I am also very tired of big corps polluting like crazy and then shifting blame towards the customers, especially wherever there is no "greener" choice. New pipelines get built to send oil to plastic factories, yet you hear only "advice" to consume less plastic directed to the customer. The real polluters never ever get mentioned, yet we are asked to switch to plastic straws, as if they make any difference against thousands of cubic meters of plastic produced every day.
The rules of our society are dictated by corporations and money. We're enabling those corporation with our purchasing habits.
Btw, paper straws are not that much better, neither for us or the environment (they're coated with PFAS).
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00456...
[1] I really don’t get the paper straw thing. They’re fine today and they’re going to improve over time.
That may be good to your conscience, but you realise that you have not tackled the problem at all, do you?
If you really want to have an impact, try and achieve a concrete result: for example, help someone relocate from India to Canada!
If you frame it like that, climate change could be even seen as some sort of salvation : Soon, it’ll be the uniting “enemy” that humanity has to face and beat if it wants to continue to exist. We have to cooperate, and we have to become better beings to overcome this tremendous challenge.
And if you overcome it, and leave a better world to your children, is that not purposeful?
https://solar-power-now.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/bette...
Soon, someone will beat you over the head wih arguments like "you're a hypocrite for using computer to make a post on HN" and that you should be grateful for your air conditioner (which I don't use) and that if you lived 70 years ago your head would've fallen off by now, etc etc...
It's the credible part that I have never heard any good results for. Clearly almost anything I can do as an individual (other than science or politics) is not going to have any kind of influence and large scale inter-national agreements haven't exactly led to much.
So if you want to join this up as a fight, at first we must know how to fight and we must know that it has a reasonable chance of success.
Educate yourself, and educate others. Fight ignorance and consumerism. Fight those who're making it wrong.
> Clearly almost anything I can do as an individual is not going to have any kind of influence
Those in a position of power would like you to believe that. Because this viewpoint preserves the status quo.
All social justice movements in history started with a few individuals loudly demanding changes while being ridiculed by the masses, whose own lives they were trying to improve.
A tsunami is made up of many drops together. Be the change you want to see in the world, and all of that.
> we must know that it has a reasonable chance of success
We now know that nobody will solve it for us, certainly not the politicians or the corporations, until we loudly start demanding change. Meanwhile, we should prepare for the worst while simultaneously trying to prevent the worst from happening.
It may not work out in the end, as shown in the movie 'Don't Look Up.' The protagonists are sitting after the lost fight, having dinner while the extinction event is happening. Their last words (if I remember correctly) are: "I'm glad we tried.".
Rationally, that is the thing to do.
All predictive models agree that temperatures are not going to decrease during the following decades. We should be organizing the largest human migration in history, and instead we are wasting time on comfort solutions that give people the illusion to do something while accomplishing exactly nothing.
Seems over the course of human history humans have firmly marched in the direction of making life more comfortable. You are going to have a hard time convincing humanity to go against their nature.
In fact the modern materialistic lifestyle is probably an exception rather than historical rule. For most of history religious beliefs were uniting people and creating solace despite the more arduous existence.
The uniqueness of our condition is the scale of required change (global, spanning both avid consumer populations and deprived ones), the speed of required change (a few decades), the complex interplay with technological solutions and the rigidity/monoculture of economic systems.
Not clear how all this will play out.
But I've also lost hope on that. After all I would have thought the rise of Nazism in Germany would have provided us a historical lesson. Less than 100 years later and that lesson appears to be lost on many people.
> People just want the magic tree
Most probably do. I don't. You do.
The question I think we should consider is, if giving up these habits is so critical to saving humanity, why are they so cheap? The problem is fundamental to the system, there is no way to dig ourselves out of this hole.
Because the real costs were/are pushed off to the future, instead of being paid up-front. The real cost should have included the price of fixing the damage caused in the extraction/production/shipping/use/disposal of the product.
The cost will be paid. It only gets more expensive with time.
As a people I have to watch the Amazon being chopped down and burned and coal usage being at an all time high, while methane is spewed out by leaking coal seam plants and some how it's something I'm doing wrong?
Imagine how people in Africa feel about all this...we worry about AI wiping out humanity but we're doing a pretty good job ourselves....
Say what you will about saving developer time, but should we maybe think about these resources too?
