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Cleaning New York's harbor with one billion oysters

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Re: Cleaning New York's harbor with one billion oysters

#71

Post by parasubvert »

jerf wrote: post #67
faitswulff wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think op means we should have zero enemies in fixing our environment. If we were truly all on the same page and freaking out, taking meaningful action would be a lot easier.

"I think op means we should have zero enemies in fixing our environment." You do. Everybody wants clean air, clean water, etc. The Captain-Planet-Villain model of somebody literally cackling about how much pollution they're going to release into the world today is nonsense. The problem is people who see a short-term gain of their own, standing against the environmental problems they cause. They may not even believe t…

A major segment of the US populace is supporting policy to remove all polluting regulations , dismantle the EPA, and would scream murder over a Carbon tax the same way “conservatives” in Canada are over Federal plans.

They’re not evil overlords cackling, but rather they’re in mass denial over a zero sum scientific equation, and have created a cult around their disbelief that’s as strong as any environmental group. If you understand science, from that sense, they’re definitely acting like tragic villains.

I wish it were so easy, that all environmentalists would need to do is admit they’ve overreached sometimes and been alarmist on the timeline etc, and people will see the reason in ideas like carbon taxes.

That’s not the experience I see out there. People are treating carbon taxes as the equivalent of communist invasion and an immoral affront to free society, rather than a conservative policy idea. (Similar to the healthcare debate)

I suppose there will always be people in the middle that could swing either way, they’re our main hope.

But I think it’s not helpful to scold “both sides” as you do above, equating over-eager environmentalists with those that want to accelerate our pollution and use of fossil fuels for short term gain. One is a misdemeanour, the other is quite literally contributing to global destabilization. Global warming in the next 75 years is leading to a wave of refugee immigration the world has never seen before (that a large segment of the populace also currently would reject and let starve). Germany has been poltically destabilized by 2 million Syrians. What happens when 1 billion or more are knocking on Europe and the US’s doors? I only wish I was overstating this for effect.

Re: Cleaning New York's harbor with one billion oysters

#72

Post by thisisweirdok »

jerf wrote: post #67
faitswulff wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think op means we should have zero enemies in fixing our environment. If we were truly all on the same page and freaking out, taking meaningful action would be a lot easier.

"I think op means we should have zero enemies in fixing our environment." You do. Everybody wants clean air, clean water, etc. The Captain-Planet-Villain model of somebody literally cackling about how much pollution they're going to release into the world today is nonsense. The problem is people who see a short-term gain of their own, standing against the environmental problems they cause. They may not even believe t…

Everybody wants _their_ own air and water to be clean. The problematic people are the ones who don't care if your water/air is dirty because it benefits them.

Re: Cleaning New York's harbor with one billion oysters

#73

Post by InclinedPlane »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #9
ako wrote: post #5

We should all be freaking out about what we’ve done to the earth, but nobody seems to really be able to compare it within historical context. We just dont know what it was like just a century ago. I’m always surprised by facts like in this story and similar like https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/02/05/257046530/b... And https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/nyregion/new-york-city-sm...

Freaking out doesn’t seem to be helping? A lot of people have been freaking out for a long time. If anything, it seems to lead to a combination of despondency in allies and stubbornness in enemies. I’d advise working on solutions to specific problems, calmly and deliberately.

I think the OP meant "freaking out" as in "putting a universal sense of urgency behind our efforts at correction and remediation". There seems to be zero sense of urgency behind a lot of these issues today, especially at a policy level, even for issues that have a time horizon of just a few years. It's bizarre and frustrating. It looks very much as though if we were faced with the CFC/ozone problem today we would fail to meet the challenge as we did in the '80s/'90s. It's easy to forget that the ozone challenge required a tremendous amount of complication international diplomacy and required some real compromises.

Re: Cleaning New York's harbor with one billion oysters

#74

Post by AshleyGrant »

jerf wrote: post #67
faitswulff wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think op means we should have zero enemies in fixing our environment. If we were truly all on the same page and freaking out, taking meaningful action would be a lot easier.

"I think op means we should have zero enemies in fixing our environment." You do. Everybody wants clean air, clean water, etc. The Captain-Planet-Villain model of somebody literally cackling about how much pollution they're going to release into the world today is nonsense. The problem is people who see a short-term gain of their own, standing against the environmental problems they cause. They may not even believe t…

> The Captain-Planet-Villain model of somebody literally cackling about how much pollution they're going to release into the world today is nonsense.

And yet we have idiots in diesel trucks modded to "roll coal" cackling as they "own the libs" when they spew out soot.

Re: Cleaning New York's harbor with one billion oysters

#75

Post by coldtea »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #9
ako wrote: post #5

We should all be freaking out about what we’ve done to the earth, but nobody seems to really be able to compare it within historical context. We just dont know what it was like just a century ago. I’m always surprised by facts like in this story and similar like https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/02/05/257046530/b... And https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/nyregion/new-york-city-sm...

