Although "environmentally friendly" is not strictly equal to "minimum possible GHG footprint". The plastic bag may have a lower carbon footprint, but it isn't going to biodegrade as quickly, and may end up turning into microplastics that persist for a long time.
In stores we have selfservice weighting scales for fruits and veggies that print the barcode. There's an option "with one-use bag/without bag" and the one-use bag option subtracts 2 grams.
This very similar to the "if you wash recycling in water heated via coal burn generated electricity then it creates CO2" argument.
Okay, let's stop burning coal then, because we use electricity for a lot more things than just recycling.
Similarly, if cotton is that bad for the environment, maybe we need to fix that generally rather than just switch to disposable plastic bags for this one minor use case?
The cloth reusables are a little more harsh on the environment for initial acquisition, but I like that if they get holes, I can patch them. I'm not sure how feasible that is with the thicker plastic bags, and a cursory search doesn't bring anything up, but it's worth looking into patching the plastic bags.
duct tape, but now we need to take into account the environmental impact of that.
though the biggest problem with reusable plastic bags is the weakness of the handles. i'd rarely get more than a dozen uses out of a plastic bag before the handle rips. and that is not as easily to fix because of the stresses involved.
also, i feel the math is off, because cloth bags are a lot stronger and they get uses that no plastic bag is even designed for. so the reality is that even if i use plastic bags for shopping, i'd have a cloth bag anyways for other needs. and if i have it already, then using it more comes with zero additional impact.
plastic bags only have less impact on the environment than the cloth bags that i don't already own.
Well ok, in the "already have it" vein, how about just taking stuff home in the boxes that the store receives its goods in? Ours has a pile near the registers. Then we break them down and use them as sheet mulch.
I also wondered this - initially I saw that the chart linked had a "Lifecycle Analysis" and so I nodded and went on my way thinking that disposal had been accounted for.
I'm glad you brought it up, because upon looking at the study the chart is based on, it seems hopelessly optimistic - it accounts for several end-of-life scenarios but they are all 'good' disposals performed after plastic collection, like recycling or incineration. Zero accounting for accidental or incompetent sending to landfills, which indeed seems the main issue with plastic bags.
(The study is also specific to Denmark, where perhaps disposal programs are more reliable than they are in the US.)
>The plastic bag may have a lower carbon footprint, but it isn't going to biodegrade as quickly, and may end up turning into microplastics that persist for a long time.
What you described is a non-issue if the bag is disposed of properly. Presumably you, as a environmentalist can be relied upon to do that.
We already have them since quite a while, also to dissolve most metals and stones. But producing them in the required quantities would be kind of out of proportion to use it for garbage disposal.
And disposing garbage in acid means still having lots of garbage basins with acid. You might want to check out some chemistry.
that's only true if every plastic bag user disposes of the bags properly. part of the problem of using plastic bags is that it increases the demand. i specifically ask for less plastic bags in the produce section in order to teach the sales person that it is not necessary to have each item individually wrapped as is the custom here. i want them to apply that to other customers and so reduce the use of bags even more.
The linked chart about grocery bags[1] is not only about GHG footprint:
> Environmental impact is measured over a full life-cycle analysis (LCA) across the following metrics: greenhouse gas emissions, ozone depletion, human toxicity (cancer effects), human toxicity (non-cancer effects), photochemical ozone formation, ionizing radiation, particulate matter, terrestrial acidification, terrestrial eutrophication, marine eutrophication, ecosystem toxicity, resource depletion (fossil), resource depletion (abiotic), and water resource depletion.
An “effective environmentalism” might be a good meme to attempt a rebrand of nuclear, microwaves, and factory farming. But there’s nothing about how to prevent effective environmentalism from becoming performative just like how the author notes environmentalism has.
Factory farming animals is specifically mentioned in the article as causing less environmental damage than organic or cage free methods. Whether true or not doesn’t prevent effective environmentalism from becoming as performative as environmentalism.
Which only looks at greenhouse gas emissions (and only then compares grass feeding to grain feeding), and does NOT consider the effects to local groundwater, surface water, or air quality from CAFOs.
Besides things like frequent manure spills that pollute surface and groundwater, children living near these CAFOs have elevated rates of asthma.
The piece is very focused on greenhouse gases and the benefits of "economies of scale" but doesn't say a peep about the meltdown of our consolidated food supply when the pandemic subjected it to supply shocks.
I don't think the author, or anyone who eats meat (and is intellectually honest and invested in environmental impact), is trying to argue that it's not expensive. But if you've already made the ethical choice that you still want to eat meat, it's worthwhile to study what methods for producing it are less impactful and more sustainable.
Also skeptical of the honey thing. Honeybees produce honey which is a valuable product on its own, but honeybees are also distinguished from other bee species by their massive colonies (colonies are the groups of bees, hives are where they live). This is why there is an industry that trucks honeybee colonies/hives around the country to pollinate whichever crops are in season. This is to the detriment of whichever pollinator species live locally. The honeybees pollinate, but they take a disruptive amount of pollen to feed their own colonies at the expense of the native pollinators, and in return they share their diseases like varroa mites.
If a crop needs pollination but you want to reduce dependence on honeybees, it's likely you would need to break up the land the crop is on in order to plant flowering species that attract native pollinators at the edges, and that comes with its own downsides for maintenance and harvest.
I don't know if I would say it's 100% on the trucks (the honeybees didn't ask to be driven everywhere, after all), but the honeybees do disrupt the native ecosystems when they get to their targets; call it a 90-10 or a 95-5 split of culpability perhaps. Smaller scale hive operations that produce honey in one location probably don't have the same outsized impact on so many locations as these truck operations do.
1a. If you can't do the above, use public transport.
1b. If you can't do that, consider moving to a city where you can do all of the above (if you can afford it). If you're rural, seek a land trust or farmer to buy your land when you do.
2. Insulate your house.
3. Get solar if you can afford it.
3a. Replace all gas appliances with electric (Heat pump, electric water heater, ec)
4. Don't fly.
5. Dietary changes, but remember to include ecosystem services and impact in your analysis. A little carbon is worth it if it means more land stays free of pesticides and continues to provide for the ecosystem.
At least, this is the best I've been able to make of it after a decade of study using open sources. Agriculture is important, but whenever I've actually dug into the referenced data I always find they're optimizing for the wrong things, leaving out important variables, or just all around cherry picking data with an end goal in mind.
Dramatically reducing meat consumption is the single best thing the average westerner could do to limit their environmental impact. Why did you remove it?
a) Because that's not true. The numbers don't actually work out that way. Transportation and heating are most American's biggest carbon contribution. Agriculture is down a ways.
b) Because there is evidence that meat production done right IE intensive rotation grazing or silvopasture where the meat is grazed on a small section of land at a time and most of the land is left fallow most of the time can actually drastically increase ecosystem services. It allows the land to function as native prairie or savanna.
There is also evidence that this sort of grazing can substantially reduce carbon emissions. Meanwhile monocultured grain, beans, and veggies - especially conventional with heavy pesticide* (edit: originally wrote fertilizer, meant pesticide) use - are devastating to ecosystems. They're essentially turning large swaths of land into killing fields, taking the bottom right out of ecosystem and contributing to the massive drop in insect populations (which form the foundation of the food web) we've seen across the developed world.
In short - the agricultural analysis is really fucking complex, multivariate, and grey.
She links a literature analysis that claims to contradict much of this, but I've read literature analyses making these sorts of claims before that just ignore most of the alternative systems, gloss over a lot of nuance, or downplay the harm of convention systems in major ways. I need to read the one she linked, but experience has taught me to treat it skeptically.
I'm a meat eater and also very invested in reducing my environmental impact despite that, and I'm very interested in learning more about this. Can you point me to your original sources?
The vast majority of monocultured grains are used to feed livestock. Plant based diet, even if you ate soy and wheat and corn and nothing else, has an order of magnitude smaller impact than eating meat.
>Because there is evidence that meat production done right IE intensive rotation grazing or silvopasture where the meat is grazed on a small section of land at a time and most of the land is left fallow most of the time can actually drastically increase ecosystem services. It allows the land to function as native prairie or savanna.
>Meanwhile monocultured grain, beans, and veggies - especially conventional with heavy fertilizer use - are devastating to ecosystems.
You're suggesting, in a very roundabout way, that we drastically reduce meat consumption. None of these things you describe can be done sustainably without a drastic reduction of livestock.
Yea, I do agree that we need to reduce meat consumption and focus on sustainably grazed operations for the meat that is consumed.
But that's not the same as putting it on top of the list. Ever since Cowspiracy came out (which has been roundly debunked) there's been this segment of the environmental movement that wants to put beef on the top of the list of carbon problems. It just doesn't belong there and there are so many issues with putting it there - not least of which is the individual responsibility trap.
Climate cannot be solved by individual action alone. Individual action is necessary, but not sufficient. And since people have limited capacity to make lifestyle changes, we need them to focus that capacity where it will do the most good. Meat just isn't it - transporation, housing, energy - those are where it belongs. We should be encouraging people to eat less meat, yes, and to eat sustainably pastured an grazed meat. But we shouldn't be telling people to go vegan as their primary lifestyle change.
>And since people have limited capacity to make lifestyle changes, we need them to focus that capacity where it will do the most good. Meat just isn't it - transporation, housing, energy - those are where it belongs.
Diet is actually one of the easiest things for people to change. You have to eat every day. And there is evidence this personal choice has affected markets. Walmart wouldn't be selling more soy milk, selling tempeh, producing their own plant-based cheese if it was just a non-impactful minority changing their habits. Even if it takes a year to change, it helps people understand they can do things that do help the environment.
Everything you describe - transportation, housing, energy are all things that take often decades to reform. Giving people something they can do right now to make a collective impact (however small the impact) is worthwhile. It brings a certain kind of spirituality to the movement - even if I can't switch to an EV or the bus takes too long or I rent, so I can't do energy efficient changes, I can still eat food that reduces my impact on the environment. I can eat with people who share environmentalist feelings. We can come to collective conclusions, like deciding to take the bus to go downtown tomorrow instead of driving. We can share emotions about our worry, but also our optimism for the future. When it comes time to demand systemic changes, we already have a well-organized cohort to proselytize for those changes.
Diet is also one of the most personal things to ask people to change, deeply tied in with their health, habits, cultures, and religion. If you ask them to do something that crosses some of those lines, you will have exactly the opposite effect you are claiming it will have. If you tell people that the most important thing they can do is adopt a diet that undercuts their health (many people cannot healthily maintain a vegan diet - including many, many vegan influencers) then you will demoralize them.
This push to tie the vegan diet to climate, it didn't come from the climate movement - it came from the animal rights movement. And it really exploded with Cowspiracy, which was a blatant propaganda film that badly abused the literature and has since been roundly debunked.
You still see some climate campaigners harping on this point, George Monboit being the most prominent to come to mind, but again, an honest accounting of the literature does not support their point -- that "going vegan is the easiest and highest impact choice an individual can make for their personal carbon reduction". It is not easy for most people and the impact of it is not nearly that clear cut.
The meme is a distraction that was imposed on the environmental movement by people who do not have the environment, or climate change mitigation, as their first priority.
I've been seeking a sustainable diet and agriculture for over a decade. Believe me when I tell you it is not simple or clear cut. There are a lot of things we should be pursuing in that area, but universal veganism is not one of them. (General meat reduction is, but that is not the same thing.)
No one is suggesting people become vegan. You keep constructing strawmen, and proposing things that will in fact dramatically increase the costs of meat and force the things you say you don’t want. It’s non-sensical.
“… while shifting to a vegetarian meal one day a week could save the equivalent of driving 1,160 miles.”
The root comment had "stop eating eggs, honey, and fish" before "take public transportation".
The comment above mine includes eating fake cheese.
Come on, it's pretty clear what they're driving at.
Also, nowhere have I said I don't want a reduction in meat consumption. In multiple comments I have said that it is a necessary part of the solution, whether by personal choice or driven by market forces as people shift to more sustainable agricultural solutions.
I am arguing against putting it front and center in the fight against climate change as the OP does and as the root comment on this thread does.
Below is the list you provided, and no where in it do you call for a reduction in meat consumption. You have some weird ax to grind, because telling people to not fly is a far bigger sacrifice than asking them to eat a plant based meal once a day instead of a meat based meal.
Here is you’re list.
