36 ms·

We can’t beat the climate crisis without rethinking land use

35 points by vwoolf 5y ago

echelon 5y ago
Does anybody think climate change will actually be resolved without an incredibly dramatic event taking place? I'm talking about something like Clathrate Gun Hypothesis [1], not increased hurricane activity or Miami slowly sinking. A runaway heating event or worse. Humans mostly don't want to invest in things that don't have immediate payoff, where "immediate" <= one human lifespan. (Typically we want things even faster than this.) I doubt lecturing a generation of kids will change policies. Those kids will still consume economic products that cause carbon emissions. Nobody -- and I mean nobody -- is willing to do a shutdown to the level that would be required to stop warming. This article that proposes more dense cities. Nobody is going to do that for the climate. Think about how many stakeholders in reaching an 80% population vaccination rate didn't show up. These people are wasting their breath. The human species cannot solve this problem unless we manage to kill off all the plants and stop having oxygen. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis
- glogla 5y ago
  You're right. But of course by the time of the dramatic events, it will be too late to do anything. Humanity will die off and thats good - looking at the world we built, we deserve it. I fell thankful for being here to witness final moments of mankind. Its goong to be a fun ride.
  - zpeti 5y ago
    The extreme politicisation of this issue has caused this kind of thinking, which is simply not true. Even the IPCC, the biggest authority on climate change says that temperatures might increase 2C in the next 50 years, reducing the GROWTH in GDP in the world by 6% (NOT actual GDP). This might have some bad consequences, but it's a far cry from the doomsday scenario of humanity dying within 12 years that people like AOC have talked about. (btw, global temperatures rose about 2C in the last 50 years. We survived. In fact humanity is doing fairly well on most metrics)
    - jmcgough 5y ago
      We're talking about more frequent severe weather conditions, heat waves (like the historic one occurring in the PNW), millions displaced from their homes, and a mass extinction event. Sometimes GDP is the wrong metric to optimize for.
    - dathos 5y ago
      >In fact humanity is doing fairly well on most metrics Sure, but almost every other species on this planet with is is not doing that great. And even though we think we're so smart, a collapse in population of any species might have more impact on us than we now think.
    - berkeleynerd 5y ago
      The current report is quite a bit worse than this sanguine take. The pending report appears to be even more worrisome. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/6/23/leaked-un-report-warns-accelerating-climate-devastation https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/6/23/leaked-un-report-wa...
      - ALittleLight 5y ago
        A quote from that article: “Life on Earth can recover from a drastic climate shift by evolving into new species and creating new ecosystems,” it says. “Humans cannot.” Seems odd. Humans live or can live anywhere on Earth, but we're uniquely incapable of handling new ecosystems? I'd like to see the new report.
    - timeon 5y ago
      Well one of causes of war in Syria (that destabilized whole region and part of EU and accelerated Brexit etc. etc.) was drought and crop failure. And people are not only ones that are migrating north. We are still managing, but relativizing things that humanity as whole is doing well seem like willful ignorance.
  - throwaway316943 5y ago
    I look forward to watching anti-natalists and nihilists remove themselves from the gene pool. We don’t need your death cult bullshit.
  - berkeleynerd 5y ago
    In my view, both nihilism and foolish optimism seem to be coping mechanisms. Very few can really look this issue dead in the eye and still live a joyful, productive life. It’s a serious, pressing issue at a scale that is hard to imagine.
  - raxxorrax 5y ago
    Even in the worst case humanity would survive. Parts of the world might become inhabitable for us without climate control. I think the greater dangers are other species dying off and our food chain collapses. But even that is unlikely, because we eat basically everything. With survival I mean not survival of everyone of course.
- coryrc 5y ago
  You'll probably be interested in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Adaptation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Adaptation
raxxorrax 5y ago
Let me guess: Everyone should live in a city and houses should be owned by gigantic holding companies. You are getting predictable. I wrote this comment before reading the article because there are indeed articles that aren't worth reading and you know the content. I think in this case, it is good to not read the article for once. The headline supplies enough information to extrapolate the data.
easytiger 5y ago
Isn't it amazing how all solutions to all these problems require an intellectual elite preaching to people about how to live their lives.
- adrianN 5y ago
  The most popular solution, a carbon tax, requires nobody to preach to anybody.
  - nickpp 5y ago
    Is it "the most popular solution" really?! Because I can't seem to find it implemented anywhere. I am all in favor of a carbon tax, btw.
    - h4kor 5y ago
      Sweden, Switzerland, Finland, Norway, France, Iceland, Denmark, Ireland, UK, ....
    - adrianN 5y ago
