15 ms·

I can't think of anything at the grocery store that doesn't have some sort of negative implication. Heck, just driving to the grocery store burns fuel and suppo

I can't think of anything at the grocery store that doesn't have some sort of negative implication. Heck, just driving to the grocery store burns fuel and supports the automotive industry. Biking to the grocery store burns food (of which all food has negative implications) and supports the bicycle industry. You can work yourself into knots over it; there is no way in which you can eat food and not have some negative impact. So, IMO, you either give up the battle entirely, or you can stop killing yourself over it but still make intelligent choices. For example, I eat fish because I believe fish farming could be a better choice for the future than cattle farming, and I eat chicken because the feed-to-meat ratio is better than beef. As not only animals but meat-eating animals, it's just a fact of life that our/your existence costs something, means some sort of sacrifice for another organisim. You can try to reduce your impact, but you can't not have an impact. Also, a little bit of my personal philosophy here- one way we could reduce our impact is by doing as little as possible, never moving about and burning more calories than absolutely necessary. Never performing strenuous activity that results in regenerative & anabolic processes, which require extra nutrients. But the way I see it, just existing costs the world "100 externality". If living to the fullest costs "110 externality", I feel like I am doing a disservice if I chose the first option, saving so little "externality" and spending my life miserable. For have I not then utterly wasted the costs I imposed on the world?

