https://www.businessinsider.in/science/environment/news/indi...
https://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/april/tigers-genetic-div...
From any major airport in the world you can probably get to Brisbane for $1000 USD return. Then Brisbane to Cairns is around $100 AUD return. You could win back the cost of your flights at the Cairns Casino, the best (worst) attraction in town!
It’s far away from most people and it’s not cheap, but if you want to do it, spend the rest of this year saving up and do it when Australia opens its borders.
Heating your house and eating meat contribute far more to your personal carbon footprint than flying, unless you fly much more than usual.
Individual action is also important, but we will never solve the climate problem by ignoring what governments can/should do.
By all means do all those things: I go in that direction myself. But also vote, because there are damages that will not be remedied short of large-scale wielding of power, and voting has some chance of directing the large-scale power that can remedy the institutional bad actors.
Again just my thoughts. Didn’t mean to hit a nerve here.
1. Don’t eat meat.
2. Don’t get in airplanes.
3. Don’t drive a car.
4. Live in as small a house/apartment as you can.
5. Don’t have kids.
It turns out that when people ask, “But what can I do?” What they really mean is “What can I do that won’t really inconvenience me that much?”
One is that you're advocating for a hair-shirt, masochistic lifestyle stripped of all joy. I have no objection to you choosing a vow of poverty, and to pass on children, but don't try and sell it as inconvenience, what you're asking for is basically religious orders.
The second problem is, all you've done is reduced demand for those goods you've chosen not to consume. That makes them cheaper, so other people can afford more of them.
Congratulations, you've done... nothing! But you get to feel good (?) about it? Don't get me wrong, being a childless vegan with a bike and a tiny apartment can be a satisfying lifestyle, but doesn't it undermine the feeling of self-righteousness a little bit to know that all you've done is make it so one more suburban family with four kids can have tri-tip for dinner and fly to Cancun on holiday?
Climate change is unfortunate since it means getting many countries working together, and some may see a benefit in doing nothing.
As to what people can do? I'm not sure there is an answer. A technological solution would be great but isn't assured, voting is a problem in that you already need a lot of people thinking the same way, and leading a good lifestyle will assuage personal guilt but move the needle very little, so I think it's worthwhile but not a solution. I am not sure it will make a difference as you say when others will step in and consume what you left on the table.
My opinion is that nothing meaningful will happen until we see some obvious signs of distress and even then we'll be lucky if people scramble for a solution. We are starting to see problematic weather patterns, reef bleaching, and other evidence but since the problem is statistical in nature we always get people who say such events are not necessarily an indicator of a problem. Broader scientific literacy in the community to understand the fundamentals involved would take a generation and would have to be led from the top down meaning we get back to the same issue of bringing an entire country on board.
So I don't have an answer, but I don't think someone always needs an answer to point out something isn't working. Regulation would work within a country, but you need to get leadership on board and this is a global problem meaning one country isn't enough. The solution will have to align with selfish interests whether economic or actual survival. My hopes are on cheap green energy and maybe one of the cleaner variants of nuclear but that is more of a faith-based answer than anything. I hope it'll work out but don't know enough to be sure.
If you think a big house, a car, kids, flying for vacation, and a steak are what make life worth living, well then enjoy the end of the ride.
Where? Because I don’t know of a major party anywhere in the world that matches the first description.
Environmentalism, but only so long as it doesn't actually challenge the status quo of our society.
You have the Liberal Party of Canada, which brought in a carbon tax, great, but in order to justify to the public their expansion of oil sands export development. The notion that we would stop pumping oil out of the ground and burning it is unthinkable.
The even more progressive BC NDP also committed to exporting liquified natural gas to be burned in other countries, justifying it with promises of carbon tax increases.
Parties that were considering our climate crisis with due gravity would be doing everything they could to lower CO2 emissions, not taking one step forward, and one step back, and fiddling around the edges.
And political stances are remarkably heritable.
This is a circular argument for anthropocentrism. It makes no attempt to define any of its qualifying characteristics from outside the human perspective.
To some, coral reefs, rainforests, and biodiversity are all a level of creation higher order than what humans can produce. Those things didn't need us to exist. In fact we ruin them. Not to mention other forms of created beauty humans haven't figured out how to ruin yet, such as sunsets or starry skies.
You won't be able to do this. Human minds will make human arguments. Even if you had a "higher order" perspective, human minds would only be able to comprehend it in their own terms. Definition? Perspective? These themselves are human notions.
> sunsets or starry skies
Happen thanks to our atmosphere, in a narrow wavelength of EM that precambrian critters found useful to eat each other with. Beauty is in the eye of the anthropocentric beholder.
The circularity is unavoidable. Like induction, you just have to be okay with it.
I think the burden is on you here if you want people not to believe humans, of which I assume you and I are a part of, and our perspectives matter the most.
Until the coral reef learns to speak up and say, hey I'm putting my foot down. Humans and our choices determine it's continued existence. That alone makes our perspectives the most important if you want to continue having a coral reef, because it's our perspectives you'd need to be changing to keep it around.
We are for better or worse the arbiters around these parts.
I don't view it as a deficiency in other species' ability to communicate. It's a deficiency in our ability to listen. The reefs are speaking up, they're literally laying their lives on the line and the 'body' count is communication to humans that we should stop. It's not just coral, we are in the middle of a mass extinction event. One that just so happens to correlate with the exponential growth of humanity.
I think it's fair for people to question direct participation in exponential population growth. More people for more people's sake is not a solution, it's a problem. Of course this leads to a lot of really bad ideas about population control. Its a hard problem to solve, but I argue it's the same class of hardness as getting people to change their behavior in the middle of a mass extinction that doesn't impact them with anything but second order effects.
Quick edit: That article is just to backup my comment about population decline, I don't really agree with the article's opinion to ramp up births.
> But as my colleague Robin Hanson has pointed out, dwindling populations create their own inexorable logic.
“have their own inexorable logic” seems to stand in for “cam be scaremongered via naive assumption that trends extend to infinity”.
> If the Japanese population shrinks by half, to 65 million or so, what’s to stop it from declining to 30 million? Or 20 million?
The same negative feedback pressure that is why the runaway growth that was the concern when people projected then-current trends forward ~50-60 years ago didn’t happen, either.
It’s much more plausible that global human population is approaching the horizontal asymptote of a logistic curve than that the slowing of global growth points to a shift to permanent population loss that would be an existential threat.
One obvious factor: strong non-family economic support systems are one of the strongest predictors of low natural population growth, but shrinking populations strain thlse systems, reducing their long-term viability. There are many more negative feedback mechanisms at work, too.
> If you think the world is overpopulated and has serious environmental problems, you might welcome this news.
It me
You're more than welcome to think not of course, however this is definitely a more common thought than not. There's a larger shared set of values that people tend to hold even if it's not objective and I think you'd have to go to great lengths to prove me incorrect regarding those things being good to the majority, and even greater lengths that the opposite thought is good at all.
Personally I don't care if I ever see the reef, the Amazon or any other ecosystem. I'm pretty much interested in sustainable ecosystems to ensure human welfare.
Seems like the best idea is to just enjoy the time we have left.
Please. What a joke.
Read the IPCC reports. They are projecting massive increases in the wealth and health of the whole world in all future emissions scenarios.
Some scenarios are just worse than others, but all are better than today.
The world has been improving for centuries. The idea that we need to "enjoy what time we have left" is absolutely insane. It's pseudo-science
Yes, human impacts on the environment cause problems. No, they aren't going to cause human extinction.
Read "Enlightenment Now" or "The Rational Optimist" for some perspective.