Satellite imagery shows Northern California kelp forests have collapsed | Hacker News

Even if we ever do manage to come together and fund active carbon capture, it will take decades to reverse the trend. And then possibly centuries for the oceans to de-acidify. Together with active efforts to burn down nature in the places where most biodiversity remains, the mass extinction even is likely to run its course before we get to a stable ecosystem. Sure we can restore most of the biomass, but it will be much fewer species. And letting the nature run its course will, naturally, take millions of years.

Brazil burns down forest mainly because of the United State’s desire for think like soy beans to feed cows.

Poorer countries use coal because it’s cheap and global conditions don’t enrich them enough to get better sources.

The sad truth is we force countries to be poor and exploit their own resources so we don’t have to do it ourselves. And of course then we’ll all pay the price living on a dying planet.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, the other bidder would _also_ prefer to work doing good in the world, but takes the highest paying job instead, so they can outbid me.

The number two exporter? The United States, at 34.1%, the vast majority of this also goes to China, again, for pigs.

Also look up a chart of CO2 production per capita and compare Brazil's to your country's before you start talking like you are.

If you want to point fingers then fine, but at least do it properly and be informed.

_Biomass should not count as renewable_

It is not carbon neutral. Monocultures requires petrol based inputs (and petrol reliant for output), and store less than half the c02 of an old growth forest.

Biomass was one of the biggest mistakes in the green movement.

"There was a man in the jungle

Trying to make ends meet

Found himself one day with an axe in his hand

When a voice said "Buddy can you spare that tree

We gotta save this world-starting with your land."

It was a rock 'n' roll millionaire from the USA

Doing three to the gallon in a big white car

And he sang and he sang 'till he polluted the air

And he blew a lot of smoke from a Cuban cigar"

Make of that what you will. I dont think brazil would burn old forrests at the rate they are with US somewhere in the equation. Nor do I think Indonesia would deforrest without the US/EU need for palm oil above all else.

Plant a lot more saplings before you point a finger at nations in different states of development.

Nuclear fission power is economically unfeasible and completely incapable of "saving the climate". It's a complete ruse.

Any new reactor type you'd build now would go online the EARLIEST 10-15 years from now. And then they will never be profitable and you still have no actual proper solution to waste management other than some fluffy marketing slides.

> And letting the nature run its course will, naturally, take millions of years.

Yea, letting physics run it's course will take 100,000 years too with a plutonium half-life of 24,000 years. A country like Germany doesn't have vast desert lands to store dangerous materials *reliably* for that long. It's also not willing to just dump it in third world countries or international waters.

Just burn the waste and distribute it from smokestacks. That's how coal handles its radioactive waste, and that seems to be accepted.

I agree however, that it's hard to argue for nuclear when it takes so long to get plants built that the developers die of boredom before grounds is broken.

Let's say I agree to build a modern reactor type today. Planning and construction begin, it doesn't have a host of issues and cost explosions like the "new" Finnish plants [1], problems that are typical for modern large scale engineering projects in Europe.

Then it will go online in 12 years and deliver the megawatts of power as planned. That's 12 years of progress in renewables at the same time. Just look at photovoltaics since 2006: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics^[2] and that's just ONE out of many categories of renewables. A decade of progress while monstrous masses of concrete a poured for an 80s power plant design so it doesn't blow up in our faces and make land inhospitable for thousands of years. Is that where we should invest our cognitive energy?

Nuclear waste disposal and upgrading/modernizing the many 1960s reactor designs out there would have been key but it hasn't happened because of cost.

If nuclear was cheap, reliable and environmentally friendly it would have replaced coal a long time ago. But even Western states with tight proliferation control and a strongly embedded infrastructure in the Western security hemisphere are not opting to vastly extend nuclear fission power for a decent number of reasons.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Finland#New_c...^[3]

Nuclear isn't the only thing that tends to take longer than planned. I would confidently bet that we'll still be running coal in 12 years' time. Certainly I think it's worth hedging against when the cost is building what, a few dozen power plants that follow existing designs?

Nuclear is a fairly solved engineering problem (it's problem is public relations and economics). If you start building a reactor today in 10-15 years it will begin producing power consistently and will continue to do so for at least it's design lifetime and probably beyond.