Freaking out doesn’t seem to be helping? A lot of people have been freaking out for a long time. If anything, it seems to lead to a combination of despondency in allies and stubbornness in enemies. I’d advise working on solutions to specific problems, calmly and deliberately.

>Freaking out doesn’t seem to be helping? A lot of people have been freaking out for a long time.

Have they? I think it's what societies does as a group that shows whether we're "freaking out", and judging by our collective response, it seems like we could not care less...

Re: Cleaning New York's harbor with one billion oysters

#76

Post by ForHackernews »

makerofspoons wrote: post #61
nnq wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a world where all natural habitat has been completely decimated That's probably the way we'll have it, but there will be artificial-natural habitat , eg. "reservations", that could grow to even be country-sized or half-continent-sized if we manage resources right. (Though probably they'll be smaller since we're going to have to some pretty large scale heavily-engineered-and-very-unnatural-agriculture to prevent fam…

There is reason to believe we may have already hit peak farmland or may in the near future: http://freakonomics.com/2012/12/21/why-peak-farmland-is-good... https://www.forbes.com/sites/billconerly/2015/05/26/peak-far...

Lots of current farmland is due to become unproductive with climate change, so we'd better hope we don't need as much.

Re: Cleaning New York's harbor with one billion oysters

#77

Post by coldtea »

jerf wrote: post #67
faitswulff wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think op means we should have zero enemies in fixing our environment. If we were truly all on the same page and freaking out, taking meaningful action would be a lot easier.

"I think op means we should have zero enemies in fixing our environment." You do. Everybody wants clean air, clean water, etc. The Captain-Planet-Villain model of somebody literally cackling about how much pollution they're going to release into the world today is nonsense. The problem is people who see a short-term gain of their own, standing against the environmental problems they cause. They may not even believe t…

>You do. Everybody wants clean air, clean water, etc. The Captain-Planet-Villain model of somebody literally cackling about how much pollution they're going to release into the world today is nonsense.

Actually it's totally sensible and compatible with the actual actions of the various actors involved.

Companies continue to plunder the ecosystem in ways that knowingly damage it (fracking, rainforest depletion, etc), we have cheaper air fares than ever, every major company does only token moves while continuing the damages, and so on.

And of course for decades important agreements weren't signed because of financial interests...

Re: Cleaning New York's harbor with one billion oysters

#78

Post by autokad »

atq2119 wrote: post #37
autokad wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "lets say, that NYC didn't write off 5 billion to Amazon. Could the city have budgeted more for the failing subway and nasty harbor given that they received more in taxes? Maybe" You do realize NYC is not collecting less taxes because Amazon came? If Amazon goes to another city, they collect 0. if Amazon gets a tax break, they collect 0. now you could argue that Amazon provides some sort of extra burden on city res…

The problem with that logic is that you're predetermining your conclusion by picking the baseline that you're comparing against. You pick your preferred baseline, fair enough. But since we're talking about a discriminatory tax break here, it's perfectly reasonable to choose as baseline a world without discrimination. And in that comparison, NY de facto pays the 5 billion or whatever it is. Of course, this is also cho…

No. There is no discussion, the answer is absolutely no.

NYC is not PAYING 5 billion dollars. they are simply not taxing it, therefor you can not say 'what else could they have used this money on instead'.

Its like me hosting a website for many charging 100$, and one person comes to me and says they will pay me 0$ but do other stuff, but otherwise they will not use my services. I can not say 'gee, if I charged them 100$ I could do these other things with the money', because I am not paying them 100$ to use my site.

Re: Cleaning New York's harbor with one billion oysters

#79

Post by someguydave »

ericdykstra wrote: post #16
ako wrote: post #5

We should all be freaking out about what we’ve done to the earth, but nobody seems to really be able to compare it within historical context. We just dont know what it was like just a century ago. I’m always surprised by facts like in this story and similar like https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/02/05/257046530/b... And https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/nyregion/new-york-city-sm...

Sometimes I think our only options going forward are a world where all natural habitat has been completely decimated, or an eco-fascist regime enforces pollution (and thus effectively population) control on the whole planet.

[flagged]

Re: Cleaning New York's harbor with one billion oysters

#80

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

ako wrote: post #53
ThomPete wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freaking out is the opposite of what we need. I am not worried about the consequences being so severe we cant handle them, there are other quite scarier scenarios. Freaking out gives us the opposite of solutions,just a lot of noise and premature solutions such as focusing on inferior solutions such as solar. This is the right way to do it, deal with the problems you see and can deal with.

The biggest problem is that people don’t see the problem, because they can’t see it in historical context.

Yep. This is known as "shifting baselines syndrome" https://oceana.org/blog/daniel-pauly-and-george-monbiot-conv...
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