pygy_ 13y ago
That's patent nonsense. The problem is not consumption/destruction per se, but the fact that we destroy more than what the planet can build out of solar energy. We're burning the reserves and the means of production.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  What, precisely, is nonsense about my comment? Brushing something off as nonsense and saying vanishingly little else is not exactly a compelling argument. Also, did you read my parent? Parent was not talking about sustainability and burn rate vs. incoming solar energy or production rate. Parent was talking about mental anguish brought about by the costs his existence poses on the planet- at least, that's what I heard.
  - pygy_ 13y ago
    The anguish of the parent comes from the fact that the common industrialized lifestyle is not sustainable (he refers to ocean acidification aka net carbon dioxide surplus). If our lifestyle was sustainable, I don't think he'd feel any anguish, but you'll have to ask him to be sure. re. nonsense, paragraph per paragraph: 1) biking is more energetically efficient than walking. 2) eating any kind of meat daily is not sustainable in the long run, and thus not intelligent (which does not prevent me from eating some, from time to time). 3) You ignore the notion of sustainability. Having some impact does not matter, as long as you stay beneath the sustainability threshold. 4) Your 100 / 110 ratio seems to come out of nowhere. Do you have any data to support it?
    - sliverstorm 13y ago
      Riding a bicycle is very energy efficient, but it still has externalities. Which was part of my point, everything does, even the most efficient choices. I presumed my parent was not primarily concerned with sustainability due to bits like dead orangutans and I like beef, but I sympathize for a fellow mammal. Sympathy and orangutans are not really part of the sustainability picture, which is a separate and large issue I don't intend to dive into right now. Eating meat can be sustainable. I'm pretty confident if we all ate crickets, there would be practically no sustainability concerns, and we can't all eat quinoa as our protein source anyway. Chile is not able to grow enough quinoa to feed the world (quinoa is a picky plant) The 100 / 110 is purely invented as a thought experiment, but I consider it to be representative. Your daily BMR is ~2000 Calories. Engaging in activity, sports, games, or mental exercises do increase your caloric consumption for the day, but your body adjusts quickly and your additional caloric consumption for the activity falls quickly into the hundreds of calories for all but the most strenuous activities. Plus, the more strenuous (calorie-expensive) the activity, the more likely you are to take rest days, which lowers your average daily caloric consumption.
      - pohl 13y ago
        I'm having a hard time trying to imagine how financially-incentivized systematic removal of the habitats of species after species after species can be considered anything but unsustainable.
- o_s_m 13y ago
  What about the materials used in the solar panels, in addition to the process used to make them.
  - pygy_ 13y ago
    I was referring to photosynthesis, not solar panels.
  - dredmorbius 13y ago
    Noting that parent was referring to net primary productivity (on which, Jeffrey Dukes, "Burning Buried Sunshine", is very strongly recommended: http://globalecology.stanford.edu/DGE/Dukes/Dukes_ClimChange1.pdf http://globalecology.stanford.edu/DGE/Dukes/Dukes_ClimChange...), the sustainability of various renewable energy technologies is an open question. But here's the dilemma as I see it: • Modern technological civilization is predicated on abundant cheap (high EROEI) energy sources. Technology follows from, rather than leads to, energy availability, and hence isn't an answer. • For reasons of both depletion (peak oil / gas / coal) and pollution (greenhouse gasses, AGW, mercury and other emissions), continued use of fossil fuels isn't viable. We've already heat peak conventional liquids (oil), and global total peak oil production is likely within 5-15 years. Gas follows shortly after, coal likely by the late 21st / mid 22nd century assuming demand doesn't collapse entirely (which would generally indicate a collapse of civilization). • If you want to continue a technological civilization of some sort, then you've got to find alternative high-grade forms of energy. Likely a mix of electrical generation (highly fungible) and limited liquid or solid fuels production (for transport and storage needs). Capacities to produce both are fairly constrained. • The alternative is ... a non-technological level of civilization. Likely a collapse in both technological levels and population (from famine, disease, war, the usual). Which means that the future of humanity will be relying on solar power -- collected and stored by plants. And be living in a drastically depleted environment in which many ores and mineral resources, as well as water, topsoil, and ecosystems have been hugely depleted. "Rebooting" civilization would be at best very, very difficult. • I like a technological civilization, don't get me wrong. But I don't see it as sustainable. And there's nothing in the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, ecology, or geology which say the Universe owes us our standard of living. Answering your question about solar PV: the economics look difficult, and numerous people who are convinced of peak oil and climate change suggest that they may well not work, see Ted Trainer, John Michael Greer, Charles A.S. Hall, and Gail Tverberg among them: "Renewable Energy: No Solution For Consumer Society" http://www.countercurrents.org/trainer240411.htm http://www.countercurrents.org/trainer240411.htm But that doesn't exactly leave us with good alternatives, and my feeling is that PV or other high-grade solar technologies (solar thermal, Stirling or related engines) are worth pursuing with our remaining fossil fuel reserve (we really should have been pursuing these decades ago). What's your alternative? Enjoy your day.
