14 ms·

What is the solution though? I believe that the main reason for these problems are population explosion.

perfunctory 6y ago
Everybody knows what the solution is. There is no lack of solutions. There is a lack of courage to implement them. While population may be a concern, it's not the main problem. > The richest 10% of people in the world are responsible for around 50% of global emissions https://oi-files-d8-prod.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/file_attachments/mb-extreme-carbon-inequality-021215-en.pdf https://oi-files-d8-prod.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/s3fs-pub...
- xiphias2 6y ago
  With Tesla being one of the best investments of the last decade (after Bitcoin and NVidia maybe), large investors have to take CO2 emissions seriously. People are already paying extra money for sustainability, and in the future it will be the only rational business decision as well.
- Angostura 6y ago
  The problem is that the solutions are mildly inconvenient, and we can't have that, in the face of an existential threat.
- aboringusername 6y ago
  How is the population not the "main problem" here? Take a look at the locust, and how in [1], they say: "Cheke’s team is recommending a fungus called Metarhizium anisopliae, which kills a locust by growing inside its body." Typically, when a population becomes unsustainable, as humans are because of their immense requirements over vast decades, we tend to find a way to 'control' that population. Typically, this is by killing them. Yet, because we have the capability to rationalize we understand vast swarms of locusts are terrible yet vast swarms of humans are just something we have to accept. The idea that we need to kill billions of humans would be unfathomable, yet, reducing our numbers will be the only way to make life on earth sustainable - for all living things. This is something Sir David Attenborough also agrees with [2]. This planet is not, was not and will never be capable of sustaining 8 billion healthy, prosperous humans with fair and equal access to food, water and shelter. We need to kill, or in some way reduce the number of humans on this planet. Anything else is a gigantic waste of time and will only serve as a distraction and way to make us feel better that we can somehow overcome this earth threatening disease called "human kind". Because of our constant encroachment into nature, we are pushing animals to their limits, which is how great pandemics are developing and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future (e.g wet markets). Coronavirus is not the worst pandemic we're dealing with right now. Humankind is. And whilst we're constantly taking space away from nature, nature will fight back and take away ourselves. We are the worst problem this planet has. [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00725-x https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00725-x [2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/av/science-environment-45741482/sir-david-attenborough-population-growth-has-to-come-to-an-end https://www.bbc.com/news/av/science-environment-45741482/sir...
  - totetsu 6y ago
    Well it looks like the Uyghurs didn't get their ticket to the future.
- ArkVark 6y ago
  The top 10% is people who earn over $18,000/year, which probably includes most of HackerNews readers: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/business/global-income-calculator/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/business/global... Keep in mind that this richest 10% contribute the majority of humanity's value-added commerce and production, cultural output, and scientific output. For example, Romania has an equal scientific output to Pakistan: https://www.natureindex.com/country-outputs https://www.natureindex.com/country-outputs Despite Pakistan being 212 million people vs Romania 19 million. Pakistan emits 178mt of Co2, vs Romania 79mt (2016). Pakistan's CO2 output is 2.2x greater, but their total GDP is only 1.31x bigger. When you look at emissions against output, its clear that the West and East Asia are substantially more efficient than other regions on the planet.
  - perfunctory 6y ago
    What is your point? Yes, HackerNews readers, including you and me, bear extra responsibility.
    - ArkVark 6y ago
      The point is that instead of looking to reduce the population of the West and East Asia, which will have an impact on humanity's economic, cultural, scientific output, we should look at reducing populations (though education and family planning for women) in less-productive areas.
      - perfunctory 6y ago
        Look, even if all countries except of say US suddenly magically disappear tomorrow, the planet will still keep warming up. Even if you reduce the world population to whatever your acceptable level is, you still need to build zero carbon infrastructure/industry for the people that remain. Net zero per person is net zero per person. Doesn't matter how many people there are. And right now, that building is not happening. Or at least not fast enough.
  - karmakaze 6y ago
xwdv 6y ago
From the article, the solution is obvious, but no one has the courage to implement it. An artificial virus, deadly and highly contagious, with long incubation periods, forcing people to stay home and sending high CO2 emission industries crumbling into bankruptcy. Look what something as weak as COVID has done in a short amount of time. Also make another virus that can spread through high methane emitting livestock and kills them quickly, and anyone who eats an infected animal. At the same time if you create a vaccine against the virus, you can sell it to powerful and wealthy individuals on the black market for vast sums of money. There might be riots, but why contain it? Let it spread through the schools and churches.