      Various forms of carbon pricing are already implemented. There is for example a minuscule carbon tax in Germany and a carbon market in the EU. Naturally there are big enough holes in both that they're not particularly effective, but that is just because politicians are currently busy pretending to solve the crisis without implementing any solution.
    - meowkit 5y ago
      Popular may be the wrong word. Climate change is driven by carbon/greenhouse emissions, which are generated by productivity/industry, which is created by our economic paradigm namely capitalism. Capitalism is great imo, except when its unconstrained - it then becomes cancerous and a positive feedback loop. Feedback loops are exponential by their implicit mathematical nature. Either this loop is going to go vertical and explode, or we temper the exponentiation rate to buy more time. A carbon tax will temper the growth rate by treating emissions as a cost and not a willie nillie economic “externality”. But this will make a country uncompetitive in the short term - which makes it politically tenuous and even unviable to those who can only think in the short term. It would likely need to be paired with incentives for other industries and trade agreements/sanctions to force other nations to cooperate. So all this to say our solutions are become tree hugging hippies, techno optimism (new efficient technology will save us!), or capital controls (carbon tax, etc). I don’t know about everyone else, but the first one is a pipe dream, the second is an existential gamble, and the third one actually seems manageable.
fouc 5y ago
>We must prioritize development in the kinds of neighborhoods that permanently reduce total driving and consume less energy. Such human-centered neighborhoods have the added benefit of helping us adapt to climate impacts, improve public health, and promote access to activities. Encouraging their development should be a central part of any national climate resilience strategy. I wonder if a moratorium could be issued to freeze all land zoning changes beyond the border of all cities, stop cities from growing outwards. This would force growth to turn inwards, and improve neighborhood density.
- Aerroon 5y ago
  I'm sure everyone that owns property would be thrilled about this. Send property prices soaring even more, which means even higher rents! Much of what the article seems to suggest are things that would increase property prices.
  - iso1631 5y ago
    > Send property prices soaring even more, which means even higher rents! Not neccersarilly. There's a cap on rent, that being what people are willing and able to pay.
    - Aerroon 5y ago
      Yeah, but since you need to live somewhere people would probably be willing to drop all kinds of other things first.
      - iso1631 5y ago
        They already do. Price is set to a level of what people are able to pay, to a point where enough people are priced out that they can't live where they want because they can't afford it. Until supply massively increases, price does not reduce. Artificial changes like government subsidised rent schemes allow distribution of housing on non-financial means. This allows wages for people like teachers, shop clerks, security guards etc to stay low, and that's not good. Building outward does not increase supply in the city centre, increasing density does. Nothing encourages increasing density like charging. Imagine a $300/year/square foot charge. Not many people would be buying a low density 1000 square-foot house with $450k/year tax, instead there would be a massive demand to build 150 apartments on that lot instead, which would cost $2k a year each. There are currently plenty of places to live cheaply. There are not plenty of places to live where people want to live (central cities), so prices are higher there. The only solution to that is to increase availability where people want to live.
dang_is_erect3 5y ago
The denizens of the HackerNews won’t like this very much… they love their suburbs!
blue1 5y ago
Except, this does nothing for the already-existing cities, so it is just a planner's fantasy, unless the price of transportation becomes so high to cause the cities to transform. I think this is rather unlikely. I am thinking, couldn't we consume less energy for transportation just by making lighter vehicles? 95% of the energy used by a car is expended just to move the vehicle itself, not for its ultimate purpose, which is moving a human.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  I am thinking, couldn't we consume less energy for transportation just by making lighter vehicles? Like bikes?
- konspence 5y ago
  >I am thinking, couldn't we consume less energy for transportation just by making lighter vehicles? Subways do that. Centuries old technology
  - blue1 5y ago
    Subways are great but they only work in dense cities; many cities are not dense and will never be.
- h4kor 5y ago
  We have to get rid of the car as the main mode of transportation. Trains, busses and bikes must be the main ways to travel. This will not only reduce the energy cost of transportation but also make cities attractive again https://unevenearth.org/2018/08/the-social-ideology-of-the-motorcar/ https://unevenearth.org/2018/08/the-social-ideology-of-the-m...
- Tade0 5y ago
  We could and we are in some regions of the world: Japan has kei cars, the EU L6e and L7e vehicles. Unfortunately they often cost as much as cheap highway-capable cars and the fuel consumption, while better, isn't amazing. EVs fare better regarding the latter, but they're even more expensive. Personally I was close to getting a Renault Twizy, but after I started working remotely the need for a commuter vehicle disappeared.
