undefined | Better HN

0 pointsryanmercer6y ago0 comments

>But what solutions are you proposing? Can we afford them, without having to change any of our laws, or our lifestyles one whit?

No, but without too much inconvenience we can outlaw cattle ranching. Cattle are nowhere near a natural species at this point from millenia of animal husbandry and there are 1.3-1.5 billion alive at any given moment. Under extremely ideal conditions you need 1.5 acres (in other parts of the world you need tens of acres) to feed one cow for 12 months. Imagine if we let even 2 billion acres go wild in the next 2 years (it takes 18 months~ to get a cow to slaughter weight), imagine how much water that saves from land that has to be irrigated, imagine what happens if you start letting grasslands reclaim much of that land.

Better, outlaw cattle for beef. Only allow dairy cows to remain, that leaves you 250-300 cattle. Now require those to be pasture fed in months that they can be. This allows them to not only be healthier but to work their own manure back into the soil which will improve the soil quality if they are rotated from field to field. In some places you simply return it to the natural grasslands, in others you actually start replanting forests that were cut decades or centuries ago to use for farmland. Simply removing a BILLION cows makes an immediate impact over 18 months. Some of the land you still have to use for growing crops for feeding humans but only a fraction. The rest can be well on it way to restoration in 1-2 years.

-----

Also tackle zoning/city planning. Set up rules for new construction where commercial and retail is evenly distributed throughout residential, with solid grid roads with dedicated bike and walking paths.

-----

Then place quite high tariffs on fruits and vegetables to reduce out of season consumption considerably. At one point oranges in the United States, outside of states like Florida, were a special treat you got once a year if your family had some money to throw around - now you can go to the grocery and get oranges, bananas, dragon fruit, tomatoes, peppers, pineapple and coffee beans like you're some kind of Mansa Musa-rich ruler.. Most of the produce you see in stores, most of the year, comes from another country, a notable percentage of the time from another continent. Not only does this result in massive amounts of waste/spoilage, it requires massive amounts of fossil fuels for ships, trains and truck not to mention regional and local warehouses to store the stuff for days at a time before moving to retail outlets. If you buy a piece of fruit, especially one not native to the United States, at the grocery it might have been handled by a dozen people, been in a ship then on a train then on a truck, and traveled thousands of miles (in fact, the average American meal is estimated to have travelled 1500 miles to get to a plate [1]).

[1] https://cuesa.org/learn/how-far-does-your-food-travel-get-yo...

----

These are three fairly simple things to implement. Will you be eating grapes in the winter in Arizona? Probably not. Will people miss hamburgers (I sure as hell will, but chicken sandwiches are good and chicken is an order of magnitude better as far as greenhouse emissions goes per pound of meat).

Or we can watch city after city in India and Africa, millions upon millions of people, go without water and say "oh how unfortunate, not my problem" and wake up one day, go to the tap to get a glass of water, only to hear some sputtering only to find, there's no water.

We can wait until we go to the grocery and corn is 5$ a cob and looks pathetic, until pork butt is 37$ a pound because the grain crops largely failed from drought or excessive rain cough which we've seen a taste of this year with the rains, there's corn knee high by my home that should already be tasseled cough or until we're paying 100$ for a 20lb bag of black beans, thinking how lucky we were to find them because Dave on Facebook just posted a picture of his grocery selling them for 110$.

edit: oh look, within 3 minutes of posting this someone went through and down voted my last few comments, in different threads.

0 comments

2 comments · 1 top-level

jointpdf6y ago· 1 in thread

So I’m 100% in favor of urgent and strong action on climate change. Reducing impact of cattle ranching, improving urban planning, and encouraging local food consumption are all great medium-to-long time horizon goals.

But: 1) It’s not enough. The methane and CO2 from extraneous transportation only accounts for some portion of the GHG problem. 2) Restricting peoples’ access to food (up to and including outright banning major classes of food) is an extreme solution that is sure to be extremely unpopular, correspondingly. And environmental economic theory strong suggests that command and control style policies are less efficient than market-based solutions (e.g. cap and trade, carbon tax and dividend), which also have the effect of catalyzing innovation and long-term change via the price signal. But, I do think coal fired power plants are worth a ban and rapid decommissioning. 3. That said, I also think we’re beyond the market-based solutions that economists and technocrats (like me!) approve of. I’m in favor of wartime-scale and worldwide production of renewable energy infrastructure + decarbonization efforts (including reforestation and other forms of carton capture), worldwide. Ideally, with the US leading the way, given that we are responsible for a plurality of the cumulative emissions since the industrial revolution. This also means supporting sustainable development where appropriate.

People of every political stripe hate draconian bans and love building stuff. It would be something amazing to look back on if we really went all-in and mobilized a rapid decarbonization/greening of the planet. Either way, it’s our generation’s grand challenge.

ryanmercerOP6y ago

>But: 1) It’s not enough.

Obviously, the cattle methane impact is roughly 1/20th as bad as our CO2 emissions depending on cattle diet and then fudging some in for refrigeration and transportation probably double it, although that is part of the known CO2 emissions already.

But they're relatively painless massive changes that can be sold to the unbelieving masses.

Go talk to some random people at your work, or on your facebook friends list. Most will probably think global warming is fake, is a politics thing, that there's no evidence "of course it's the warmest June in recorded history, we've only been recording with good instruments for a few decades" "it's cyclical" "It's just part of the sun's cycle, it'll cool back down" "it was much warmer for the dinosaurs and they did fine" are actual answers you are likely to hear.

We can start doing something or we can keep going "it's not enough, we can't, not enough, not feasible, not enough money, too expensive, won't scale". Anything we do to slow it, buys us a little more time for some revolutionary/miraculous tech breakthrough.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse