> "Doing so will require systemic shifts in how we produce food, create energy, manage our oceans and use materials,"
This is a hard political problem. The owners of the current means to produce meat/oil/etc. want to keep their fortune and to move them to renewable/plant-base/new-tech solutions make them lose that edge and creates real competition.
The problem with economy/ecology is that many people are addicted to easy money. We have the tech and knowledge (or we are close in some fields) to replace the problematic industries.
The change for the better is a matter of time and pushing politicians and big investors to do the right thing.
Very much indeed. It frustrates me to no end to look back 20 years in the past and see that Al Gore ran on an anti global warming platform in the 2000 presidential election, and lost to an oil baron. While in the 2020 presidential election the democratic candidate hardly mentions the climate disaster while the western parts of the country is literally on fire.
Over the years we have tried to solve the climate disaster with some (but very limited) success. Methods including carbon tax, international agreements and green infrastructure. However these efforts have always stopped short of being implemented on a necessary scale (international agreements especially). It is a hard problem only because modern politicians are unwilling to implement any of the necessary policy to tackle it (even though most voters generally want it; green infrastructure especially).
I'm not going to get in to a link war. All I'd ask is: in your personal experience, what have you observed? Are the seas higher than when you were a child? Are you struggling to breathe for all the C02?!? Stripping away the news coverage, what real life effects have you experienced personally?
Unfortunately, I'm not prepared to trust what I think are politicised governance authorities. At least not if they go against or do not cohere with my personal experience.
You are missing the forest for the trees. This is 20 years ago, and Al Gore was (even then) not a leading climate activist nor a climate scientist. Our knowledge of both the nature and the scope of the climate disaster has change in the meantime. Heck, we used to call it the greenhouse effect or global warming back then. Since then we’ve gotten a better understanding and are able to make better predictions and construct better policy to tackle it. Saying: “Al Gore was wrong about prediction A and B”, reminds me of creationists saying: “Evolution is wrong because Charles Darwin said the origin of organism A was environmental condition B, when in fact it wasn’t”.
I really don’t even believe Al Gore would have saved us from the Climate Disaster. I’m guessing he would have had a similar success as Obama giving health care for all.
The point is that Al Gore could run on an anti-climate change platform with the Democratic party 20 years ago. Today even a train-loving Biden is hard against investing in the green infrastructure we needed 20 years ago, even though the majority of his voters desperately want it.
The crux of my frustration is that 20 years ago there was a political will to do something about this, while now—as the west coast is literally on fire, the gulf states are being bombarded with unprecedented hurricanes and the east coast just lived through horrible heat waves—solving the climate crisis is a hard problem because politicians are unwilling to take the necessary actions.
> we used to call it the greenhouse effect or global warming back then.
And before that we were going to have a mini ice age...
Also, can I say I find it odd when people talk using the pronoun 'we'. The Queen does that when she talks about her country. That's called the royal 'we'.
What global warming effect can you say you've witnessed? I don't think I can say I've noticed a single thing. Nothing. Some warm summers some cold winters - ie weather. As a cyclist it seems the quality of air has improved and I'm noticing more birds. So 20+ years of talk and fear, and there's nothing to see?
I'm at the point where I see that all that fear serves a purpose in its own right. I don't think the rhetoric matches the reality. But putting people in a state of fear that they are also powerless to address does serve a purpose. The purpose is that it supports government. It supports global governance too. Government plays up a problem that only it can solve, and it can only solve that problem by reducing the freedoms of the people it governs. So less freedom of travel, closer monitoring, etc. For me, it's one of the justifications given for what is shaping up to be a technocratic hell. And technologists are unwittingly building the infrastructure.
What I see with Al Gore is, on the one side - a self-serving politician, happy to talk up the importance of governance when he is a member of the governing class, and on the other - a salesman doing a sales job given he is invested in green energies.
Let me get this straight. Your saying there is a conspiracy to fear monger the population with prediction of climate disaster so that we will agree on mass surveillance and to losing other freedoms.
While at the same time we have already had mass surveillance and travel restrictions imposed on us from the global war on terror (started under George Bush a year after winning the election against Al Gore), while not having any enforced international carbon reduction treaty all the while global carbon emission keeps expanding out of control.
If this was a true conspiracy so far they’ve done a very poor job with it for the past 20 years, and I say you have nothing to worry about.
I'm saying it is a long running conspiracy. We lost freedoms with the global war on terror, we have lost freedoms since then, we are going to lose more freedoms in the very near future. I can see the direction we are heading. And no, I'm not cheering it on as you seem to be.
> If this was a true conspiracy so far they’ve done a very poor job with it for the past 20 years.
What's poor about their job? I think they have done an excellent job. Most people defer to experts over their own experience. Imagine, one's own experience not carrying any weight with one's own beliefs! So, they have done an excellent job.
It's not just about the capital owners. The actual people chopping down rainforests for palm oil plantations are formerly impoverished farmers. You can stop corporations from buying from them, but you're hurting these poorer communities the most.
Deforestation in Brazil was almost stopped when Bolsonaro came into office and has surged since then. For me this is one of the primary reasons why i worry about the future of our civilisation: every nature reserve, every protected animal, every small victory against ecological destruction can so easily be lost again.
Those who wish to protect must be on guard every day and win every fight.
Those who wish to destroy must only win once and can choose the best time.
There are ways to construct constitutions such that no one person in a democracy has the power to do this much damage. E.g. only a multi-participatory and diverse parliament—and crucially not any government; especially not any president—has the power to enact laws which can cause such a damage.
In a successful democracy, the people don’t have the option to vote them self a dictator.
Switzerland is perhaps an example of this. There's no president — the head of the federal government is a 7-member Federal Council elected by the parliament, with representation proportional to parliament. This means that politics is generally more consensus-driven and less subject to extreme views.
Swiss politics also makes heavy use of referendums, and any aspect of federal/cantonal/local law can be decided in a referendum if there's enough support.
Note: I am a recent transplant to Switzerland so I'm still learning the ways in which the Swiss system has advantages and, crucially, disadvantages (I'd guess stalemate/slow progress are some).
There are quite a few theoretical disadvantages to the Swiss system, including what you mentioned. The surprising thing is though, when I compare to all other systems, I don't see that much of stalemate or progress gap. So even without understanding why, it seems to me it gets somehow evened out.
One of the core beliefs I have for understanding the world is that equality is an unstable equilibrium.
Imagine an almost perfectly balanced democracy where everyone has nearly equal agency and power. At some point, maybe at the political level of brownian motion, someone will have a tiny edge. They will naturally use that bit of extra power to garner a little more power. Because the most useful thing to with a little extra power is always to capture some more.
Compound that over many iterations and your democracy is dead.
Thus, I believe that all systems of equality and democracy need active, constant recalibration to maintain fairness. There is no perfectly written constitution that you can set in motion like clockwork and have it run flawlessly forever. There is no static equilibrium, but you can have dynamic equilibrium. Constant vigilance.
> One of the core beliefs I have for understanding the world is that equality is an unstable equilibrium.
I think this has been statistically proven[1]. So I should probably add that in addition to a well crafted constitution that prevents any single party from enacting a damaging law, such a constitution needs to be revised or rewritten whenever a single party has been deemed to gain such power.
Revising and rewriting the constitution needs to be done with the utmost care off course and have ample democratic safeguards to prevent a dictator.
A true democracy has the power to revise its constitution when that constitution is no longer able to protect the democracy it defines from a dictator.
---
1. Almost 10 years ago I learned D3 by building an interactive graph testing this in a game of capitalism. After a few rounds of completely fair zero-sum trades where all parties start with the same amount, the bulk of the wealth will always accumulate on few hands.
> Large plantations cultivate export crops on about
15 percent of the total agricultural area, but the majority
of farmers (68 percent) are smallholders operating on less
than one hectare.
Indonesia's population is still growing. If you're an uneducated farmer in a large family with a small farm, the only option you have to make a living may be to work in a palm oil plantation.
Are you sure the word is dispossessed here? Were those farmers working on their own land, and then had it taken away from them by force without payment?
> you're hurting these poorer communities the most.
My point is that redistributing wealth in a better way, we would get less opposition to upgrade our production means and people like that poor farmers and others will get a bigger piece of the cake in a more healthy environment and conserving their culture and land.
I agree with you, thou. The current mindset is that the super-rich are super-rich and their wealth cannot be touched. So, we are left with limited options on how to manage with the scraps. If we think out of the box and realize that we can redistribute wealth better, there will be still very rich people but also farmers would get a more fair price for their contribution.
This is key. It's this cultural blind spot where we gloss over the fact that these people are impoverished and so desperate that they would destroy the home around them, partly because we allow a tiny fraction of humanity to amass absurd wealth. Then we double down by making it socially acceptable for them to leverage that wealth into making it untouchable and ever-growing.
If we just took this situation as strictly unacceptable, then we are working with a much larger range of options.
The idea that big reward == all that innovation needed is pretty sick. It assumes all it takes is innovation to solve literal planet scale problems.
“... The owners of the current means to produce meat/oil/etc...”
Just as often as big operations contributing to this, it’s the mom or pop or children doing this in a subsistence manner. A contributing factor is encroachment due to local population growth.
Indeed. Madagascar is a slow-motion environmental catastrophe because every family has many children and each of those children eventually needs to slash-and-burn rainforest in order to plant enough rice to sustain themselves. Also a lot of tree-felling to make charcoal, because for whatever reason Malagasy villagers cannot afford e.g. kerosene to cook with. The result is the steady eradication of all those cool lemurs and other rainforest wildlife, but the perpetrators of this destruction are not millionaire industrial fatcats like people often imagine, they are dirt-poor subsistence farmers.
And without significant investment by those with resources, asking them to preserve the environment is a direct ask for them to go hungry or cold for the sake of the environment. This is an ask that 99.99% or more of the human population will absolutely ignore.
Not cool. This kind of imperialist mindset has historically been at the head of some of the most awful actions in human history. Including forced relocations, imposed poverty, sustained resource theft, sustained vandalism and theft of local artifacts, slave labor, and even genocide.
If the rich world really cared about the wildlife in Madagascar we would fund green local infrastructure projects so that the local population could enjoy a sustainable lifestyle on their own.
The problem is much more complex than people being "addicted to easy money". Wealthy nations have buffer to take on unnecessary expense in addressing their basic needs, like food and shelter. This is dramatically less true in non-wealthy nations. Creating ecological mandates can have actual human impact on food availability and on human standard of living. Not the marginal improvements experienced in developed nations, but life or death quality of life changes to the worlds poorest.
