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I mean you can't have 8 billion needy, constantly consuming humans for 60/70 years and somehow have a sustainable, vibrant and healthy ecosystem. You can't hav

• TedShiller 6y ago
  It’s funny how we are aware of the damage, and yet everyone still wants to live like a millionaire It’s not possible.
  • dominotw 6y ago
    > It’s not possible. Why not. You can live like a millionaire and not have kids. Having a kid is many factors worse than living a millionaire.
    • oivey 6y ago
      Really, really depends on how you live. People in first world countries are worse for the environment than people in third world countries by a wide margin per capita.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • JoeAltmaier 6y ago
        Well, in some senses. Yet ocean plastics were reported to be 90% China and India. Soil erosion has been mostly eliminated in the US and is endemic elsewhere. And obviously, since most remaining native species are in 3rd world countries, the threats to them are there. It seems logical to direct efforts to control damage toward the places where they are occurring.
        • kiliantics 6y ago
          China and India conduct a huge amount of their economic activity in order to satisfy the demand of people in other places though, i.e. that plastic, coal burning, etc. is mostly on us.
        • grenoire 6y ago
          Yes, because we exported our environmental responsibilities regarding plastic manufacturing and processing to those countries, which inevitably pollute for us.
        • tsimionescu 6y ago
          Until recently, China had been importing a vast amount of the world's trashed plastic, ostensibly for recycling, but likely simply dumping a good part of it. The global economy doesn't allow for simple answers to the sources of trash and waste. China (and India) are massive exporters of goods, only a fraction of their manufacturing is consumed internally. And of course, the biggest importers are the US and Europe.
      • elmomle 6y ago
        To further clarify this comment: living like a millionaire (consuming more in general) increases your carbon footprint.
    • flatline 6y ago
      The US is effectively zero population growth, as are many other affluent parts of the world. This seems like an overly simplistic assessment.
      • dominotw 6y ago
        I am assuming we need to go negative in population growth, current population levels are not sustainable.
        • aboringusername 6y ago
          It's almost like a pandemic could be natures way of enacting that, yet it seems now we've conquered its capability to do widespread damage in terms of human lives lost. This must be one of the least fatal pandemics in history
      • monkeydreams 6y ago
        The problem is not necessarily the population growth, but the growth in aggregate demand. The rich demand more and more every year, the middle-class demand more and more every year, and the poor demand to live like the middle class. Your population can be stable, but the economy is not.
        • PeterisP 6y ago
          While economy has historically been coupled to resource and energy usage, recently we have decoupled economic growth from things like that, countries can and do have economic growth with stable or decreasing ecological footprint as the service economy and digital/attention economy can provide more and more things people want without necessarily consuming more physical resources.
          • monkeydreams 6y ago
            > While economy has historically been coupled to resource and energy usage, recently we have decoupled economic growth from things like that I get what you are saying but I would need to see this sustained before I believe that we have finally broken the back of GDP to Ecological Footprint linkage. I'm not optimistic about mankind's ability to keep its footprint under control.
    • bpodgursky 6y ago
      This is such a sick mindset. "Sure, we can run the world down for a bit -- all we have to do is sacrifice the opportunity of future generations to experience the world"
      • greenpresident 6y ago
        I don’t have a sister. Did my parents rob her of the opportunity to live a meaningful life? There is nothing that could be robbed of anything.
    • daamsie 6y ago
      iirc dogs are also equivalent to the average emissions of a person in Vietnam. So best to cut them out as well.
      • dominotw 6y ago
        sure
    • lovecg 6y ago
      Are you advocating for only certain people not to have kids (in which case, what’s your criteria on who should and who shouldn’t), or that no one should have kids (e.g. the humanity should die out)?