“ 1. Walk or bike.
1a. If you can't do the above, use public transport.
1b. If you can't do that, consider moving to a city where you can do all of the above (if you can afford it). If you're rural, seek a land trust or farmer to buy your land when you do.
2. Insulate your house.
3. Get solar if you can afford it.
3a. Replace all gas appliances with electric (Heat pump, electric water heater, ec)
4. Don't fly.
5. Dietary changes, but remember to include ecosystem services and impact in your analysis. A little carbon is worth it if it means more land stays free of pesticides and continues to provide for the ecosystem.”
That’s not clear. Dietary changes could mean a lot of different things. When you also consider the fact that he keeps going on and on about a niche low volume method of raising cattle, it would be easy for someone to think that he is not advocating for less meat consumption.
>> Dramatically reducing meat consumption is the single best thing the average westerner could do to limit their environmental impact[...]
> b) Because there is evidence that meat production done right IE intensive rotation grazing or silvopasture where the meat is grazed on a small section of land at a time and most of the land is left fallow most of the time can actually drastically increase ecosystem services. It allows the land to function as native prairie or savanna.
There's no way the method of meat production that you described can produce meat to sastisfy current US demand, let alone increasing demand from the developing world. Therefore practically speaking, reduction of meat consumption will still be needed.
Yes, agreed, reduction of meat consumption does need to happen. But saying "we should reduce meat consumption and ensure the meat produced is produced through these systems" is very different from putting it at the top of the list and drawing almost all focus to it.
There is more to the environment than carbon footprint. Meat production is the leading cause of deforestation, it’s the biggest user of water in the south west, the cause of antibiotic resistant bacteria, and that’s ignoring the horrific conditions in factory farms.
Did you actually read the study linked in the article? They didn't measure anything. They used accepted values for each phase of the process taken from databases. In several areas there weren't - notably around pasturing - there wasn't good data. So they more or less fudged and "accounted for it in their error bars".
Meanwhile, here's a study I found, which I linked elsewhere in the thread, that found that under the right circumstances, grass finished, rotationally grazed cattle can actually act as a carbon SINK. Not a carbon producer. Now that's one study and I have no idea of the quality and trustworthiness of the journal it's in, but it lines up with other studies I've read on the topic. And it tracks with the ecological model. There are ecosystems where these animals belong and in those ecosystems they play a key role in building the soil, and soil building is one of the key methods of carbon sequestration.
Here's another study I found showing that many factors play into whether grazing hoofed animals builds soil or erodes it. Grass type, soil type, rainfall patterns - they all matter.
Again, single study, no idea of the quality of the journal, but it goes to show that these questions are not definitively answered. These lifecycle analyses that people keep pointing to are using a limited set of data sets that have huge deficiencies.
And that's why I push back on these narratives so hard. They are not well founded. Every time I dig into the studies being referenced, I find massive assumptions and huge deficiencies and a paucity of actual measurement.
I have no idea why you keep bringing up these very niche methods that can’t produce the volumes of beef that people consume today by a very large margin. It’s like saying that it would use a lot less carbon to ride your bike from Los Angeles to New York than to fly there. It’s an absurd comparison. Honestly, what point do you think you’re making?
These are only niche methods because we haven't invested in them and they hold an enormous amount of promise.
The dialog around agriculture and sustainability all too often is akin to telling people to just cut their power consumption rather than discussing or exploring non-emitting sources of energy.
You say I have some weird axe to grind, because I keep pushing back on people saying that meat consumption is a much bigger contributor to GHG emissions than it is. Yet you keep insisting that I'm somehow not accounting for a meat reduction as a piece of the puzzle when I have readily admitted that it should be a piece of the puzzle multiple times, and have happily conceded that it will be necessitated if we switch to the more sustainable, but less productive modes of producing it.
I think I've made my point pretty clearly, and repeatedly. Seems to me like your the one with an axe to grind, one not supported by the data.
Again, no where in your list of what we should do did you include meat consumption. When you talk about these methods, that are unproven at scale, you do NOT mention the implications regarding the amount of meat that can be produced that way.
My suggestion that people eat one less meat based meal per day is far less drastic that if all meat was produced with the methods you are advocating. Yet, you imply that I am the one calling for the drastic action.
Edit: let me ask you this, what are you actually proposing? Should the government ban meat that isn’t produced the way you suggest? If not, what are you proposing that will have a bigger impact than my suggestion that people eat one less meat based meal a day?
Not him, but I think I can provide a blunt answer, though I'll caveat that it is likely different than what he may have provided, and one you will probably not like: I do not take people requesting me to eat less meat seriously. My family, my friends, my colleagues not only do not take you seriously, we have in fact already stopped listening to you.
The internet over represents vegans, so you and many others are naturally underestimating how much of a minority anti-meat fanatics truly are.
If a self-proclaimed environmentalist even suggests that we as individuals need to stop eating meat to save the planet, then we naturally assume you are a moralizing vegan who is trying to launder your issue under the guise of environmentalism.
Eating meat is a part of a humans natural diet, studies saying otherwise have repeatedly been proven to be wrong, we no longer trust you. The ketogenic diet has helped many people I know see real health improvements, further cementing our distrust for mainstream dietary "science" that always seem to align with the morals of vegans (and big corporations) but never show any genuine results in real life.
In fact over the course of my entire life, I have never met a preachy vegan who didn't either look like a cancer survivor or a fat ass who's diet only consists of junk food.
Studies showing the negative environmental impact of meat agriculture have the same smell as the ones saying it's bad for our health, we also do not trust them. Studies saying that adjustments to how it is farmed could help the environment, are much more palatable, something people would realistically be willing to try, since there is less likely to be moralizing vegans involved within the equation, and therefore more likely to actually work at all.
Any hint of moralizing veganism within any environmental suggestion is doomed for failure. The difference between your suggestion and his is that yours isn't even going to be acknowledged by the general public, while his solution could at least be feasibly accepted.
That is the difference, even if the effect ends up similar (higher meat prices).
No where did I advocate for veganism or anything like that. I wouldn’t ever want to push for anything like that. Im suggesting people eat less meat, not zero meat. But it doesn’t really matter what I say, we’ll either figure out how to get their voluntarily, or it will be forced on us by nature with immense suffering.
Burning 1 gallon of motor gasoline emits the same carbon as producing 1.3lb of finished beef. Flying once from U.S. to Europe has the same GHG impact as producing 80 pounds of beef. For a typical U.S. household, transportation is a bigger source of greenhouse gas emissions than food.
There's currently a propaganda war between multiple powerful lobbies - the animal rights lobby, the meat producers, conventional ag producers, and more - which means there is a ton of misinformation flying around about the actual environmental impacts of eating meat. Really, of all things dietary.
Meanwhile there are a bunch of people exploring alternate agriculture systems through agroecological approaches that show a lot of promise, but haven't been studied enough to really make claims about either way.
Further, you cannot just say "x amount of finished beef produces y emissions" because there are so many factors that go into it. Feedlot vs traditional range vs intensive rotational vs silvopasture are all different with completely different environmental impacts - of which carbon is only one.
That source is primarily examining conventional feedlot approaches.
> An all grass cow-calf – to – finish operation was included as a minor component in the eastern and northwestern regions
They examined a single all grass finished operation. There are studies that have found grass finishing can cut emissions in cattle by as much as 80%.
> The modeled operations were not intended to be actual operations; they were developed to represent the practices found in each region.
> Environmental footprints for all individually simulated ranch and feedlot operations were integrated into full production systems within their respective study regions using two methods
They also don't appear to be measuring actual operations, but rather modeling operations based on surveys of farmers and ranchers about the characteristics of their operations and then extrapolating from there.
Models have their place for sure, but I wouldn't make any kind of declaration of certainty based on a single model-based study. You have to average the outputs of hundreds or thousands of models, and even then, you can't be sure you have the answer.
A better approach would be one that measures the actual output of each operation at various phases and averages across them. Difficult to do, but I've seen studies that attempted it.
Gladly, although, with the caveat that science works in the aggregate so any individual paper should be treated with skepticism and that I have no idea what quality of journals these are coming from because the open access literature is currently a royal fucking mess.
Here's another study that found that the soil type of the grassland and the dominant species of grass had a significant effect on whether intensively grazing it sequestered or released carbon from the soil overall:
And that one appears to be a literature review of other studies.
Related note, you have to be so careful looking through the studies, here's one that purports to compare the different systems. But when you read the abstract it uses "A deterministic model based on the metabolism and nutrient requirements of the beef population". In other words, they aren't actually measuring anything. They just have numbers in a database for "x lb of beef requires y inputs" and "x lb of beef gives z outputs" and they're crunching those numbers under assumptions about the productivity of each approach. Naturally, they find that conventional feedlots are the most environmentally friendly.
I mean, the paper uses data from the National Cattlemen's Beef Association™, which is a beef lobbying group. The third author of the paper is also from the NBCA, and the paper was funded by the Beef Checkoff™, which a beef marketing program. I have my reservations about the accuracy of this paper.
Again, that is a chart based on a single source. Which may or may not be open access and I've been through enough of these tonight, but look at my other comments on similar sources to see my problems with them. All too often they are based on "accepted dataset" which are full of all kinds of faulty assumptions and modeling. Meanwhile, there are people going out and actually measuring agroecology systems and finding a totally different result.
Let's say you could convince an extra 10% of the world to follow those rules, and that it doesn't cause a rebound effect (as per the Jevons paradox). How much extra time would that buy us before an unstoppable climate catastrophe?
There is already an unstoppable climate catastrophe happening. Many of the effects are already baked in for the next 50-100 years and it will disproportionately affect the poor.
What we can still control is how bad it is. (An increase 1.5 degrees C looks a hell of a lot different than 4 degrees C). That's still very much a fight worth fighting.
When people ask if we should do this or that, the answer should be "yes". These rules are fine - we should eat less meat, we should drive and fly less, etc. We should also do more systemic things, like investing heavily in battery tech and solar and wind and even fusion longshots. We should regulate the hell out of emissions, and use the proceeds from taxes and fines to help mitigate the effects on the poor. Getting to net zero carbon is going to be hard but it has to happen.
Okay, perhaps I should have asked "How many lives do you think would be saved this century compared to the default scenario where an extra 10% of the world aren't convinced to follow those rules?".
And rhetoric like your last paragraph is just going to produce backlash and make the problem worse.
"The rules are fine", and net zero "has" to happen". So in your mind there's no room for argument and the objective is sacred. So how many guns are you willing to put to peoples' heads to get them to change their diets? To get them to stop flying? Driving in particular is required for many peoples' livelihoods, particularly those on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum.
IMO, the truly "hard" part of getting to net zero is getting people like you to realize you're not going to force your proposed solutions onto the rest of the world. You're going to have to team up with people you don't like. You know why Texas, the oil/petrochemical capital of the US, has so much wind power? It isn't because an army of environmentalists descended on the state house shouting slogans and waving signs, it isn't to save the environment, it isn't to stop climate change. It's because wind energy is cheap in Texas, something that appeals to even the most coal-rolling, roundup-spraying, green-lawn-in-the-desert Texan.
If you want to save the environment, drop the moralizing and meet people where they are. Until that happens environmentalism is just going to produce backlash, that allow the environmental movements feel even more superior and do things to produce even more backlash, until the price of meat, power, transportation and housing goes up so much that you get a backlash that undoes any short-term progress that was made.
I'm under no illusions that everyone is suddenly going to sacrifice quality of life to save the planet - humanity, writ large, is happy to burn coal until they choke to death on the fumes.
So how do we stop the slow-motion disaster that we're living in?
1) I completely agree that trying to minimize pain by teching our way out is important. The reason we have cheap wind and solar power is heavy government investment in research, which eventually trickles out and becomes commercially viable. The recent energy bill is great, but doesn't go nearly far enough. Still, if you take an honest look at the numbers, it's simply not going to be enough to avoid the worst effects.
2) We have to make it more profitable to be low-carbon than it is to burn things. I think that unavoidably leads to the conclusion that we need to tax carbon. It also has to be done in a smart way - not super-high all at once, and then return the proceeds with checks to the middle/lower income people who are hit hardest to solidify political support. The goal is to nudge people to change their behaviors, without doing it so hard that they vote you out of office.