But also the owners of the means to produce soybean and grain are happy that they can cut out the middleman and sell their product direct to consumers rather than as animal feed. They will end up with more wealth.
We are addicted to high population density, making babies and helping get everyone to what we consider is the minimum level of consumption, which is exactly 2x higher than the Earth can provide sustainably.
At one point we’ll have to say “Earth can only feed X billion people if we want to have a medium pressure on our environment”.
Second reply: Impact = Population * Affluence * Technology.
The problem is not rising population, it's rising affluence and inert technology.
As people earn more, they consume more in general, and more of environmentally harmful products like meat, cars, and plane trips in particular.
Meanwhile we're not improving core technologies quickly enough.
We make buildings using Portland cement. Cement making is responsible for about 1/20 of total carbon emissions by itself. Planes are not electric yet; nor are cars. Cities are badly designed for pedestrians. Meat substitutes aren't good enough or cheap enough yet. We burn coal to make electricity, thanks to the coal industry's astroturfing campaign against nuclear in the 1960s and 1970s.
We also burn coal to make steel. We cut down forest to make biofuels, a bizarre and depraved practice.
Eh every large city I've been to that isn't in US or Canada is extremely pedestrian friendly. To the point of being actively nicer and easier to navigate by foot than by car.
Even NYC and SF are way faster to navigate by foot/bike than by car. I've stopped using Uber in SF because it's faster (and cheaper) to get places with a rented bike.
Well there are thousands of small cities and towns which are not this way. Hell, if you leave San Francisco and go to any other bay area city it's not this way
> As people earn more, they consume more in general, and more of environmentally harmful products like meat, cars, and plane trips in particular.
That is one part of the problem. But, as we have seen, there is alternatives. Because the pandemic, more people is working from home, playing video games instead of traveling or even learning new skills.
I love to travel, but also to play games or read books. A change of culture will help with that. Governments could also apply "sin taxes" to luxuries that harm the environment in favor of more social and cultural activities that hire more people but consume less natural resources.
I’m not sure the travel industry is the worst perpetrator here. But regardless, asking people to give up their traveling is simply too much. I would much rather look at commuting and the shipping industry. As well as family/friendly visits which could be done using green on-ground mass transports.
There's nothing wrong with population density. We'd do better to have people living in dense city centers instead of sprawled out into every corner of the wilderness.
North Dakota has more than 10x the per-capita COVID-19 infection rate of New York City right now, despite having only about 0.03% of the population density.
We are not addicted to making babies, or at least not endlessly. Take a look at Wikipedia's list of countries by total fertility rate, and then google for charts showing what's been happening to it over the last few decades.
Most countries, the significant exceptions being in Sub-Saharan Africa, have TFR below or near replacement (2.1).
When girls are allowed to learn to read, and when people move to cities women don't have all that many kids.
Most of the world's current population growth is due to increasing lifespan.
So don't worry about managing population. In a few decades the worry will be about keeping it up, not down. (With Sub-Saharan Africa, again, as the exception.)
It's kind of weird to see the people worried about over-population come crashing into the new worry about population stagnation or decline. Both problems are hard. The only fun stage is unconstrained growth unless we can somehow reach stability without continually killing people to stay there like we used to.
In pre-industrial times, the population was naturally limited by food shortages. People were chronically exceeding the carrying capacity and then being culled back. They've always been "addicted" to high population density. What's the alternative? Extinction? Every species does the same, but for most of them, nobody cares about the endless hardship of living at the limit of carrying capacity.
The key quote is that 94% of the drop is in Latin America and the Caribbeans. For example in France forests are increasing since more than 100 years [0].
So discussing diet is interesting but eating les meat in the developed world will do nothing for the obvious big problem: Amazon deforestation.
The amount of land covered by forest says nothing about biodiversity and general wildlife. Replanting forests doesn't bring back all of the species who disappeared along with their habitat.
Brazil is the world's biggest beef exporter, including to the EU, and the majority of deforested land goes to grazing, not agriculture.
Forests in France are on the rebound because colonial powers outsourced their rapacious practices to the colonies. As old colonial powers loosened their grip on the colonies, the influence of globalized corporations remained to leverage and exacerbate local corruption and the vast imbalance of wealth and power.
France destroyed basically all of their forest in the last few centuries. It's a funny claim. It's like a homeless man saying his wealth increased by 100% in one day.
There's a real problem with conservation in the West where we lecture developing countries about the environmental destruction we ourselves did long ago for pure monetary gain.
It's hard to have a proper conversation about it and find solutions when there's a real hypocrisy that is quite blatant to one party and not the other.
I see this with the EU and palm oil in SEA, what exactly does Europe want them to do? If they can't sell palm they'll still farm something else (probably far less efficient too, palm oil per kg needs 4x less space than European canola).
It's not an easy issue in the first place and borders/nationalism/trade protection makes it even harder.
> France destroyed basically all of their forest in the last few centuries. It's a funny claim. It's like a homeless man saying his wealth increased by 100% in one day.
Sure but the point is that it's not directly related to the "Wildlife in catastrophic decline since the 70's".
I'm not sure I follow the rest, there is no time for philosophical debates about wether the West has the right to lecture developing countries, the earth cannot afford developing countries going down that path, period.
My point was that adapting our diet in the west looks useless to stop that catastrophic decline happening now, but maybe it could be a powerful act of solidarity to lead by example? To be clear I'm not discussing the merits of eating less meat (I'm vegetarian), just pointing out that it doesn't look like a short term solution for the very issue in TFA.
> there is no time for philosophical debates about wether the West has the right to lecture developing countries
I'm quite involved in conservation movements and this really is a huge issue if not the biggest. You can't simply just turn up and lecture them. It's incredibly counterproductive and everyone on the ground knows this while people sitting comfy in their home in Europe and the States nod approvingly at these justice warriors telling others far removed from their existence to reign in their ways.
Let reverse it:
Will the US reduce its per capita emissions to say the level of China? That would involve the average person reducing their carbon footprint by half, which is going to dramatically impact quality of life if done today.
How do think that would go down if some country told Americans to do that? How would the average person react to having that imposed on them?
"France has destroyed practically all of its forest in recent centuries." It's false, it's the opposite: over the period of 1000/1500 there was much less forest in France than today because wood was the only energy for heating.
>New modelling evidence suggests we can halt and even reverse habitat loss and deforestation if we take urgent conservation action and change the way we produce and consume food.
I'm pessimistic with this claim. From my experience, if a productive process like agriculture becomes more efficient, we scale up output. The resources being used up, in this case land, won't be reduced. For an analogy, consider how adding more lanes to a busy highway ultimately means more people drive and congestion is just as bad.
What we need is more government protection of habitats. But it's hard for a government to directly and explicitly oppose economic opportunities.
"In economics, the Jevons paradox occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises due to increasing demand."
"Increasing demand" seems pretty funny when we have whole industries dedicated to artificially generating demand (e.g. marketing and advertising) and when the ultimate quality metric for a country is it's GDP - so both business as well as government will do whatever it can to keep demand from going down.
Sometimes I feel we're sitting in the bus from Speed (that will explode if it goes under 50 Mph) and just realized we're headed towards a roadblock. So now we're paradoxically trying to come to a full stop and not go below 50mph at the same time and wonder why it's not working.
As a matter of fact, the more industrialized nations have increased productivity and production, while decreasing the amount of land devoted to agriculture (returning a great deal of it to 'nature').
I think the future is very grim for biodiversity. Even if we stopped destroying habitats tomorrow, many larger animals are already living in small, isolated pockets surrounded by roads, farms, and industry. Meanwhile, plants and smaller animals face intense competition from invasive species - often brought in by accident thanks to the constant flow of goods around the globe. We're probably headed for a pretty homogeneous global ecology - where "economically significant" or highly adaptable plants and animals thrive, while the others are relegated to zoos, national parks, or extinction.
The glimmer of hope that I have is that the same sort of market forces that create these problems can be marshaled to solve them. For example, if the wealthiest countries implemented a carbon tax including a border adjustment (accounting for goods from countries with a laxer carbon policy) would give governments a single, simple dial that the could turn to lower carbon emissions. Similarly, we ought to be able to implement other kinds of ecological taxes to great effect. However, arriving at that kind of policy is a purely political problem.
In the meanwhile, there are other market-based solutions, like organizations who certify products' sustainability. The certifier allows the manufacturer to place the sustainability trademark on their products if they pass the required audits. I'm of the impression that this has made a significant impact for forest-derived products via the Forest Stewardship Council (https://fsc.org/) with a handful of activists decades ago pushing the largest retailers (e.g., Home Depot) of forest-derived products to invest significantly in FSC-certified products.
> market forces that create these problems can be marshaled to solve them. For example, if the wealthiest countries implemented a carbon tax including a border adjustment (accounting for goods from countries with a laxer carbon policy) would give governments a single, simple dial that the could turn to lower carbon emissions.
Taxes are not market forces, they are exogenous interventions on markets. Which means having wealthiest countries implement a carbon tax is not riding market dynamics for free, but a difficult multi-agent cooperation problem that makes defecting competitively very advantageous. This includes for example requiring cooperation with India (5th in GDP) and China (2nd in GDP) who have been enjoying high, multi-year economic growth, whose de-carbonization would hurt their economies disproportionately, unlike other rich countries. Unfortunately exports only account for ~20% of their GDPs so there is only so much leverage to apply there either.
Taxing carbon is just removing the carbon subsidy that we currently enjoy because it isn’t sustainable. If we decide we want to subsidize India’s pollution or whatever, we can still do that. Anyway, you don’t have a market at all without government and you don’t have a government without taxes so appeals to taxes being an intrusion aren’t persuasive IMO.
I'm not sure what point you're making. Even if the tax leads to a small black market for unregulated pollution, the legitimate market would remain regulated and thus our society would reap enormous environmental benefits. Moreover, the effort to thwart the tax constitutes a cost in and of itself, albeit the cost would necessarily be lower than the tax (to the extent that it's not lower, there is no incentive for a black market at all, which is also a real possibility)--this increased cost of pollution will also deter pollution just like the tax itself. Note that we tax lots of things effectively: gasoline, cigarettes, etc, and in none of those cases have a significant portion of the legitimate market moved to a black market--those taxes are quite effective. Lastly, Europe already has its own carbon taxes without the (rather silly) hypothetical consequences raised by critics in this thread.