  • elihu 6y ago
    To be fair, there were some pretty drastic reduction in emissions from transportation in the last year. That was due to a global pandemic rather than environmental activism, but still it's progress. It may have at least caused some permanent changes in behavior regarding driving to the office every day. Before the pandemic I didn't work from home at all. Now after working from home 100% for a year I'm looking forward to being able to see my coworkers in person again when things open up, but I'll probably work from home a few days a week. Not a huge change, but every little bit helps, especially when hundreds of millions or billions of other people start working from home a few days a week who wouldn't before.
• ctdonath 6y ago
  Will you personally be carbon/environmentally neutral next year?
  • aboringusername 6y ago
    My understanding is this is extremely difficult short of killing myself. Using a car, the internet, a smartphone, electricity...You're tied into industries that are simply not carbon neutral. How much electricity is used when you browse the internet loading the 15,000 JS files and ad networks/trackers everywhere? How much energy (i.e battery % on a phone) is wasted per human, per day for absolutely pointless nonsense? I think I need to be forced into changes, such as having to buy an electric car, or being made to walk due to driving being made illegal. If I can enhance my life whilst I get the chance to do so during my time on earth I will, unless I am prevented from doing so. I always opt for what is beneficial to me (and, judging by the sheer number of cars on the road, I am not alone in this). Otherwise, I freely admit I have little desire to put effort into pretending I can somehow help the planet - that's the job of governments to set the policies society needs to accept, we either do it together or not at all. I want to be as anti-carbon-neutrality as possible until it's illegal for me to cause pollution in any way (due to a shift in opinion and generating harmful emissions being 100% illegal and punishable by jail).
    • astrange 6y ago
      Forcing you to do in particular to do either of these things wouldn’t help. The reason you’re using a car and not walking is cities aren’t built densely enough because California’s land use rules are made to keep the state looking like a 50s sitcom set. Electric cars are better for families (even in Japan), but having car-shaped cars is still pretty polluting due to road and tire dust, so encouraging micromobility + mass transit would be a better move for the individual.
      • StavrosK 6y ago
        "Carbon neutral" isn't the same as "non-polluting". "All" you need to be carbon neutral is to not burn fossil fuels for your energy.
• neaanopri 6y ago
  We've decided not to do anything. Any other conclusion is foolish optimism. The effects will happen.
• hshshs2 6y ago
  enough people won’t care until it impacts their daily lives directly, and by the time it does it’ll be too late we could likely do it with 10 billion people on the planet, but with the greed there it won’t happen
• deleted 6y ago
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• staunch 6y ago
  > You can't have all the modern day luxuries (cars, airplanes, electricity 24/7) and somehow expect everything to just "hum" along. [Citation needed]
• s1artibartfast 6y ago
  >you can't have 8 billion needy, constantly consuming humans for 60/70 years and somehow have a sustainable, vibrant and healthy ecosystem. It is worth noting that the collapse had nothing to do with over harvest of sea life.
  • bbarn 6y ago
    The cause of the wasting symptom is still unknown, that's why the link in the article leads to a school that is looking for specimens to analyze. It would be very surprising, to me at least, to find ultimately humans did not contribute to this chain of events. Whether it's something like microplastics causing the lesions on the star fish or water temperature/chemical concentration leading to some fungal spore growing, I suspect ancient kelp forests aren't vanishing without our help.
    • s1artibartfast 6y ago
      This is an entirely different point than mine about harvest. It is entirely possible it is in some way related to human activity. It is also possible that it is completely unrelated. Booms, busts, and radical ecosystem changes do happen all the time in nature.
      • boringg 6y ago
        They do, it’s true, but not on the time horizon that we have been seeing in the last 50 years which seems to be speeding up
        • fingerlocks 6y ago
          How do we know that? I’m not disagreeing with you- but I can’t imagine any historic evidence could rule out the existence of a highly volatile and cyclical population change.
        • samatman 6y ago
          That's not true at all. Nature isn't gradual, it's catastropic. The Younger Drayas caused a 7° to 10° C drop worldwide in a matter of decades. Volcanic eruptions, sudden drought, earthquakes, asteroid impacts, abrupt population crashes: sudden change is normal. Yes, a lot of the change we see now is human impact. But this could easily be a virus that hit the sea stars out of the blue. We just don't know.
