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We look for villains but the real problem is simply humans in general. We do so much damage to the world. Plastic, greenhouse gases, overfishing, etc. to supp
by melling 6y ago
We look for villains but the real problem is simply humans in general.
We do so much damage to the world.
Plastic, greenhouse gases, overfishing, etc. to support our way of life.
Lots of other examples...We kill millions of birds with our pets, buildings, and green energy
We need to find a way to reduce our impact on the planet.
- j-pb 6y ago"green energy" if you're insinuating that wind power kills birds, that's something you can totally stop worrying about. A single turbine kills as many birds as a cat per year.
- pvaldes 6y agoNot even in the same league. A cat will not kill bald eagles or herons, a turbine will.
- melling 6y agoI’m talking about the aggregate number. Buildings, cats, ... Our total footprint. I’m not sure of the exact wind turbine impact. It’s a rapidly growing form of energy. But that really is my point, people brush aside all the small impacts and we damage the environment in many small ways that really add up As for birds, the Audubon has some information. “ Wind turbines kill an estimated 140,000 to 328,000 birds each year in North America, making it the most threatening form of green energy. And yet, it’s also one of the most rapidly expanding energy industries: more than 49,000 individual wind turbines now exist across 39 states.” https://www.audubon.org/news/will-wind-turbines-ever-be-safe-birds https://www.audubon.org/news/will-wind-turbines-ever-be-safe...
- Forricide 6y agoThe American Bird Conservancy estimates that "In the United States alone, outdoor cats kill approximately 2.4 billion birds every year." [0] Although it's true that everything we do as a species / society has an impact on the environment, I think it's still important to look at things like this with perspective. Unfortunately, even green/renewable energy sources have a negative impact on the environment; wind isn't the only one. Not sure I really disagree, though, just wanted to mention that the wind impact isn't really that (relatively) bad. [0] https://abcbirds.org/program/cats-indoors/cats-and-birds/ https://abcbirds.org/program/cats-indoors/cats-and-birds/
- arcticbull 6y agoNuclear energy doesn't kill any birds, though, and is the safest form of energy in terms of (human) deaths per terawatt hour. This kind of data should inform our decision making.
- jbay808 6y agoI bet a nuclear power plant (and its associated uranium mining) kills many more birds than a cat does.
- arcticbull 6y agoYou think it kills more than 2.4 billion birds per year in the US alone? Or did you mean more than a single cat? Did they forget to put on the upper biological shield? To be clear there are 98 reactors in the US, so that would be almost 25,000,000 birds per reactor per year, or 67,000 per day, or 2,800 per hour, or 46 per minute. That's nearly one bird per second. It would probably be hard to hear over all that racket.
- j-pb 6y agoYet... I'm all in for nuclear, once we know how to get rid of the waste products. It's never been about reactor safety, we have a storage problem, that hasn't been solved yet. Without that we're just slithering into the next "waste product that we don't know how to get rid of" cycle. Also even if we had solved it, it's too late to go nuclear now. The next 20 years will be crucial when it comes to stopping climate change. We simply don't have the time to waste 7.5 years on building new reactors. What we need to do is ramp up the production of existing tech to the max. It's much easier to scale the current renewable production capacity horizontally than scale vertically with nuclear.
- coolspot 6y agoMost logical and somehow most controversial way is to stop human population growth. All big problems - pollution, deforestation, climate change are caused by having too many people on this planet.
- williamdclt 6y agoI don't see how it is "most logical". It seems more logical to me for humans to stop destroying our ecosystem than it is to limit the number of humans that destroy. Probably the answer is "both" anyway, but even if we divided the number of humans by 2, our impact on the ecosystem would still be crazy high (assuming the impact decreases linearly, which is probably not the case)
- coolspot 6y agoOn current level of average quality of life in the US one can’t stop destroying ecosystem. Each person in US needs a home. Heat, water, electricity and waste disposal for that home. A phone, likely a vehicle. Fresh food - a lot. QoL levels are rising worldwide, so eventually each human on earth will demand all of these things. You can’t consume significantly less (not 10x less). To achieve that you would need to became a caveman again.
- sitkack 6y agoImpact per person is still high. We could have a million people on the planet, but if they consume the same as 5 thousand people each, there is no difference. The farmer in Bangladesh isn't the problem.
- coolspot 6y agoThe farmer in Bangladesh takes wast amount of land from wild animals and trees, puts a lot of water and chemicals in the soil, fights “pests”. Don’t underestimate impact of one farmer, especially in a country with millions of farmers.
- blablabla123 6y agoThere's definitely the need for some 10x change here. Reducing CO2 output or plastic trash by 30% might of course help a lot but to actually solve things, these numbers need to be reduced by 99% or so. People manage to hyperoptimize everything when it comes to production lines, logistics or finance. I think this is also the ultimate reason why the environment must become strongly coupled with the finance system.
- sukilot 6y agoWait till you find out how many animals are killed by lions and spiders each year.
- melling 6y agoAn elephant is killed by a human every 15 minutes. https://www.worldanimalfoundation.com/advocate/wild-earth/params/post/1286260/an-elephant-killed-every-15-minutes/ https://www.worldanimalfoundation.com/advocate/wild-earth/pa... We kill hundreds of millions of animals with our cats. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadkill https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadkill Lions kill to eat.
- refurb 6y agoWait, you’re blaming humans when animals get diseases? I mean sure, we could have an impact, but animals are no different than humans, they get ravaged by epidemics. Think about human life before current medical care. A million different things trying to kill you. No different for an animal.
- coding123 6y agoEcologically if we're decimating a type of fish/animal/bird/insect/bacteria that helps keep down another or prop up another fish/animal/bird/insect/bacteria, the downstream effect is endless. Eventually the effect can circle back all the way to humans again.
- melling 6y agoNo, I didn’t blame humans for when animals get diseases. Humans kill an elephant every 15 minutes. That’s about 100 a day. At any rate, maybe you should look into our impact on the environment. Most people have no idea, so we continue to do the damage.
- refurb 6y agoHow many elephants die per day from natural causes?
- tonyhb 6y agoThat doesn't impact us killing 100 per day. Relativity doesn't matter.
- klyrs 6y agoBetter question: how many elephants are born every day? https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/mar/03/african-elephants-killed-faster-than-they-are-being-born https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/mar/03/african-...
- blix 6y agoGP isn't blaming humans for animal diseases, but I am. Human trade spreads pathogens/diseases at a tremendous rate compared to natural diffusion. There's quite a long list of diseases in non-humans spread through human trade. Human activity might also make animals more susceptible to disease in general through a weakening of overall health through pollution and environmental disruption. This effect is hard to quantify but has the potential to be quite large.
- driverdan 6y agoI downvoted you because they don't know what is killing these elephants. The problems you mention may have nothing to do with it.
- melling 6y ago“ No-one knows why the animals are dying in Botswana - home to a third of Africa's declining elephant population” We are concerned about 300 because humans kill tens of thousands a year and we are driving them towards extinction. If something goes wrong with the elephant population in Botswana, the acceleration will increase
- thatoneuser 6y agoUm... Really? The problem is humans? I guess all the mass extinction events before us were our fault too.