> Anyway, you don’t have a market at all without government
That is not true, in fact most of the markets in history operated either without currencies (e.g. barter, farm labor etc) or with currencies that have inherent value (e.g gold, silver). A switch to fiat money implies state backing indeed, but a) it doesn't have to be one particular state (e.g. can do business with US dollars in some 3rd world countries) and innovations like bitcoin enable markets without any centralized currency.
> If we decide we want to subsidize India’s pollution or whatever, we can still do that.
That is the crux of the criticism you say you find silly. How exactly? Please show your work, because I am curious how we can subsidize China or India's emissions resulting from their domestic economy.
> Europe already has its own carbon taxes
Again please pay attention to domestic vs imported carbon. Most of the claims of approximating carbon neutrality is much smaller than in reality, because of the increasing consumption of carbon positive goods from developing countries.
Government != currency. In the most general sense it’s just the system that defines, interprets, and enforces property rights. That can be a tribal chief or the US government or the WTO.
> That is the crux of the criticism you say you find silly. How exactly? Please show your work, because I am curious how we can subsidize China or India's emissions resulting from their domestic economy
Writing them a check would be the most obvious way.
> Again please pay attention to domestic vs imported carbon. Most of the claims of approximating carbon neutrality is much smaller than in reality, because of the increasing consumption of carbon positive goods from developing countries.
I agree, there needs to be a border adjustment, and claims of carbon neutrality need to be similarly adjusted for imported carbon. I don’t see how that materially changes the calculus. Maybe the argument is that wide-scale border adjustments haven’t been proven out, and fair enough, but let’s maintain perspective: we’re speeding toward a cliff and we can’t be too concerned about bumps off to the left or the right.
> Writing them a check would be the most obvious way.
How much the check should be for exactly? This is important because even if we assume we can get perfect compliance if we paid for it, you might find the amount required surprisingly, I dare say impossibly, high.
As a thought experiment let's say we are going to subsidize the transformation of China's non-green energy production. For comparison I will use a levelized cost of energy which rolls in capital costs, operating costs, operating capacity efficiency (which is low for renewables) and depreciation. The figures are about 0.1$/kWh for new coal (though most coal already has the infrastructure so will only have non-capital costs) and roughly 0.2$/kWh for solar (similar for other renewables). If you write a check to convert 2019 China's non-green energy production (7000TWh * 70%) the figure we get is $1 trillion, which is roughly the discretionary spending of annual federal budget, %5 of US's GDP and 1.3% of the world's GPD. That is for China only.
No political apparatus in a democracy can muster the political will to justify subsidies of this scale.
I’m not arguing that we should subsidize China at all. Frankly we subsidize them too much already, but that’s a separate topic. My only point is that we taxing carbon doesn’t preclude subsidizing them to whatever extent we choose. It seems like you’re arguing that if we pass a carbon tax it will hurt China’s economy because business will move to greener countries (countries who are now competitive after adjusting for pollution, which is what a carbon tax aims to do), and that the US has a moral obligation to reimburse them (China) for that lost business. If I’m misunderstanding, I apologize and perhaps you could clarify; however, if I understand correctly, then I strongly disagree. The West in general and the US specifically has already made China’s economy world class and that at the expense of the environment and arguable to our own economic troubles (particularly inequality). We have no moral obligation to China, IMHO.
I guess I don't quite get what you suggest we should subsidize. China and India are two of the big, emerging polluters, and their exports only account for roughly 20% of their GDP. So a good 80% chunk will run on non-green energy even if we devised the perfect policy to make the remaining 20% of the entirety of their exports green. (US imports only a portion of that but let's assume entire world cooperated).
This is not accounting for the havoc it would wreak in international trade obviously, hurting China's exports is never hurting them alone, because trades not only go both ways, but also through; meaning depending on a lot of Chinese intermediary goods that we export affects US's GDP, and also worlds GDP. If I am understanding suggestion correctly, for example a carbon tax on iPhone's manufacturing would reduce how many iPhones are sold in the entire world, not just US, and ultimately would impact US's economic power in the form of a reduction, which also reduces the ability of "writing checks" for other interventions.
I don’t think we should subsidize anyone, neither China nor India, but only pointing out that a carbon tax doesn’t prevent us from doing so if we wanted to.
Ultimately I still don’t understand why you’re claiming that we depend on China and India to implement their own carbon taxes in order for us to be successful. If all wealthy countries implement a carbon tax with a border adjustment, China and India will either have to invest in greener tech and practices to compete in the wealthy first world market or be content in a less valuable market where pollution is allowed to be externalized.
> This is not accounting for the havoc it would wreak in international trade obviously, hurting China's exports is never hurting them alone, because trades not only go both ways, but also through; meaning depending on a lot of Chinese intermediary goods that we export affects US's GDP, and also worlds GDP.
Of course it’s going to hurt our economy. We’ve been living partly off of unsustainable environmental debt, and the whole point of a carbon tax is to reckon with that. Economic pain drives us toward greener solutions so we can enjoy a sustainable economy. The only “trick” to a carbon tax is deciding what the carbon tax rate should be at any moment in time to balance economic pain with necessary environmental goals. We should want to avoid an abruptly high carbon tax rate and prefer an initially low rate that rises gradually to allow our economies some time to invest in and implement green technologies, but waiting longer to implement the tax means the carbon tax rate will have to grow more steeply which translates to greater economic hardship.
Just about everything humans do is an exogenous intervention on markets, one way or another. And markets respond to them, via the cited market forces. The notion of the "free market" is a toxic fiction. Any market that works for its participants is intricately curated.
> Just about everything humans do is an exogenous intervention on markets, one way or another
Markets is simply the name for a particular collective of human interactions in response to pricing signals based on supply and demand, it is not a separate entity of its own. Taxes are exogenous in that they distort the equilibrous price points. That is not saying that it is always bad, because markets do fail.
> The notion of the "free market" is a toxic fiction.
Free market is a useful fiction for some economic modeling. No one has invoked the notion that real world markets has to/can be free, as mentioned, they do fail. But also interventions on them do fail catastrophically too.
This is important, because whether to intervene with markets or not is not as hard as the question of exactly in what manner to intervene. Our pet economic policy/intervention ideas might sound nice but rarely work exactly the way intended without side effects. Lack of a carbon tax is doesn't have to be due to a conspiracy of misanthropic apocalyptic evil but simply due to the difficulty of the multi-agent cooperation it requires based on the current incentive structures.
Can you elaborate on multiagenct cooperation? I grant your abstract point that markets are hard, but carbon taxes specifically are pretty straight forward and we can see that Europe has no disastrous consequences in their implementation. Further, we know to a very high degree of confidence that continuing our carbon subsidy will have disastrous consequences. A carbon tax is the simplest and most elegant solution.
In short what Paris Agreement intends and what it fails to achieve. It assumes signatories will be voluntarily reducing their carbon emissions without binding enforcement, and they don't.
For a while let's assume that energy production is the only activity that causes carbon emission. Compared to staying at status quo, reducing carbon emissions is at least expensive for its infrastructure transition costs, but can also be more expensive for its operating costs if the country was particularly rich in non-green energy resources. This means, making a transition while others are not is particularly disadvantageous to that state's economy; they will be producing everything for more expensive while buying cheaply produced non-green imports from non-abiding countries. This is even worse if we consider that no single country's carbon neutrality means much for meeting global warming targets.
This means defecting is very profitable for any given country, which creates a game theoretic equilibrium at no one doing any decarbonization. Transitioning to the other equilibrium (where everyone is handicapped equally with green production) requires every agent to be ensured that other agents are not defecting in a lockstep fashion, and current policy tools cannot achieve that (at least yet).
It seems like you’re correctly identifying the tragedy of the commons nature of environmentalism, but then advocating that we ruin the environment because if we don’t someone else will, which is to say the only sure-fire way to lose. Maybe I’m misreading—it’s late. Hopefully you will correct my error.
I am not advocating that, in fact I am with you in how bad it is, but I am also telling what the incentive structure looks like and what would it take to move it to the other equilibrium point. There are many and different types of agents in this game and appeals to morality or apocalypticism just don't work on them. There needs to be a concrete, depolarizing, global leadership that coordinates this transition, to make sure parties don't defect despite cheating being very profitable, and they also believe that this will be the case with others.
Paris agreement was an attempt at this but also demonstrated that we still couldn't muster the political will to do anything sufficiently concrete. Unlike nuclear weapons, which has much fewer agents to coordinate with and a more immediately imaginable impact, climate change proves to be difficult problem regarding the nature of coordination it requires and ease of popularizing the policies around it. We need tools to match that difficulty.
Thanks for clarifying. I don’t see why the Paris Agreement is a useful analog for a carbon tax. A carbon tax doesn’t depend on the good faith of partner countries, but the border adjustment itself incentivizes other countries to reduce their emissions (they want to trade with us). The more wealthy countries who implement a carbon tax with border adjustment, the stronger this incentive mechanism becomes. There is a political problem in getting a larger block of wealthy countries on board, but it’s not unrealistic to think of Europe and North America forming that initial block, and surely there’s enough wealth in those markets that it would incentivize other countries to get on board.
In whatever case, I can’t imagine an environmental solution that won’t have the same (or worse) political problems. As far as I can tell, border adjuster carbon tax most neatly and efficiently aligns incentives.
Yet people are continually intervening in markets, almost always without causing failure. An intervention that produces undesired results can be stopped or modified, provided it it not forced by legislation or biased perception, and something else tried. That is how most ongoing interventions have evolved.
In the US, the necessary flexibility is provided by agencies issuing regulations under statutory authority.
While lack of a carbon tax might not be the result of active evil -- throughout history it has been the result, instead, of garden variety ignorance and sloth -- evil can certainly play a role, and does.
In the US, failure ever to apply laws on the books enabling direct prosecution of corporate officers, or revoking corporate charters, or regulating behavior of monopolies, are indications of evil at work.
> Yet people are continually intervening in markets, almost always without causing failure. An intervention that produces undesired results can be stopped or modified, provided it it not forced by legislation or biased perception, and something else tried
I find that perspective very naive. Economy doesn't have an undo button. If that was the case we could have reverted all the financial crises, depressions etc before they spiraled out. History is full of such failures caused by or made worse with interventions. Economists get a lot of crap for not being a proper science or not being able to predict the future perfectly, but they are what stands between such failures and the impression of "almost always without causing failure". Economy is like a pool table, in which you might aim for your ball to one hole, but might inadvertently hit your opponent's ball into a hole or mess up the table otherwise. There is no undo once you make the hit. Job of the economists is to find the best angles.
