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> In 2010, Norway pledged to support Indonesia with up to 1 billion USD depending on results. It's easy to sit in a developed western country, buying products
by maaaats 8y ago
> In 2010, Norway pledged to support Indonesia with up to 1 billion USD depending on results.
It's easy to sit in a developed western country, buying products from other countries, and then complain about their emissions. I'm glad that we're trying to be responsible. It may not be enough or not the right way to do it (some thoughts on this?), but it's something.
- StreamBright 8y agoThis is exactly what most Westerners do not get about China. If you want to reduce emissions stop buying their products.
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y agoAnd buy products from where instead? Is everything made in China uniformally disastrous for the environment? I was under the impression the easiest way for people, who live in developed nations, to reduce emissions is to eat less meat?
- XorNot 8y agoIt's less beef, specifically. On a practical level cutting out meat entirely can actually increase emissions because you can raise farm animals off of human inedible parts of plants like stems and other marginal food (i.e. parts we don't get any nutrition from). Beef however is one of the worst conversion methods in this regard, but animals like chickens and goats are quite efficient.
- est31 8y agoInsects are most efficient btw, but there are cultural reservations about them in the west.
- zcid 8y agoI looked into raising crickets, but most of my research suggested that they aren't any more efficient than chickens. It seems that a lot of the studies we currently have are poorly done or not transferable to mass production. In addition, the amount of extra work for processing crickets made the project less than optimal at least for a small operation.
- kibwen 8y agoIf Silicon Valley can propel nutrient sludge like Soylent into notoriety, then I'm sure it can do the same for cricket nuggets. :P
- renholder 8y ago>...like Soylent into notoriety... As long as it isn't green. =]
- benj111 8y agoDoesn't require Silicon Valley. Pink slime can now be sold as beef mince in the US. How hard do you think it would be to get powdered cricket labelled as 'protein enhancer' or some such? Plus people will happily eat things with cochineal [1] in it, so I can't see highly processed insect additives being a problem. Won't be called Cricket nuggets though. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochineal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochineal
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoThey could grow insects to process into unrecognisable "filler", right?
- int_19h 8y agoIt's already done, and has been for ages - dried crickets can be ground into "cricket flour". This takes care of the things crunching while you eat them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cricket_flour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cricket_flour
- 8y ago
- dh-g 8y agoComposting the waste is more efficient so it would be hard to see a net increase from the elimination of animal production.
- hannob 8y ago> And buy products from where instead? Buy less products overall. > I was under the impression the easiest way for people, who live in developed nations, to reduce emissions is to eat less meat? The most effective thing is probably less carbon intensive transport (that means first and foremost flying). But less meat (or better no meat) is still among the more impactful things.
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y agoAirliners get better fuel efficiency per mile per passenger than most single-occupant cars. The majority of people do not fly multiple times per week. Having said that, I do agree with the main thrust of your comment: consume less.
- kaybe 8y agoThey also don't drive several thousand or tens of thousand kilometers in one go once or more a year either in addition to the normal driving, so I'd say that argument is not helpful here.
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y agoThat’s a good point. I wonder how many people are willing to eat less beef vs how many are willing to give in their once a year or less long-haul-flight holiday.
- distances 8y agoThat's not how it'll work though. Do vegans get more flight allowances? Do people with kids have to forgo meat as well as vacations? Obviously no consumer choice driven solution is going to work. The costs have to be included in the goods and services if we want any actual reduction.
- lazyjones 8y ago> *Airliners get better fuel efficiency per mile per passenger than most single- http://www.greenrationbook.org.uk/resources/footprints-air-travel/ http://www.greenrationbook.org.uk/resources/footprints-air-t... seems to disagee. In fact, driving a typical car for one year produces less CO2 than one long-distance flight per passenger.
- adrianN 8y agoEating less meat is pretty high on the list [1]. But I think that for many people it is easier to buy less crap they don't really need, or to fix things instead of replacing them. Buying used instead of new is also an option. [1] https://www.drawdown.org/solutions https://www.drawdown.org/solutions
- kaybe 8y agoThe worst culprit for many people I know is flying. You can eat a lot of meat for the emissions of just one long-haul flight. (Which is sad because flying is great.)
- fghtr 8y agoReference: http://www.kimnicholas.com/uploads/2/5/7/6/25766487/fig1full.jpg http://www.kimnicholas.com/uploads/2/5/7/6/25766487/fig1full...
- Pelam 8y agoInteresting fact, jet powered short haul flights are worse per distance due to the fact that most energy is used in takeoff and landing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_aviation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_aviati... I also read somewhere that propeller based airplanes flying lower in the atmosphere would be better option for short haul flights.
