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


I started free diving for abalone along the Sonoma coast in 2008. The first few years of diving were plentiful and majestic. But my friends and I noticed the changes around 2015. Less sunflower stars and star fish. After some red tide events, the abalone die offs were crazy. Coves that used to have abs stacked on top of each other were almost empty. Finding a 9” abalone became a chore. The thinner kelp forests meant less fish, less life. It’s been difficult to watch first hand. I get sad thinking about the reality that my children will most likely never see the underwater forests that filled my soul and gave me a deep love of the ocean. I hope we can help the system get back in balance.

We likely won't, at least nowhere near the 20th century balance. For all the new tree saplings planted elsewhere, Brazil straight burns down old growth in the rainforest. For all the wind and solar installed by the rich countries, poor countries are happy for the cheaper coal. Replacing nuclear base power with fossil fuels doesn't help too.

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.


While your comment isn’t factually wrong it’s phrased to almost blame the poorer countries.

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.


A less carbon intense life is possible, but much easier without the fear of a needy tomorrow...the consumer may be the biggest cause of so much CO2, but like in "Grapes of Wrath" when you are pushed into a place where you can't grow what you need, can't stay in a place for free so have to go out and work to buy your food and then have too much money so you buy useless stuff....also from that book (prescient in today's awaited ecological collapse) the idea that fruit prices were so low they built factories to put them in cans...to conclude imo the lifestyle that comes from the "western" world's slave mentality to work and growth is the main cause of climate change...that and the overabundance of never ending more printed money...

Interesting idea. It reminds me of the fact I'd like to work full time on climate breakdown, but don't because those jobs pay a lot less. After all, trying to buy a house!

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.


75% of Brazil's soybean exports go to China, for pig feed. This is 47.6% of all soybean exports.

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


Most electricity production in Brazil is renewable, at much higher levels than most first world countries, including yours most likely. https://i.imgur.com/gMBJEQG.png

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.

[1]

I support and agree with your sentiment. Western countries are to blame, but

_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.


Joe Jackson, Obvious Song:

"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"


Yeah, being poor doesn't give you the option of having conservation at the top of your list of priorities. Not to mention poor countries don't use all that much energy per capita.

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.


Fortunately, solar is now cheaper than coal. Doesn’t solve everything, but it’s not all doom.

The US has cut down and destroyed three quarters of a billion acres of primary forest.

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


Here it is again, the subtle but completely unfounded nuclear power astroturfing.

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.


> 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.


I thoroughly agree with you on coal! We need to get away from it as soon as possible. I just do not believe that nuclear fission power is the way anymore. 25 years ago I would have had another opinion entirely because the time frame would have been different.

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]


And if in 12 years those photovoltaics somehow haven't replaced coal - maybe the efficiency improvements stop, maybe there's issues with the supply of rare earths, maybe - then we'll be in a fine fix won't we.

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?


> Any new reactor type you'd build now would go online the EARLIEST 10-15 years

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.


I think many people who oppose building new nuclear power plants would also support shutting off coal first.

I have been diving in the Monterey, CA region since 1999 and have seen the change first hand. Sunflower sea stars are now extinct in the area; I haven't seen one in years. Some of the smaller sea star species have started to gradually recover but they aren't effective at preying on purple urchins. There is a local group culling urchins but they'll only be able to cover a small area.

https://g2kr.com/[4]


Thank you for sharing this. I literally got open water certified in Monterey this afternoon, and I will be signing up to volunteer!

I am very excited for the results of the urchin culling experiment Fish and Wildlife has allowed in Monterey. There is debate in the scientific community if allowing the public to kill urchins will hurt or help the cause.

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.


> it also releases their spawn and can cause a even worse environmental disaster

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


They are probably pointing out that there could be a better way to kill/remove/move the urchin without releasing the spawn.

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


This is the sad state of humans trying to help or fix mother nature. In almost every instance, the fix results in one of those "oh, didn't think of that" kind of things. I don't know the lady swallowed the dog to chase the cat to catch the bird to eat the spider to catch the fly. It's a literal nursery rhyme we teach kids.

