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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding-meat-and-dairy-is-single-biggest-way-to-reduce-your-impact-on-earth https://www.theguardian.com/env

• ForHackernews 3y ago
  Don't have kids; eat whatever you like. Your own impact pales next to N^N impact of your descendents.
  • jvanderbot 3y ago
    Demographic collapse is also a very bad thing. And it's even more of a tragedy of the commons than simply not eating meat/dairy.
  • losvedir 3y ago
    What's the point of saving the Earth if no one is alive to experience it?
    • vsareto 3y ago
      I feel like you zoomed right past the point of having an equilibrium between population and what the planet can support
      • throwuwu 3y ago
        The planet by itself can only support a few million humans. It’s human technology and intelligence that support the rest.
        • jxramos 3y ago
          That is an interesting distinction, the order we bring to things--nature refined and directed. Makes me recall this analogy I remember reading years ago about a Japanese Zen garden not being something you'd experience in nature but rather only from a human tended and curated garden. That image changed the way I think about nature and humans in nature.
      • cpach 3y ago
        Replacement fertility is around 2.10 kids per woman. Most rich countries are way below that line.
        • dukeyukey 3y ago
          Although that leads to the mother of all natural selection - after a few generations, you'll have selected almost exclusively for families that have lots of kids. My bet is that fertility will flatten out and recover a good bit over the next few decades.
        • LightBug1 3y ago
          Global replacement rate is about 2.3 so ... I wonder when many in those 'rich' countries will learn that they need to embrace that instead of 'build the wall'. Anyway, I don't think replacement fertility is the right measure here. Replacement fertility could be crashing, but if the ratio of 'modern'* humanity is increasing as it is, then the problem remains ... there's probably a term for this if anyone knows. * (by 'modern' [super air-quoted] I mean, those who have the wants and desires and ability to get the goods and services of the 'rich' countries).
  • mjh2539 3y ago
    Yeah but my kids' kids are going to figure out how to make cows that can photosynthesize.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • webnrrd2k 3y ago
      A modest proposal -- your kids could just figure out how to photosynthesize directly.
  • myshpa 3y ago
    Most of the carbon footprint on the planet comes from the relatively low number of people in the US and Europe. Not having kids and consuming like crazy won't save anything. https://ourworldindata.org/contributed-most-global-co2 https://ourworldindata.org/contributed-most-global-co2 Who has contributed most to global CO2 emissions? (Don't forget we've outsourced our manufacturing to China) https://www.businessinsider.com/climate-change-worst-places-in-the-world-hardest-hit-2021-10?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/climate-change-worst-places-... Countries contributing the least to the climate crisis are feeling the worst of its effects
    • dukeyukey 3y ago
      > Most of the carbon footprint on the planet comes from the relatively low number of people in... Europe That's not so true now, China emits as much CO2 per capita as Europe does, and quite a bit more than the greener European countries (e.g. France, Sweden, the UK). This remains even after adjusting for consumption rather than production.
      • myshpa 3y ago
        > That's not so true now Maybe not now, I was talking about cummulative footprint. Even now China is a third of EU + UK + US together. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co2-emissions-region?stackMode=absolute https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co2-emissions-... https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co-emissions https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co-emissions (see 1950-1980) It seems obvious that it's US & EU who made the China the polluting giant it is now.
    • ForHackernews 3y ago
      > Most of the carbon footprint on the planet comes from the relatively low number of people in the US and Europe. > Not having kids and consuming like crazy won't save anything. Most of the people on this site are American or European. You are the problem you name.
      • myshpa 3y ago
  • throwuwu 3y ago
    If you think that population trends are still exponential then you’ve been living under a rock
    • ilyt 3y ago
      Yup, if all countries got to the "1st world countries" birth rates the population would slowly start to drop, maybe even equalize at some point.
      • throwuwu 3y ago
        Population collapse is like a banking collapse, it happens slowly at first and then all at once.
        • ilyt 3y ago
          Well if you don't fix the problem of "it's too dystopian to even think about having children", sure
          • throwuwu 3y ago
            That’s not the main reason why so many more people are childless now. We have a long road ahead to fix this.
    • lm28469 3y ago
      At a global scale yes. Now look at specific countries/continents, some are absolutely exploding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Nigeria#/media/File:Nigeria_single_age_population_pyramid_2020.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Nigeria#/media... https://www.populationpyramid.net/africa/2020/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/africa/2020/ They currently use a tiny fraction of the energy the west does (and pollute a tiny fraction), they'll eventually catch up in "quality of life", with all the comes with it (exploding energy consumption)
      • throwuwu 3y ago
  • nh23423fefe 3y ago
    is this a longtermism?
• _kulang 3y ago
  How about not driving a car absolutely everywhere? Even electric cars use many times more energy than an entire household. I already eat less meat than I used to but I cannot look past the obscenely high energy use of a car
  • myshpa 3y ago
    Yes ... fossil fuels absolutely too ... that's another reason why WFH is so important.
  • OGWhales 3y ago
    Where I live currently, that’s simply infeasible. It’s a city, just very poor public transit and the city was designed without pedestrians or bikers in mind. I hope to move soon, and being able to walk/bike/take public transit is a priority for where I choose, but it makes me think there are so many places in the US where going anywhere without a car is not a realistic option. Car dependency is a big issue in the US.
    • lm28469 3y ago
      > Where I live currently, that’s simply infeasible. Technology let use thrive in places we shouldn't even have lived in the first place, a lot of people just "can't" do anything, that's why we're fucked
      • OGWhales 3y ago
        The area was established prior to cars and was livable, but as it grew everything was designed with cars in mind and made it unlivable without them. So it’s not that cars made an unlivable place otherwise livable, it’s that cars made a livable place unlivable without them. It’s certainly possible for another form of transit to exist in this town, but everything was designed with cars in mind and there is little interest in fixing it, because almost everyone has a car (excluding those that can't afford them, but we don't talk about that or the weak economic mobility that lack of proper public transit absolutely contributes to).
    • 3y ago
• baremetal 3y ago
  >Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth I grow my own food and meat. I think growing your own food is the single biggest way to reduce your impact on Earth. All that industrial farming and transportation required to feed people. So many people living in single family homes could turn their lawns into gardens and produce _surplus_ vegetables. Several times what their family can eat. And even people in dense urban areas could have community gardens ie rooftop gardens. It seems popular to want solutions that doesn't involve any sweat equity. Which I find unfortunate, at best.
  • MisterTea 3y ago
    > I grow my own food and meat. When do I Start planting chicken eggs? Ive not had any sprout so far and my garden smells awful.
    • jaggederest 3y ago
      I recommend leaving them in the chicken house under the chicken, they sprout in about 3 weeks and ripen fully after about 12 more weeks.
• Etrnl_President 3y ago
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• unsupp0rted 3y ago
  > Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth No it isn’t. The single biggest way to reduce your impact on Earth is so unpalatable as to be literally unthinkable: don’t eat meat and dairy, avoid having children that have children that have children that all want to eat meat and dairy. Avoid having children that take airplanes and eat almonds. Avoid having children and your impact on the Earth rapidly zooms out to nothing. That’s not the only reason or the main reason to avoid having children. But it’s as good a reason as any. Nobody will mention it at the top of articles though. Children are a joy and a treasure and not having them would be a slight against human nature.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • nathan_compton 3y ago
    By this same logic it would be even better for you to commit suicide. People don't mention not having children because it is a fundamental biological drive and for most people, the problem isn't how do we eliminate carbon emissions _full stop_, but how do we eliminate carbon emissions while still allowing some form of palatable human existence? I'm for all sorts of radical action to stop climate degradation. But "just don't have kids" really is tantamount to saying "just don't exist or be human." It isn't just a tough sell, it isn't even what is being discussed.
    • unsupp0rted 3y ago
      I exist and am human and don’t have any need to commit suicide. It’s incredibly simple for me to use birth control methods, barely an inconvenience. I have lots of reasons to avoid having kids, but it doesn’t hurt that a side effect is I automatically become a top-1% environmentalist in any crowd I’m standing in, without even really trying.
      • BasedAnon 3y ago
        > I exist and am human and don’t have any need to commit suicide. But it would reduce your carbon output, even though as with all things someone else would just consume more to make up for it.
• joshuahedlund 3y ago
  > as many as 274 species going extinct every day This number is not based on evidence. I clicked through the links on this number, and it traces back basically to guesses that say if there are 100 million species on earth and if 0.1% of them go extinct every year then, well, that divides into that number. If you try to look up specifics - birds, for instance - you'll find that far fewer bird species have gone extinct in this century so far than the pace of the last century[0]. Which is actually encouraging! We are up against big odds but the immense efforts put into conservation are not hopeless - it's working! [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bird_extinctions_by_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bird_extinctions_by_ye...
  • myshpa 3y ago
    https://news.mongabay.com/2023/06/global-study-of-71000-animal-species-finds-48-are-declining/ https://news.mongabay.com/2023/06/global-study-of-71000-anim... Global study of 71,000 animal species finds 48% are declining https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/brv.12974 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/brv.12974 More losers than winners: investigating Anthropocene defaunation through the diversity of population trends https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2023/april/almost-half-of-all-uk-bird-species-in-decline.html https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2023/april/almost-half-o... Almost half of all UK bird species in decline https://www.sciencealert.com/the-current-mass-extinction-is-already-far-more-dire-than-we-realized https://www.sciencealert.com/the-current-mass-extinction-is-... The Current Mass Extinction Is Already Far More Dire Than We Realized https://www.businessinsider.com/germany-insect-population-flying-bugs-climate-change-pesticides-population-decline-2017-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/germany-insect-population-fl... A 27-year study found the amount of insects flying in the air has declined 75% — but no one knows why https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/18/a-wake-up-call-total-weight-of-wild-mammals-less-than-10-of-humanitys https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/18/a-wake-u... ‘A wake-up call’: total weight of wild mammals less than 10% of humanity’s https://old.reddit.com/r/science/comments/xrml3d/alarming_report_warns_1_in_8_bird_species_now/ https://old.reddit.com/r/science/comments/xrml3d/alarming_re... Alarming report warns 1 in 8 bird species now facing extinction https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/23/extinct-tree-species-sequoias/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/2... As many as one in six U.S. tree species is threatened with extinction https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/13/almost-70-of-animal-populations-wiped-out-since-1970-report-reveals-aoe https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/13/almost-7... Animal populations experience average decline of almost 70% since 1970, report reveals
• guy98238710 3y ago
  Most people don't have time to study stuff like this. Even if they do, it's hard to tell whom to believe. Cost of pollution must be factored into products. That will change behavior.
• wyager 3y ago
  > Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth Also the 'single biggest way' to become unhealthy, weak, and scrawny. There is no conceivable way that the (putative, but questionable) negative externalities of healthy food consumption outweigh that. Also, given that anti-meat activism tends to be either quasi- or literally religious (in the case of groups like Seventh-day adventists), of course my prior is that any anti-meat activist can dump a huge pile of link spam saying "hey, check it out, every problem is actually caused by that thing I don't like". This has little bearing on my posterior distribution, because every time I've looked into specific claims about emission equivalence or deforestation, they are methodologically very dishonest (typically by tricks like falsely equating protein quality or assigning revenue in bizarre ways).
  • cloverich 3y ago
    One of my favorite NFL players was Vegan. He would uhh... run people over and generally out class people constantly. A quick google search of "NFL players who are vegan" reveals several well known players. These are among the strongest, most athletic people to have ever existed. So whatever the challenges of being vegan, I suspect "being weak" is certainly not one of them.
    • mr_mitm 3y ago
      Have they always been vegan though? A glance at [0] shows they all decided to go vegan at some point in their adult life. Growing big and strong on a regular diet and then turning vegan does not exactly support the vegan lifestyle. Even this vegan powerlifter [1] turned vegan only at 32 (vegetarian at 26). [0] https://www.livekindly.com/vegan-nfl-players/ https://www.livekindly.com/vegan-nfl-players/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrik_Baboumian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrik_Baboumian
      • cloverich 3y ago
        > Have they always been vegan though? That's a fair point. Another athlete I do follow who is ripped[1], has been reportedly Vegan since he was 2. Generally speaking when I think of building muscle in the gym, I think of protein powder and supplements as opposed to eating ever larger quantities of meat; I don't think that's controversial? AFAIK the only thing you need if you are vegan is a Vitamin supplement. I'm not a Vegan promoter or anything -- I'm not even sure what a Vegan eats for most of their meals (but would love to learn). But having some background in nutrition I'm skeptical there's any shortcoming to being Vegetarian, Vegan, etc, that a very simple supplement (i.e. like one regular vitamin) wouldn't overcome. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daLfGBK67xY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daLfGBK67xY