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We are in a bind. Sustainability is a social, economic, political and emotional challenge of major proportions - maybe even unprecedented in human history. Und

We are in a bind. Sustainability is a social, economic, political and emotional challenge of major proportions - maybe even unprecedented in human history. Understandably, people don't want to give up their existing comforts and habits. Understandably, people that don't have these comforts feel its only fair that they too get access to them. Understandably, people don't want to see wind or solar parks or other intrusive installations in their backyard. Understandably, complex and less that 100% certain science tackling long-term effects and phenomena will be questioned by people with limited trust to institutions of tarnished authority. People just want the magic tree of energy driven consumption to go on as this is the dominant model of a "fulfilling" life. What is brewing is a toxic cocktail of denial, blame shifting, panic, snake oil salesmen, speculators etc. We certainly haven't seen the end of history.

timeon 3y ago
> Understandably > Understandably > Understandably > Understandably > People just want the magic tree Most probably do. I don't. You do.
haizhung 3y ago
What if having a comfortable life is not the best way to live a life? What about a life with purpose and accomplishment? If you frame it like that, climate change could be even seen as some sort of salvation : Soon, it’ll be the uniting “enemy” that humanity has to face and beat if it wants to continue to exist. We have to cooperate, and we have to become better beings to overcome this tremendous challenge. And if you overcome it, and leave a better world to your children, is that not purposeful?
- myshpa 3y ago
  What If We Create A Better World For Nothing? https://solar-power-now.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/betterworldfornothing.jpg https://solar-power-now.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/bette...
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  But this is in conflict with the dogmatic religion of "progress" and technological accomplishment and is a highly taboo point of view to take. Especially when there are techno capitalists in the room. Soon, someone will beat you over the head wih arguments like "you're a hypocrite for using computer to make a post on HN" and that you should be grateful for your air conditioner (which I don't use) and that if you lived 70 years ago your head would've fallen off by now, etc etc...
- tomjen3 3y ago
  It way be the freshest take on the subject I have seen, but it runs into the same problem that all climate activism has: Okay, you have now raised my awareness sufficiently. What do you want me to do that can credibly solve this problem? It's the credible part that I have never heard any good results for. Clearly almost anything I can do as an individual (other than science or politics) is not going to have any kind of influence and large scale inter-national agreements haven't exactly led to much. So if you want to join this up as a fight, at first we must know how to fight and we must know that it has a reasonable chance of success.
  - myshpa 3y ago
    > What do you want me to do that can credibly solve this problem? Educate yourself, and educate others. Fight ignorance and consumerism. Fight those who're making it worse. > Clearly almost anything I can do as an individual is not going to have any kind of influence Those in a position of power would like you to believe that. Because this viewpoint preserves the status quo. All social justice movements in history started with a few individuals loudly demanding changes while being ridiculed by the masses, whose own lives they were trying to improve. A tsunami is made up of many drops together. Be the change you want to see in the world, and all of that. > we must know that it has a reasonable chance of success We now know that nobody will solve it for us, certainly not the politicians or the corporations, until we loudly start demanding change. Meanwhile, we should prepare for the worst while simultaneously trying to prevent the worst from happening. It may not work out in the end, as shown in the movie 'Don't Look Up.' The protagonists are sitting after the lost fight, having dinner while the extinction event is happening. Their last words (if I remember correctly) are: "I'm glad we tried.".
- afpx 3y ago
  I would like that to come true. Likely, climate change will cause 1-2B people to flee tropical areas causing government instability and strife. I can’t see how that will be collaborative.
  - pif 3y ago
