Not possible to do myself, and it's not feasible to pay someone to do it. I don't have the tools, the electronics, nor the replacement parts (not to mention knowledge or time) to keep a modern car going for the remaining 30-50 years of my lifetime. Attempting to fix it at the point where everything is falling apart becomes impractical (as I keep trying to tell my dad when he's spending even more money to make a '79 truck run).
Not to mention that getting those parts custom made or shipped to you from across the country incurs its own environmental penalty.
> Eat less meat.
I've found that, to keep a balanced diet without meat, it's quite a bit more expensive, and exceptionally more time consuming. Then there's the health issues (like those outlined in the scar study featured on HN a week or so ago).
I absolutely could compromise my health and lifespan for the sake of the world, but I'm not going to.
> Consuming less, buying less.
There's a lower limit to how much less you can do and still remain as a healthy, productive adult, but I agree that it's a good thing to do for many reasons; it's something I try and do.
Even if I took every step outlined, it would have, effectively, no impact on the environment.
Forget all the pessimism and misanthropy. It's never going to solve our problems. Instead, focus on making things that make people more efficient. We won't ever be able to guilt-trip and shame our way out of climate change, but we just might be able to engineer our way out instead.
And, if you have ample means, have as many kids as you can support in your chosen lifestyle, so they will grow up to invent more and better policies and technologies to make the future a place we actually want to live in again.
I used to be strongly opposed to this mindset, but living next door to neighbours with land rovers, a mountain of turf cut from a "protected" bog for heating (hey, it's free, and you get to destroy wetland habitate _and_ emit more than coal!), and _SEVENTEEN KIDS_ (because God made them or something). I really am doubting if the few people who actually give a shit having _fewer_ kids is the answer. We need to outcompete people like quiverfull.
How ironic considering that the very source of earths problems are because of humans. Somehow, the solution is more. Never a better response from, a human.
This misanthropy is self-defeating and accomplishes nothing besides making the holder feel smug and superior.
Be honest: the entire species isn’t going to be persuaded to stop reproducing to save kelp forests. You know this is true as well as I do. Nor is everyone going to get rid of all their possessions and return to preindustrial life. Only a few people want to do this, and since it doesn’t scale, it doesn’t work.
Fifty years of this moral pleading to reduce consumption and reproduction has done jack shit to help the environment. Eight billion people want a developed-world affluent lifestyle and each and every one of them will personally guillotine you if you try to deny it to them. Preventing this desire is a lost cause.
Given that humanity stubbornly will not listen to you, and given that your odds of establishing a totalitarian state to force them to do so are long, it is time to look for other solutions. If humans are going to be here and are going to demand affluence, we desperately need to find ways to deliver that without destroying the biosphere. And having fewer kids will not help with that—in fact it’ll hurt. The more minds we can focus on the problem, the better.
It will not be easy and there is no promise of success, but it is better than a cause that is already lost.
When things go extinct without human presence, it’s a morally neutral event. It’s just something that happens. No one cries for the trilobites.
When you say the source of earth’s problems are because of humans, I believe you’re right but not for the reason you think. Earth doesn’t have problems. Earth simply abides. Humans on earth, they have belief systems that consider certain changes to the planet problems. In that sense humans are the cause of the problems. Without humans to care about it, it’s just a change, not a problem.
Yeah, that struck me as odd too. The biggest thing anyone can do to reduce their future carbon footprint is usually to have fewer or no children.
That's a pretty big thing to ask, though, as children are pretty central to most people's lives.
It's an interesting point, though: is it better long term for environmentally-conscious people to have fewer or more children? If they have fewer, then most of the children born will be to parents who are not environmentally-conscious, and will likely grow up without an ethos of reducing their consumption, which will negatively affect public policy. But if environmentally-conscious people have more children, they will add to the drain on the planet, but raise kids who hopefully will grow up to influence public policy in the direction of less consumption. Not sure which choice will be a net benefit, but I suspect the kind of person who would make their child-bearing choices primarily on the basis of environmental impact is uncommon enough that it wouldn't make much of a difference either way.
>It's an interesting point, though: is it better long term for environmentally-conscious people to have fewer or more children?
Earth has produced a grand total of one species that even has the potential to be effective stewards. That's us. Earth is already on the far backside of how much longer it will be habitable due to the Sun. And I see no reason to think that any other intelligence that did evolve here wouldn't be beset by the same problems we have now.
So (IMO) intelligent, conscientious people having fewer children helps nothing. We (humans) are the best thing our biosphere has got, by a long shot, in terms of long-term preservation of life, which is something that I personally think is of great importance.
But is it? I thought it was because of peoples and more to the point corporations and government "excessive" consumption of resources....? I'd argue kids actually (can) diminish use of resources by combining 2 (a couple) individuals in a smaller (spatial)unit sharing meals, going out/traveling less,
... also the happiness, anger,sadness and whole other spectrum of emotions one is directly confronted with when having kids helps with entertaining empathy...
>I've found that, to keep a balanced diet without meat, it's quite a bit more expensive, and exceptionally more time consuming.