Survivorship bias, humans make corrective actions to local environments all of the time and there are no noticeable issues. When something goes wrong it’s news though.

We have minimal if any data about how many of the course corrections go well, precisely for that reason. However because we don’t know how many there are, it’s not accurate to claim to know it’s survivorship bias. It could be that, but it could not be. There’s not enough data to make a conclusion.

While that is true of trying to introduce new species to predate over-populated species (or really any novel species introduction), there is a long history of humans successfully managing their own predation to help balance over/under populated species. Obviously we have had failure in this area too but it we do know it is possible for us to do it and improve things.

Wouldn't solve the problem necessarily.

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".


Technically yes some divers do eat them, but these aren't the same species of urchin that people typically eat as uni sushi. The gonads in purple urchins are so small that's it's hardly worth the effort of cleaning them.

Yes I've taken some home from the beach and they're just fine. The eggs turn into ooze pretty quick so I don't know how viable they'd be commercially.

Do you know if they've looked at trapping the urchins? I believe traps are used to harvest urchins elsewhere and it works ok.

Same thing in British Columbia: over 90%, 5.7 billion have died since 2013 [1].

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]


I remember my partners parents saying the same about star fish population around Hornby island. The time frame matches up as well.

Purple urchins have long been common in the northeast Pacific Ocean as far as British Columbia. They're not migrating any further north but the population has increased because the ecosystem is out of balance.

There is a company called Urchinomics that is catching the purple urchins, then feeding them in a land based environment, then selling them worldwide as high quality uni.[1][2]

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]


One reason we don't have kelp forests in Oregon is due to sea otters having been wiped out, which kept the urchins at bay.[0]

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]


It seems the parameters for healthy ocean ecosystems is much tighter than on land and much more sensitive to change. The UK has similar issues (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/mar/04/catastro...) and Australia is well documented.

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.

[9]

I mean you can't have 8 billion needy, constantly consuming humans for 60/70 years and somehow have a sustainable, vibrant and healthy ecosystem.

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 expect that we're not even detecting most collapses like these. It's like when your garage is on fire but you're in the bedroom on the other side of the house. It starts to smell funky but you're not yet aware that your whole house will be gone in the next hour

> 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


> You can't have all the modern day luxuries (cars, airplanes, electricity 24/7)

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.


Almost everything you describe is a product of bad urban/house planning.

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.


>I can't do without a car

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.


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

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.


> Fix what you have when you need to.

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.


We already have a surplus of people in developed nations. Having more people doesn't change anything.

> have as many kids as you can support

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.


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...

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.


>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.


> 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/[10]


> 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

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


Didn't say to not eat meat- but most people eat more than necessary.

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.


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.

Wanna do something for the environment? Don't have kids. One kid absolutely dwarfs all things suggested so far, combined. By far.

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.


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."

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.


So you're saying letting people from Niger immigrate to the USA is the worst possible thing for the environment?

The USA is basically set up to grind natural resources (and people) into money without concern for anything else so that's one way to look at it.

Interestingly, excluding the people part, that’s the same description given about Bitcoin and it’s environmental impact.

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.

A big part of that 190x footprint is all the stuff the US makes and exports to other countries.

It’s silly to attribute it all Americans.


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.

And my point is we’re not necessarily under counting.

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


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.


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.


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.


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.

This kind of response is pretty monstrous. The logical next step would be to tell people to, well, stop living. Complete and total nihilism.

We tried in Europe and it just ended up with politician encouraging third world immigration to sustain industry, so now we have two problems.

Does a healthy ecosystem on planet earth have any value of there aren’t any humans here to see it?

I think it's a fair philosophical question.

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.

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 think "The only way out is through" meaning, we will not solve the problem by consuming less or becoming primitive. We will solve the problem by developing through the environmental constraints and replacing our harmful behaviors with better ones. For example, solar, wind, nuclear, and one day fusion providing power instead of coal, oil, and natural gas. Electric cars instead of internal combustion and so on.

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.


'consuming less' does not mean 'becoming primitive'.

ever-growing consumption on a finite planet is unrealistic.