Look, we were happy to keep dumping arsenic in streams until those externalized costs were built into the cost of doing business. The effects of carbon as a pollutant are here now - we can't keep pretending that they don't exist. What is the cost of Miami being underwater? What is the cost of wildfires and drought in the west? Yes, it will cost billions of dollars, but if it saves trillions, that's a smart investment.
You don't start eating 50kg a day if you become vegetarian, and you don't spend 30 hours a day travelling if you do it by train. Yes, universally switching from cars to any other form of transport would save people 1-3 hours a day to do other things, but if they spend that time doing anything other than sitting in a car it's a win.
You also don't get to use "what if noone did that" as a counter argument for something helping if everybody did it.
If everyone insulated their home properly, got rid of their cars, stopped eating beef, and cut the remaining animal proteins by half we'd be pretty close to net zero right now.
My point about the Jevons paradox is that if, for example, 10% of people stopped eating meat (for climate reasons), that could mean that the price of meat goes down, which would make meat more affordable for other potential consumers, so a different 10% of people might end up starting to eat meat.
That's an extreme example, but it's not impossible to imagine that there are low-income occasional meat-eaters out there who might start consuming more meat if the price went down. Maybe the increase wouldn't completely reverse the initial reduction, but if the net result was equivalent to only 5% of people changing their lifestyle, then we're talking about a very small change in CO2 emissions.
I'm imagining that people will do the opposite because it is known that people usually buy more of a desirable commodity when its price goes down.
Of course there are limits to how much latent demand there is, and how price-sensitive consumers are, but it is not unreasonable for me to have raised this as a possibility.
Congrats, you are actually just an inconsequential stooge. Environmental corruption and depletion is not a consumer problem, at least not directly. It is a product of industrial production processes. Eat meat, eat dairy, preserve your health and your brain in doing so, and find ways to create industry that is clean, that would make you an environmentalist... maybe... if you successfully altered the system.
Stop pretending like climate change is created by consumers and can be controlled by "turning your lights off."
I think you have a valid point, but I'm not sure it's made effectively, which I think is why you got downvotes.
An example might help: Elon Musk is not, AFAIK, vegan. But he's done a lot to popularize electric cars, having far more impact than he could by changing his diet. Likewise, the Beyond meat people have probably done a lot more to reduce meat consumption than they could ever outweigh by eating steak every meal for the rest of their lives. (I am actually not clear on the net environmental benefit of using gas vs. making more batteries, but let's say for the sake of argument that electric cars are an environmental benefit, since it's just an example.)
You are probably right. I didn't sleep well and I'm tired and the smarmy "one-weird-trick" vibe of the post I replied to just annoyed me . I will own the "not made effectively" indictment.
> Stop pretending like climate change is created by consumers
But it is actually created by consumers. By human beings consuming resources and emitting greenhouse gases in return. Simply because there's nothing else even close in scale as a source of global warming. What else could there be, wild herbivores?
It follows almost tautologically that it is human beings that is causing the warming.
You blame "industrial production processes". But those are completely funded by human consumption in a mostly on-demand action.
So what else is there to blame? The transportation industry? Again, completely funded by, and a direct response of consumers buying stuff. Consumption is at the beginning of the chain. It's the cause.
So your argument sounds wrong to me. It sounds like you want to shift blame to wealthy industrialists. Guess what, a fat bank balance or stock ownership like that of Elon Musk or Bezos does not emit greenhouse gases by simply existing.
Honestly a “fuck carbon emissions” t-shirt is probably an easier and more direct way of communicating your membership to the “environmentalism” tribe while still doing fuck-all to reduce emissions. If you actually care about the environment, then you’re doing everything in your power to promote carbon pricing or other policies that have an outsized impact beyond shallow lifestyle choices. Personal responsibility stuff plays right into fossil fuel industry’s hand—it’s all premature micro optimization. To copy another commenter, it’s arranging deck chairs on the titanic.
Using transit, walking, or cycling is promoting 'other policies that have an outsized impact beyond shallow lifestyle choices' because these modes all hage network effects. It becomes vastly easier for city planners to override idiotic traffic engineers with once a comparatively tiny threshold of people are using them. There is also a network effect in knowledge and experience. If you learn all the safe byways and tracks then it becomes immensely easier for anyone nearby who knows you to start walking, if twenty of you in an area start cycling then your local mechanic might be afford to stay in business and run an outreach event.
> Using transit, walking, or cycling is promoting 'other policies that have an outsized impact beyond shallow lifestyle choices' because these modes all hage network effects.
I see your point, but this isn't viable. Too many people live too far away from their workplaces, shopping centers, etc (not to mention unpleasant weather) for walking/cycling and we don't have adequate public transit networks (nor can we build them in time to meet our public transit goals). Moreover, EVs are coming in very quickly and will largely wipe out our personal transportation carbon footprint (especially as the grid transitions to clean energy) such that there's very little to be gained (environmentally speaking) from a transition to walking, cycling, and public transit (I say this as someone who wants America to be more walkable, but not at the expense of the environment). Not only is it technically unviable to build out the transit networks and otherwise reorganize our society away from cars, but it's politically unviable--apart from urban progressives, there's very little political will for public transit (many of the people who say they support increased public transit networks aren't actually going to avail themselves of them until they really become more convenient than cars for their specific transit needs).
> Moreover, EVs are coming in very quickly and will largely wipe out our personal transportation carbon footprint (especially as the grid transitions to clean energy) such that there's very little to be gained
EVs still cause massive inefficiency in infrastructure and living. They require obscene amounts of energy to make and run (just less obscene than similarly oversized ICEs). They cause local and global pollution. And they compete for resources with other, much better solutions. Direct emissions are only a tiny part of the ravages cars cause on the climate and environment. The only upside is they are so inefficient they might induce the public to buy grid storage directly.
> Not only is it technically unviable to build out the transit networks and otherwise reorganize our society away from cars,
Places like istanbul or toronto prove that it can be done in less time than an EV transition will take (and in toronto's case in the face of massive political opposition). The costs are commensurable with the subsidies and infrastructure required for moving from ice to ev.
Getting the political will starts with not concern trolling with lies every time it comes up.
> EVs still cause massive inefficiency in infrastructure and living. They require obscene amounts of energy to make and run (just less obscene than similarly oversized ICEs).
Maybe, but there's no sense in optimizing for those things in the midst of a climate crisis. Yes, if we could flip a switch and everyone could start cycling, that would help the climate crisis enormously, but there is no such switch and in reality it would be completely reorganizing our society which is not a viable project in the timeframe the climate demands.
> They cause local and global pollution.
They cause less pollution per passenger mile than the average diesel bus.
> The only upside is they are so inefficient they might induce the public to buy grid storage directly.
They are strictly more efficient than the status quo, and especially where it counts: miles traveled per unit carbon emission. This is the overriding concern.
> Places like istanbul or toronto prove that it can be done in less time than an EV transition will take (and in toronto's case in the face of massive political opposition).
Istanbul and Toronto are more densely populated than almost anywhere in the United States. Of course public transit investment works there. Moreover, they're individual small places--we're talking about public transit infrastructure for the entirety of the United States--there aren't enough public transit infrastructure firms in the world to get that done, and developing experienced people to do that work takes decades and considerable expense.
> Getting the political will starts with not concern trolling with lies every time it comes up.
I would say that smugness and self-righteousness from the anti-car people is the biggest obstacle to political will. I don't think the people bringing a dose of reality to the anti-car party are doing any meaningful harm.
> Maybe, but there's no sense in optimizing for those things in the midst of a climate crisis. Yes, if we could flip a switch and everyone could start cycling, that would help the climate crisis enormously, but there is no such switch and in reality it would be completely reorganizing our society which is not a viable project in the timeframe the climate demands.
Those things are the climate crisis. Tailpipe emissions are only one part of the ravages that car dependent suburbia puts on the climate.
There is also a trivial switch to start the transition for >50% of the population. Put some paint and barnicles on the roads and end euclidean zoning.
> They are strictly more efficient than the status quo, and especially where it counts: miles traveled per unit carbon emission. This is the overriding concern.
The overriding concern is units of carbon emission. Halving the per km but doubling the miles travelled doesn't net you anything.
> Istanbul and Toronto are more densely populated than almost anywhere in the United States. Of course public transit investment works there. Moreover, they're individual small places--we're talking about public transit infrastructure for the entirety of the United States--there aren't enough public transit infrastructure firms in the world to get that done, and developing experienced people to do that work takes decades and considerable expense.
Low density is a symptom, not a cause. If you don't legally mandate low density, take the lion's share of infrastructure to enable it, and gesture to traffic making things unlivable any time anyone tries to build an apartment then you get density hy default.
More of the people live in the higher density areas definitionally. Stop forcing them to spread out and let the others who actually need to be spread out use EVs (or ICEs as there are so few of themit doesn't matter). More money has been gifted to Elon Musk for luxury vehicles in california alone than would be required to build out a world class transit system for San Francisco and LA from scratch, at his promis of a ridiculous boondoggle, high speed rail was cancelled.
> I don't think the people bringing a dose of reality to the anti-car party are doing any meaningful harm.
"We can't do the one thing that works because of those other people objecting to it" while objecting to it is obvious disingenuous lies and self righteous smugness to boot. You are the opposition you gesture vaguely to, and the solution to the political problem is to stop being the political problem.
It's also not self righteous or smug to say stop taking most of the infrastructure money and 90% of the communally paid for space to build a moat of death around me that is only passible if I spend a quarter of my income on a car. It's not even neutral. It's a tiny step towards equality and you're so entitled you perceive it as an attack.
EVs are here to save the car industry, not the planet.
> Those things are the climate crisis. Tailpipe emissions are only one part of the ravages that car dependent suburbia puts on the climate.
Perhaps, but again we're not going to convert our suburbs into dense urban utopias in just a few decades even if we had the political will. But as with EVs, we can move people from natural gas residential heating to cleaner heat pumps (which become even cleaner as we transition the grid to renewables).
> There is also a trivial switch to start the transition for >50% of the population. Put some paint and barnicles on the roads and end euclidean zoning.
If you want bike lanes, go for it, but you're deluding yourself if you think that's going to meaningfully reduce transportation emissions for >50% of the US population.
> The overriding concern is units of carbon emission. Halving the per km but doubling the miles travelled doesn't net you anything.
Of course, EVs don't travel twice as far as ICE cars, and their per-mile carbon emissions of an EV is about 1/3 that of gasoline cars today (https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric_emissions.html) and it only gets better as the grid transitions to clean energy sources.
> Low density is a symptom, not a cause. If you don't legally mandate low density, take the lion's share of infrastructure to enable it, and gesture to traffic making things unlivable any time anyone tries to build an apartment then you get density hy default.
Yes, zoning plays a part in density, but removing zoning restrictions isn't going to turn some exurb into Istanbul or Toronto. Density has no natural state, it's the result of interaction between dynamic social, technological, and economic forces which push people together or pull them apart. Arguing that everything would be dense enough to support public transit if only we changed our zoning laws is absurd, and I say that as someone who wants to change zoning laws.
> More of the people live in the higher density areas definitionally. Stop forcing them to spread out and let the others who actually need to be spread out use EVs (or ICEs as there are so few of themit doesn't matter).
Not definitionally, but yes, more people live in higher density areas. I'm not "forcing them to spread out"--I'm support changing zoning laws! Critically, *changing zoning laws isn't incompatible with EVs*! My position has consistently been "we should continue to invest in EVs rather than forcing everyone to change their lifestyles" (obviously this doesn't imply forcing people who are happily using public transit to adopt EVs), but it seems your position has changed from "we should force everyone to change their lifestyles" to "stop forcing public-transit-using urbanites to use EVs" (which no one was proposing).
> More money has been gifted to Elon Musk for luxury vehicles in california alone than would be required to build out a world class transit system for San Francisco and LA from scratch, at his promis of a ridiculous boondoggle, high speed rail was cancelled.
This doesn't impugn EVs. I can't speak to California specifically, but nationally it makes a lot more sense to invest in something that we know will work (EVs) than something that is politically impossible, impossibly expensive, and certain to fail to meet the required environmental timelines (getting some significant share of the country to move to areas of higher density and change their lifestyles so they can make public transit viable in the next several decades).
> It's also not self righteous or smug to say stop taking most of the infrastructure money and 90% of the communally paid for space to build a moat of death around me that is only passible if I spend a quarter of my income on a car. It's not even neutral.
