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Is there a way to know how much to care? We do all sorts of things that displace species, so having some way of contextualizing and weighting the harm against t
by zbrozek 3y ago
Is there a way to know how much to care? We do all sorts of things that displace species, so having some way of contextualizing and weighting the harm against the benefit would be helpful.
- monkeynotes 3y agoSeems to me it would initially be a narrowly scoped to the immediate outflow. As the brine dissipates I assume it will be normalized by the rest of the ocean as it's diluted. However, as with all human endeavours, scaling up will scale up the problem. And we won't pay attention to that until it's a huge issue.
- jakderrida 3y ago[flagged]
- solardev 3y agoNot the OP, but I think humans in general find it difficult to scale up. Whether in software or manufacturing or politics or environmental issues, we're much more equipped to deal with 1 or 10 of something than 100,000 or 1 trillion of it. At the end of the day we're still limited by our biology and brains, evolved for very different setting than the world we now live in. We try and we get by but by and large we're not doing great at large scale issues, whether it's jobs or housing or healthcare or saving the planet or just plain getting along with each other. We're primates adapted for small group living in local communities, abruptly given way more power than our biology was designed for. Is that misanthropic? I dunno. If dolphins had opposable thumbs, they'd probably have gotten themselves into a similar bind.
- monkeynotes 3y agoWhether it's misanthropic or not is moot if it's just a plain fact.
- solardev 3y agoYeah, true too.
- solardev 3y agoThis is necessarily a value judgment, isn't it? There are tools like lifecycle analyses and environmental impact reports and threatened species lists that can help estimate/enumerate impacts. But ultimately how much to care is a personal question, and people are going to disagree over whether some small fish or rare owl or fluffy panda is worth more or less than someone's job or a local industry or just some other charismatic species. Species will always come and go, and they're going to die off faster than we can protect them, sadly. We only get to decide which ones to prioritize, at different personal, local, national, global levels etc.
- zbrozek 3y agoI would start by wanting to know about the impact and benefit relative to other activities which we already do. Like how's it compare to various flavors of farming?
- solardev 3y agoThere's a database for California Environmental Quality Act reports, I think (Environmental Impact Reports? Statements? One is federal and the other is state, can't remember which is which). That probably have similar solar farms you can look at. Not sure about huge desal projects. Maybe overseas? I'll try to find some analyses this weekend if I can.
- bobthepanda 3y agoThe Canaries have 32% of the economy based on tourism, and a good chunk of that depends on the local ecology (scuba, nice beaches, etc.) If you want to see what a tourism place looks like when you destroy its ecology, you only need look at the abandoned areas around the Salton Sea.
- palmfacehn 3y agoThe Salton Sea in its current iteration was created by the failure of an irrigation canal. Before that there was no Salton Sea as we know it or tourist area.
- bobthepanda 3y agoSure, but that’s beside the point of the question, which is “how do we know salinifying an area enough to kill species is bad”