    > Likely, climate change will cause 1-2B people to flee to temperate areas Rationally, that is the thing to do. All predictive models agree that temperatures are not going to decrease during the following decades. We should be organizing the largest human migration in history, and instead we are wasting time on comfort solutions that give people the illusion to do something while accomplishing exactly nothing.
  - kcplate 3y ago
    Flee tropical areas or flee to tropical areas? I can tell you that living in a tropical area (closer to the equator) i haven’t noticed any perceptible effects of climate change.
    - mdhen 3y ago
      Yeah the subtropics are hotter then the tropics are during their summers. And I do expect these areas to suffer the worst.
- kcplate 3y ago
  Is a “better” world a world where their lives are less comfortable than they are now? Seems over the course of human history humans have firmly marched in the direction of making life more comfortable. You are going to have a hard time convincing humanity to go against their nature.
- nologic01 3y ago
  It is definitely within society's capability to (more or less) unite behind common purpose, based on ideals and values that are not consumption driven. In fact the modern materialistic lifestyle is probably an exception rather than historical rule. For most of history religious beliefs were uniting people and creating solace despite the more arduous existence. The uniqueness of our condition is the scale of required change (global, spanning both avid consumer populations and deprived ones), the speed of required change (a few decades), the complex interplay with technological solutions and the rigidity/monoculture of economic systems. Not clear how all this will play out.
- taylodl 3y ago
  You're optimistic. The denial you see today isn't going to wane over time. People's minds are being poisoned and once poisoned, they're essentially gone. The most optimistic thing you can hope for is our grandkids and great grandkids, who will suffer the full blunt of climate change, will wonder why we did so little to stave off what we knew was going to happen. But I've also lost hope on that. After all I would have thought the rise of Nazism in Germany would have provided us a historical lesson. Less than 100 years later and that lesson appears to be lost on many people.
thefz 3y ago
I am really concerned about climate and I have tried to change as many habits as I can to lower my footprint. I am also very tired of big corps polluting like crazy and then shifting blame towards the customers, especially wherever there is no "greener" choice. New pipelines get built to send oil to plastic factories, yet you hear only "advice" to consume less plastic directed to the customer. The real polluters never ever get mentioned, yet we are asked to switch to plastic straws, as if they make any difference against thousands of cubic meters of plastic produced every day.
- myshpa 3y ago
  Ocean plastic coming from straws is 0.03% of all plastic in the ocean. 46% of the Pacific garbage patch is fishing nets. The rules of our society are dictated by corporations and money. We're enabling those corporation with our purchasing habits. Btw, paper straws are not that much better, neither for us or the environment (they're coated with PFAS). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0045653521007074?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00456...
- ericmay 3y ago
  At the end of the day, people need to change their habits and consume less (or differently - i.e. paper straws [1]) and the government needs to regulate companies and their pollution - which means we need to vote. If you aren’t willing to change your personal habits, or if you think it’s hopeless, you’re just going to never see change. You don’t have to wait until private jet flights are banned to take action. [1] I really don’t get the paper straw thing. They’re fine today and they’re going to improve over time.
- pif 3y ago
  > I have tried to change as many habits as I can to lower my footprint That may be good to your conscience, but you realise that you have not tackled the problem at all, do you? If you really want to have an impact, try and achieve a concrete result: for example, help someone relocate from India to Canada!
taberiand 3y ago
It seems to me the problem isn't the consumer; it's not the fault of individual selfishness and ignorance. The way the system operates demands this self-destructive consumption continues unabated. The question I think we should consider is, if giving up these habits is so critical to saving humanity, why are they so cheap? The problem is fundamental to the system, there is no way to dig ourselves out of this hole.
- rhythmicdancer 3y ago
  Why so cheap? Because the real costs were/are pushed off to the future, instead of being paid up-front. The real cost should have included the price of fixing the damage caused in the extraction/production/shipping/use/disposal of the product. The cost will be paid. It only gets more expensive with time.
ChatGTP 3y ago
Meanwhile as a "people" I have to sit here and watch MS, Google, Tesla and god knows who else buy and run as many GPUs as possible and run them at maximum capacity while I'm being told to sit back and stop eating meat, not use my A/C and all the rest of it. As a people I have to watch the Amazon being chopped down and burned and coal usage being at an all time high, while methane is spewed out by leaking coal seam plants and some how it's something I'm doing wrong? Imagine how people in Africa feel about all this...we worry about AI wiping out humanity but we're doing a pretty good job ourselves....
- Ekaros 3y ago
  I often wonder could we do things more efficiently. At least from power point of view. In computing and telecom. Do we actually need to move megabytes of javascript or massive pictures each time we refresh a web page? Say what you will about saving developer time, but should we maybe think about these resources too?
  - tomjen3 3y ago
    I don't think that matters too much if just one physical meeting gets replaced with a phonecall or a video call we are miles and miles ahead on the CO2 budget.
    - nologic01 3y ago
      In this sense this is a major silver line from the pandemic that may have significant impact on the sustainability challenge. We cannot unsee that a lot of work can be accomplished without pushing around the planet our clumsy bodies in massive exoskeletons.
- myshpa 3y ago
  > while I'm being told to ... stop eating meat > I have to watch the Amazon being chopped down https://ourworldindata.org/drivers-of-deforestation https://ourworldindata.org/drivers-of-deforestation The research suggests that by far the largest driver of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has been driven by the expansion of pasture land for beef production, soy is likely to have played at least some role in the loss of forest. More than three-quarters (77%) of global soy is fed to livestock for meat and dairy production. Just 7% of soy is used directly for human food products such as tofu, soy milk, edamame beans, and tempeh. https://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/weve-lost-35-percent-of-forests-in-the-past-300-years https://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/weve-lost-35-pe... The Southern Brazilian Amazon has lost 30 percent of its forests, and if the destruction doesn’t stop, the area will lose 56 percent of its forests by 2050. Environmental scientists argue the loss of the Amazon will have a global impact ... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/feb/19/colombia-cattle-ranching-coca-amazon-deforestation https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/feb/19/colombia... Cattle, not coca, drive deforestation of the Amazon in Colombia – report https://phys.org/news/2022-08-global-forest-area-capita-decreased.html https://phys.org/news/2022-08-global-forest-area-capita-decr... New study finds global forest area per capita has decreased by over 60% https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/jun/02/the-multinational-companies-that-industrialised-the-amazon-rainforest https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/jun/02/t... The multinational companies that industrialised the Amazon rainforest Ranching is the biggest driver of deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions after land grabbing, with which it is often closely associated. By 2018, the Brazilian Amazon had lost 741,759 sq km (about 286,000 sq miles) of its original forest cover, mainly due to agricultural expansion. This accelerated during the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, when forest clearance increased by 59.5%, the fastest rate since at least 1988. More than 2bn trees were cut or burned. The soya sector is another powerhouse in the region. Between 2014 and 2020, five multinational food companies – Bunge, Cargill, ADM, Amaggi and Louis Dreyfus – extracted soya worth $18bn on global markets ... https://earth.org/major-companies-responsible-for-deforestation/ https://earth.org/major-companies-responsible-for-deforestat... 13 Major Companies Responsible for Deforestation 1. Cargill (soy & beef) 3. Wilmar International Ltd. (soy) 4. Walmart (palm oil, pulp and paper, soy, and beef) 5. JBS (beef) 6. IKEA 9. Starbucks 10. McDonald’s 11. Yum! Brands (KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell) 13. Ahold (meat) https://news.mongabay.com/2023/05/3-million-hectares-of-colombian-amazon-deforested-for-illegal-pasture-study/ https://news.mongabay.com/2023/05/3-million-hectares-of-colo... 3 million hectares of Colombian Amazon deforested for illegal pasture: Study https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/02/more-than-800m-amazon-trees-felled-in-six-years-to-meet-beef-demand https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/02/more-tha... More than 800m Amazon trees felled in six years to meet beef demand https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26231772/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26231772/ Biodiversity conservation: The key is reducing meat consumption https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/15/4110/htm https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/15/4110/htm Which Diet Has the Least Environmental Impact on Our Planet? A Systematic Review of Vegan, Vegetarian and Omnivorous Diets https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-opportunity-costs-food https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-opportunity-costs-food What are the carbon opportunity costs of our food? https://www.wri.org/insights/without-changing-diets-agriculture-alone-could-produce-enough-emissions-surpass-15degc https://www.wri.org/insights/without-changing-diets-agricult... Without Changing Diets, Agriculture Alone Could Produce Enough Emissions to Surpass 1.5°C of Global Warming ... and many more ... > some how it's something I'm doing wrong? You have to answer that.
piva00 3y ago
The cherry on top is that it's all fueled even harder by the hyperindividualism that thrived on the second half of the 20th century onward. No sense of community or belonging to a social group, atomised individuals each acting on their own wants and needs, with no cohesive social force to impel a sense of duty to the collective. Atomising society from the late 70s to today might end up being not only a major historical mistake but a catastrophic one.
- nologic01 3y ago
  This atomisization was essential(?) to industrialize the comfort society. But in any case it failed fundamentally on both the social harmony and environmental sustainability axes. Social bonds and ubuntu (finding meaning in others) is something we naturally do. It doesnt take particular superhuman virtue. The question is whether there is an escape path away from the black hole trajectory we are currently falling-in and towards a more meaningful, sustainable and balanced future.
danaris 3y ago
> Understandably, people don't want to give up their existing comforts and habits. Sure. > Understandably, people that don't have these comforts feel its only fair that they too get access to them. Yep. > Understandably, people don't want to see wind or solar parks or other intrusive installations in their backyard. ...Sorry, you lost me. Particularly with repeating the basically-propaganda that industrial-scale wind or solar installations would be literally in people's backyards. Now, I can't speak for you, but every wind or solar farm I've seen people opposing—and I live in the middle of farm country, which means both lots of wide-open spaces for such things, and lots of conservative people who think they're (sometimes literally) the Devil's work—were well away from their actual houses. They were solar farms on the neighboring farmer's land (so, nearly a mile from their house), or windmills Anywhere Within Their Sight Lines. I'm sure there are some places where someone wants to install an industrial wind turbine that would be close enough to someone's house that they would, say, be concerned it might fall on it—those things are tall. But that's an incredibly rare case. And frankly, I can't see any legitimate reason to object to someone else building a wind farm on their property. I have zero sympathy for people who are more concerned with their own "pristine views" or property values than they are with sustainable energy generation. So it seems to me that your apparent insoluble dilemma falls apart as soon as you take away the entitlement and short-sightedness of some of the richest and most arrogant among us.
- nologic01 3y ago
  I wish i could share your optimism that it is only extreme behavior that opposes the adoption of renewable technologies. But we already have growing evidence that many new frictions show up and they are not obviously short-sighted. E.g., land based wind-turbines might be on pristine hilltop locations, need access roads that might require deforestation. Geothermal units might create their own local pollution etc. The gigantic scale of required alternatives if we are to maintain current energy use patterns will only increase tensions. These are further compounded by the economic and control aspects of that transition (who benefits directly): eg building an installation that aims to serve datacenters and a global social media noise instead of powering the local community.
locustous 3y ago
Understandably, some of us just don't trust scientists wholesale.