- kilroy_jones 6y ago
  I'm going to agree this a solution, but I think we should probably tick through the first thousand or two more reasonable ones before we get to mass murder.
  - xwdv 6y ago
    There is no time, a lot of the other solutions require people to willingly change their behaviors en masse. But people don’t change. They have to be forced to changed.
    - carapace 6y ago
      "Release a deadly virus to save the world!" You're talking like a character from a bad sci-fi movie. And I should know. I've been binge-watching MST3K for a week solid.
hannob 6y ago
I recommend reading this if the first thing that comes to mind is something about population: https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/9/26/16356524/the-population-question https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/9/26/1635652... As for what the solutions are: Reduce meat consumption, particularly beef, develop better meat/milk/cheese alternatives, replace fossil fuels, for the time that won't be completely possible fix methane leakage in fossil fuel production.
- Eric_WVGG 6y ago
  There is a pretty simple solution to the meat problem. Most of that methane comes from cows, and some seaweed thrown into their diet eliminates their methane emissions. https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/11/23/1826/how-seaweed-could-shrink-livestocks-global-carbon-hoofprint/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/11/23/1826/how-seaweed...
  - hannob 6y ago
    This seaweed story comes up so often. Every time I looked it up it seems this is based on some very small studies. As far as I know noone has ever implemented this at scale (if you know otherwise - please provide links) and is selling meat produced that way. Look, I'm not against researching such stuff. But calling that "a pretty simple solution" before this has ever been tried out for real doesn't seem valid.
    - Eric_WVGG 6y ago
      Simpler than convincing the globe to change their eating habits, certainly. I don’t have any better idea than you how the science works out, and the supply chain thing sounds nontrivial, but that’s nothing compared to getting masses of people to change their habits. We can’t talk red staters into take wearing masks for a few months, and next we are going to make them give up bbq?
      - germinalphrase 6y ago
        Or allow prices to rise and people will choose to eat less meat on their own.
carapace 6y ago
One major part of the solution is applied ecology, such as Permaculture or Syntropic agriculture. We can grow all our own food (and even carbon-neutral alcohol fuel) in gardens in ecologically harmonious ways. (The historical rule is: If your civilization destroys soil it fails.) The population is leveling off and is projected to stabilize by 2100.
- gridlockd 6y ago
  > We can grow all our own food (and even carbon-neutral alcohol fuel) in gardens in ecologically harmonious ways. [citation needed] Not sure what kind of garden you are talking about, I like gardens to plant vegetables and such, but their caloric output is very low.
  - carapace 6y ago
    Look up "Permaculture" or "Syntropic agriculture". Basically you mimic Nature and intensify it.
    - gridlockd 6y ago
      I'm broadly aware that this stuff exists, but where does it say that this can produce enough output to rival current methods?
      - carapace 6y ago
        I don't have a link handy, I'll try to find it again and post it, but there's an article or video about Ernst Gotsch, the founder of what he calls "Syntropic" farming, where it talks about how his farm produces the best cocoa in the world at 3x the crop of conventional farms of the same quality with no inputs. It's important to remember that the modern mega-farms are only cost-effective due to massive subsidies. A typical modern farm loses something like a dollar an acre per year and would fail immediately without subsidies. They're not profitable. While they are certainly highly efficient for a narrow range of species, they are physically incapable of producing the vast majority of food species at all. Comparing an acre of modern farmland growing modern corn in the modern way with modern subsidies to an acre of a Permaculture or Syntropic food forest: The modern farm will produce far more of that corn than the eco-farm. But it will require inputs: fertilizer, irrigation, and everything concerned with the farm machinery, etc., and only produce that corn. Everything else: water, land, machinery, people, gets used up or polluted by the process. In contrast the acre of food forest might not produce any corn at all, or it may contain four or five or more species of it, as well as fruit and nut trees, bananas and plantain plants, climbing fruiting vines, berry bushes, root crops, flowers, cucurbits, bamboo, etc. resulting in dozens of different yields. It requires no inputs. It's more labor intensive and cannot (yet) be automated. But it's fun, easy, profitable, and it produces the material needed to make more of itself, so it's scalable.
doitLP 6y ago
Top climate solutions ranked by amount of greenhouse gas they remove: https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/table-of-solutions https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/table-of-solutions #1 is reduced food waste
- cedex12 6y ago
  How trustworthy is this table?

