing these very industries. But that's just a tiny country that's already doing very well in that regard; right next to us is Germany and the UK with their heavy industries. And the whole emissions of Europe is negligible compared to the US and China. Change won't come from individuals; it comes from politics. If you really care about the environment, you'll have much more influence if you become a politician instead of (or in addition to) a vegan.

scatters 8y ago
Industry exists to serve personal consumption. Other than a few percent of GDP spent on defense and national infrastructure, the remainder of emissions is ultimately the responsibility of the individuals whose consumption that activity enables. If everyone took full responsibility for their emissions including those intermediated through industry we could see a much larger reduction in emissions.
- vharuck 8y ago
  Asking for people to individually change consumption habits, especially when it could put them at a disadvantage if others don't change, has repeatedly proven to be a bad solution. It's often better to use government as a focused effort to change things.

scott_s 8y ago

Local food is not necessarily more environmentally friendly. According to a paper on food transportation and reducing its carbon footprint, about 11% of typical US food consumption's carbon footprint comes from transportation [1]. If the food you're eating from the area you're in is not suited well for growing that kind of food, it's quite possible the local farmers are making more of a carbon impact versus growing it in a more suited area and shipping it. [1] "Food transportation issues and reducing carbon footprint", Wayne Wakeland , Susan Cholette , and Kumar Venkat. http://www.cleanmetrics.com/pages/Ch9_0923.pdf http://www.cleanmetrics.com/pages/Ch9_0923.pdf

ryanmercer 8y ago
Transporting food is a lot more than just fuel consumption, the farther you transport a given amount of food the greater your loss potential is to spoilage/contamination/infestation etc. It also promotes unsustainability, the US exports an insane amount of grain and imports nearly half of it's fruit for example, using land in America to feed livestock and people in China, Russia, India etc while eating fruit year round by importing it from Europe, Africa, Asia, South America, Australia, New Zealand etc.
11235813213455 8y ago
local at country scale I meant (France or Italy which is near)