11 ms·

The Menace of Eco-Fascism (2018)

50 points by casefields 7y ago

deogeo 7y ago
> The sheer novelty of Dooley’s existence has proven irresistible to journalists—netting her gawking profiles in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and on National Public Radio—but that coverage has tended to obscure her extremism. Alongside advocating for sustainable energy, Dooley’s other pet issues are opposing amnesty for undocumented immigrants and increasing border security. Enforcing current immigration law, which would leave legal immigration into the US at the near-record 1.1 million per year, is now (presumably anti-immigrant) extremism? In almost any other country, this would be pro-immigrant extremism! To give a sense of comparison, 15.1% of the US population is foreign born, compared to 1.7% for Japan, and 0.1% for China.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- colechristensen 7y ago
  China and Japan are both quite unfriendly to outsiders and ridiculous choices to compare with a country formed almost entirely of immigrants from the quite recent past.
  - lostmsu 7y ago
    True, but still hardly any kind of extremism.
  - Taniwha 7y ago
    In the past few years Japan has realised it's heading for demographic issues, it's opening up its immigration, I expect this to change quite quickly
    - hrktb 7y ago
      Did it become any easier to get a permanent visa for instance ? Japan has a long history of allowing a mass of low wage workers to come in with very bounded conditions (work limited to elderly care for instance) and it rarely translates to the worker staying in Japan ore than a few years. I don’t know if it’s what you were thinking about ?
      - Taniwha 7y ago
        Possibly for some https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2018/12/04/commentary/japan-commentary/new-immigration-policy-japan/#.XU_TkN9fihc https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2018/12/04/commentary/j...
  - A2017U1 7y ago
    Japan is actually getting quite friendly lately, as a full-time remote worker have been investigating moving there for a while.
    - culturestate 7y ago
      The Japanese government is opening up, but it's gonna take some time for Japanese society to do the same. I can tell you from experience that integrating as a foreigner in Japan is...challenging.
      - A2017U1 7y ago
        Eh, such generalizations, I've lived and worked in very racist homogenous societies for years and still never struggled to find local friends. There's always cool folks to befriend, unless the insinuation here is no foreigner should move to Japan until a hundred million people change their ways? My opinion is _we_ all should change, and waiting for that to happen may take a while.
- Taniwha 7y ago
  For New Zealand it's 25%, Australia 22%, the UK 14%, France 9%, Germany 12%, Canada 22%, the Netherlands 19% Frankly 15% is about average for Western Countries
  - jgmjgm 7y ago
    I think talking about averages is somewhat misleading. There has been a steep upward trend in the US and Europe. In the 1960s we'd be talking about less than 5% for the US and Europe so that is a big change. It's fair to say that there have been major policy changes over the past 50 years but it's misleading -- I'm not accusing you, just pointing out -- to say it's an average because that implies a steady state. I don't think USA/EU is at 15% yet. Europe trends just a little less than the USA (at least from 2016). I was just skimming this article today (below). I may have misinterpreted it so feel free to set the record straight. See Fig 1. Peri, G. 2016. Immigrants, Productivity, and Labor Markets. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 30(4): 3–30. Canada and Australia have had very high rates for a long time. Australia's is higher though. I'm not sure why Peri chose to combine the series because they are quite different but higher than the US. The AU/NZ (and Canada too I suppose) cases are interesting because they all have very overheated housing markets and prices are historically high relative to average wages. The USA went through a market correction and let the housing bubble burst but these markets did not. I've heard it argued that increased immigration to major housing markets is considered to be one way to keep the construction industry and house/rent prices sustainable. I'm curious if anyone has any thoughts or insight into this.
    - Taniwha 7y ago
      Maybe "average" was the wrong word, perhaps "unremarkable" is a better one. Before Trump the US was proud to describe itself as a nation of immigrants (I was one for 20 years) but Americans have this myth that they take in far more immigrants than anywhere else, it's just not true
      - jgmjgm 7y ago
        Well it does a pretty remarkable job. Recall too that the stats are foreign born as a percentage of the population (Peri, 2016 that I mentioned above). The USA is larger than all Canada, Australia, UK and NZ combined. So, let's not pretend that the US is not taking new comers at all. We're still in the ballpark of close to 50 million people. This compares to about 7 million in Canada.
- lumberjack 7y ago
  The current anti-brown sentiment and violence in the US is clearly extremism. You are trying to hide behind the tried and tested, "but it's the law" and you conveniently omit why the movement even exists (racism, brown people are icky) and how "justice" is being carried out (through inhumane methods that show no empathy and cause great harm to the victims).
- i4t 7y ago
  Except for a very small minority, aren't you all immigrants in the US? Or is there a rule for when immigrants can label themselves 'natives'?
  - pmontra 7y ago
    This is how Europeans (and maybe not only us) commonly think about Americans, all immigrants from Europe first, from the rest of the world next. However probably it's not how they think about themselves. I'd like to hear from them.
  - hollerith 7y ago