Grid scale battery technology isn't here yet. No one has installed a battery (a grid scale battery is multiple Gwh of storage, the Tesla Australia battery is 194Mwh) with that kind of capacity. Excluding of course pumped hydro which is limited by topological factors.

https://g2kr.com/^[4]

Many divers in the area (mostly from out of town) think they can help the kelp forests by smashing them with whatever tools they can. I have even found a lost hammer while diving a popular site in Monterey.

While smashing effectively ends the life of the urchins, it also releases their spawn and can cause a even worse environmental disaster. It is also not an effective solution for the whole coast and will only work to clear areas frequented by divers.

Wouldn't the spawn be released anyway? I can see how this strategy would be ineffective, but how is it worse?

Although it's very hard to get them off their spot and handling them.

We need more experts and more resources in ecology to detect the main problems, otherwise we could be like a dog chasing its own tail. The problem can be predation, but also could be contamination, or just two degrees more in water temperature blocking the settlement of the tiny "kelpings".

When I was a kid in the 90s, and starting to dive in the 2000s, sea stars were everywhere on the ocean floor, even really close to the city center of Vancouver. They were so ubiquitous that they were completely uninteresting to us locals. We would hear that BC was considered world-renowned for scuba diving quality, and think "How dull, it's just a shit ton of sea stars"

(Of course, we were young, stupid, and also called them starfish not sea stars then)

Me and some friends would go camping at an oceanfront spot on Vancouver Island every year, and go crabbing with mixed results. Half of the irritation was sometimes you'd be pulling up what felt like a really heavy crab trap full of goodness (We were always responsible and only kept the males over the legal size), only to find it full of sea stars who chased away the crabs and ate our bait.

Then, about six or seven years ago, the sea stars just...disappeared. And they didn't come back.

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/sunflower-se...^[5]

The reason this is critical is that purple urchins can effectively starve themselves and go into hibernation with a virtually empty body. This virtually empty body is not desirable for either (a) traditional fisherman or (b) any predators (e.g. even fish that eat urchin know to not eat the urchins that have overgrazed a kelp forest as they know they are empty.

If Urchinomics can get the unit economics to work out such that there is a financial incentive to catch a significant number of these urchin, that could change this situation.

[1] https://www.urchinomics.com/^[6]

[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/09/09/756929657/sa...^[7]

Unfortunately, according to OPs article:

Others have suggested bringing in another kelp forest predator, the sea otter, to help fight back the urchins. The problem with this appears to be that sea otters aren’t so interested in the skinny, starved urchins occupying the most barren areas, reports Anuradha Varanasi for Inverse. A separate study published this week in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests the otters do eat urchins but that they prefer the more well-fed residents of the coast’s remaining kelp forests to the so-called “zombie urchins” clinging to life in the denuded barrens.

[0] - https://oregonwild.org/about/blog/lost-sea-otters-oregon-par...^[8]

Outside of mechanical damage and over fishing, it's hard to know what could help, you can't really adjust ocean conditions, it's just too vast - for example something fundamental in relation to temperature and water acidity has changed meaning you can't just replant, it'd just suffer the same fate. It kind of implies to save the oceans climate change needs to be improved globally.

You can't have all the modern day luxuries (cars, airplanes, electricity 24/7) and somehow expect everything to just "hum" along.

I think news reports like these will become more common, more frequent and a natural byproduct of how things are now, regardless as to whether human activity/climate change is the cause.

I am uncertain about this whole "2030" neutrality thing, why not 2025? Why not next year? We're not very good at setting ambitious targets nor making people suffer for the benefit of nature (I'm sure somewhere there is a "link" between this event and the devastating impact humans are having on the natural world as we know it)

Even a pandemic didn't have much effect whereas in previous times tens of millions would've been expected to die.

Cue another attenborough documentary telling us how everything is basically screwed...Somehow he would convince us about how fossil fuels is directly responsible for this activity taking place...

> I am uncertain about this whole "2030" neutrality thing, why not 2025? Why not next year?

"next year" for a politician is "right now". "in 2030" is never since they'll be long retired.

There is a funny thing happening right now in France, most politicians from the 70s, 80s,&c. are coming out saying we should focus on climate change, the very same people who actively participated in worsening the situation back in the days. They only wake up now because their life is basically over and they want to rip some last minute karma points. Short term individual goals will always defeat long term global ones

I'm still feeling this argument out a bit, but... what can an individual actually do about it? Even if you look beyond how little any individual family contributes to pollution, in comparison to even some of the simplest industrial ventures.