souprock 5y ago
This is way off target: "the kinds of neighborhoods that permanently reduce total driving" People change jobs without changing where they live. It won't matter what kind of neighborhood a person lives in if the person still commutes a long distance. Transaction costs are high. For a dense city, moving to a different apartment means losing rent control. Elsewhere, the process of selling and buying a house will eat up about 10% the value of the house. Switching kids to different school districts is often unacceptable. The typical modern two-income household makes this far worse. Moving close to one employer just means moving away from the other employer. Cutting one person's commute just lengthens the other person's commute. Why bother?
- AstralStorm 5y ago
  Rent control is amenable to government policy, as is the number of housing units built and necessary slack of free units for travel. Same with transaction issues, moving itself is cheap but can be further subsidized. The harder problems are social - propinquity (you lose your neighbors) and schools (kids lose their friends).
- adrianN 5y ago
  In Berlin about 70% of all commutes are not done by car. By having things like supermarkets and entertainment closer to your home you don't need to drive there at least.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5y ago
  > People change jobs without changing where they live. It won't matter what kind of neighborhood a person lives in if the person still commutes a long distance. And it gets more complicated in two-income households. Both parties could work in completely different directions/areas
- greyface- 5y ago
  Post-COVID, this might be less of an issue than it has been historically. If a person is working remotely, there is no commute, and it doesn't matter where their employer is located.
bluescrn 5y ago
The obvious way to get rid of most cars is by squeezing as many people as possible into extremely dense high-rise cities, small areas in which mass transit can function. But who actually wants to live like that? To live in a tiny property in a noisy city, to save a planet that you then have far less ability to explore and enjoy?
- AstralStorm 5y ago
  Ask South Koreans and Singaporeans. They seem to be quite fine with it.
  - bluescrn 5y ago
    Big cities have an appeal to the 20-somethings, but most older people are only in cities for the jobs, and as soon as WFH becomes an option they want to go somewhere nicer and/or less expensive. And cities are usually the worst place to be during any sort of crisis (e.g. pandemic, riots, shortages/panic buying) (Maybe it's the pricing that's all wrong. Maybe living in a city should be the cheaper option, and living in a more rural area should be an expensive luxury? But that's not what the market has given us)
- opportune 5y ago
  Is that facetious? Many people want to live like that including me
- totetsu 5y ago
  Being a nature loving person who currently lives in the sprawl(but the wrong side of Tokyo bay), I have to say there are a lot of people who do want to live like that, and thats great for them, I don't understand it but, leave all the mountains empty for me and my fellow ramblers. The only problem is that as long as democracy is people weighted and not land weighted, all the big empty space will be controlled by people who have no connection to or value for it. so they will just let it become the site of extraction, or to build high ways, or wind turbines, etc.
  - 5y ago
bruce343434 5y ago
Unreadable article in its original form, even more unreadable and cut-up in "reader mode".
shafyy 5y ago
I was disappointed to see that this article didn't mention livestock agriculture. Rethinking cities is important for many reasons, but the climate impact is a drop in the bucket. We use 50% of the habitable land on earth for agriculture, and 77% thereof is used to produce meat and dairy. At the same time, meat and dairy only make up 18% of the world's calory supply, and 36% of the protein supply. It's crystal clear that the best thing we can do to free up land is to reduce livestock agriculture. This also has some more advantages, for example increasing biodiversity, decreasing zoonotic diseases like the current shitshow we're in, decreasing antibiotics resistance (the next shitshow we're about to enjoy), increasing the number of parks for recreation (which has a positive psychological impact on people). Oh yes, and animal welfare. Source: https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food
- rini17 5y ago
  In many biomes, there were large herbivores living since ever. They are part of ecosystem and and if you remove them the biodiversity actually declines. Responsible grazing is not a problem at all. What is a problem: unsustainable farming of grain/wheat to use as feed (or even feeding processed dead animals). Lumping these together is a harmful simplification.
  - mssundaram 5y ago
    There's a vast difference in historical numbers of large herbivores roaming wild and the amount needed to supply demand for meat. If the current level of demand is constant, it becomes nearly impossible to supply as "grassfed"
    - rini17 5y ago
      How vast? We're basically talking of the same land - how many cows it could support directly vs. indirectly via feedstock production. I don't see any reason why it should be many times more.
      - 5y ago