timeon 3y ago

> Understandably > Understandably > Understandably > Understandably > People just want the magic tree Most probably do. I don't. You do.

haizhung 3y ago

What if having a comfortable life is not the best way to live a life? What about a life with purpose and accomplishment? If you frame it like that, climate change could be even seen as some sort of salvation : Soon, it’ll be the uniting “enemy” that humanity has to face and beat if it wants to continue to exist. We have to cooperate, and we have to become better beings to overcome this tremendous challenge. And if you overcome it, and leave a better world to your children, is that not purposeful?

myshpa 3y ago
What If We Create A Better World For Nothing? https://solar-power-now.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/betterworldfornothing.jpg https://solar-power-now.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/bette...
ChatGTP 3y ago
But this is in conflict with the dogmatic religion of "progress" and technological accomplishment and is a highly taboo point of view to take. Especially when there are techno capitalists in the room. Soon, someone will beat you over the head wih arguments like "you're a hypocrite for using computer to make a post on HN" and that you should be grateful for your air conditioner (which I don't use) and that if you lived 70 years ago your head would've fallen off by now, etc etc...
tomjen3 3y ago
It way be the freshest take on the subject I have seen, but it runs into the same problem that all climate activism has: Okay, you have now raised my awareness sufficiently. What do you want me to do that can credibly solve this problem? It's the credible part that I have never heard any good results for. Clearly almost anything I can do as an individual (other than science or politics) is not going to have any kind of influence and large scale inter-national agreements haven't exactly led to much. So if you want to join this up as a fight, at first we must know how to fight and we must know that it has a reasonable chance of success.
- myshpa 3y ago
  > What do you want me to do that can credibly solve this problem? Educate yourself, and educate others. Fight ignorance and consumerism. Fight those who're making it worse. > Clearly almost anything I can do as an individual is not going to have any kind of influence Those in a position of power would like you to believe that. Because this viewpoint preserves the status quo. All social justice movements in history started with a few individuals loudly demanding changes while being ridiculed by the masses, whose own lives they were trying to improve. A tsunami is made up of many drops together. Be the change you want to see in the world, and all of that. > we must know that it has a reasonable chance of success We now know that nobody will solve it for us, certainly not the politicians or the corporations, until we loudly start demanding change. Meanwhile, we should prepare for the worst while simultaneously trying to prevent the worst from happening. It may not work out in the end, as shown in the movie 'Don't Look Up.' The protagonists are sitting after the lost fight, having dinner while the extinction event is happening. Their last words (if I remember correctly) are: "I'm glad we tried.".
afpx 3y ago
I would like that to come true. Likely, climate change will cause 1-2B people to flee tropical areas causing government instability and strife. I can’t see how that will be collaborative.
- pif 3y ago
  > Likely, climate change will cause 1-2B people to flee to temperate areas Rationally, that is the thing to do. All predictive models agree that temperatures are not going to decrease during the following decades. We should be organizing the largest human migration in history, and instead we are wasting time on comfort solutions that give people the illusion to do something while accomplishing exactly nothing.
- kcplate 3y ago
  Flee tropical areas or flee to tropical areas? I can tell you that living in a tropical area (closer to the equator) i haven’t noticed any perceptible effects of climate change.
  - mdhen 3y ago
    Yeah the subtropics are hotter then the tropics are during their summers. And I do expect these areas to suffer the worst.
kcplate 3y ago
Is a “better” world a world where their lives are less comfortable than they are now? Seems over the course of human history humans have firmly marched in the direction of making life more comfortable. You are going to have a hard time convincing humanity to go against their nature.
nologic01 3y ago
It is definitely within society's capability to (more or less) unite behind common purpose, based on ideals and values that are not consumption driven. In fact the modern materialistic lifestyle is probably an exception rather than historical rule. For most of history religious beliefs were uniting people and creating solace despite the more arduous existence. The uniqueness of our condition is the scale of required change (global, spanning both avid consumer populations and deprived ones), the speed of required change (a few decades), the complex interplay with technological solutions and the rigidity/monoculture of economic systems. Not clear how all this will play out.
taylodl 3y ago
You're optimistic. The denial you see today isn't going to wane over time. People's minds are being poisoned and once poisoned, they're essentially gone. The most optimistic thing you can hope for is our grandkids and great grandkids, who will suffer the full blunt of climate change, will wonder why we did so little to stave off what we knew was going to happen. But I've also lost hope on that. After all I would have thought the rise of Nazism in Germany would have provided us a historical lesson. Less than 100 years later and that lesson appears to be lost on many people.

thefz 3y ago

I am really concerned about climate and I have tried to change as many habits as I can to lower my footprint. I am also very tired of big corps polluting like crazy and then shifting blame towards the customers, especially wherever there is no "greener" choice. New pipelines get built to send oil to plastic factories, yet you hear only "advice" to consume less plastic directed to the customer. The real polluters never ever get mentioned, yet we are asked to switch to plastic straws, as if they make any difference against thousands of cubic meters of plastic produced every day.

myshpa 3y ago
Ocean plastic coming from straws is 0.03% of all plastic in the ocean. 46% of the Pacific garbage patch is fishing nets. The rules of our society are dictated by corporations and money. We're enabling those corporation with our purchasing habits. Btw, paper straws are not that much better, neither for us or the environment (they're coated with PFAS). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0045653521007074?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00456...
ericmay 3y ago
At the end of the day, people need to change their habits and consume less (or differently - i.e. paper straws [1]) and the government needs to regulate companies and their pollution - which means we need to vote. If you aren’t willing to change your personal habits, or if you think it’s hopeless, you’re just going to never see change. You don’t have to wait until private jet flights are banned to take action. [1] I really don’t get the paper straw thing. They’re fine today and they’re going to improve over time.
pif 3y ago
> I have tried to change as many habits as I can to lower my footprint That may be good to your conscience, but you realise that you have not tackled the problem at all, do you? If you really want to have an impact, try and achieve a concrete result: for example, help someone relocate from India to Canada!