    American here. The way we use the word "immigrant" is that if you were born here and grew up here, you are not considered an immigrant.
    - pjc50 7y ago
      Unless you're not white, in which case you're called an "anchor baby" or "second-generation immigrant".
- empath75 7y ago
  Close to 100% of Americans are descended from people who were foreign born.
- chupa 7y ago
  And at the same time the author shits on someone for defending Palestinians. (((They))) are all the same.
- pjc50 7y ago
  > The sheer novelty of Dooley’s existence has proven irresistible to journalists This is the real problem. It doesn't matter if your ideas are good or even popular, if they're controversial enough the news media will magnify them for you.
- southerntofu 7y ago
  > Enforcing current immigration law (...) is now extremism? Well, of course. Advertising for armed psychopath (ICE/police or fascist militias) to terrorize, deport or kill other people in the name of stupidly enforcing the rules written on papers, that's fucking extremist. Without Godwin'ing my way around this issue, simply enforcing rules is what every fascist government is about. The Nazis in Germany in the 40's took this to a shocking level, ensuring it was against your material interests at all times not to follow rules, even when they seemed unjust. Giving everyone equal rights and opportunities is a supposedly founding principle of your "democracy". Your ancestors were welcomed on this land by its native people, before they turned against their hosts and slaughtered and enslaved them by the millions in the name of God and Capitalism. You need to realize every person crossing the border is an actual person. Not a robot/soldier sent to harm you, but a human being in search of a better life. Threatening and using force against peaceful people looking for a refuge, that's what psychopaths do. Hope you can take time to reflect on what you said.
  - deogeo 7y ago
    > Giving everyone equal rights and opportunities is a supposedly founding principle of your "democracy". It's not 'my' democracy - I and my ancestors remained in Europe. And lets not engage in revisionist history - that founding principle was explicitly limited to "free White persons of good character" [1]. While the at once ineffective and cruel manner the US enforces its borders leaves much to be desired, that doesn't make the very concept of controlling immigration unjust. There are countries other besides the US to immigrate to. As for your comparison with Nazi Germany, perhaps it would have more weight if the US was incredibly restrictive with immigration (and, as always in these matters, ignoring that people weren't scrambling to get into Nazi Germany..) But as it stands, not only does the US have the largest rate of immigration in the world [2] (though not per-capita), but it also grants citizenship to anyone born there - a practice almost exclusive to the Americas [3]. I'm sorry if this reply seems harsh, but I find it utterly mind-boggling how you could compare the Nazi ethno-state, to a country where the majority ethnicity is voluntarily becoming a minority. They are going from 87% white in 1970 [4], to minority-white in 2044 [5]. That's in 74 years, a single lifespan, from overwhelming majority, to minority. Literally the opposite of what Nazi Germany was doing. But if this is comparable to ethnic cleansing, then what does that make almost all other countries? Some sort of ultra-nazis? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalization_Act_of_1790 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalization_Act_of_1790 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_net_migration_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_net_migra... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_States#Race_and_ethnicity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_State... [5] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/22/us/white-americans-minority-population.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/22/us/white-americans-minori...
adventuretime 7y ago
Not surprised to see the left slowly distancing itself from environmentalism (save climate hysteria), given the coming African population bomb: http://theconversation.com/theres-a-strong-chance-that-one-third-of-all-people-will-be-african-by-2100-84576 http://theconversation.com/theres-a-strong-chance-that-one-t... 4.5 billion Africans by 2100 will mean ecological devastation the likes of which we've never seen, and traditional environmentalism will increasingly prove difficult to reconcile with anti-racism.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- adrianN 7y ago
  If we haven't learned how to live sustainably by 2100, we'll have wrecked the planet anyway. Future environmentalism will likely be about helping developing countries skip the extremely polluting stage of development.
  - djaychela 7y ago
    I think that many 'carbon offset' payments work by paying for less polluting technology to be installed in developing countries in the method you describe.
  - mavhc 7y ago
    You mean by 2010
- atoav 7y ago
  In Europe environmentalism is a fundamental part of every left leaning party and overpopulation is a topic old as stone — parties usually have some kind of stance here that goes as follows: “Do what you can to raise the standard in Africa while making that investment help their economies and help the planet by absorbing CO2. A raised living standard reduces birth rates and migration while at the same time it could help the environment if done right.” There are ideas like solar farms in africa that produce hydrogen which is in turn beeing shipped and used for electricity etc. So to say they don’t have concepts says more about you than about those who you try to criticise here..
deevolution 7y ago