I can't do without electricity 24x7, because I live in the north. I'd freeze to death. Think the recent crap Texas had to go through, for around 8 months of the year.

I can't do without a car because my commute is around 20 miles one way. I - quite literally - can't afford to live closer to work; the prices are on par with the bay area ($600,000 1,000 sqft condos), despite living in a very sparsely populated state with "competitive" wages in the $80k range for experienced software developers.

I could (and have) done without airplanes, but the alternative (if I want to keep my job) is to drive for around 18 hours. Not terribly friendly. The bus is closer to 48 hours, with prices on par with the airlines.

It is, for all intents and purposes, impossible for me (for a vast majority of people, I'd posit) to live without a job, without electricity, and without a car. And, realistically, I have very little control over my house, my car, my food, etc; these are instead largely based on my salary.

I get what's been made available by the market to me at a price that I can afford. It's not as if the market will change to less profitable products just because they're a bit better for the world. And it's not as if I can suddenly afford more expensive products just because they're better for the world.

House planning could require far less electricity, but it's not required by building codes, and the market doesn't acknowledge its value.

Urban planning puts workplaces far away from residential areas because they used to be heavy polluters, but never stopped doing it when workplaces improved.

My workplace office is 1km away from my residence. Someone had the smarts to put a small amount of office buildings in an otherwise residential neighborhood (as well as a few shops). I moved here for the job - it was the obvious choice.

Mixed use zoning has made it so I don't just not need a car, I don't even use public transit often.

Never buy another car. Fix what you have when you need to.

Eat less meat. Live principled- not that you don't but doing these things is almost contagious. I notice friends and family following my lead. Consuming less, buying less.

In my country most cars are bought used, imported from another country (usually Germany, sometimes the US) after they've deemed them not worth fixing (i.e. salvage). Whatever is broken is fixed up, tested for safety and emissions (we are an EU country), and sold to someone here. Labour costs are quite low (compared to Western EU & US), there's a great availability and parts, and people are quite skilled here, so pretty much anything can be done.

It used to be common to import cars from the UK (for some reason, much cheaper 2nd hand than the rest of Europe), and convert them from right to left hand drive - but a few years ago the government said they wouldn't allow those cars to be re-registered, which put an end to that.

Recently a friend had to fix the Webasto unit (diesel pre-heater) on his car and found someone who admitted his 'hobby' was fixing them. €100 later and what he thought he needed to replace was as good as new.

When the cars come here they often already have multiple hundreds of thousands of kilometers on the clock, but they are usually 'fixed' so who knows how much they've really done. Said friend's odometer says it has done 350k, but we assume it's closer to 500k.

Once cars are deemed salvage here (usually at the point where the floor is rusting out, or the frame has been damaged in an accident), parts are stripped and resold on the 2nd+ hand market, or the cars are shipped to Central Asian countries where the same all happens again.

Anyway, I'm not really sure what my point is, but it seems relevant to this. If you really want to you can keep an old car running, whether it's economical is a different story (I imagine in the US with higher labour costs and lower availability of spare parts, maybe not). But you also need to consider how things are used after your life, cars for sure do not just get melted down when you declare them worthless (one man's trash, is another man's treasure definitely applies here). I'd imagine consumer electronics and appliances are much worse for the environment in this regard than cars.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Nsfl, this is a video from one of the supposedly "best" slaughterhouse in France: https://youtu.be/KWbgZQxd6J4^[11]

I was a little facetious when suggesting to keep your car forever. Just don't ditch it merely for being "old". That really goes for anything.

You can also accept the fact that you are but one human among billions. Tend your garden.

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.

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.

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 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?

Doing online advertising produces much less CO2 than say running a steel mill.

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.

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.

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.

People just are not going to use less stuff. In fact, they're going to use more. There are billions of people in the developing world who use a lot less energy and stuff than people in the developed world - but they are developing and will come to use and consume more and more. We won't impoverish ourselves, we can't ask the developing world to stay poor, and the population is growing all the time.

Plans or hopes that involve consuming less are unrealistic. The only way to save the environment is better technology and geo-engineering.

ever-growing consumption on a finite planet is unrealistic.

While infinite growth is obviously not possible I think we are a long way from the population that we could reasonably support on a still healthy planet if we had the technology to do so. I also think that in a hundred years or maybe a little less we'll start to get big opportunities for growth in space, both in the form of doing manufacturing off world and creating new population centers.