taberiand 3y ago

It seems to me the problem isn't the consumer; it's not the fault of individual selfishness and ignorance. The way the system operates demands this self-destructive consumption continues unabated. The question I think we should consider is, if giving up these habits is so critical to saving humanity, why are they so cheap? The problem is fundamental to the system, there is no way to dig ourselves out of this hole.

rhythmicdancer 3y ago
Why so cheap? Because the real costs were/are pushed off to the future, instead of being paid up-front. The real cost should have included the price of fixing the damage caused in the extraction/production/shipping/use/disposal of the product. The cost will be paid. It only gets more expensive with time.

ChatGTP 3y ago

Meanwhile as a "people" I have to sit here and watch MS, Google, Tesla and god knows who else buy and run as many GPUs as possible and run them at maximum capacity while I'm being told to sit back and stop eating meat, not use my A/C and all the rest of it. As a people I have to watch the Amazon being chopped down and burned and coal usage being at an all time high, while methane is spewed out by leaking coal seam plants and some how it's something I'm doing wrong? Imagine how people in Africa feel about all this...we worry about AI wiping out humanity but we're doing a pretty good job ourselves....

Ekaros 3y ago
I often wonder could we do things more efficiently. At least from power point of view. In computing and telecom. Do we actually need to move megabytes of javascript or massive pictures each time we refresh a web page? Say what you will about saving developer time, but should we maybe think about these resources too?
- tomjen3 3y ago
  I don't think that matters too much if just one physical meeting gets replaced with a phonecall or a video call we are miles and miles ahead on the CO2 budget.
  - nologic01 3y ago
    In this sense this is a major silver line from the pandemic that may have significant impact on the sustainability challenge. We cannot unsee that a lot of work can be accomplished without pushing around the planet our clumsy bodies in massive exoskeletons.
myshpa 3y ago
> while I'm being told to ... stop eating meat > I have to watch the Amazon being chopped down https://ourworldindata.org/drivers-of-deforestation https://ourworldindata.org/drivers-of-deforestation The research suggests that by far the largest driver of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has been driven by the expansion of pasture land for beef production, soy is likely to have played at least some role in the loss of forest. More than three-quarters (77%) of global soy is fed to livestock for meat and dairy production. Just 7% of soy is used directly for human food products such as tofu, soy milk, edamame beans, and tempeh. https://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/weve-lost-35-percent-of-forests-in-the-past-300-years https://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/weve-lost-35-pe... The Southern Brazilian Amazon has lost 30 percent of its forests, and if the destruction doesn’t stop, the area will lose 56 percent of its forests by 2050. Environmental scientists argue the loss of the Amazon will have a global impact ... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/feb/19/colombia-cattle-ranching-coca-amazon-deforestation https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/feb/19/colombia... Cattle, not coca, drive deforestation of the Amazon in Colombia – report https://phys.org/news/2022-08-global-forest-area-capita-decreased.html https://phys.org/news/2022-08-global-forest-area-capita-decr... New study finds global forest area per capita has decreased by over 60% https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/jun/02/the-multinational-companies-that-industrialised-the-amazon-rainforest https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/jun/02/t... The multinational companies that industrialised the Amazon rainforest Ranching is the biggest driver of deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions after land grabbing, with which it is often closely associated. By 2018, the Brazilian Amazon had lost 741,759 sq km (about 286,000 sq miles) of its original forest cover, mainly due to agricultural expansion. This accelerated during the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, when forest clearance increased by 59.5%, the fastest rate since at least 1988. More than 2bn trees were cut or burned. The soya sector is another powerhouse in the region. Between 2014 and 2020, five multinational food companies – Bunge, Cargill, ADM, Amaggi and Louis Dreyfus – extracted soya worth $18bn on global markets ... https://earth.org/major-companies-responsible-for-deforestation/ https://earth.org/major-companies-responsible-for-deforestat... 13 Major Companies Responsible for Deforestation 1. Cargill (soy & beef) 3. Wilmar International Ltd. (soy) 4. Walmart (palm oil, pulp and paper, soy, and beef) 5. JBS (beef) 6. IKEA 9. Starbucks 10. McDonald’s 11. Yum! Brands (KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell) 13. Ahold (meat) https://news.mongabay.com/2023/05/3-million-hectares-of-colombian-amazon-deforested-for-illegal-pasture-study/ https://news.mongabay.com/2023/05/3-million-hectares-of-colo... 3 million hectares of Colombian Amazon deforested for illegal pasture: Study https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/02/more-than-800m-amazon-trees-felled-in-six-years-to-meet-beef-demand https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/02/more-tha... More than 800m Amazon trees felled in six years to meet beef demand https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26231772/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26231772/ Biodiversity conservation: The key is reducing meat consumption https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/15/4110/htm https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/15/4110/htm Which Diet Has the Least Environmental Impact on Our Planet? A Systematic Review of Vegan, Vegetarian and Omnivorous Diets https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-opportunity-costs-food https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-opportunity-costs-food What are the carbon opportunity costs of our food? https://www.wri.org/insights/without-changing-diets-agriculture-alone-could-produce-enough-emissions-surpass-15degc https://www.wri.org/insights/without-changing-diets-agricult... Without Changing Diets, Agriculture Alone Could Produce Enough Emissions to Surpass 1.5°C of Global Warming ... and many more ... > some how it's something I'm doing wrong? You have to answer that.