The KISS solution would be to shoot all 1.4B cows on earth. That would slow climate change significantly and give us enough time to transition the world into using renewable resources. Also before I get downvoted for suggesting such an appalling idea as going on a cow murdering genocide, stop and reflect about the origin of that big piece of meat you ate for dinner tonight. Let's kill these cows once and for all.
- adrianN 7y ago
  Methane accounts for less than 20% of all GHG emissions (in CO2 equivalent units), and cows are only responsible for a part of that. Reducing the number of cattle is important, but killing all cattle would only buy us a few years before we have to completely decarbonize the global economy. In industrialized economies, agriculture's relative impact is even lower, since we emit so many GHGs from other sources.
  - deevolution 7y ago
    It's still a significant contributor of methane. This change wont happen overnight of course but more alt meat companies such as beyond meat and impossible burger will be able to engineer superior food products that will eventually price real meat out of the market. The cow populations will suffer slowly as will their corporate slave masters.
    - jesssse 7y ago
      Cows are happier being farmed than not being.
      - TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
        [citation needed] The extinct elephant in the room is the fact that those cows are going to be slaughtered for food anyway.
      - deevolution 7y ago
        As a human maximalist, I could care less about what those cows think. The problem we face as a society is that too many of us are cow maximalist to the point we're prioritizing these cows lives over our own. Buying that cheese burger at McDonalds is a vote for more cows which has far more negative externalities than eating veggies.
polotics 7y ago
I guess the time has come to point you all to the archdruid: https://www.ecosophia.net/the-next-twilight-of-environmentalism/ https://www.ecosophia.net/the-next-twilight-of-environmental...
devoply 7y ago
In the end our business leaders and state leaders are too busy exploiting science to empower and enrich themselves to have any actual concern about science, i.e. ask environmental scientists what they should do in their business and political decisions... And similarly the alt-right is weary of science because it gets in the way of its dreams of domination, control, supremacy and tribalism. They have more in common, the supposed would be Eco-fascists and the business interests than the casual observer is led to believe. Science is better paired with idealists who can imagine a better world using science than with rationalists who are simply exploited by business interest and the state for more power and profit... solving trivial issues like how to get more eyeballs for ad dollars.
carapace 7y ago
What was that? Hitler was a vegetarian? FWIW, the environment really is the ultimate non-partisan issue and I think we are about one or two heat waves or water shortages away from finding that out. This made me think we'll see unilateral geoengineering by e.g Bangladesh before it gets too hot: https://spaswell.wordpress.com/2016/11/18/dr-gwynne-dyer-geopolitics-in-a-hotter-world-ubc-talk-transcribed-sept-2010/ https://spaswell.wordpress.com/2016/11/18/dr-gwynne-dyer-geo... I don't think there's anything intrinsically authoritarian in ecology, if anything evolution is anarchy, but I can entertain (and be dismayed by) the thought that e.g. Chinese Communism may turn out to be the successful system in a hundred years. Recall "How is China able to provide enough food to feed over 1B people?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20537409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20537409 that describes regenerative ecological farm systems.
- 7952 7y ago
  At a local level environmental decisions are highly political. Try building a road, a wind farm, a cycle lane, or a pedestrian precinct and you will get a lot of anger and passion. And a lot of interventions have a number of unintended consequences that affect people. A lot of these environmental decisions have winners and losers. That makes them political and partisan. But politicians often don't want to deal with that. They want to delegate authority to a bunch of experts and independent organisations who can make objective decisions. Except there are still loosers who will be angry. And they just see a faceless beurocracy that doesn't care what they think. We should accept that the environment is political and try and win the argument. Stop relying on science and actually pursuade people on an emotional and moral level.
  - carapace 7y ago
    Personally, I think the problem is Spiritual, and no amount of politics will fix it. We are divorced from Nature, we treat life as a thing to exploit rather than neighbors to live with. I don't think we can save ourselves without a deep shift in our world view, a renewal of our relationship with life. I think we will either reach a crisis and transform (in a biologically-rooted variant of the Singularity, IRL not cyberspace) or we will crash and burn. Of course, there's a third possibility: we scrape by without crashing and without spiritual renaissance, e.g. some combination of geo-engineering and ecological agriculture lets us off the climate-apocalypse hook. In the first two scenarios we don't need politics anymore, but in the third it still exists and is caught up in the strange loops of modern space-age-a-go-go life.
devmunchies 7y ago
“These fascist love the planet, and here is why that’s a bad thing” Give me a break.
- smadge 7y ago
  The primary caution of the article is of fascist or nativist tendencies infiltrating environmental organizations and movements.
rurban 7y ago
They were missing another prominent case: Jörg Urban, now the AFD leader in Sachsen, who was a former Green League party leader. I guess you can call that an eco-fascist party, but I'm not an expert. You may call him a Neonazi officially though. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B6rg_Urban https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B6rg_Urban

