3 ms·

Arguing for less consumption is a non-starter. It's a tacit admission that the solution to global warming is killing say 30% of the global population, just fram

Arguing for less consumption is a non-starter. It's a tacit admission that the solution to global warming is killing say 30% of the global population, just framed in an indirect manner so it doesn't sound like genocide.

atoav 6y ago
Genocide? Really? I thought it was part of the HN codex not to read others opinions in a unfavourable way unless there is no other conclusion, but okay. Deforestation to make way for livestock, along with methane emissions from cows and fertilizer use, creates as much greenhouse gas emissions as all the world’s cars, trucks and airplanes combined. The fertilizer has to be used for the life stocks food. If you eat 1 kJ of meat vs 1 kJ of the soy that is produced to feed it, there is less water usage [1], less CO2 emissions [2], less land usage etc. If anything a move away from meat would help earth to accommodate more people. And that is only meat. What if you are able to buy one product that lasts a decade vs 10 that last a year? This kind of "use the resources more efficiently"-stuff is what I mean when I say reduce consumption. And that should by the way not be the task for individuals to tackle, we need higher standards when it comes to efficient resource usage, quality and lifetime of products, etc. This is not something that will be solved fast enough by consumers and their wallets. Of course energy and transportation is a factor as well in all of this. If we don't want to move our planet into " lol maybe we go extinct"-territory, we will have to reduce individual transport and expand public transport and use renewable or otherwise more efficient means of converting energy. The thing is: doing it later means we would have to do even harder changes. If we all started tackling this 4 decades ago we could have gone with a smooth, gradual change. Now even instantaneous change would be only amount to damage limitation. The Greenlandic ice is over the tipping point. We cannot unmelt it. And heating 0°C ice to 0°C water takes the same amount of energy as it takes to heat 0°C water to 80°C water. This means thermally speaking our breaks are still working, but they will stop working any moment and we cannot stop them from loosing their function anymore. The last year of reading up on climate science really made me realize that things are far worse than I thought they were. [1] The waterfootprint of beef vs soy is nearly 15 times bigger: https://research.utwente.nl/en/publications/the-water-footprint-of-soy-milk-and-soy-burger-and-equivalent-ani https://research.utwente.nl/en/publications/the-water-footpr... [2] For CO2 it might be even worse: https://ourworldindata.org/less-meat-or-sustainable-meat https://ourworldindata.org/less-meat-or-sustainable-meat

atoav 6y ago

Genocide? Really? I thought it was part of the HN codex not to read others opinions in a unfavourable way unless there is no other conclusion, but okay. Deforestation to make way for livestock, along with methane emissions from cows and fertilizer use, creates as much greenhouse gas emissions as all the world’s cars, trucks and airplanes combined. The fertilizer has to be used for the life stocks food. If you eat 1 kJ of meat vs 1 kJ of the soy that is produced to feed it, there is less water usage [1], less CO2 emissions [2], less land usage etc. If anything a move away from meat would help earth to accommodate more people. And that is only meat. What if you are able to buy one product that lasts a decade vs 10 that last a year? This kind of "use the resources more efficiently"-stuff is what I mean when I say reduce consumption. And that should by the way not be the task for individuals to tackle, we need higher standards when it comes to efficient resource usage, quality and lifetime of products, etc. This is not something that will be solved fast enough by consumers and their wallets. Of course energy and transportation is a factor as well in all of this. If we don't want to move our planet into " lol maybe we go extinct"-territory, we will have to reduce individual transport and expand public transport and use renewable or otherwise more efficient means of converting energy. The thing is: doing it later means we would have to do even harder changes. If we all started tackling this 4 decades ago we could have gone with a smooth, gradual change. Now even instantaneous change would be only amount to damage limitation. The Greenlandic ice is over the tipping point. We cannot unmelt it. And heating 0°C ice to 0°C water takes the same amount of energy as it takes to heat 0°C water to 80°C water. This means thermally speaking our breaks are still working, but they will stop working any moment and we cannot stop them from loosing their function anymore. The last year of reading up on climate science really made me realize that things are far worse than I thought they were. [1] The waterfootprint of beef vs soy is nearly 15 times bigger: https://research.utwente.nl/en/publications/the-water-footprint-of-soy-milk-and-soy-burger-and-equivalent-ani https://research.utwente.nl/en/publications/the-water-footpr... [2] For CO2 it might be even worse: https://ourworldindata.org/less-meat-or-sustainable-meat https://ourworldindata.org/less-meat-or-sustainable-meat