Yes it’s Spain and it’s always hot which is why we bought it but this year was something else. The mix of both very high temps (higher than usual for July) and much higher humidity just made it very uncomfortable. We don’t usually need the AC on in July but we had to run it every night this time to be able to sleep.
Even the pool wasn’t refreshing as it was a constant 33C whereas it is usually around 28-30.
On the Wednesday night just gone we also had a heat burst. My first experience with such a thing and wow that was something else. It was like opening an oven door. The blast of scorching hot air in my face was almost suffocating.
Of course there have always been outlier days that have been too damn hot over the past two decades but this time it was the whole two weeks. Not just the odd day. I dread to think that it will be like in August which is when the temps usually hit their highest.
I’m a simple software guy I don’t pretend to know much about the climate but I listen and when thousands of scientists present data that shows average temps going up it makes me worry. If things continue like this some areas just won’t be reasonable to live or visit. They’re just not comfortable. You have to stay indoors as the sun roasts you in minutes and the humidity just makes you feel like crap constantly.
Even our neighbours who live there are talking of moving as it isn’t a nice place to live anymore. You feel trapped indoors with AC and do all you can to avoid going outside.
If these kinds of temperatures do continue to rise as predicted there is going to be a huge relocation of people to more liveable locations which is going to be a whole other problem.
I live in [redacted] where we have hot temperatures in the summer but we have pretty good humidity and it rarely feels “too hot”. I have AC but almost never need to use it unless it climbs to around 40C for a few consecutive days so I am used to pretty hot but I just did not enjoy Spain these past two weeks and was so glad to arrive home last night to 29C.
We have always avoided August as it's never been a nice time to visit due to the heat as well as being much busier due to the school holidays.
As for it's value I don't know if I am honest. It hasn't been something we've looked into in a very long time so I really have no idea.
I have far more shame about how much food I waste or worse how much I used to consume if I am honest. When I look at the environmental impact of the food I eat it dwarfs everything else.
Even if I were to fly every time that would have been 42 two-hour flights over two decades. I wouldn't have shame over that number of flights considering I've worked with people that fly more than that in a couple of months just for meetings.
I think the environmental impact of that one flight pales in comparison to the plastic packaging our family consumes on a yearly basis... and we are conscientious of our usage.
Here, repaired it for you.
Remember the sinking island scene in Erik the Viking?
We need to force manufacturers to make things fixable. And mandate certain level of support for spare parts and batteries.
Same with all types of connectors. I wish the US passed the passed the law requiring common charging port, common audio port(audio jack was perfect), etc. Audio jack removal by Apple and subsequently Google is an atrocity.
- Build nuclear power plants everywhere. Yes even in countries like Iran and North Korea
- Don't subsidize fossil fuel use by any mechanism. Yes dropping the Russian fuel cap.
- Make reducing emissions a priority that means it comes first in consideration. Yes ahead of Uighurs in China, Women in Iran and Afghanistan.
You will not get everything you want.
But if you believe climate change is civilization ending then you need to give up what you don't need.
Just Stop Oil is super obnoxious but if climate change is destroying our planet why is it they still get openly assaulted in the street in a "first world" country? It's because people aren't even willing to be late to the cinema.
Meat
Look in the mirror. Have you been on a plane? Do you use motor transport? Does your home have electricity? The problem is you, not some baby in a country where people consume in a year what an American does in a day.
When they said these are important matters in TV, did you really believe them? These, among many other issues, are not even in the queue my friend.
I'm thinking we're still really far away. Migration from areas that become uninhabitable is still weak. And it doesn't look like any state that has substantial military/commercial/political power is interested in starting a fuss about it. Germany's Green party, probably the strongest climate centric party in the world, somehow thinks that potential nuclear reactor problems are just as bad as global warming.
Loss of glaciers in Himalaya ... 500 mil people on the move
Tropic & wet bulb or 50+C temperatures ... 2 mld. people on the move
Deforestations & droughts ... mass migrations, almost everybody affected
Large scale crop failures (temperatures, droughts, polinators ...) ... famines, wars
Biodiversity loses (it's critical) ... famines, huge loses for future ppl
Thermohaline circulation slow/shutdown ... cooling of northern countries, agricultural loses, extreme events
Loss of ice cover (Arctic, Greenland, Antarctic) ... rising oceans for several meters, major cities underwater
Cascading tipping points ... who knows
I'm starting to believe the sooner the system collapses, the better for the future of humanity.