50 points by casefields 7y ago

> The sheer novelty of Dooley’s existence has proven irresistible to journalists—netting her gawking profiles in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and on National Public Radio—but that coverage has tended to obscure her extremism. Alongside advocating for sustainable energy, Dooley’s other pet issues are opposing amnesty for undocumented immigrants and increasing border security. Enforcing current immigration law, which would leave legal immigration into the US at the near-record 1.1 million per year, is now (presumably anti-immigrant) extremism? In almost any other country, this would be pro-immigrant extremism! To give a sense of comparison, 15.1% of the US population is foreign born, compared to 1.7% for Japan, and 0.1% for China.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
colechristensen 7y ago
China and Japan are both quite unfriendly to outsiders and ridiculous choices to compare with a country formed almost entirely of immigrants from the quite recent past.
- lostmsu 7y ago
  True, but still hardly any kind of extremism.
- Taniwha 7y ago
  In the past few years Japan has realised it's heading for demographic issues, it's opening up its immigration, I expect this to change quite quickly
  - hrktb 7y ago
    Did it become any easier to get a permanent visa for instance ? Japan has a long history of allowing a mass of low wage workers to come in with very bounded conditions (work limited to elderly care for instance) and it rarely translates to the worker staying in Japan ore than a few years. I don’t know if it’s what you were thinking about ?
    - Taniwha 7y ago
      Possibly for some https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2018/12/04/commentary/japan-commentary/new-immigration-policy-japan/#.XU_TkN9fihc https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2018/12/04/commentary/j...
- A2017U1 7y ago
  Japan is actually getting quite friendly lately, as a full-time remote worker have been investigating moving there for a while.
  - culturestate 7y ago
    The Japanese government is opening up, but it's gonna take some time for Japanese society to do the same. I can tell you from experience that integrating as a foreigner in Japan is...challenging.
    - A2017U1 7y ago
      Eh, such generalizations, I've lived and worked in very racist homogenous societies for years and still never struggled to find local friends. There's always cool folks to befriend, unless the insinuation here is no foreigner should move to Japan until a hundred million people change their ways? My opinion is _we_ all should change, and waiting for that to happen may take a while.
Taniwha 7y ago
For New Zealand it's 25%, Australia 22%, the UK 14%, France 9%, Germany 12%, Canada 22%, the Netherlands 19% Frankly 15% is about average for Western Countries
- jgmjgm 7y ago
  I think talking about averages is somewhat misleading. There has been a steep upward trend in the US and Europe. In the 1960s we'd be talking about less than 5% for the US and Europe so that is a big change. It's fair to say that there have been major policy changes over the past 50 years but it's misleading -- I'm not accusing you, just pointing out -- to say it's an average because that implies a steady state. I don't think USA/EU is at 15% yet. Europe trends just a little less than the USA (at least from 2016). I was just skimming this article today (below). I may have misinterpreted it so feel free to set the record straight. See Fig 1. Peri, G. 2016. Immigrants, Productivity, and Labor Markets. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 30(4): 3–30. Canada and Australia have had very high rates for a long time. Australia's is higher though. I'm not sure why Peri chose to combine the series because they are quite different but higher than the US. The AU/NZ (and Canada too I suppose) cases are interesting because they all have very overheated housing markets and prices are historically high relative to average wages. The USA went through a market correction and let the housing bubble burst but these markets did not. I've heard it argued that increased immigration to major housing markets is considered to be one way to keep the construction industry and house/rent prices sustainable. I'm curious if anyone has any thoughts or insight into this.
  - Taniwha 7y ago
    Maybe "average" was the wrong word, perhaps "unremarkable" is a better one. Before Trump the US was proud to describe itself as a nation of immigrants (I was one for 20 years) but Americans have this myth that they take in far more immigrants than anywhere else, it's just not true
    - jgmjgm 7y ago
      Well it does a pretty remarkable job. Recall too that the stats are foreign born as a percentage of the population (Peri, 2016 that I mentioned above). The USA is larger than all Canada, Australia, UK and NZ combined. So, let's not pretend that the US is not taking new comers at all. We're still in the ballpark of close to 50 million people. This compares to about 7 million in Canada.