Sweden and switzerland disprove all of your rhetoric about insufficient density or any argument about cold weather or hills.
Sweden has a lower population density than the USA, but has a quarter modeshare in each of transit and cycling. There are cities with population densities as low as some places in texas that still have good non-car infrastructure. Re. building transit and density in a couple of decades, that's how long it took to steamroll urban areas and replace them with highways. It can be undone in less time. And again toronto and istanbul did it, so san francisco and new york with orders of magnitude more money can do it too.
It's not an idealogical pipedream when many places have done it successfully. Just because you currently choose to restrict the designs that produce good living areas with infrastructure that is far cheaper to maintain and run to rich people, doesn't make them expensive or unattainable.
Sustainable transport and zoning are good for the budget, they're good for the environment, they're good for car drivers, they're good for residents, and they're good for the poor. Your gaslighting about calling people smug not being an attack does not change that.
The pipedream that hasn't happened is one where self driving cars work properly and don't render any high density area completely uninhabitable by humans.
No, but I do appreciate your personal boycott making animal foods less expensive without having any marginal effect on production. As an avid consumer of such foods: thank you for your service.
This is just performance, like chaining yourself to a concrete slab. The real thing, if anyone really cared, would be to prosecute manufacturers for planned obsolescence. A washing machine uses a plastic bearing instead of a slightly more exlensive aluminum one? You send it to an FTC like agency, they inspect it and send some VP to jail. This would drastically reduce the size of plastic islands in the oceans, emissions from factories (who are busy manufacturing junk to replace broken junk).
That’s extreme and I think most of your point comes from a belief in being vegan as an ethical way of life rather than from a genuine willingness to limit people environmental impact.
The proper way to frame it provided someone has no desire to be vegetarian would be limit your consumption of meat - only eat red meat as an exceptional treat and favour poultry a few times a week - and switch to plant based milk.
Eggs and honey are very much fine as is cheese given the average per individual amount eaten per year.
That’s only an American things. Honey bees are native species where I live. Also foreign honey bees displacing native species are not really what people have in mind when they think of protecting the environment. Just import foreign honey if that makes you feel better.
This is what happens when you optimize for only a single variable.
And the end result won't be what you want it to be. It doesn't do us any good to stop climate change if the ecosystem still collapses out from under us.
Creating a sustainable environment is a systems problem and carbon is just one of many variables in that system. Yes, it's a really important one and in many ways it is the most pressing. But biodiversity and maintaining ecosystem services are close seconds, and if you optimize your eating for carbon in the way the author is describing you inevitably end up doing more net harm by undercutting those other two.
Further, a lot of the "data" she's linking is completely with out method or context. And method and context can make a huge difference in these sorts of lifecycle analyses. They are fraught with pitfalls. It's one of the reasons it's been so fucking hard to pin down exactly what the most environmental behavior is.
And this whole mess is one of the prime motivators behind my current effort to write an open academic publishing platform [1] that would allow review to be crowdsourced so that we can open and centralize the whole literature. Because then we actually could get a complete picture of what the best current answer to these questions is with out having to go through secondary sources like this which inevitably cherry pick studies, data, and lack context.
By the way, this is exactly what a climate change denier would write, except that that would talk about collapsing the economy if we focused too much on reducing carbon emissions.
The truth is reducing CO2 emissions is an emergency, and any other environmental considerations other than doing that is just arguing about deck chairs on the Titanic.
At this point, we would have been in a much better position if the Greens had no been so rabidly anti-nuclear. Germany is restarting coal plants now.
At some point, as the article argues, following “environmental intuitions” is self-defeating.
And today and 50 years from now and very likely at least another 100 years beyond that. Prior inaction does not mean it's over. We don't get the luxury of having a "oh well we lost this round" mentality.
If you really want to curb co2 emissions significantly, the only effective way would be to nuke the USA, Europe, China and sterilize all but 5% of the remaining world population.
That is not true. The all-or-nothing mentality is why vegetarian purists do little to curb mass meat consumption. We don't need to choose between industrial society and destroying our habitat. We can have both if we're thoughtful about what indulgences we allow.
It's really not a single variable problem, though. We're also looking at biodiversity collapse as humans atomize and invade wild spaces, and declines in insect populations which prop up the rest of the biosphere, including human agriculture.
We're making significant progress on cleaning up energy production, as wind and solar are now the most economic ways to produce new energy by a very long shot. The trajectory of the temperature curve is bending in the right direction, and should bend further. At some point we also need to pay attention to the rest of the quality of life on earth.
I agree that following environmental intuitions is self-defeating, but so is chasing red herrings. And this is exactly why I'm trying to build something that will allow us all to make these analysis on primary sources, not secondary ones like the OP.
Climate is an emergency, but if we go chasing the wrong "solutions" based on bad data or incomplete data, or take the base of the ecosystem out from under us in the process, then we won't resolve the emergency or we'll end up in a worse place.
There are some things we know - transportation, housing, urban design, energy, many aspects of industrial manufuaction and waste disposal. These are still complex, but have much clearer cost benefit analysis. We know what the answers are there. Some of them involve individual action (like I laid out below) others are going to require collective action.
Agriculture is a mess with a pitched propaganda war taking place around it. I've spent a decade trying to sort out what is true, and I'm still no closer to feeling like I can say with certainty what the most ecological diet is. But I know that anyone who can say it with certainty has not done complete research.
> The truth is reducing CO2 emissions is an emergency
Almost nobody among claiming that treats it seriously.
Prominent celebrities claiming that travel by plane.
Greenpeace continues to oppose nuclear power.
Solar power gets blocked because some endemic species or pretty views are threatened.
Noone supports killing air travel.
---------------------------
Almost nobody among "CO2 is emergency" is actually willing to sacrifice own benefits or other priorities. At most they demand sacrifice from others.
I am not going to treat plane-travelling celebrities declaring climate emergency that threatens survival of humanity. The same goes for eco-organizations not willing to support deregulation of nuclear power.
> reducing CO2 emissions is an emergency, and any other environmental considerations other than doing that is just arguing about deck chairs on the Titanic
I don't think that latter sentence follows from the first at all - it's very much a slow emergency that will play out over decades and indeed centuries, and furthermore with a global population of 8+ billion, clearly it's not feasible for all of us to drop everything just to focus on any one single environmental issue.
There are inevitably going to some actions that need to be taken to ensure long term ecological health that aren't related to mitigating against climate change, but are just as important, esp. wrt release of toxins/agricultural runoff into the environment, or drawing down water tables or monitoring invasive species (a problem already, but often exacerbated by warming temperatures). Thankfully we can walk and chew gum at the same time.
(FWIW I agree re the anti- nuclear stance of environment groups - and would do so regardless of the need for low-emission power: nuclear energy production generally has a much lower environmental footprint than fossil fuel generation)
It's a slow emergency in the sense that the effects will slowly increase, but it's very much a fast emergency in that the actions we take now are vastly more effective than they would be in a decade, or even a year. Because it's a self-feeding system, we will have to work much harder in the future to get the same results we could get by making reasonable mitigations today.
Sure - I don't think that changes my point though. And I have some sympathy for the argument that there may be some changes we shouldn't rush into without understanding them better (e.g. Sri Lanka's experiment with organic farming), or until we have better/cheaper technology available - what we should be doing now is a lot more research into mitigation and adaptation options.
“The truth is reducing CO2 emissions is an emergency, and any other environmental considerations other than doing that is just arguing about deck chairs on the Titanic.”
This statement is wrong. Climate and collapsing ecosystems/biodiversity are connected, and one is not more urgent than the other.
We would have been in a much better position if nuclear and fossil fuel interests hadn't been rabidly anti-renewable either because we could have started the transition 20-30 year earlier.
"Environmentalism" didn't originally have anything to do with preserving human life. If you don't regard the preservation of human life/civilization as the goal, what's the argument for CO2 emissions being an emergency?
The project looks cool! I've built quite a few open academic publishing platforms, we would have a lot to talk about I imagine :)
You might be interested in what we're doing at LabDAO, including our publishing lab and the community governance we're developing. Note: we're a DAO but it's not about crypto.
I honestly have no idea. I don't think I know nearly enough about GPT3 to hazard a guess.
I could imagine using natural language processing as part of looking at generating an automated Q&A algorithm or attempting to automate literature reviews in some way, but in the review process?
Someone I was talking to the other day was suggesting using sentiment analysis during the review process as a kind of tone grammarly aid to help people write constructive reviews, which is interesting. But I think that's different from GPT3.
Judging from your bio, I would guess you have much strong ideas about that answer to that question than I do. What are your thoughts?
If you like, you can link me to a paper you know well and I’ll send a review based on gpt3, without reading it. You can tell me if it is sensible.
I rather like the frontiers review process as a gatekeeping process. Papers get much better through their interactive review.
But I don’t think peer review should stop with publication. I think there is a need to rate and rank and otherwise gather sentiments from researchers on papers in their field —ideally in a manner that allows for new important work to surface more easily. Whether the goal is to make science human and machine readable, for the further advancement of science. There is going to be a lot of science.
> I think there is a need to rate and rank and otherwise gather sentiments from researchers on papers in their field —ideally in a manner that allows for new important work to surface more easily.
I think what I'm building in peer-review.io actually achieves this. Because I've split out the two functions of review into pre-publication review and post-publication integrity management.
Pre-publication review is entirely about helping authors improve their work. It's rather akin to a Github PR.
Post-publication integrity management happens through voting and responses. More akin to StackExchange. Votes require responses, though responses don't require votes. That part is all public and on going. If you vote on a paper based on reading it, and then later discover its fraudulent in some way, you can come back and change your vote and edit your response. Both review and voting/response stay with the paper in perpetuity.
Two that I hear constantly: rooftop solar and urban gardening (or "farming" if you must). Both are ecological catastrophes when they prevent the effective use of cities to house people in energy-efficient buildings with low demand for transportation. Protecting rooftop solar with "solar access rights" is something that some find superficially green but is actually ruinous.
What is the problem with urban gardening? On a rooftop, greenery would help with the heat, and I find it difficult to believe that greenery in a space which otherwise has none would be an "ecological catastrophe".
There isn't anything wrong with urban gardening itself. The problem comes when anti-development groups impose policies to prevent any building from casting a shadow on anything. Greenery and open space are both good and important, and gardening is a fine hobby. But urban gardens don't feed anyone and if there is a choice between housing people in an existing city, or protecting an existing garden from shadows, we should choose the housing every time.
Same thing goes for rooftop solar power: it's fine, but protecting it is not important.
Just going from my local experience. The build-nothing approach to housing in Berkeley, championed by zucchini-hugging (google it) hippie morons, combined with the solar access ordinance that prevents development even along major transit corridors. This has caused an explosion of car-dependent exurban sprawl in former wilderness, wetlands, and farms.
Even tokyo has enough rooftops to provide most of its electricity, and your apartment building can be twice as dense if you make it twostories and cover the whole lot rather than dedicating half of the block to a driveway, dedicating the first floor to parking and making it three story.
If you limit the neighbor to n stories at the boundary and n+1 at a setback of the winter noon sun angle where n is the current building then you can get your solar cake and eat it too.
Agree on the urban farming front (delicious lead). Although when done right, high mass yield, refrigerated, low calorie produce can be a net neutral or minor win there and should he considered as reasonable as any other hobby. There is also something to be said for the follow on effects of praxis, even if the immediate effects are minor.
The author confuse being environmentalist with trying to reduce her carbon footprint.
Environment is not all about carbon footprint. Reducing...or rather not increasing as much global warming doesn't help reducing the 7th continent or the micro plastics/graphene/whatever life threatening microscopic waste we are sending in the environment.
The climate's been changing since the world came into being. Stop trying to play God and think you can control nature. Fear mongering. Look how miserable western countries are with their eco warrior solutions.
Some of the arguments seem misplaced via bad assumptions. This is exactly the approach that will alienate trad thinkers who need to be convinced in order for any effective action to be taken. Here are the issues I had:
- Highly processed food, including fake meat, could be extremely bad for you. The point is we just don't know yet as there isn't good data.
- Dense cities have the potential to be inhumane and not worth living in for various health (e.g. particulates, aerosols, nitrogen, disease) and social (digital-gov tight controls over movement, work, and access to resources) reasons. Just look at covid era China. Large groups of people displaced into under resourced cities ends badly.