Agricultural risks consolidating ag into even more megacorps.
Insurance costs making a lot of currently habitable places uninsurable, and after a few natural catastrophes nobody willing to settle in them.
Wet-bulb temperatures making the deaths of a few hundred thousands of people a frequent occurrence in many parts of the world.
Marine die-offs making the source of cheap high-quality protein in many places no longer accessible and lowering nutrition in several human populations.
Can we instead of make some changes on local level that effectively work with the climate change or minimise the impact? Might mean need to abandon some locations, but there has always been population movements.
We are not turning back the systems that will heat the world.
If we approach it as a local challenge, there is a chance we can invent new ways to deal with it.
Maybe instead of this being the end, it could be a beginning of new science and development that counters the negative impacts of change.
Maybe, just maybe, we can get some good out of it.
How many would be able to live like this, how many would die until we would get to this point, and do we really want this?
The problem is the overconsumption and overpollution. That's the only problem.
Nothing good would come from your proposed solution, imho.
We can always get our towns ready to receive the millions of climate refugees we'll be creating.
You mean, like, switching to a vegan diet, using public transport and stop flying? Those seem radical enough for most people in the Northern Hemisphere.
> Such as detonating thermonuclear weapons to throw enough dust above the troposphere to cool the planet down?
Weird world, one in which people can consider drastically changing the composition of the atmosphere, affecting all forms of life over the planet at the same time, instead of purchasing less from Amazon and doing some changes in their diet and holiday plans.
It’s systemic solutions that are needed. Some of those may include disincentivizing consumption. But it’s also not simple given that in many places there’s serious pushback against that. And also the economic cost. Everything is interwoven.
I wish people stopped pretending that this is just a matter of going vegan.
One of these things is not like the other.
Vegan diets — and I support them in principle — do little or nothing to reduce carbon emissions.
Vegan diets just don't deliver enough calories and essential nutrients without (industrial) supplementation, and veganism depends on broadscale monoculture crops with massive fossil-fuel inputs to grow, harvest and distribute, and exist in places largely that used to be healthy ecosystems supporting animal life.
Nice idea, and I'm cool with the overall philosophy and principles of veganism, but yoking it to climate activism, conflating it with strategies to "save the planet" is misguided.
That'll take a monumental effort, for a fairly minor impact. "eat less beef" sure.
People leaving the aircon on 24/7. Horribly uninsulated homes, buying and returning hundreds of items.
But ultimately, it's a shift to renewables+storage/nuclear that has to happen.
Pushing for people to go vegan is essentially counter-productive.
Speaking of flying, some billionaires have a second jet scouting ahead for air pockets. Remember Macron slyly taking off his watch under the table as he preached austerity? As much as I am frustrated by the apathy and short-sightedness of people, it's hard to blame them when those could so easily go first instead just consolidate and line their pockets where they can, to prepare for a crash they help make unavoidable that way. With private bunkers and going to Mars and freezing themselves and stuff that is so much derpier, less rational, so much more alienated, than some average person thinking they'd like to see the ocean one more time, so fuck it, they'll book a flight.
https://www.dw.com/en/german-greens-lay-out-nuclear-power-po...
That generation of power plants isn't really helping and new ones need a lot of time to build and produce lots of CO2 in the process.
The solution is to stop mindless consumption. We use the same material to wrap and bake food and drink unhealthy drinks as we do to build airplanes. We use plastic for use cases that take place over seconds and minutes and then throw it away. We drive everywhere because of poor urban design. We use plastic to carry food home from stores and restaurants. We fill our homes with plastic, metal, wood, and electronic junk, very little of it actually needed.
Mindless consumption makes the U.S. waste 1/3 of the food produced every year. 96% of that goes directly into landfills. It is literally throwing energy away, energy that we sapped away from the ground and ecosystems. Only 4% of the waste is composted. Full adoption of composting food waste and reducing it in total could bring emissions down by as much as high single digits or low teens percentages.
We also need greater wealth equality, which brings education and health equality as well.
It's almost silly how simple the real solutions are.
I planted milkweed last year, or rather let the milkweed that the previous owner would put mulch over. Surprise, we have monarch caterpillars this year.
There are real consequences to our actions, and if we reverse them, we get real consequences back.
Simple? Real? Let me give you some numbers. Let's use electricity as a proxy for consumption[1].