35 points by vwoolf 5y ago

Does anybody think climate change will actually be resolved without an incredibly dramatic event taking place? I'm talking about something like Clathrate Gun Hypothesis [1], not increased hurricane activity or Miami slowly sinking. A runaway heating event or worse. Humans mostly don't want to invest in things that don't have immediate payoff, where "immediate" <= one human lifespan. (Typically we want things even faster than this.) I doubt lecturing a generation of kids will change policies. Those kids will still consume economic products that cause carbon emissions. Nobody -- and I mean nobody -- is willing to do a shutdown to the level that would be required to stop warming. This article that proposes more dense cities. Nobody is going to do that for the climate. Think about how many stakeholders in reaching an 80% population vaccination rate didn't show up. These people are wasting their breath. The human species cannot solve this problem unless we manage to kill off all the plants and stop having oxygen. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis

glogla 5y ago
You're right. But of course by the time of the dramatic events, it will be too late to do anything. Humanity will die off and thats good - looking at the world we built, we deserve it. I fell thankful for being here to witness final moments of mankind. Its goong to be a fun ride.
- zpeti 5y ago
  The extreme politicisation of this issue has caused this kind of thinking, which is simply not true. Even the IPCC, the biggest authority on climate change says that temperatures might increase 2C in the next 50 years, reducing the GROWTH in GDP in the world by 6% (NOT actual GDP). This might have some bad consequences, but it's a far cry from the doomsday scenario of humanity dying within 12 years that people like AOC have talked about. (btw, global temperatures rose about 2C in the last 50 years. We survived. In fact humanity is doing fairly well on most metrics)
  - jmcgough 5y ago
    We're talking about more frequent severe weather conditions, heat waves (like the historic one occurring in the PNW), millions displaced from their homes, and a mass extinction event. Sometimes GDP is the wrong metric to optimize for.
  - dathos 5y ago
    >In fact humanity is doing fairly well on most metrics Sure, but almost every other species on this planet with is is not doing that great. And even though we think we're so smart, a collapse in population of any species might have more impact on us than we now think.
  - berkeleynerd 5y ago
    The current report is quite a bit worse than this sanguine take. The pending report appears to be even more worrisome. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/6/23/leaked-un-report-warns-accelerating-climate-devastation https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/6/23/leaked-un-report-wa...
    - ALittleLight 5y ago
      A quote from that article: “Life on Earth can recover from a drastic climate shift by evolving into new species and creating new ecosystems,” it says. “Humans cannot.” Seems odd. Humans live or can live anywhere on Earth, but we're uniquely incapable of handling new ecosystems? I'd like to see the new report.
  - timeon 5y ago
    Well one of causes of war in Syria (that destabilized whole region and part of EU and accelerated Brexit etc. etc.) was drought and crop failure. And people are not only ones that are migrating north. We are still managing, but relativizing things that humanity as whole is doing well seem like willful ignorance.
- throwaway316943 5y ago
  I look forward to watching anti-natalists and nihilists remove themselves from the gene pool. We don’t need your death cult bullshit.
- berkeleynerd 5y ago
  In my view, both nihilism and foolish optimism seem to be coping mechanisms. Very few can really look this issue dead in the eye and still live a joyful, productive life. It’s a serious, pressing issue at a scale that is hard to imagine.
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  Even in the worst case humanity would survive. Parts of the world might become inhabitable for us without climate control. I think the greater dangers are other species dying off and our food chain collapses. But even that is unlikely, because we eat basically everything. With survival I mean not survival of everyone of course.
coryrc 5y ago
You'll probably be interested in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Adaptation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Adaptation

raxxorrax 5y ago

Let me guess: Everyone should live in a city and houses should be owned by gigantic holding companies. You are getting predictable. I wrote this comment before reading the article because there are indeed articles that aren't worth reading and you know the content. I think in this case, it is good to not read the article for once. The headline supplies enough information to extrapolate the data.

easytiger 5y ago

Isn't it amazing how all solutions to all these problems require an intellectual elite preaching to people about how to live their lives.