I’d be interested in what you consider “balanced”. I’ve found that when my diet is almost exclusively plants my grocery bill was nearly halved. I’ve even found it’s cheaper to by from higher end organic grocery stores than Walmart supercenters when I exclude meat. The scales tip the other way when I buy processed or boxed vegetarian/vegan food.
The GP stated that they live in "the North". Depending on which country that is, that may very well indicate that quite a few foodstuffs are more expensive (and environmentally damaging) due to transport from areas where it can grow, or it may simply not be available.
I couldn't have a balanced and nutritionally complete diet without mean, if I stuck to what I can obtain from local sources or what's available at the same or lower price than meat. Also, most of the stuff that is available seems to be based on Soy produced abroad, and then shipped here.
With that taken into account, I'll stick to having some meat in my diet and keeping both costs and the CO2 footprint down. After all, simply reducing the meat consumption would probably have a large effect on it's own.
>most of the stuff that is available seems to be based on Soy produced abroad
This makes me think you may have been falling into the mindset that you either need to eat equivalent protein as a meat diet or were biasing towards processed foods which tend to rely heavily on soy. Personally, I don’t like the taste of those and I found they tend to be more expensive. Trying to make a facsimile of one diet with another is difficult.
I can’t speak more to the OPs geography without specifics but for the vast amount of the “north” in the US, it’s not much of a problem. Of course, it’s all relative to personal goals.
Regardless, I think you’re right in just reducing meat consumption is a more pragmatic approach for most. I think both issues speak to the need to adjust what the “norm” is, both for health and environmental reasons.
Frankly all of this advice sounds a lot like “don’t water your lawn in a drought” while the almond farmers down the road continue to guzzle it up. One tends to throw their arms up in exasperation and drown their lawn in water out of sheer hopelessness.
> I've found that, to keep a balanced diet without meat, it's quite a bit more expensive, and exceptionally more time consuming.
Mass produced meat is cheap because you don't pay it in $ but in pollution and animal suffering.
I was a "ah whatever they're just animals" guy for a long time, but once you do your research it's basically impossible to eat cheap meat again. It's jot even a question of polluting less, it repulses me now
Do what you want others to do as well. Yes you can't change everything yourself, but as a community you can. This is a problem of individualism. You can't fix that with more individualism.
> I've found that, to keep a balanced diet without meat, it's quite a bit more expensive, and exceptionally more time consuming.
Do you just gnaw on raw steak from the dumpster? I have been a vegetarian since 2009 mostly because it is so quick and convenient. Other than fruit and shelled nuts, I cannot think of anything faster and simpler than opening a can of beans. Frozen vegetables come pre-chopped, you just put them in a frying pan. If you are concerned about your health and lifespan, you should become vegan, like I did in 2017. It is the fastest, easiest way to lower your cholesterol and improve your cardiovascular function. I did not expect my exercise performance or subjective feeling to improve as much as it did. Anyway, here is a good source for ideas: https://nutritionfacts.org/
In exchange for sacrificing what many people feel is a vital component of life you could have a completely insignificant impact on the environment!
Also, compare the birth rate per woman in the US (1.73) to somewhere like Niger (7). Getting Western populations to decline faster will not have any meaningful effect on total human population.
The average American's carbon footprint is 190x that of the average Niger citizen. Until that changes, population growth in Niger isn't a worry from a climate change perspective. Though it could still cause geopolitical instability in that country and its neighbors.
Unless you think that Niger will persist in poverty forever, or that people born in Niger never move to the US or Europe, then yes, it's still a worry.
It's pretty well-established that a nation's fertility reduces as it grows richer. So Niger will either remain poor but irrelevant to climate change. Or it'll leave poverty behind, but also cut its birth rate.
Either way, only what developed countries (and China, India, Brazil, maybe Nigeria and Indonesia) do today matters in the fight against climate change. There's no one else to point fingers at, unless you're looking for an excuse to do nothing.
As a percentage of total population, the number of people who emigrate from a poor country like Niger to a developed country is quite small. And they'd likely be poor there too, and consume fewer resources on average.
By the time the developing world develops and slows their birth rate they'll have a massive population. They have a big population now and are growing fast. If we don't actually solve global warming the addition of billions more wealthy people will be a huge environmental burden.
I think "doing nothing" is what people who advocate reduction of consumption and having fewer kids are doing. Those plans won't be implemented and they won't work. What I'm advocating is technological development to solve the problems related to global warming.
> I think "doing nothing" is what people who advocate reduction of consumption and having fewer kids are doing. What I'm advocating is technological development to solve the problems related to global warming.
You may think so but that's not the case. I don't know of too many vegan-organic-bike-riding-hippy types who think we shouldn't invest in grid-scale storage, renewable power, carbon capture, or more efficient heating & cooling, manufacturing, or transportation systems. Arguably the only tech many of them oppose is nuclear power.
We need both - reduction of consumption and technological development. People who think just one or the other will be enough are deluded.
