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

#81

Post by dbingham » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 7:01 PM UTC

dqv wrote: post #78

dbingham wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, I do agree that we need to reduce meat consumption and focus on sustainably grazed operations for the meat that is consumed. But that's not the same as putting it on top of the list. Ever since Cowspiracy came out (which has been roundly debunked) there's been this segment of the environmental movement that wants to put beef on the top of the list of carbon problems. It just doesn't belong there and there are so…

>And since people have limited capacity to make lifestyle changes, we need them to focus that capacity where it will do the most good. Meat just isn't it - transporation, housing, energy - those are where it belongs. Diet is actually one of the easiest things for people to change. You have to eat every day. And there is evidence this personal choice has affected markets. Walmart wouldn't be selling more soy milk, sel…

Diet is also one of the most personal things to ask people to change, deeply tied in with their health, habits, cultures, and religion. If you ask them to do something that crosses some of those lines, you will have exactly the opposite effect you are claiming it will have. If you tell people that the most important thing they can do is adopt a diet that undercuts their health (many people cannot healthily maintain a vegan diet - including many, many vegan influencers) then you will demoralize them.

This push to tie the vegan diet to climate, it didn't come from the climate movement - it came from the animal rights movement. And it really exploded with Cowspiracy, which was a blatant propaganda film that badly abused the literature and has since been roundly debunked.

You still see some climate campaigners harping on this point, George Monboit being the most prominent to come to mind, but again, an honest accounting of the literature does not support their point -- that "going vegan is the easiest and highest impact choice an individual can make for their personal carbon reduction". It is not easy for most people and the impact of it is not nearly that clear cut.

The meme is a distraction that was imposed on the environmental movement by people who do not have the environment, or climate change mitigation, as their first priority.

I've been seeking a sustainable diet and agriculture for over a decade. Believe me when I tell you it is not simple or clear cut. There are a lot of things we should be pursuing in that area, but universal veganism is not one of them. (General meat reduction is, but that is not the same thing.)

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

#82

Post by kurupt213 » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 7:03 PM UTC

AstralStorm wrote: post #8

simple-thoughts wrote: post #3

An “effective environmentalism” might be a good meme to attempt a rebrand of nuclear, microwaves, and factory farming. But there’s nothing about how to prevent effective environmentalism from becoming performative just like how the author notes environmentalism has.

Factory farming does not get to be put in there, eating animals is very expensive ecologically. Only agriculture.

It’s still a necessity so it needs to be included

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

#83

Post by kurupt213 » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 7:04 PM UTC

simple-thoughts wrote: post #15

AstralStorm wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Factory farming does not get to be put in there, eating animals is very expensive ecologically. Only agriculture.

Factory farming animals is specifically mentioned in the article as causing less environmental damage than organic or cage free methods. Whether true or not doesn’t prevent effective environmentalism from becoming as performative as environmentalism.

It makes sense that it is true since it’s the most cost effective way - required resources are generally tied directly to cost

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

#84

Post by dr_dshiv » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 7:23 PM UTC

dbingham wrote: post #74

dr_dshiv wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you anticipate the effect of GPT3 will be in the reviewing process?

I honestly have no idea. I don't think I know nearly enough about GPT3 to hazard a guess. I could imagine using natural language processing as part of looking at generating an automated Q&A algorithm or attempting to automate literature reviews in some way, but in the review process? Someone I was talking to the other day was suggesting using sentiment analysis during the review process as a kind of tone grammarly ai…

If you like, you can link me to a paper you know well and I’ll send a review based on gpt3, without reading it. You can tell me if it is sensible.

I rather like the frontiers review process as a gatekeeping process. Papers get much better through their interactive review. But I don’t think peer review should stop with publication. I think there is a need to rate and rank and otherwise gather sentiments from researchers on papers in their field —ideally in a manner that allows for new important work to surface more easily. Whether the goal is to make science human and machine readable, for the further advancement of science. There is going to be a lot of science.

* check this out: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02787-5

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

#85

Post by WastingMyTime89 » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 7:25 PM UTC

The issue with environmentalism is that we are all the victims of multi decades PR campaigns crafted to deflect people attention from what’s really polluting towards meaningless things.

People are angry their neighbours don’t properly sort their trash while recycling is a shame. Meanwhile planned obsolescence is prevalent.

Making people feel guilty about their very small impact prevent them looking at the real culprits: electricity production, oil companies, global manufacturing and shipping and construction.