Average global per capita electricity consumption is currently about 3000 kWh/a. To put that into context, you can drive your environmentally friendly EV (20kWh/100km) roughly 15 000 km (10 000 miles) and use no more electricity at anything during the year.
US electricity consumption is ~12 000 kWh per year. So if you want to not force third world to poverty forever and keep the global consumption at current levels (I'm not yet discussing decreasing global consumption, just keeping it at current levels). US folks would need to cut their consumption by 75% to allow the poorer to get even.
Sorry, but that is neither simple nor real. If we want to see the poor countries to rise to even mediocre living standards, we will face a huge increase in global consumption. You do not need to like this (I do not), but it is a fact. So please, stop whining about the need to reduce our consumption and start supporting initiatives how we can produce lots more energy and stuff sustainably. Because we need to do that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
It's not the same material. There are thousands of types of very different plastics.
>We drive everywhere because of poor urban design
Reversing allegedly poor urban design is the work of decades.
A fully green economy might be possible in the far future but the transition seems like it is going to take a century or more.
The numbers say that even if the whole operation was powered by coal, it'd sequester 20 times as much CO2 as it generated. Use natural gas or other electricity generation for some of it, and the ratio improves dramatically.
Costs less than a $trillion a year which is one percent of global GDP.
Edit: it's the easy, safe, cheap thing to do; and we won't do it.
Given the push politically for solutions that are going to impact negatively the lives of millions of people "for their own good", I think some are already pushing for "radical solutions".
Luckily, there's pushback this time.
Parts of these are being tried by the Greens in Germany (part of govt), but everyone is getting totally histerical, with all sorts of influence groups coming out of their holes and trying to shut down all the efforts.
This leads me to believe that they're lying about how important it is to them. Supposedly, it is a world-ending scenario... at least when it comes to wrecking economies. But the moment real fixes are discussed it's "oh no, we can't do that". Considering how much they've had hardons for economic meddling for a century and a half at this point, why should I believe that it's anything other than a ploy to do what they've always wanted?
Yeah, Nuh.
"detonating thermonuclear weapons to throw enough dust above the troposphere to cool the planet down" isn't a real solution, and we've done this before .. leaving aside the two atomic detonations at the end of WWII and looking just at the 2,000 test detonations since (many larger, much larger, than the H & N explosions) the absolute worst case examples were ground level blasts that lifted material into the sky. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo
Better fixes include inflating bubbles between the earth and sun to reduce incoming light .. at least that one is reversable and fine tuneable.
Or, you know, maybe consuming less and winding down a bit on the baby making?
If the only proper argument for doing it is that "the left" is against it and "the right" is for it, that seems comparatively weak.
Same people (the rich) have been in power for a long time in much of the world. Its like they need anyones permission to do anything.
"The factory of ignorance": Arte tells about these industrialists who manipulate science
https://www.tellerreport.com/life/2021-02-23-%0A---%22the-fa...
Inside big beef’s climate messaging machine: confuse, defend and downplay
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/03/beef-ind...
Why Right-Wingers Are So Afraid of Men Eating Vegetables
https://newrepublic.com/article/171781/meat-culture-war-cric...
The meat industry is borrowing tactics from Big Oil to obfuscate the truth about climate change
https://www.salon.com/2022/11/11/the-meat-industry-is-borrow...
Why the media too often ignores the connection between climate change and meat
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23778399/media-ignores-cl...
How Big Oil is manipulating the way you think about climate change
https://www.salon.com/2023/05/13/how-big-oil-is-manipulating...
Disinformation and lies are spreading faster than Australia's bushfires
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jan/12/disin...
Rightwing war on ‘woke capitalism’ partly driven by fossil fuel interests and allies
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/22/rightwing-wa...
Senate Hearing Exposes 'Insidious' Dark Money Network Fueling Climate Crisis
https://www.commondreams.org/news/senate-dark-money-climate
Report: 1,500 Big Oil Lobbyists “Double Agents” for Supposed Climate Champions
https://truthout.org/articles/report-1500-big-oil-lobbyists-...
Chemical industry used big tobacco’s tactics to conceal evidence of PFAS risks
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/07/pfas-3m-...
Analysis: Most research on PFAS harms is unpublicized
It's not othering the problem. I think that the people who are already here are already doing enough damage, and that it's enormously selfish and pathologically narcissistic to want to add more humans to the world just to pass along your DNA. Of all the things you listed, I will never consume more than one human's worth of those resources. Whereas for every child you have, you are placing a claim on exponentially increasing resources in perpetuity.