Everybody knows what the solution is. There is no lack of solutions. There is a lack of courage to implement them. While population may be a concern, it's not the main problem. > The richest 10% of people in the world are responsible for around 50% of global emissions https://oi-files-d8-prod.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/file_attachments/mb-extreme-carbon-inequality-021215-en.pdf https://oi-files-d8-prod.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/s3fs-pub...

xiphias2 6y ago
With Tesla being one of the best investments of the last decade (after Bitcoin and NVidia maybe), large investors have to take CO2 emissions seriously. People are already paying extra money for sustainability, and in the future it will be the only rational business decision as well.
Angostura 6y ago
The problem is that the solutions are mildly inconvenient, and we can't have that, in the face of an existential threat.
aboringusername 6y ago
How is the population not the "main problem" here? Take a look at the locust, and how in [1], they say: "Cheke’s team is recommending a fungus called Metarhizium anisopliae, which kills a locust by growing inside its body." Typically, when a population becomes unsustainable, as humans are because of their immense requirements over vast decades, we tend to find a way to 'control' that population. Typically, this is by killing them. Yet, because we have the capability to rationalize we understand vast swarms of locusts are terrible yet vast swarms of humans are just something we have to accept. The idea that we need to kill billions of humans would be unfathomable, yet, reducing our numbers will be the only way to make life on earth sustainable - for all living things. This is something Sir David Attenborough also agrees with [2]. This planet is not, was not and will never be capable of sustaining 8 billion healthy, prosperous humans with fair and equal access to food, water and shelter. We need to kill, or in some way reduce the number of humans on this planet. Anything else is a gigantic waste of time and will only serve as a distraction and way to make us feel better that we can somehow overcome this earth threatening disease called "human kind". Because of our constant encroachment into nature, we are pushing animals to their limits, which is how great pandemics are developing and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future (e.g wet markets). Coronavirus is not the worst pandemic we're dealing with right now. Humankind is. And whilst we're constantly taking space away from nature, nature will fight back and take away ourselves. We are the worst problem this planet has. [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00725-x https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00725-x [2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/av/science-environment-45741482/sir-david-attenborough-population-growth-has-to-come-to-an-end https://www.bbc.com/news/av/science-environment-45741482/sir...
- totetsu 6y ago
  Well it looks like the Uyghurs didn't get their ticket to the future.
ArkVark 6y ago
The top 10% is people who earn over $18,000/year, which probably includes most of HackerNews readers: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/business/global-income-calculator/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/business/global... Keep in mind that this richest 10% contribute the majority of humanity's value-added commerce and production, cultural output, and scientific output. For example, Romania has an equal scientific output to Pakistan: https://www.natureindex.com/country-outputs https://www.natureindex.com/country-outputs Despite Pakistan being 212 million people vs Romania 19 million. Pakistan emits 178mt of Co2, vs Romania 79mt (2016). Pakistan's CO2 output is 2.2x greater, but their total GDP is only 1.31x bigger. When you look at emissions against output, its clear that the West and East Asia are substantially more efficient than other regions on the planet.
- perfunctory 6y ago
  What is your point? Yes, HackerNews readers, including you and me, bear extra responsibility.
  - ArkVark 6y ago
    The point is that instead of looking to reduce the population of the West and East Asia, which will have an impact on humanity's economic, cultural, scientific output, we should look at reducing populations (though education and family planning for women) in less-productive areas.
    - perfunctory 6y ago
      Look, even if all countries except of say US suddenly magically disappear tomorrow, the planet will still keep warming up. Even if you reduce the world population to whatever your acceptable level is, you still need to build zero carbon infrastructure/industry for the people that remain. Net zero per person is net zero per person. Doesn't matter how many people there are. And right now, that building is not happening. Or at least not fast enough.
- karmakaze 6y ago

xwdv 6y ago

From the article, the solution is obvious, but no one has the courage to implement it. An artificial virus, deadly and highly contagious, with long incubation periods, forcing people to stay home and sending high CO2 emission industries crumbling into bankruptcy. Look what something as weak as COVID has done in a short amount of time. Also make another virus that can spread through high methane emitting livestock and kills them quickly, and anyone who eats an infected animal. At the same time if you create a vaccine against the virus, you can sell it to powerful and wealthy individuals on the black market for vast sums of money. There might be riots, but why contain it? Let it spread through the schools and churches.