-Nuclear is great until you get something like Ukraine where its used as a stick against the rest of Europe. Thyroid cancer rates in western europe would spike as a result of a critical incident. Or ofc Fukashima and Chernobyl. I'm totally pro nuclear but not mentioning its failures is a bad take and I don't believe the figures about nuclear related deaths.
> Dense cities have the potential to be inhumane and not worth living in for various health (e.g. particulates, aerosols, nitrogen, disease)
Sure they have the potential for this, but only if we don’t take these problems into account and mitigate them. Take particulates for example (and noise, which you didn’t mention but is also an issue); a lot is from cars. If we assume that every city resident will have and frequently use a car, then sure that becomes an issue. But if we provide viable alternatives to driving and make them as or more convenient than driving, much less of an issue.
True, but the potential must be possible given existing resources and political systems and not inhuman or utopian. EVs are possible and not utopian for the most part and so you are right. Although the energy crisis will heavily impact manufacture of EVs.
Another point: fertility drops massively in cities and this is an environmental concern as you need labour to transition industries at scale (e.g. nuclear plants, solar, wind, biomanufacture). Low birth rate dense cities are a recipe for disaster in terms of sufficient labour for a green transition.
The list of issues with the authors "I'm a misunderstood future hero" viewpoint goes on and on imo.
Low-traffic neighborhoods, grassy tram tracks for sound dampening, protected bike lanes, etc are also possible and not utopian. We do ourselves a disservice if we think about them as some unattainable ideal. They exist, right now.
Yes, they exist, but are only implemented in very small pockets of neighborhoods in cities across the US and there is usually huge hurdles in expanding them. They seem like window dressing in wealthy neighborhoods rather than as solutions being expanded citywide.
Exactly.. and believing that this will distribute evenly across the population magically and solve the issues relating to dense and unhealthy post-climate cities is the kernel of moderate climate-utopic thinking. Sure these interventions exist but so do Ferraris. They may or may not scale.
I find this questionable.
Sure, the type of food is more important than where it comes from - IF you eat meat. This argument effectively states that you can stop making environmentalist choices once you have avoided the biggest offenders.
Now, if you really care about moving towards a more environmentally friendly world, you'll not stop there. You'll first want to change your diet to be plant-based, but then also want to make sure that those plant-based foods you buy are best-in-class (environmentally speaking), i.e. lead to healthier soil and less microplastics.
Beyond the environmental aspect, I'd also suggest looking at what impact your choices have along social and economical axes.
You can't make decisions about "environmentalism" if you haven't decided on your goals. Reduce greenhouse gases? Reduce solid waste and microplastics? Reduce animal suffering? Preserve biodiversity and habitat? Give the social appearance of being "green"?
My imperfect personal tactic is to consume less of everything.
The issue with environmentalism is that we are all the victims of multi decades PR campaigns crafted to deflect people attention from what’s really polluting towards meaningless things.
People are angry their neighbours don’t properly sort their trash while recycling is a shame. Meanwhile planned obsolescence is prevalent.
Making people feel guilty about their very small impact prevent them looking at the real culprits: electricity production, oil companies, global manufacturing and shipping and construction.
>People are angry their neighbours don’t properly sort their trash while recycling is a shame. Meanwhile planned obsolescence is prevalent.
Is this seriously an issue compared to trash in general? Sure, people bitch about how it's impossible to repair their iphones or macbooks, but even if you had to replace them every other year, the amount of trash they generate in relation to everything else is absolutely minuscule.
>It’s a conscientious strategy. Making people feel guilty about their very small impact prevent them looking at the real culprits: electricity production
But every kilowatt that you don't consume is a kilowatt that's not being generated by the electric grid. In that sense your actions have a direct impact on greenhouse emissions. Sure, you unplugging your electronics isn't going to single-handedly stop global warming, but that's because no one is single-handedly causing global warming either.
Also, you can literally buy a PV system for your house which would cut your emissions to zero.
>oil companies
see above, also electric cars.
>global manufacturing and shipping and construction
Well the goods you buy has to be manufactured somewhere, so presumably you're against the shipping rather than the manufacturing aspect. However, this source[1] says that shipping is responsible for 2.5% of global emissions, which isn't very significant.
> Is this seriously an issue compared to trash in general?
No it’s not an issue that’s my point. What people sort is rarely recycled anyway. That’s why it’s a shame.
> But every kilowatt that you don't consume is a kilowatt that's not being generated by the electric grid.
Yes but what individual consumes is far less relevant than how this electricity is produced especially when you compare domestic consumption to industrial consumption. It’s far more impactful to lobby for the end of coal power plants than switch off your electronic.
> see above, also electric cars.
Yes, it’s finally coming quite slowly but for decades oil was heavily subsidised.
> Well the goods you buy has to be manufactured somewhere, so presumably you're against the shipping rather than the manufacturing aspect.
I’m not against anything. There are huge gain to be made in both shipping and manufacturing. Investments are far too low because they are not mandated.
That’s my point. The most significant gains are at an institutional or corporate level. Most of the debate surrounding individual behaviour is a distraction.
These kind of articles usually have a summary buried in them, this might be it:
> "Lab-grown meat, dense cities, and nuclear energy need a rebrand. These need to be some of the new emblems of a sustainable path forward."
1) Lab-grown meat is nowhere near commercialization. At best we have plant-based meat substitutes that have similar nutritional profiles (high protein) to meat that can be produced at scale.
2) Dense cities don't really matter that much, as each human requires a similar amount of arable land to grow the food they need each year. That per-human land area might be a bit less for vegetarians, but I doubt it's that big of a factor.
3) Nuclear energy is still quite expensive relative to wind/solar/storage, and that won't change because nuclear's catastrophic failure potential requires over-engineering and high-security, plus the uranium ore and cooling water requirements can be problematic.
Are you sure? My understanding is that people who live in dense cities rely less on automobiles, have their waste treated more efficiently, and consume less energy per capita in order to enjoy clean air and water. Those factors are more important than the land mass required to feed someone.
Depends on grandparent's definition of dense and city. You need density but you don't need tokyo, you don't need high rise and you certainly don't need lab grown meat or vertical farms.
You can pack a lot of people into a 3km^2 circle at fairly moderate density when you're not wasting 500m^2 (8 parking spaces @ 40m^2 then roads, misc infrastructure and setbacks) per person forcing them to own cars.
A well connected walkable rural town full of 3 story fourplexes and 2 story cottages all clustered within 1km around a main street and train station is completely fine.
A walkable city which is almost all under 8 stories and where large portions of the population live in row houses or five over ones is fine.
>>Dense cities don't really matter that much, as each human requires a similar amount of arable land to grow the food they need each year.
People use much less resources per unit of quality of life when they live in dense cities. Density provides massively more productivity with a given amount of natural resource consumption.
I support the use of plastic for many packaging tasks. The lighter weight helps offset the other environmental impacts.
Still support plastic bag and straw 'bans' though.
One small factor to add to the mix is giving less money and power to fossil fuel producers, which I think has an outsize effect.
So I'd like to see most plastics move towards non-fossil feedstocks and better recycling.
Luckily, Extended Producer Responsibility laws lead to both less packaging, less harmful packaging and more recycling of packaging by putting the cost of disposal onto the people with the ability to make systematic change.
The people pushing the "all regulations backfire" line are just anti-regulation because they know they can foist the costs onto other people. If they'd lie about climate change then they've kind of blown their trust with me.
I agree environmentalalsim should be data driven, in both identifying problems and potential solutions. I believe that the meme that it's not is an obvious political fabrication by genuinely bad people.
> The lighter weight helps offset the other environmental impacts.
Only when the minimal amount is used. Clamshell packaging is almost always incredibly wasteful and could be replaced by less weight of cardboard. Plastic jars and similar could often be bags or pouches. etc.
For example, British milk sellers mostly use the same shared milk container, with different labels.
They figured out how to lower the cost, because they were paying for it. They get really in depth in the specific amounts of dye to use in lids etc. to maximise recycling.
There's still inertia and favouring of status quo even in that example.
Milk bags have been in use in some places for decades, pack better, are lighter and use less plastic than a bottle lid. Other places do not use them for no particular reason.
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 339 ms ] threadThat means I've used them maybe 100 times. Now they're starting to fall apart, and soon I'll need new ones.
I wonder, since they're much heavier and clearly use a lot more plastic, whether I would have used less plastic with the disposable ones.
Okay, let's stop burning coal then, because we use electricity for a lot more things than just recycling.
Similarly, if cotton is that bad for the environment, maybe we need to fix that generally rather than just switch to disposable plastic bags for this one minor use case?
https://www.worldwildlife.org/industries/cotton
though the biggest problem with reusable plastic bags is the weakness of the handles. i'd rarely get more than a dozen uses out of a plastic bag before the handle rips. and that is not as easily to fix because of the stresses involved.
also, i feel the math is off, because cloth bags are a lot stronger and they get uses that no plastic bag is even designed for. so the reality is that even if i use plastic bags for shopping, i'd have a cloth bag anyways for other needs. and if i have it already, then using it more comes with zero additional impact.
plastic bags only have less impact on the environment than the cloth bags that i don't already own.
Except using it more means more wear and tear which means replacing it sooner. So unfortunately it doesn’t make the math easier.
I'm glad you brought it up, because upon looking at the study the chart is based on, it seems hopelessly optimistic - it accounts for several end-of-life scenarios but they are all 'good' disposals performed after plastic collection, like recycling or incineration. Zero accounting for accidental or incompetent sending to landfills, which indeed seems the main issue with plastic bags.
(The study is also specific to Denmark, where perhaps disposal programs are more reliable than they are in the US.)
https://www2.mst.dk/Udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-...
What you described is a non-issue if the bag is disposed of properly. Presumably you, as a environmentalist can be relied upon to do that.
[1] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-40/chapter-I/subchapter-I...
> Environmental impact is measured over a full life-cycle analysis (LCA) across the following metrics: greenhouse gas emissions, ozone depletion, human toxicity (cancer effects), human toxicity (non-cancer effects), photochemical ozone formation, ionizing radiation, particulate matter, terrestrial acidification, terrestrial eutrophication, marine eutrophication, ecosystem toxicity, resource depletion (fossil), resource depletion (abiotic), and water resource depletion.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/grocery-bag-environmental...
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa6cd5
Which only looks at greenhouse gas emissions (and only then compares grass feeding to grain feeding), and does NOT consider the effects to local groundwater, surface water, or air quality from CAFOs.
Here's a CDC resource that goes into depth about the swathe of negative effects on local resources CAFOs create: https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/ehs/docs/understanding_cafos_nalboh...
Besides things like frequent manure spills that pollute surface and groundwater, children living near these CAFOs have elevated rates of asthma.
The piece is very focused on greenhouse gases and the benefits of "economies of scale" but doesn't say a peep about the meltdown of our consolidated food supply when the pandemic subjected it to supply shocks.
AFAIK only food delivery to restaurants was slightly affected
1. stop buying meat
2. stop eating meat
3. stop buying dairy-based products
4. stop eating dairy-based products
5. stop eating eggs, honey, fish
6. use public transport, if possible
7. don‘t fly, if possible
Congrats, you now are an environmentalist.
If a crop needs pollination but you want to reduce dependence on honeybees, it's likely you would need to break up the land the crop is on in order to plant flowering species that attract native pollinators at the edges, and that comes with its own downsides for maintenance and harvest.
Get your house insulated. Helps with both heating and cooling.
Use a fan rather than AC if you can.
Do not buy unneeded stuff, buy durable, sell or repair rather than junk.
1. Walk or bike.
1a. If you can't do the above, use public transport.
1b. If you can't do that, consider moving to a city where you can do all of the above (if you can afford it). If you're rural, seek a land trust or farmer to buy your land when you do.
2. Insulate your house.
3. Get solar if you can afford it.
3a. Replace all gas appliances with electric (Heat pump, electric water heater, ec)
4. Don't fly.
5. Dietary changes, but remember to include ecosystem services and impact in your analysis. A little carbon is worth it if it means more land stays free of pesticides and continues to provide for the ecosystem.
At least, this is the best I've been able to make of it after a decade of study using open sources. Agriculture is important, but whenever I've actually dug into the referenced data I always find they're optimizing for the wrong things, leaving out important variables, or just all around cherry picking data with an end goal in mind.
