Local food is not necessarily more environmentally friendly. According to a paper on food transportation and reducing its carbon footprint, about 11% of typical US food consumption's carbon footprint comes from transportation [1]. If the food you're eating from the area you're in is not suited well for growing that kind of food, it's quite possible the local farmers are making more of a carbon impact versus growing it in a more suited area and shipping it.

[1] "Food transportation issues and reducing carbon footprint", Wayne Wakeland , Susan Cholette , and Kumar Venkat. http://www.cleanmetrics.com/pages/Ch9_0923.pdf

Transporting food is a lot more than just fuel consumption, the farther you transport a given amount of food the greater your loss potential is to spoilage/contamination/infestation etc. It also promotes unsustainability, the US exports an insane amount of grain and imports nearly half of it's fruit for example, using land in America to feed livestock and people in China, Russia, India etc while eating fruit year round by importing it from Europe, Africa, Asia, South America, Australia, New Zealand etc.

local at country scale I meant (France or Italy which is near)

If everyone does it, at best we'd get a 25% decline in emissions; the vast, VAST majority of emissions, global warming, pollution, etc is caused by industry, which in turn is controlled by governments.

Some of them are doing something about it; this morning I heard the Dutch government is proposing a new emissions tax for industry: 45 euros per ton in 2021, raising by 2% annually to 80 euros per ton in 2050. Of course, the problem is that at the same time the government is subsidizing these very industries.

But that's just a tiny country that's already doing very well in that regard; right next to us is Germany and the UK with their heavy industries. And the whole emissions of Europe is negligible compared to the US and China.

Change won't come from individuals; it comes from politics. If you really care about the environment, you'll have much more influence if you become a politician instead of (or in addition to) a vegan.

Industry exists to serve personal consumption. Other than a few percent of GDP spent on defense and national infrastructure, the remainder of emissions is ultimately the responsibility of the individuals whose consumption that activity enables. If everyone took full responsibility for their emissions including those intermediated through industry we could see a much larger reduction in emissions.

Asking for people to individually change consumption habits, especially when it could put them at a disadvantage if others don't change, has repeatedly proven to be a bad solution. It's often better to use government as a focused effort to change things.

> My environmental fingerprint is probably <5% of average first-world countries people, I don't consume much, food mostly obviously, and local one, mostly vegs/fruits according to the season. no car, no pets, not a smoker, working remotely, avoiding trips as much as possible

You forgot to mention the #1 (by far) contributor that is 20 to 50 times more significant than everything else you mentioned.

> We recommend four widely applicable high-impact (i.e. low emissions) actions with the potential to contribute to systemic change and substantially reduce annual personal emissions: having one fewer child (an average for developed countries of 58.6 tonnes CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) emission reductions per year), living car-free (2.4 tCO2e saved per year), avoiding airplane travel (1.6 tCO2e saved per roundtrip transatlantic flight) and eating a plant-based diet (0.8 tCO2e saved per year).

http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541

That's recursive reasoning because a child also eats, travels by car and by airplane.

It's also equivalent to saying: Kill yourself because you cause 58.6t CO2 (unless children cause more CO2 than adults which would be absurd because children don't take a lot of emission-relevant decisions)

It's not equivalent since you're already alive. Not producing a child isn't the same as killing one's self in any way.

Of course it is. You can immediately and permanently eliminate all of your CO2 production going forward. That's a big help to the world, not very useful for yourself though.

Obviously if we eliminate humanity we also eliminate humanity's impact on the world. You can also get rid of all bugs in your code by deleting the code. That is the exact definition of throwing the baby out with the bathwater though. We're looking for ways to eliminate humanity's impact without eliminating humanity.

In 1600s, the population of the world was a little more than half a billion.[1] We predict 10 billion by 2050.

We certainly can work towards reducing our population. Starting with 1/2 surviving child per person. It is important that it can’t be bought or sold in order to maintain diversity of human genetic code.

We could also likely become part AI or part synthetic instead of organic to deal with a different planet. But I am treading sci fi here.

[1]http://www.ecology.com/population-estimates-year-2050/

P.S. nice handle!!

I hate to do this, but apparently you didn't understand what was quoted:

"One fewer child"

So instead of 3, have 2. If you were so inclined to have a vasectomy or tubal ligation after a 3rd child, it would help the overall situation.

It's about lowering the growth rate in human population. Similarly, your analogy to code is incorrect. It's about eliminating new bugs but reducing the number of commits.

In your value system.

It's easy to construct a value system where my own life and my future child's life are both worth more than 58 t CO2.

Well, then you may have a catch-22 where the expense of having your child could cause making the world unlivable for that child thus condemning it or its descendants to non-existence. Thus generalized to the whole population the best action to maintain the ability to have those valued children is to have fewer of them on average. So we're back to the same conclusion.

How do you reconcile the future warfare and famine risk to your N existing children caused by the additional carbon of your hypothetical N+1 vs your utility of having an N+1th child, though? Because that is the actual formulation.

You reconcile it by reading some history books and realizing that life has always been tough and that the future probably won't be any tougher than the past.

Except for the fact we are, in decades, affecting climate in a way that took several millennia previously and we've contaminated the water and air with not only microplastics but all sorts of outright toxic compounds.

Then of course we are making species go extinct 1,000 to 10,000 times the background rate because we are contaminating ecosystems, clear-cutting ecosystems and causing ecosystems to collapse by directly influencing climate making it impossible for parts of those ecosystems to survive.