- kaybe 8y agoI wonder what the difference between 'switch electric car to car free' and 'live carfree' is? The effect over time or not using rentals/other people's cars maybe?
- lotsofpulp 8y agoManufacturing and maintaining a vehicle produced pollution itself, so not creating demand for one is less polluting than still creating a demand for a vehicle of any type.
- peanutz454 8y agoI find this difficult to believe! One transatlantic round trip flight is about 60% as bad as living car free? Assuming you do not travel at all - right? But you will travel. You will cycle to work, and you will burn more calories, and you will therefore eat more food, ending up contributing just as much too increasing emissions!
- NeedMoreTea 8y agoChina is fastracking to being a developed nation faster than anyone before, and missing out many of the developed world's mistakes. They'll have poisonous air for a shorter time than the US or Europe did. They'll have the least obsolete infrastructure of anyone. Making stuff in China isn't necessarily disastrous. Making huge amounts of overly cheap shite that doesn't last, or do the job properly is especially disastrous as it encourages waste. Shipping huge amounts of stuff around the globe is disastrous. Making stuff in places that don't yet have mature and tight environmental protections is disastrous. (Probably a significant reason it moved there in the first place) I'd pay more for a MBP or another Thinkpad made in Greenock (where IBM used to make them), or anywhere in the EU. I'm in a minority so small it may as well not exist in wanting locally made stuff. For most stuff, I try not to buy at all, but I can rarely choose local any more.
- empath75 8y agoEven if they assembled them elsewhere, most of the parts and raw materials would have to come from China these days.
- NeedMoreTea 8y agoIn the early days of Chinese manufacturing they would have been importing most. Suppliers tend to cluster where manufacturers are, and import specialist parts. Of course as you just posted in the other comment, CO2 taxes reflecting the full environmental costs would tend to encourage more clustering, more local production, and generally buying less wastefully. As popular as plague no doubt, but stuff needs to get expensive again. Perhaps better to say "expensive enough".
- mazsa 8y agoFYI: "Feeding cows seaweed cuts 99% of greenhouse gas emissions from their burps, research finds" https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/cows-seaweed-methane-burps-cut-greenhouse-gas-emissions-climate-change-research-a8368911.html https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/cows-seaweed-metha...
- kasey_junk 8y agoBut it does hardly anything got the carbon costs of their feed.
- mazsa 8y ago"hardly anything" = 80% of feed crops, foregone absorption of greenhouse gases (i.e. 32% of all of their carbon costs, cf. https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/54D2913D-11FD-4F76-8E61F6CA3450980D_source.jpg https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/54D29... )
- chosenbreed37 8y agoIs the sourcing of seaweed in sufficient quantities free of cost?
- philipkglass 8y agoThe active anti-methane compound from seaweed is likely bromoform: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10811-016-0830-7 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10811-016-0830-7 It would be a cheap food supplement since the methane inhibition required only about 2% seaweed in cattle food, which in turn implies a bromoform feed content of only about 35 parts per million. Though no doubt some farmers would prefer to be able to say that they add seaweed rather than a particular chemical to their cattle feed.
- mazsa 8y agoof course nothing is free but they think it may be feasible: https://www.symbrosiasolutions.com/team https://www.symbrosiasolutions.com/team
- entity345 8y agoTotally ineffective and counterproductive. Doing what you suggest would not necessarily have any impact on emissions (as they might just shift to another country) while ensuring that 1.3 billion people remain poor and that their country remains undeveloped. Far better to impose strict requirements on production methods. But if that is more expensive there should also be financial help available to countries that may not afford it.
- samatman 8y agoChina is the sole producer of certain electronic components, this is not viable at present. Granted if you really really want to reduce your personal emissions, stop using technology from post-1950, maybe buy some land...
- nabla9 8y ago> China is the sole producer of certain electronic components I don't believe this is correct in meaningful sense. Do you have any examples? China assembles many components, but that's not something that can't be moved to elsewhere. Vietnam is already replacing China. Best way to deal with exported CO2 emissions is to put carbon tax on imports and not to try to control where they are manufactured.
- varjag 8y agoNearly all passives, generic active components, and a bulk of the cheaper processes ICs are being produced in China for a while now. PCBA production is another issue, but much of it happens in China too. Vietnam doesn't seem to be really that different from China in politics, environment or other respects. It is hard to see how moving things from China to Vietnam is an improvement.
- nabla9 8y agoChina is not the sole producer in any of these categories and not even the biggest. Japan is still the biggest exporter of passive components.