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

#86

Post by chrisamiller » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 7:33 PM UTC

scottLobster wrote: post #59

chrisamiller wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, particu…

I'm under no illusions that everyone is suddenly going to sacrifice quality of life to save the planet - humanity, writ large, is happy to burn coal until they choke to death on the fumes.

So how do we stop the slow-motion disaster that we're living in?

1) I completely agree that trying to minimize pain by teching our way out is important. The reason we have cheap wind and solar power is heavy government investment in research, which eventually trickles out and becomes commercially viable. The recent energy bill is great, but doesn't go nearly far enough. Still, if you take an honest look at the numbers, it's simply not going to be enough to avoid the worst effects.

2) We have to make it more profitable to be low-carbon than it is to burn things. I think that unavoidably leads to the conclusion that we need to tax carbon. It also has to be done in a smart way - not super-high all at once, and then return the proceeds with checks to the middle/lower income people who are hit hardest to solidify political support. The goal is to nudge people to change their behaviors, without doing it so hard that they vote you out of office.

Look, we were happy to keep dumping arsenic in streams until those externalized costs were built into the cost of doing business. The effects of carbon as a pollutant are here now - we can't keep pretending that they don't exist. What is the cost of Miami being underwater? What is the cost of wildfires and drought in the west? Yes, it will cost billions of dollars, but if it saves trillions, that's a smart investment.

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

#87

Post by pasabagi » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 7:38 PM UTC

wizofaus wrote: post #69

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> reducing CO2 emissions is an emergency, and any other environmental considerations other than doing that is just arguing about deck chairs on the Titanic I don't think that latter sentence follows from the first at all - it's very much a slow emergency that will play out over decades and indeed centuries, and furthermore with a global population of 8+ billion, clearly it's not feasible for all of us to drop everyth…

It's a slow emergency in the sense that the effects will slowly increase, but it's very much a fast emergency in that the actions we take now are vastly more effective than they would be in a decade, or even a year. Because it's a self-feeding system, we will have to work much harder in the future to get the same results we could get by making reasonable mitigations today.

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

#88

Post by WastingMyTime89 » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 7:40 PM UTC

seasox wrote: post #4

Don‘t think about microwave vs. stove. Instead, do the following: 1. stop buying meat 2. stop eating meat 3. stop buying dairy-based products 4. stop eating dairy-based products 5. stop eating eggs, honey, fish 6. use public transport, if possible 7. don‘t fly, if possible Congrats, you now are an environmentalist.

That’s extreme and I think most of your point comes from a belief in being vegan as an ethical way of life rather than from a genuine willingness to limit people environmental impact.

The proper way to frame it provided someone has no desire to be vegetarian would be limit your consumption of meat - only eat red meat as an exceptional treat and favour poultry a few times a week - and switch to plant based milk.

Eggs and honey are very much fine as is cheese given the average per individual amount eaten per year.

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

#89

Post by photochemsyn » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 7:41 PM UTC

These kind of articles usually have a summary buried in them, this might be it:

> "Lab-grown meat, dense cities, and nuclear energy need a rebrand. These need to be some of the new emblems of a sustainable path forward."

1) Lab-grown meat is nowhere near commercialization. At best we have plant-based meat substitutes that have similar nutritional profiles (high protein) to meat that can be produced at scale.

2) Dense cities don't really matter that much, as each human requires a similar amount of arable land to grow the food they need each year. That per-human land area might be a bit less for vegetarians, but I doubt it's that big of a factor.

3) Nuclear energy is still quite expensive relative to wind/solar/storage, and that won't change because nuclear's catastrophic failure potential requires over-engineering and high-security, plus the uranium ore and cooling water requirements can be problematic.

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

#90

Post by jshen » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 7:42 PM UTC

dbingham wrote: post #67

gruez wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Dramatically reducing meat consumption is the single best thing the average westerner could do to limit their environmental impact[...] > b) Because there is evidence that meat production done right IE intensive rotation grazing or silvopasture where the meat is grazed on a small section of land at a time and most of the land is left fallow most of the time can actually drastically increase ecosystem services. It…

Yes, agreed, reduction of meat consumption does need to happen. But saying "we should reduce meat consumption and ensure the meat produced is produced through these systems" is very different from putting it at the top of the list and drawing almost all focus to it.

There is more to the environment than carbon footprint. Meat production is the leading cause of deforestation, it’s the biggest user of water in the south west, the cause of antibiotic resistant bacteria, and that’s ignoring the horrific conditions in factory farms.