However I feel there are also choices that align with all the goals. Such as spending less on cheap disposable shit (which is so hard to do in our current environmenr) and using the materials in higher quality durable things that also offer a better experience. Not to mention shifting some consumption to services like amazing food and culture.

There’s no physical law that says we must put CO2 in the air to unlock these resources. With the right incentives people will figure it out.

What's the forcing function? It's already been proven that a global climate crisis is not enough to move society. It's not profitable enough to convince corporations to do it. The 0.1% have no cause to do it; even the humanitarians among that group have much better investments they can make.

EDIT: Also, in the past, living in the north without electricity was managed by burning wood and coal. Given the significant increase in population the impact to the environment of burning all that would be irrecoverable on its own.

Can policy not make it profitable? It seems like regulation can be a means of creating market incentives. It worked well for leaded gas, I tend to think a carbon tax/market may work

At worst, there is no way that anything approaching that sort of regulation will ever fly in today's political system. Period.

Get politically engaged with organisations that are demanding systemic change

EDIT: I don't see what is negative or controversial about this suggestion. The commenter says they cannot do the right thing because of how the system works and what options it makes available to them and at what price. So in that case we must all do work to change the system. The market is currently dictated by many different policies and legislation, causing most things you buy to be artificially cheap or expensive in one way or another. We can change this through policy or other means to make carbon products more expensive -- driving more expensive while clean transit is cheap, inner city housing cheaper than suburban sprawl, etc.

  Rise like Lions after slumber   In unvanquishable number--   Shake your chains to earth like dew   Which in sleep had fallen on you--   Ye are many -- they are few.

The good news is that this is already happening in most places. The bad news is that population growth is still out of control in Africa and parts of Asia, and may lead to a environmental crisis before population growth gets under control.

Raw population numbers are not the biggest concern. Consumption and excessive luxury, wasteful production practices and burying all of these under the rug are the root of all these problems

Have children. Not too many. Raise them well.

It is worth noting that the collapse had nothing to do with over harvest of sea life.

It would be very surprising, to me at least, to find ultimately humans did not contribute to this chain of events. Whether it's something like microplastics causing the lesions on the star fish or water temperature/chemical concentration leading to some fungal spore growing, I suspect ancient kelp forests aren't vanishing without our help.

It is entirely possible it is in some way related to human activity. It is also possible that it is completely unrelated. Booms, busts, and radical ecosystem changes do happen all the time in nature.

Nature isn't gradual, it's catastropic. The Younger Drayas caused a 7° to 10° C drop worldwide in a matter of decades.

Volcanic eruptions, sudden drought, earthquakes, asteroid impacts, abrupt population crashes: sudden change is normal.

Yes, a lot of the change we see now is human impact. But this could easily be a virus that hit the sea stars out of the blue. We just don't know.

We have to understand the connection between a seemingly "innocent" event such as throwing trash in a random place and something else happening thousands of miles away - the events can be interconnected and the various documentaries have been trying to make us think about that.

If our activity causes warming that causes more storms that causes species to migrate earlier to different parts of the globe than usual that causes unpredictable food for other animals which they were relying on and have done for years, which in turn means they can't reproduce or sustain their cubs meaning other animals might suffer as a result and suddenly the entire chain is broken, disjointed and collapses.

Humans have no idea how fragile the ecosystem is or how resilient it may be (since we've never had this many humans living at once, consuming at the rates we are and causing the warming we've been witnessing).

The sea star wasting may be tied to global warming or not and there are some plausible hypothesis. That said, there is no credible theory which ties it to overfishing.

I also pretty regularly collect urchins in that kelp forest, purple and red in that area, and the ones the otter were taking were smaller than the ones I would have chosen. So, at the least, there's at least one sea otter that particularly cares to each some sea urchins, and one human that cares to each the others.

It’s not possible.

Before the pandemic I didn't work from home at all. Now after working from home 100% for a year I'm looking forward to being able to see my coworkers in person again when things open up, but I'll probably work from home a few days a week. Not a huge change, but every little bit helps, especially when hundreds of millions or billions of other people start working from home a few days a week who wouldn't before.

It seems logical to direct efforts to control damage toward the places where they are occurring.

The global economy doesn't allow for simple answers to the sources of trash and waste. China (and India) are massive exporters of goods, only a fraction of their manufacturing is consumed internally. And of course, the biggest importers are the US and Europe.