adrianN 5y ago
The most popular solution, a carbon tax, requires nobody to preach to anybody.
- nickpp 5y ago
  Is it "the most popular solution" really?! Because I can't seem to find it implemented anywhere. I am all in favor of a carbon tax, btw.
  - h4kor 5y ago
    Sweden, Switzerland, Finland, Norway, France, Iceland, Denmark, Ireland, UK, ....
  - adrianN 5y ago
    Various forms of carbon pricing are already implemented. There is for example a minuscule carbon tax in Germany and a carbon market in the EU. Naturally there are big enough holes in both that they're not particularly effective, but that is just because politicians are currently busy pretending to solve the crisis without implementing any solution.
  - meowkit 5y ago
    Popular may be the wrong word. Climate change is driven by carbon/greenhouse emissions, which are generated by productivity/industry, which is created by our economic paradigm namely capitalism. Capitalism is great imo, except when its unconstrained - it then becomes cancerous and a positive feedback loop. Feedback loops are exponential by their implicit mathematical nature. Either this loop is going to go vertical and explode, or we temper the exponentiation rate to buy more time. A carbon tax will temper the growth rate by treating emissions as a cost and not a willie nillie economic “externality”. But this will make a country uncompetitive in the short term - which makes it politically tenuous and even unviable to those who can only think in the short term. It would likely need to be paired with incentives for other industries and trade agreements/sanctions to force other nations to cooperate. So all this to say our solutions are become tree hugging hippies, techno optimism (new efficient technology will save us!), or capital controls (carbon tax, etc). I don’t know about everyone else, but the first one is a pipe dream, the second is an existential gamble, and the third one actually seems manageable.

fouc 5y ago

>We must prioritize development in the kinds of neighborhoods that permanently reduce total driving and consume less energy. Such human-centered neighborhoods have the added benefit of helping us adapt to climate impacts, improve public health, and promote access to activities. Encouraging their development should be a central part of any national climate resilience strategy. I wonder if a moratorium could be issued to freeze all land zoning changes beyond the border of all cities, stop cities from growing outwards. This would force growth to turn inwards, and improve neighborhood density.

Aerroon 5y ago
I'm sure everyone that owns property would be thrilled about this. Send property prices soaring even more, which means even higher rents! Much of what the article seems to suggest are things that would increase property prices.
- iso1631 5y ago
  > Send property prices soaring even more, which means even higher rents! Not neccersarilly. There's a cap on rent, that being what people are willing and able to pay.
  - Aerroon 5y ago
    Yeah, but since you need to live somewhere people would probably be willing to drop all kinds of other things first.
    - iso1631 5y ago
      They already do. Price is set to a level of what people are able to pay, to a point where enough people are priced out that they can't live where they want because they can't afford it. Until supply massively increases, price does not reduce. Artificial changes like government subsidised rent schemes allow distribution of housing on non-financial means. This allows wages for people like teachers, shop clerks, security guards etc to stay low, and that's not good. Building outward does not increase supply in the city centre, increasing density does. Nothing encourages increasing density like charging. Imagine a $300/year/square foot charge. Not many people would be buying a low density 1000 square-foot house with $450k/year tax, instead there would be a massive demand to build 150 apartments on that lot instead, which would cost $2k a year each. There are currently plenty of places to live cheaply. There are not plenty of places to live where people want to live (central cities), so prices are higher there. The only solution to that is to increase availability where people want to live.

dang_is_erect3 5y ago

The denizens of the HackerNews won’t like this very much… they love their suburbs!

blue1 5y ago

Except, this does nothing for the already-existing cities, so it is just a planner's fantasy, unless the price of transportation becomes so high to cause the cities to transform. I think this is rather unlikely. I am thinking, couldn't we consume less energy for transportation just by making lighter vehicles? 95% of the energy used by a car is expended just to move the vehicle itself, not for its ultimate purpose, which is moving a human.

tonyedgecombe 5y ago
I am thinking, couldn't we consume less energy for transportation just by making lighter vehicles? Like bikes?
konspence 5y ago
>I am thinking, couldn't we consume less energy for transportation just by making lighter vehicles? Subways do that. Centuries old technology
- blue1 5y ago
  Subways are great but they only work in dense cities; many cities are not dense and will never be.
h4kor 5y ago
We have to get rid of the car as the main mode of transportation. Trains, busses and bikes must be the main ways to travel. This will not only reduce the energy cost of transportation but also make cities attractive again https://unevenearth.org/2018/08/the-social-ideology-of-the-motorcar/ https://unevenearth.org/2018/08/the-social-ideology-of-the-m...
Tade0 5y ago
We could and we are in some regions of the world: Japan has kei cars, the EU L6e and L7e vehicles. Unfortunately they often cost as much as cheap highway-capable cars and the fuel consumption, while better, isn't amazing. EVs fare better regarding the latter, but they're even more expensive. Personally I was close to getting a Renault Twizy, but after I started working remotely the need for a commuter vehicle disappeared.

