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The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory

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Re: The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory

#201

Post by fc417fc802 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #85
bayindirh wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, it's a hard problem. For business trips, the choice is between two hours and two days, and unfortunately my body goes haywire if I don't eat some meat at least a couple of days per week (talking about 200g/300g total though. Not kilos of it). On the other hand, I'd happily take trains as more high speed lines open in my country, and reduce meat consumption to bare minimum my body can tolerate. For personal tr…

> my body goes haywire if I don't eat some meat at least a couple of days per week Isn't this just a nutrient deficiency in whatever you were eating instead of meat? Meat is "convenient" because it's high in a wide variety of minerals, vitamins, essential amino acids, etc. that your body can't make. (The animals mostly can't make them either but guess what livestock eats.) There are plants that contain each of them,…

Might be lack of understanding of essential nutrients and associated planning. But also might not be related to that at all. The gut microbiome is impacted by your food choices, varies from person to person, and can have severe impacts on your overall health.

Re: The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory

#202

Post by bwestergard »

SJC_Hacker wrote: post #104
mullingitover wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> each and every one of us contributes to its intensification or mitigation through our decisions. I have to disagree here. This idea of a consumer-level personal responsibility for the fossil energy industry's externalized costs is a lot like the plastic producers shifting blame for waste by saying that it's the consumers' fault for not recycling. It's transparent blame-shifting. The fossil energy industry pulls the…

Its a case of prisoner's dilemma. Individuals making the proposed lifestyle changes in order to make a genuine dent in AGW amount to jumping on the tracks in order to stop a freight train. This is the one issue where I feel some sympathy with the right. I hate "Virtue signaling" about as much as they do. I'm sorry, but if you are going to snap at people over eating beef, while you fly/drive all over the country/world…

I am not a vegan. My social world in D.C./NYC has many secular, left-wing, vegans. Many of them are friends or loved ones. They demonstrably speak their mind in front of me on countless issues on which we disagree.

I have dined with them countless times at restaurants where they order vegan and I don't. I have never once been "snapped at" about my dietary decisions. Some of these people have dedicated years of their life to non-human animal rights activism.

So I am very skeptical that this shaming occurs at any appreciable scale. I suspect it is mostly psychological projection: one doubts the morality of one's decisions, judges oneself harshly, but experiences this as the judgement of others.

Re: The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory

#203

Post by davidw »

hackyhacky wrote: post #79
davidw wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Work on local things to make your own city better. Plenty of stuff that's not too difficult, even if it won't fix everything: * Multifamily housing is much more energy efficient. Is it legal to build throughout your city, or does zoning prevent it? * Is there good bicycle infrastructure so people don't have to drive for everything? * Does your city still have expensive parking mandates that lock in car dependency? Ge…

Individual habits will not be decisive in fighting climate change. Telling people to follow this advice will (a) inconvenience them in the short term (b) lull them to a false sense of security that they are fighting climate change (c) set them up for disappointment when climate change happens anyway, and (d) worst of all, these suggestions let the real perpetrators off the hook. If you want to see real progress on th…

None of this "lulls" involved people, nor lets anyone off the hook.

These are things that ordinary people without a lot of money or power can work on today in a country like, say, the US, where the federal government is in the hands of evil people and is not going to be doing much in terms of climate change in the near future.

The federal government may be a lost cause for the moment, but your city or state might provide an avenue to get some things done. Those things won't fix the whole problem, but they're still progress, and the connections you make while doing those things will be useful in future, bigger fights.

Re: The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory

#204

Post by smadge »

Simbio wrote: post #124
SJC_Hacker wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its a case of prisoner's dilemma. Individuals making the proposed lifestyle changes in order to make a genuine dent in AGW amount to jumping on the tracks in order to stop a freight train. This is the one issue where I feel some sympathy with the right. I hate "Virtue signaling" about as much as they do. I'm sorry, but if you are going to snap at people over eating beef, while you fly/drive all over the country/world…

Prisoner's dilemma is a bad reference here. Prisoner's dilemma is about situation when optimal outcome requires cooperation from all participants. In the situation with climate change, personal decisions of 99% of Earth population do not really matter.

It is a classic cooperation problem. Perhaps not prisoners dilemma. Perhaps not at individual scale. Probably tragedy of the commons.

Cooperation is not consuming fossil fuels. Defection is consuming fossil fuels.

If you cooperate and other defects you suffer climate impact and expensive energy (expensive everything, worse economic growth than others).

If you defect and other cooperates you suffer climate impact but at least you get cheap energy (cheap everything, more economic growth than others).

People, nations, corporations, etc don’t stop using fossil fuels because they incur a penalty against their competitors if they volunteer to and their competitors don’t.

Re: The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory

#205

Post by akramachamarei »

netsharc wrote: post #120
aleda145 wrote: post #9

Very alarming. I feel like especially the West is regressing on climate change with the rise of the far right ( https://www.politico.eu/article/robert-lambrou-alternative-f... ) I don't know what to do.

Fear and egoism is probably causing the rise of the far-right, fear of not having enough, and egoism of "Why do I have to share?" (and being dumb enough to believe "make it great again" lies). And then the idiotic "center" who doesn't want to lose voters start moving to the right. With the decaying planet less capable of producing food, there'll be less, and there'll be more of that scarcity mindset (although do we e…

Ever admitting the positives of autocrats for their apparent efficiency disqualifies surrounding suppositions. And that's not an ad hominen, that's just Bayesian.