> In the US, failure ever to apply laws on the books enabling direct prosecution of corporate officers, or revoking corporate charters, or regulating behavior of monopolies, are indications of evil at work.
Well good luck with that then, because I don't know any solution to solve "evil" other than calling the priests. When we turn these dynamics into conspiratorial archetypes, we shoot ourselves in the foot because it messes up with the framing of our agency. We either give up in resentment to the "evil", or we need to be a force of "good" and fight it, while forgetting that we are dealing with massively complex, dynamical, emergent systems with parameters too many and too big to optimize by a single person, ideology or solution. Just like we don't debug code by invoking "good and evil" because it is a stupid dichotomy that doesn't match the sophistication of the problem, we most likely can't debug society/economy/ecology with that either.
That is actually the reason I was surprised to it being downvoted. The comment gives both right wing and left wing solutions. But it’s not being downvoted any more, so I guess HN-ers are now reading the full answer, instead of hitting that down arrow as soon as they see a praise for a tax.
It's (past) time to start collecting genomes and marrow samples from as many critically endangered species as possible. Unextinction is a difficult problem, but without the necessary material, it's impossible.
Sure, that's going to favor charismatic megafauna. But we like those, it's right in the name. And it's no substitute for building wildlife corridors, managing park lands better, extirpating invasives, and all the rest. But it doesn't draw resources away from those things either.
> We need a top down approach to limit damage to nature and make sustainability the "GDP" of tomorrow.
I'm ready to say that most us know, instinctively, what the solution needs to be. It's just that we are morally obliged not to even consider it, let alone propose it.
It doesn't really matter if we collect the genetic material if we aren't reversing the actions that caused it to become extinct. For example, arable land is shrinking and population growth as well as an increase in consumption will not leave much (if any) suitable space for some types of wildlife.
Which is why I specifically said that those actions are important also.
But it does matter regardless, because rewilding in the future is distinctly possible. If we're able to rebuild an acceptable habitat, and we have the genetic information on hand, we can conceivably unextinct a species and reintroduce it. Without the genetic material, this is impossible.
It's similar to the logic of cryostorage, although I would estimate the odds of it working for wild species to be much higher than those for frozen humans, let alone their brains.
The second derivative of population is decidedly negative, as is the slope throughout the high-consumption regions of the world; optimism on that front is rational.
Bio-banking is worthwhile in some cases, but generally speaking it's on par with escaping to Mars in terms of practical utility. Genomes without a hospitable environment would be mostly anachronistic.
What you propose is like putting humpty dumpty back together, except you're also drunk, blind-folded, and one of your arms is handcuffed to a hippo. I think gene-banks are a novelty, nothing more. Definitely not part of any serious wildlife conservation strategy.
In a zoo, we take an animal out of the wild, and keep it alive. Ideally breeding them as well.
In my suggestion, we tranquilize an animal, take a blood sample, and extract marrow from the hip. We then perform a full genome sequence on the blood, and freeze the marrow down, with compounds which vitrify the cells such that they can be revived at any point in the future.
We should do both. But the latter has advantages: the animal stays in the wild, it scales better, and the only ongoing input is a bit of energy to keep the cells cold.
We don't have the technology to print a whole genome from a file, but I expect we will. Stem cell cloning is well understood, and will only get better.
Doing this to as many individuals as possible will preserve genetic diversity. It's insurance, basically.
It's like a zoo where everything's dead. Which actually simplifies things quite a bit for us. There are many animals we still haven't figured out how to keep in captivity, because studying wild animals in the wild is very expensive. Crazy expensive. Especially ocean animals.
My perception is that climate change policy hasn't been sufficiently focused on biodiversity, maybe because it has taken so much effort to get the public on board with the idea that the science is real.
There isn't much overlap between these two issues. Climate change is associated with using fossil fuels to produce energy. Decreases in biodiversity are associated with human land use such as agriculture, transportation, and construction, and also with pollution. Politically, tying one issue to the other just poisons them both. The only variable they share is the human population. Growth in human population is already slowing dramatically.
Still, even sparsely populated rural humans have a pretty big effect on the natural habitat. We've pretty significantly displaced wild animals with humans/livestock/pets everywhere: https://xkcd.com/1338/
Fragile species will continue to be in decline. Long term, large species will remain in protected environments like national parks. The idea that humans are incapable of protecting larger species is belied by a visit to Yellowstone.
Our living environments create opportunities for well-adapted species to flourish. This will certainly shift the makeup of our planet's biodiversity.
You mention all of this in passing, but I think these effects make the prognosis on biodiversity somewhat less than "very grim".
The United States went through a roughly 100 year period or so where conservation efforts were... er, not terribly great. It took about 100 years for humans to shoot an incredibly large passenger pigeon population into extinction, and bison which once numbered millions on the plains was reduced to mere hundreds. Fortunately, in the mid 19th century to early 20th century in particular, people began to notice and started protecting areas. Thank goodness for that, but a large portion of ecosystems did get wiped out (to give one example, roughly 95% of the California redwood forests).
Megafauna do get most of the attention, but a lot of the hidden economic / scientific benefits of maintaining biodiversity I think comes from smaller parts of the ecosystem -- for instance, drug discovery. Or, the widely used polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique for copying DNA... which for all we know is a technique that might not even exist today had preservationists not had the foresight to preserve the Lower Geyser Basin of Yellowstone National Park, where the crucial enzymes for this technique were found.
Unfortunately that period also roughly corresponded with the rise of the middle class and lifting the majority of the population to a level of material comfort that was (at it's peak at least) the envy of the world.
Most of the worst environmental damage today is not happening in the highly developed west, it's happening in the rest of the world that - understandably - doesn't care as much about saving the local animals as it cares about catching up to the material standards of the wealthy world.
> Our living environments create opportunities for well-adapted species to flourish
That statement is a tautology. "Some" species will flourish in all productive biomes, by definition. But the ecosystems that existed will be highly disrupted. So we're replacing large predator marine species with jellyfish. Beavers with rats, wolves with feral cats, etc... And the plant diversity is quite a bit more impacted.
Your point amounts to "well, all life isn't going extince, so what's your problem?". The problem is that there is moral value in preserving what exists. Some of us like to believe that "causing a mass extinction event due to entirely preventable causes" is, y'know, a bad thing.
Ok, this is a crazy comment, but I have been playing Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 a lot and almost every piece of land has something, somewhere built on it. Farm, suburb, etc It's depressing but maybe it helps me understand that we are using
too much of earth. Do we really need endless farms?
I believe in the contiguous USA the furthest you can get from a road is only 20 miles. There are no undisturbed places left, really. Unfortunately preserving roadless areas is politically contentious here. Clinton enacted a roadless area rule at the end of his administration and Bush tried to reverse it a week later.
I agree, but the fact that there was a forest/logging road in that area as recently as 50 years ago does indicate that it is an environment recently impacted by humans.
I can't really know what people think is or isn't a road but these are objectively roads and I think you are understating the extent to which resource extraction activities use these roads today, and the degree to which any road, no matter how much or little used, alters the ecosystem through which it passes.
The point is that humans have touched it. There’s a perception there’s large segments of the American West and Midwest that haven’t been touched. Which is what they’re describing. Almost every place, at one point or another was close to the road. When we’ve only had cars for the last 100 or so, that’s quite a statement.
Completely disagree. Tje richest 10% of the world is responsible for 50% of CO2 output. I don't know about other metrics, but that I'm sure that pattern isn't just limiter to carbon footprint. We don't have a population problem. We have a problem with Greer and resource use that slashing ourr population - even drastically - will not in any way solve.
The richest 10% of the world also come from regions with stable-to-negative population growth. Those regions are our only hope for moving to a sustainable technological platform while maintaining a high quality of life; we're talking about the people who buy solar panels, windmills, and electric cars, who at least can build nuclear plants, if they get over their political reservations.
The poorest 50% of the world would absolutely love to emit more CO2, and will do so just as fast as they can acquire the resources.
I don't think any steps to limit population growth really need to be taken, however, other than two things which are good in and of themselves: women's education, and improving access to birth control.
But concerns about Earth's carrying capacity need to be taken seriously. Malthus is wrong right up until he isn't, and we should strive to avoid hitting that limit.
If we are going to have endless people we need endless farms probably.
It would be cool if we could keep the population of the globe like 1/10 what it is now but I don't know of a humane and rights respecting way to achieve that.
Or maybe if we reduce our standard of living it would help but how low can we go? And people aren't going to go for that either. It's a tough problem.
Small scale farming is not always ecologically destructive. We Definitely don’t need endless mono-crop farms, but adding more small scale, diversified, local farms would probably be a net gain for climate. Look into silvopastures and the carbon drawdown benefits. Also helps build in resiliency to the supply chain for food, something we saw the need for at the outset of the lockdown when grocery chains were depleted.
How are people on Hacker News changing their behavior around food and energy consumption?
And besides individual action what community action have you taken?
Personally I have found myself on a similar path to Peter Kalmus[1]. Before having kids I did what I could: didn’t own a car, commuted by bike, composted, minimized fashion/tech consumption, etc. On the other hand my career required significant plane travel for a time. Now with kids I feel extremely motivated to take further action to reduce energy consumption and interact directly with nature: through gardening, removing all plane travel, installing rooftop solar, etc.
On the collective action front I become increasingly frustrated that something as obvious and “market based” as the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act (HR 7173)[2] isn’t already law. Something like that feels like the bare minimum solution to putting the US on the right track.
I stopped trying to fix the climate disaster on my own a long time ago. There is nothing you can do to save us from the climate disaster. The illusion of green lifestyle only serves to push the responsibility from the actual polluters over to the consumer.
While polluters (including those that marked high polluting consumer products on mass scale) are not made to pay for their pollution (e.g. by carbon tax) they will keep polluting.
I’ve shifted towards trying to push politicians into enforcing stricter international agreements and building more green infrastructure. So far it has only made me feel even more powerless then before.
You said it yourself. You can’t fix climate change on your own. Neither by personal conservation or political stumping. It will take a majority of us to solve climate change.
Like any movement for societal change, you have to accept you can’t do it alone. But you must still do your part. Do it by leading by example, voting, and campaigning for change. Don’t give up! Focus on what you can control.
>And besides individual action what community action have you taken?
I didn't have any kids.
Its a message that unfortunately most people still refuse to hear (much less accept) - the earth is massively overpopulated. It doesn't matter how think try to dice the onion, there are far too many people for the earth's finite, renewable resources to sustainably support. Certainly our wasteful and overly consumptive habits are accelerating this destruction but no matter how we tailor our habits, the fact is that there are simply billions too many.