There is also evidence that this sort of grazing can substantially reduce carbon emissions. Meanwhile monocultured grain, beans, and veggies - especially conventional with heavy pesticide* (edit: originally wrote fertilizer, meant pesticide) use - are devastating to ecosystems. They're essentially turning large swaths of land into killing fields, taking the bottom right out of ecosystem and contributing to the massive drop in insect populations (which form the foundation of the food web) we've seen across the developed world.
In short - the agricultural analysis is really fucking complex, multivariate, and grey.
She links a literature analysis that claims to contradict much of this, but I've read literature analyses making these sorts of claims before that just ignore most of the alternative systems, gloss over a lot of nuance, or downplay the harm of convention systems in major ways. I need to read the one she linked, but experience has taught me to treat it skeptically.
https://ourworldindata.org/less-meat-or-sustainable-meat
>Meanwhile monocultured grain, beans, and veggies - especially conventional with heavy fertilizer use - are devastating to ecosystems.
You're suggesting, in a very roundabout way, that we drastically reduce meat consumption. None of these things you describe can be done sustainably without a drastic reduction of livestock.
But that's not the same as putting it on top of the list. Ever since Cowspiracy came out (which has been roundly debunked) there's been this segment of the environmental movement that wants to put beef on the top of the list of carbon problems. It just doesn't belong there and there are so many issues with putting it there - not least of which is the individual responsibility trap.
Climate cannot be solved by individual action alone. Individual action is necessary, but not sufficient. And since people have limited capacity to make lifestyle changes, we need them to focus that capacity where it will do the most good. Meat just isn't it - transporation, housing, energy - those are where it belongs. We should be encouraging people to eat less meat, yes, and to eat sustainably pastured an grazed meat. But we shouldn't be telling people to go vegan as their primary lifestyle change.
Diet is actually one of the easiest things for people to change. You have to eat every day. And there is evidence this personal choice has affected markets. Walmart wouldn't be selling more soy milk, selling tempeh, producing their own plant-based cheese if it was just a non-impactful minority changing their habits. Even if it takes a year to change, it helps people understand they can do things that do help the environment.
Everything you describe - transportation, housing, energy are all things that take often decades to reform. Giving people something they can do right now to make a collective impact (however small the impact) is worthwhile. It brings a certain kind of spirituality to the movement - even if I can't switch to an EV or the bus takes too long or I rent, so I can't do energy efficient changes, I can still eat food that reduces my impact on the environment. I can eat with people who share environmentalist feelings. We can come to collective conclusions, like deciding to take the bus to go downtown tomorrow instead of driving. We can share emotions about our worry, but also our optimism for the future. When it comes time to demand systemic changes, we already have a well-organized cohort to proselytize for those changes.
This push to tie the vegan diet to climate, it didn't come from the climate movement - it came from the animal rights movement. And it really exploded with Cowspiracy, which was a blatant propaganda film that badly abused the literature and has since been roundly debunked.
You still see some climate campaigners harping on this point, George Monboit being the most prominent to come to mind, but again, an honest accounting of the literature does not support their point -- that "going vegan is the easiest and highest impact choice an individual can make for their personal carbon reduction". It is not easy for most people and the impact of it is not nearly that clear cut.
The meme is a distraction that was imposed on the environmental movement by people who do not have the environment, or climate change mitigation, as their first priority.
I've been seeking a sustainable diet and agriculture for over a decade. Believe me when I tell you it is not simple or clear cut. There are a lot of things we should be pursuing in that area, but universal veganism is not one of them. (General meat reduction is, but that is not the same thing.)
“… while shifting to a vegetarian meal one day a week could save the equivalent of driving 1,160 miles.”
https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/sustainability...
The comment above mine includes eating fake cheese.
Come on, it's pretty clear what they're driving at.
Also, nowhere have I said I don't want a reduction in meat consumption. In multiple comments I have said that it is a necessary part of the solution, whether by personal choice or driven by market forces as people shift to more sustainable agricultural solutions.
I am arguing against putting it front and center in the fight against climate change as the OP does and as the root comment on this thread does.
Here is you’re list.
“ 1. Walk or bike. 1a. If you can't do the above, use public transport. 1b. If you can't do that, consider moving to a city where you can do all of the above (if you can afford it). If you're rural, seek a land trust or farmer to buy your land when you do.
2. Insulate your house.
3. Get solar if you can afford it. 3a. Replace all gas appliances with electric (Heat pump, electric water heater, ec)
4. Don't fly.
5. Dietary changes, but remember to include ecosystem services and impact in your analysis. A little carbon is worth it if it means more land stays free of pesticides and continues to provide for the ecosystem.”
Reduction of meat consumption is part of 5. Dietary changes
> b) Because there is evidence that meat production done right IE intensive rotation grazing or silvopasture where the meat is grazed on a small section of land at a time and most of the land is left fallow most of the time can actually drastically increase ecosystem services. It allows the land to function as native prairie or savanna.
There's no way the method of meat production that you described can produce meat to sastisfy current US demand, let alone increasing demand from the developing world. Therefore practically speaking, reduction of meat consumption will still be needed.
Meanwhile, here's a study I found, which I linked elsewhere in the thread, that found that under the right circumstances, grass finished, rotationally grazed cattle can actually act as a carbon SINK. Not a carbon producer. Now that's one study and I have no idea of the quality and trustworthiness of the journal it's in, but it lines up with other studies I've read on the topic. And it tracks with the ecological model. There are ecosystems where these animals belong and in those ecosystems they play a key role in building the soil, and soil building is one of the key methods of carbon sequestration.
http://www.thefutureoffoodjournal.com/index.php/FOFJ/article...
Here's another study I found showing that many factors play into whether grazing hoofed animals builds soil or erodes it. Grass type, soil type, rainfall patterns - they all matter.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/gcb.12144
Again, single study, no idea of the quality of the journal, but it goes to show that these questions are not definitively answered. These lifecycle analyses that people keep pointing to are using a limited set of data sets that have huge deficiencies.
And that's why I push back on these narratives so hard. They are not well founded. Every time I dig into the studies being referenced, I find massive assumptions and huge deficiencies and a paucity of actual measurement.
The dialog around agriculture and sustainability all too often is akin to telling people to just cut their power consumption rather than discussing or exploring non-emitting sources of energy.
You say I have some weird axe to grind, because I keep pushing back on people saying that meat consumption is a much bigger contributor to GHG emissions than it is. Yet you keep insisting that I'm somehow not accounting for a meat reduction as a piece of the puzzle when I have readily admitted that it should be a piece of the puzzle multiple times, and have happily conceded that it will be necessitated if we switch to the more sustainable, but less productive modes of producing it.
I think I've made my point pretty clearly, and repeatedly. Seems to me like your the one with an axe to grind, one not supported by the data.
My suggestion that people eat one less meat based meal per day is far less drastic that if all meat was produced with the methods you are advocating. Yet, you imply that I am the one calling for the drastic action.
Edit: let me ask you this, what are you actually proposing? Should the government ban meat that isn’t produced the way you suggest? If not, what are you proposing that will have a bigger impact than my suggestion that people eat one less meat based meal a day?
The internet over represents vegans, so you and many others are naturally underestimating how much of a minority anti-meat fanatics truly are.
If a self-proclaimed environmentalist even suggests that we as individuals need to stop eating meat to save the planet, then we naturally assume you are a moralizing vegan who is trying to launder your issue under the guise of environmentalism.
Eating meat is a part of a humans natural diet, studies saying otherwise have repeatedly been proven to be wrong, we no longer trust you. The ketogenic diet has helped many people I know see real health improvements, further cementing our distrust for mainstream dietary "science" that always seem to align with the morals of vegans (and big corporations) but never show any genuine results in real life.
In fact over the course of my entire life, I have never met a preachy vegan who didn't either look like a cancer survivor or a fat ass who's diet only consists of junk food.
Studies showing the negative environmental impact of meat agriculture have the same smell as the ones saying it's bad for our health, we also do not trust them. Studies saying that adjustments to how it is farmed could help the environment, are much more palatable, something people would realistically be willing to try, since there is less likely to be moralizing vegans involved within the equation, and therefore more likely to actually work at all.
Any hint of moralizing veganism within any environmental suggestion is doomed for failure. The difference between your suggestion and his is that yours isn't even going to be acknowledged by the general public, while his solution could at least be feasibly accepted.
That is the difference, even if the effect ends up similar (higher meat prices).
Carbon Footprint Factsheet | Center for Sustainable Systems
https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/sustainability...
There's currently a propaganda war between multiple powerful lobbies - the animal rights lobby, the meat producers, conventional ag producers, and more - which means there is a ton of misinformation flying around about the actual environmental impacts of eating meat. Really, of all things dietary.
Meanwhile there are a bunch of people exploring alternate agriculture systems through agroecological approaches that show a lot of promise, but haven't been studied enough to really make claims about either way.
Further, you cannot just say "x amount of finished beef produces y emissions" because there are so many factors that go into it. Feedlot vs traditional range vs intensive rotational vs silvopasture are all different with completely different environmental impacts - of which carbon is only one.
> An all grass cow-calf – to – finish operation was included as a minor component in the eastern and northwestern regions
They examined a single all grass finished operation. There are studies that have found grass finishing can cut emissions in cattle by as much as 80%.
> The modeled operations were not intended to be actual operations; they were developed to represent the practices found in each region.
> Environmental footprints for all individually simulated ranch and feedlot operations were integrated into full production systems within their respective study regions using two methods
They also don't appear to be measuring actual operations, but rather modeling operations based on surveys of farmers and ranchers about the characteristics of their operations and then extrapolating from there.
Models have their place for sure, but I wouldn't make any kind of declaration of certainty based on a single model-based study. You have to average the outputs of hundreds or thousands of models, and even then, you can't be sure you have the answer.
A better approach would be one that measures the actual output of each operation at various phases and averages across them. Difficult to do, but I've seen studies that attempted it.
But here's a paper that found that properly grazed beef could not only potentially reach net-zero emissions, but might even be a carbon sink: http://www.thefutureoffoodjournal.com/index.php/FOFJ/article...
Here's another study that found that the soil type of the grassland and the dominant species of grass had a significant effect on whether intensively grazing it sequestered or released carbon from the soil overall:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/gcb.12144
And that one appears to be a literature review of other studies.
Related note, you have to be so careful looking through the studies, here's one that purports to compare the different systems. But when you read the abstract it uses "A deterministic model based on the metabolism and nutrient requirements of the beef population". In other words, they aren't actually measuring anything. They just have numbers in a database for "x lb of beef requires y inputs" and "x lb of beef gives z outputs" and they're crunching those numbers under assumptions about the productivity of each approach. Naturally, they find that conventional feedlots are the most environmentally friendly.
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/2/2/127
Note that one's also in an MDPI journal, which MDPI has begun to get a reputation as a pay to play paper mill.
What we can still control is how bad it is. (An increase 1.5 degrees C looks a hell of a lot different than 4 degrees C). That's still very much a fight worth fighting.
When people ask if we should do this or that, the answer should be "yes". These rules are fine - we should eat less meat, we should drive and fly less, etc. We should also do more systemic things, like investing heavily in battery tech and solar and wind and even fusion longshots. We should regulate the hell out of emissions, and use the proceeds from taxes and fines to help mitigate the effects on the poor. Getting to net zero carbon is going to be hard but it has to happen.
"The rules are fine", and net zero "has" to happen". So in your mind there's no room for argument and the objective is sacred. So how many guns are you willing to put to peoples' heads to get them to change their diets? To get them to stop flying? Driving in particular is required for many peoples' livelihoods, particularly those on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum.
IMO, the truly "hard" part of getting to net zero is getting people like you to realize you're not going to force your proposed solutions onto the rest of the world. You're going to have to team up with people you don't like. You know why Texas, the oil/petrochemical capital of the US, has so much wind power? It isn't because an army of environmentalists descended on the state house shouting slogans and waving signs, it isn't to save the environment, it isn't to stop climate change. It's because wind energy is cheap in Texas, something that appeals to even the most coal-rolling, roundup-spraying, green-lawn-in-the-desert Texan.
If you want to save the environment, drop the moralizing and meet people where they are. Until that happens environmentalism is just going to produce backlash, that allow the environmental movements feel even more superior and do things to produce even more backlash, until the price of meat, power, transportation and housing goes up so much that you get a backlash that undoes any short-term progress that was made.
