We're getting bombarded with messages from the fossil fuel industry like "recycle," "ban nuclear," "ban straws," "ban plastic bags" that distract from the industry's real impact. If we want to solve the problem, we have to focus on the core issue: burning fossil fuels.
We're at a potentially species-ending crossroads - and we're moving towards saving ourselves. But it'll take actual focus on the problem to solve it instead of looking for perfect solutions to everything.
I'd say we're still moving away from that.
> The hardest hit were grassland birds, down by more than 50 percent, mostly due to the expansion of farms that turn a varied landscape into acres of neat, plowed rows.
i guess you can blame all the above on a single root cause, though: human over-population. we just don't have plagues and famines like we used to; we're really good at killing everything that we don't like.
i see my neighbors dousing their lawn with weed killer and pesticides every season, followed by grass nutrients! then burn 2gal of gasoline to mow that lawn every week. nothing better than an insect-less, uniform green lawn!
yes! i was fined because my dandelions crossed the magical 8" threshold for a week a few seasons ago. i happily paid it of course. you see, i had saved up the $20 by then with all the money i didnt spend on weed killer and fertilizer.
i'm just the worst person in my HOA.
the irony, of course, is that immediately behind my 0.2 acre property is a massive wetland with "grass" that's 10-15ft tall.
Actually over-production since a lot of food is wasted before consumption.
The over production started before we adopted fossil fuels.
in no way is this the root cause, in any real scientific analysis. it is literally just the rallying call of right wing politics.
To support such a large population, half of the earth's habitable land is currently being used for agriculture - that's a shitload of habitat destruction - that's not even accounting for all the rest of the space people use for homes, etc.
This is a fact (to some margin of error). It's indisputable that humans require land to produce food through agriculture, and that amount of required land increases with population size. I'm curious what analysis could possibly show human population growth doesn't result in more wildlife habitat destruction.
Since we stopped being hunter-gatherers, we've required agriculture to support large sedentary populations. Land use by humans/wildlife is generally a zero-sum game.
Elon Musk is like “there’s no problem, guys, keep on having more kids!” and he himself did.
Right wingers are pro life, and many religious ones advocate not even using condoms.
Left wingers are the reason women now have so much education and careers that they postpone having children til their 30s.
Anyway, the amount of resources and garbage is proportional to how many humans are on the planet. I don’t see what Elon Musk is so worried about “population collapse”. For an otherwise smart guy, he seems to be very mistaken about this core issue. Maybe he thinks we can escape to Mars and start over LOL
In no way is this true. No left-wing organization is advocating for this, liberal organizations and activists are.
> Left wingers are the reason women now have so much education and careers that they postpone having children til their 30s.
Oh you're one of those people.
I heard once in one of my classes that every 1 acre of farmland disrupts 24 acres of adjacent land, not just the surrounding acres but the ones surrounding that!
Meanwhile, global warming is terrible but the world being even 5 degrees hotter doesn’t kill most stuff, but 10b acres of farming can destroy entire continents
You're blaming the media for not talking about species going extint but about flooding. If people don't change even with the threat of human life being lost then there's no way they care if multiple species of birds goes extinct.
We've created a culture where being selfish is acceptable. Where polluting by modifying your vehicle is cool. Where caring about the environment makes you part of a conspiracy and who do you blame? The media for not talking about it more.
people won't change. they are addicted to convenience, low prices, diversity in options, and unlimited availability. which is also great for corporate profits.
as a species, humans plan and invest very little beyond our own lifetimes. but we're just animals after all. all the talk about becoming an interplanetary (mars) species for our own survival has to be the most absurd statement that can be made to dismiss the very real problems we should solve here first. but billionaires need an excuse to play Tony Stark.
it's not cool or profitable to do the boring work of unfucking ourselves.
You just won't say the real people who are to blame. You want to lay the blame on all people equally
80% of 0.001% is a rounding error. scale matters. just because a first-world country of 5M can do something does not make this attainable for the other 99.999% of the human population.
> Renewables in Europe are still moving at great speed
imo, nuclear (not fusion, mind you) + electric, is the only realistic way out of the energy mess.
they didnt get your message in Nigeria
I would also suggest it’s more akin to blaming drug users instead of drug dealers, but whatever metaphor floats your boat.
> addicted to convenience, low prices, diversity in options, and unlimited availability
applies just as much to Norway as to other rich countries. Maybe not in exactly the same way as in the US, but in their own way.
The idea that Norway holds some sort of moral high ground with respect to fossil fuels is offensive.
They at the very LEAST deserve the moral high ground of largely distributing the economic benefits of those fossil fuels to their citizens rather than to a dozen billionaires while their nation's infrastructure becomes dilapidated
But we can change our behavior by showing ourselves less ads. And that would solve a lot of other problems too.
i have uBO chrome extension installed, so i'm doing pretty good by that metric!