• oh_sigh 6y ago
  The die off is attributed to a mysterious disease affecting sea stars, and a couple years of warm marine weather. It's wholly possible this has nothing to do with humans at all, and is a natural event. Yes, the disease may have been caused or spread by human activity, and yes, the warm marine weather may have been caused by human-created global warming, but you're jumping the gun to say that this is because we have 8 billion people who want a certain standard of living.
  • lostlogin 6y ago
    > The die off is attributed to a mysterious disease affecting sea stars, and a couple years of warm marine weather. It's wholly possible this has nothing to do with humans at all, and is a natural event. It is, and we keep hearing this argument for situations across the entire plant. There is a clear trend.
• redisman 6y ago
  Climate change is also just one of the ecological problems we’re making worse by the day. Micro plastics, importing non native species and parasites, insecticides, herbicides with unknown systemic effects, destroying most wild areas, etc.
• mempko 6y ago
  vast majority of those 8 billion people use very little resources. It's over consumption of the worlds top 10% (probably includes you and me) that caused most of the damage.
• falcolas 6y ago
  > You can't have all the modern day luxuries (cars, airplanes, electricity 24/7) I'm still feeling this argument out a bit, but... what can an individual actually do about it? Even if you look beyond how little any individual family contributes to pollution, in comparison to even some of the simplest industrial ventures. I can't do without electricity 24x7, because I live in the north. I'd freeze to death. Think the recent crap Texas had to go through, for around 8 months of the year. I can't do without a car because my commute is around 20 miles one way. I - quite literally - can't afford to live closer to work; the prices are on par with the bay area ($600,000 1,000 sqft condos), despite living in a very sparsely populated state with "competitive" wages in the $80k range for experienced software developers. I could (and have) done without airplanes, but the alternative (if I want to keep my job) is to drive for around 18 hours. Not terribly friendly. The bus is closer to 48 hours, with prices on par with the airlines. It is, for all intents and purposes, impossible for me (for a vast majority of people, I'd posit) to live without a job, without electricity, and without a car. And, realistically, I have very little control over my house, my car, my food, etc; these are instead largely based on my salary. I get what's been made available by the market to me at a price that I can afford. It's not as if the market will change to less profitable products just because they're a bit better for the world. And it's not as if I can suddenly afford more expensive products just because they're better for the world.
  • kiliantics 6y ago
    > what can an individual actually do about it? Get politically engaged with organisations that are demanding systemic change EDIT: I don't see what is negative or controversial about this suggestion. The commenter says they cannot do the right thing because of how the system works and what options it makes available to them and at what price. So in that case we must all do work to change the system. The market is currently dictated by many different policies and legislation, causing most things you buy to be artificially cheap or expensive in one way or another. We can change this through policy or other means to make carbon products more expensive -- driving more expensive while clean transit is cheap, inner city housing cheaper than suburban sprawl, etc.
    • 6y ago
• planet-and-halo 6y ago
  For a somewhat encouraging counterpoint to this statement, check out the book "More From Less." It describes a lot of positive trends including decreasing demand for many resources whose extraction is damaging to the environment. Some examples: we farm far less land in the United States than we used to while producing more food, and that unused area slowly reverts to forest; we use less metal to make containers for the same volume of liquid. There's still plenty to worry about, but more positive signs than you'd think.
  • tsimionescu 6y ago
    All of these "reasons for optimism" trends in the US (and, to a big extent, Europe as well) are to be ignored, since the US is simply moving production of everything outside the country on an unprecedented scale. Every farm that gets released in the mid-west is likely made up by another swath of Amazon rain-forest burned down in Brazil . Even in internal production, every increase in productivity is met with an increase in the push to get people to consume more, so there are no real gains to be had in the current system.