- learc83 8y ago>It is hard to see how moving things from China to Vietnam is an improvement. It's an improvement in the way that multiple competitors are almost always an improvement. Say the world wants to pressure China to reduce CO2 emissions or release the Uighurs from internment camps, having another producer of certain critical goods weakens their negotiating position. Also Vietnam is a lot more likely to be open to democratic reforms than China is in the foreseeable future. >Nearly all passives Also this is not true.
- kakarot 8y agoIf our neoliberal globalist government didn't effectively force us to outsource the production of the products we consume with unrestricted labor markets and generally stagnant wages in the face of explosive inflation, maybe we would have that luxury. Poor people have been put in a position where they really don't have a lot of options. Blaming poor Westerners is like blaming a child for their parent's bad spending habits.
- bilbo0s 8y ago>Blaming Westerners is like blaming a child for their parent's bad spending habits... I'd amend that a bit and say, "Blaming [poor] Westerners is like blaming a child for their parent's bad spending habits...". Wealthy westerners and their policy decisions, as you rightly point out, are largely responsible for the current state of affairs vis-à-vis the economy.
- kakarot 8y agoI agree. Edited :)
- DyslexicAtheist 8y agolet me fix that for you: if you want to reduce emissions stop consuming
- empath75 8y agoInstitute a carbon tax that fully captures the externalities of releasing CO2 in the air and people will be forced to.
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoInstitute a carbon tax and it'll vanish into someone's pocket while the manufactured goods still have the same emissions.
- dontreact 8y agoYou can have a revenue neutral carbon tax where the funds go back into people’s pockets, but the change in consumption pattern would happen because for example renewable energy would not increase in price.
- empath75 8y agoI imagine they wouldn’t because goods that use significantly less carbon will cost significantly less. I don’t care what you do with the taxes, the point is making sure that goods are priced appropriately.
- NeedMoreTea 8y agoUse some of it to subsidise insulation and better standard buildings, cleaner air and power, better railways etc. Fund a UBI. I'm fascinated at downvotes for this suggestion. What's actually wrong with spending part on lower impact infrastructure and part on a replacement for a broken welfare system?
- skosch 8y agoYour heart is in the right place, but what you advocate isn't currently palatable to anyone, left or right, on the political spectrum. Instead, push for a fee-and-dividend model – not entirely UBI, but similar in spirit. It's what most economists support, and it has enough bipartisan support [0] that there is actually a bill before Congress now that has a chance of passing. [0] https://citizensclimatelobby.org/climate-solutions-caucus/ https://citizensclimatelobby.org/climate-solutions-caucus/
- andrepd 8y agoPeople do get that, but waiting for people to spontaneously start doing the right thing is just not a very good strategy. That's why we need a carbon tax. To force people to.
- kodablah 8y agoAlways another regressive tax needed as the only way to solve a problem. There are other options that don't so egregiously favor the ones with money.
- jogjayr 8y agoCarbon taxes can be offset with a per-person tax credit. This makes it revenue neutral while ensuring that big consumers pay more taxes. They do it in British Columbia already [1] 1. https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/environment/climate-change/planning-and-action/carbon-tax https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/environment/climate-chang...
- skosch 8y agoYou make it revenue neutral – look up fee and dividend, the method favoured by most economists. The bottom ~2/3rd of households would, on average, get more money back than the tax would cost them.
- npongratz 8y ago> The bottom ~2/3rd of households would, on average, get more money back than the tax would cost them. Please correct me if I'm misunderstanding: 2/3rds of households would first have to pay up, and then they'll get more money back than they paid in? If that's true, it sounds like it would be instituting needless added complexity, with a layer added for politicians and bureaucrats to take a cut before giving it back.
- dontreact 8y agoThe value add of the layer in complexity is that the costs of some goods but not others would go up. This would make buying and investing in renewables more favorable economically.
- tomp 8y agoThat’s why I oppose free trade. We need a legislative solution that would ban (or tax highly) products from countries/companies that skim environmental / employment standards...
- bwb 8y agoI like that, call it a fix for the problem of the common good. About time we recognize the entire planet is our home and if someone trashes part x it eventually spreads to part y.
- rypskar 8y agoWho should set the rules? If you should follow national rules in importing country, would not this mean that most European countries would have to ban products from USA?
- tomp 8y agoWell, yeah, that's the idea. If Europeans want to maintain some standards, it doesn't make sense that companies can simply relocate abroad to escape enforcement. On the other hand, if a company would want to sell to EU, it would simply certify/prove that its supply chain follows the standards!
- rypskar 8y agoSince hn don't show who upvote you, I'll add a small comment that I hope EU and others would dare to do more with this than they do now
- simonbyrne 8y agoWhy? China's per capita emissions are less than half of the US.
- StreamBright 8y agoAnd the volume?