We cannot unsee that a lot of work can be accomplished without pushing around the planet our clumsy bodies in massive exoskeletons.
> I have to watch the Amazon being chopped down
https://ourworldindata.org/drivers-of-deforestation
The research suggests that by far the largest driver of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has been driven by the expansion of pasture land for beef production, soy is likely to have played at least some role in the loss of forest.
More than three-quarters (77%) of global soy is fed to livestock for meat and dairy production. Just 7% of soy is used directly for human food products such as tofu, soy milk, edamame beans, and tempeh.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/weve-lost-35-pe...
The Southern Brazilian Amazon has lost 30 percent of its forests, and if the destruction doesn’t stop, the area will lose 56 percent of its forests by 2050. Environmental scientists argue the loss of the Amazon will have a global impact ...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/feb/19/colombia...
Cattle, not coca, drive deforestation of the Amazon in Colombia – report
https://phys.org/news/2022-08-global-forest-area-capita-decr...
New study finds global forest area per capita has decreased by over 60%
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/jun/02/t...
https://earth.org/major-companies-responsible-for-deforestat...
1. Cargill (soy & beef)
3. Wilmar International Ltd. (soy)
4. Walmart (palm oil, pulp and paper, soy, and beef)
5. JBS (beef)
6. IKEA
9. Starbucks
10. McDonald’s
11. Yum! Brands (KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell)
13. Ahold (meat)
https://news.mongabay.com/2023/05/3-million-hectares-of-colo...
3 million hectares of Colombian Amazon deforested for illegal pasture: Study
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/02/more-tha...
More than 800m Amazon trees felled in six years to meet beef demand
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26231772/
Biodiversity conservation: The key is reducing meat consumption
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/15/4110/htm
Which Diet Has the Least Environmental Impact on Our Planet? A Systematic Review of Vegan, Vegetarian and Omnivorous Diets
https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-opportunity-costs-food
What are the carbon opportunity costs of our food?
https://www.wri.org/insights/without-changing-diets-agricult...
Without Changing Diets, Agriculture Alone Could Produce Enough Emissions to Surpass 1.5°C of Global Warming
... and many more ...
> some how it's something I'm doing wrong?
You have to answer that.
I'm building furniture myself and not using Ikea.
I never go to Starbucks and I've had McDonalds probably 5 times in ten years.
This reinforces my point, millions of other people go to McDonalds each day because it's cheap food, I can't judge them for it.
So me never eating McDonalds and building my own furniture from recycled timber means hardly anything and the rain forest is still fucked.
The US Government should do more about it. Not me.
Soy it is then ;)
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2019.0003...
Soybean is one of the primary ingredients in poultry diets ...
77% of soy is for animal feed (source higher in the thread)
> So me never eating it means hardly anything and the rain forest is still fucked. ... Not me.
> The US Government should do more about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
Be well.
I'll assume you're a vegetarian, and you're probably eating legumes and the legumes you're eating are exported from a country where people cannot afford them. This was an issue I had with being vegetarian, one, I was hungry and tired a lot of the time and I needed a lot more time to prepare meals to feel better. Second, most legumes I had access too where taken from India, Mexico and South Amerca, thus people in those countries were going without.
I'll continue to eat food...and if I can't get access to it readily, I'll take it by other means.
So I get it, you're being smug, but you're dismissing the fact that people need to eat food. This should have priority over burning fossil fuels for energy.
You've not refuted shit with your graphs.
McDonalds isn't going to shut down for you. They' just drop their prices to lure people back.
Be well.
One takes 77% of the land, the other one 7%. We have so many animals to feed, that we need to deforest the Amazon (that was the discussion about, wasn't it) to be able to feed them all.
Just by those numbers alone it's clear that without the need to feed those armies of domestic animals we'd been able to slash international trade of those foods significantly. Were we not growing corn and seeds for animals, we'd have a lot of space to feed our populations with veggies.
> which have chopped down many of their forests, such as the USA
Again, if our needs were not that high, we wouldn't need to cut anything, but we'd be able to regrow them.
> I'll assume you're a vegetarian
No, vegan. And by choosing to eat legumes and peas I'm using 10-100x less land compared to the regular carnist.