    • planet-and-halo 6y ago
      That's not true, according to the book. Both the US and many foreign countries have peaked in their consumption of many important resources. Feel free to argue with the book's research, but I found it compelling.
      • therealdrag0 6y ago
        I didn't read the book but listened to the econTalk episode with the author and read an article by the author with the same thesis. When I looked into it a bit I came away unconvinced. As much as I want to believe, I don't think he fully accounted for shifts in manufacturing. I forget exactly what I found, but if I where to guess it would be something like our imports of certain resources might have peaked, but that doesn't account to things that are manufactured in part/whole outside the US. If I buy an inflatable Kayak made in China, then how is that oil/rubber accounted for? US oil/rubber imports maybe have gone down, but have our inflatable Kayak imports gone down and is it tracked?
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• lm28469 6y ago
  I expect that we're not even detecting most collapses like these. It's like when your garage is on fire but you're in the bedroom on the other side of the house. It starts to smell funky but you're not yet aware that your whole house will be gone in the next hour > I am uncertain about this whole "2030" neutrality thing, why not 2025? Why not next year? "next year" for a politician is "right now". "in 2030" is "never" since they'll be long retired. There is a funny thing happening right now in France, most politicians from the 70s, 80s,&c. are coming out saying we should focus on climate change, the very same people who actively participated in worsening the situation back in the days. They only wake up now because their life is basically over and they want to rip some last minute karma points. Short term individual goals will always defeat long term global ones
• WhompingWindows 6y ago
  Hmm, I think your stance is a tad defeatist in this specific instance. The article's main contention is without the Sunflower sea stars, the urchins have no eager predation, and therefore can decimate any kelp nearby. I believe it's possible to have modern luxuries without making sea stars extinct, but the scale and diversity and degree to which we use those luxuries will determine how much damage we do. There's also the possibility a specific pollutant is harming the sea stars, which was the case with birds' eggs and pesticides in the past.
• Robotbeat 6y ago
  I just don't understand this argument. Cars and airplanes, if powered by clean electricity, make it pretty low impact. It's not even that hard. We spent like $2 trillion on a coronavirus stimulus bill. $2 trillion on clean electricity infrastructure would be enough to clean up the electric grid to like 90-95% fossil free. Another $2 trillion of incentives and mandates would allow most transportation in the US to be fossil free (pure electric cars and trucks, with plug-in hybrid cars and trucks as an interim measure) and charged by our 90-95% fossil free grid. (Electricity and transport are the two biggest things, followed by heating and industry... which ALSO have fairly straightforward solutions to becoming almost entirely carbonfree.) I'm convinced that a HUGE reason we don't just pull the trigger and do this now is because a huge swath of the environmental activist community is deadset on demanding a reduction in consumption and "modern day luxuries" even when not strictly necessary. That means that it's a political dead end and literally every other goal becomes a higher priority. Any climate action that doesn't "reduce consumption" is seen as not being "real." We should just see it like solving the Ozone Hole (which is now healing, BTW). Instead of giving up refrigeration and air conditioning, we developed non-ozone-depleting refrigerants. I'm sorry that Attenborough probably won't be satisfied with that answer, but we really can have 8 billion humans with modern day luxuries provided we're responsible about it. And it's not even hard. I have two (used) electric cars that I bought for $10k apiece, and they mostly charge using nuclear electricity. With a heat pump (air source with ground-source backup), and I'll be set for heating my house as well.
  • therealdrag0 6y ago
    Not sure we have clean-electric airplanes? But I agree with everything else. Personally I recently used some calculators to see what my carbon footprint is and found a plausible offset for it (certified program through my utility company that goes to buying/building more green energy). And it was pretty darn cheap, less than 15/mo for myself in a 1 bedroom apt, a SUV, and multiple flights a year. Now a larger family increases that number, but nothing the middle-class can't handle. (I Also donate a ton to Wildlife Conservation Network) I'm trying to do my part, but it seems meaningless without appropriate political decisions that would have real impact by costing our externalities.