pickleport 13y ago
You make it sound like your decadences cost little ("10 percent externality") and give you lots of happiness, when it's the other way around -- things like eating cattle, fish -- things like driving -- have huge environmental costs and probably don't make you that much happier or better off.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  1) I'm not talking about decadence, I'm talking about burning a little extra calories to engage in sports and games and such. Or choosing foods that are not the very best in terms of externalities, but still OK and also good for your health. You could live on nothing but rice, but it would totally ruin your health, and then have you not wasted all that rice? 2) Engaging in sports do not increase your average daily caloric consumption much. Once your body normalizes to your activity level, your BMR is something like 75%-90% of your total calorie consumption for the day. So the incremental cost is indeed low. 3) Fish can be a very economical meat. Feed conversion ratio is fantastic. To my knowledge most environmental damage comes from irresponsible fishers/farmers, not from inherent problems with fish. Crickets (one of the few even more efficient meats) are simply not available.
dredmorbius 13y ago
there is no way in which you can eat food and not have some negative impact. Actually, no, there are, collectively. Humans have existed, give or take, for a couple million years. In modern form for about 80,000, and with present levels of cognition, for around 10,000. For most of that time, humans most certainly did affect local ecosystems (and sometimes in significant fashion), but had relatively little impact on the global environment as a whole. That ended with the Industrial Revolution, and it's only been picking up pace since, with global impacts becoming more evident since the 20th century. Global warming was first postulated in 1932 (by the US Naval Research Lab: http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1woc0v/carbon_dioxide_heats_the_earth_1932/ http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1woc0v/carbon_d...) The simple truth is that we've got too many people, consuming too many resources, to be sustainable. As with software (fast, cheap, good, pick two), you've got three options from which you can choose two alternatives: big (populations), rich (in resource consumption), or long (in sustainability). Pick two. Humans can support a large population with high per-capita resource consumption ... for a brief time. Or a high population for a long time ... at very low per-capita resource consumption (and there's no guarantee that present rates are in fact sustainable at low p-c rates). Or a high per-capita resource consumption (high personal wealth) for a long time ... with a low population. Technology skews this a bit, but in the long term, I suspect, acts largely as an accelerator of resource depletion. So, yes, your "lots of people doing little" is one option, but what's desperately required is to reduce total population levels. By a lot. The historical record shows that ~500 million - 2 billion might be a sustainable range. I tend to suspect the lower bound of that range.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  I was talking about the anguish of simply having an impact, as I judged that to be what my parent was really thinking about. Of killing an animal for food, or even a plant. Of cutting down a tree to build a house, or trapping and killing a rat in that house. Of lumbering forests, because it's not right, not fair to the forest and its inhabitants (not because it's unsustainable) It doesn't matter if it's sustainable or not, that does not fix this question. What does sustainability matter to the cow you just ate? To the tree you just felled? Why do you get to live, while the plant/animal must die? It's a question I struggled with for a while in the past.
secstate 13y ago
Fish farms are some of the worst pollutants in the ocean. Remote stretches of Patagonia are becoming cess pools of salmon shit as a result of salmon farming. Don't get me wrong, there are sustainable ways to farm fish and other seafood, but most are a complete ecological disaster. Even something as seemingly harmless as mussel farming has detrimental impacts on the local ocean ecology, as surprise, surprise mussels produce waste and accumulating it in one place is not a good thing.
- marcosscriven 13y ago
  On a recent flight from Punta Arenas to Puerto Montt saw an awful lot of huge Salmon farms from the air.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  Yup. To elaborate more fully, I buy wild-caught fish because of how unsustainably many fish farms are run right now. I buy particular varieties of fish based on what species are most sustainably fished. I buy fish to support the fish industry ("vote with your wallet") in hopes that people will see the demand and continue to pursue & improve fish farming in the future.
- malbs 13y ago
  As well as all the antibiotics that are pumped into the feed to keep the fish "healthy"
ronaldx 13y ago
> just existing costs the world "100 externality". If living to the fullest costs "110 externality"... 110, OK, here your point makes some sense. But what about when living to the fullest costs "850+ externality"? (e.g. compare mean oil consumption per capita US vs China). If we're going to use this argument, at least let's be honest about it: we are not at 110, and our motility is not the problem.