The comment I'm replying to is discussing things like not flying or not using electricity. I'd describe forgoing modern comforts as primitive.

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.


Agreed on needing better tech and the futility of trying to forcefully lower living standard.

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.


I think it's going to need both. We are in a phase where we can basically do the low hanging fruits. I assume we'll be able to save a lot of CO2 that way. But the goal is ZERO. I just can't imagine a world with net zero CO2 and everybody is driving a Tesla. The mining, fabrication, transport, materials is all very resource hungry. I think current studies suggest an electric car uses about half as much CO2 in it's lifetime. I'm sure it can be improved.. but ZERO ?

Cap and trade, and then gradually lower the cap (driving the price of emitting carbon up). When a lot of money is on the line people tend to get creative.

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.


your situation is pretty common. it has a small effect, but vote for candidates who will reduce car dependency and support public transport measures. the developed world got this right in the early 20th century, we can do it again.

20 miles is doable with an eBike or speed pedelec. Probably not as environment-friendly as a normal bike, but probably beats a car. And it’s healthier.

People lived in the north prior to the invention of electricity, so it's possible. Maybe more difficult now due to the quantity of firewood that would be needed with a larger population? Architecture (and dense urban development) plays an important role in electricity-free livability across various climate conditions. Some buildings work well in the cold, some work well in the heat. That's not to say you as an individual can address these problems, but society as a whole can design urban systems which support low-energy living in even difficult conditions.

> but society as a whole can design urban systems which support low-energy living in even difficult conditions.

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.


>It's not profitable enough to convince corporations to do it.

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 best, like leaded gas, it will take about 30 years, which in this case is far, FAR too late.

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


The best solution, AFAICS, is to push for space exploration. In the meantime, if you're single, you could try to live in a more dense downtown location where living car-free is practical. I'm not sure that would be a good idea if you had kids though.

> what can an individual actually do about it?

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.


I will never have enough money in my entire lifetime to out-politic Google for one year, let alone the oil industry for the remainder of my life.

  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.

Getting involved can take other forms than just giving money. And even whatever little money you can give, if multiplied by others who care, can help.

This is self-selection against those willing to acknowledge and work towards solving the problem.

The only thing that can be done is have fewer children. Everything else is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

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.


And yet, those places in Asia and Africa are much less of a problem for the environment than we are in Europe and the USA.

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


Done. I have no children, nor plans for children. Sadly, a childhood friend of mine has made up for myself and my partner 5 times over.

And as it turns out, it's your childhood friend that get to raise those children and not you, so if you wanted to help posterity then we'll have to hope your friend isn't a climate change denier or something.

Have children. Not too many. Raise them well.


How do you know that this was in response to you? Isn't it more likely that it was in response to another person?

>you can't have 8 billion needy, constantly consuming humans for 60/70 years and somehow have a sustainable, vibrant and healthy ecosystem.

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


The cause of the wasting symptom is still unknown, that's why the link in the article leads to a school that is looking for specimens to analyze.

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.


This is an entirely different point than mine about harvest.

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.


They do, it’s true, but not on the time horizon that we have been seeing in the last 50 years which seems to be speeding up

That's not true at all.

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.


How do we know that? I’m not disagreeing with you- but I can’t imagine any historic evidence could rule out the existence of a highly volatile and cyclical population change.

Just to be clear, almost every species that has ever existed has gone extinct. And almost all of that has happened before humans existed.

That being said, it's almost definitely due to humans, I just wanted to be pedantic.


I think that mindset is what has led us to the current predicament we're now facing.

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 fact that events can sometimes have unintuitive consequences does not make it rational to claim two random things are connected and ignore all the science we do have.

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.


The size of the sea otter population is almost certainly a result of human activity. In particular the fur trade and fisheries.

We're pretty bad at managing wild resources, but then again, we're pretty bad at saving them as well. For example, the same marine mammal act which saved sea otters from extinction has also allowed for the overpopulation of harbor seals which is going to drive the southern resident orcas into extinction. And the fisheries systems that we've built to save salmon and steelhead populations have resulted in less genetic diversity in wild populations that make them more susceptible to disease and predation. Not that I have an answer to this, just a little frustrated that we didn't care about this stuff sooner, and had a more developed body of science on how to deal with these things.

