I started free diving for abalone along the Sonoma coast in 2008. The first few years of diving were plentiful and majestic. But my friends and I noticed the changes around 2015. Less sunflower stars and star fish. After some red tide events, the abalone die offs were crazy. Coves that used to have abs stacked on top of each other were almost empty. Finding a 9” abalone became a chore. The thinner kelp forests meant less fish, less life. It’s been difficult to watch first hand. I get sad thinking about the reality that my children will most likely never see the underwater forests that filled my soul and gave me a deep love of the ocean. I hope we can help the system get back in balance.
We likely won't, at least nowhere near the 20th century balance. For all the new tree saplings planted elsewhere, Brazil straight burns down old growth in the rainforest. For all the wind and solar installed by the rich countries, poor countries are happy for the cheaper coal. Replacing nuclear base power with fossil fuels doesn't help too.
Even if we ever do manage to come together and fund active carbon capture, it will take decades to reverse the trend. And then possibly centuries for the oceans to de-acidify. Together with active efforts to burn down nature in the places where most biodiversity remains, the mass extinction even is likely to run its course before we get to a stable ecosystem. Sure we can restore most of the biomass, but it will be much fewer species. And letting the nature run its course will, naturally, take millions of years.
This is factually wrong, looks at CO2 emissions per capita, USA has carbon footprint double that of France.
Do people in US have twice better life? They don't, its just that the policy doesnt give a flying fuck about environment. The government spends more on military programs to defend from hypothetical weapons that dont exist yet, than it does on dealing with the certainty of climate change.
People here bitching about brazil removing forest, forest cover of UK is like 12%, one of the lowest in thw world. The 'ambition' is to plant like 2% more trees in 30 years. We just cut it down years ago, and so are off the hook.
You know what the wealthy countries should have done? Funded development of fusion properly, actually invested in renewables and shared technology with developing nations, had electric vehicles in mass production by 2010. Then you could do around and point at aome poor farmer fuck knows where trying to feed his family.
As things stand China has 10x more electric buses than the rest of the world combined, a couple Nordic countries have shown leadership in Wind. But most of western world is not just complicit, but a partner in crime, has actively enabled and protected their oil firms to commit literal crimes.
As the oceans warm and more fresh water is released into the ocean from melting ice it caused the ocean to become more acidic, which is causing the phytoplankton population to decline further. Also as the water warms different types of phytoplankton increase and not all as economics at converting CO2 into oxygen, and some create other problems.
There is nothing we can do as a "stop gap" solution for the oceans, and phytoplankton, just like any natural system in decline the phytoplankton population will continue a slow decrease and then when it hits a tipping point it will crash.
When the phytoplankton population crashes, and it will, the impact will be catastrophic. Short of inventing a technology to capture and sequester 45 Billion metric tonnes of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere each and every year, there is nothing we can do to stop or even slow down what's happening to the oceans.
I'd guess transportation plays a bigger role, but not sure.
US emissions are ~29% transportation and ~27% electricty generation [1]. The US uses ~13x as much oil [2].
Natural Gas isn't particularly dirty. Coal and petroleum only make up 24% of power generation in the US [3]. Fossil fuels make up ~9% of electricity production in France [4].
Just a small nit but the OP was referencing CO2. Natural gas is cleaner than other fossil fuels. “Clean” != low carbon (although it’s lower than other fossil fuels)
I would expect our spread out nature to contribute to that a lot. We drive a lot (and often environmentally unfriendly vehicles). Our food chain also involves shipping food substantial distances (not sure how true that is of Europe).
I wonder how much efficiency and resiliency are competing interests in the supply chain. From one perspective, consolidation creates a more efficient system due to economies of scale. On the other hand, distributed systems tend to be more reliable, but less efficient
A big part of this is that urban planning in the US is suburb centric which is devastating not only for the environment, but also for the economy. City centers have higher density and more tax dollars and they subsidize the infrastructure of the suburbs. Basically, the suburbs tax income can't sustain their own infrastructure so American cities rely on growth in order to fund new developments and infrastructure maintenance. It's essentially a ponzi where the music stops when the growth stops. So not only are American cities terrible for the environment, but they are incentivized to continue to grow in order to fund legacy infrastrucure, which inevitably places a strain on the environment.
The car model of a city is what is destroying our environment. North America needs better urban planning if we have any chance at all in making a dent in global climate change.
At face value that source send to suggest that it's a great result, but I'm struggling to get my head around the statistics in the table - the early ones seem really low.
The biggest driver of loss of woodland, I assume, has been the same as in the Amazon today - farming and logging.
Wikipedia tells me estimates put the 14th century population of England at somewhere between 3.7 and 7 million. The table suggests a downward trend of woodland over time, which I assume would be driven by industry and therefore related to population. Today, urban and industrial land use must be massively higher than it was then, meaning that in relative trends the loss of woodland was even more profound.
How could people in medieval times have required the same footprint of de-wooded land as a population 14 times larger today (even accounting for more efficient farms, move to fossil fuels and nuclear, etc)? What would the natural woodland cover be with no human inhabitants - surely at least 50%?
> a couple Nordic countries have shown leadership in Wind.
While I am glad that we have done some progress, there is a large caveat to it. The enthusiasm was great until the grid hit 100% capacity, at which point investment to build more dropped quickly. At the same time the average production rate per day is around 40-50%, which remained is mostly produced through heavily subsidized fossil fuels. It is a leadership of a kind, but it is too early to say if it can produce a solution long term.
comparing the US to France isn't really accurate, it would be more honest to compare to EU, in terms of geographical distance, closer in population, and GDP.
And yes, China and India are now large, significant sources of CO2 emissions and both those countries need to do more. There is no solution to global climate change without China and India. If you look at CO2 emissions in the US since 2000 we've dropped -- the trend lines are good, the US is doing its part.
India and China need to do theirs.
And I will just ignore the population bomb that is going off in Africa at the moment.
While your comment isn’t factually wrong it’s phrased to almost blame the poorer countries.
Brazil burns down forest mainly because of the United State’s desire for think like soy beans to feed cows.
Poorer countries use coal because it’s cheap and global conditions don’t enrich them enough to get better sources.
The sad truth is we force countries to be poor and exploit their own resources so we don’t have to do it ourselves. And of course then we’ll all pay the price living on a dying planet.
First, they only track emissions that they can directly tie with consumption. The statement "fifty percent of the world’s carbon emissions are produced by the world’s richest 10%" is not supported by the study because it makes no attempt to track all of the world's carbon emissions.
Second, they assume that income == consumption == carbon emissions, which is a very bad assumption. The world's richest people do not spend their entire income every year, so using that as the basis for consumption is inaccurate. Also, assuming that every dollar spent, no matter where or by whom, has the exact same emissions associated with it is incorrect. Wealthy people are the people who can afford to put solar panels on their roofs and buy new electric cars, but by this study they are penalized for such consumption.
In general, I find that oxfam optimizes their studies for the headlines. When you dig into it, there are so many qualifiers and assumptions made that it seems clear the study was authored with an specific outcome in mind.
"The top 10% earn 5x more money than average" is not as outrageous a headline as we are used to seeing. But by multiplying by a carbon emission factor of 1, they get to write "Top 10% emits half of world's carbon", which generates way more clicks.
So are you saying the assertion that rich countries spend far more CO2 per capita than poorer countries is incorrect? What studies would you point to that offer a more accurate estimate?
> So are you saying the assertion that rich countries spend far more CO2 per capita than poorer countries is incorrect?
I made no statement one way or the other, _and neither did OP's study_. I'm just pointing out that the linked paper is bogus.
FWIW, your statement is factually correct - rich countries pollute more per capita than poor countries. I think a more useful metric is emissions per dollar GDP[1]. This measure how carbon efficient an economy is.
We could drop carbon emissions to nearly zero by reverting all of human society to be hunter-gatherers who haven't discovered fire yet. Building a more efficient economy lets us get closer to zero emissions without losing all of our modern quality of life improvements.
I agree to an extent. But I don’t think carbon-per-dollar captures the full picture. You speak of quality of life improvements but the economy is largely measured in consumption not quality of life. If maximizing quality of life per unit of carbon is your goal it presupposes that all economic productivity/consumption contributes equally to quality of life. I think there’s an argument that the hedonic treadmill makes this an incorrect assumption
I agree. GDP is not a great measure of quality of life. I also don't think its controversial to say I would be less happy if I lived in a place without electricity, plumbing, or internet. GDP is a first degree approximation of those kinds of quality of life goods.
I only meant to say that the reason poor countries have a low per-capita emissions is because they are very poor. It is not a very instructive or useful metric to look at. Per GDP emissions lets us look at a "lifestyle adjusted" carbon emissions. There are countries in all four quadrants of the poor v rich, efficient v inefficient graph. That gives us a lot more insight into how to structure an economy.
My point (and where we may disagree) is that GDP is only informative to a point. As you point out, that point may be when certain essentials are met such as access to healthcare, clean water, and electricity. Beyond that point GDP as a maximization function may be counterproductive and only measuring marginal utility decreasing marginal utility per unit of carbon increase. Choosing the right metric matters - choosing GDP is at best a clunky approximation once a certain level of industrialization is achieved. After that, there are probably better metrics to measure quality of life. So if we’re trying to maximize quality of life, we should probably focus on those rather than a twisted economist view that productivity is the best measure of a society.
A less carbon intense life is possible, but much easier without the fear of a needy tomorrow...the consumer may be the biggest cause of so much CO2, but like in "Grapes of Wrath" when you are pushed into a place where you can't grow what you need, can't stay in a place for free so have to go out and work to buy your food and then have too much money so you buy useless stuff....also from that book (prescient in today's awaited ecological collapse) the idea that fruit prices were so low they built factories to put them in cans...to conclude imo the lifestyle that comes from the "western" world's slave mentality to work and growth is the main cause of climate change...that and the overabundance of never ending more printed money...
1) the word “tax”
In carbon-tax terrifies people, especially in America. So we get a tragedy of the commons situation with the cost of carbon made into an externality.
2) massive FUD and manipulation of media and environmental efforts to stop awareness of climate change for decades.
Fox News destroyed scientists on TV to discredit global warming.
People have made this happen, and they have gleefully lived without any repercussions - which is why the model has been copied around the world.
Hilariously the oil firms are rebranding themselves as eco firms.
> 1) the word “tax” In carbon-tax terrifies people, especially in America. So we get a tragedy of the commons situation with the cost of carbon made into an externality.
Reducing their quality of life and expectations is what terrifies people. People want their vacations to Tahiti, their SUV, their detached single family homes with backyards and front yards, more children etc.
People know the only way out of this is to reduce consumption - of everything. But obviously few want to, especially when they don’t believe others will chip in and reduce also.
Which is a non sequitur, peoples quality of life was much worse with the loss of breathable air, drinkable water or houses lost to wildfires (Jan 2019 Australia for example). Its not like people want a high quality of life which excludes those things.
Your final point is describing a collective action problem, but that is solved by simply exposing the full cost of a goods to people.
That is what markets do, very very well. Expose costs via pricing, and let people respond to that information.
If your skin care product packaged by X company is 30% more expensive because its cost of carbon is included, then people will buy the less expensive option and go on their merry way.
>Which is a non sequitur, peoples quality of life was much worse with the loss of breathable air, drinkable water or houses lost to wildfires (Jan 2019 Australia for example). Its not like people want a high quality of life which excludes those things.
“People” meaning as a whole, with sufficient cooperation to enact political change, on a global level, such that the cost of pollution can be priced into products.
But that pricing in will also cause the cost of everything we use to go up, causing a decrease in the amount of consumption (which is the intended effect), but that is an immediate and easily visible “loss” to people.
> But obviously few want to, especially when they don’t believe others will chip in and reduce also.
That last part there is very important. I feel much like this, me personally going ascetic, while all my fellow humans don't give a damn, doesn't help anything. This needs to come from the top, the politicians, with rules, regulations, fees and fines. Thus, I vote for the greenest and most ascetic party there is. But I have little hope left.
Many pushing a carbon tax have far too high an expectation of how the impact of a tax would fall. Without a lot of other systemic changes and programs implemented in concert with a carbon tax, the market would allocate much like it it has as already - only optimizing profit with a carbon constraint without regard to anything else - likely increasing inequality.
Interesting idea. It reminds me of the fact I'd like to work full time on climate breakdown, but don't because those jobs pay a lot less. After all, trying to buy a house!
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, the other bidder would _also_ prefer to work doing good in the world, but takes the highest paying job instead, so they can outbid me.
And that house is what is causing the climate breakdown in the first place, since it is a detached single family home with a garage, reducing population density and magnifying the amount of energy required to push all the mass people want to live (water, sewer, gas, people, groceries, vehicles, trash, etc).