Dumb arguments like this do more harm to the climate change cause than anything else. It comes across as an unreasonable and uneducated point of view that no one listens to.
Mission fucking accomplished. If nuclear simply isn't profitable they'll have to shift to solar+wind+battery eventually.
> It's not the same material. There are thousands of types of very different plastics.
Aluminum.
> If we want to see the poor countries to rise to even mediocre living standards, we will face a huge increase in global consumption.
Why does reducing overall consumption in developed countries and reducing conspicuous and vacuous consumption everywhere hurt developing countries? There are different levels and definitions of consumption and energy consumption is not the only one and not what I meant or described.
> we can produce ... stuff sustainably
Producing things more sustainably was part of my point.
I guess maybe the final point is clearly defining what we mean by consumption. I view consumption that extends beyond providing a moderate way of living, access to healthcare and education, social services, and transportation to be harmful, and it's that excess that I think should be reduced everywhere. There's no reason why developing countries should not be able to learn what a travesty much of the developed world is and adjust what it means to become more developed.
"uncharted" is the keyword here, do you understand what it really means?
As for the comparative wealth, I already earn 1/3 of what I would in the US, my home is smaller, I don't own a car and I have no A/C. And now I should also be taxed even more, while Americans who already pollute 10x as much keep doing as they please.
Fuck that. That's fucking unfair and I am not willing to do that.
But it is funny how people who personally make choices that reduce co2 fight against policies that would apply to everyone (well, at least in the same country, given there’s no world government).
You'll go first, the scientists will go in a second ship.
And I don't know what phone sanitizers are.
I've tried to debunk your comment, but it would take a long time, so I rewrote it instead.
"We are not doing it so the nature will destroy the economy and when that happens basically everything falls apart. We then won't have enough food and essentials for everyone but loads of people would be without jobs and others would lose their homes, their livelihood or life even.
A fully green economy could be right around the corner, but instead the transition seems like it is going to take a century or more, which is not enough time not to enter societal and environmental collapse, so it seems more like an extinction level event."
> And I don't know what phone sanitizers are.
We're their descendants. Rejoice, you're in for a treat ... I suggest to you ... The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. You'll enjoy it (the book, not the movie!).
I assumed people know world's energy consumption breakdown (cement, food, heating, electrical energy, chemical processes, ...), and what does that imply if most of the world catches up to more or less developed levels. If not I recommend starting education there.
> If not I recommend starting education there.
If you have some references to educate, then I'm more than willing to read them.
The alternative is facing the uncomfortable truth that climate change is the aggregate of small decisions made every day by every human, and there is no single action that will address it.
The financial system is based on growth, with the majority of money (97% IIRC) being debts we must repay with interest.
This leads to exponential growth, which is unsustainable in a finite environment (thus overshooting the carrying capacity).
https://futureearth.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/great_acc...
Billionaires are simply skilled players amassing virtual wealth in someone else's computer by extracting existing resources.
To really solve this, we must change the game, diminish ourselves and eliminate the pressures of exponential growth.
And even in a science fiction scenario where we become a type 2 civilization, it's not clear that's a bad thing assuming we can expand to nearby star systems. Robin Hanson's Grabby Alien solution to the Fermi Paradox suggests this is what civilizations will do, and we might as well grab up as much real estate until we come into contact with the other expanding spheres of alien expansion (granted this is very long term).
Growing trees?
I am not convinced that making myself poorer as an example would have any impact at all, without the rest of the world playing along. And in any case it is unfair.
I would be for pretty radical action: banning cars, rationing meat/energy/consumption, but it has to be fair. Otherwise I am not willing to do it.
We have flown of course but more often we will drive as we usually break the journey up visiting friends and family in Barcelona and Valencia on the way.
It takes longer to drive obviously but it is a more relaxed journey than flying. Plus as we don't have any time restrictions such as with a hotel booking we can just take our time and if we decide to stay a few more days for whatever reason it doesn't require any changing of flights, etc. Also means we don't need to hire a car for our stay.
This quote emphasizes the idea that if individuals embody and practice positive values and actions, it can lead to a significant impact on the world around them. Similarly, if everyone were to act rightly, it would undoubtedly result in a different and improved world.
Yes, but that's not reality. Hoping for the best whilst not actually making a dent in carbon emissions is not helping the problem at all.
