Low EV adoption will lead to much more death and suffering due to climate change. So, sure, it's not the ideal way to achieve this result, but it's better than the alternative.
I wouldn't be so optimistic. At the current trend, we might be just walking corpses. Like newborn Japanese children from Nagasaki on the 2nd August 1945 (4 days before its sudden democratisation or vaporisation by the American democrazy). We are just seeing the apocalypse in slow motion.
According to some of the most optimistic doomsayers of the Interwebs, the warming levels we are enjoying as of today are due to the CO2 levels of 30 years ago.
Currently listening to I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter. A fascinating exploration of consciousness written 20 years ago but very relevant in the age of AI.
it doesn't fix everything wrong in the state but it's > 0. There's a lot of additional economic activity that comes with the construction too. Restaurants get busier, Walmart gets busier, lots of auto repair/servicing will be needed etc. Som e people will move for construction and end up staying there. It can be a shock to the local communities though but i think the positives still outweigh the negatives.
The biggest issue is these kinds of construction jobs are temporary. It's similar to but not quite as bad as datacenters where you get a very short term influx of skilled highly paid labor but those jobs don't stick around after the construction is over. Starbase will require more people on site at least.
The construction is temporary but what are the economic impacts of having a fully operational spaceport that launches 20,000% more tonnage to orbit than the Florida Space Coast?
Probably a great deal of long term economic impact.
One would think the same thing about having some of the biggest chemical manufacturing and refining industries around and yet the people of Louisiana are some of the poorest in the US.
Tons of money flowing through the state. Just to a select few people who own the plants for the most part, not for the people working there day to day. I don't see why one would think that would change.
My friend. If you know anything about Louisiana and their current government is that the people are there to be exploited. This is not going to help the people of the area at all.
>It's similar to but not quite as bad as datacenters where you get a very short term influx of skilled highly paid labor but those jobs don't stick around after the construction is over.
The issue with Datacentres is that you cant model the advantage of lower colo costs on jobs in the area.
The problem is that some people dont want to permit anything unless they can measure the benefits, when the market doesnt always work like that.
The whole "temporary jobs" line is completely irrelevant nonsense. Sure, it's correct, but who cares? The alternative is zero. It's not like there is only a limited amount of undeveloped land and a bunch of people bidding for it. And of course those jobs don't stick around after construction is over. They're construction workers. They move on to the the next construction job.
Sounds like "legal language" threshold for whatever reason? The Terafab announcement used the same phrase:
>The initial phase of Terafab is estimated to require approximately $16.8 billion in capital investments from SpaceX and Tesla, with potential future expansion phases bringing total investment much higher. This facility will employ at least 3,000 people, many of whom will be from Grimes and nearby Brazos County — continuing the trend of our other Texas sites where between 60% and 80% of new hires are local residents.
That Starbase concept (not that the numbers are realistic by any means) is orders of magnitude more ambitious than what SpaceX does today with 22k employees.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig, especially if you're into philosophical thinking. The way he blends it with a compelling narrative is masterful.
Plenty of people (including me) are vegan, healthy, and happy. As omnivores above the poverty line, we can all make conscious and conscientious choices about what we eat. Going vegan is one of the most effective ways to combat global warming (if you're not in a position to donate large sums of money toward climate change research or mitigation).
I would say it’s important to emphasize people don’t need to go complete vegan. Reducing consumption of animal products can be more realistic for most people.
It's somewhat revealing to me that whenever this comes up people feel personally attacked by people trying to make ethical choices using data. Why is it so threatening to you?
IMO we should share data and let people make their own choices.
I think they have these kinds of visceral responses because they’re experiencing cognitive dissonance regarding the ethical treatment of animals when the issue is raised by vegans.
Deep down they know that how we collectively treat animals is abhorrent and shameful and they see their role in it and it frustrates them that they won’t change their behaviour when they’re faced with the overwhelming proof that it is possible to do in the form of someone else doing so.
It’s a crab bucket mentality coming from a place of shame. I say this as an omnivore who isn’t in so much denial about my role in animal suffering and ecological destruction.
> As omnivores above the poverty line, we can all make conscious and conscientious choices about what we eat.