lumberjack 7y ago
The current anti-brown sentiment and violence in the US is clearly extremism. You are trying to hide behind the tried and tested, "but it's the law" and you conveniently omit why the movement even exists (racism, brown people are icky) and how "justice" is being carried out (through inhumane methods that show no empathy and cause great harm to the victims).
i4t 7y ago
Except for a very small minority, aren't you all immigrants in the US? Or is there a rule for when immigrants can label themselves 'natives'?
- pmontra 7y ago
  This is how Europeans (and maybe not only us) commonly think about Americans, all immigrants from Europe first, from the rest of the world next. However probably it's not how they think about themselves. I'd like to hear from them.
- hollerith 7y ago
  American here. The way we use the word "immigrant" is that if you were born here and grew up here, you are not considered an immigrant.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    Unless you're not white, in which case you're called an "anchor baby" or "second-generation immigrant".
empath75 7y ago
Close to 100% of Americans are descended from people who were foreign born.
chupa 7y ago
And at the same time the author shits on someone for defending Palestinians. (((They))) are all the same.
pjc50 7y ago
> The sheer novelty of Dooley’s existence has proven irresistible to journalists This is the real problem. It doesn't matter if your ideas are good or even popular, if they're controversial enough the news media will magnify them for you.
southerntofu 7y ago
> Enforcing current immigration law (...) is now extremism? Well, of course. Advertising for armed psychopath (ICE/police or fascist militias) to terrorize, deport or kill other people in the name of stupidly enforcing the rules written on papers, that's fucking extremist. Without Godwin'ing my way around this issue, simply enforcing rules is what every fascist government is about. The Nazis in Germany in the 40's took this to a shocking level, ensuring it was against your material interests at all times not to follow rules, even when they seemed unjust. Giving everyone equal rights and opportunities is a supposedly founding principle of your "democracy". Your ancestors were welcomed on this land by its native people, before they turned against their hosts and slaughtered and enslaved them by the millions in the name of God and Capitalism. You need to realize every person crossing the border is an actual person. Not a robot/soldier sent to harm you, but a human being in search of a better life. Threatening and using force against peaceful people looking for a refuge, that's what psychopaths do. Hope you can take time to reflect on what you said.
- deogeo 7y ago
  > Giving everyone equal rights and opportunities is a supposedly founding principle of your "democracy". It's not 'my' democracy - I and my ancestors remained in Europe. And lets not engage in revisionist history - that founding principle was explicitly limited to "free White persons of good character" [1]. While the at once ineffective and cruel manner the US enforces its borders leaves much to be desired, that doesn't make the very concept of controlling immigration unjust. There are countries other besides the US to immigrate to. As for your comparison with Nazi Germany, perhaps it would have more weight if the US was incredibly restrictive with immigration (and, as always in these matters, ignoring that people weren't scrambling to get into Nazi Germany..) But as it stands, not only does the US have the largest rate of immigration in the world [2] (though not per-capita), but it also grants citizenship to anyone born there - a practice almost exclusive to the Americas [3]. I'm sorry if this reply seems harsh, but I find it utterly mind-boggling how you could compare the Nazi ethno-state, to a country where the majority ethnicity is voluntarily becoming a minority. They are going from 87% white in 1970 [4], to minority-white in 2044 [5]. That's in 74 years, a single lifespan, from overwhelming majority, to minority. Literally the opposite of what Nazi Germany was doing. But if this is comparable to ethnic cleansing, then what does that make almost all other countries? Some sort of ultra-nazis? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalization_Act_of_1790 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalization_Act_of_1790 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_net_migration_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_net_migra... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_States#Race_and_ethnicity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_State... [5] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/22/us/white-americans-minority-population.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/22/us/white-americans-minori...