People have to change themselves first (to break the walls built by others) to want to change the society.
Hope is not hopium. Hope is necessary for any action to take place.
Anyway, an argument towards stopping future use and abuse of a broken system is not equivalent to an argument to destroy existing structures. The former is corrective; the latter is revolutionary. Revolutions are stupid and useless because they always result in a new iteration of the existing problem.
And of course when it comes to making babies almost everyone thinks, that their child or they themselves are special and it is OK to have more than one child for them. Especially comfortable when they already have two or more children, or for some ego reason want more children than proposed. Oh and never dare to mention China and one child policy either in this context, or the consequences for the world, if that policy had not existed.
China can't even turn off their "one child policy". It was a switch they could flip, and now can't unflip. How's that going to work out for them?
My children are enthusiastic about becoming parents themselves one day, and I wouldn't be shocked if we get 6 or more grandchildren. Turns out, all you have to do is always behave as if having children is a good thing... which was easy for me, since it is. It seems likely that the future will look alot more like me than it will look like you.
Don't need thermonukes. Seed the oceans with iron.
There (might not be) enough fossil fuels left, and EROI is falling fast, so the question is whether we'd able to do this before the energy runs out and our economy will be forcibly reduced by nature.
> carbon capture once that technology matures
I'm worried that's just a technological pipedream. No such technology will probably exist for decades at the scale needed. We'd need millions of such factories. In fact, we already have such "technology", it's called forests ... but we're not doing that either.
> Carrying capacity isn't fixed
No, it's not. We've extended it in the past, but now it seems that it started decline ... and might enter freefall soon. I'd suggest this for more info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPb_0JZ6-Rc
> energy isn't fixed either
Yes, and it's heating the planet and oceans 100x more than what we're consuming now. 5 atomic bombs every second now, is it? I'm aware that 254x254 km2 of solar panels would be enough for all our energy needs (except storage) ... but we're far from that. Even in the most optimistic scenarios we're targeting 25-30% of renewable energy in 2050 ... not really enough.
> science fiction scenario where we become a type 2 civilization
I'd like us to get there. But we might as well be at the end of the runway, looking at the great filter with our own eyes right now.
The Finnish Greens are pro-nuclear, perhaps because they are not beholden to the same sources of funding as their German counterparts (and not to just blame the Greens here: look at your former Chancellor Schroeder).
Towns and cities are actually far more resource efficient than rural and suburban sprawl.
The only inefficient thing in them is highrises. But five-story buildings are incredibly infrastructure-efficient. Walking through a midrise neighborhood puts you past more people per minute, than driving 120 mph through a suburb.
When everything works as intended. In a collapse everything changes.
Imagine energy grid not working, no tap water, non-existent food supply, money is worthless ... such kind of future.
Unless you're a subsistence peasant, which 99.9% of rural and semi-rural (suruban) people aren't, you're going to have the same exact problems from a lack of all those things.
That’s false. In France we have a project to bury them 500m underground in stable geological formations. And even if this site failed to retain the radioactive (which studies says it will not) that would be a minor issue against climate change.
As for security issues since nuclear power exists (~70 years) we can count deadly accidents in some dozens of victims while the pollution due to burning fuels kills several thousands of people every year.
At this point it’s so ridiculous that you have way more chance to die in a plane crash of anything nuclear.
Also contrary to a belief, a plane crashing in a nuclear powerplant, while creating a certain horrible mess would not be really different than crashing it in any petrochemical plant. For comparison that would be way less dramatic than the AZF of Beyrouth explosions.
It's not a solution if it's still a project otherwise nuclear fusion and carbon dioxide capturing would be solutions too.
Something else to consider is that the stuff with the highest radioactivity is usually the shortest. At this stage having a robust forever-lasting solution for nuclear waste is not a larger priority.
There are places in the world where you can just find uranium rocks lying on the ground.
Fine, take the Finnish repository as an example then.
It isn't helpful averting one problem to create another one.
To whine and screech "that's too dangerous, don't do that" when other people were proposing solutions. These are the same people who are touted as the experts, mind you. This means that when journalists and talking heads and other jackasses say "but the experts don't even think those things will work", they are talking about the same people who claim that there is an emergency in the first place.
They aren't interested in potential solutions. It's just an attempt to wrestle political power away from those who currently have it and implement economy-murdering policy because they're mad poor people eat meat.
