Being an effective environmentalist can often feel like being a bad one • Hacker News Board

Re: Being an effective environmentalist can often feel like being a bad one

#51

Post by dane-pgp » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 5:32 PM UTC

chrisamiller wrote: post #23

dane-pgp wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say you could convince an extra 10% of the world to follow those rules, and that it doesn't cause a rebound effect (as per the Jevons paradox). How much extra time would that buy us before an unstoppable climate catastrophe?

There is already an unstoppable climate catastrophe happening. Many of the effects are already baked in for the next 50-100 years and it will disproportionately affect the poor. What we can still control is how bad it is. (An increase 1.5 degrees C looks a hell of a lot different than 4 degrees C). That's still very much a fight worth fighting. When people ask if we should do this or that, the answer should be "yes".…

Okay, perhaps I should have asked "How many lives do you think would be saved this century compared to the default scenario where an extra 10% of the world aren't convinced to follow those rules?".

Re: Being an effective environmentalist can often feel like being a bad one

#52

Post by dbingham » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 5:33 PM UTC

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #17

dbingham wrote: post #5

This is what happens when you optimize for only a single variable. And the end result won't be what you want it to be. It doesn't do us any good to stop climate change if the ecosystem still collapses out from under us. Creating a sustainable environment is a systems problem and carbon is just one of many variables in that system. Yes, it's a really important one and in many ways it is the most pressing. But biodiver…

By the way, this is exactly what a climate change denier would write, except that that would talk about collapsing the economy if we focused too much on reducing carbon emissions. The truth is reducing CO2 emissions is an emergency, and any other environmental considerations other than doing that is just arguing about deck chairs on the Titanic. At this point, we would have been in a much better position if the Green…

I agree that following environmental intuitions is self-defeating, but so is chasing red herrings. And this is exactly why I'm trying to build something that will allow us all to make these analysis on primary sources, not secondary ones like the OP.

Climate is an emergency, but if we go chasing the wrong "solutions" based on bad data or incomplete data, or take the base of the ecosystem out from under us in the process, then we won't resolve the emergency or we'll end up in a worse place.

There are some things we know - transportation, housing, urban design, energy, many aspects of industrial manufuaction and waste disposal. These are still complex, but have much clearer cost benefit analysis. We know what the answers are there. Some of them involve individual action (like I laid out below) others are going to require collective action.

Agriculture is a mess with a pitched propaganda war taking place around it. I've spent a decade trying to sort out what is true, and I'm still no closer to feeling like I can say with certainty what the most ecological diet is. But I know that anyone who can say it with certainty has not done complete research.

Re: Being an effective environmentalist can often feel like being a bad one

#53

Post by dbingham » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 5:33 PM UTC

Blahah wrote: post #30

dbingham wrote: post #5

This is what happens when you optimize for only a single variable. And the end result won't be what you want it to be. It doesn't do us any good to stop climate change if the ecosystem still collapses out from under us. Creating a sustainable environment is a systems problem and carbon is just one of many variables in that system. Yes, it's a really important one and in many ways it is the most pressing. But biodiver…

The project looks cool! I've built quite a few open academic publishing platforms, we would have a lot to talk about I imagine :) You might be interested in what we're doing at LabDAO, including our publishing lab and the community governance we're developing. Note: we're a DAO but it's not about crypto. Contact in my profile if you'd like to chat.

Cheers! Would love to chat!

Re: Being an effective environmentalist can often feel like being a bad one

#54

Post by xor99 » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 5:33 PM UTC

Some of the arguments seem misplaced via bad assumptions. This is exactly the approach that will alienate trad thinkers who need to be convinced in order for any effective action to be taken. Here are the issues I had:

- Highly processed food, including fake meat, could be extremely bad for you. The point is we just don't know yet as there isn't good data.

- Dense cities have the potential to be inhumane and not worth living in for various health (e.g. particulates, aerosols, nitrogen, disease) and social (digital-gov tight controls over movement, work, and access to resources) reasons. Just look at covid era China. Large groups of people displaced into under resourced cities ends badly.

-Nuclear is great until you get something like Ukraine where its used as a stick against the rest of Europe. Thyroid cancer rates in western europe would spike as a result of a critical incident. Or ofc Fukashima and Chernobyl. I'm totally pro nuclear but not mentioning its failures is a bad take and I don't believe the figures about nuclear related deaths.

Re: Being an effective environmentalist can often feel like being a bad one

#55

Post by CatWChainsaw » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 5:34 PM UTC

blueflow wrote: post #44

CatWChainsaw wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also skeptical of the honey thing. Honeybees produce honey which is a valuable product on its own, but honeybees are also distinguished from other bee species by their massive colonies (colonies are the groups of bees, hives are where they live). This is why there is an industry that trucks honeybee colonies/hives around the country to pollinate whichever crops are in season. This is to the detriment of whichever pol…

So the problem is not honey/bees, its driving them around in a truck.

I don't know if I would say it's 100% on the trucks (the honeybees didn't ask to be driven everywhere, after all), but the honeybees do disrupt the native ecosystems when they get to their targets; call it a 90-10 or a 95-5 split of culpability perhaps. Smaller scale hive operations that produce honey in one location probably don't have the same outsized impact on so many locations as these truck operations do.

