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Insects Are in Serious Trouble

theatlantic.com

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Re: Insects Are in Serious Trouble

#61

Post by ams6110 »

valuearb wrote: post #45
b0rsuk wrote: post #10

I think nothing will change as long as economic growth is understood as economic Good . Current economy can't work if there's no economic growth. Banks are among the biggest culprits. If banks lend money at a 5% interest rate, their customers must grow their businesses by 5%. A new, sustainable economy is needed. I think about it each time I see the Race for the Galaxy card. I've seen a radical example of this among…

Modern capitalism can be easily sustainable. You just have to do two things. 1) Legislate frameworks for market based solutions to externalities i.e. tragedies of the commons such as air pollution, water quality, etc. Cap and trade would be one framework for addressing CO2. 2) Eliminate mercantilism, where government policies are used to interfere in market forces, usually for the benefit of wealthy business owners.…

You would just see 2) disguised as 1).

How much pollution is OK? What is the market price for a pound of carbon in the air or part-per-billion of mercury in waste water? Those decisions would be made by regulators, meaning there would be influence-peddling.

Re: Insects Are in Serious Trouble

#63

Post by carapace »

mikeash wrote: post #59
carapace wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well now you're just playing semantic games with the word "growth". Never mind the details of the economy, population growth is the killer. As long as the net ecosystem gain per person is negative rather than positive we are accelerating at a wall.

If the original post had said that population growth needed to be stopped, I'd have agreed with it. But that's not what it said. The whole thrust of that comment and the ensuing conversation is the nature of economic growth. That's not "semantic games," that's a different topic.

I re-read just now and yes, you're right. Sorry about that.

Re: Insects Are in Serious Trouble

#64

Post by b0rsuk »

yayana wrote: post #49
leephillips wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no economist, but: If I borrow from a bank to buy a hotdog stand, and the payback is two years at $500/month, I need to earn $500/month + other expenses + profit every month for two years (or default and give the bank the stand, which is the collateral). I don't need to grow. The bank gets its interest, and I get an income from my business. Win-win. Where is "growth" required?

Your hot dog stand was the growth and now they need a 10% bigger next investment for their return on it. They need you to have a competitor with a better stand so they can loan you both money or they need prices to have gone up thanks to other Banks finding speculations and you wanting to sell. Otherwise, they now have 10% more money they need to invest and less of a solution than 2 years ago.

I didn't reply to that person's post because I took it literally - buying someone else's hotdog stand. In that case yes, 0 growth.

Re: Insects Are in Serious Trouble

#65

Post by njarboe »

autokad wrote: post #50
njarboe wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think one of the main problems is that GDP is used as the measure of national prosperity. GDP goes down when people decide to work less. Some kind of net wealth measurement would be much better parameter for a country to try and maximize. Include natural resources and the biosphere in that wealth. In this scheme taking oil from the ground and burning it would likely be a net negative on national wealth while using…

nothing is neither created nor destroyed, by that very law there cannot be a crop that does not take from the soil. If I eat a banana that has potassium in it, it lends to the fact that it took potassium out of the soil. farmers do add fertilizer and other stuff back to the soil, though we are finding that maybe there is more to the equation. certain methods like tilling are done to kill parasites, etc, but it may al…

True, for some farming elements are removed from the plot of land faster than natural replenishment. These will have to be added back by humans in some way. The main constituents of food, on the other hand, come from the atmosphere. Hydrogen, Carbon, Oxygen, and Nitrogen (with the right plants/bacteria). Soil is a mixture of organic matter, minerals, gases, liquids, and organisms that together support life [1]. This soil is needed for efficient agriculture and certain farming practices increase the amount of soil and other decrease it. Once it is gone, farming stops.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil

Re: Insects Are in Serious Trouble

#66

Post by xorcist »

mikeash wrote: post #18
b0rsuk wrote: post #10

I think nothing will change as long as economic growth is understood as economic Good . Current economy can't work if there's no economic growth. Banks are among the biggest culprits. If banks lend money at a 5% interest rate, their customers must grow their businesses by 5%. A new, sustainable economy is needed. I think about it each time I see the Race for the Galaxy card. I've seen a radical example of this among…

I like growth. I want to be wealthier or be able to work less (which is really just an aspect of being wealthier). I want everybody else to be wealthier too. I want my children to be better off than I am. The problem is growth without care for the consequences. Making some people wealthier at the expense of killing the planet is a bad plan. But I think that it goes too far the other way to turn around and say that gr…

Why wealthier? Will you be more happy with three cars than with two?