We need to stop fossil fuels asap, stop animal ag (deforestation, pollution, biodiversity loss, etc.), reform agriculture (soils, biodiversity, poisons) and start reforesting/afforesting.
There are tons of studies that show it's the best way to stop the climate crisis.
How Compatible Are Western European Dietary Patterns to Climate Targets? Accounting for Uncertainty of Life Cycle Assessments by Applying a Probabilistic Approach
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/21/14449
Global food system emissions could preclude achieving the 1.5° and 2°C climate change targets
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aba7357
Biodiversity conservation: The key is reducing meat consumption
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26231772/
Which Diet Has the Least Environmental Impact on Our Planet? A Systematic Review of Vegan, Vegetarian and Omnivorous Diets
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/15/4110/htm
The way we eat could lead to habitat loss for 17,000 species by 2050
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22287498/meat-wildlife-bi...
Our global food system is the primary driver of biodiversity loss
https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/our-glob...
If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares. The expansion of land for agriculture is the leading driver of deforestation and biodiversity loss.
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
Rapid global phaseout of animal agriculture has the potential to stabilize greenhouse gas levels for 30 years and offset 68 percent of CO2 emissions this century
https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Which Diet Has the Least Environmental Impact on Our Planet? A Systematic Review of Vegan, Vegetarian and Omnivorous Diets
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/15/4110/htm
Without Changing Diets, Agriculture Alone Could Produce Enough Emissions to Surpass 1.5°C of Global Warming
https://www.wri.org/insights/without-changing-diets-agricult...
Global food system emissions could preclude achieving the 1.5° and 2°C climate change targets
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aba7357
Livestock and climate change: what if the key actors in climate change are... cows, pigs, and chickens?
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Livestock-and-climate-...
The carbon opportunity cost of animal-sourced food production on land
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00603-4
Study finds forest protection successfully leads to reduced emissions at global scale
https://phys.org/news/2023-06-forest-successfully-emissions-...
What are chances that everyone globally will just switch to vegan diet to save on CO2 before 2050 or whatever end date? My fair estimate is zero.
It's like wishing people aren't lazy or corrupt or that are more honest. To quote the poet "You don't get what you want".
If there was a significant portion of the population with changed habits (and numbers of vegans and vegetarians are rising fast in the last few years, so much that it's affecting sales of meat and dairy already), the abolishing of animal ag subsidies will be much more probable.
Then without subsidies the reduction in consumption is automatic - the price would take care of that. 90% (IIRC) of corporate profits in animal ag comes from subsidies.
Otherwise ... to quote the poet ... "You'll get what you don't want".
Oh science again... You totalitarians are always calling for science when lacking arguments to convince people....
Nazism was supposedly based on race science. Communism was entirely scientific. So were COVID lockdowns.
And now climate science. It isn't science it is just weird millenarian religion. Please stop propagating your religious beliefs on HN.
It's okay to question and be critical, but dismissing scientific consensus without proper examination won't lead us anywhere.
Let's put aside the conspiracy theories and embrace the wonders of knowledge and progress that science offers ;)
My point is about the fact that we already know and have most of the solutions: less consumption, less emissions, less destruction of our environment. Yet, most people with decision power (be it as individuals, as heads of governments or companies) refuse to accept and follow them. Instead, many prefer to propose global-scale, geo-modifications whose results are unknown and potentially more dangerous.
It’s something we can do today, just need to decide whether having a burger is more important or not.
But they won't. Even here on HN, where some smart people roam, touching their meat (like, eating LESS of it, not quitting altogether) will make them into incoherent angry (I guess) men. And that's of course a big step, smaller steps are even not a thing for many people; not flying, no car, hell, here people even refuse to obey the law of not topping up (or filling) their swimming pools even though there is an huge water shortage.
The only way will be if governments decide to step in. Problem there is; a lot of gov people and the people they support or who support them, are giving the wrong examples; big cars, slabs of meat, villas all over the place, bailing out struggling airlines, making sure the energy/oil companies can make more profits, making sure farmers have to obey nothing of these new rules because export products (so they can keep using whatever amount of water, cut ancient trees down just like that, ...) etc. People pick the govs they like, which means they hope either things will get better for themselves (not the world) or remain the same.
But I agree we need much stronger regulation.
I would have hoped that especially this HN crowd would change their mind because it's quite clear and logical that not consuming meat and dairy will mean requiring fewer resources and producing less pollution.
