I think this and many of the similar problems plaguing the earth will only be solved with a drastic reduction of people on the planet. Get the population down to 1 or 2 billion of us and a lot of these issues go away. Deforesting, not an issue if the demand for lumber is cut down by 80%. Same for coal, oil, paving, lithium... It all gets solved with just less people. 8 billion people is just too much, even if we all…
Bird populations declining fast across North America
161–170 of 322 posts
Re: Bird populations declining fast across North America
#162I've noticed an even more disturbing trend of learned helplessness and misanthropic Malthusianism in these threads over the years. Not a single comment, at time of writing, has had a positive tone, and there are very few actionable suggestions. No consideration is given to the many positives in modern life, nor to realistic, productive tradeoffs. Everyone wants to wail in dismay at the perceived impending doom and do…
There are plenty of folks on HN who are trying to solve climate change, myself included. But if you spend enough time in the industry, it becomes apparent that it is incredibly difficult to move the needle without significant government level intervention. For example, no matter how hard you try, there will be no profitable carbon capture venture under our current regulatory regime. Every scheme to sell some sort of…
The free market approach is to tax carbon emissions. Capture the externality of carbon in the economic and pricing system, and you'll unleash innovation and competition to reduce that cost.
Re: Bird populations declining fast across North America
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
And make outdoor cats illegal. An unpopular opinion no doubt. But from nature photographers to veterinarians, the outdoor cat is not good for anyone, including the cat.
Bob cats, mountain lions, etc used to have the entire US as their range. I suspect the bird population boomed after we got rid of the cats (100-150 years ago). Now that we have house cats they’re dropping again. Boom-bust cycles for animals are common. I try to reflect what the natural order was 10,000 years ago and reflect. 20,000 years ago, there was an ice sheet over North America - ie no birds. https://en.m.wikip…
Unless you're talking about the lynx (which mainly eats hares), the historic ranges of American cats barely overlap with LGM ice cover. It's not very relevant to this discussion.
Re: Bird populations declining fast across North America
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
GDP is a useful abstraction that can help guide policies. Do you have concrete examples of its unjust use that were supported by economists? I don’t know any government that considers maximizing GDP as its primary goal.
Maximizing GDP doesn’t need to be the primary goal to as you say guide policies. There are plenty of policies aimed to increase economic growth as measured by GDP. Economists however are on all sides of this issue, it isn’t some monolithic field where everyone agrees on even basic ideas.
What economists are on the side that GDP is a perfect measure that precisely captures the increase in well-being? I have never heard of one. If you look at the IMF website you will find a nuanced explanation of what GDP is and is not. For example, it states that
> It is also important to understand what GDP cannot tell us. GDP is not a measure of the overall standard of living or well-being of a country. Although changes in the output of goods and services per person (GDP per capita) are often used as a measure of whether the average citizen in a country is better or worse off, it does not capture things that may be deemed important to general well-being.
Tirades that when economists calculate GDP the human society is serving "abstractions" or the devil over the "real" and God is just fearmongering.
Re: Bird populations declining fast across North America
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
I blame online communities for this. Cat ladies are insane and organized now. In my city, there’s a group distributing shelters and placing them in various outdoor areas to keep feral cats alive over the winter. They are as nutty as the pigeon feeders, except the cats kill everything in sight.
We have a group like this, which feeds a couple dozen feral cats on "Kitty Cat Lane." Of course there is science behind the insanity -- toxoplasmosis infections from the cats they love.
Our local Nextdoor exploded when some particularly nutty cat vigilante started stealing cats and spaying them.
I think as society sprawls out and folks have fewer kids, this stuff gets escalated.
Re: Bird populations declining fast across North America
#166Until human society stops serving abstractions (like money) over things that are real, then real things will continually face consequence. These will still over into our lives in a multitude of ways until we no longer have real systems to support these abstractions. Loss of natural life is such a failure. Today we speak of stock markets, governments, businesses. Someday, our main concern will not be these shared drea…
Pretty much the premise of the movie Interstellar.
Re: Bird populations declining fast across North America
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are simply too many of us and 'growth' will ultimately doom us unless we act fast. It won't matter if the percentage of clean energy is 50% if we are still emitting greenhouse gasses at 1990 levels. We need carbon zero yesterday to be honest, but the world is only just now waking up to this fact... The world going Carbon neutral by 2050-2060? The damage we are going to do between now and then will be phenomenal…
Going carbon zero "right now" will just trade one disaster for another. And some argue an even bigger diaster. Energy is required for human life to live now. We cant go back with out massive famine and death. Just cutting boff energy production not get to Carbon zero NOW like many are demanding is not feesable, realistic, or moral
I think that implies that carbon emitting methods are the only way we can produce energy. Sure, constructing hydroelectric plants emits carbon right now but ideally it wouldn't in the future. We shouldn't be spending money and energy constructing new gas pipelines in 2021, for example. That effort would be better spent on emission free energy sources or on electric vehicle manufacturing capabilities.
Re: Bird populations declining fast across North America
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disagree with this. According to this article, birds aren't dying off because people choose the almighty dollar, they're dying because they smash into windows or are hunted by cats. The solution isn't to examine our relationship to abstractions versus reality, it's to put a screen on the window so the bird will notice it in time.
And make outdoor cats illegal. An unpopular opinion no doubt. But from nature photographers to veterinarians, the outdoor cat is not good for anyone, including the cat.
Would that even be beneficial? If the problem is that there are fewer insects and therefore the birds have less food, then cats suppressing the bird population might have a positive impact on insects, which the birds eat. That might be good for birds too in the long run.
Predators are part of a feedback loop. That the predators in question are housecats makes it a somewhat unnatural feedback loop, but that doesn't necessarily make it bad.
Housecats are part of the food chain as well; they can be killed by cayotes and raccoons, and hawks might sometimes go after a small cat.
Re: Bird populations declining fast across North America
#169Until human society stops serving abstractions (like money) over things that are real, then real things will continually face consequence. These will still over into our lives in a multitude of ways until we no longer have real systems to support these abstractions. Loss of natural life is such a failure. Today we speak of stock markets, governments, businesses. Someday, our main concern will not be these shared drea…
I don't know if the "population of birds in north America" is a more or less abstract concept than money, but I'd bet they're similar.
Re: Bird populations declining fast across North America
#170A good a post as any to share the data surrounding the leading causing of habitat loss. I'll leave everyone to make their own opinions based on said research: https://ourworldindata.org/drivers-of-deforestation