Some people ignore this obvious issue because its a difficult problem to solve that carries with it a host of economic and ethical issues. Others ignore it due to religious beliefs, and others because they worship at the altar of technology (which they believe can solve every problem). As long as this remains the case, we cannot even begin to acknowledge the issue and seek solutions.
Some argue that the population levels of "developed" countries have plateaued or begun to shrink slightly but that isn't happening remotely fast enough given the rate of degradation of our ecosystem. Unfortunately, at the end of the day, objective reality doesn't care about our economic or ethical concerns and the sustainable resources we all depend on to survive (the birds, the bees, the wildlife, the oceans, clean air, clean water, contiguous forests, ect) will continue to be degraded and will force a solution to this problem whether through famine, war, disease or otherwise.
If people want to advocate that overpopulation isn't a problem, they should live in dhaka or other densely packed poor areas. Anyone living in developed countries have no idea how it is to live there.
US population density = under 100 per mile^2
SF population density = 18k per mile^2
Major cities in Bangladesh, India, Phillipines have well over 50k/ml^2
Those countries also have nation wide population density of over 500/ml^2 at least.
Most people there can't buy an electric vehicle any time soon. They don't have tall buildings or functional transportation. They don't have enough jobs. The pollution levels are worse. Their countries have more corruption and less rights for everyone. They don't have enough drinking water or land for agriculture geographically.
Overpopulation makes solving all the problems harder.
I adopted a mostly plant-based diet. It’s very effective in terms of impact reduction, and most people can do it easily with minimal lifestyle sacrifice (compared to things like giving up flying and driving and aircon).
It’s a matter of degree. Eating “a lot” of meat is worse than a little flying. But I personally think giving up meat is much less of a personal sacrifice than giving up international travel.
Same here, I'm on a bike for everything, I eat organic (literally, I forage a lot of fruit when going for a ride, currently there are many figs). So my consumption and my environmental impact is certainly super low.
I pick up plastic trash every now and then, it's hard to counter all that continuous litter volume
Next step is to spread this philosophy, but it's not easy or even possible to change other people lifestyles. It's sad because, it's definitely healthy to live that way
Just talked with someone today, near a fig tree, he said they should cut that tree next to the road because it was dangerous, I replied to him, the fig tree is more important than the road and car traffic with a smile, and a bit of sadness inside because I know what will happen
I’m not trying to shame you for your efforts—plastic trash is indeed ugly and annoying; thank you for picking it up—but plastic straws are not the reason the west coast is on fire.
50% of habitable land on earth is taken up by agriculture, 77% of which is used for meat & diary (including the crops grown for livestock to eat), which contributes only 18% to the global calorie supply because of the inefficiency of animal products:
I wonder how much of an impact it would have to return the land used by meat & diary to nature (40 million km^2 out of the 104 million km^2 of habitable land, minus some for more crops for humans). Wild animals would have more of chance, they'd be more forests to capture more carbon, and industrial animal farming wouldn't be polluting the planet with carbon, methane and waste products that are contributing to climate change.
I don't know a practical solution to the above, but people are in denial about how much damage animal farming is doing globally and the insane scale of it (about 70 billion animals are used for food each year).
The general attitudes of "well, people are never going to reduce their use of animal products to help so..." and "lab based meat will save us at some point in the future and then I'll probably switch if they're indistinguible from real meat" is depressing. We're running out of time.
I think these figures are pretty misleading. First of all, they only look at calories, not protein. If you wanted to replace all the meat and dairy with equivalent protein substitutes you’d be looking at huge amounts of land for growing soybeans, peanuts, tree nuts. Replace all the milk with almond milk and you’re still dealing with huge water and land use for a product that has inferior protein and nutrients.
Second of all, you can raise livestock like cattle, sheep, and goats on extremely rough terrain. Good luck growing soybeans on a bunch of jagged cliffs. Those areas may be highly inefficient in terms of land area per gram of protein, but it’s not going to be productive farmland otherwise.
> If you wanted to replace all the meat and dairy with equivalent protein substitutes you’d be looking at huge amounts of land for growing soybeans, peanuts, tree nuts
Most livestock aren't eating grass though, they're eating crops like soy because soy is full of protein (and that land use is included in the 40 million km^2 figure).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soybean
"Around 80% of the global soybean crop is used to feed livestock.[46] Soya imports represent 47% of Europe’s deforestation footprint"
> Replace all the milk with almond milk
Or rice milk, oat milk, or soy milk. When cows are eating soybeans to produce milk right now, soy milk is always going to be more efficient.
> Good luck growing soybeans on a bunch of jagged cliffs.
If we were only farming grass fed cows on jagged cliffs, it would be less of a problem compared to mass deforestation to grow soybeans to feed to cows in intensive farms. The latter is the reality right now for everyone to have access to cheap meat but it's not sustainable.
Saying that someone's figures are misleading because the alternative is "huge" isn't a compelling argument. What's the amount? How much does it depend on the crop? What about rice and lentils?
Why almond milk? Why not another alternative? Why do we need milk at current quantities at all?
You can raise livestock on rough terrain, but the vast majority of the world's livestock is not raised like that. Meat prices would explode if we did that. You don't have to ban all meat to get most of the effect, not everyone has to become vegan. Livestock are part of a healthy agriculture; for example by turning waste into manure. Grazing is also important for maintaining certain biomes.
What we need to stop is industrial meat production. Americans eat nearly 100kg of meat per year. How about we reduce that to 25kg like in Turkey for a start. That's still a steak per week.
Switzerland does a lot of raising livestock near mountaintops and I think none of the cows in boxes factory farming. Prices of beef in shops seem to not exceed $100/kg, for most cuts hover around $50/kg ($22.5/pound). How does that compare?
> I think these figures are pretty misleading. First of all, they only look at calories, not protein. If you wanted to replace all the meat and dairy with equivalent protein substitutes you’d be looking at huge amounts of land for growing soybeans, peanuts, tree nuts. Replace all the milk with almond milk and you’re still dealing with huge water and land use for a product that has inferior protein and nutrients.
I don't follow — I get my protein mostly from grains and a small amount of legumes. In Australia, about 2/3rds of all crop production is grown as animal feed, and 90% of the food given to farmed chickens and pigs are grains [1].
> Second of all, you can raise livestock like cattle, sheep, and goats on extremely rough terrain. Good luck growing soybeans on a bunch of jagged cliffs. Those areas may be highly inefficient in terms of land area per gram of protein, but it’s not going to be productive farmland otherwise.
And you can grow crops inside vertical farms within urban areas.
Inefficiency of meat and dairy production and land use were major arguments for switching to a vegan diet (when I did so) 20 years ago.
Others have chimed in with data, so here's today's anecdotal evidence: today I'm surrounded by fields and farmland. Fields make up roughly 60% of land. 20% of this land houses cattle and 80% grows barley which no human will ever consume. It's only grown for the cattle
I think it comes as no surprise that less land could produce more food for humans if the crops didn't have to pass through the cattle.
Some farmers not far from here are growing quinoa. It has a very good nutritional profile and offers a more effective use of land.
A bunch of people have said it already but I have to add my voice in the hope the message is heard: humans don't need tons of protein. Most sources list less than a gram per kilo of bodyweight per day, e.g.:
It's quite easy to achieve this with a no or low animal product diet.
I don't know for sure but I expect the obsession with protein is down to carbohydrates being demonised in the last couple of decades of fad diets (much as fat was before that).
> If you wanted to replace all the meat and dairy with equivalent protein substitutes you’d be looking at huge amounts of land for growing soybeans, peanuts, tree nuts
In addition to the other replies, I'd like to point out that insect farming is an often overlooked solution. But of course it's just not sexy enough for most westerners.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations:
> Edible insects contain high quality protein, vitamins and amino acids for humans. Insects have a high food conversion rate, e.g. crickets need six times less feed than cattle, four times less than sheep, and twice less than pigs and broiler chickens to produce the same amount of protein. Besides, they emit less greenhouse gases and ammonia than conventional livestock. Insects can be grown on organic waste. Therefore, insects are a potential source for conventional production (mini-livestock) of protein, either for direct human consumption, or indirectly in recomposed foods (with extracted protein from insects); and as a protein source into feedstock mixtures.
> In addition to the other replies, I'd like to point out that insect farming is an often overlooked solution.
What is the actual problem that needs a solution though? I feel like "but where will we get our protein from?" is a common fallacy on the subject of meat that people accept without evidence. We're eating more meat now than ever and most Americans eat too much protein:
> The Department of Health advises adults to avoid consuming more than twice the recommended daily intake of protein (55.5g for men and 45g for women).
Its main component is wheat flour with everything washed away but the gluten so it's super cheap to produce and make.
I think "you need meat for protein" is just a persistent meme/myth people cling on to to justify eating meat. Where do people think the animals are getting their protein from?
> Athletes require slightly more protein than the rest of the population. According to the British Nutrition Foundation (BNF), endurance athletes require between 1.2 and 1.4g per kg of body weight daily, while those competing in strength and speed events need between 1.2 and 1.7g per kg of body weight. These intakes can easily be achieved by eating a normal balanced diet.
This is in line with what most people aim for in macros. 1.2 g protein / kg body weight means way more than 50 grams per day.
I did not dispute that you can get proteins from plants. I am however not sure of their profiles; proteins are a group of compounds, not a single one. Typically since animals eat plants and not the other way around, animal-sourced proteins are a superset of vegetable ones.
Yes, but the recommended daily allowance for an adult male (which you said was too little) is for regular people - most people aren't athletes and shouldn't be eating like one.
> I am however not sure of their profiles; proteins are a group of compounds, not a single one
Maybe look up what plant based athletes eat if you're concerned e.g.
Seitan, pea protein and soybean products are all very high in protein for example.
> Typically since animals eat plants and not the other way around, animal-sourced proteins are a superset of vegetable ones.
Can you offer any proof that this is true + significant in some way compared to a plant based diet? How are plant based athletes performing at a high level if it's important? These kinds of statements are things that people cling to so they can keep a high meat diet, which has an environmental impact.
From all the history I have read of civilisation, it's been grain that has been the foundation of human society as we know it, meat couldn't get us anywhere.
Meat eating among the poor in European societies and derived societies is a new phenomenon at least in the idea that every meal has meat in it.
Take a look outside of Europe or even within less wealthy areas of Europe and their diets are magnitudes lower in their meat consumption.
I've read the opposite re: inflammatory side effects of meat that we are discovering. WHO a few years ago put eating sulfite infested meat as being carcinogenic.