Of course, although I'm assuming you meant that as a rebuttal? Keep in mind that output does not always need to be physical. In fact, the history of capitalism shows that growth is coupled with more people doing less physical work and that countries with greater wealth and resources (e.g. the ability to make more stuff more efficiently) will move towards a service oriented economy.
Yes, I agree that the more advanced an economy gets the less coupled GDP is to physical labor. But efficiency is not a 1:1 relationship with GDP unless the work input is equal. Meaning, just because there is an increase in efficiency does not guarantee there is an increase in productivity so efficiency shouldn’t be used as a perfect corollary to GDP, just one aspect that helps drive it.
It’s like saying “my per hour pay rate went up” and assuming your annual take has also increased. That’s only true if your total hours didn’t drop enough to erode those rate gains.
To your point, GDP and efficiency are both increasing but hours per worker are generally decreasing.
His point was
> Brazil burns down forest mainly because of the United State’s desire for think like soy beans to feed cows.
You can easily replace that with
> Brazil burns down forest mainly because of the Chinese desire for soy beans to feed pigs
and the point still stands. Brazil is planting soy beans because a rich trading partner is paying them more than the ranforests attract with no future foresight, despite this being a devestating blow to the entire world. It's unreasonable to expect Brazil to stand up and say "hey we're done with this" while other powers are encouraging the practices.
Except China emits more than double the CO2 that America does. The USA emits less today than it did 10 years ago, while China's emissions grow exponentially. The original point was that there is a lot of work to do outside of rich, western countries.
I'm not saying America is blameless, or that it is all China's fault. I'm saying putting all of your effort and focus on America while ignoring the growth of the world's largest polluter will not solve the problem.
The USA can afford to emit less than it did 10 years ago precisely because it has emitted so much in the past and its economy is basically built. Any bemoaning about China or other currently-developing countries that doesn't also talk about how we should also be helping them bootstrap themselves with more advanced systems is just privilege at having gotten there first and pulling the ladder up behind us.
Isn't renewable energy generally cheaper than coal at this point?[1]. You're right, that we have done the work to research, develop, and manufacture renewable energy sources. Now all the rest of the world just has to buy the thing that is cheaper.
Yes, renewable is cheap, but also unreliable. And storage to manage that unreliability is, per your link, more expensive than the corresponding fossil fuel plants. It's either that or drastically over-provision the renewables, which then has to be factored into the cost.
Right now, the cheapest approach from scratch could maybe consist of:
1. Over-provisioned renewables,
2. connected to a large-area grid to mitigate local-scale negative impacts to renewable productivity,
3. with enough fossil fuel capacity to basically serve as "storage" and bridge large-scale negative impacts to renewable productivity.
But, of course, China is not building from scratch -- they've been at this for decades. And the inversion of prices between renewables and fossil fuels is a fairly recent one.
You can add US for comparison. China's emissions have been plateauing for the past 10 years, while the US is going down. Per-capita, China is still less than half of the US, so it'll take a long time before the US catches up, if ever.
And if you choose to normalize by GDP, China emits twice as much as the USA[1][2]. China has lots of very poor people, bringing down the per-capita average, but the USA has a more carbon efficient economy.
The point I tried to make is that it doesn't matter if it's the us, china, france, russia, etc. Blaming brazil isn't the solution, they're only doing this because china (in this case) are prioritizing cheap soy over the health of the Amazon.
The exact same argument is true for palm oil in indonesia; blaming indonesia for destroying borneo and sumatra isn't going to fix the problem when it's all being exported to the EU and india.
It is incumbent upon those with the power to stop degrading the environment to do so. Where the Amazon rainforest is concerned, that's Brazil.
Getting every nation which might want cheap soybeans (all of them, to a first approximation) to agree to stop buying from Brazil is a complex coordination problem with rewards for defection. Getting Brazil to stop cutting down the rainforest for the profit of agribusiness is coordinating the policy of a single nation; still difficult, just not completely intractable.
Brazilian soybeans rely on genetic modification to survive in the sweltering climate. Monsanto is perhaps the best target here.
> Brazil burns down forest mainly because of the United State’s desire for think like soy beans to feed cows.
In the UK at least, we seem to have palm oil in everything, and Indonesia and that part of the world are busily hacking down forests and killing orangutans in the process.
What's the sudden need for palm oil? We hardly used it in the 70s and 80s when I was a kid.
British supermarkets should hang their heads in shame about palm oil and refuse to stock food that uses it. They're complicit whether they realise it or not.
Even so called 'ethical palm oil' just means that those that want it, and can't get it from an 'ethical supplier' because Western companies consume the supply, get it from "illegal" suppliers.
> Brazil burns down forest mainly because of the United State’s
And because brazilians voted for president a man clearly hostile to science and environment conservation... with not surprising results. If you vote a man that calls himself Captain chainsaw you obtain exactly the prize what you asked for
I don't think "But I can get money for burning my children's future!" is a good excuse for sais burning unless you're literally starving. Which the burners in Brazil et al are not.
People have agency, there's no Coca Cola goons with guns to their heads this time.
If you can make enough money to move away from the destruction you wrought, and live in luxury while providing education that elevates your offspring to a higher social class, many people will do the wrong thing for selfish reasons.
I cant hear it anymore, when companies claim to have become "carbon" neutral. It almost always boils down to - "we bought a paper in some third world country" on which is stated that money has been paid to plant trees or otherwise capture carbon. Usually the reality on the ground shows that this money went nowhere and thus, that company is not carbon neutral.
Why is the default always to blame poorer countries?
The US is one of the largest contributors of CO2 in the world. The per capita argument is silly: They're a single, centralised source of pollution. Just regulate it already. The impact would be phenomenal.
As for the poorer countries: How about the wealthier nations that outright stole the mineral resources from us start paying that money back in the form of a solution rather than having their denizens pointing obese fingers at us?
I'm not saying give the money back (would be nice though), but how about spending that ill-gotten gain on progress for a change?
You misread me quite badly. I've never lived in the US and actually come from a country 4x poorer (at least according to GDP/C), that's still ramping up coal, despite being told not to.
Most electricity production in Brazil is renewable, at much higher levels than most first world countries, including yours most likely. https://i.imgur.com/gMBJEQG.png
Also look up a chart of CO2 production per capita and compare Brazil's to your country's before you start talking like you are.
If you want to point fingers then fine, but at least do it properly and be informed.
I support and agree with your sentiment. Western countries are to blame, but
_Biomass should not count as renewable_
It is not carbon neutral. Monocultures requires petrol based inputs (and petrol reliant for output), and store less than half the c02 of an old growth forest.
Biomass was one of the biggest mistakes in the green movement.
> For all the wind and solar installed by the rich countries, poor countries are happy for the cheaper coal.
Rich countries still burn plenty of coal. The US ranks 11th globally in per-capita coal consumption, burning 1.6 tons of coal annually, over twice the global average. Australia nearly tops the list, burning 2.8 tons per person. And that's not even touching the truly tremendous amounts of gasoline wasted on individual commuters in first world countries, or the historical emissions used by the "rich" countries to establish their economies.
Countries are also moving away from coal in favor of more cleanly burning natural gas. They will need to keep those plants up, because renewables are not as predictable and they need a stable and predictable backup like fossil fuels or nuclear.
Renewables are nice, but managing and balancing them is a lot more difficult.
Solar, like wind, is not an energy source you can control. It's nice when it's there, but it can't be the backbone of your energy mix without controllable energy sources, like coal
I get similar results with KWh costs (i.e. energy rather than power), but the sources are more spread out; it’s still more cost effective than coal even when I make conservative estimates about the number of cycles a LiIon can do.
What do you do when it's winter, and there hasn't been any significant wind for several days and batteries are empty ?
All these prices are computed "when there are enough supplies", which is easier to guarantee with coal/gas/oil/nuclear. On the best case scenario, renewable are cheaper than anything else. The issue is that the price of electricity is driven by the hardest watts to create, not the easiest ones.
You turn on the gas plants. That's fine. If you run the gas plants 36 days a year, you've cut emissions by 90%. If overhead means you have to double the amount of emissions (say, to have hot spares), you've still cut emissions 80%.
We don't absolutely have to hit zero to do enormous good to the environment. Cut power plant emissions 80% and it won't be the long pole in the tent any more. The biggest efforts will be in concrete and transportation and agriculture.
We already have the power plants built. We've got plenty of time for things to evolve as solar and other renewables ramp up, and fossil fuels go offline. It's not some kind of knock against renewables if they can't solve 100% of the problem. 90%, or even 80%, is just fine.
If you need to build a gas power plant to compensate for the production solar and wind can't give when you need it, the price per watt of electricity explodes.
Picture this: It's 9PM on a cold winter day, sun has been down for hours and there was not been a lot of wind today. People are home, watching TV and heating their home. Batteries are now empty (they started depleting at around 5Pm when the sun went out). You now need to produce 100% of the peak electricity consumption of the year, using gas, oil, coal, nuclear or hydro.
This scenario shows that whatever you do with wind and solar, you need to be able to produce 100% of the peak electricity consumption with controllable power plants. The cost of wind and solar is not the cost of the power plants vs the cost of the gas power plant it replaces, but on top of it. For every GW of wind you add to the grid, you need to add an equivalent GW from a controllable source just in case. This backup GW won't be used most of the time, but the cost of it should be taken into account when you compute price per GW.
It is unfair to compare the price per GW between solar/wind and gas/nuclear/coal/hydro, when the feature of both are so different. Solar and wind provide amazing ROI, when they want to, not when you need it to. So the cost needs to include the price of the backup system that's going to stay dormant 80% of the time. Ans that significantly change the math of it all.
The only way to get out of this is to either reduce our total energy consumption, so that the current controllable plants can provide enough, and then build solar and wind, to reduce how often we need to rely on them. Or to find a green and controllable energy source, like hydro (which has other issues).
Build more PV. PV is now so cheap that in most places it genuinely makes more sense to build PV based on winter output, with batteries for overnight use, rather than to build coal or nuclear. It’s close either way for gas, but the price trend suggests that even gas will stop being economical this decade.
And by “most places” I include the UK, which is north of the entire contiguous USA.
Europe needs to destroy her cities and give her farmland back to Nature before she criticizes Brazil. Europe has 150 years of industrial revolution grade emissions to atone for.
Europeans systematically killed their fauna and their flora to live a better life and would now like to deny others the same. Well, undo your harm first.
"Fairness" is not a useful concept to apply here. Yes, it's not fair that Ugo the caveman could just bash Uga the cavewoman over the head and rape her while I can't do the same with my neighbour Sally. But that lack of "fairness" is irrelevant given that the thing in question (rape/destroying the environment) is bad.
Indeed it is not, which is why its a tragedy that wealthy countries basically sit around paying lip service to the issue and point finger at some poor farmer god kbow where claiming pollution is his fault
Meanwhile people who control the global financial markets and industry bear no responsibility
I would be far more careful in tossing aside the concept of fairness. Fairness still applies to your cave people. Sexual assault was never fair; it's true that you can't do something earlier people could, but that unfairness is more than weighed about by the fairness granted to Sally.
In this case, fairness would probably look like devoting more resources to poor countries so they don't have to go through the same "destroying the environment" cultural growth phase. First world country growth was predicated on the access to energy afforded to us by selling out the environment. We are attempting to cut off that avenue for other cultures. It seems fair to accelerate them past the point of needing to destroy the environment, rather than telling them they just have to deal with being a backwater since they don't have a way to generate the energy needed to become a bleeding edge society.
In more practical terms, and avoiding the concept of fairness, lesser developed countries aren't going to simply acquiesce and stop. They have no reason to. Cutting off their access to large amounts of energy is going to fling them back into the 1700-1800s. Have you seen The 1% on Netflix? It'll look like that. A small number of highly advanced countries with access to plentiful energy and all the technology that brings, and then a large number of countries that are dirt poor. I would be surprised if you could even manufacture modern medicine without access to large amounts of power.
It will create a global power struggle, and first world nations are going to have to police basically the entire world to ensure there aren't any revolts or nations that are refusing to willingly go back in time.
Energy and forest burning are different issues. Brazil is perfectly capable of becoming a properous country without destroying its rainforests.
If it's practicality you care about, the USA is perfectly capable of unilaterally forcing Brazil to stop destroying rainforests via threat of sanctions or blockades.
Also, just like how rape isn't fair to Sally, nor is rain forest burning fair to the year 2100 Brazilians.
Yeah, being poor doesn't give you the option of having conservation at the top of your list of priorities. Not to mention poor countries don't use all that much energy per capita.
Make of that what you will. I dont think brazil would burn old forrests at the rate they are with US somewhere in the equation. Nor do I think Indonesia would deforrest without the US/EU need for palm oil above all else.
> Yeah, being poor doesn't give you the option of having conservation at the top of your list of priorities.
Yes it does. Very little of todays poverty, particularly in a place like Brazil is of the starvation-level variety and the people burning down the forrests are very much NOT the starving poor, they're on the wealthier side even!