pygy_ 13y ago

That's patent nonsense. The problem is not consumption/destruction per se, but the fact that we destroy more than what the planet can build out of solar energy. We're burning the reserves and the means of production.

sliverstorm 13y ago
What, precisely, is nonsense about my comment? Brushing something off as nonsense and saying vanishingly little else is not exactly a compelling argument. Also, did you read my parent? Parent was not talking about sustainability and burn rate vs. incoming solar energy or production rate. Parent was talking about mental anguish brought about by the costs his existence poses on the planet- at least, that's what I heard.
- pygy_ 13y ago
  The anguish of the parent comes from the fact that the common industrialized lifestyle is not sustainable (he refers to ocean acidification aka net carbon dioxide surplus). If our lifestyle was sustainable, I don't think he'd feel any anguish, but you'll have to ask him to be sure. re. nonsense, paragraph per paragraph: 1) biking is more energetically efficient than walking. 2) eating any kind of meat daily is not sustainable in the long run, and thus not intelligent (which does not prevent me from eating some, from time to time). 3) You ignore the notion of sustainability. Having some impact does not matter, as long as you stay beneath the sustainability threshold. 4) Your 100 / 110 ratio seems to come out of nowhere. Do you have any data to support it?
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    Riding a bicycle is very energy efficient, but it still has externalities. Which was part of my point, everything does, even the most efficient choices. I presumed my parent was not primarily concerned with sustainability due to bits like dead orangutans and I like beef, but I sympathize for a fellow mammal. Sympathy and orangutans are not really part of the sustainability picture, which is a separate and large issue I don't intend to dive into right now. Eating meat can be sustainable. I'm pretty confident if we all ate crickets, there would be practically no sustainability concerns, and we can't all eat quinoa as our protein source anyway. Chile is not able to grow enough quinoa to feed the world (quinoa is a picky plant) The 100 / 110 is purely invented as a thought experiment, but I consider it to be representative. Your daily BMR is ~2000 Calories. Engaging in activity, sports, games, or mental exercises do increase your caloric consumption for the day, but your body adjusts quickly and your additional caloric consumption for the activity falls quickly into the hundreds of calories for all but the most strenuous activities. Plus, the more strenuous (calorie-expensive) the activity, the more likely you are to take rest days, which lowers your average daily caloric consumption.
    - pohl 13y ago
      I'm having a hard time trying to imagine how financially-incentivized systematic removal of the habitats of species after species after species can be considered anything but unsustainable.
o_s_m 13y ago
What about the materials used in the solar panels, in addition to the process used to make them.
- pygy_ 13y ago
  I was referring to photosynthesis, not solar panels.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  Noting that parent was referring to net primary productivity (on which, Jeffrey Dukes, "Burning Buried Sunshine", is very strongly recommended: http://globalecology.stanford.edu/DGE/Dukes/Dukes_ClimChange1.pdf http://globalecology.stanford.edu/DGE/Dukes/Dukes_ClimChange...), the sustainability of various renewable energy technologies is an open question. But here's the dilemma as I see it: • Modern technological civilization is predicated on abundant cheap (high EROEI) energy sources. Technology follows from, rather than leads to, energy availability, and hence isn't an answer. • For reasons of both depletion (peak oil / gas / coal) and pollution (greenhouse gasses, AGW, mercury and other emissions), continued use of fossil fuels isn't viable. We've already heat peak conventional liquids (oil), and global total peak oil production is likely within 5-15 years. Gas follows shortly after, coal likely by the late 21st / mid 22nd century assuming demand doesn't collapse entirely (which would generally indicate a collapse of civilization). • If you want to continue a technological civilization of some sort, then you've got to find alternative high-grade forms of energy. Likely a mix of electrical generation (highly fungible) and limited liquid or solid fuels production (for transport and storage needs). Capacities to produce both are fairly constrained. • The alternative is ... a non-technological level of civilization. Likely a collapse in both technological levels and population (from famine, disease, war, the usual). Which means that the future of humanity will be relying on solar power -- collected and stored by plants. And be living in a drastically depleted environment in which many ores and mineral resources, as well as water, topsoil, and ecosystems have been hugely depleted. "Rebooting" civilization would be at best very, very difficult. • I like a technological civilization, don't get me wrong. But I don't see it as sustainable. And there's nothing in the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, ecology, or geology which say the Universe owes us our standard of living. Answering your question about solar PV: the economics look difficult, and numerous people who are convinced of peak oil and climate change suggest that they may well not work, see Ted Trainer, John Michael Greer, Charles A.S. Hall, and Gail Tverberg among them: "Renewable Energy: No Solution For Consumer Society" http://www.countercurrents.org/trainer240411.htm http://www.countercurrents.org/trainer240411.htm But that doesn't exactly leave us with good alternatives, and my feeling is that PV or other high-grade solar technologies (solar thermal, Stirling or related engines) are worth pursuing with our remaining fossil fuel reserve (we really should have been pursuing these decades ago). What's your alternative? Enjoy your day.

pickleport 13y ago

You make it sound like your decadences cost little ("10 percent externality") and give you lots of happiness, when it's the other way around -- things like eating cattle, fish -- things like driving -- have huge environmental costs and probably don't make you that much happier or better off.