Do you have any good sources on the bioavailability of meat vs. plant nutrients? I've tried giving up meat before and have found that I feel noticeably worse both physically and mentally when I don't eat it, even if I eat a lot of plant protein and take supplements.
I don't know if this simply due to my own unique biochemistry or what, but it's not subtle. I have a fast metabolism, so that may have something to do with it? I know plenty of vegans and vegetarians who say they feel better after giving up meat, so I've always figured it depends on the person.
> Do you have any good sources on the bioavailability of meat vs. plant nutrients? I've tried giving up meat before and have found that I feel noticeably worse both physically and mentally when I don't eat it, even if I eat a lot of plant protein and take supplements.
> I don't know if this simply due to my own unique biochemistry or what, but it's not subtle. I have a fast metabolism, so that may have something to do with it?
For better or worse, it's very easy to end up eating a caloric deficit on a plant-based diet. I'm very glad I use a kitchen scale and small script I wrote to calculate how much kcal/protein/carbs/fat I'm actually getting in comparison to what I should be getting. To put it mildly, plant-based diets take some getting used to.
Protein is important, but beyond 1.4-1.6 grams of protein per kg body weight, your body increasingly relieves itself of any excess. Particularly if you stick to eating low-fat legumes, grains and greens per Esselstyn [1], getting enough protein isn't a concern. In fact, I have to consciously choose low protein foods like potatoes and rice just to ensure I don't get too much protein.
I have to be honest I had the same experience (which is unfortunate).
I went vegetarian and borderline vegan for 2 years and I wound up feeling depressed and run down.
It could’ve been from other things too, it’s only anecdotal.
I started introducing some chicken and fish into my diet again and I felt better.
I now eat meat again, just conscious of how much I’m eating and try eat a bit less.
One thing I noticed is that with being a vegetarian, I found to eat properly is harder. I had to cook a lot more to find the protein and calories, it seems to be something which I could probably do correctly if I had more time for it.
Balanced diet is the way to go I think.
One of the things I hate about eating meat is the copious amounts of plastic it comes in. With fruit and vegetables I don’t need too worry as much as I don’t put it in plastic bags, it’s a shame that meat is sold in disposable plastic.
You were all probably low on iron, among other things.* B12, Calcium, Omega-3's, and a handful of trace elements are also on that list. Most of those can be solved by supplementation, but iron's more tricky. Likely why life evolved carnivorous tendencies in the first place - the iron is safely tucked away in a readily-absorbed heme complex.
Iron's one of those things your body doesn't absorb easily through supplements, and competes with Calcium absorption (So, no taking it in multivitamins or consuming dairy at the same time you take it, otherwise it will inhibit absorption). It will also chelate with tannins (which are in teas, coffee, wine, and chocolate), which also inhibits absorption. And, for more fun, if you over-do it on the iron, it will horribly poison you, so, uh, basically check with a doctor re: supplements. That said, if you're good about balancing out the protein, iron, b12, calcium, and omega-3's (among others), you'll feel a lot less crappy in transitioning over to a plant-based diet.
*In my semi-scientific, zero-medical-training, not-a-doctor opinion
I'm not a vegan of any sort, but one day I realized that I hadn't eaten meat for really long time and I didn't really want to anymore. That must have something to do with fruits: there's definitely some almost material "energy" in them and eating sandwiches with meat feels like chewing paper sometimes. 10 years ago my diet was almost entirely meat.
"Well-planned vegan diets are regarded as appropriate for all stages of life, including infancy and pregnancy, by the American Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics,[f] Dietitians of Canada,[23] the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council,[24] New Zealand Ministry of Health,[25] Harvard Medical School,[26] and the British Dietetic Association.[27]"
There's lots of examples of sports people, academics, musicians etc. who are on plant based diets too to prove the point:
> The unfortunate reality is that mankind as we know it, probably developed to the level it did, in part due to the consumption of meat.
Hedging language aside — i.e. "humans evolved because X to some extent" — I recently had an epiphany touring the north island of New Zealand by minibus. Productivity utterly collapses when you have to frequently move from one (temporary) settlement to another. What you eat isn't nearly as impactful as the degree to which you can be stationary.
Interestingly, primitive hunter-gatherer societies could rely upon wild game or fish for caloric intake, which was conducive to a nomadic life. There's no need for an agricultural revolution if you're OK with killing wild animals to harvest their flesh for food. But to call this instrumental in human development is I think wrong. Meat is without question the most primitive way to feed: meat consumption does not require any amount of long-term settlement nor does it require much intelligence: carnivorous animals low in general intelligence regularly kill each other in the wild for food.
Meat consumption is fundamentally a primitive adaptation. Factory farmed meat consumption is a relatively modern phenomenon driven first and foremost by human habituation to the taste of flesh. Plants can provide every nutrient required for human survival save for vitamin B12.
> Meat is absolutely PACKED with bioavailable nutrients in a way that most plant products simply aren't.
Such as? Meat is a euphemism for slabs of fat and muscle tissue containing amino acids. With the exception of wild-caught fatty fish like salmon — factory farmed fatty fish contain greatly reduced levels of omega-3s — the fat is of questionable healthiness compared to vegetable sources. And if you're convinced it's necessary to consume the muscle tissue of formerly living creatures for amino acids, you'd eat insects for environmental sustainability's sake. In fact, insect exoskeletons are a rich source of dietary calcium directly comparable to dairy. The fact most of you reading this wouldn't dream of eating insects, goes to show nutritional value is not why you're eating meat. Taste is #1.
> Add to that, the growing evidence that much of the plant material we're eating may have inflammatory side effects of consumption.
Citation needed.
> The point I am making is that a solution isn't a solution if it means getting rid of one of the most dense forms of nutrition we have.
Where do high-fat nuts and seeds fit in your view of "dense forms of nutrition"? E.g. gram for gram, you're getting much more calories from nuts and seeds than you're getting from low-fat muscle tissue such as chicken.
What a ridiculous hot take. We buy meat to have a varied and healthy diet, and yes we like our food to taste good - as is that is something to be ashamed of?
We don’t buy insects because last time I checked, supermarkets don’t sell them. Maybe you could look into why time and time again, insect food startups fail.
I'm not here to be your enemy, so please don't make me out to be one. I wasn't raised vegetarian by any means, and I know fully well meat tastes amazingly good, and that having a varied diet is important. But heart disease, diabetes and many types of cancers are worryingly linked with the consumption of meat, dairy and eggs. As the documentary Forks Over Knives [1] makes abundantly clear, a whole foods plant-based diet is in every way a life extension technology.
> Is that something to be ashamed of?
Wanting to feel satiated is nothing to be ashamed of. What is arguably shameful, however, is how the bacon gets made [2].
But heart disease, diabetes and many types of cancers are diseases that you will get, regardless of diet or lifestyle, if nothing else kills you first.
This part is more of a reply to people claiming meat is the natural thing to eat so it must be healthy, it's what we've eaten for centuries, you can't be healthy without eating meat etc.
Nobody is arguing that taste isn't important but are your current taste preferences more important than climate change and animal suffering?
Nobody is arguing that taste isn't important but are your current taste preferences more important than climate change
No, but synthmeat will largely take care of that aspect of the problem. Not as soon as we'd like, but we'll get there.
and animal suffering?
To the extent animals are suffering, I'd encourage you to get involved legislatively. Contact your representatives, and support organizations that work for change (ethically, which excludes PETA). Animal abuse is unnecessary and unlike climate change, it can be stopped, right now, if people speak up.
“Plants can provide every nutrient required for human survival save for vitamin B12.”
Which is what’s interesting to me, you basically cannot actually be vegan without supplements. Maybe this is where we should go as a specifies for ethical reasons.
But it’s a mental leap to rely on supplements for vital nutrients.
All of the B12 consumed anywhere in the world -- and all animals need it -- comes exclusively from bacteria. The bacteria in your colon produce thousands of times as much as you need, but you do not absorb so much as a nanogram of it. (Dogs and rabbits eat their own crap to get it.)
The process for absorbing B12, in the upper intestine, is the most intricate of any vitamin, starting with saliva. Apparently the huge variety of almost-B12 variants have to be filtered out, so as not to gum up the works.
It is common for Americans (and maybe others?) over 50 to develop an autoimmune reaction to some part of the process, and lose most ability to absorb B12. (You may notice shooting pains in your arms if you get this.) Then you need to take 5mg daily supplements. The micrograms in meat and dairy are then not enough.
So, if you think you are eating meat for the B12, surprise! that is not where it comes from. Homo erectus probably got enough from the dirt on everything, and grubs.
> Homo erectus probably got enough from the dirt on everything, and grubs
And now they are extinct. It seems that the plan didn't worked very well.
The faster way to ingest lots and lots of bacteria so you don't die is a simple one: Carrion. Our ancestors ate as much as they could find. The other monkeys are dead (and our plant eaters relatives are almost extinct).
You are descended from Homo Erectus. They survived for many times longer than H. sap has, and it is far from clear that we will outlast them, in the end.
Eat carrion if you like. I will send flowers to your grave.
I don't need to, animals have plenty of vitamin B12, but I could do if necessary of course, because my species is omnivore. Better than ignoring my real nature and being forced to eat dirt or my own crap to fix my diet.
> I will send flowers to your grave.
Can't fall to mention that is a nice detail. Will be appreciated.
B12 usually comes from bacteria in soil (and not meat directly) that we don't get now because of cleaner vegetables and cleaner water. Likewise, many industrial animals kept indoors won't get as much B12, so that's why they're given B12 supplements. If you avoid meat, you can just take B12 supplements directly instead of them being filtered through an animal first. If you think this sounds "unnatural", there's nothing natural about intensive animal farming which is where most people get their meat from.
We used to get B12 from bacteria in the soil, but these days we clean our food immaculately, and we're also ruining our soil. My understanding is that B12 deficiency is a potential problem for everyone; vegan diets are just under more scrutiny. Also, the whole notion of "supplements" is not very useful; it's all just food. I don't know how B12 is produced, but if they're growing it by culturing the same bacteria we used to get B12 from, we have only industrialized the same symbiotic relationship we already had with certain microbes.
My B12 supplement is derived from plant sources, which I find far preferable to secondary B12 consumption from injected grain-fed animal tissue which is the modern status quo.
It’s super frustrating to hear people defend their meat eating as if it has no impact on the world. Or that it’s a requirement for health or it’s the reason why we evolved (both of which don’t seem to be true). It’s one of the easiest and most straightforward changes a person can make to have a positive impact on the environment and their own health.