So how do we stop the slow-motion disaster that we're living in?
1) I completely agree that trying to minimize pain by teching our way out is important. The reason we have cheap wind and solar power is heavy government investment in research, which eventually trickles out and becomes commercially viable. The recent energy bill is great, but doesn't go nearly far enough. Still, if you take an honest look at the numbers, it's simply not going to be enough to avoid the worst effects.
2) We have to make it more profitable to be low-carbon than it is to burn things. I think that unavoidably leads to the conclusion that we need to tax carbon. It also has to be done in a smart way - not super-high all at once, and then return the proceeds with checks to the middle/lower income people who are hit hardest to solidify political support. The goal is to nudge people to change their behaviors, without doing it so hard that they vote you out of office.
Look, we were happy to keep dumping arsenic in streams until those externalized costs were built into the cost of doing business. The effects of carbon as a pollutant are here now - we can't keep pretending that they don't exist. What is the cost of Miami being underwater? What is the cost of wildfires and drought in the west? Yes, it will cost billions of dollars, but if it saves trillions, that's a smart investment.
You don't start eating 50kg a day if you become vegetarian, and you don't spend 30 hours a day travelling if you do it by train. Yes, universally switching from cars to any other form of transport would save people 1-3 hours a day to do other things, but if they spend that time doing anything other than sitting in a car it's a win.
You also don't get to use "what if noone did that" as a counter argument for something helping if everybody did it.
If everyone insulated their home properly, got rid of their cars, stopped eating beef, and cut the remaining animal proteins by half we'd be pretty close to net zero right now.
That's an extreme example, but it's not impossible to imagine that there are low-income occasional meat-eaters out there who might start consuming more meat if the price went down. Maybe the increase wouldn't completely reverse the initial reduction, but if the net result was equivalent to only 5% of people changing their lifestyle, then we're talking about a very small change in CO2 emissions.
Of course there are limits to how much latent demand there is, and how price-sensitive consumers are, but it is not unreasonable for me to have raised this as a possibility.
Stop pretending like climate change is created by consumers and can be controlled by "turning your lights off."
An example might help: Elon Musk is not, AFAIK, vegan. But he's done a lot to popularize electric cars, having far more impact than he could by changing his diet. Likewise, the Beyond meat people have probably done a lot more to reduce meat consumption than they could ever outweigh by eating steak every meal for the rest of their lives. (I am actually not clear on the net environmental benefit of using gas vs. making more batteries, but let's say for the sake of argument that electric cars are an environmental benefit, since it's just an example.)
But it is actually created by consumers. By human beings consuming resources and emitting greenhouse gases in return. Simply because there's nothing else even close in scale as a source of global warming. What else could there be, wild herbivores?
It follows almost tautologically that it is human beings that is causing the warming.
You blame "industrial production processes". But those are completely funded by human consumption in a mostly on-demand action.
So what else is there to blame? The transportation industry? Again, completely funded by, and a direct response of consumers buying stuff. Consumption is at the beginning of the chain. It's the cause.
So your argument sounds wrong to me. It sounds like you want to shift blame to wealthy industrialists. Guess what, a fat bank balance or stock ownership like that of Elon Musk or Bezos does not emit greenhouse gases by simply existing.
I see your point, but this isn't viable. Too many people live too far away from their workplaces, shopping centers, etc (not to mention unpleasant weather) for walking/cycling and we don't have adequate public transit networks (nor can we build them in time to meet our public transit goals). Moreover, EVs are coming in very quickly and will largely wipe out our personal transportation carbon footprint (especially as the grid transitions to clean energy) such that there's very little to be gained (environmentally speaking) from a transition to walking, cycling, and public transit (I say this as someone who wants America to be more walkable, but not at the expense of the environment). Not only is it technically unviable to build out the transit networks and otherwise reorganize our society away from cars, but it's politically unviable--apart from urban progressives, there's very little political will for public transit (many of the people who say they support increased public transit networks aren't actually going to avail themselves of them until they really become more convenient than cars for their specific transit needs).
EVs still cause massive inefficiency in infrastructure and living. They require obscene amounts of energy to make and run (just less obscene than similarly oversized ICEs). They cause local and global pollution. And they compete for resources with other, much better solutions. Direct emissions are only a tiny part of the ravages cars cause on the climate and environment. The only upside is they are so inefficient they might induce the public to buy grid storage directly.
> Not only is it technically unviable to build out the transit networks and otherwise reorganize our society away from cars,
Places like istanbul or toronto prove that it can be done in less time than an EV transition will take (and in toronto's case in the face of massive political opposition). The costs are commensurable with the subsidies and infrastructure required for moving from ice to ev.
Getting the political will starts with not concern trolling with lies every time it comes up.
Maybe, but there's no sense in optimizing for those things in the midst of a climate crisis. Yes, if we could flip a switch and everyone could start cycling, that would help the climate crisis enormously, but there is no such switch and in reality it would be completely reorganizing our society which is not a viable project in the timeframe the climate demands.
> They cause local and global pollution.
They cause less pollution per passenger mile than the average diesel bus.
> The only upside is they are so inefficient they might induce the public to buy grid storage directly.
They are strictly more efficient than the status quo, and especially where it counts: miles traveled per unit carbon emission. This is the overriding concern.
> Places like istanbul or toronto prove that it can be done in less time than an EV transition will take (and in toronto's case in the face of massive political opposition).
Istanbul and Toronto are more densely populated than almost anywhere in the United States. Of course public transit investment works there. Moreover, they're individual small places--we're talking about public transit infrastructure for the entirety of the United States--there aren't enough public transit infrastructure firms in the world to get that done, and developing experienced people to do that work takes decades and considerable expense.
> Getting the political will starts with not concern trolling with lies every time it comes up.
I would say that smugness and self-righteousness from the anti-car people is the biggest obstacle to political will. I don't think the people bringing a dose of reality to the anti-car party are doing any meaningful harm.
Those things are the climate crisis. Tailpipe emissions are only one part of the ravages that car dependent suburbia puts on the climate.
There is also a trivial switch to start the transition for >50% of the population. Put some paint and barnicles on the roads and end euclidean zoning.
> They are strictly more efficient than the status quo, and especially where it counts: miles traveled per unit carbon emission. This is the overriding concern.
The overriding concern is units of carbon emission. Halving the per km but doubling the miles travelled doesn't net you anything.
> Istanbul and Toronto are more densely populated than almost anywhere in the United States. Of course public transit investment works there. Moreover, they're individual small places--we're talking about public transit infrastructure for the entirety of the United States--there aren't enough public transit infrastructure firms in the world to get that done, and developing experienced people to do that work takes decades and considerable expense.
Low density is a symptom, not a cause. If you don't legally mandate low density, take the lion's share of infrastructure to enable it, and gesture to traffic making things unlivable any time anyone tries to build an apartment then you get density hy default.
More of the people live in the higher density areas definitionally. Stop forcing them to spread out and let the others who actually need to be spread out use EVs (or ICEs as there are so few of themit doesn't matter). More money has been gifted to Elon Musk for luxury vehicles in california alone than would be required to build out a world class transit system for San Francisco and LA from scratch, at his promis of a ridiculous boondoggle, high speed rail was cancelled.
> I don't think the people bringing a dose of reality to the anti-car party are doing any meaningful harm.
"We can't do the one thing that works because of those other people objecting to it" while objecting to it is obvious disingenuous lies and self righteous smugness to boot. You are the opposition you gesture vaguely to, and the solution to the political problem is to stop being the political problem.
It's also not self righteous or smug to say stop taking most of the infrastructure money and 90% of the communally paid for space to build a moat of death around me that is only passible if I spend a quarter of my income on a car. It's not even neutral. It's a tiny step towards equality and you're so entitled you perceive it as an attack.
EVs are here to save the car industry, not the planet.
Perhaps, but again we're not going to convert our suburbs into dense urban utopias in just a few decades even if we had the political will. But as with EVs, we can move people from natural gas residential heating to cleaner heat pumps (which become even cleaner as we transition the grid to renewables).
> There is also a trivial switch to start the transition for >50% of the population. Put some paint and barnicles on the roads and end euclidean zoning.
If you want bike lanes, go for it, but you're deluding yourself if you think that's going to meaningfully reduce transportation emissions for >50% of the US population.
> The overriding concern is units of carbon emission. Halving the per km but doubling the miles travelled doesn't net you anything.
Of course, EVs don't travel twice as far as ICE cars, and their per-mile carbon emissions of an EV is about 1/3 that of gasoline cars today (https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric_emissions.html) and it only gets better as the grid transitions to clean energy sources.
> Low density is a symptom, not a cause. If you don't legally mandate low density, take the lion's share of infrastructure to enable it, and gesture to traffic making things unlivable any time anyone tries to build an apartment then you get density hy default.
Yes, zoning plays a part in density, but removing zoning restrictions isn't going to turn some exurb into Istanbul or Toronto. Density has no natural state, it's the result of interaction between dynamic social, technological, and economic forces which push people together or pull them apart. Arguing that everything would be dense enough to support public transit if only we changed our zoning laws is absurd, and I say that as someone who wants to change zoning laws.
> More of the people live in the higher density areas definitionally. Stop forcing them to spread out and let the others who actually need to be spread out use EVs (or ICEs as there are so few of themit doesn't matter).
Not definitionally, but yes, more people live in higher density areas. I'm not "forcing them to spread out"--I'm support changing zoning laws! Critically, *changing zoning laws isn't incompatible with EVs*! My position has consistently been "we should continue to invest in EVs rather than forcing everyone to change their lifestyles" (obviously this doesn't imply forcing people who are happily using public transit to adopt EVs), but it seems your position has changed from "we should force everyone to change their lifestyles" to "stop forcing public-transit-using urbanites to use EVs" (which no one was proposing).
> More money has been gifted to Elon Musk for luxury vehicles in california alone than would be required to build out a world class transit system for San Francisco and LA from scratch, at his promis of a ridiculous boondoggle, high speed rail was cancelled.
This doesn't impugn EVs. I can't speak to California specifically, but nationally it makes a lot more sense to invest in something that we know will work (EVs) than something that is politically impossible, impossibly expensive, and certain to fail to meet the required environmental timelines (getting some significant share of the country to move to areas of higher density and change their lifestyles so they can make public transit viable in the next several decades).
> It's also not self righteous or smug to say stop taking most of the infrastructure money and 90% of the communally paid for space to build a moat of death around me that is only passible if I spend a quarter of my income on a car. It's not even neutral.
I don't know how you can type ...
Sweden has a lower population density than the USA, but has a quarter modeshare in each of transit and cycling. There are cities with population densities as low as some places in texas that still have good non-car infrastructure. Re. building transit and density in a couple of decades, that's how long it took to steamroll urban areas and replace them with highways. It can be undone in less time. And again toronto and istanbul did it, so san francisco and new york with orders of magnitude more money can do it too.
It's not an idealogical pipedream when many places have done it successfully. Just because you currently choose to restrict the designs that produce good living areas with infrastructure that is far cheaper to maintain and run to rich people, doesn't make them expensive or unattainable.
Sustainable transport and zoning are good for the budget, they're good for the environment, they're good for car drivers, they're good for residents, and they're good for the poor. Your gaslighting about calling people smug not being an attack does not change that.
The pipedream that hasn't happened is one where self driving cars work properly and don't render any high density area completely uninhabitable by humans.
The proper way to frame it provided someone has no desire to be vegetarian would be limit your consumption of meat - only eat red meat as an exceptional treat and favour poultry a few times a week - and switch to plant based milk.
Eggs and honey are very much fine as is cheese given the average per individual amount eaten per year.
And the end result won't be what you want it to be. It doesn't do us any good to stop climate change if the ecosystem still collapses out from under us.
Creating a sustainable environment is a systems problem and carbon is just one of many variables in that system. Yes, it's a really important one and in many ways it is the most pressing. But biodiversity and maintaining ecosystem services are close seconds, and if you optimize your eating for carbon in the way the author is describing you inevitably end up doing more net harm by undercutting those other two.
Further, a lot of the "data" she's linking is completely with out method or context. And method and context can make a huge difference in these sorts of lifecycle analyses. They are fraught with pitfalls. It's one of the reasons it's been so fucking hard to pin down exactly what the most environmental behavior is.