So average person in USA, who is definitely not starving, will finally give up their ridiculous truck that pollutes more than 10 brazilian farmers ever could?
> the people burning down the forests are very much NOT the starving poor
Hmm. Growing up in a developed industrial economy must be lovely. So the communities who've lived in or by said forrests are a non issue? You know, the people who've lived there for centuries if not longer. People to whom the forest isn't just a bunch of trees but home.
Because middle class brazilians in Rio or Cruziero can afford Macdonalds, so there are no poor people and woo woo we can burn down the forest to plant soy and make grazing land for cattle? That's it? Were going to burn millenia old forests just so Macdonalds can make more beef burgers. A fucking burger?
Indonesia is losing their forests to Doritoes. A fucking chip. Future generations better make usuable manure of our bones.
One is confusing between groups and individuals. An individual (e.g. the OP) can have planted several saplings and can thus point fingers (id one holds with these silly heuristics about who is allowed to point out bad things).
The other is that the state of saplings in the USA is irrelevant to whether or not old forests should be burnt down in Brazil.
Well of course. He was attacking Brazil when the US is a far far far worse polluter, so since it wasn't a good-faith debate in the first place, I felt a fallacy or two couldn't make things any worse.
Here it is again, the subtle but completely unfounded nuclear power astroturfing.
Nuclear fission power is economically unfeasible and completely incapable of "saving the climate". It's a complete ruse.
Any new reactor type you'd build now would go online the EARLIEST 10-15 years from now. And then they will never be profitable and you still have no actual proper solution to waste management other than some fluffy marketing slides.
> And letting the nature run its course will, naturally, take millions of years.
Yea, letting physics run it's course will take 100,000 years too with a plutonium half-life of 24,000 years. A country like Germany doesn't have vast desert lands to store dangerous materials *reliably* for that long. It's also not willing to just dump it in third world countries or international waters.
> Yea, letting physics run it's course will take 100,000 years too with a plutonium half-life of 24,000 years. A country like Germany doesn't have vast desert lands to store dangerous materials reliably for that long. It's also not willing to just dump it in third world countries or international waters.
Just burn the waste and distribute it from smokestacks. That's how coal handles its radioactive waste, and that seems to be accepted.
I agree however, that it's hard to argue for nuclear when it takes so long to get plants built that the developers die of boredom before grounds is broken.
I thoroughly agree with you on coal! We need to get away from it as soon as possible. I just do not believe that nuclear fission power is the way anymore. 25 years ago I would have had another opinion entirely because the time frame would have been different.
Let's say I agree to build a modern reactor type today. Planning and construction begin, it doesn't have a host of issues and cost explosions like the "new" Finnish plants [1], problems that are typical for modern large scale engineering projects in Europe.
Then it will go online in 12 years and deliver the megawatts of power as planned. That's 12 years of progress in renewables at the same time. Just look at photovoltaics since 2006: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics and that's just ONE out of many categories of renewables. A decade of progress while monstrous masses of concrete a poured for an 80s power plant design so it doesn't blow up in our faces and make land inhospitable for thousands of years. Is that where we should invest our cognitive energy?
Nuclear waste disposal and upgrading/modernizing the many 1960s reactor designs out there would have been key but it hasn't happened because of cost.
If nuclear was cheap, reliable and environmentally friendly it would have replaced coal a long time ago. But even Western states with tight proliferation control and a strongly embedded infrastructure in the Western security hemisphere are not opting to vastly extend nuclear fission power for a decent number of reasons.
And if in 12 years those photovoltaics somehow haven't replaced coal - maybe the efficiency improvements stop, maybe there's issues with the supply of rare earths, maybe - then we'll be in a fine fix won't we.
Nuclear isn't the only thing that tends to take longer than planned. I would confidently bet that we'll still be running coal in 12 years' time. Certainly I think it's worth hedging against when the cost is building what, a few dozen power plants that follow existing designs?
Nuclear was affordable and effective when countries were building out national programs for nuclear. France was building them at crazy speed, every reactor was identical, safety information and skills were shared.
Then came the age of neoliberalism where public infrastructure for some reason needs to be build with private money for profit. We could have lent government money to the project at 0.1% interest, but instead in UK we built it with private money of 5% interest + profit. On a 50 year project that quadruples your cost. Now ever reactor is a different design with different issues, built by a firm that overpromises and under delivers, mired in contract disputes
That every reactor is too different maybe stems from idiotic regulations, ecohype and nimbyism streching build times so long that every time another one gets started there's a new design available.
And not from financing, although the multidecade stretches do not help that either.
EDIT: And these same delays force operation of 50 year old designs to the failure, just because building some new ones is in fact infeasible. Then those ancient reactors fail, as in Fukushima, and we're onwards on the spiral.
> Any new reactor type you'd build now would go online the EARLIEST 10-15 years
Nuclear is a fairly solved engineering problem (it's problem is public relations and economics). If you start building a reactor today in 10-15 years it will begin producing power consistently and will continue to do so for at least it's design lifetime and probably beyond.
Grid scale battery technology isn't here yet. No one has installed a battery (a grid scale battery is multiple Gwh of storage, the Tesla Australia battery is 194Mwh) with that kind of capacity. Excluding of course pumped hydro which is limited by topological factors.
Why so much fatalism? From what I understand, this seems like a one-off situation, and could swing back into full restoration once the urchins die off from starvation.
If nature is anything, it's most certainly resilient! Mt. Saint Helens erupting caused more pollution than the entire industrial revolution combined, and a year of worldwide lockdown cleared up metric shedloads of air pollution.
Why trust what so-called experts say about 20 years out when their models suck for the next few years?
It’s more than just letting urchins starve. The spines from their dead bodies prevent the bull kelp from establishing their foothold. And ocean warming is also very problematic for the kelp. Much more so than urchins.
I don’t mean to be fatalistic, but I’m realistic. One of my closest friends in the world is a marine biologist studying red abalone on the CA coast. We’ve been discussing this problem for years as it has caused the closure of the fishery, thus eliminating one of our favorite shared pastimes. We WANT to dive for abs again, but all the evidence is pointing to towards an ecosystem where that won’t be possible anytime soon.
I have been diving in the Monterey, CA region since 1999 and have seen the change first hand. Sunflower sea stars are now extinct in the area; I haven't seen one in years. Some of the smaller sea star species have started to gradually recover but they aren't effective at preying on purple urchins. There is a local group culling urchins but they'll only be able to cover a small area.
Same thing in British Columbia: over 90%, 5.7 billion have died since 2013 [1].
When I was a kid in the 90s, and starting to dive in the 2000s, sea stars were everywhere on the ocean floor, even really close to the city center of Vancouver. They were so ubiquitous that they were completely uninteresting to us locals. We would hear that BC was considered world-renowned for scuba diving quality, and think "How dull, it's just a shit ton of sea stars"
(Of course, we were young, stupid, and also called them starfish not sea stars then)
Me and some friends would go camping at an oceanfront spot on Vancouver Island every year, and go crabbing with mixed results. Half of the irritation was sometimes you'd be pulling up what felt like a really heavy crab trap full of goodness (We were always responsible and only kept the males over the legal size), only to find it full of sea stars who chased away the crabs and ate our bait.
Then, about six or seven years ago, the sea stars just...disappeared. And they didn't come back.
I appreciate the suggestion but I would rather focus on gathering data for Project Baseline Point Lobos which is tracking changes at one specific area near Monterey.
I am very excited for the results of the urchin culling experiment Fish and Wildlife has allowed in Monterey. There is debate in the scientific community if allowing the public to kill urchins will hurt or help the cause.
Many divers in the area (mostly from out of town) think they can help the kelp forests by smashing them with whatever tools they can. I have even found a lost hammer while diving a popular site in Monterey.
While smashing effectively ends the life of the urchins, it also releases their spawn and can cause a even worse environmental disaster. It is also not an effective solution for the whole coast and will only work to clear areas frequented by divers.
NZ has a similar problem with urchin ("Kina", in NZ) barrens. The urchins in NZ urchin barrens, as in CA, are malnourished and are subsequently difficult and unproductive to eat as they contain very little actual meat.
This is the sad state of humans trying to help or fix mother nature. In almost every instance, the fix results in one of those "oh, didn't think of that" kind of things. I don't know the lady swallowed the dog to chase the cat to catch the bird to eat the spider to catch the fly. It's a literal nursery rhyme we teach kids.
Survivorship bias, humans make corrective actions to local environments all of the time and there are no noticeable issues. When something goes wrong it’s news though.
We have minimal if any data about how many of the course corrections go well, precisely for that reason. However because we don’t know how many there are, it’s not accurate to claim to know it’s survivorship bias. It could be that, but it could not be. There’s not enough data to make a conclusion.
Disagree - ecologists are specifically categorized as wicked problems (as opposed to ‘tame’ problems like say chess) because they are complex and you never know where the fallout is going to be.
We know if the disasters because we see them go wrong more often than not.
Survivorship bias applies more to things like CEO success stories, startup success stories and sports personalities.
A tiny fraction make it big, and these get studied/reported on.
While that is true of trying to introduce new species to predate over-populated species (or really any novel species introduction), there is a long history of humans successfully managing their own predation to help balance over/under populated species. Obviously we have had failure in this area too but it we do know it is possible for us to do it and improve things.
Technically yes some divers do eat them, but these aren't the same species of urchin that people typically eat as uni sushi. The gonads in purple urchins are so small that's it's hardly worth the effort of cleaning them.
We need more experts and more resources in ecology to detect the main problems, otherwise we could be like a dog chasing its own tail. The problem can be predation, but also could be contamination, or just two degrees more in water temperature blocking the settlement of the tiny "kelpings".
Purple urchins have long been common in the northeast Pacific Ocean as far as British Columbia. They're not migrating any further north but the population has increased because the ecosystem is out of balance.
I feel like we’d have to check around hard to reach places to see if them being gone means dead or if they just adapted and migrated to other areas or deeper seas etc.
One reason we don't have kelp forests in Oregon is due to sea otters having been wiped out, which kept the urchins at bay.[0]
Unfortunately, according to OPs article:
Others have suggested bringing in another kelp forest predator, the sea otter, to help fight back the urchins. The problem with this appears to be that sea otters aren’t so interested in the skinny, starved urchins occupying the most barren areas, reports Anuradha Varanasi for Inverse. A separate study published this week in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests the otters do eat urchins but that they prefer the more well-fed residents of the coast’s remaining kelp forests to the so-called “zombie urchins” clinging to life in the denuded barrens.
There is a company called Urchinomics that is catching the purple urchins, then feeding them in a land based environment, then selling them worldwide as high quality uni.[1][2]
The reason this is critical is that purple urchins can effectively starve themselves and go into hibernation with a virtually empty body. This virtually empty body is not desirable for either (a) traditional fisherman or (b) any predators (e.g. even fish that eat urchin know to not eat the urchins that have overgrazed a kelp forest as they know they are empty.
If Urchinomics can get the unit economics to work out such that there is a financial incentive to catch a significant number of these urchin, that could change this situation.
Thank you for sharing this, I hope they find a California location soon. Because they are filter-feeders I would guess they are as helpful as oyster farms for cleaning the water. As long as they are contained that is.
There are millions and millions of purple urchins along the California coast. Rocks in many areas are literally covered in urchins. In order to harvest them you have to pry them off one at a time so they're not going to die out that way.
I am a diver in NorCal and regularly participate in sea urchin culling.
The state had been horrible at allowing ANY action to combat the kelp forest collapse.
A blight wiped out the sea stars. The lack of sea stars caused a 100x jump in urchin population.
Urchins eat kelp. Worst yet, they only eat the bottom part, and then 99% of the kelp floats away.
The state banned even the most modest actions.
You need a fishing license to harvest urchins.
You could only harvest 20 per day. Recently it’s upped to unlimited though.
You had to harvest the urchin, which is way more involved than simply smashing them with a hammer. Smashing in NorCal is only allowed in a spot in Monterey and Fort Bragg. The myth that smashing leads to spawning was laid to rest long ago and yet the authorities were still paralyzed. The paralysis lasted so long that everything is just a barren desert.
Sea urchins can live 100 years in a semi dormant starvation state. This isn’t some case where letting them starve out for a season will bring back the kelp.
Disagree. In a democracy, the only way to make the important policy changes is for the majority of people to be on board with it. Tiny actions by individuals move the needle of public opinion. Additionally, different individuals reducing their consumption in different ways provides a diversity of ideas which can later inspire the so-called "scientific solutions".
I hear you; and I'm pretty pessimistic that the "democratic" solution will solve anything. Look at covid - the US's approach to mask wearing seems to be what you're proposing - millions of tiny actions by individuals. The result is over half a million people dead. If those deaths were clustered in SF, that would be every man (or every woman) in San Francisco dead from the pandemic. In comparison here in Australia during the entire pandemic we've only lost 900 people to covid. Single cases make the news here.