In many ways it reminds me of addiction, with people reacting in the same way any addict would in defense of their toxic habit. The path out of the addiction takes some initial thought and sustained effort (and even a bit of mental and physical withdrawal), but the other side isn’t that hard to get to in this case. Isn’t having compassion for the environment, the animals, and each other worth it though? If you look at it deeply you begin to see how much unnecessary suffering it causes in the world due to how interdependent everything is.
Surely a portion of grazing land is also habitat to a significant amount of wildlife. Whereas large mono crops leave no room for competition and result in much death in the automated processing of crops. Not a lot of great options with billions of people to feed.
Animal farming simply doesn't have to be so destructive. There's a simple solution to a simple problem. Look at New Zeland, regenerative agriculture. By allowing cattle to eat grass instead of grain (ha) we can avoid using pesticide and actually increase biodiversity, while planting trees as well. This increases carbon sequestration and has plenty of other benefits to the local wildlife.
In fact, it can have a positive carbon impact (well, negative, but you catch my drift).
In short, the solution: buy grass-fed or pasture raised animals.
> In short, the solution: buy grass-fed or pasture raised animals.
It's worth noting though that for this to work we'd need to eat less meat and pay more for it because grass-fed takes much more land. The reason we have industrial animal farms with soy fed cattle is we need so much meat and we want it cheap (and countries that used to eat less meat want more meat as they get richer).
This is a frequent paradox of industrialization: it makes certain things too cheap and that turns out to actually not be good for us. Corn Syrup, as one case in point. Plastic packaging as another. Traffic congestion on roads. Carbon in general.
If we were more comfortable pricing in externalities we could accomplish massive societal change in a quick and easy manner without most people even noticing too much. This was done all over the west to mostly eliminate smoking, and I'm surprised it isn't used more often.
So, to take your point, pass regulatory reform that only pasture raised cattle with appropriate limits on density etc. to be actually regenerative, and then the price of meat would go up quite a bit, and naturally most people would start to see it as a delicacy and eat less of it (and more importantly, expect less of it).
I've found that I perform way better when I eat well. So that has allowed me to eat more grass-fed meat. I think it's easily possible to do it in a ecologically conscious way if it was something anybody cared about. But they care more about the coast line they're still holding on to that's inevitably eroding.
We can also plant trees, it doesn't have to be a traditional farm. If we planted a certain number of conifers we could easily soak up all of that c02 and even convert it into oxygen, if that's your biggest concern.
They eat all the nutrients in meat, just in pill form. It's not very convincing. Also they have tons of problems with insulin resistance and supplements have tons of flaws. Most of these athletes are spending much more and destroying the environment much more than the equivalent amount of meat or eggs would do.
I don't think we're going to move away from an ecological collapse unless we stop using pesticides.
Most vegan athletes don't last too long. I'm of Indian heritage, so I'm well aware of vegetarianism.
I should also mention that there are many, many ways to do a vegan diet wrong. The studies probably don't include too many sources of sugar, which is probably the bane of a vegan's existence since they're constantly looking for blood glucose in order to do things as their body can't use gluconeogenesis as there is less protein (and therefore more cortisol!).
An Oxford research report refutes many of the claims made in favor of "regenerative animal agriculture" [1]. It's basically the clean coal of factory farming.
Also, to the extent "regenerative animal agriculture" works at all, it can be done without slaughtering the animals for their flesh.
I personally don't believe in anthropocentric climate change, so greenhouse emissions aren't a big deal for me--we've been warming for 10000 years and we're still -2C, and the temperature is always correlated with C02. I'd say there's no comparison to clean coal at all, you have the burden of proof there. Clean coal has no advantages other than less C02. Good farming practices can prevent ecological collapse. Especially avoiding use of roundup, which contains dioxin (!) now. Dioxin has been used in chemical warfare in the past. So is the problem meat, or agriculture?
Bigger deal is total ecological collapse. We can lose the coast, or we can lose the most. I don't think it's a choice we can avoid.
So yeah, it's really just a sell to those who believe C02 has a major impact on climate change. It's definitely well correlated--and it has been throughout time, before humans started combusting.
I'll read that study tomorrow and post back, you could be right in terms of the impact of C02 could be negligible, but there are other possibilities like planting trees to divide the cows up.
"lab based meat will save us at some point in the future and then I'll probably switch if they're indistinguible from real meat"
Why isn't that the answer? Nobody wants to be out of the animal husbandry business more than the meat producers do. Even if they haven't realized it yet.
> Why isn't that the answer? Nobody wants to be out of the animal husbandry business more than the meat producers do. Even if they haven't realized it yet.
Because lab based meat isn't here yet:
- You can't buy it in supermarkets or for cheap, and I haven't heard a realistic timeline for when this is going to change.
- Is there going to be realistic lab based cuts of steak, duck, pork and chicken? Whole chickens? Lab based ground beef is one thing but lab based versions of everything the public wants is another.
- Beyond burgers and similar are already here which some people say are as good a beef burgers, yet there isn't a stampede to change over by either consumers or manufacturers. Why would lab based meat be different? I can see people demanding the "real thing" on principle.
We don't have time to wait when climate change is here now. Lab based meat is not a solution if it takes decades to make an impact. People that say they'll switch from real-meat when lab based meat is here are essentially saying they'll change when they don't have to change anything.
We don't have time to wait when climate change is here now
Yes, we do, and we will. Everything you've said could apply equally to electric vehicles, which people like yourself said were never going to be "the answer" for a hundred different reasons, yet which are, nevertheless, happening.
The point is we should be doing something now and adopting lab based meat when it actually arrives, instead of doing nothing and hoping it comes. The catastrophic impact of climate change is coming on the scale of decades - we really don't have time to wait.
> which people like yourself said were never going to be "the answer" for a hundred different reasons
What a weird thing to write. You don't know anything about what I think of electric vehicles or my wider views.
You don't know anything about what I think of electric vehicles or my wider views
When you make identical arguments, it's reasonable to infer identical underlying motivations and beliefs.
What a weird thing to write
Not as weird as assuming that people are "doing nothing and hoping it comes" with respect to synthetic meat. There is serious money in that market. It's being worked on, trust me. Like EVs, it's not a trivial engineering problem.
> Not as weird as assuming that people are "doing nothing and hoping it comes" with respect to synthetic meat. There is serious money in that market. It's being worked on, trust me. Like EVs, it's not a trivial engineering problem.
I'm not talking about the people putting research and engineering time into synthetic meat, I'm talking about personal consumption - most people could give up meat today if they really wanted to and start helping the planet now. You don't need to wait for synthetic meat to arrive to start helping right now. I think synthetic meat is a great idea by the way but not when people have the attitude of "I will only reduce/avoid meat when synthetic meat arrives".
Electric cars doesn't hold as a good analogy to me e.g. many need a car to get work or make deliveries so you couldn't easily give up driving while you waited for electric vehicles to arrive, it could be expensive to replace your car (unlike changing your diet).
I wish we spent more time talking about "habitat destruction" instead of "climate change", while understanding that climate change is the largest form of habitat destruction.
There is an huge difference between saving giant panda in zoos and saving the forests where giant panda lives (and all the other species of birds, flowers and mammals including pandas with it.
De-extinction would be to save just one screw from a perfectly tuned and complex machine that produces more than pandas. No-extinction is better than de-extinction and also much more cheap.
"change" feels neutral. "destruction" is always bad. There's also a lot of habitat destruction (e.g. ocean acidification) that might not fit the normal concept of "climate change". "Habitat destruction" can include things like deforestation, which would be bad even if it didn't affect climate. "Habitat destruction" might also serve as a reminder that we're destroying our own habitat as well, not just that of other plants and animals.
The net effects of climate change (and of course the magnitude) are big question marks in my book.
But you bring up the exact thing I think every time I hear the more extreme climate change claims.
We have some very real and relevant issues right now that are huge, existential even, and not based on theoretical models and we don't seem to be discussing or doing anything at all about these. Groundwater depletion. Topsoil depletion. Loss of habitat and biodiversity. Microplasics. Desertification.
I think you committed a bit of heresy there. When expressing ideas about political topics, you also have to give praise the correct Gods or people will think you're an enemy.
I believe this study but it contrasts oddly with my own experience. I have lived for many of my 60+ years in the American West. Species which have made a comeback: wild turkeys, cougar, eagles, rocky mountain sheep, even wolves in some areas. Is this because American patterns of interaction with wildlife are different than elsewhere? Genuinely curious here.
The article obviously and necessarily omits thousands of pages worth of detail, but I'm pretty sure that if you dug into the scientific findings a disproportionate amount of the decline in vertibrate biodiversity has been in places like Peru, Brazil, Congo, Malaysia -- all the places with jungles and tropical rainforests, which contain a disproportionate amount of the world's terrestrial biodiversity in the first place and which are near-universally under dire threat of being logged into oblivion, cleared for palm plantations, etc.
The USA is not doing fantastic when it comes to conservation, but much of the world is doing far worse.
I live in a city. We've exterminated every animal except cats and dogs, which we've modified with a multi-millennium breeding program to suit our desires. Pretty much every surface is covered in concrete, all the plants are curated by humans. As far as the eye can see is a totally artificial biosphere.
This is where pretty much all the humans live. Most of the people who get worried about wildlife decline live here too. I get why there are some people who care, but I don't get why they expect the median human to care or why it becomes an important political issue. People are voting with their feet - exterminating the competition is an outcome of human civilisation.
There’s room outside the cities. Even cities require farms at the very least, which — while not wilderness — are not concreted over. Wilderness is good for mental health, clean air, and having options in the case of a collapse of our artificial ecologies of food crops.
There isn't anything especially natural happening on a farm either, they are artificial environments to the same extent as a city. There isn't going to be anything there that isn't being managed by humans.
And if our artificial crops collapse we're doomed. Nature can't support the population levels we've reached.
Nature is not our competition, it is the substrate in which we live. To exterminate it is to exterminate ourselves. A simple example is how ocean flora, outside our concrete biomes, produce the oxygen we breathe.
To me (at least in the area I live in) the easiest and quickest win is to plant trees massively.
There is so much space available. But somehow people/governments wants to have grass vegetation as a filler between roads, inside parks etc.
The thing is, unmanaged natural life is generally not compatible with human flourishing.
Let the land go feral and soon you're looking at an unfathomable amount of ticks fed on unchecked deer who breed faster than anything can handle and infect each other with prions because the alternative is reintroducing wolves to the environment.