Life is already orders of magnitude 'tougher than the past'.

I mean, you are absolutely, 100% incorrect. It's textbook fallacy. X is tough, Y was tough, we survived Y, and therefore we can survive X.

The planet has never been through warming as rapid as what we are going through in known geological (not human) history. There was a paper hosted and copublished by NASA to that effect in the last month. It's literally unknown how much life can survive the velocity of the change that is in progress.

What "history books" should I read about climate science, too?

Climate change has caused famine and strife for humans in the past. It's one of the more common reasons for civilizational decline. Sure, this round of climate change is worse. But our ability to fend for ourselves is better.

Again, 100% fallacy. "Sure, this round of climate change is worse." and comparing that to another change (our coping ability) with no discussion of magnitude.

The degree of climate change is not just "worse". It's without precedent in geologic history in velocity of change. Our improved ability to fend for ourselves is many orders of magnitude less that the degree of change that is happening.

You can read your history books and multiple it by 100 or 1000.

The scale of both differences is unknown. Current rate of climate change is unprecedented. Human civilizational complexity is also unprecedented. There is no way to know what the outcome will be.

Period.

Given that, it would be pretty stupid to preemptively quit.

Nobody's quitting. Recognizing the gravity of our situation is essentially the opposite of quitting.

Limiting further population increase is in no way equivalent to saying kill yourself. This is a gross exaggeration.

I'm just saying it logically follows that killing yourself is likely even better than not having children.

I consider it a failure of the study if it says "don't have kids" if (and only if) its original aim was to show how that can be done without drastic measures (such as "kill all humans", "don't have kids", ...).

It's like suggesting to not have kids in order to fight cancer. Yes, absolute cancer occurrences will decrease if you don't have kids, yet we have not in any way addressed the underlying problem.

EDIT: Previously I said "absolute cancer rates" where I should have said absolute cancer occurrences

Fighting cancer involves lowering cancer rates in each individual person. Individual likelihood of cancer is unaffected by the global population. Fighting climate change involves lowering CO2 rates for the globe, and is heavily influenced by the global population and the population of rich countries.

> Fighting climate change involves lowering CO2 rates

Exactly, and not having kids doesn't lower CO2 rates per capita, it just reduces absolute CO2 emissions.

Hence the equivalence that the article's statistics implicitly suggest killing humans reduces CO2 emissions and my claim that this type of info doesn't help at all.

It reduces absolute CO2 emissions if everyone has less children. Biology tells us that life does not stop reproducing short of extinction level events, however.

So your solution is to simply do nothing. It might offend some voters’ sense of entitlement. That things aren’t the same as they were 30 years ago.

We could do it the hard way. When ocean levels rise the coastal house market will collapse. Water will become scarce as aquifers get spoiled by salt. And climate patterns are certainly changing. Places that used to get an abundance of rain are already facing a drought. But some douchebag in a bro-dozer is certainly sticking it to the rich.

My apologies for going off track, but your last statement reminds me of how "The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy" begins.

> So your solution is to simply do nothing.

I never said that. I said implementing extreme solutions like a 95% cut to everyone's carbon footprint are a terrible idea.

Also we are most likely talking about like a 0.5-2 ft rise maybe over the next 30 years. That is not exactly a "day after tomorrow" panic situation. The coastal real estate economy can deflate over 30 years.

It seems to be quite well established that not dealing with climate change is going to be significantly more expensive than taking preventative action. So your arguments about economic hardship and the associated problems are (if valid) really arguments for taking more drastic action against the problem.

> It seems to be quite well established that not dealing with climate change is going to be significantly more expensive than taking preventative action.

Over what time period though? Projections are all over the place, and it is basically impossible to predict where our technology will be 20 years from now. Maybe moderate interdiction now on our part will stave off the worst of it until we discover technologies that will get us out of this jam.

We haven't discovered any major technologies in the last 20 years that would make a significant difference; what makes you think the next 20 years would be any different?

I'm confident we will make some gains in things like lower power consumption and better efficiency with renewables, but we're coming up against some hard physical limits; plus we are finding more toys all the time that demand more energy.

The best chance of finding technological solutions is to pour money into researching clean technologies, which is not something I would be against, but it doesn't guarantee anything.

Hoping for a technological solution in the future is a bit like spending all your money and taking out loans you are unable to pay in the uncertain hope of a windfall in the future.

It doesn't have to be this way. We utilize automation and slave-like labor to produce disposal junk.

It would be much better if via policy we encourage repairs, and levy a cost on packaging of any kind.

Then the market will sort itself out and there will be work in form of a robust secondary market.

That's a big problem for sure. Unfortunately, the collapse we'll get if we do not rapidly transition to a sustainable economy is likely to be much, much worse. But your point is a good one - how do we manage an orderly transition to a sustainable steady-state* economy when the changes needed to do so in the time we have are likely to be so drastic, they will cause a collapse of any social system that tries to make them?

*We can probably eke out some more economic growth while cutting resource consumption, but sooner or later continued growth and finite resources become an impossibility. If nothing else, we'll eventually generate too much waste heat from energy production.

If we all suffocate because the phytoplankton died off, I’m sure the history books will note that we freely voted for mass suicide.

There are enough sadists that I wouldn’t rule out a homicide yet.

In the most practical terms, wouldn’t a first-world genocide be good* for the environment? I mean, the problem is us, right?

*I am not personally endorsing genocide.

Yes, world-wide genocide would be amazing for the environment.