The difference is that (on this topic) our government has showed real leadership. We haven't left health policy in the hands of millions of individuals. We put health policy in the hands of experts, and then implemented strict policies to get us to 0. Change didn't happen from individuals independently figuring out what to do. Change happened from the country as a whole picking a direction and moving in that direction together.
In comparison, Australia has been utterly appalling with climate change. Its a national embarrassment. I don't eat meat and I don't have a car - but I don't think thats going to matter much in the long run. What we need is to do the same thing for the planet that we did for covid - we need effective leadership on climate change. We need to do it together.
My point was less on the benefits/drawbacks of individual decisions and more on the presence of democracy and therefore the need to convince individuals of public policy to make it happen.
For the record, I think of democracy as a strictly positive thing even when it seems like democratic societies have erred.
Vague inspirational language is exactly what I was talking about. The anti-prosperity gospel won't solve the "mysterious" starfish wasting disease the article mentioned. But it will demoralize, like self-righteous economic shutdowns do.
If I put all my effort into politics and forget everything else, I estimate that my effort will amount to as close to zero as I can calculate.
On the other hand, by just not ordering one Widget off Amazon, I am making a huge impact, if you count all the materials mining, shipping and re-shipping, packaging and re-packaging, and so on.
Your individual reductions in consumption are pointless here. If you just ceased to exist it would not meaningfully move the needle.
At this point we need hard societal pressure via laws to make any kind of statistical difference. I’d prefer someone be a hypocrite pushing for legislation to reduce emissions (e.g. Al Gore on a private jet) than someone who reduces locally and calls it good.
There are just too many people that don’t care for “local action” to stop the impending doom.
Put more constructively, you need to have strongly negative carbon emissions at this point. Pick a carbon intensive company or industry, and work to reduce its emissions. Your individual CO2 emissions are rounding error.
Or better to steer the ship using the levers of power that are available to those in power. Fighting a losing battle results in a loss regardless of how valiant the fight. Do what you can to have the greatest impact, which means working with those in power to make societal change.
Yes. I agree with you. Much better to steer the ship and never hit the iceberg.
Some situations are like a jiu-jitsu match where an opponent can pin you down. In a subset of these situations and unlike in a jiu-jitsu match—you can’t tap out.
Say you’re in one of these situation.
Don’t avoid the feeling provoked by this impending doom. You can’t tap out. You cant restart the match.
In such an encounter, grace might mean to keep fighting. Keep thinking. Keep struggling. Recognize your prison.
Small nitpick: the Titanic tried to steer away from the iceberg too late, and thus the iceberg cut along the side, exposing many more airtight compartments than if they hit head-on.
This in no way detracts from your point - unlike the Titanic, steering away from ecological disaster too late will never make things worse, it just won't be enough - but the metaphor isn't quite apt.
I feel encouraged to see this comment. Thank you for posting it. I've been reading Thomas Merton's _Raids on the Unspeakable_ recently and I sense some of that same heart in what you write.
Individual actions are the raw material of a collective shift in mindset that adds up to hard societal pressure to create laws that do make a difference.
Nope. It doesn’t work that way. Climate change has been mainstream knowledge for 15 years and nothing has meaningfully changed despite plenty of people buying Priuses.
The collective shift in mindset of half of the US didn’t do shit and we’re already past the point of irrevocable damage. Hard decisions need to be made (pressure all countries in the world extremely) and you using the iPhone for a few extra years is just placation to avoid real change.
How do you figure that? If I buy one less Widget, that's one less Widget that needs to be restocked, one less Widget ordered from the factory, one less Widget added to the production requirements estimate, one less Widget's carbon footprint. Seems like simple math to me.
If I tell ten people about my strategy and they buy ten fewer Widgets, that's ten fewer Widgets' worth of carbon footprint.
If you factor in material mining, transportation, production, transportation, storage, transportation, and packaging trash, that's a lot of reduction.
Not only that, my life is simpler, I spend more time making meaning rather than consuming, and am overall happier.
Or... I can waste my time trying to affect the political system, which I will never move a nanometer with all my effort, or affecting the corporations, whom I will also not move a nanometer with all my life's effort, etc.
> How do you figure that? If I buy one less Widget, that's one less Widget that needs to be restocked
But that’s fucking useless. It is simple math and the math is that you’ve moved the needle on carbon output from one company by 0.0000001%.
An advertising campaign that associates that widget with Devil worshippers probably moves the needle two orders of magnitude more than that.
Solving climate change is a global numbers game. If you’re not changing more than your own behavior, you are effectively complicit and not doing anything to stop it.
> If I tell ten people about my strategy and they buy ten fewer Widgets, that's ten fewer Widgets' worth of carbon footprint.
See, but this is the only bit that has any meaningful effect. This is you being political and affecting change.
You’ll quickly realize that your individual reduction is completely irrelevant in total harm you’ve reduced.
The earth has 200 million square-miles of area, so your portion of the 7.6 billion people equates to 0.0263 square miles. Do your part to keep that virtual area as clean as possible!
By not buying a Widget, I'm reducing the number of Widgets ordered by one, the number of Widgets produced by one, and the number of Widgets planned for production by one.
Not only that, but I'm eliminating all the materials mining, shipping, re-shipping, packaging, re-packaging, and so on, which adds up to quite a bit per Widget.
I think you are grossly underestimating the impact of one un-ordered Widget.
I am not trying to help kelp specifically. I wasn't even aware of this particular thing happening. But I know for sure that every time I spend a dollar on something new, there is a direct chain of multiple events set in motion which does harm to my own habitat as well as those closely related to me.
It actually does make sense. Overconsumption is a huge contributor to the problems that we see today. People buying a lot of junk that they don't need leads to wasted resources and overexploited ecosystems.
Mathematically, using a metaphor, it's like your family is having a budgeting crises, your spouse spends 10k/year on coffee, your kids spend 50k/year on dog patreons, and your accountant's only recommendation is for _you_ to personally look out for and pick up every penny you find in a parking lot.
I don't think your metaphor is in any way accurate, I think it is disingenious and an attempt to disempower the individual.
It's more like both my spouse and I and my kids are each over-spending on a daily basis, and I tell them that we all have to cut our spending, and start doing it first, leading by example, and not buying two lattes per day.
I'm not picking pennies in the parking lot, I'm not spending dollars on things, literally! I am amazed at the level of inaccuracy in your metaphor, thank you for that.
The article isn't about your neuroses, it's about a specific chain reaction of sea life. Soothing your guilt with anticonsumptionism doesn't solve the questions raised.
The most effective thing is probably banding together to vote in politicians that will actually do something about climate change.
It’ll be at least another 8 years until the US does that (unless Biden ends up changing course), and that’s way past the point of no return for the planet.
Even if Biden isn’t reelected in 4 years, it will just mean we end up with an even more climate hostile president.
In the very short term, people should be protesting in the streets to end the filibuster, and then immediately fund primary challenges to any democrat the stands in the way of the green new deal.
That's pretty cynical. Biden says he wants to end fossil fuel consumption by 2050. You might say it's insufficiently aggressive but it's also still 100% impossible so long as we have an opposition party unwilling to even acknowledge the problem.
The day I proposed to my wife on a beach north of Monterey, we found a nearly perfect abalone shell on the beach. To this day she uses it to store her jewelry in. Saddens me to think that no one else will ever find one of these mother of pearl treasures there again without the kelp forests intact.
The larger abalone had already been wiped out in the Monterey area by sea otters and withering syndrome even before the purple urchins ate most of the kelp. Otters are the primary predators for abalone and when the otters were hunted nearly to extinction then the abalone population exploded. But then otters were protected so they ate many of the abalone, and withering syndrome killed others. I still occasionally see small abalone while diving.
Fukushima happened in 2011. This article states the dieoffs of starfish and kelp began 8 years ago. I wonder if there is a connection? Considering all the Plutonium flooding into the pacific. Plutonium the most TOXIC substance known to man. Its not even the radiation, its chemically toxic.
Plus other mass mortalities of marine animals in Peru, Chile , etc that where blamed to climate and put under the rug. I'm not denying a role of climate change on that, just that we don't know what really happened but they positively happened after Fukushima.
Marine pathology is not easy, invertebrate viruses are practically unexplored, and you need to allow a resources to study that (Hint: Will not happen, because... hum, would be embarrasing)
This is unbelievably sad. I learned to scuba dive in southern California in the early 90s. Kelp was ubiquitous back then, and it harbored all manner of marine life. Swimming through a kelp forest was a magical experience.
five years ago half the coast of australia suffered massive dieback of mangroves, coral and sea grass.
The worst I saw was mangroves around the Gulf of Carpentaria, and my immediate assumption was the dirty lead mine nearby, but then people around the country started connecting dots to other intertidal and coastal failures that started to all line up until the entire northern coast was implicated.
The broad impact, coupled with records, suggested that this was a response to a season of low rainfall in the context of sustained elevated sea temperatures. recovery has been very gradual, as predicted.
It wouldn't be helpful in this case, but I've long thought that the US should create marine "national parks" in the coastal waters. Within those parks, no fishing would be allowed, and no motorized boats.
There's precedent, Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument covers the uninhabited northwestern islands of the Hawaiian archipelago, their surrounding waters, and Midway Atoll. It's several times the size of the state of Hawaii.
I spent a lot of time kayaking around Monterey in 2016.
A couple of observations.
We were constantly reminded to maintain distance from endangered Sea Otters.
The Sea Otters were pretty cool, but it quickly became annoying at trying to avoid and maintain distance from them as they seemed to be as common as cockroaches.
And the kelp.
Trying to avoid the aforementioned Sea Otters required kayaking thru massive kelp beds, which was like kayaking thru spaghetti.
This was along Cannery Row and the local Marine Reserve.
I certainly hope it’s as frustratingly awesome full of sea otters and kelp like it was 5 years ago.
I saw a bunch of sea otters in that area today. The population seems to be fairly healthy, although it's difficult for researchers to get a precise count. Kelp forests have been reduced.
I visited Monterey in 2014 and what really struck me were the skinny, dying, and dead seals on the rocks of the boat harbor. Perhaps it was always that way but it really seemed like the dying gasps of an ecosystem wiped out by human activity. I had to actually stop and cry for a while at the horror of it all. Then I went to the museum at the mission and saw how little space and time they gave to the native people who once lived there. A few quick mentions at the beginning. Loads of stories about Spanish and American conquerors, and then a sad diorama showing their beautiful hand made garments right by the exit when the kids are tired and everyone wants to get to the next place.
If I learned one thing from Octonauts videos, it's that sea otters eat purple sea urchins. So while sea urchins are terrible for kelp forests, they're great for large sea otter populations.
I mean you can't have 8 billion needy, constantly consuming humans for 60/70 years and somehow have a sustainable, vibrant and healthy ecosystem.
You can't have all the modern day luxuries (cars, airplanes, electricity 24/7) and somehow expect everything to just "hum" along.
I think news reports like these will become more common, more frequent and a natural byproduct of how things are now, regardless as to whether human activity/climate change is the cause.
I am uncertain about this whole "2030" neutrality thing, why not 2025? Why not next year? We're not very good at setting ambitious targets nor making people suffer for the benefit of nature (I'm sure somewhere there is a "link" between this event and the devastating impact humans are having on the natural world as we know it)
Even a pandemic didn't have much effect whereas in previous times tens of millions would've been expected to die.
Cue another attenborough documentary telling us how everything is basically screwed...Somehow he would convince us about how fossil fuels is directly responsible for this activity taking place...
> You can't have all the modern day luxuries (cars, airplanes, electricity 24/7)
I'm still feeling this argument out a bit, but... what can an individual actually do about it? Even if you look beyond how little any individual family contributes to pollution, in comparison to even some of the simplest industrial ventures.
I can't do without electricity 24x7, because I live in the north. I'd freeze to death. Think the recent crap Texas had to go through, for around 8 months of the year.
I can't do without a car because my commute is around 20 miles one way. I - quite literally - can't afford to live closer to work; the prices are on par with the bay area ($600,000 1,000 sqft condos), despite living in a very sparsely populated state with "competitive" wages in the $80k range for experienced software developers.
I could (and have) done without airplanes, but the alternative (if I want to keep my job) is to drive for around 18 hours. Not terribly friendly. The bus is closer to 48 hours, with prices on par with the airlines.
It is, for all intents and purposes, impossible for me (for a vast majority of people, I'd posit) to live without a job, without electricity, and without a car. And, realistically, I have very little control over my house, my car, my food, etc; these are instead largely based on my salary.
I get what's been made available by the market to me at a price that I can afford. It's not as if the market will change to less profitable products just because they're a bit better for the world. And it's not as if I can suddenly afford more expensive products just because they're better for the world.
Almost everything you describe is a product of bad urban/house planning.