adventuretime 7y ago

Not surprised to see the left slowly distancing itself from environmentalism (save climate hysteria), given the coming African population bomb: http://theconversation.com/theres-a-strong-chance-that-one-third-of-all-people-will-be-african-by-2100-84576 http://theconversation.com/theres-a-strong-chance-that-one-t... 4.5 billion Africans by 2100 will mean ecological devastation the likes of which we've never seen, and traditional environmentalism will increasingly prove difficult to reconcile with anti-racism.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
adrianN 7y ago
If we haven't learned how to live sustainably by 2100, we'll have wrecked the planet anyway. Future environmentalism will likely be about helping developing countries skip the extremely polluting stage of development.
- djaychela 7y ago
  I think that many 'carbon offset' payments work by paying for less polluting technology to be installed in developing countries in the method you describe.
- mavhc 7y ago
  You mean by 2010
atoav 7y ago
In Europe environmentalism is a fundamental part of every left leaning party and overpopulation is a topic old as stone — parties usually have some kind of stance here that goes as follows: “Do what you can to raise the standard in Africa while making that investment help their economies and help the planet by absorbing CO2. A raised living standard reduces birth rates and migration while at the same time it could help the environment if done right.” There are ideas like solar farms in africa that produce hydrogen which is in turn beeing shipped and used for electricity etc. So to say they don’t have concepts says more about you than about those who you try to criticise here..

deevolution 7y ago

The KISS solution would be to shoot all 1.4B cows on earth. That would slow climate change significantly and give us enough time to transition the world into using renewable resources. Also before I get downvoted for suggesting such an appalling idea as going on a cow murdering genocide, stop and reflect about the origin of that big piece of meat you ate for dinner tonight. Let's kill these cows once and for all.