Re: The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory

#206

Post by thesuitonym »

throw310822 wrote: post #185
mullingitover wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> each and every one of us contributes to its intensification or mitigation through our decisions. I have to disagree here. This idea of a consumer-level personal responsibility for the fossil energy industry's externalized costs is a lot like the plastic producers shifting blame for waste by saying that it's the consumers' fault for not recycling. It's transparent blame-shifting. The fossil energy industry pulls the…

I never understood this. The companies sold you fossil fuel, you burnt it and got benefits out of it: transportation, energy, heating, constructions, fertilizers and food, etc. You want them to pay for the negative consequences of your fossil fuel consumption while you keep all the generated benefits?

The amount of fossil fuels that a working class individual burns are a rounding error compared to what big companies burn. How many private jets are in the air right now? Even if you drive the most energy inefficient truck ever produced, run your home HVAC at max, and buy gasoline just to burn in your back yard, you will never measure up. It's like saying we need to dry the oceans, so you should stop peeing in it.

Re: The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory

#207

Post by aoeusnth1 »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #189
throw310822 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood this. The companies sold you fossil fuel, you burnt it and got benefits out of it: transportation, energy, heating, constructions, fertilizers and food, etc. You want them to pay for the negative consequences of your fossil fuel consumption while you keep all the generated benefits?

Neat, I’ve never seen a fossil fuel company exec on hacker news before. Welcome!

I'm an environmentalist and I agree with this framing. The solution is going to be painful and must increase prices on products and services that fossil fuels are currently the cheapest solution for. If you're not willing to personally sacrifice anything to reduce fossil fuel consumption you can see why carbon taxes are not popular, right? France's protests against them, for example, are a good example of a populist reaction against attempts to regulate the economy to have less emissions.

Re: The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory

#208

Post by EGreg »

throw310822 wrote: post #185
mullingitover wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> each and every one of us contributes to its intensification or mitigation through our decisions. I have to disagree here. This idea of a consumer-level personal responsibility for the fossil energy industry's externalized costs is a lot like the plastic producers shifting blame for waste by saying that it's the consumers' fault for not recycling. It's transparent blame-shifting. The fossil energy industry pulls the…

I never understood this. The companies sold you fossil fuel, you burnt it and got benefits out of it: transportation, energy, heating, constructions, fertilizers and food, etc. You want them to pay for the negative consequences of your fossil fuel consumption while you keep all the generated benefits?

No, what we wanted for decades is for cars to shift to the free market of electric energy, just like every one of our other appliances have for decades. Electricity is a free market - can be generated by hydro, solar, wind, geothermal, even nuclear. If tomorrow they invent clean fusion power then electric cars would be able to benefit.

The cars being locked into fossil fuels is the result of fossil fuel subsidies from the government. Otherwise, OPEC raising prices would have long ago led to improvements in battery technology and electric cars. But the federal government shields the fossil fuels companies to make sure the “price at the pump” is small.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRnUY6V2Knk

We should be raising pigovian taxes on fossil fuels at the point of extraction, and redistribute it to all our citizens as a UBI. Alaska has been doing this for decades and they have almost the lowest GINI index of all states year after year.

Just like we want bottling and clothing companies to shift from plastics to bidegradeable materials. But you like to keep individuals distracted and blame them for using a straw and a bag, as if THAT is the main cause of pollution. And plastic recycling was a total scam designed to keep people distracted from forcing change on corporations pollution and unsustainable practices upstream.

Re: The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory

#209

Post by jandrewrogers »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #85
bayindirh wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, it's a hard problem. For business trips, the choice is between two hours and two days, and unfortunately my body goes haywire if I don't eat some meat at least a couple of days per week (talking about 200g/300g total though. Not kilos of it). On the other hand, I'd happily take trains as more high speed lines open in my country, and reduce meat consumption to bare minimum my body can tolerate. For personal tr…

> my body goes haywire if I don't eat some meat at least a couple of days per week Isn't this just a nutrient deficiency in whatever you were eating instead of meat? Meat is "convenient" because it's high in a wide variety of minerals, vitamins, essential amino acids, etc. that your body can't make. (The animals mostly can't make them either but guess what livestock eats.) There are plants that contain each of them,…

I can't speak for the OP but it is well-established that there are significant genetic adaptations to the amount of meat in the diet, or a loss of genetic adaptation for metabolizing some plant staples. This is no different than the genetics that cause significant variation in the ability to metabolize legumes, lactose, alcohol, etc. Local optimizations.

There are ethnic populations that have reduced capacity to efficiently metabolize some plant-based diets due to thousands of years of selection pressure (or lack thereof). A diverse plant-based diet won't kill them, they simply lack the enzymes to have a good experience with it because for thousands of years they had little use for those genes.

It is a relatively small population globally, as it tends to coincide with regions that weren't conducive to supporting large populations thousands of years ago. The current distribution has significant overlap with the developed world though.

I have to imagine that someone with meat-adapted genetics is going to suffer quality of life issues on a purely plant-based diet. Everyone has a set of foods like that.

Re: The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory

#210

Post by betaby »

Let's compare two countries at the same level of development.

Canada has 14 tonnes carbon footprint per person. Canada is a cold country.

France has 8 tonnes carbon footprint per person. Climate is way warmer.

We can't continue adding population and the wondering what is going on.

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