House planning could require far less electricity, but it's not required by building codes, and the market doesn't acknowledge its value.
Urban planning puts workplaces far away from residential areas because they used to be heavy polluters, but never stopped doing it when workplaces improved.
My workplace office is 1km away from my residence. Someone had the smarts to put a small amount of office buildings in an otherwise residential neighborhood (as well as a few shops). I moved here for the job - it was the obvious choice.
Mixed use zoning has made it so I don't just not need a car, I don't even use public transit often.
I think "The only way out is through" meaning, we will not solve the problem by consuming less or becoming primitive. We will solve the problem by developing through the environmental constraints and replacing our harmful behaviors with better ones. For example, solar, wind, nuclear, and one day fusion providing power instead of coal, oil, and natural gas. Electric cars instead of internal combustion and so on.
People just are not going to use less stuff. In fact, they're going to use more. There are billions of people in the developing world who use a lot less energy and stuff than people in the developed world - but they are developing and will come to use and consume more and more. We won't impoverish ourselves, we can't ask the developing world to stay poor, and the population is growing all the time.
Plans or hopes that involve consuming less are unrealistic. The only way to save the environment is better technology and geo-engineering.
Agreed on needing better tech and the futility of trying to forcefully lower living standard.
However I feel there are also choices that align with all the goals. Such as spending less on cheap disposable shit (which is so hard to do in our current environmenr) and using the materials in higher quality durable things that also offer a better experience. Not to mention shifting some consumption to services like amazing food and culture.
The comment I'm replying to is discussing things like not flying or not using electricity. I'd describe forgoing modern comforts as primitive.
While infinite growth is obviously not possible I think we are a long way from the population that we could reasonably support on a still healthy planet if we had the technology to do so. I also think that in a hundred years or maybe a little less we'll start to get big opportunities for growth in space, both in the form of doing manufacturing off world and creating new population centers.
I think it's going to need both. We are in a phase where we can basically do the low hanging fruits. I assume we'll be able to save a lot of CO2 that way. But the goal is ZERO. I just can't imagine a world with net zero CO2 and everybody is driving a Tesla. The mining, fabrication, transport, materials is all very resource hungry. I think current studies suggest an electric car uses about half as much CO2 in it's lifetime. I'm sure it can be improved.. but ZERO ?
Cap and trade, and then gradually lower the cap (driving the price of emitting carbon up). When a lot of money is on the line people tend to get creative.
There’s no physical law that says we must put CO2 in the air to unlock these resources. With the right incentives people will figure it out.
Never buy another car. Fix what you have when you need to.
Eat less meat. Live principled- not that you don't but doing these things is almost contagious. I notice friends and family following my lead. Consuming less, buying less.
> Never buy another car. Fix what you have when you need to.
In my country most cars are bought used, imported from another country (usually Germany, sometimes the US) after they've deemed them not worth fixing (i.e. salvage). Whatever is broken is fixed up, tested for safety and emissions (we are an EU country), and sold to someone here. Labour costs are quite low (compared to Western EU & US), there's a great availability and parts, and people are quite skilled here, so pretty much anything can be done.
It used to be common to import cars from the UK (for some reason, much cheaper 2nd hand than the rest of Europe), and convert them from right to left hand drive - but a few years ago the government said they wouldn't allow those cars to be re-registered, which put an end to that.
Recently a friend had to fix the Webasto unit (diesel pre-heater) on his car and found someone who admitted his 'hobby' was fixing them. €100 later and what he thought he needed to replace was as good as new.
When the cars come here they often already have multiple hundreds of thousands of kilometers on the clock, but they are usually 'fixed' so who knows how much they've really done. Said friend's odometer says it has done 350k, but we assume it's closer to 500k.
Once cars are deemed salvage here (usually at the point where the floor is rusting out, or the frame has been damaged in an accident), parts are stripped and resold on the 2nd+ hand market, or the cars are shipped to Central Asian countries where the same all happens again.
Anyway, I'm not really sure what my point is, but it seems relevant to this. If you really want to you can keep an old car running, whether it's economical is a different story (I imagine in the US with higher labour costs and lower availability of spare parts, maybe not). But you also need to consider how things are used after your life, cars for sure do not just get melted down when you declare them worthless (one man's trash, is another man's treasure definitely applies here). I'd imagine consumer electronics and appliances are much worse for the environment in this regard than cars.
Not possible to do myself, and it's not feasible to pay someone to do it. I don't have the tools, the electronics, nor the replacement parts (not to mention knowledge or time) to keep a modern car going for the remaining 30-50 years of my lifetime. Attempting to fix it at the point where everything is falling apart becomes impractical (as I keep trying to tell my dad when he's spending even more money to make a '79 truck run).
Not to mention that getting those parts custom made or shipped to you from across the country incurs its own environmental penalty.
> Eat less meat.
I've found that, to keep a balanced diet without meat, it's quite a bit more expensive, and exceptionally more time consuming. Then there's the health issues (like those outlined in the scar study featured on HN a week or so ago).
I absolutely could compromise my health and lifespan for the sake of the world, but I'm not going to.
> Consuming less, buying less.
There's a lower limit to how much less you can do and still remain as a healthy, productive adult, but I agree that it's a good thing to do for many reasons; it's something I try and do.
Even if I took every step outlined, it would have, effectively, no impact on the environment.
Forget all the pessimism and misanthropy. It's never going to solve our problems. Instead, focus on making things that make people more efficient. We won't ever be able to guilt-trip and shame our way out of climate change, but we just might be able to engineer our way out instead.
And, if you have ample means, have as many kids as you can support in your chosen lifestyle, so they will grow up to invent more and better policies and technologies to make the future a place we actually want to live in again.
I used to be strongly opposed to this mindset, but living next door to neighbours with land rovers, a mountain of turf cut from a "protected" bog for heating (hey, it's free, and you get to destroy wetland habitate _and_ emit more than coal!), and _SEVENTEEN KIDS_ (because God made them or something). I really am doubting if the few people who actually give a shit having _fewer_ kids is the answer. We need to outcompete people like quiverfull.
How ironic considering that the very source of earths problems are because of humans. Somehow, the solution is more. Never a better response from, a human.
This misanthropy is self-defeating and accomplishes nothing besides making the holder feel smug and superior.
Be honest: the entire species isn’t going to be persuaded to stop reproducing to save kelp forests. You know this is true as well as I do. Nor is everyone going to get rid of all their possessions and return to preindustrial life. Only a few people want to do this, and since it doesn’t scale, it doesn’t work.
Fifty years of this moral pleading to reduce consumption and reproduction has done jack shit to help the environment. Eight billion people want a developed-world affluent lifestyle and each and every one of them will personally guillotine you if you try to deny it to them. Preventing this desire is a lost cause.
Given that humanity stubbornly will not listen to you, and given that your odds of establishing a totalitarian state to force them to do so are long, it is time to look for other solutions. If humans are going to be here and are going to demand affluence, we desperately need to find ways to deliver that without destroying the biosphere. And having fewer kids will not help with that—in fact it’ll hurt. The more minds we can focus on the problem, the better.
It will not be easy and there is no promise of success, but it is better than a cause that is already lost.
When things go extinct without human presence, it’s a morally neutral event. It’s just something that happens. No one cries for the trilobites.
When you say the source of earth’s problems are because of humans, I believe you’re right but not for the reason you think. Earth doesn’t have problems. Earth simply abides. Humans on earth, they have belief systems that consider certain changes to the planet problems. In that sense humans are the cause of the problems. Without humans to care about it, it’s just a change, not a problem.
Yeah, that struck me as odd too. The biggest thing anyone can do to reduce their future carbon footprint is usually to have fewer or no children.
That's a pretty big thing to ask, though, as children are pretty central to most people's lives.
It's an interesting point, though: is it better long term for environmentally-conscious people to have fewer or more children? If they have fewer, then most of the children born will be to parents who are not environmentally-conscious, and will likely grow up without an ethos of reducing their consumption, which will negatively affect public policy. But if environmentally-conscious people have more children, they will add to the drain on the planet, but raise kids who hopefully will grow up to influence public policy in the direction of less consumption. Not sure which choice will be a net benefit, but I suspect the kind of person who would make their child-bearing choices primarily on the basis of environmental impact is uncommon enough that it wouldn't make much of a difference either way.
>It's an interesting point, though: is it better long term for environmentally-conscious people to have fewer or more children?
Earth has produced a grand total of one species that even has the potential to be effective stewards. That's us. Earth is already on the far backside of how much longer it will be habitable due to the Sun. And I see no reason to think that any other intelligence that did evolve here wouldn't be beset by the same problems we have now.
So (IMO) intelligent, conscientious people having fewer children helps nothing. We (humans) are the best thing our biosphere has got, by a long shot, in terms of long-term preservation of life, which is something that I personally think is of great importance.
But is it? I thought it was because of peoples and more to the point corporations and government "excessive" consumption of resources....? I'd argue kids actually (can) diminish use of resources by combining 2 (a couple) individuals in a smaller (spatial)unit sharing meals, going out/traveling less,
... also the happiness, anger,sadness and whole other spectrum of emotions one is directly confronted with when having kids helps with entertaining empathy...
>I've found that, to keep a balanced diet without meat, it's quite a bit more expensive, and exceptionally more time consuming.
I’d be interested in what you consider “balanced”. I’ve found that when my diet is almost exclusively plants my grocery bill was nearly halved. I’ve even found it’s cheaper to by from higher end organic grocery stores than Walmart supercenters when I exclude meat. The scales tip the other way when I buy processed or boxed vegetarian/vegan food.
The GP stated that they live in "the North". Depending on which country that is, that may very well indicate that quite a few foodstuffs are more expensive (and environmentally damaging) due to transport from areas where it can grow, or it may simply not be available.
I couldn't have a balanced and nutritionally complete diet without mean, if I stuck to what I can obtain from local sources or what's available at the same or lower price than meat. Also, most of the stuff that is available seems to be based on Soy produced abroad, and then shipped here.
With that taken into account, I'll stick to having some meat in my diet and keeping both costs and the CO2 footprint down. After all, simply reducing the meat consumption would probably have a large effect on it's own.
>most of the stuff that is available seems to be based on Soy produced abroad
This makes me think you may have been falling into the mindset that you either need to eat equivalent protein as a meat diet or were biasing towards processed foods which tend to rely heavily on soy. Personally, I don’t like the taste of those and I found they tend to be more expensive. Trying to make a facsimile of one diet with another is difficult.
I can’t speak more to the OPs geography without specifics but for the vast amount of the “north” in the US, it’s not much of a problem. Of course, it’s all relative to personal goals.
Regardless, I think you’re right in just reducing meat consumption is a more pragmatic approach for most. I think both issues speak to the need to adjust what the “norm” is, both for health and environmental reasons.
Frankly all of this advice sounds a lot like “don’t water your lawn in a drought” while the almond farmers down the road continue to guzzle it up. One tends to throw their arms up in exasperation and drown their lawn in water out of sheer hopelessness.
> I've found that, to keep a balanced diet without meat, it's quite a bit more expensive, and exceptionally more time consuming.
Mass produced meat is cheap because you don't pay it in $ but in pollution and animal suffering.
I was a "ah whatever they're just animals" guy for a long time, but once you do your research it's basically impossible to eat cheap meat again. It's jot even a question of polluting less, it repulses me now
Do what you want others to do as well. Yes you can't change everything yourself, but as a community you can. This is a problem of individualism. You can't fix that with more individualism.
> I've found that, to keep a balanced diet without meat, it's quite a bit more expensive, and exceptionally more time consuming.
Do you just gnaw on raw steak from the dumpster? I have been a vegetarian since 2009 mostly because it is so quick and convenient. Other than fruit and shelled nuts, I cannot think of anything faster and simpler than opening a can of beans. Frozen vegetables come pre-chopped, you just put them in a frying pan. If you are concerned about your health and lifespan, you should become vegan, like I did in 2017. It is the fastest, easiest way to lower your cholesterol and improve your cardiovascular function. I did not expect my exercise performance or subjective feeling to improve as much as it did. Anyway, here is a good source for ideas: https://nutritionfacts.org/
In exchange for sacrificing what many people feel is a vital component of life you could have a completely insignificant impact on the environment!
Also, compare the birth rate per woman in the US (1.73) to somewhere like Niger (7). Getting Western populations to decline faster will not have any meaningful effect on total human population.
The average American's carbon footprint is 190x that of the average Niger citizen. Until that changes, population growth in Niger isn't a worry from a climate change perspective. Though it could still cause geopolitical instability in that country and its neighbors.
Unless you think that Niger will persist in poverty forever, or that people born in Niger never move to the US or Europe, then yes, it's still a worry.
It's pretty well-established that a nation's fertility reduces as it grows richer. So Niger will either remain poor but irrelevant to climate change. Or it'll leave poverty behind, but also cut its birth rate.