sliverstorm 13y ago
1) I'm not talking about decadence, I'm talking about burning a little extra calories to engage in sports and games and such. Or choosing foods that are not the very best in terms of externalities, but still OK and also good for your health. You could live on nothing but rice, but it would totally ruin your health, and then have you not wasted all that rice? 2) Engaging in sports do not increase your average daily caloric consumption much. Once your body normalizes to your activity level, your BMR is something like 75%-90% of your total calorie consumption for the day. So the incremental cost is indeed low. 3) Fish can be a very economical meat. Feed conversion ratio is fantastic. To my knowledge most environmental damage comes from irresponsible fishers/farmers, not from inherent problems with fish. Crickets (one of the few even more efficient meats) are simply not available.

dredmorbius 13y ago

there is no way in which you can eat food and not have some negative impact. Actually, no, there are, collectively. Humans have existed, give or take, for a couple million years. In modern form for about 80,000, and with present levels of cognition, for around 10,000. For most of that time, humans most certainly did affect local ecosystems (and sometimes in significant fashion), but had relatively little impact on the global environment as a whole. That ended with the Industrial Revolution, and it's only been picking up pace since, with global impacts becoming more evident since the 20th century. Global warming was first postulated in 1932 (by the US Naval Research Lab: http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1woc0v/carbon_dioxide_heats_the_earth_1932/ http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1woc0v/carbon_d...) The simple truth is that we've got too many people, consuming too many resources, to be sustainable. As with software (fast, cheap, good, pick two), you've got three options from which you can choose two alternatives: big (populations), rich (in resource consumption), or long (in sustainability). Pick two. Humans can support a large population with high per-capita resource consumption ... for a brief time. Or a high population for a long time ... at very low per-capita resource consumption (and there's no guarantee that present rates are in fact sustainable at low p-c rates). Or a high per-capita resource consumption (high personal wealth) for a long time ... with a low population. Technology skews this a bit, but in the long term, I suspect, acts largely as an accelerator of resource depletion. So, yes, your "lots of people doing little" is one option, but what's desperately required is to reduce total population levels. By a lot. The historical record shows that ~500 million - 2 billion might be a sustainable range. I tend to suspect the lower bound of that range.

sliverstorm 13y ago
I was talking about the anguish of simply having an impact, as I judged that to be what my parent was really thinking about. Of killing an animal for food, or even a plant. Of cutting down a tree to build a house, or trapping and killing a rat in that house. Of lumbering forests, because it's not right, not fair to the forest and its inhabitants (not because it's unsustainable) It doesn't matter if it's sustainable or not, that does not fix this question. What does sustainability matter to the cow you just ate? To the tree you just felled? Why do you get to live, while the plant/animal must die? It's a question I struggled with for a while in the past.

secstate 13y ago

Fish farms are some of the worst pollutants in the ocean. Remote stretches of Patagonia are becoming cess pools of salmon shit as a result of salmon farming. Don't get me wrong, there are sustainable ways to farm fish and other seafood, but most are a complete ecological disaster. Even something as seemingly harmless as mussel farming has detrimental impacts on the local ocean ecology, as surprise, surprise mussels produce waste and accumulating it in one place is not a good thing.

marcosscriven 13y ago
On a recent flight from Punta Arenas to Puerto Montt saw an awful lot of huge Salmon farms from the air.
sliverstorm 13y ago
Yup. To elaborate more fully, I buy wild-caught fish because of how unsustainably many fish farms are run right now. I buy particular varieties of fish based on what species are most sustainably fished. I buy fish to support the fish industry ("vote with your wallet") in hopes that people will see the demand and continue to pursue & improve fish farming in the future.
malbs 13y ago
As well as all the antibiotics that are pumped into the feed to keep the fish "healthy"

ronaldx 13y ago

> just existing costs the world "100 externality". If living to the fullest costs "110 externality"... 110, OK, here your point makes some sense. But what about when living to the fullest costs "850+ externality"? (e.g. compare mean oil consumption per capita US vs China). If we're going to use this argument, at least let's be honest about it: we are not at 110, and our motility is not the problem.