- isr 8y agoHow about this? Tax goods from (or with large inputs from) China AND the US. Heavily. Harshly. Punitively. Between them, those 2 are most culpable in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. If you are truly motivated by a genuine desire to address what IS the single most grevious threat, then you ought to agree. Wholeheartedly. If you're just going to harp on about China, and ignore the US as being equally the problem (and if we take history into account, the US is the BIGGEST problem), then there's another word for that motivation. And that word is not "environmentalism"
- rypskar 8y agoBy volume don't really make sense, the only way is to count per person. Counting by volume depend on how you decide to put groups together for counting. You would always be able to say that "the others" are larger than the one you are and say that what you do don't matter. But the easiest to change is what you do, not what everyone else do
- BurningFrog 8y agoMy pragmatic take is that if we keep buying their stuff - and we will - they will soon become rich enough to clean up their environment, just like all rich countries do. If you're familiar with the history of industrialism, all currently clean and rich countries went through a phase of horrible dirtiness as they rose out of awful poverty. Fortunately, China seems to go through the same steps as the west 3-5 times faster than we did. Sometimes, the only way out is through!
- lotsofpulp 8y agoYou think the environment will continue to be relatively hospitable to humans while we go "through" China, then India, then Africa/South America?
- BurningFrog 8y agoChina is already halfway through. India isn't too far behind. The rest of the world is comparatively small. So, yeah, I think we have pretty big margins, TBH. Just my personal hunch. I don't ask you to agree.
- tim333 8y agoWe're talking CO2 here. The US has not exactly stopped emitting as it got rich.
- JBReefer 8y agoUS emissions are radically down though thanks to efficiency and moving from coal to nat gas + renewables. We're down almost 20% from 2000. https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2017/10/24/yes-the-u-s-leads-all-countries-in-reducing-carbon-emissions/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2017/10/24/yes-the-u-s-...
- reaperducer 8y agoThis is exactly what most Westerners do not get about China. If you want to reduce emissions stop buying their products. Help me find a consumer toaster made in the United States. I searched for six months and only found ones made in China. If I want a giant hotel toaster, there is an American option. But nothing sized for a household kitchen. There are lots of people who make efforts to buy domestically. But so much manufacturing has gone to China that for some items there is no alternative.
- yesenadam 8y agoI'm not sure how to say this constructively, but your comment reads as if there are only 2 countries in the world! Why is 'Made in USA' your only alternative to 'Made in China'?
- reaperducer 8y agoIt isn't. But as I stated, there were exactly zero choices other than Made in China when I searched. And I did a very thorough search.
- NeedMoreTea 8y agoDualit Classic. A very expensive toaster that's been made by hand, for ages, in the UK. Repairable too! https://www.dualit.com/products/classic https://www.dualit.com/products/classic
- reaperducer 8y agoOssim. When I live in the UK I'll pick one up. Until then, the point stands: Made in China is all that is available to me.
- oarsinsync 8y agoAmazon.com has them in stock
- dawnerd 8y agoUnfortunately that's not really an option for most things. And even when you find something thats made "in America" it's usually just assembled here with parts from China.
- phil248 8y agoSure an economic collapse in China would benefit the environment, but so would the economic collapse of the West. There are better solutions that don't involve trading human suffering for environmental protection.
- sigfubar 8y agoHow developed can the US be considering that we have destroyed our manufacturing base and cannot even provide clean water and healthcare for our own citizens?
- masterblasters 8y agoThis is very bad there is nothing to be gained by reducing emissions. If Carbon level continue to rise, we'll evolve to live on CO2. If you stop carbon emissions you are effectively preventing God's or Nature's job.
- SVResponsible 8y agoTrying to be responsible is the minimum you can ask of any human.
- lazyjones 8y agoPeople in developed western countries have been buying rainforests to protect the environment for decades: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/mar/24/cantwejustbuyalltherainf https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/mar/24/cantwe... I'm not sure how it's being protected though. OTOH the earth has been getting greener recently: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/we-are-making-the-globe-greener/article26147272/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/we-are-making-the-gl... https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100201171641.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100201171641.h... http://www.keepmepostedeu.org/portfolio/growing-forests/ http://www.keepmepostedeu.org/portfolio/growing-forests/
- freeflight 8y agoI remember buying a childrens-print magazine, as a kid in the 80s, that had a bit more expensive special issue, but each sold copy was supposedly used to buy a couple of m² of the rainforest. They marketed it in an "own a piece of the rainforest" way and kid me was super stoked about the idea of owning a piece of rainforest, imagining how I would be living there. I think it might have been Yps [0], but I'm not 100% certain. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yps_(comics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yps_(comics)