I think a lot of people have a limit to their material needs, when they are more happy catering for their real interests instead of chasing more wealth. It may be a cliché, but probably for a reason.

Re: Insects Are in Serious Trouble

#67

Post by sxates »

Years ago when I lived in suburban Texas with a typical suburban house with a back yard that had open space behind it I had a terrible insect problem. Exposed skin would get a mosquito bite-per-minute, the dogs were coming inside covered in fleas, etc. So I went to Home Depot and bought this yard spray that promised to kill mosquitos, fleas, ticks, etc. and I hosed down the back yard in a desperate attempt to reclaim it for our families use.

What struck me as soon as I was done spraying the yard was how quiet it was. It was eerie. It then occurred to me that I hadn't just killed the pests, I had killed everything.

These sorts of products are in every hardware store. How many other people just casually eliminate all insects in their yard, and perhaps do so frequently? What do those chemicals do when they wash away into the watershed? Same question for all the chemicals used in agriculture - it can't be good, right?

In a way it boggles the mind that this is an acceptable product, which is socially acceptable to use. I certainly regret it, but I seem to be in the minority.

Re: Insects Are in Serious Trouble

#68

Post by b0rsuk »

greg7gkb wrote: post #52
avip wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there "growth" without consuming physical resources? If not, we have to accept OP's POV that economic growth is by definition unsustainable. "Anyone who thinks exponential growth can continue forever is either a madman or an economist"

There is absolutely 'growth' without consuming resources. Economic growth also includes improvements in efficiency, which typically reduce the amount of physical resources used. Also, look at the transition in our lives from physical media to digital media. Digital channels have brought massive growth while reducing the need for paper, CDs, DVDs, etc.

That kind of growth requires constant inventions, rather than occasional inventions to use in existing factories. Also I think efficiency improvements offer diminishing returns (sorry I can't prove it). But there's only so much value you can get from a handful of matter, especially if it has to be cost-effective. At some point you bump into limits of physical properties.

A silly tale I read in an old popular science book: Aliens arrive at the Earth. They make peaceful contact with humans and want to exchange knowledge. They get every single human book ever printed, they drop them on a pile, then... one of them takes a metal rod out of his pocket, and makes a scratch on it somewhere in the middle. THERE, it's archived. All they need is to measure the exact spot where the scratch is made and calculate the ratio of rod below the scratch to the rod above the scratch. The decimal representation of that irrational number encodes entire human knowledge.

Re: Insects Are in Serious Trouble

#69

Post by mikeash »

xorcist wrote: post #66
mikeash wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like growth. I want to be wealthier or be able to work less (which is really just an aspect of being wealthier). I want everybody else to be wealthier too. I want my children to be better off than I am. The problem is growth without care for the consequences. Making some people wealthier at the expense of killing the planet is a bad plan. But I think that it goes too far the other way to turn around and say that gr…

Why wealth ier ? Will you be more happy with three cars than with two? I think a lot of people have a limit to their material needs, when they are more happy catering for their real interests instead of chasing more wealth. It may be a cliché, but probably for a reason.

I think you might have missed the part where being able to work less is one potential result of being wealthier. Will I be more happy with another car? Probably not. Will I be more happy if I work 30 hours a week instead of 40? Probably.

Re: Insects Are in Serious Trouble

#70

Post by b0rsuk »

xorcist wrote: post #66
mikeash wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like growth. I want to be wealthier or be able to work less (which is really just an aspect of being wealthier). I want everybody else to be wealthier too. I want my children to be better off than I am. The problem is growth without care for the consequences. Making some people wealthier at the expense of killing the planet is a bad plan. But I think that it goes too far the other way to turn around and say that gr…

Why wealth ier ? Will you be more happy with three cars than with two? I think a lot of people have a limit to their material needs, when they are more happy catering for their real interests instead of chasing more wealth. It may be a cliché, but probably for a reason.

You may have a limit of how much you need, but your neighbor may get the kick of owning more cars than you. I have a personality disorder which makes me less competitive, so I'm rather sensitive to it.
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