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Insect collapse

theguardian.com

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Re: Insect collapse

#121

Post by CalRobert »

gerbilly wrote: post #84
latch wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is silly. The economy has been booming for a while now and technology is more advanced that it's ever been. The situation is accelerating the wrong way. More of the same won't help. Plant trees and revive massive amount of land loss that most countries have caused due to poor stewardship (overgrazing). Better capture negative externalities. Or at the very least, stop subsidizing them. (aka, tax beef production,…

> Plant trees and revive massive amount of land loss that most countries have caused due to poor stewardship In some places you can't even plant the trees back. For example if you clearcut trees on a karst landscape, the rain washes away the thin soil completely, leaving only bare rock. >The lesson goes back to the ancient Romans, who harvested the great pine trees on the Dalmatian karst on the southern tip of Croati…

Frustratingly these landscapes are often seen as natural in places where they've been around for a long time, a problem of shifting baselines. I was going to point out that this is a huge problem in Ireland, where the landscape is sheepwrecked, but the article uses it as an example:

"The land would resemble a feature in Ireland called the Burren—an expanse of rundkarren produced by overgrazing and logging, marked by fissures that hint at the fathomless void beneath. "

The burren's OK, but it would be nicer as forest.

Re: Insect collapse

#122

Post by DoofusOfDeath »

linguistbreaker wrote: post #99
skh wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me the only thing we can really do is not have children. There are too many people on the planet.

I've thought this too but then you are leaving the future to those who breed more irresponsibly. Another way to look at it would be that we have a responsibility to raise more responsible people.

> I've thought this too but then you are leaving the future to those who breed more irresponsibly.

The movie "Idiocracy" addresses this very issue. It's a comedy, and I really enjoyed it.

Re: Insect collapse

#123

Post by rollo »

nopriorarrests wrote: post #40
open-source-ux wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...the hardware needed to run the software absolutely has environmental impact I agree. When I look at other industries I see efforts to reduce energy consumption. Most programmers, in contrast, couldn't care less. The most popular languages are the least energy efficient. But they make life easier for developers, or as devs love to say 'more productive'. Who cares if you need to add more and more server boxes to you…

>The most popular languages are the least energy efficient. What does it mean?

JS is the most popular language. Thus most software is wasting orders of magnitude more energy than it should. The same functionality would require less than a tenth of processing power (and thus energy and physical hardware) if it were implemented properly.

Re: Insect collapse

#124

Post by jellicle »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #75
dmichulke wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Insect collapse

#125

Post by [deleted] »

titzer wrote: post #14

This planet will not support 7 billion humans. Certainly not 7 billion stupid-ass humans who swing massive sledgehammers into the pillars of the biosphere that support them in their hedonistic blunder in search of more "wealth". When I hear the words "economic growth", and then weigh it against the destruction of this magnitude, I often want to vomit. And how do I square the fact that I work on flipping bits in compu…

[deleted]

Re: Insect collapse

#126

Post by skh »

astazangasta wrote: post #108
skh wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me the only thing we can really do is not have children. There are too many people on the planet.

This line of reasoning is spurious. The people who consume the most resources also have the lowest fertility rates. What we can do other than despair and contemplate genocide is transition to a carbon neutral economy. It really only requires political will.

It's not genocide to not have children. At an individual level the best thing we can do is to not have children if you are in a rich country. Those of us who live in rich countries massively over consume (including myself in this). Going to a carbon neutral economy is not helpful if it isn't done on a world wide scale. Right now rich countries have a nice system whereby they can realistically become carbon neutral in terms of their energy usage but their appetite for consumer goods is one of the main reasons for all of those polluting factories in other countries. Rich countries are outsourcing their pollution.

The resource consumption per capita of a person in the U.S. far exceeds the resource consumption of a person in Afghanistan. One American is more damaging to the world wide environment than a family in Afghanistan. Thus your second statement is not relevant. It is true that Americans have fewer children than people in poor countries. But our overconsumption more than makes up for this deficit.

It really only requires political will.

Are you an American? Because this statement sounds like someone who is not aware of the political reality in the United States.

Re: Insect collapse

#128

Post by skh »

linguistbreaker wrote: post #99
skh wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me the only thing we can really do is not have children. There are too many people on the planet.

I've thought this too but then you are leaving the future to those who breed more irresponsibly. Another way to look at it would be that we have a responsibility to raise more responsible people.

Yes, this is true. For me the way that I deal with the reality of a planet becoming a shitty place to live is to not have children. It is the best way for me to cope with the situation. People can choose to do otherwise.

Re: Insect collapse

#129

Post by skh »

otikik wrote: post #111
skh wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me the only thing we can really do is not have children. There are too many people on the planet.

Your comment arrives a bit too late. I already have one child. What else?

That's basically it. Assuming you live in a rich country the facts are that we way over consume. The people who say they are vegan and recycle and whatnot are still way over consuming for the most part. All of those cars, clothes, devices, etc. that they possess are very harmful to the planet. Limit yourself to one child since that is below the replacement rate for population growth. That's my suggestion and my way of dealing with the reality of the world we live in.

Re: Insect collapse

#130

Post by vharuck »

scatters wrote: post #98
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cours…

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.
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