7 ms·
Biggest industries burn through $7.3T of natural capital a year
- zoklet-enjoyer 3y agoVegans are the heroes we need https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local
- phkahler 3y agoWell now we know what makes economies go!
- bhawks 3y agoThe inclusion of "land use" and "water use" immediately makes this suspect to me. What's wrong with using land for agriculture or using rainfall and water? With the article calling out wheat farming as one of their top concerns, what do they want as an alternative? Starving people? Depopulation? You can make strong environmental arguments without reaching to such extremes. It actually undercuts the position.
- sanxiyn 3y agoTheoretically speaking, not all water use is renewable like rainfall, you can in fact deplete aquifers, and ancient near east in fact desertified due to unsustainable water use. Ditto for land use, you can in fact erode and degrade topsoil, ancient near east etc. Skimming the report, it doesn't do reasonable job of taking land use and water use into account, but in principle, there's nothing wrong with taking unsustainable portion of land use and water use into account.
- endliner 3y agoFreshwater and fertile topsoil are easily exhaustible resources. There are rivers (e.g. Colorado River) that are drying up due to overuse, and much of human waste gets either polluted with chemicals or ends up flushed into the ocean, never to be reclaimed. Once you dry up one river too many, you'll have both starvation and depopulation, but also daily shellings.
- aeternum 3y agoNew rivers can also form, and volcanoes create new fertile land. How much does the Mississippi spill into the ocean and why don't you consider that a massive waste of freshwater?
- imtringued 3y agoAre humans patient enough to wait for the next volcanoe?
- jonahbenton 3y agoI like people, and eating meat, and lots of other things...but I and just about all of us are burning through the infrastructure that makes humans possible. And when humans aren't possible, there won't be any more humans. That's reality. The physical systems on which we depend for survival do not care about what we want. Our only hope for maintaining a human population is to recognize that.
- proxy9 3y agoIt's not just industries, we all do. If we are honest with ourselves, we are just some parasites to this planet
- kevviiinn 3y agoThe impact of corporations is far greater than of individual citizens
- moshun 3y agoThe greatest idea corporations ever came up with was to convince us all that we can individually stop what’s happening. Remember the fantasy that many of us grew up on that recycling would save the planet? Turns out things like plastic recycling is a joke. Or how about when the oil companies invented the idea of “carbon footprint” to convince the public it was their responsibility to curb emissions, even though the vast majority of pollution isn’t from consumers?
- apsec112 3y ago[deleted]
- candiddevmike 3y agoGreat, let's do it
- jkhdigital 3y agoExternalities are the activists’ favorite technical-sounding economic concept because they introduce a fudge factor into every single economic process that can be abused to support almost any conclusion. The article essentially claims that nearly all major industries would be unprofitable is forced to pay their externalities. Great! Let’s shut it all down, let everyone gradually die off and then we’ll finally reach the sustainable utopia these people seek.
- junofan 3y agoClimate activists would be better off developing a compelling vision. Look at how much progress Tesla has made by offering cars that people actually want. Nobody wants to live in the world envisioned by climate activists. That is why activists have made no progress in the last 50 years.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- moshun 3y agoYour comment ignores that these industries, corporations and governments driving climate change for profit have gone to extreme lengths to make sure activists make no progress that would affect earnings. It’s also a strange argument to make that activists need to convince you that drinking contaminated water, breathing polluted air and ruining the natural world for profit isn’t a sustainable vision for the future. Activists aren’t trying to sell you a product they are trying to warn you. Holding them to the showmanship antics of any given CEO seems misguided.
- anigbrowl 3y ago- Hello I am a firefighter, did you know your house is on fire - OK but what's your vision for this issue - I'm going to spray water on it, also you should stand farther away - Aren't you just being reflexively contrarian?
- drewm1980 3y agoTesla's cars (and private automobiles in general) are not a compelling vision, they're toys for rich people. I looked it up. About a million Teslas have ever been manufactured. Round the population to a power of 10... 10 billion people. So one human in 10k gets a Tesla. The main thing most climate activists that I talk to want is for billions of people to not have to die off due to resource mismanagement. People don't believe that it's even possible for our civilization to collapse, even though entire civilizations have collapsed numerous times over the course of history. This is not a world we're envisioning, is a world we're ~visioning. With our eyeballs.
- junofan 3y agoI skimmed the Trucost report. To a first approximation, the $7.3T number is fabricated. This hyperbole harms serious problem solving.