Either way, only what developed countries (and China, India, Brazil, maybe Nigeria and Indonesia) do today matters in the fight against climate change. There's no one else to point fingers at, unless you're looking for an excuse to do nothing.
As a percentage of total population, the number of people who emigrate from a poor country like Niger to a developed country is quite small. And they'd likely be poor there too, and consume fewer resources on average.
By the time the developing world develops and slows their birth rate they'll have a massive population. They have a big population now and are growing fast. If we don't actually solve global warming the addition of billions more wealthy people will be a huge environmental burden.
I think "doing nothing" is what people who advocate reduction of consumption and having fewer kids are doing. Those plans won't be implemented and they won't work. What I'm advocating is technological development to solve the problems related to global warming.
> I think "doing nothing" is what people who advocate reduction of consumption and having fewer kids are doing. What I'm advocating is technological development to solve the problems related to global warming.
You may think so but that's not the case. I don't know of too many vegan-organic-bike-riding-hippy types who think we shouldn't invest in grid-scale storage, renewable power, carbon capture, or more efficient heating & cooling, manufacturing, or transportation systems. Arguably the only tech many of them oppose is nuclear power.
We need both - reduction of consumption and technological development. People who think just one or the other will be enough are deluded.
(Voluntary) reduction of consumption has the side-effect that the electorate becomes more agreeable to measures such as carbon taxes. An SUV and burger-loving electorate will never vote for them, because they would make SUVs and burgers more expensive. Without carbon taxes, there's no market mechanism to control emissions. And there's less funding for technological development or subsidies to green tech.
Bitcoin is closer to a deity for which people sacrifice their electricity as an offering. Meanwhile Americans are merely fulfilling their selfish desires. Bitcoin can work with 1 KW of power just as well as it can work with 1 TW of power.
And what about all the crap America imports from all over the world? (I use "America" as a shorthand for the entire developed world. We're all responsible)
I keep being told that America doing anything to reduce emissions is pointless "because China builds a new coal plant ever hour" or something factoid like that. But China does a substantial portion of the world's manufacturing. So if you're giving America's emissions a pass, you should give China a pass as well, right?
My point is that we are actually under-counting our CO2 emissions (if we simply go by emissions per capita) because we consume more imported goods from other countries that have expended CO2 to produce them than we export.
Niger is actually a great example for illustrating that better health (e.g. infant mortality rate) and economic outlook results in dramatically falling birth rates. Current birth rate is 6.7, but it was 7.5 only ten years ago: https://knoema.de/atlas/Niger/Fertilit%c3%a4tsrate
In my view the people of the developing world have their challenge - figuring out how to make their people wealthy, healthy, educated, and safe. People in the developed world have the challenge of figuring out how to scale. The answer to scaling cannot be "Maybe we'll just have fewer people or be poor."
While I don't agree on the premise here. There's never gonna be the one thing solving the whole problem. It's gonna be the sum of a million little things. Don't let good be the enemy of perfect.
That’s a weird argument to make. When people care about “the environment” they usually mean something like “keep the planet pleasant for humans”. Sure the humanity can commit collective sacrificial suicide to “preserve the environment”, but to what end? The cockroaches will do just fine either way.
I just find it amusing that the very source of the problem (humans) are themselves positing that they are also part of the solution.
Why kid ourselves? 8+ billion humans are going to consume, and keep consuming, endlessly. The ONLY actual solution that involves humans is expansion. We either expand to another planet / galaxy, or we ride this one out to its (and our) death.
That's why we should prioritize science more as a collective. We need more Elon Musks with giant aspirations to really move the needle.
The so-called problem is only a problem because humans deem it such.
Does the earth differentiate between malaria and kelp forests? No. Humans differentiate between them, actively trying to eliminate one and wringing our hands and trying to prevent the destruction of the other.
To call it “a problem” is to implicitly assert dominion over the land, sky and sea while pretending that you are not.
That's quite deluded. Elon Musk has done less than nothing to make moving to another planet feasible, despite all his grandomania dreams. We are thousands of years away from any notion of expansion beyond Earth. Even if he were to magically get a handful of people living on Mars (he won't) that is not going to bring us even an inch closer to something like a sustainable Mars colony.
And no, human beings do not naturally "consume and consume endlessly". In fact, the vast majority of those 8 billion people (say, 7.9 billion of them, or maybe 7.5 billion if you want) are consuming a fraction of the total resources. The vast majority of climate change is due to the richest ~10-20% in the richest countries on Earth. One way or another, this state of affairs will end in the next 50 years at most. Hopefully it will end in a more egalitarian society that respects the environment.
A race that can conceive of no other good than itself is locked into a certain kind of death spiral, as it will destroy everything around itself to make more "good". With our global reach and our local incentives spurring ever more consumption, we are headed for a very stark reckoning with the finite resources of our planet.
This is commonly done under the assumption that your kid is an average polluter and that you cannot teach your kid to cause less pollution. For many people that is true. I kind of doubt that it is true for me.
Does nature and beauty matter if there are no sentient beings to observe it?
When many (most?) people talk about mitigating or reversing climate change, their main goal is the benefit to humanity. Sure, there is some level of empathy and caring for the species going extinct every year, but even part of that is only as far as how a healthy, diverse biosphere better supports human life.
Global civilization has a long history of emptying pristine environments of sentient beings and not realizing what it has done...we have no monopoly on sentience or beauty. We are just a small part of nature.
Or just get an electric car (plug-in hybrid if you're worried). It's already less than half the emissions of a conventional new car. And if you keep the car for a significant length of time, you'll have beat the emissions of even just keeping your existing crappy used conventional car.
Get politically engaged with organisations that are demanding systemic change
EDIT: I don't see what is negative or controversial about this suggestion. The commenter says they cannot do the right thing because of how the system works and what options it makes available to them and at what price. So in that case we must all do work to change the system. The market is currently dictated by many different policies and legislation, causing most things you buy to be artificially cheap or expensive in one way or another. We can change this through policy or other means to make carbon products more expensive -- driving more expensive while clean transit is cheap, inner city housing cheaper than suburban sprawl, etc.
Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number--
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you--
Ye are many -- they are few.
People lived in the north prior to the invention of electricity, so it's possible. Maybe more difficult now due to the quantity of firewood that would be needed with a larger population? Architecture (and dense urban development) plays an important role in electricity-free livability across various climate conditions. Some buildings work well in the cold, some work well in the heat. That's not to say you as an individual can address these problems, but society as a whole can design urban systems which support low-energy living in even difficult conditions.
> but society as a whole can design urban systems which support low-energy living in even difficult conditions.
What's the forcing function? It's already been proven that a global climate crisis is not enough to move society. It's not profitable enough to convince corporations to do it. The 0.1% have no cause to do it; even the humanitarians among that group have much better investments they can make.
EDIT: Also, in the past, living in the north without electricity was managed by burning wood and coal. Given the significant increase in population the impact to the environment of burning all that would be irrecoverable on its own.
>It's not profitable enough to convince corporations to do it.
Can policy not make it profitable? It seems like regulation can be a means of creating market incentives. It worked well for leaded gas, I tend to think a carbon tax/market may work
People lived in the north without electricity but they've NEVER lived in the north without fire. And there aren't enough trees in the north. Iceland (for instance) cut all of theirs down for heating and other uses. Similar to the British Isles. They turned to burning peat and coal to stay warm (etc). Others have mentioned whale blubber.
Unless you live near a hot springs, electricity is actually the best we've got for staying warm in the north with the least carbon emissions. Nuclear, wind, hydro, or geothermal are all valid options for producing this electricity in the North. Probably in combination and probably with some storage (batteries plus occasional hydrogen?) and heatpumps to increase the efficiency. So in fact, USE electricity.
In the Global South, solar reigns supreme as far as the least expensive energy source.
Get an electric car. Even a plug-in hybrid is good enough to cover your commute. There are a bunch of used Volts and Bolts out there that are quite affordable, and even entry-level new Teslas are no more expensive than the average new vehicle.
I sympathize with you because the environmentally minded are telling you to do the impossible and claiming that electric cars are a cop out or whatever. They aren't. It's actually easy.
your situation is pretty common. it has a small effect, but vote for candidates who will reduce car dependency and support public transport measures. the developed world got this right in the early 20th century, we can do it again.
The best solution, AFAICS, is to push for space exploration. In the meantime, if you're single, you could try to live in a more dense downtown location where living car-free is practical. I'm not sure that would be a good idea if you had kids though.
Or get an electric car. Even with embodied emissions, it's half (or less) of the emissions of a conventional car. And improving over time. (In the US, emissions per kWh of electricity have dropped about 30% over the last 10 years alone.)
Living in a dense neighbourhood where you don't need to commute by car is more efficient still. But yes, if that isn't an option, an electric car, preferrably a Tesla so you can indirectly support Musk's space exploration goals, seems like the next best option.
20 miles is doable with an eBike or speed pedelec. Probably not as environment-friendly as a normal bike, but probably beats a car. And it’s healthier.
The only thing that can be done is have fewer children. Everything else is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
The good news is that this is already happening in most places. The bad news is that population growth is still out of control in Africa and parts of Asia, and may lead to a environmental crisis before population growth gets under control.
And yet, those places in Asia and Africa are much less of a problem for the environment than we are in Europe and the USA.
Raw population numbers are not the biggest concern. Consumption and excessive luxury, wasteful production practices and burying all of these under the rug are the root of all these problems
And as it turns out, it's your childhood friend that get to raise those children and not you, so if you wanted to help posterity then we'll have to hope your friend isn't a climate change denier or something.
I expect that we're not even detecting most collapses like these. It's like when your garage is on fire but you're in the bedroom on the other side of the house. It starts to smell funky but you're not yet aware that your whole house will be gone in the next hour
> I am uncertain about this whole "2030" neutrality thing, why not 2025? Why not next year?
"next year" for a politician is "right now". "in 2030" is "never" since they'll be long retired.
There is a funny thing happening right now in France, most politicians from the 70s, 80s,&c. are coming out saying we should focus on climate change, the very same people who actively participated in worsening the situation back in the days. They only wake up now because their life is basically over and they want to rip some last minute karma points. Short term individual goals will always defeat long term global ones
The cause of the wasting symptom is still unknown, that's why the link in the article leads to a school that is looking for specimens to analyze.
It would be very surprising, to me at least, to find ultimately humans did not contribute to this chain of events. Whether it's something like microplastics causing the lesions on the star fish or water temperature/chemical concentration leading to some fungal spore growing, I suspect ancient kelp forests aren't vanishing without our help.
This is an entirely different point than mine about harvest.
It is entirely possible it is in some way related to human activity. It is also possible that it is completely unrelated. Booms, busts, and radical ecosystem changes do happen all the time in nature.
As a man of a science background, nothing is impossible it's just highly unlikely.
If you've been watching the changes in the aquatic habitat and the sea life populations they becoming simple / basic and more homogeneous as a function of changing water temperatures (and harvesting of sea life without the ability to replenish).
I won't disagree that it is possible virus or range of other possibility - I am not providing an answer. However it's a very high probability that the natural ability for that ecosystem to defend against the virus (if it was) was likely impeded by human impacts which change the water temperature and the species of life that live in that area.
We could posit many different theories, the fact is that nature is changing rapidly under our watch and to insinuate that it is a natural occurrence is disengeinuine and irresponsible at best and seems to be the push of a false narrative to undermine the consensus in the scientific community.
How do we know that? I’m not disagreeing with you- but I can’t imagine any historic evidence could rule out the existence of a highly volatile and cyclical population change.
I think that mindset is what has led us to the current predicament we're now facing.
We have to understand the connection between a seemingly "innocent" event such as throwing trash in a random place and something else happening thousands of miles away - the events can be interconnected and the various documentaries have been trying to make us think about that.
If our activity causes warming that causes more storms that causes species to migrate earlier to different parts of the globe than usual that causes unpredictable food for other animals which they were relying on and have done for years, which in turn means they can't reproduce or sustain their cubs meaning other animals might suffer as a result and suddenly the entire chain is broken, disjointed and collapses.
Humans have no idea how fragile the ecosystem is or how resilient it may be (since we've never had this many humans living at once, consuming at the rates we are and causing the warming we've been witnessing).
The fact that events can sometimes have unintuitive consequences does not make it rational to claim two random things are connected and ignore all the science we do have.
The sea star wasting may be tied to global warming or not and there are some plausible hypothesis. That said, there is no credible theory which ties it to overfishing.
We're pretty bad at managing wild resources, but then again, we're pretty bad at saving them as well. For example, the same marine mammal act which saved sea otters from extinction has also allowed for the overpopulation of harbor seals which is going to drive the southern resident orcas into extinction. And the fisheries systems that we've built to save salmon and steelhead populations have resulted in less genetic diversity in wild populations that make them more susceptible to disease and predation. Not that I have an answer to this, just a little frustrated that we didn't care about this stuff sooner, and had a more developed body of science on how to deal with these things.