I can confidently say that I personally saw a sea otter about 15 miles north of Santa Barbara about 5 months ago that was snacking on purple sea urchins. It would go down, come up, do something, and repeat, and I came across several very-recently-eaten purple urchins washed up along the beach on my walk that morning.

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.


For a somewhat encouraging counterpoint to this statement, check out the book "More From Less." It describes a lot of positive trends including decreasing demand for many resources whose extraction is damaging to the environment. Some examples: we farm far less land in the United States than we used to while producing more food, and that unused area slowly reverts to forest; we use less metal to make containers for the same volume of liquid. There's still plenty to worry about, but more positive signs than you'd think.

All of these "reasons for optimism" trends in the US (and, to a big extent, Europe as well) are to be ignored, since the US is simply moving production of everything outside the country on an unprecedented scale. Every farm that gets released in the mid-west is likely made up by another swath of Amazon rain-forest burned down in Brazil . Even in internal production, every increase in productivity is met with an increase in the push to get people to consume more, so there are no real gains to be had in the current system.

Climate change is also just one of the ecological problems we’re making worse by the day. Micro plastics, importing non native species and parasites, insecticides, herbicides with unknown systemic effects, destroying most wild areas, etc.

It’s funny how we are aware of the damage, and yet everyone still wants to live like a millionaire

It’s not possible.


To be fair, there were some pretty drastic reduction in emissions from transportation in the last year. That was due to a global pandemic rather than environmental activism, but still it's progress. It may have at least caused some permanent changes in behavior regarding driving to the office every day.

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’s not possible.

Why not. You can live like a millionaire and not have kids. Having a kid is many factors worse than living a millionaire.


Really, really depends on how you live. People in first world countries are worse for the environment than people in third world countries by a wide margin per capita.

Well, in some senses. Yet ocean plastics were reported to be 90% China and India. Soil erosion has been mostly eliminated in the US and is endemic elsewhere. And obviously, since most remaining native species are in 3rd world countries, the threats to them are there.

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


Until recently, China had been importing a vast amount of the world's trashed plastic, ostensibly for recycling, but likely simply dumping a good part of it.

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.


Yes, because we exported our environmental responsibilities regarding plastic manufacturing and processing to those countries, which inevitably pollute for us.

China and India conduct a huge amount of their economic activity in order to satisfy the demand of people in other places though, i.e. that plastic, coal burning, etc. is mostly on us.

To further clarify this comment: living like a millionaire (consuming more in general) increases your carbon footprint.

The US is effectively zero population growth, as are many other affluent parts of the world. This seems like an overly simplistic assessment.

The problem is not necessarily the population growth, but the growth in aggregate demand. The rich demand more and more every year, the middle-class demand more and more every year, and the poor demand to live like the middle class.

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


While economy has historically been coupled to resource and energy usage, recently we have decoupled economic growth from things like that, countries can and do have economic growth with stable or decreasing ecological footprint as the service economy and digital/attention economy can provide more and more things people want without necessarily consuming more physical resources.

A lot of the time, that is only achieved by outsourcing production and other high-environmental tole activities to the third world. I am extremely skeptical of most countries claiming to have achieved this.

Do you have a source for this? Considering the basic improvements seen in the efficiency of various devices and processes, I'm dubious that the outsourcing of environmentally costly activity is the cause of this GDP-resources trend.

> While economy has historically been coupled to resource and energy usage, recently we have decoupled economic growth from things like that

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.


I am assuming we need to go negative in population growth, current population levels are not sustainable.

It's almost like a pandemic could be natures way of enacting that, yet it seems now we've conquered its capability to do widespread damage in terms of human lives lost. This must be one of the least fatal pandemics in history

iirc dogs are also equivalent to the average emissions of a person in Vietnam. So best to cut them out as well.