- myshpa 3y agoNoam Chomsky, an American linguist, philosopher, and political activist, once said, "If you're in a system where you must make profit in order to survive, you are compelled to ignore negative externalities, effects on others". https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/economics/externalities https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/economics/externa... Stephen Hawking criticized the economy for ignoring externalities, particularly in the context of climate change. In his book "Brief Answers to the Big Questions," Hawking wrote, "We are now learning that climate change is bringing with it not only changes to the physical environment but also to the way we think about economics. It is forcing us to recognize that many of the ways we have been measuring economic progress, based on the idea of unlimited growth, have been deeply flawed"
- AbrahamParangi 3y agoNoam Chomsky is a socialist in spite of all available evidence of the atrocities committed by most socialist states against their people. His career as a linguist is respected. His career as an economist or as a political commentator is of no worth at all.
- TeaDrunk 3y agoi don't know if its fair to conflate an economic system with a political one
- jkhdigital 3y agoPolitics and economics are virtually inseparable. There’s a reason the field of economics used to be called “political economy”.
- klik99 3y agoScience and math are in practice virtually inseparable. Math can be studied independently of science, but science can't be studied independently of math. Similarly economics can be studied independently of politics, but good luck understanding politics without mentioning economics.
- aaronbrethorst 3y ago(2013) The author, David Roberts subsequently wrote for Vox (https://www.vox.com/authors/david-roberts https://www.vox.com/authors/david-roberts) and is now publishing a really terrific podcast via his Substack at http://volts.wtf http://volts.wtf
- sanxiyn 3y ago> Of the top 20 region-sectors ranked by environmental impacts, none would be profitable if environmental costs were fully integrated. Ponder that for a moment: None of the world's top industrial sectors would be profitable if they were paying their full freight. This is non sequitur. You can't go from "industries ranked by environmental impacts" to "biggest industries". This is so ridiculous I double checked whether I missed something, and no, I haven't missed anything. The logic really is that bad.
- ineedasername 3y agoOne problem (among many) is that even the current minimal attempts to pay for externalities in the form of carbon credits is mostly a perverse system of offsets taking the form of, for just one example, paying a logging company to not cut down trees that they wouldn’t cut down anyway. And even the initiative to plant more trees in the millions. For all its noble purpose and good will— which I don’t fault and thing should continue— will have only the barest and most minimal impact on carbon capture. And this is just o e of many externalities unpaid by corporations, subsidizing the cost of products we all use every day. But no— I have no solution here, at least nothing plausibly likely to happen until the impacts of our actions becoming so obvious that they cannot be ignored. I am hopeful the human race will survive it, but only with enormous sacrifice.
- myshpa 3y agoMillions of trees is nothing. We'd need 1000+ trees for every westerner (IIRC).
- vegetablepotpie 3y agoI remember reading in another thread about Tesler’s law, which says that in software you can neither create nor destroy complexity, you can only move where it exists. Costs in society are similar. The days of the traditional corporation, i.e. an organization that has shareholders, management, and employees made sense in the period of 1600 to 1950, but since then the world has gotten smaller. Our ability to shift costs (externalities) onto our planet has been curtailed by the fact that we’ve gone from a population of millions to billions. When you try to grow wealth by extracting stuff, sometime, someone, somewhere is going to feel it and will pay for it without any benefits to them. Regulation, has been shoehorned in as a solution. But it operates as a bandaid that no one has been happy with. Every regulation simultaneously goes too far and doesn’t go far enough. It shifts decision making power from one institution to another, (business to government) and depends on an army of bureaucrats, to implement. The fundamental solution is simple, make corporations pay for the externalities they create. This would be done at the point of purchase and would not grow the size of government because taxation systems that do this already exist. The implementation of this idea though is inconsistent and politically perilous because of path dependence. No one wants to pay for something they got for free before. For example, Citizens Climate Lobby has been campaigning for years for a Carbon Price and despite a lobbying effort from over 200,000 volunteers the US has yet to see a carbon price implemented. To do political lobbying for every externality like this would be a Sisyphean task. My solution, high concept, would be to make a society like Star Trek. We need to make a techno utopia, paired with social progress to sustain it. Although you can’t have Star Trek without warp drive, warp drive doesn’t make Star Trek, humanity had also evolved socially on the show. We will not travel faster than light, our warp drive will be computers. One of the keys to my approach is to have better models, models of climate, models of toxicity, models of the economy, models of human behavior, etc. That will let us have predictive capabilities to test ideas before they have consequences and model where costs are borne and bill the beneficiaries. The raw TFLOPs of our hardware will not give us this, rather human ingenuity and skepticism will. To achieve that will require giving people license to question and develop. This means giving teachers autonomy, instituting universal basic income, and creating public spaces.