(Voluntary) reduction of consumption has the side-effect that the electorate becomes more agreeable to measures such as carbon taxes. An SUV and burger-loving electorate will never vote for them, because they would make SUVs and burgers more expensive. Without carbon taxes, there's no market mechanism to control emissions. And there's less funding for technological development or subsidies to green tech.
Bitcoin is closer to a deity for which people sacrifice their electricity as an offering. Meanwhile Americans are merely fulfilling their selfish desires. Bitcoin can work with 1 KW of power just as well as it can work with 1 TW of power.
And what about all the crap America imports from all over the world? (I use "America" as a shorthand for the entire developed world. We're all responsible)
I keep being told that America doing anything to reduce emissions is pointless "because China builds a new coal plant ever hour" or something factoid like that. But China does a substantial portion of the world's manufacturing. So if you're giving America's emissions a pass, you should give China a pass as well, right?
My point is that we are actually under-counting our CO2 emissions (if we simply go by emissions per capita) because we consume more imported goods from other countries that have expended CO2 to produce them than we export.
Niger is actually a great example for illustrating that better health (e.g. infant mortality rate) and economic outlook results in dramatically falling birth rates. Current birth rate is 6.7, but it was 7.5 only ten years ago: https://knoema.de/atlas/Niger/Fertilit%c3%a4tsrate
In my view the people of the developing world have their challenge - figuring out how to make their people wealthy, healthy, educated, and safe. People in the developed world have the challenge of figuring out how to scale. The answer to scaling cannot be "Maybe we'll just have fewer people or be poor."
While I don't agree on the premise here. There's never gonna be the one thing solving the whole problem. It's gonna be the sum of a million little things. Don't let good be the enemy of perfect.
That’s a weird argument to make. When people care about “the environment” they usually mean something like “keep the planet pleasant for humans”. Sure the humanity can commit collective sacrificial suicide to “preserve the environment”, but to what end? The cockroaches will do just fine either way.
I just find it amusing that the very source of the problem (humans) are themselves positing that they are also part of the solution.
Why kid ourselves? 8+ billion humans are going to consume, and keep consuming, endlessly. The ONLY actual solution that involves humans is expansion. We either expand to another planet / galaxy, or we ride this one out to its (and our) death.
That's why we should prioritize science more as a collective. We need more Elon Musks with giant aspirations to really move the needle.
The so-called problem is only a problem because humans deem it such.
Does the earth differentiate between malaria and kelp forests? No. Humans differentiate between them, actively trying to eliminate one and wringing our hands and trying to prevent the destruction of the other.
To call it “a problem” is to implicitly assert dominion over the land, sky and sea while pretending that you are not.
That's quite deluded. Elon Musk has done less than nothing to make moving to another planet feasible, despite all his grandomania dreams. We are thousands of years away from any notion of expansion beyond Earth. Even if he were to magically get a handful of people living on Mars (he won't) that is not going to bring us even an inch closer to something like a sustainable Mars colony.
And no, human beings do not naturally "consume and consume endlessly". In fact, the vast majority of those 8 billion people (say, 7.9 billion of them, or maybe 7.5 billion if you want) are consuming a fraction of the total resources. The vast majority of climate change is due to the richest ~10-20% in the richest countries on Earth. One way or another, this state of affairs will end in the next 50 years at most. Hopefully it will end in a more egalitarian society that respects the environment.
A race that can conceive of no other good than itself is locked into a certain kind of death spiral, as it will destroy everything around itself to make more "good". With our global reach and our local incentives spurring ever more consumption, we are headed for a very stark reckoning with the finite resources of our planet.
This is commonly done under the assumption that your kid is an average polluter and that you cannot teach your kid to cause less pollution. For many people that is true. I kind of doubt that it is true for me.
Does nature and beauty matter if there are no sentient beings to observe it?
When many (most?) people talk about mitigating or reversing climate change, their main goal is the benefit to humanity. Sure, there is some level of empathy and caring for the species going extinct every year, but even part of that is only as far as how a healthy, diverse biosphere better supports human life.
Global civilization has a long history of emptying pristine environments of sentient beings and not realizing what it has done...we have no monopoly on sentience or beauty. We are just a small part of nature.
Not possible to do myself, and it's not feasible to pay someone to do it. I don't have the tools, the electronics, nor the replacement parts (not to mention knowledge or time) to keep a modern car going for the remaining 30-50 years of my lifetime. Attempting to fix it at the point where everything is falling apart becomes impractical (as I keep trying to tell my dad when he's spending even more money to make a '79 truck run).
Not to mention that getting those parts custom made or shipped to you from across the country incurs its own environmental penalty.
> Eat less meat.
I've found that, to keep a balanced diet without meat, it's quite a bit more expensive, and exceptionally more time consuming. Then there's the health issues (like those outlined in the scar study featured on HN a week or so ago).
I absolutely could compromise my health and lifespan for the sake of the world, but I'm not going to.
> Consuming less, buying less.
There's a lower limit to how much less you can do and still remain as a healthy, productive adult, but I agree that it's a good thing to do for many reasons; it's something I try and do.
Even if I took every step outlined, it would have, effectively, no impact on the environment.