The article mentions orcas slightly, but it is more about the effect of the marine mammal act on salmon populations. The effect on orcas is mostly implied, it is fairly well known that decreased availability of their primary food source (salmon) is causing their near extinction.
I can confidently say that I personally saw a sea otter about 15 miles north of Santa Barbara about 5 months ago that was snacking on purple sea urchins. It would go down, come up, do something, and repeat, and I came across several very-recently-eaten purple urchins washed up along the beach on my walk that morning.
I also pretty regularly collect urchins in that kelp forest, purple and red in that area, and the ones the otter were taking were smaller than the ones I would have chosen. So, at the least, there's at least one sea otter that particularly cares to each some sea urchins, and one human that cares to each the others.
For a somewhat encouraging counterpoint to this statement, check out the book "More From Less." It describes a lot of positive trends including decreasing demand for many resources whose extraction is damaging to the environment. Some examples: we farm far less land in the United States than we used to while producing more food, and that unused area slowly reverts to forest; we use less metal to make containers for the same volume of liquid. There's still plenty to worry about, but more positive signs than you'd think.
> we use less metal to make containers for the same volume of liquid.
But we use x% more containers every year. This is exactly like plane engines getting x% more efficient, it doesn't matter if you double the number of flights over the same period.
You can always make micro adjustments here and there but it won't do much in the long run, they just give us excuses to stay collectively lazy. If your house is on fire, throwing water at it with a table spoon instead of a tea spoon won't do much of a difference.
It's much easier to pat ourselves on the back than look at the harsh truth... there is no more room for being optimistically stupid
The point is that overall demand for many specific resources has peaked. Feel free to argue with the book's research, but here's the thesis:
-------
"In recent years we’ve seen a different pattern emerge: the pattern of more from less. In America—a large, rich country that accounts for about 25 percent of the global economy—we’re now generally using less of most resources year after year, even as our economy and population continue to grow. What’s more, we’re also polluting the air and water less, emitting fewer greenhouse gases, and seeing population increases in many animals that had almost vanished. America, in short, is post-peak in its exploitation of the earth. The situation is similar in many other rich countries, and even developing countries such as China are now taking better care of the planet in important ways."
Peaked for who ? Wait for India and Africa to catch up with US lifestyle, that's when things will start getting interesting. We over polluted for the last 100+ years, even if we start plateauing we're still in for a bad time (and we're not even plateauing)
It's easy to save a few grams of metal here and there and ban plastic straw when we already live like kings while the rest of the world is barely starting to access the lifestyles we had in the 60s.
Peaked for the United States, which represents something like 25% of world economic activity. That's also accounted for the in the book. You're right about certain long-lived problems like CO2 because of how long it takes them to clear from the environment, but that doesn't mean that it isn't good news that we've decreased our consumption/pollution of a particular resource. It's certainly better than continuing to increase demand. The farmland one is a great example: I defy you to explain to me how it isn't good news that the amount of farmland in the United States has decreased by an area equivalent in size to the state of Washington. Blind optimism is indeed stupid, but willful pessimism is equally stupid.
> I defy you to explain to me how it isn't good news that the amount of farmland in the United States has decreased by an area equivalent in size to the state of Washington.
It's not bad per say but it's a drop in the bucket, they import and export more than every before, which means insane amount of pollution due to the shipping industry, this alone would defeat everything else they attempt: https://container-xchange.com/blog/shipping-emissions/
Out of sight out of mind I guess...
Zoom out, look at the big picture, we shouldn't stop at borders but look at the global scale. France banning plastic bags when China builds so many coal power plants is no more than virtue signalling. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-coal-idUSKBN2A308U
All of these "reasons for optimism" trends in the US (and, to a big extent, Europe as well) are to be ignored, since the US is simply moving production of everything outside the country on an unprecedented scale. Every farm that gets released in the mid-west is likely made up by another swath of Amazon rain-forest burned down in Brazil . Even in internal production, every increase in productivity is met with an increase in the push to get people to consume more, so there are no real gains to be had in the current system.
That's not true, according to the book. Both the US and many foreign countries have peaked in their consumption of many important resources. Feel free to argue with the book's research, but I found it compelling.
I didn't read the book but listened to the econTalk episode with the author and read an article by the author with the same thesis. When I looked into it a bit I came away unconvinced. As much as I want to believe, I don't think he fully accounted for shifts in manufacturing.
I forget exactly what I found, but if I where to guess it would be something like our imports of certain resources might have peaked, but that doesn't account to things that are manufactured in part/whole outside the US. If I buy an inflatable Kayak made in China, then how is that oil/rubber accounted for? US oil/rubber imports maybe have gone down, but have our inflatable Kayak imports gone down and is it tracked?
I just don't understand this argument. Cars and airplanes, if powered by clean electricity, make it pretty low impact.
It's not even that hard. We spent like $2 trillion on a coronavirus stimulus bill. $2 trillion on clean electricity infrastructure would be enough to clean up the electric grid to like 90-95% fossil free.
Another $2 trillion of incentives and mandates would allow most transportation in the US to be fossil free (pure electric cars and trucks, with plug-in hybrid cars
and trucks as an interim measure) and charged by our 90-95% fossil free grid. (Electricity and transport are the two biggest things, followed by heating and industry... which ALSO have fairly straightforward solutions to becoming almost entirely carbonfree.)
I'm convinced that a HUGE reason we don't just pull the trigger and do this now is because a huge swath of the environmental activist community is deadset on demanding a reduction in consumption and "modern day luxuries" even when not strictly necessary. That means that it's a political dead end and literally every other goal becomes a higher priority. Any climate action that doesn't "reduce consumption" is seen as not being "real."
We should just see it like solving the Ozone Hole (which is now healing, BTW). Instead of giving up refrigeration and air conditioning, we developed non-ozone-depleting refrigerants.
I'm sorry that Attenborough probably won't be satisfied with that answer, but we really can have 8 billion humans with modern day luxuries provided we're responsible about it. And it's not even hard. I have two (used) electric cars that I bought for $10k apiece, and they mostly charge using nuclear electricity. With a heat pump (air source with ground-source backup), and I'll be set for heating my house as well.
But I agree with everything else. Personally I recently used some calculators to see what my carbon footprint is and found a plausible offset for it (certified program through my utility company that goes to buying/building more green energy). And it was pretty darn cheap, less than 15/mo for myself in a 1 bedroom apt, a SUV, and multiple flights a year. Now a larger family increases that number, but nothing the middle-class can't handle. (I Also donate a ton to Wildlife Conservation Network)
I'm trying to do my part, but it seems meaningless without appropriate political decisions that would have real impact by costing our externalities.
To be fair, there were some pretty drastic reduction in emissions from transportation in the last year. That was due to a global pandemic rather than environmental activism, but still it's progress. It may have at least caused some permanent changes in behavior regarding driving to the office every day.
Before the pandemic I didn't work from home at all. Now after working from home 100% for a year I'm looking forward to being able to see my coworkers in person again when things open up, but I'll probably work from home a few days a week. Not a huge change, but every little bit helps, especially when hundreds of millions or billions of other people start working from home a few days a week who wouldn't before.
Really, really depends on how you live. People in first world countries are worse for the environment than people in third world countries by a wide margin per capita.
Well, in some senses. Yet ocean plastics were reported to be 90% China and India. Soil erosion has been mostly eliminated in the US and is endemic elsewhere. And obviously, since most remaining native species are in 3rd world countries, the threats to them are there.
It seems logical to direct efforts to control damage toward the places where they are occurring.
Yes, because we exported our environmental responsibilities regarding plastic manufacturing and processing to those countries, which inevitably pollute for us.
Until recently, China had been importing a vast amount of the world's trashed plastic, ostensibly for recycling, but likely simply dumping a good part of it.
The global economy doesn't allow for simple answers to the sources of trash and waste. China (and India) are massive exporters of goods, only a fraction of their manufacturing is consumed internally. And of course, the biggest importers are the US and Europe.
China and India conduct a huge amount of their economic activity in order to satisfy the demand of people in other places though, i.e. that plastic, coal burning, etc. is mostly on us.
The problem is not necessarily the population growth, but the growth in aggregate demand. The rich demand more and more every year, the middle-class demand more and more every year, and the poor demand to live like the middle class.
Your population can be stable, but the economy is not.
While economy has historically been coupled to resource and energy usage, recently we have decoupled economic growth from things like that, countries can and do have economic growth with stable or decreasing ecological footprint as the service economy and digital/attention economy can provide more and more things people want without necessarily consuming more physical resources.
> While economy has historically been coupled to resource and energy usage, recently we have decoupled economic growth from things like that
I get what you are saying but I would need to see this sustained before I believe that we have finally broken the back of GDP to Ecological Footprint linkage. I'm not optimistic about mankind's ability to keep its footprint under control.
A lot of the time, that is only achieved by outsourcing production and other high-environmental tole activities to the third world. I am extremely skeptical of most countries claiming to have achieved this.
Do you have a source for this? Considering the basic improvements seen in the efficiency of various devices and processes, I'm dubious that the outsourcing of environmentally costly activity is the cause of this GDP-resources trend.
It's almost like a pandemic could be natures way of enacting that, yet it seems now we've conquered its capability to do widespread damage in terms of human lives lost. This must be one of the least fatal pandemics in history
Are you advocating for only certain people not to have kids (in which case, what’s your criteria on who should and who shouldn’t), or that no one should have kids (e.g. the humanity should die out)?
The die off is attributed to a mysterious disease affecting sea stars, and a couple years of warm marine weather. It's wholly possible this has nothing to do with humans at all, and is a natural event.
Yes, the disease may have been caused or spread by human activity, and yes, the
warm marine weather may have been caused by human-created global warming, but you're jumping the gun to say that this is because we have 8 billion people who want a certain standard of living.
> The die off is attributed to a mysterious disease affecting sea stars, and a couple years of warm marine weather. It's wholly possible this has nothing to do with humans at all, and is a natural event.
It is, and we keep hearing this argument for situations across the entire plant. There is a clear trend.
Hmm, I think your stance is a tad defeatist in this specific instance. The article's main contention is without the Sunflower sea stars, the urchins have no eager predation, and therefore can decimate any kelp nearby. I believe it's possible to have modern luxuries without making sea stars extinct, but the scale and diversity and degree to which we use those luxuries will determine how much damage we do. There's also the possibility a specific pollutant is harming the sea stars, which was the case with birds' eggs and pesticides in the past.
vast majority of those 8 billion people use very little resources. It's over consumption of the worlds top 10% (probably includes you and me) that caused most of the damage.
Climate change is also just one of the ecological problems we’re making worse by the day. Micro plastics, importing non native species and parasites, insecticides, herbicides with unknown systemic effects, destroying most wild areas, etc.
My understanding is this is extremely difficult short of killing myself. Using a car, the internet, a smartphone, electricity...You're tied into industries that are simply not carbon neutral. How much electricity is used when you browse the internet loading the 15,000 JS files and ad networks/trackers everywhere? How much energy (i.e battery % on a phone) is wasted per human, per day for absolutely pointless nonsense?
I think I need to be forced into changes, such as having to buy an electric car, or being made to walk due to driving being made illegal. If I can enhance my life whilst I get the chance to do so during my time on earth I will, unless I am prevented from doing so. I always opt for what is beneficial to me (and, judging by the sheer number of cars on the road, I am not alone in this).
Otherwise, I freely admit I have little desire to put effort into pretending I can somehow help the planet - that's the job of governments to set the policies society needs to accept, we either do it together or not at all.
I want to be as anti-carbon-neutrality as possible until it's illegal for me to cause pollution in any way (due to a shift in opinion and generating harmful emissions being 100% illegal and punishable by jail).
Forcing you to do in particular to do either of these things wouldn’t help. The reason you’re using a car and not walking is cities aren’t built densely enough because California’s land use rules are made to keep the state looking like a 50s sitcom set.
Electric cars are better for families (even in Japan), but having car-shaped cars is still pretty polluting due to road and tire dust, so encouraging micromobility + mass transit would be a better move for the individual.
It would help if the people who realized that also realized that cost is one reason we can't have more. There is no reason that stations have to be large instead of utilitarian (10x the price). There is no reason trains need any operators, much less then 3 often required by law and union contract. There is no reason it takes 24 people to run a TBM (12 is the number in other countries). There is no reason why trains can't run more often. There is no reason "turf wars" mean that two different divisions of the same agency fight each other for limited budget instead of working together for the city.