And this whole mess is one of the prime motivators behind my current effort to write an open academic publishing platform [1] that would allow review to be crowdsourced so that we can open and centralize the whole literature. Because then we actually could get a complete picture of what the best current answer to these questions is with out having to go through secondary sources like this which inevitably cherry pick studies, data, and lack context.
[1] https://blog.peer-review.io/we-might-have-a-way-to-fix-scien...
The truth is reducing CO2 emissions is an emergency, and any other environmental considerations other than doing that is just arguing about deck chairs on the Titanic.
At this point, we would have been in a much better position if the Greens had no been so rabidly anti-nuclear. Germany is restarting coal plants now.
At some point, as the article argues, following “environmental intuitions” is self-defeating.
Anything else is just greenwashing at this point.
Which we don't because we fear losing comfort/commodity and can't agree on modalities.
We're making significant progress on cleaning up energy production, as wind and solar are now the most economic ways to produce new energy by a very long shot. The trajectory of the temperature curve is bending in the right direction, and should bend further. At some point we also need to pay attention to the rest of the quality of life on earth.
Climate is an emergency, but if we go chasing the wrong "solutions" based on bad data or incomplete data, or take the base of the ecosystem out from under us in the process, then we won't resolve the emergency or we'll end up in a worse place.
There are some things we know - transportation, housing, urban design, energy, many aspects of industrial manufuaction and waste disposal. These are still complex, but have much clearer cost benefit analysis. We know what the answers are there. Some of them involve individual action (like I laid out below) others are going to require collective action.
Agriculture is a mess with a pitched propaganda war taking place around it. I've spent a decade trying to sort out what is true, and I'm still no closer to feeling like I can say with certainty what the most ecological diet is. But I know that anyone who can say it with certainty has not done complete research.
Almost nobody among claiming that treats it seriously.
Prominent celebrities claiming that travel by plane.
Greenpeace continues to oppose nuclear power.
Solar power gets blocked because some endemic species or pretty views are threatened.
Noone supports killing air travel.
---------------------------
Almost nobody among "CO2 is emergency" is actually willing to sacrifice own benefits or other priorities. At most they demand sacrifice from others.
I am not going to treat plane-travelling celebrities declaring climate emergency that threatens survival of humanity. The same goes for eco-organizations not willing to support deregulation of nuclear power.
I don't think that latter sentence follows from the first at all - it's very much a slow emergency that will play out over decades and indeed centuries, and furthermore with a global population of 8+ billion, clearly it's not feasible for all of us to drop everything just to focus on any one single environmental issue. There are inevitably going to some actions that need to be taken to ensure long term ecological health that aren't related to mitigating against climate change, but are just as important, esp. wrt release of toxins/agricultural runoff into the environment, or drawing down water tables or monitoring invasive species (a problem already, but often exacerbated by warming temperatures). Thankfully we can walk and chew gum at the same time. (FWIW I agree re the anti- nuclear stance of environment groups - and would do so regardless of the need for low-emission power: nuclear energy production generally has a much lower environmental footprint than fossil fuel generation)
This statement is wrong. Climate and collapsing ecosystems/biodiversity are connected, and one is not more urgent than the other.
honestly I never understood this. Always seemed a more Luddite response than a environmentally principled one.
You might be interested in what we're doing at LabDAO, including our publishing lab and the community governance we're developing. Note: we're a DAO but it's not about crypto.
Contact in my profile if you'd like to chat.
I could imagine using natural language processing as part of looking at generating an automated Q&A algorithm or attempting to automate literature reviews in some way, but in the review process?
Someone I was talking to the other day was suggesting using sentiment analysis during the review process as a kind of tone grammarly aid to help people write constructive reviews, which is interesting. But I think that's different from GPT3.
Judging from your bio, I would guess you have much strong ideas about that answer to that question than I do. What are your thoughts?
I rather like the frontiers review process as a gatekeeping process. Papers get much better through their interactive review. But I don’t think peer review should stop with publication. I think there is a need to rate and rank and otherwise gather sentiments from researchers on papers in their field —ideally in a manner that allows for new important work to surface more easily. Whether the goal is to make science human and machine readable, for the further advancement of science. There is going to be a lot of science.
* check this out: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02787-5
I think what I'm building in peer-review.io actually achieves this. Because I've split out the two functions of review into pre-publication review and post-publication integrity management.
Pre-publication review is entirely about helping authors improve their work. It's rather akin to a Github PR.
Post-publication integrity management happens through voting and responses. More akin to StackExchange. Votes require responses, though responses don't require votes. That part is all public and on going. If you vote on a paper based on reading it, and then later discover its fraudulent in some way, you can come back and change your vote and edit your response. Both review and voting/response stay with the paper in perpetuity.
Also, thanks for the link, I'll give it a read!
Same thing goes for rooftop solar power: it's fine, but protecting it is not important.
OK. But how it makes
> rooftop solar and urban gardening (or "farming" if you must). Both are ecological catastrophe
claim true?
OK, that makes more sense.
> zucchini-hugging (google it)
Nothing relevant gets found
If you limit the neighbor to n stories at the boundary and n+1 at a setback of the winter noon sun angle where n is the current building then you can get your solar cake and eat it too.
Agree on the urban farming front (delicious lead). Although when done right, high mass yield, refrigerated, low calorie produce can be a net neutral or minor win there and should he considered as reasonable as any other hobby. There is also something to be said for the follow on effects of praxis, even if the immediate effects are minor.
Environment is not all about carbon footprint. Reducing...or rather not increasing as much global warming doesn't help reducing the 7th continent or the micro plastics/graphene/whatever life threatening microscopic waste we are sending in the environment.
- Highly processed food, including fake meat, could be extremely bad for you. The point is we just don't know yet as there isn't good data.
- Dense cities have the potential to be inhumane and not worth living in for various health (e.g. particulates, aerosols, nitrogen, disease) and social (digital-gov tight controls over movement, work, and access to resources) reasons. Just look at covid era China. Large groups of people displaced into under resourced cities ends badly.
-Nuclear is great until you get something like Ukraine where its used as a stick against the rest of Europe. Thyroid cancer rates in western europe would spike as a result of a critical incident. Or ofc Fukashima and Chernobyl. I'm totally pro nuclear but not mentioning its failures is a bad take and I don't believe the figures about nuclear related deaths.
Sure they have the potential for this, but only if we don’t take these problems into account and mitigate them. Take particulates for example (and noise, which you didn’t mention but is also an issue); a lot is from cars. If we assume that every city resident will have and frequently use a car, then sure that becomes an issue. But if we provide viable alternatives to driving and make them as or more convenient than driving, much less of an issue.
Another point: fertility drops massively in cities and this is an environmental concern as you need labour to transition industries at scale (e.g. nuclear plants, solar, wind, biomanufacture). Low birth rate dense cities are a recipe for disaster in terms of sufficient labour for a green transition.
The list of issues with the authors "I'm a misunderstood future hero" viewpoint goes on and on imo.
I don’t expect this will happen magically. I expect it will happen through advocacy and legislation.
Now, if you really care about moving towards a more environmentally friendly world, you'll not stop there. You'll first want to change your diet to be plant-based, but then also want to make sure that those plant-based foods you buy are best-in-class (environmentally speaking), i.e. lead to healthier soil and less microplastics.
Beyond the environmental aspect, I'd also suggest looking at what impact your choices have along social and economical axes.
My imperfect personal tactic is to consume less of everything.
Refuse -> Reduce -> Reuse -> Recycle
People are angry their neighbours don’t properly sort their trash while recycling is a shame. Meanwhile planned obsolescence is prevalent.
Making people feel guilty about their very small impact prevent them looking at the real culprits: electricity production, oil companies, global manufacturing and shipping and construction.
Is this seriously an issue compared to trash in general? Sure, people bitch about how it's impossible to repair their iphones or macbooks, but even if you had to replace them every other year, the amount of trash they generate in relation to everything else is absolutely minuscule.
>It’s a conscientious strategy. Making people feel guilty about their very small impact prevent them looking at the real culprits: electricity production
But every kilowatt that you don't consume is a kilowatt that's not being generated by the electric grid. In that sense your actions have a direct impact on greenhouse emissions. Sure, you unplugging your electronics isn't going to single-handedly stop global warming, but that's because no one is single-handedly causing global warming either.
Also, you can literally buy a PV system for your house which would cut your emissions to zero.
>oil companies
see above, also electric cars.
>global manufacturing and shipping and construction
Well the goods you buy has to be manufactured somewhere, so presumably you're against the shipping rather than the manufacturing aspect. However, this source[1] says that shipping is responsible for 2.5% of global emissions, which isn't very significant.
[1] https://www.ukri.org/news/shipping-industry-reduces-carbon-e...
No it’s not an issue that’s my point. What people sort is rarely recycled anyway. That’s why it’s a shame.
> But every kilowatt that you don't consume is a kilowatt that's not being generated by the electric grid.
Yes but what individual consumes is far less relevant than how this electricity is produced especially when you compare domestic consumption to industrial consumption. It’s far more impactful to lobby for the end of coal power plants than switch off your electronic.
> see above, also electric cars.
Yes, it’s finally coming quite slowly but for decades oil was heavily subsidised.
> Well the goods you buy has to be manufactured somewhere, so presumably you're against the shipping rather than the manufacturing aspect.
I’m not against anything. There are huge gain to be made in both shipping and manufacturing. Investments are far too low because they are not mandated.
That’s my point. The most significant gains are at an institutional or corporate level. Most of the debate surrounding individual behaviour is a distraction.
> "Lab-grown meat, dense cities, and nuclear energy need a rebrand. These need to be some of the new emblems of a sustainable path forward."
1) Lab-grown meat is nowhere near commercialization. At best we have plant-based meat substitutes that have similar nutritional profiles (high protein) to meat that can be produced at scale.
2) Dense cities don't really matter that much, as each human requires a similar amount of arable land to grow the food they need each year. That per-human land area might be a bit less for vegetarians, but I doubt it's that big of a factor.
3) Nuclear energy is still quite expensive relative to wind/solar/storage, and that won't change because nuclear's catastrophic failure potential requires over-engineering and high-security, plus the uranium ore and cooling water requirements can be problematic.
Are you sure? My understanding is that people who live in dense cities rely less on automobiles, have their waste treated more efficiently, and consume less energy per capita in order to enjoy clean air and water. Those factors are more important than the land mass required to feed someone.
You can pack a lot of people into a 3km^2 circle at fairly moderate density when you're not wasting 500m^2 (8 parking spaces @ 40m^2 then roads, misc infrastructure and setbacks) per person forcing them to own cars.
A well connected walkable rural town full of 3 story fourplexes and 2 story cottages all clustered within 1km around a main street and train station is completely fine.
A walkable city which is almost all under 8 stories and where large portions of the population live in row houses or five over ones is fine.
Houston or Phoenix is not fine.
People use much less resources per unit of quality of life when they live in dense cities. Density provides massively more productivity with a given amount of natural resource consumption.
Still support plastic bag and straw 'bans' though.
One small factor to add to the mix is giving less money and power to fossil fuel producers, which I think has an outsize effect.
So I'd like to see most plastics move towards non-fossil feedstocks and better recycling.
Luckily, Extended Producer Responsibility laws lead to both less packaging, less harmful packaging and more recycling of packaging by putting the cost of disposal onto the people with the ability to make systematic change.
The people pushing the "all regulations backfire" line are just anti-regulation because they know they can foist the costs onto other people. If they'd lie about climate change then they've kind of blown their trust with me.
I agree environmentalalsim should be data driven, in both identifying problems and potential solutions. I believe that the meme that it's not is an obvious political fabrication by genuinely bad people.
Only when the minimal amount is used. Clamshell packaging is almost always incredibly wasteful and could be replaced by less weight of cardboard. Plastic jars and similar could often be bags or pouches. etc.
For example, British milk sellers mostly use the same shared milk container, with different labels.
They figured out how to lower the cost, because they were paying for it. They get really in depth in the specific amounts of dye to use in lids etc. to maximise recycling.
https://wrap.org.uk/resources/report/hdpe-milk-bottle-resear...
None of that needed specific regulations, just assigning the costs to the people responsible.
Milk bags have been in use in some places for decades, pack better, are lighter and use less plastic than a bottle lid. Other places do not use them for no particular reason.