And even the plant life is dangerous as unpruned, splintery trees drop branches in every windstorm, the brush periodically catches on fire, thorny or irritating plants proliferate and roots infiltrate and destroy nearby structures.
It can take millennia to develop a stable, beautiful, all-natural environment, and there are sort of 'minimum size requirements' in the range of hundreds to thousands of miles.
System engineer here. The economic system current is wrong, it does not reward
keeping ecological systems in a good state! We need to fix the economic system so that preserving wild life and nature is rewarded.
Well functioning eco systems is very valuable to us as humans yet we do not preserve them as we should.
Wildlife is valuable
Clean air is valuable
Oceans clean of plastic and full of fish is valuable
Not warming earth is valuable
How do we make a fix to the economic system that such values are kept for future generations?
I think "the economic system is wrong" is a bit of a stretch, but despite objectively working pretty well there are a few glaring problems (some of which potentially lead to society imploding if left unchecked... but aside from that, pretty good!)
As far as I'm aware, I think the most glaring problems (tragedy of the commons, dealing with negative externalities) are very well known & have relatively well understood policy solutions (e.g. Pigovian tax).
When there is wide enough social buy-in that these policy solutions can be implemented without expending/risking too much political capital, the "problem" ends up resolved.
A good example might be smoking in Australia. Very highly taxed, forced grotesque health warning images plastered all over the cigarette packets, etc. The comparison travelling through Italy vs Australia with respect to number of smokers is pretty amazing. The population understands & accepts the negative externalities of smoking well enough to accept the forced hand of policymakers intervening in their lives, and won't vote anybody out because of it.
So to me, the more appropriate question is, how do we incentivise enough social buy-in that people will accept the personal disadvantages of e.g. a carbon tax, and still lend their support (vote) to the party who choses to implement it? Didn't work well for France last time they tried to hike taxes on fuel.
Climate change and environmental collapse are somewhat larger dimensions than smoking though, both in impact as well as required policy changes.
The tobacco industry has never had a particular good reputation, so getting social buy-in is not that hard. It has no more utility than the alcohol industry, so getting rid of it has not a lot of knock-on effects. Even then, demanding a few scary pictures was a slap on the wrist, compared to outright banning them. (Not sure about Australia, but other notions actually work with local bans in a gradually increasing number of locations)
I think fighting climate change and environmental collapse are harder problems because the responsible industries are deeply intertwined into our economic systems and lifestyles. They are also providing a significant amount of political power. We'll have to actively work to find alternative ways of doing things in many areas before we're able to scale back here.
I find it notable how indirect the author is about the “Why” in this story:
> New modelling evidence suggests we can halt and even reverse habitat loss and deforestation if we take urgent conservation action and change the way we produce and consume food.
> The British TV presenter and naturalist Sir David Attenborough said the Anthropocene, the geological age during which human activity has come to the fore, could be the moment we achieve a balance with the natural world and become stewards of our planet.
Many people consider anthropogenic extinction immoral and the ongoing human-caused mass extinction event to be an urgent moral crisis.
But let's suppose you were going to take a cynical argument along the lines of "these species are going extinct due to their poor adaptations to a changing environment, it's just evolution," or let's just say you think moral objections are irrational. Then from this (ignorant and needlessly cruel) perspective,
- the destruction of the Amazon is likely to have profound climatological/geochemical impacts, including increased C02 in the atmosphere
- widespread defaunation of predators could very well lead to increased pests or disease-carrying animals
- loss of insect life could be catastrophic to industrial agriculture
- overharvested fishing and agricultural resources means diminshing returns (and possibly famine) for future generations
More generally, the destruction we've wrought upon the world in the last 150 years is scientifically uncharted territory, and it's deeply naïve to assume that 150 years of strong economic growth can be extrapolated to suppose that destroying the planet will work out for humans in the long term.
which, from the Darwinian perspective, will cause either our extinction, or an adaptation, but only after many have died. It's probably all avoidable, but I don't see the human kind, in its current form and way of societal organisation being able to get out of this.
I can’t even begin to think of how we actually fix this with a world clutching so desperately to fossil fuels and large amounts of people considering climate change a hoax.
Surprise, surprise. What did we think would happen with increasing quality of life (increased consumption) and increasing population (further increase in consumption).
Fascinating to see how these comment threads debate the relative facility of different diets, and even armchair evolutionary biology... while conveniently avoiding the critical topic: the choices we continue to make are defacing the planet, destabilizing ecologies, and exterminating other species at a scale that is hard to imagine. We’re all ok with this?
So, why is it so hard, when confronted with facts about the consequences of your decisions, to really think about the meaning of your actions (much less to resolve to change your habits)?
Not to put too fine a point on it, but for all of you who ate a burger for dinner tonight, were you thinking about the devastation you’re a part of? (And of course the list of destructive-yet-normalized ways of living is long; try picking one relevant to you).
The answer is similar to the one for those who retort to the suggestion that taxation should be higher with: "if you love paying tax so much why don't you just send a big cheque to the government?".
In both cases, it is that an individual's actions don't move the needle. Even a low-to-mid double-digit percentage of the population's actions don't move the needle that much.
So, to address your accusatory question: no, thinking people are not OK with the destructions of ecosystems, the decline in animal populations or the extinction of many species.
And if it were the case that through my own avoidance of consuming meat for the rest of my life I could significantly abate these problems, I'd happily make that choice.
But thinking people also know it's not remotely as simple as the question implies. I could avoid meat for the rest of my life, and it would make zero difference to these problems. Even worse, everyone in the world could avoid eating meat, but that would still leave (indeed possibly exacerbate) the issue of land and resource use for the production of plant-based foods. And it would also have no bearing on the issue of animal poaching for medicinal or ornamental uses, of which I'm pretty sure just about nobody on this website is an advocate or customer.
None of this is to say it's a lost cause, that there's nothing that can or should be done to improve things. Plenty is being done, and plenty more should be done.
To the extent that heathy ecosystems are necessary for human survival, self-interest will ensure that more efforts go into that, and social/political pressure will continue to see benevolent efforts being undertaken.
But for solutions to be truly effective, they have to be co-ordinated across society, and that is the great challenge we face.
I often observe that people who choose to avoid meat for environmental reasons and finger-wag at others for not following suit are avoiding confronting the deeper realities and challenges involved with solving these problems.
My question is not accusatory, though I did frame it quite specifically, so maybe it feels confining. But, in reading your response I’m not sure what question you’re answering. I didn’t ask why people don’t behave differently. I asked the question that comes before it. Why is it hard to think about the meaning of your actions?
In a way, your response does answer it: you said people see that their actions won’t be effective unless they are a coordinated with other’s on a scale that can make a difference. I think that’s the same as saying: your actions are meaningless in themselves. What an interesting idea. But I’m sure you don’t feel that way about everything.
A better analog than people sending the Federal Reserve more money than they owe to the IRS would be voting: does your vote not matter unless it is the decisive one? Which vote is decisive? Is the meaningfulness of a vote or of voting found only in its effectiveness?
But that’s still not a good enough analog. The points that you and other commenters have made all point to the need for collective, coordinated action. I won’t dispute that; but if we’re talking about effectiveness and not meaningfulness (or, again, do you think they’re the same thing?) then the dynamic of collective action is fundamentally a social dynamic: people are neither provoked by nor affirmed by what they see the people around them doing. If you made visible, ethical choices (as I’m sure you do) you find that a friend or colleague is starting to make similar choices. The visibility encourages others. Maybe the very same arguments about the futility of action make it all the more critical.
I should be explicit about one other thing. I may be wrong, but my assumption in asking my question about how thinking about the meaning of your actions is hard is that that thoughtfulness is what will change your behavior.
The central question of your original comment seemed to me to be: "We’re all ok with this?"
You've followed up pointing out that the actual central question was "So, why is it so hard, when confronted with facts about the consequences of your decisions, to really think about the meaning of your actions".
As I said in the my first reply, I think it's pretty clear that people in this discussion thread, and most people frequenting this website, are not OK with this.
And in response to the more recent comment: plenty of people in this thread are demonstrating that they are thinking about the consequences of their decisions.
But as I, and plenty of others here have pointed out, no amount of "thinking about consequences" will change the fact that the consequences of an individual's actions in insolation are profoundly different to the consequences of the same action co-ordinated across the entire society.
The voting system works (to the extent that it does work - and I must say where I live, in Australia, it works much better through being legally compulsory and therefore not subject to manipulation of eligibility+attendance), because the cost is low (take a few hours out of your day once every couple/few years) and the payoff relatively high (feel you have a stake in your democracy/society, influence policy, celebrate the victory if your candidate/party wins).
Other forms of co-ordinated activity all have equivalent factors of cost vs. payoff that lead to the intended outcome.
So I guess there's your answer: to solve this problem, there needs to be a cost vs. benefit formulation that leads to a widespread change in behaviour.
>So, why is it so hard, when confronted with facts about the consequences of your decisions, to really think about the meaning of your actions (much less to resolve to change your habits)?
The statistics show most people can't keep themselves from eating excess calories and developing diabetes and hypertension. They certainly know their eating habits will cause them pain in the long run. Yet they still do it. Because it's obviously hard to choose the long term benefit over the short term benefit.
If people can't control themselves from binging on sugar, salt, alcohol, in order to prevent harm to themselves, there's not much chance they're going to do it for their kids or grandkids, and definitely not for great grandkids.
Because it's a coordination problem. You can make lifestyle changes to reduce the waste and emissions you produce, but half of the people in your building can't be arsed to separate their trash.
That's in Germany, where people seemingly care about the environment. Go to southern Europe and you'll see roads lined with trash. Go to Turkey and you'll undo all of your work in a week or two.
A member of the 'doomsday cult' here. From the West Coast, I see global warming out my window in the form of unprecedented wildfire, in part caused by warming and related drying out of the landscape. Denial doesn't fix this problem.
> In part caused by warming and related drying out of the landscape.
Nope. Maybe a small part than makes it happen at best 10% more often. But insignificant. You and those around you are worth well more than 10% than your parents.
You could have managed it locally at a state level, through education, prevention, preparation, treatment, mitigation, harm minimisation and repair but you didn't.
It's on you. You chose big screen TV's and pretending recycling matters instead.
This is a hard political problem. The owners of the current means to produce meat/oil/etc. want to keep their fortune and to move them to renewable/plant-base/new-tech solutions make them lose that edge and creates real competition.
The problem with economy/ecology is that many people are addicted to easy money. We have the tech and knowledge (or we are close in some fields) to replace the problematic industries.
The change for the better is a matter of time and pushing politicians and big investors to do the right thing.