souprock 5y ago

This is way off target: "the kinds of neighborhoods that permanently reduce total driving" People change jobs without changing where they live. It won't matter what kind of neighborhood a person lives in if the person still commutes a long distance. Transaction costs are high. For a dense city, moving to a different apartment means losing rent control. Elsewhere, the process of selling and buying a house will eat up about 10% the value of the house. Switching kids to different school districts is often unacceptable. The typical modern two-income household makes this far worse. Moving close to one employer just means moving away from the other employer. Cutting one person's commute just lengthens the other person's commute. Why bother?

AstralStorm 5y ago
Rent control is amenable to government policy, as is the number of housing units built and necessary slack of free units for travel. Same with transaction issues, moving itself is cheap but can be further subsidized. The harder problems are social - propinquity (you lose your neighbors) and schools (kids lose their friends).
adrianN 5y ago
In Berlin about 70% of all commutes are not done by car. By having things like supermarkets and entertainment closer to your home you don't need to drive there at least.
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5y ago
> People change jobs without changing where they live. It won't matter what kind of neighborhood a person lives in if the person still commutes a long distance. And it gets more complicated in two-income households. Both parties could work in completely different directions/areas
greyface- 5y ago
Post-COVID, this might be less of an issue than it has been historically. If a person is working remotely, there is no commute, and it doesn't matter where their employer is located.

bluescrn 5y ago

The obvious way to get rid of most cars is by squeezing as many people as possible into extremely dense high-rise cities, small areas in which mass transit can function. But who actually wants to live like that? To live in a tiny property in a noisy city, to save a planet that you then have far less ability to explore and enjoy?

AstralStorm 5y ago
Ask South Koreans and Singaporeans. They seem to be quite fine with it.
- bluescrn 5y ago
  Big cities have an appeal to the 20-somethings, but most older people are only in cities for the jobs, and as soon as WFH becomes an option they want to go somewhere nicer and/or less expensive. And cities are usually the worst place to be during any sort of crisis (e.g. pandemic, riots, shortages/panic buying) (Maybe it's the pricing that's all wrong. Maybe living in a city should be the cheaper option, and living in a more rural area should be an expensive luxury? But that's not what the market has given us)
opportune 5y ago
Is that facetious? Many people want to live like that including me
totetsu 5y ago
Being a nature loving person who currently lives in the sprawl(but the wrong side of Tokyo bay), I have to say there are a lot of people who do want to live like that, and thats great for them, I don't understand it but, leave all the mountains empty for me and my fellow ramblers. The only problem is that as long as democracy is people weighted and not land weighted, all the big empty space will be controlled by people who have no connection to or value for it. so they will just let it become the site of extraction, or to build high ways, or wind turbines, etc.
- 5y ago

bruce343434 5y ago

Unreadable article in its original form, even more unreadable and cut-up in "reader mode".

shafyy 5y ago

I was disappointed to see that this article didn't mention livestock agriculture. Rethinking cities is important for many reasons, but the climate impact is a drop in the bucket. We use 50% of the habitable land on earth for agriculture, and 77% thereof is used to produce meat and dairy. At the same time, meat and dairy only make up 18% of the world's calory supply, and 36% of the protein supply. It's crystal clear that the best thing we can do to free up land is to reduce livestock agriculture. This also has some more advantages, for example increasing biodiversity, decreasing zoonotic diseases like the current shitshow we're in, decreasing antibiotics resistance (the next shitshow we're about to enjoy), increasing the number of parks for recreation (which has a positive psychological impact on people). Oh yes, and animal welfare. Source: https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food

rini17 5y ago
In many biomes, there were large herbivores living since ever. They are part of ecosystem and and if you remove them the biodiversity actually declines. Responsible grazing is not a problem at all. What is a problem: unsustainable farming of grain/wheat to use as feed (or even feeding processed dead animals). Lumping these together is a harmful simplification.
- mssundaram 5y ago
  There's a vast difference in historical numbers of large herbivores roaming wild and the amount needed to supply demand for meat. If the current level of demand is constant, it becomes nearly impossible to supply as "grassfed"
  - rini17 5y ago
    How vast? We're basically talking of the same land - how many cows it could support directly vs. indirectly via feedstock production. I don't see any reason why it should be many times more.
    - 5y ago