kilroy_jones 6y ago
I'm going to agree this a solution, but I think we should probably tick through the first thousand or two more reasonable ones before we get to mass murder.
- xwdv 6y ago
  There is no time, a lot of the other solutions require people to willingly change their behaviors en masse. But people don’t change. They have to be forced to changed.
  - carapace 6y ago
    "Release a deadly virus to save the world!" You're talking like a character from a bad sci-fi movie. And I should know. I've been binge-watching MST3K for a week solid.

hannob 6y ago

I recommend reading this if the first thing that comes to mind is something about population: https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/9/26/16356524/the-population-question https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/9/26/1635652... As for what the solutions are: Reduce meat consumption, particularly beef, develop better meat/milk/cheese alternatives, replace fossil fuels, for the time that won't be completely possible fix methane leakage in fossil fuel production.

Eric_WVGG 6y ago
There is a pretty simple solution to the meat problem. Most of that methane comes from cows, and some seaweed thrown into their diet eliminates their methane emissions. https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/11/23/1826/how-seaweed-could-shrink-livestocks-global-carbon-hoofprint/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/11/23/1826/how-seaweed...
- hannob 6y ago
  This seaweed story comes up so often. Every time I looked it up it seems this is based on some very small studies. As far as I know noone has ever implemented this at scale (if you know otherwise - please provide links) and is selling meat produced that way. Look, I'm not against researching such stuff. But calling that "a pretty simple solution" before this has ever been tried out for real doesn't seem valid.
  - Eric_WVGG 6y ago
    Simpler than convincing the globe to change their eating habits, certainly. I don’t have any better idea than you how the science works out, and the supply chain thing sounds nontrivial, but that’s nothing compared to getting masses of people to change their habits. We can’t talk red staters into take wearing masks for a few months, and next we are going to make them give up bbq?
    - germinalphrase 6y ago
      Or allow prices to rise and people will choose to eat less meat on their own.

carapace 6y ago

One major part of the solution is applied ecology, such as Permaculture or Syntropic agriculture. We can grow all our own food (and even carbon-neutral alcohol fuel) in gardens in ecologically harmonious ways. (The historical rule is: If your civilization destroys soil it fails.) The population is leveling off and is projected to stabilize by 2100.

gridlockd 6y ago
> We can grow all our own food (and even carbon-neutral alcohol fuel) in gardens in ecologically harmonious ways. [citation needed] Not sure what kind of garden you are talking about, I like gardens to plant vegetables and such, but their caloric output is very low.
- carapace 6y ago
  Look up "Permaculture" or "Syntropic agriculture". Basically you mimic Nature and intensify it.
  - gridlockd 6y ago
    I'm broadly aware that this stuff exists, but where does it say that this can produce enough output to rival current methods?
    - carapace 6y ago
      I don't have a link handy, I'll try to find it again and post it, but there's an article or video about Ernst Gotsch, the founder of what he calls "Syntropic" farming, where it talks about how his farm produces the best cocoa in the world at 3x the crop of conventional farms of the same quality with no inputs. It's important to remember that the modern mega-farms are only cost-effective due to massive subsidies. A typical modern farm loses something like a dollar an acre per year and would fail immediately without subsidies. They're not profitable. While they are certainly highly efficient for a narrow range of species, they are physically incapable of producing the vast majority of food species at all. Comparing an acre of modern farmland growing modern corn in the modern way with modern subsidies to an acre of a Permaculture or Syntropic food forest: The modern farm will produce far more of that corn than the eco-farm. But it will require inputs: fertilizer, irrigation, and everything concerned with the farm machinery, etc., and only produce that corn. Everything else: water, land, machinery, people, gets used up or polluted by the process. In contrast the acre of food forest might not produce any corn at all, or it may contain four or five or more species of it, as well as fruit and nut trees, bananas and plantain plants, climbing fruiting vines, berry bushes, root crops, flowers, cucurbits, bamboo, etc. resulting in dozens of different yields. It requires no inputs. It's more labor intensive and cannot (yet) be automated. But it's fun, easy, profitable, and it produces the material needed to make more of itself, so it's scalable.

doitLP 6y ago

Top climate solutions ranked by amount of greenhouse gas they remove: https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/table-of-solutions https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/table-of-solutions #1 is reduced food waste

cedex12 6y ago
How trustworthy is this table?