Your population can be stable, but the economy is not.

I get what you are saying but I would need to see this sustained before I believe that we have finally broken the back of GDP to Ecological Footprint linkage. I'm not optimistic about mankind's ability to keep its footprint under control.

"Sure, we can run the world down for a bit -- all we have to do is sacrifice the opportunity of future generations to experience the world"

Yes, the disease may have been caused or spread by human activity, and yes, the warm marine weather may have been caused by human-created global warming, but you're jumping the gun to say that this is because we have 8 billion people who want a certain standard of living.

It is, and we keep hearing this argument for situations across the entire plant. There is a clear trend.

[Citation needed]

I think I need to be forced into changes, such as having to buy an electric car, or being made to walk due to driving being made illegal. If I can enhance my life whilst I get the chance to do so during my time on earth I will, unless I am prevented from doing so. I always opt for what is beneficial to me (and, judging by the sheer number of cars on the road, I am not alone in this).

Otherwise, I freely admit I have little desire to put effort into pretending I can somehow help the planet - that's the job of governments to set the policies society needs to accept, we either do it together or not at all.

I want to be as anti-carbon-neutrality as possible until it's illegal for me to cause pollution in any way (due to a shift in opinion and generating harmful emissions being 100% illegal and punishable by jail).

Electric cars are better for families (even in Japan), but having car-shaped cars is still pretty polluting due to road and tire dust, so encouraging micromobility + mass transit would be a better move for the individual.

The above is but a short list of things to attack if you in favor of trains. Note that the above cuts at a lot of things that Democrats - who claim to be in favor of trains hold dear. You will discover that fighting to make trains a better option than cars is harder as a democrat where everyone agrees but wants to put their finger in the pie, than as a republican where everyone isn't interested in trains but might let you get by with a small amount just to keep you quiet (this won't be enough to build a useful system, but it might be enough to prove it can be cost effective)

> You will discover that fighting to make trains a better option than cars is harder as a democrat where everyone agrees but wants to put their finger in the pie, than as a republican where everyone isn't interested in trains but might let you get by with a small amount just to keep you quiet (this won't be enough to build a useful system, but it might be enough to prove it can be cost effective)

And where is train hush money being handed out in the last four years? Pretty sure that's out of the frying pan into the fire.

This is perfectly exemplified by UTA Trax, which had a humble start in slightly blue SLC, but has expanded outward at an incredibly rapid pace, with approval votes coming from some of the reddest counties in the nation. Building efficiently and cost effectively is quite possibly the best vote-switcher on transit that we could make.

This sort of transit just allows for further sub-urbanization and car culture when the highways fill up. It doesn't promote cross-sector density (just larger central business districts), and it doesn't reduce the externalities of the American way of living.

To be fair, this is by no means a mistake exclusive to red states. The WMATA in DC, and LIRR and Metro North in NYC all commit the same sin.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bc/Salt_Lak... Guess the mountains hem it in one some sides; that gives me some hope. Maybe someday it will look more like https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/659/32455034626_dc15a3023b_o.j...^[13][14]

It should also be noted that Calgary faced similar challenges to SLC, and they optimized for it in similar ways: optimizing for total system length and highest frequencies per dollar spent, and often developing suburban park and ride stations. And over the last 40 years, Calgary has become more dense as a result. It has become one of the highest ridership per mile systems in north america, better than any in the US, besting even a 125 year old line with significant subterranean sections right through the dense core of Boston.

Let’s say you go buy a Tesla or Volt. The cost to charge it at a station or even your house isn’t carbon neutral. It depends on how your local power is generated. In my gas that’s primarily natural gas.

Is the $0.11/kWh truly, not to mention the cost of the battery and all the lithium/magnesium/nickel mining it requires, more “carbon neutral” than a 35 mpg petrol vehicle with all the catalytic converters and whatnot.

In reality the combustion engine pollutants contributors seem to be more shipping related. Diesel boats, diesel trains, diesel 18 wheelers etc.

Yes. My power company gives me a green energy certificate, which means that all the money I pay for energy goes to green producers.

> the catalytic converters and whatnot.

You're conflating pollution with carbon emissions. The only thing that matters to carbon emissions is mass of fuel burnt.

> In reality the combustion engine pollutants contributors seem to be more shipping related. Diesel boats, diesel trains, diesel 18 wheelers etc.