adrianN 7y ago
Methane accounts for less than 20% of all GHG emissions (in CO2 equivalent units), and cows are only responsible for a part of that. Reducing the number of cattle is important, but killing all cattle would only buy us a few years before we have to completely decarbonize the global economy. In industrialized economies, agriculture's relative impact is even lower, since we emit so many GHGs from other sources.
- deevolution 7y ago
  It's still a significant contributor of methane. This change wont happen overnight of course but more alt meat companies such as beyond meat and impossible burger will be able to engineer superior food products that will eventually price real meat out of the market. The cow populations will suffer slowly as will their corporate slave masters.
  - jesssse 7y ago
    Cows are happier being farmed than not being.
    - TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
      [citation needed] The extinct elephant in the room is the fact that those cows are going to be slaughtered for food anyway.
    - deevolution 7y ago
      As a human maximalist, I could care less about what those cows think. The problem we face as a society is that too many of us are cow maximalist to the point we're prioritizing these cows lives over our own. Buying that cheese burger at McDonalds is a vote for more cows which has far more negative externalities than eating veggies.

polotics 7y ago

I guess the time has come to point you all to the archdruid: https://www.ecosophia.net/the-next-twilight-of-environmentalism/ https://www.ecosophia.net/the-next-twilight-of-environmental...

devoply 7y ago

In the end our business leaders and state leaders are too busy exploiting science to empower and enrich themselves to have any actual concern about science, i.e. ask environmental scientists what they should do in their business and political decisions... And similarly the alt-right is weary of science because it gets in the way of its dreams of domination, control, supremacy and tribalism. They have more in common, the supposed would be Eco-fascists and the business interests than the casual observer is led to believe. Science is better paired with idealists who can imagine a better world using science than with rationalists who are simply exploited by business interest and the state for more power and profit... solving trivial issues like how to get more eyeballs for ad dollars.

carapace 7y ago

What was that? Hitler was a vegetarian? FWIW, the environment really is the ultimate non-partisan issue and I think we are about one or two heat waves or water shortages away from finding that out. This made me think we'll see unilateral geoengineering by e.g Bangladesh before it gets too hot: https://spaswell.wordpress.com/2016/11/18/dr-gwynne-dyer-geopolitics-in-a-hotter-world-ubc-talk-transcribed-sept-2010/ https://spaswell.wordpress.com/2016/11/18/dr-gwynne-dyer-geo... I don't think there's anything intrinsically authoritarian in ecology, if anything evolution is anarchy, but I can entertain (and be dismayed by) the thought that e.g. Chinese Communism may turn out to be the successful system in a hundred years. Recall "How is China able to provide enough food to feed over 1B people?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20537409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20537409 that describes regenerative ecological farm systems.

7952 7y ago
At a local level environmental decisions are highly political. Try building a road, a wind farm, a cycle lane, or a pedestrian precinct and you will get a lot of anger and passion. And a lot of interventions have a number of unintended consequences that affect people. A lot of these environmental decisions have winners and losers. That makes them political and partisan. But politicians often don't want to deal with that. They want to delegate authority to a bunch of experts and independent organisations who can make objective decisions. Except there are still loosers who will be angry. And they just see a faceless beurocracy that doesn't care what they think. We should accept that the environment is political and try and win the argument. Stop relying on science and actually pursuade people on an emotional and moral level.
- carapace 7y ago
  Personally, I think the problem is Spiritual, and no amount of politics will fix it. We are divorced from Nature, we treat life as a thing to exploit rather than neighbors to live with. I don't think we can save ourselves without a deep shift in our world view, a renewal of our relationship with life. I think we will either reach a crisis and transform (in a biologically-rooted variant of the Singularity, IRL not cyberspace) or we will crash and burn. Of course, there's a third possibility: we scrape by without crashing and without spiritual renaissance, e.g. some combination of geo-engineering and ecological agriculture lets us off the climate-apocalypse hook. In the first two scenarios we don't need politics anymore, but in the third it still exists and is caught up in the strange loops of modern space-age-a-go-go life.

devmunchies 7y ago

“These fascist love the planet, and here is why that’s a bad thing” Give me a break.

smadge 7y ago
The primary caution of the article is of fascist or nativist tendencies infiltrating environmental organizations and movements.

rurban 7y ago

They were missing another prominent case: Jörg Urban, now the AFD leader in Sachsen, who was a former Green League party leader. I guess you can call that an eco-fascist party, but I'm not an expert. You may call him a Neonazi officially though. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B6rg_Urban https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B6rg_Urban