> an issue I had with being vegetarian, one, I was hungry and tired
Sometimes people try to remove meat and eating just the rest. Or when being vegan, to be a fruitarian or eat raw veggies. Or they eat just the processed stuff. Beer, cocacola and oreos are vegan, but not healthy and cannot sustain you for long.
You have to make sure you're eating properly. In this day and age there are caloric tables online, meal plans, sites full of recipes, studies etc. etc. But let's not pretend it's overly complicated.
25% of your plate should be proteins (lentils, beans, tofu, tempeh, seitan, peas ...), 25% whole grains (brown rice, quinoa, whole wheat bread, whole grain pasta), 30% vegetables (variety of colors to get different nutriets), 10-15% fruit (apple, banana, berries), 5-10% fats (avocados, nuts, seeds, or a drizzle of olive oil).
That's it. No vegans think twice about it when cooking. Variety is a key for filling and healthy diet. With such diet you won't feel hungry.
I did it wrong too, few decades ago, turned vegetarian and ate as badly as my girlfriend did. I couldn't do it longer than few months, then ate meat for many years again, in big quantities, until I've realized how big problem the animal ag is for the planet and for survival of our children. Then I've learned cooking vegan and have not been hungry or feeling deprived of anything since :)
> I'll continue to eat food...and if I can't get access to it readily, I'll take it by other means
See ... animal ag will leave us scorched earth and gives us very real chance of an environmental collapse. Then people with such attitudes will fight for the scraps. I'd prefer if we'd tried to prevent such future.
> you're dismissing the fact that people need to eat food
You're dismissing plants as not being food. We eat meat for 4 reasons, and for 4 reasons only: tradition, convenience, culture, and taste. We already get something like 63% proteins and 82% of calories from plants.
> You've not refuted shit with your graphs.
Those graphs (and studies) are better than you think.
Atomising society from the late 70s to today might end up being not only a major historical mistake but a catastrophic one.
Social bonds and ubuntu (finding meaning in others) is something we naturally do. It doesnt take particular superhuman virtue. The question is whether there is an escape path away from the black hole trajectory we are currently falling-in and towards a more meaningful, sustainable and balanced future.
Sure.
> Understandably, people that don't have these comforts feel its only fair that they too get access to them.
Yep.
> Understandably, people don't want to see wind or solar parks or other intrusive installations in their backyard.
...Sorry, you lost me.
Particularly with repeating the basically-propaganda that industrial-scale wind or solar installations would be literally in people's backyards.
Now, I can't speak for you, but every wind or solar farm I've seen people opposing—and I live in the middle of farm country, which means both lots of wide-open spaces for such things, and lots of conservative people who think they're (sometimes literally) the Devil's work—were well away from their actual houses. They were solar farms on the neighboring farmer's land (so, nearly a mile from their house), or windmills Anywhere Within Their Sight Lines.
I'm sure there are some places where someone wants to install an industrial wind turbine that would be close enough to someone's house that they would, say, be concerned it might fall on it—those things are tall. But that's an incredibly rare case.
And frankly, I can't see any legitimate reason to object to someone else building a wind farm on their property. I have zero sympathy for people who are more concerned with their own "pristine views" or property values than they are with sustainable energy generation.
So it seems to me that your apparent insoluble dilemma falls apart as soon as you take away the entitlement and short-sightedness of some of the richest and most arrogant among us.
But we already have growing evidence that many new frictions show up and they are not obviously short-sighted.
E.g., land based wind-turbines might be on pristine hilltop locations, need access roads that might require deforestation. Geothermal units might create their own local pollution etc.
The gigantic scale of required alternatives if we are to maintain current energy use patterns will only increase tensions.
These are further compounded by the economic and control aspects of that transition (who benefits directly): eg building an installation that aims to serve datacenters and a global social media noise instead of powering the local community.
Understandably, people don't want to give up their existing comforts and habits.
Understandably, people that don't have these comforts feel its only fair that they too get access to them.
Understandably, people don't want to see wind or solar parks or other intrusive installations in their backyard.
Understandably, complex and less that 100% certain science tackling long-term effects and phenomena will be questioned by people with limited trust to institutions of tarnished authority.
People just want the magic tree of energy driven consumption to go on as this is the dominant model of a "fulfilling" life.
What is brewing is a toxic cocktail of denial, blame shifting, panic, snake oil salesmen, speculators etc.
We certainly haven't seen the end of history.