Not so smart then.
> The only way will be if governments decide to step in
That's why more people vegan == more pressure for governments not to ignore the issue.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
"In a hypothetical scenario in which everyone in the world went vegan by 2050, the regrowth of trees and wilderness could sequester around 547 billion tonnes of additional CO2. Each year we emit around 36 billion tonnes of CO2 from fossil fuels, so that’s equal to around 15 years of emissions at our current levels. They also estimate an additional 225 billion tonnes of CO2 could be stored in soils ..."
That's much more impactful than reducing emissions alone. It would store a load of carbon while preserving biodiversity (paramount for healthy ecosystems).
The study probably explores what would happen if _everyone_ did that. And that’s the issue right there. Everyone casts a wide net, it includes climate deniers, poor people, rich people, hard core dairy aficionados, etc, etc. The single most important thing an individual can do is inducing systemic change in one way or another. Preferably somehow avoiding alienating the bulk of the audience, as that may end up with people in power who actively undermine any efforts towards solving the situation.
There is also a link to the PDF - try this one: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-023-00795-w.pdf.
RE: The single most important thing an individual can do is inducing systemic change in one way or another.
And that was my point. Vote with your wallet and inform others in your circle that reducing / avoiding will have positive impact. This will trigger systemic change.
Is it the only thing we can do, no it's not, but it's something you and I can do right now.
After all, if we ban beef. We have accepted that taste has no meaning in life and we can just ban everything not mandatory like spices and herbs.
It's about cutting out food that create the biggest damage to our biosphere, which is the large scale meat & dairy industry.
RE: Why not go all the way, select handful of optimal foods and only allow those to be sold or grown. [...] ban everything not mandatory like spices and herbs.
This is not about banning meat & dairy. And you can't seriously compare meat & dairy to herbs & spices.
We have accepted that human life is worthless, because cars are allowed to drive fast enough to cause fatal crashes, may as well remove all limits alltogether.
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Absolutist arguments are absolutely absurd.
It has to start in our own kitchens.
- those 4.4% co2e difference, which is quite consequent
- freshwater savings
- land savings (especially forest)
- the ability to feel morally good when looking and thinking about the food we eat
It’s exceedingly hard to get people to change habits. That’s why people in this thread don’t believe it will be a realistic (timely enough) solution if left up to mere individual decisions and not forced by systemic changes.
We've had 50+ years of climate change warnings, and nothing has really happened.
We're still not doing much... For example, the percentage of coal consumption is still around 82%, even after minor advancements in renewable sources.
Nobody at the political level is even talking about the need for a reduction in meat consumption, despite scientists being very vocal about this.
I simply feel that this is something that has to come (could come) from "down below."
Citations needed. I think cars/trucks are much bigger polluters than cows. Not to mention the ubiquitous industries of plastic, steel and cement.
https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector
Points that Agriculture is 18.6% of total CO2 emissions. Out of which plants related emissions make like 4%. Granted, part of that is animal feed, but you'll have to replace meat calories with something else.
All those sectors you've mentioned are absolutely problem too. Animal ag is 15-26% of our carbon budget, depending on which source you'll pick. That's already bigger that cement, and almost all of transport.
But animal ag is not just the emissions alone, and not only cows. Just with afforestation potential (land use change of pastures) we'd be able to store our entire 1.5C carbon budget.
This is a short (and incomplete) list of impacts of (animal & industrial) agriculture. It's imho clear from this list that animal ag (which is 75-80% of all ag) is the major culprit.
- Greenhouse gas emissions
- Deforestation (40+% of pastures used to be forests)
- Land degradation
- Water pollution
- Water overconsumption
- Loss of biodiversity
- Antibiotic resistance
- Ocean dead zones
- Inefficient land and resource use
- Ethical concerns regarding animal welfare
- Zoonotic diseases
- Air pollution
- Eutrophication
- Soil erosion
- High energy consumption
- Chemical runoff from pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers
- Destruction of habitats and ecosystems
- Inequality in global food distribution
- Public health risks from foodborne illnesses
- Nutrient pollution
- Strain on waste management systems
- Overfishing (40-70% of plankton gone, sharks 90% gone, fish almost gone)
If you want to have impact as an individual, study engineering/physics or indeed climate change ...
Although personal responsibility is never a bad thing, we need to focus on the big companies that have been deliberately hiding climate science for decades - they're the ones doing the lion's share of the polluting and suppressing alternatives.