Not every change we need to make will benefit people. More often they will require more work, more resources, or less enjoyment at rhe individual level (recycling, not driving certain types of vehicle).
This is a thinly veiled dig at Elon musk. It's so weird that you think what he's doing is the problem, with his efforts bringing about electric cars earlier than what would have happened.
He might be a loud mouth jerk, but surely he's not symbolic of the real problem here?
Government subsidies and his engineers brought that about. Not Elon freaking musk. Stop drinking his kool aid.
I don't think Elon is a saint, there's plenty not to like. But I think that you're so angered by him (probably drinking an alternative brand coolaid) that you're willing to discount any positive contribution, action, or utterance from Elon. Usually people aren't all good or all bad, as much as we'd like the world to be that simple.
what do you think $44 billion in climate lobbying would look like?
teslas still have to be manufactured. he probably would have a had a greater climate impact if he purchased everyone on earth the same model of bicycle that can be be repaired/reused indefinitely.
we should be trying to remove cars, reduce production, and replace it with public transit, etc. but that's neither cool nor profitable; electric cars are both of those things.
electric energy storage, on the other hand, is useful. so making batteries cheap is a good thing, and tesla definitely helped that a lot.
Now if only they were affordable by the masses....
Elon Musk, the guy who floats insane ideas like tunneling and hyperloop to derail public transit projects?
You can go back to the 70's.
There was a fascinating amount of experimentation in education when I grew up in the 70's. I went to two rather interesting "experimental" schools — one public, one private. But regardless, there was a Zeitgeist in the 70's both of danger (over-population, pollution) but also of optimism — that we could change course as a society if we wanted.
As an anecdote, I remember a fascinating visitor when I was in elementary school. A man showed up in our class with a fascinating machine that was described as a "computer"! (This was perhaps 1973 or so — it may well have been an analog computer.) The thing was upright and perhaps the size of a Pachinko machine. He explained that you could set some dials to represent perhaps human growth, energy use ... something like that. I mean, I was quite young so I think a lot of it flew over my head — perhaps his audience was generally an older age. In any event it was supposed to calculate ... something ... maybe how many years before we ran our of food or fissile fuel or space on the planet....
Afterword: Sadly, speaking of Zeitgeist, it seems something happened around the close of President Carter's term and when Reagan's presidency began. The Metric System they had taught us in elementary school was out the window. Ha ha, even national markers in the U.S. that had added Metric to the Imperial(?) units would dropped the metric units....
> Opposition to DDT was focused by the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring. It talked about environmental impacts that correlated with the widespread use of DDT in agriculture in the United States, and it questioned the logic of broadcasting potentially dangerous chemicals into the environment with little prior investigation of their environmental and health effects. The book cited claims that DDT and other pesticides caused cancer and that their agricultural use was a threat to wildlife, particularly birds. Although Carson never directly called for an outright ban on the use of DDT, its publication was a seminal event for the environmental movement and resulted in a large public outcry that eventually led, in 1972, to a ban on DDT's agricultural use in the United States. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT#History
By the way, you can get Silent Spring for free on https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20151002 – and it is still very much worth reading; eloquent and poetic while still being factual, informative and balanced. The producers of DDT and other poisons started a smear-campaign after the publication, but it only lead to a Streisand-effect. See also this little clip from her single TV interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nriVjC0H8I
i will say that saving (preserving) the planet for your children is still a form of "saving" it. english's lack of nuance here is unfortunate, but also makes for some hilarious puns :D
[1] I tried to Google to verify that number and found a bunch of different numbers with different qualifiers.
Fact is, humanity’s fate was sealed the moment we decided to stop living like savage animals and become civilized.
As simple creatures, humans could live indefinitely until the world ends or a major extinction event, but surviving as a civilization for millions of years is definitely going to take the sacrifice of a couple planets along the way, at the rate we’re growing. No way around that. When we’re done with Earth, we will have to use the resources of several more planets, and we will continue this until we reach some stable equilibrium or simply die out entirely.
That’s assuming we don’t start implementing some rigorous eugenics and population control, but that does not seem popular, though personally I think it’s a better solution than having an unquenchable thirst for natural resources.
Just look to the advance of the desert. People cut down vegetation to burn for cooking, and hasten desertification. But what choice do they have? They need to eat.
Environmentalists are increasingly starting to view poverty reduction and fostering economic opportunity as a critical first step in wildlife protection.
rarely does anyone talk about the rapid collapse of entire ecosystems and disappearance of millions of species in short order. coral bleaching gets a passing mention, cause us scuba divers notice how shitty the scenery is becoming. pollution is a problem for individuals to solve; "just recycle!", the plastic/oil lobby shouts at us.
we don't deserve this planet. but it will recover a few million years after we're gone. the industrial revolution was the best and the worst thing that ever happened to humanity. we don't have a chance in hell of living even 5% as long as the dinosaurs did; not here, not on mars.