Re: Being an effective environmentalist can often feel like being a bad one

#56

Post by matkoniecz » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 5:38 PM UTC

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #17

dbingham wrote: post #5

This is what happens when you optimize for only a single variable. And the end result won't be what you want it to be. It doesn't do us any good to stop climate change if the ecosystem still collapses out from under us. Creating a sustainable environment is a systems problem and carbon is just one of many variables in that system. Yes, it's a really important one and in many ways it is the most pressing. But biodiver…

By the way, this is exactly what a climate change denier would write, except that that would talk about collapsing the economy if we focused too much on reducing carbon emissions. The truth is reducing CO2 emissions is an emergency, and any other environmental considerations other than doing that is just arguing about deck chairs on the Titanic. At this point, we would have been in a much better position if the Green…

> The truth is reducing CO2 emissions is an emergency

Almost nobody among claiming that treats it seriously.

Prominent celebrities claiming that travel by plane.

Greenpeace continues to oppose nuclear power.

Solar power gets blocked because some endemic species or pretty views are threatened.

Noone supports killing air travel.

---------------------------

Almost nobody among "CO2 is emergency" is actually willing to sacrifice own benefits or other priorities. At most they demand sacrifice from others.

I am not going to treat plane-travelling celebrities declaring climate emergency that threatens survival of humanity. The same goes for eco-organizations not willing to support deregulation of nuclear power.

Re: Being an effective environmentalist can often feel like being a bad one

#57

Post by dbingham » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 5:41 PM UTC

jeffbee wrote: post #38

dbingham wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source please. There's currently a propaganda war between multiple powerful lobbies - the animal rights lobby, the meat producers, conventional ag producers, and more - which means there is a ton of misinformation flying around about the actual environmental impacts of eating meat. Really, of all things dietary. Meanwhile there are a bunch of people exploring alternate agriculture systems through agroecological appro…

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308521X1...

That source is primarily examining conventional feedlot approaches.

> An all grass cow-calf – to – finish operation was included as a minor component in the eastern and northwestern regions

They examined a single all grass finished operation. There are studies that have found grass finishing can cut emissions in cattle by as much as 80%.

> The modeled operations were not intended to be actual operations; they were developed to represent the practices found in each region.

> Environmental footprints for all individually simulated ranch and feedlot operations were integrated into full production systems within their respective study regions using two methods

They also don't appear to be measuring actual operations, but rather modeling operations based on surveys of farmers and ranchers about the characteristics of their operations and then extrapolating from there.

Models have their place for sure, but I wouldn't make any kind of declaration of certainty based on a single model-based study. You have to average the outputs of hundreds or thousands of models, and even then, you can't be sure you have the answer.

A better approach would be one that measures the actual output of each operation at various phases and averages across them. Difficult to do, but I've seen studies that attempted it.

Re: Being an effective environmentalist can often feel like being a bad one

#58

Post by matkoniecz » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 5:42 PM UTC

jeffbee wrote: post #28

CatWChainsaw wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the problem with urban gardening? On a rooftop, greenery would help with the heat, and I find it difficult to believe that greenery in a space which otherwise has none would be an "ecological catastrophe".

There isn't anything wrong with urban gardening itself. The problem comes when anti-development groups impose policies to prevent any building from casting a shadow on anything. Greenery and open space are both good and important, and gardening is a fine hobby. But urban gardens don't feed anyone and if there is a choice between housing people in an existing city, or protecting an existing garden from shadows, we sho…

> The problem comes when anti-development groups impose policies to prevent any building from casting a shadow on anything

OK. But how it makes

> rooftop solar and urban gardening (or "farming" if you must). Both are ecological catastrophe

claim true?

Re: Being an effective environmentalist can often feel like being a bad one

#59

Post by scottLobster » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 5:42 PM UTC

chrisamiller wrote: post #23

dane-pgp wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say you could convince an extra 10% of the world to follow those rules, and that it doesn't cause a rebound effect (as per the Jevons paradox). How much extra time would that buy us before an unstoppable climate catastrophe?

There is already an unstoppable climate catastrophe happening. Many of the effects are already baked in for the next 50-100 years and it will disproportionately affect the poor. What we can still control is how bad it is. (An increase 1.5 degrees C looks a hell of a lot different than 4 degrees C). That's still very much a fight worth fighting. When people ask if we should do this or that, the answer should be "yes".…

And rhetoric like your last paragraph is just going to produce backlash and make the problem worse.

"The rules are fine", and net zero "has" to happen". So in your mind there's no room for argument and the objective is sacred. So how many guns are you willing to put to peoples' heads to get them to change their diets? To get them to stop flying? Driving in particular is required for many peoples' livelihoods, particularly those on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum.

IMO, the truly "hard" part of getting to net zero is getting people like you to realize you're not going to force your proposed solutions onto the rest of the world. You're going to have to team up with people you don't like. You know why Texas, the oil/petrochemical capital of the US, has so much wind power? It isn't because an army of environmentalists descended on the state house shouting slogans and waving signs, it isn't to save the environment, it isn't to stop climate change. It's because wind energy is cheap in Texas, something that appeals to even the most coal-rolling, roundup-spraying, green-lawn-in-the-desert Texan.

If you want to save the environment, drop the moralizing and meet people where they are. Until that happens environmentalism is just going to produce backlash, that allow the environmental movements feel even more superior and do things to produce even more backlash, until the price of meat, power, transportation and housing goes up so much that you get a backlash that undoes any short-term progress that was made.

Re: Being an effective environmentalist can often feel like being a bad one

#60

Post by Jill_the_Pill » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 5:42 PM UTC

leereeves wrote: post #12

AstralStorm wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is to reuse for ages a tough plastic bag rather than use single use bags.

I have 5 reusable bags that I've used for a few years. That means I've used them maybe 100 times. Now they're starting to fall apart, and soon I'll need new ones. I wonder, since they're much heavier and clearly use a lot more plastic, whether I would have used less plastic with the disposable ones.

They do make cloth reusables