Same here.

That's ... bizarre.

Upshot is I'm doing way more to improve the environment than you are, because I'm an adult who doesn't need be compelled to be perfect before doing anything positive.

That's not really how it works. The only way humanity is at 7 billion and counting is due to advances in engineering, farming, etc.

Look for example at two extremes, starting with the CHAZ farm. You remember, the cardboard boxes with potting soil thrown on top by kids who had no idea what they were doing? Imagine if the entire planet was full of these sort of primitive smooth brains. You'd be back to hunter gatherers and a global population of ~20,000 or so rather quickly. Now look at the opposite end of the spectrum, Hokkaido rice farmers.

https://www.hokkaido-kome.gr.jp/english/about/^[15]

Despite having a less favorable climate for rice growing, Hokkaido farmers of the frozen north produce some of the highest yields and highest quality rice in Japan. When you look outside of Japan, it's even more impressive as Hokkaido consistently has higher yields than SE Asian countries with warmer humid climates more suited for rice growing.

This is a small number of people in Hokkaido, with power to change their entire world around them. They do so through science and engineering. Access to irrigation, farm equipment, and fertilizer is far more important than climate.

People who want laws to restrict CO2 would choose to destroy Hokkaido farmers. Farm equipment after all releases CO2. So does fertilizer production and transportation. So does tillage. These people seek to make us all hunter gatherers again.

Solving problems is not about squeezing yourself into the limits of your current system, it is about changing the limits of the system with science and engineering. Said more eloquently,

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw

Offsetting ones carbon footprint is cheap and easy. The fact that few people want to take any action individually undermines collective action.

The obvious path forward is for the most passionate people to lead by example.

The idea that somehow government will serve to overrule the self interest of the majority isn’t realistic.

If the majority doesn’t want change, the government can’t help.

I stopped buying anything "new" unless I absolutely cannot live without it.

Not all at once, but one thing at a time, I looked for alternatives and pulled the trigger.

The difference is that (on this topic) our government has showed real leadership. We haven't left health policy in the hands of millions of individuals. We put health policy in the hands of experts, and then implemented strict policies to get us to 0. Change didn't happen from individuals independently figuring out what to do. Change happened from the country as a whole picking a direction and moving in that direction together.

In comparison, Australia has been utterly appalling with climate change. Its a national embarrassment. I don't eat meat and I don't have a car - but I don't think thats going to matter much in the long run. What we need is to do the same thing for the planet that we did for covid - we need effective leadership on climate change. We need to do it together.

For the record, I think of democracy as a strictly positive thing even when it seems like democratic societies have erred.

At this point we need hard societal pressure via laws to make any kind of statistical difference. I’d prefer someone be a hypocrite pushing for legislation to reduce emissions (e.g. Al Gore on a private jet) than someone who reduces locally and calls it good.

There are just too many people that don’t care for “local action” to stop the impending doom.

There is grace in fighting against impending doom.

Life can be measured by how we approach things. Never lose hope. :)

Some situations are like a jiu-jitsu match where an opponent can pin you down. In a subset of these situations and unlike in a jiu-jitsu match—you can’t tap out.

Say you’re in one of these situation.

Don’t avoid the feeling provoked by this impending doom. You can’t tap out. You cant restart the match.

In such an encounter, grace might mean to keep fighting. Keep thinking. Keep struggling. Recognize your prison.

Fortune favors the prepared mind. :)

This in no way detracts from your point - unlike the Titanic, steering away from ecological disaster too late will never make things worse, it just won't be enough - but the metaphor isn't quite apt.

The earth has 200 million square-miles of area, so your portion of the 7.6 billion people equates to 0.0263 square miles. Do your part to keep that virtual area as clean as possible!

Biden has said he is not going to stand for reelection.

https://wildlife.ca.gov/Conservation/Laboratories/Shellfish-...^[17]

No more. :-(

Temperature raised a few degrees, recruitment stopped, and most laminaria submarine forests vanished.

The worst I saw was mangroves around the Gulf of Carpentaria, and my immediate assumption was the dirty lead mine nearby, but then people around the country started connecting dots to other intertidal and coastal failures that started to all line up until the entire northern coast was implicated.

The broad impact, coupled with records, suggested that this was a response to a season of low rainfall in the context of sustained elevated sea temperatures. recovery has been very gradual, as predicted.