piva00 3y ago

The cherry on top is that it's all fueled even harder by the hyperindividualism that thrived on the second half of the 20th century onward. No sense of community or belonging to a social group, atomised individuals each acting on their own wants and needs, with no cohesive social force to impel a sense of duty to the collective. Atomising society from the late 70s to today might end up being not only a major historical mistake but a catastrophic one.

nologic01 3y ago
This atomisization was essential(?) to industrialize the comfort society. But in any case it failed fundamentally on both the social harmony and environmental sustainability axes. Social bonds and ubuntu (finding meaning in others) is something we naturally do. It doesnt take particular superhuman virtue. The question is whether there is an escape path away from the black hole trajectory we are currently falling-in and towards a more meaningful, sustainable and balanced future.

danaris 3y ago

> Understandably, people don't want to give up their existing comforts and habits. Sure. > Understandably, people that don't have these comforts feel its only fair that they too get access to them. Yep. > Understandably, people don't want to see wind or solar parks or other intrusive installations in their backyard. ...Sorry, you lost me. Particularly with repeating the basically-propaganda that industrial-scale wind or solar installations would be literally in people's backyards. Now, I can't speak for you, but every wind or solar farm I've seen people opposing—and I live in the middle of farm country, which means both lots of wide-open spaces for such things, and lots of conservative people who think they're (sometimes literally) the Devil's work—were well away from their actual houses. They were solar farms on the neighboring farmer's land (so, nearly a mile from their house), or windmills Anywhere Within Their Sight Lines. I'm sure there are some places where someone wants to install an industrial wind turbine that would be close enough to someone's house that they would, say, be concerned it might fall on it—those things are tall. But that's an incredibly rare case. And frankly, I can't see any legitimate reason to object to someone else building a wind farm on their property. I have zero sympathy for people who are more concerned with their own "pristine views" or property values than they are with sustainable energy generation. So it seems to me that your apparent insoluble dilemma falls apart as soon as you take away the entitlement and short-sightedness of some of the richest and most arrogant among us.

nologic01 3y ago
I wish i could share your optimism that it is only extreme behavior that opposes the adoption of renewable technologies. But we already have growing evidence that many new frictions show up and they are not obviously short-sighted. E.g., land based wind-turbines might be on pristine hilltop locations, need access roads that might require deforestation. Geothermal units might create their own local pollution etc. The gigantic scale of required alternatives if we are to maintain current energy use patterns will only increase tensions. These are further compounded by the economic and control aspects of that transition (who benefits directly): eg building an installation that aims to serve datacenters and a global social media noise instead of powering the local community.

locustous 3y ago

Understandably, some of us just don't trust scientists wholesale.