Are you advocating for only certain people not to have kids (in which case, what’s your criteria on who should and who shouldn’t), or that no one should have kids (e.g. the humanity should die out)?

This is such a sick mindset.

"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"


I don’t have a sister. Did my parents rob her of the opportunity to live a meaningful life? There is nothing that could be robbed of anything.

vast majority of those 8 billion people use very little resources. It's over consumption of the worlds top 10% (probably includes you and me) that caused most of the damage.

The die off is attributed to a mysterious disease affecting sea stars, and a couple years of warm marine weather. It's wholly possible this has nothing to do with humans at all, and is a natural event.

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.


> The die off is attributed to a mysterious disease affecting sea stars, and a couple years of warm marine weather. It's wholly possible this has nothing to do with humans at all, and is a natural event.

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


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

[Citation needed]


My understanding is this is extremely difficult short of killing myself. Using a car, the internet, a smartphone, electricity...You're tied into industries that are simply not carbon neutral. How much electricity is used when you browse the internet loading the 15,000 JS files and ad networks/trackers everywhere? How much energy (i.e battery % on a phone) is wasted per human, per day for absolutely pointless nonsense?

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).


Forcing you to do in particular to do either of these things wouldn’t help. The reason you’re using a car and not walking is cities aren’t built densely enough because California’s land use rules are made to keep the state looking like a 50s sitcom set.

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.


Amen to that, the sooner people realize some above and below ground trains can solve a number of issues and create much more prosperity, the better.

It would help if the people who realized that also realized that cost is one reason we can't have more. There is no reason that stations have to be large instead of utilitarian (10x the price). There is no reason trains need any operators, much less then 3 often required by law and union contract. There is no reason it takes 24 people to run a TBM (12 is the number in other countries). There is no reason why trains can't run more often. There is no reason "turf wars" mean that two different divisions of the same agency fight each other for limited budget instead of working together for the city.

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)


Why hello, fellow reader of https://transitcosts.com

> 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.

[12]

> 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)

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.


I don't want to diminish that, from a brief skim of wikipedia this looks like a typical American light rail with vast suburban extensions, "park and ride" stations rather than dense development around station.

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]


You're not wrong, but underfunded transit agencies taking on highly entrenched land use laws in order to build slightly more optimally kinda falls into the category of boiling the ocean. It's not something they control, let alone have any sort of influence over. But what they can control, they did, and for a red state, they have a pretty comprehensive and rapidly growing rail system that is quite enviable compared to much bluer cities like San Jose or Minneapolis.

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.


"Carbon neutral" isn't the same as "non-polluting". "All" you need to be carbon neutral is to not burn fossil fuels for your energy.

So. From a supply chain perspective.

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.


> 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

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.


Yeah, but we don’t know if this kelp thing is because of CO2 emissions, and tire runoff actually does kill marine life in nearby rivers.

Certainly, I mean that carbon emissions are generally a bigger problem than pollution, so we should probably prioritize that first.

Pollution is really bad. Like, it’s way worse than you’d think it is. Air pollution seems to have driven the entire country crazy for most of the 20th century, and if cities are as violent as they were in 1990 then nobody is going to be interested in saving energy by living in them.

I want to be as anti-carbon-neutrality as possible until it's illegal for me to cause pollution in any way

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.


>My understanding is this is extremely difficult short of killing myself.

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


> 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.

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.


The obvious thing is to install solar on your roof. I'm hoping my system goes live this week (I've been hoping that for 4 months, but snow meant they couldn't get on the roof to finish that last bit)

I only eat chicken, buy new clothes maybe once every 18 months, bike(d) to work, fly seldom. According to my power company my electricity bill in my regular apartment is less than efficient homes in my area. I also buy carbon offsets for myself and my family.

making a bigger effort to plant trees this year, I'm well ahead for the year, but I've still got many to make up for.

We've decided not to do anything. Any other conclusion is foolish optimism. The effects will happen.

Another solution is to utilize algae, but it would destroy ecosystems at the scale we'd need it. Still a fun thought exercise.