People dream about living a good life. Our fossil fuel consumption has afforded this to many. That is why it's difficult to change. Companies don't make stuff for fun, they do it because there's consumer demand for it.
> Companies don't make stuff for fun, they do it because there's consumer demand for it.
Companies have so much power that they can fabricate (or suppress) their own demand by manipulating the political sphere. The situation exists because it's more easily profitable, the alternative takes time/effort, and our market/government incentives only focus on short-term thinking. The same companies that profit prevent changes to such incentives.
Clearly, some people care about the now more than the future.
We may just have to use solar radiation management instead.
This teaches us a valuable lesson though - money from carbon taxes must not go into the government budget. It should instead be distributed to something automatically (eg equal payments to everyone or the poorest). If it becomes part of the budget then governments might try to maximize revenue rather than deal with the problem.
Hahahaha. I can see it now: "Exxon Stratospheric Sulfur Shield - using dirty fuels in long-haul flights to create a particulate-based solar shield [0]. Partnering with governments around the globe [1] to protect the earth and boost tourism. Because we care."
[0] https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/stratospheric-aer...
[1] https://e360.yale.edu/digest/fossil-fuels-received-5-9-trill...
There is an alternative however, and countries like China are pursuing it. Want to look at what life would be like with less petroleum usage per capita? Look to Asia. I'm not some tankie, but I also don't have blinders on.
The same arguments can be made for future of your own children, retirement plans, planting trees, long term investments, etc. Yet these are not as controversial and we accept them, more or less, as generally good practices.
This natural instinct on its own is not enough to make people forget the coming danger. You need constant advertisement, news cycles, opinion pieces, disinformation campaigns, etc. to make it stick.
Of course, you'd have to actually destroy that 10%, if you leave it on a bank account the bank would lend it, or the government would use it, which would prevent this from having an impact.
Cheese is actually not that good for you [0], but yes it's tasty.
Plant based foods provide enough protein for athletes and body builders. [1] [2]
[0] https://www.pcrm.org/good-nutrition/nutrition-information/he...
[1] https://www.pcrm.org/good-nutrition/nutrition-information/pr...
I'm sure that anything is possible for highly motivated individuals for whom eating enough protein is one of the main parts of their lifestyle. I just don't know how to translate it to everyday cooking for a family.
Tofu and other soy products are not easily available where I live. I'm not sure if doing extra driving or ordering online from another country would be net positive.
Nuts are protein dense only when you count them by weight (grams protein per gram) but not that great by energy (grams protein per kcal).
I could eat beans and lentils for every meal but that's from where the part about feeling terrible comes.
It sounds like a list of excuses but it is something that is actually, for me, a daily struggle and source of stress.
Read the PCRM article about protein I posted further above, it has more info about this. PCRM is a group of doctors and other medical experts.
Where are you based?
If you live in a region where you can't survive without meat or dairy then you've got to do what you have to do to survive.
My comments are mainly geared towards regions where the majority of people consume meat & dairy because of taste pleasure, not because they need it to survive.
I find most research on the the topic to be of dubious quality. I know that when I have more protein in my diet I feel less hungry for longer and I eat overall less calories. Also I've been working out for couple of years with little to show for it. I worry sometimes that maybe low protein diet is a, or the, reason for that.
> Where are you based?
I live in a smaller, rather conservative city where it's hard to find anything but local cuisine.
> If you live in a region where you can't survive without meat or dairy then you've got to do what you have to do to survive.
I don't need it to survive. And it is something that I want to do. I just don't know how and I'm not able to find any useful resources.
On the other hand, I also worry about the impact of climate change. I think as long as things remain within current predictions we will be able to manage, but what if they don't? What if some process ends up accelerating things faster than expected?
Agree.
> What if some process ends up accelerating things faster than expected?
I think we're already there (for example, in quite few studies 2030 is the new 2050 for 1.5C target). Sea temperatures (esp. in the nothern sea) and ice cover also seems to change faster than predicted (we could have ice free summers in the arctic before 2030, and thawing of greenland is also faster than expected).
The poorest already make a lot of sustainable choices: living in apartments in cities, taking public transportation, consuming less.
It’s possible that if carbon was heavily taxed, and some of the proceeds returned to everybody, that the poorest would actually be better off. Never mind the whole stopping the climate catastrophe threat.