- WillAdams 3y agoIt would be more interesting to phrase this in terms of how much of the planet's production of renewable resources is being used/exceeded. It's my understanding that not too long ago, when this last came up in an online discussion I partipated in, our modern lifestyle is burning through some 2.5 earth's annual renewable generation worth of resources each year by using non-renewable resources. Consider that we burn up to 10 calories of petro-chemical energy to get a single food calorie for some crops --- we need to transition to some sort of sustainable lifestyle and energy usage in the near future --- the sooner the better. A phrasing which I think would make sense, and which should at least be considered in such discussions is: Under what circumstances does a person have the right to generate more heat energy than 1/current human population portion of the amount of energy which the planet is able to radiate off into space overnight? One good blog post discussing this sort of thing: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...
- iamgopal 3y agoOne idea is to create self sustainable dense forest ( of mixed plants, many growing edible fruits vegetables etc) , to reduce farming.
- gameman144 3y agoThis already is done to some degree (at local scales), but there's the issue that both the cost and the density are pretty prohibitive for large populations. Whether large populations should exist or not, they do today, and this makes us pretty reliant on high-yield low-cost food production.
- akudha 3y agoAnd eat less meat, or quit altogether. A huge portion of land is used to grow food for animals, and huge pollution comes with meat consumption.
- ozzy6009 3y agoWhen accounting for negative externalities such as "unpriced natural capital consumption", it seems only fair to also include positive externalities, such as "food/energy availability"
- dv_dt 3y agoThat's less clear because food/energy availability can be had by alternate means.
- imtringued 3y agoHow are those positive externalities? The person who burns the fuel gets the benefits, everyone else has to live with the pollution without benefitting. A farmer that burns fuel to produce food gets paid for the food that burning the fuel enabled. There is no positive externality that needs to be compensated here. If you wanted to make an argument about positive externalities you would talk about farmers leaving the soil in better condition than they arrived i.e. regenerating natural capital instead of burning it.
- lend000 3y agoExternality taxes would solve many of today's pressing problems, implemented such that the externality tax is equal to the cost to "undo" whatever externality is imposed (and assuming the government actually spends the money to do so). I.e. we should recognize that we shouldn't outlaw useful and fundamentally positive things that emit CO2 like driving a car, but rather tax the pollution according to the cost to recapture that carbon from the shared environment.
- TheDong 3y agoIt is fundamentally impossible to completely undo things, trivially so from the second law of thermodynamics. A company which produces nuclear waste can pay the cost to store it, but cannot undo its existence. A company that burns oil can offset the carbon capture, but cannot put new oil in the ground. A company that cuts a forest of 500 year old trees can't wait 500 years to verify they estimated the cost of raising such a forest again correctly (and also, the company will be gone by then anyway). Right now, we care about CO2, but there's a lot more to natural resources than simple CO2 math will give us. > we shouldn't outlaw useful and fundamentally positive things that emit CO2 like driving a car, but rather tax the pollution according to the cost to recapture that carbon from the shared environment Focusing on incrementally taxing things like that is basically what the parent article complains about. That misses the old-growth forest for the CO2 in one tree.
- lend000 3y agoOriginally all forests were all growth forests, so should we have never violated the land and stayed in the stone age? At some point we need to compromise. > It is fundamentally impossible to completely undo things, trivially so from the second law of thermodynamics. As in, undo things as a reasonable person would define them. Undoing burning gasoline could indeed involve taxing such that we produce more hydrocarbons (which is possible to do), but what good does burying oil do? I don't agree with much of the article; I think we should benefit from the bounty of the universe and I believe in property rights and the ability to own land. However, more reasonable externalities are still relevant (such as putting pollution into a shared atmosphere or body of water) or potentially even some economic or social externalities. And as the article hints at, addressing the externality of who gets access to the free bounty of the universe. But its premise: "none would be profitable if environmental costs were fully integrated" is flawed, because the prices would just rise and consumption would decrease if externalities were incorporated.
- endliner 3y agoApart from exhausting natural resources, industry also makes our lives miserable in other, more subtle ways. Compared to 150 years ago, the air we breathe is foul, the water we drink is contaminated by plastics and other chemicals, the food we eat is less flavorful and is low on nutrients. We've had clothing, running water and warm homes for ages, what we have now compared to then doesn't seem worth the effort.
- Ekaros 3y agoIs that a big number compared to global population? And if it was not spend, how much lower would standard of living be? Straight up division would be less than 1000 per person alive. Not actually that much, 3 a day...