Many comments here wondering what an individual can do... I'll tell you what I've done in order to stop feeling complicit.

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.


Disagree. In a democracy, the only way to make the important policy changes is for the majority of people to be on board with it. Tiny actions by individuals move the needle of public opinion. Additionally, different individuals reducing their consumption in different ways provides a diversity of ideas which can later inspire the so-called "scientific solutions".

I hear you; and I'm pretty pessimistic that the "democratic" solution will solve anything. Look at covid - the US's approach to mask wearing seems to be what you're proposing - millions of tiny actions by individuals. The result is over half a million people dead. If those deaths were clustered in SF, that would be every man (or every woman) in San Francisco dead from the pandemic. In comparison here in Australia during the entire pandemic we've only lost 900 people to covid. Single cases make the news here.

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.


My point was less on the benefits/drawbacks of individual decisions and more on the presence of democracy and therefore the need to convince individuals of public policy to make it happen.

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


Your individual reductions in consumption are pointless here. If you just ceased to exist it would not meaningfully move the needle.

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.


Put more constructively, you need to have strongly negative carbon emissions at this point. Pick a carbon intensive company or industry, and work to reduce its emissions. Your individual CO2 emissions are rounding error.

Individual actions are the raw material of a collective shift in mindset that adds up to hard societal pressure to create laws that do make a difference.

Better to sing on a sinking ship than to die frustrated, angry and victimized.

There is grace in fighting against impending doom.

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


I feel encouraged to see this comment. Thank you for posting it. I've been reading Thomas Merton's _Raids on the Unspeakable_ recently and I sense some of that same heart in what you write.

Or better to steer the ship using the levers of power that are available to those in power. Fighting a losing battle results in a loss regardless of how valiant the fight. Do what you can to have the greatest impact, which means working with those in power to make societal change.

Yes. I agree with you. Much better to steer the ship and never hit the iceberg.

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. :)


Small nitpick: the Titanic tried to steer away from the iceberg too late, and thus the iceberg cut along the side, exposing many more airtight compartments than if they hit head-on.

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.


Absolutely false.

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!


The most effective thing is probably banding together to vote in politicians that will actually do something about climate change.

It’ll be at least another 8 years until the US does that (unless Biden ends up changing course), and that’s way past the point of no return for the planet.

Even if Biden isn’t reelected in 4 years, it will just mean we end up with an even more climate hostile president.

In the very short term, people should be protesting in the streets to end the filibuster, and then immediately fund primary challenges to any democrat the stands in the way of the green new deal.


That's pretty cynical. Biden says he wants to end fossil fuel consumption by 2050. You might say it's insufficiently aggressive but it's also still 100% impossible so long as we have an opposition party unwilling to even acknowledge the problem.

https://joebiden.com/climate-plan/[16]


> Even if Biden isn’t reelected in 4 years

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


Source? I see some speculation, and comments from Biden saying he’s planning to run again.

The day I proposed to my wife on a beach north of Monterey, we found a nearly perfect abalone shell on the beach. To this day she uses it to store her jewelry in. Saddens me to think that no one else will ever find one of these mother of pearl treasures there again without the kelp forests intact.

The larger abalone had already been wiped out in the Monterey area by sea otters and withering syndrome even before the purple urchins ate most of the kelp. Otters are the primary predators for abalone and when the otters were hunted nearly to extinction then the abalone population exploded. But then otters were protected so they ate many of the abalone, and withering syndrome killed others. I still occasionally see small abalone while diving.

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


Generally the US National Park Services allows people to take two gallons of uninhabited shells from national seashores.

This is unbelievably sad. I learned to scuba dive in southern California in the early 90s. Kelp was ubiquitous back then, and it harbored all manner of marine life. Swimming through a kelp forest was a magical experience.

No more. :-(


It wouldn't be helpful in this case, but I've long thought that the US should create marine "national parks" in the coastal waters. Within those parks, no fishing would be allowed, and no motorized boats.

same thing also in the north of Spain with equivalent species of macroalgae.

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


five years ago half the coast of australia suffered massive dieback of mangroves, coral and sea grass.

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.

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