The above is but a short list of things to attack if you in favor of trains. Note that the above cuts at a lot of things that Democrats - who claim to be in favor of trains hold dear. You will discover that fighting to make trains a better option than cars is harder as a democrat where everyone agrees but wants to put their finger in the pie, than as a republican where everyone isn't interested in trains but might let you get by with a small amount just to keep you quiet (this won't be enough to build a useful system, but it might be enough to prove it can be cost effective)
> You will discover that fighting to make trains a better option than cars is harder as a democrat where everyone agrees but wants to put their finger in the pie, than as a republican where everyone isn't interested in trains but might let you get by with a small amount just to keep you quiet (this won't be enough to build a useful system, but it might be enough to prove it can be cost effective)
And where is train hush money being handed out in the last four years? Pretty sure that's out of the frying pan into the fire.
> You will discover that fighting to make trains a better option than cars is harder as a democrat where everyone agrees but wants to put their finger in the pie, than as a republican where everyone isn't interested in trains but might let you get by with a small amount just to keep you quiet (this won't be enough to build a useful system, but it might be enough to prove it can be cost effective)
This is perfectly exemplified by UTA Trax, which had a humble start in slightly blue SLC, but has expanded outward at an incredibly rapid pace, with approval votes coming from some of the reddest counties in the nation. Building efficiently and cost effectively is quite possibly the best vote-switcher on transit that we could make.
I don't want to diminish that, from a brief skim of wikipedia this looks like a typical American light rail with vast suburban extensions, "park and ride" stations rather than dense development around station.
This sort of transit just allows for further sub-urbanization and car culture when the highways fill up. It doesn't promote cross-sector density (just larger central business districts), and it doesn't reduce the externalities of the American way of living.
To be fair, this is by no means a mistake exclusive to red states. The WMATA in DC, and LIRR and Metro North in NYC all commit the same sin.
You're not wrong, but underfunded transit agencies taking on highly entrenched land use laws in order to build slightly more optimally kinda falls into the category of boiling the ocean. It's not something they control, let alone have any sort of influence over. But what they can control, they did, and for a red state, they have a pretty comprehensive and rapidly growing rail system that is quite enviable compared to much bluer cities like San Jose or Minneapolis.
It should also be noted that Calgary faced similar challenges to SLC, and they optimized for it in similar ways: optimizing for total system length and highest frequencies per dollar spent, and often developing suburban park and ride stations. And over the last 40 years, Calgary has become more dense as a result. It has become one of the highest ridership per mile systems in north america, better than any in the US, besting even a 125 year old line with significant subterranean sections right through the dense core of Boston.
Well the transit agency cannot change zoning laws, but they can refuse to build the parking lot.
I will hand it to Calgary though. Reading around, it does look like the job density is in the central business district is exceptionally good for such a late-developed North American city. The park and rides don't dent housing sprawl at all, but at least they allow people to commute to the same place. Hopefully that does create demand for dense housing around the central business district eventually.
I don't think refusing to build a parking lot is a good idea. However they should be careful to build it on one side (probably the freeway side knowing how hard it is to put transit anywhere else), so that the other side can develop. They can/should put their stations in places that are at least semi-multi-use as well, meaning the border between zoned commercial and zoned apartments. When/if things get more transit oriented they can sell the parking lot.
I mean if it was 1990 sure. But global warming is kinda urgent and I don't really want to wait for the morons with their zoning?
I think at this point we also need to massively raise the gas tax, pay it back as a universal dividend to avoid right-wing revolution. And simultaneously, we need to build a bunch of transit so people trying to win the gas-tax-dividend arbitrage have a valid strategy. Make the demand, make the supply.
Our political situation doesn't allow for that, but I don't really see the choice? Trying to electrify all the cars is perhaps easier on the American psyche, but much less efficient, and will not help with all the non-global-warming major externalities we need to fix nearly as urgently.
Fight battles you can win. Your way results in transit nobody rides (because it isn't useful to anyone ) and proves you hate cars, which gets you voted out and your taxes repealed.. if you give them their parking lot there is at least enough that some people ride while you wait the 20 years or so it takes to redevelop the area. Once the area is developed take away the parking lot for more valuable uses.
Let’s say you go buy a Tesla or Volt. The cost to charge it at a station or even your house isn’t carbon neutral. It depends on how your local power is generated. In my gas that’s primarily natural gas.
Is the $0.11/kWh truly, not to mention the cost of the battery and all the lithium/magnesium/nickel mining it requires, more “carbon neutral” than a 35 mpg petrol vehicle with all the catalytic converters and whatnot.
In reality the combustion engine pollutants contributors seem to be more shipping related. Diesel boats, diesel trains, diesel 18 wheelers etc.
> Is the $0.11/kWh truly, not to mention the cost of the battery and all the lithium/magnesium/nickel mining it requires, more “carbon neutral” than a 35 mpg petrol vehicle
Yes. My power company gives me a green energy certificate, which means that all the money I pay for energy goes to green producers.
> the catalytic converters and whatnot.
You're conflating pollution with carbon emissions. The only thing that matters to carbon emissions is mass of fuel burnt.
> In reality the combustion engine pollutants contributors seem to be more shipping related. Diesel boats, diesel trains, diesel 18 wheelers etc.
Burning hydrocarbons can be (more) carbon-neutral if we synthesize them. The reason it's not is that we dig them out of the ground and then don't put them back in the ground afterwards.
Of course we seem to be going for using batteries instead, but this will likely be needed for energy-dense uses like heating and aircraft.
Pollution is really bad. Like, it’s way worse than you’d think it is. Air pollution seems to have driven the entire country crazy for most of the 20th century, and if cities are as violent as they were in 1990 then nobody is going to be interested in saving energy by living in them.
>My understanding is this is extremely difficult short of killing myself.
That's not really how it works. The only way humanity is at 7 billion and counting is due to advances in engineering, farming, etc.
Look for example at two extremes, starting with the CHAZ farm. You remember, the cardboard boxes with potting soil thrown on top by kids who had no idea what they were doing? Imagine if the entire planet was full of these sort of primitive smooth brains. You'd be back to hunter gatherers and a global population of ~20,000 or so rather quickly. Now look at the opposite end of the spectrum, Hokkaido rice farmers.
Despite having a less favorable climate for rice growing, Hokkaido farmers of the frozen north produce some of the highest yields and highest quality rice in Japan. When you look outside of Japan, it's even more impressive as Hokkaido consistently has higher yields than SE Asian countries with warmer humid climates more suited for rice growing.
This is a small number of people in Hokkaido, with power to change their entire world around them. They do so through science and engineering. Access to irrigation, farm equipment, and fertilizer is far more important than climate.
People who want laws to restrict CO2 would choose to destroy Hokkaido farmers. Farm equipment after all releases CO2. So does fertilizer production and transportation. So does tillage. These people seek to make us all hunter gatherers again.
Solving problems is not about squeezing yourself into the limits of your current system, it is about changing the limits of the system with science and engineering. Said more eloquently,
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw
I want to be as anti-carbon-neutrality as possible until it's illegal for me to cause pollution in any way
That's ... bizarre.
Upshot is I'm doing way more to improve the environment than you are, because I'm an adult who doesn't need be compelled to be perfect before doing anything positive.
> freely admit I have little desire to put effort into pretending I can somehow help the planet - that's the job of governments to set the policies society needs to accept, we either do it together or not at all.
Offsetting ones carbon footprint is cheap and easy. The fact that few people want to take any action individually undermines collective action.
The obvious path forward is for the most passionate people to lead by example.
The idea that somehow government will serve to overrule the self interest of the majority isn’t realistic.
If the majority doesn’t want change, the government can’t help.
The obvious thing is to install solar on your roof. I'm hoping my system goes live this week (I've been hoping that for 4 months, but snow meant they couldn't get on the roof to finish that last bit)
I only eat chicken, buy new clothes maybe once every 18 months, bike(d) to work, fly seldom. According to my power company my electricity bill in my regular apartment is less than efficient homes in my area. I also buy carbon offsets for myself and my family.
Natural ecological processes rarely play out to this extent on a 10 year scale though. And the problem with the bull kelp species is that it is in and of itself a complete ecosystem to so many sub species below it.
Outside of mechanical damage and over fishing, it's hard to know what could help, you can't really adjust ocean conditions, it's just too vast - for example something fundamental in relation to temperature and water acidity has changed meaning you can't just replant, it'd just suffer the same fate. It kind of implies to save the oceans climate change needs to be improved globally.
We have similar problems in places here in New Zealand urchin barrens are taking over from kelp - here it's thought to be caused by over fishing taking out the larger/older fish that previously kept the urchins (kina) under control.
Kina are considered a delicacy here, but as mentioned here the kina in the barrens are underfed and not worth eating
Yes they're starving but without a natural predator to them then they will just rebound if kelp grows back.
The article did mention that the starfish predator of the urchin died from a mystery disease. I wonder if that starfish was reintroduced into the area if it would be able to survive again or simply die from the disease again.
I think the key to fixing this issue is to figure out the reason the starfish died of the disease. Then it might be possible to mitigate for that.
I worked in Orange County in college on a project to restore the White Sea Bass after the kelp forests were restored there. I really appreciated that experience in aquarium sciences and oceanography. I also liked seeing how much fisherman seemed onboard with the program.
I hope a network of volunteers in Northern California can have some success rebuilding the kelp ecosystem.
I was a small part of the project in high school. We took care of sea bass in a room in the school, and released them in the harbor near where I live. Nancy Caruso accompanied my class on that day and on a diving excursion, IIRC.
The difference between the pictures is that the "before" picture has yellow shading but the "after" picture doesn't have any yellow shading. I don't see any kelp in either picture.
"Satellite Imagery Shows ..." -- if the satellite imagery showed something, why doesn't the graphic show it, instead of some yellow dots overlaid on satellite imagery?
Because it might not show the answer to a human? In their methods they say that they employed a technique called multiple endmember spectral mixture analysis which looks to me to be a probabilistic model which performs well over a large data set, like the one they draw from. It's not just a single image they use, but a bunch, each with small spectra differences which indicate areas of cover.
EDIT: Their methods also say that `Bull kelp forests are readily identified by multiple existing high spatial resolution satellite and airborne platforms because their floating surface canopies have strong reflectance in the near-infrared, similar to terrestrial vegetation`, so you wouldn't be able to see the difference anyways.
> because their floating surface canopies have strong reflectance in the near-infrared, similar to terrestrial vegetation`, so you wouldn't be able to see the difference anyways.
This is not true. You can certainly look at the near infrared channel of an image (it is just a regular gray-scale image anyway) and see right away the vegetation.
the systematic ecodestruction of climate change is so much easier to ignore but it feels just so scary. humans can adapt but new homes & redevelop. at a cost. but who will help the planet?
It's not clear how much of a factor climate change is. Most of the sea stars have died due to a wasting disease, and so the urchin population exploded and they ate much of the kelp. The sea stars might have been weakened by warmer water several years ago but California has always experienced occasional situations like that due to the El Niño current.
A bit tangentially off topic. Today I encountered this book titled "False Alarm". It is supposed to be the book that is quite balanced in perspective in terms of environmental crisis. I'm going to get it. But first I'm curious of HN readers who have read the book, what do you think of it?
Ah yep, it's Lomborg, he's always controversial in this area, although he isn't denying anthropogenic climate change. Just be aware that he's a lecturer in statistics, not a climate scientist, and he's had issues in the past with the scientific accuracy of his books.
> DCSD made its decision in January 2003. In it, DCSD found that, by customary scientific standards, the defendant had acted at odds with good scientific practice in his systematically one-sided choice of data and in his arguments. If the book was intended to be evaluated as science and not as a contribution to the general debate, then in addition
the scientific message had been so distorted that the objective criteria for establishing scientific dishonesty had been met.
> DCSD did not find a sufficient basis, however, on which to establish that the defendant had misled his readers with intent or gross negligence. DCSDnoted, in this context, that in the preface to the book the defendant had himself drawn attention to the fact that he was no expert in environmental issues.
Assuming this is the book "False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet" I don't think you can seriously take it as a piece of serious balanced research.
The book titles itself based on what it is, which is the same thing as hundreds of other books peddling cherry picked facts to say that the "establishment" is wrong on climate change. These books take whatever micro-divergence from climate models is currently being observed and trump it up as a refutation of all climate models and of the entire macro-trend.
15 years ago it was the lack of deep ocean warming which has now been observed. I'm sure that in 2021 there are innumerable discrepancies and poorly understood phenomena which could be used for this purpose.
> a refutation of all climate models and of the entire macro-trend
Is this Lomborg you're saying is a denier? What are you basing that on?
I can believe that he is encouraging others who want to do nothing about climate change, but I didn't think he was objectively a denier. People calling him one may be playing into his shtick.
If he's not denying climate change, then it's a lie or willful disregard for the truth to say he is, and encourages the people who think it's a religion and a conspiracy. The morality of slander is not even the point, it's that tactically, you don't want to be seen making unfounded attacks because you're essentially ad-hominem'ing yourself.
I read a book of his a long time ago, and I am not 100% sure he isn't a denier these days, but he wasn't then, even though he definitely was trolling as hard as he could.