This being a forum of mostly tech workers, many of us can afford to choose more sustainable animal products and support agriculture that promotes biodiversity and carbon sequestration too. If you don't want to give animal products up, then look for sources that engage in regenerative agriculture practices. They tend to be the most humane ways to raise animals as well.
In the end, demand for meat, eggs, and dairy is never going to disappear. Maybe someday lab grown alternatives can be molecularly and structurally equivalent. But until then the most effective change we can make collectively is to change government incentives to farmers so they choose better practices.
I started out doing a "meatless Monday," and have now been vegetarian for 7 or 8 years. For someone who grew up in rural Iowa, always had a freezer full of steak and ground beef from the cows my father raised and butchered, and avoided most vegetables, it was a lot easier than I thought it would be.
Plowing pasture-land to grow soybeans is likely to reduce bio-diversity even more than running cattle on that land. A lot of pasture land is marginal land where a plow is very destructive, and is often a lot closer to the pre-human ecology where the land was grazed by large mammals.
Your primary point still stands -- eating tofu likely has a lower ecological impact than eating beef, but the trade-off isn't obvious, and second order effects can be significant.
If you stop grazing cattle on land, the owner of that land is going to find another use for the land to profit from it. Some of those uses are going to be better for bio-diversity, some are going to be worse. It's highly unlikely to become parkland.
So will going vegan reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase bio-diversity? Probably, but not certainly. This uncertainty shouldn't dissuade people from acting on "probably" though.
Please provide the research that say that going vegan is one of the most effective ways to combat global warming.
According to a Swedish study publish a few years ago (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541), going vegan is mid-tier in combating global warming. Who you buy your electric from has a larger impact on the environment than going Vegan, as does if/what car you own and naturally what kind of trips and vacations you do. A single trip with an airplane can have a bigger impact on global warming than all the meat they eat through their whole life.
Technically the lowest of the high impact actions. Combine one Moderate Impact Action with a part of a second Moderate Impact Action and you get more than a plant-based diet, or just do one of the better High Impact Action.
Sure, if you assume the low end of the range provided for a plant-based diet's impact. You'd need to combine every Moderate Impact Action to reach the high end of the range.
You asked for evidence that a plant-based diet is one of the most effective ways. You found it.
If you already don't own a car, don't travel by plane, and buy green energy, then a vegan diet is the next thing on the list.
The study gives everyone a 2.1T emission budget per year in order to achieve the 2 °C climate target. A single trip by plane can produce more than that, as can buying the wrong kind of energy. A EV car alone produce around 1T per year. A meat-based diet can coexist within that budget, same as the EV car. The average win for switching your utility purchase to a emission free source is 1.6T, while switching to a vegan diet is 0.8T. That illustrate the effectiveness between different kind of strategies to stay within that 2.1T emission budget.
This seems to say that an individual going vegan would save an entire transatlantic (!) flight for their footprint every single year, and recommends it as one of the four most effective things one can do?
I read the study wrong. A single transatlantic trip produce the same amount of emissions as eating meat for two full years. 1.6 tons for a flight vs 0.8 tons for a eating meat for a whole year.
Wynes & Nicholas downgraded electricity sourcing to "questionable merit." Table 1 gives a range of under 100 kg to 2,500 kg CO₂e saved per year, depending on the default CO2 intensity of the state/country you are living in.
A plant-based diet is one of their high-impact lifestyle choices.
This is bullshit. The vast majority of CO2 is created by energy production.
The problem is systemic and blaming other people for their lifestyle choices is neither effective nor helpful and just leads to further division. It's exactly this sort of division that helps fossil companies to destroy the planet and keep making money.
It's more than 6%. Cows eat a lot, so people cut forests to grow more feed (like in the Amazon). Deforestation contribute to global warming, not to mention the biodiversity damage.
Cows also eat lots of alfalfa and grasses which takes no artificial fertilizer or pesticides to grow. And produce a not insiginificant amount of premium quality fertilizer from it that is reducing artificial fertilizer production.
If we care about deforestation then we definitive should also not use ethanol as a replacement fuel, since ethanol uses the exact same farming and plants as the one used for feeds. Animal feed and bio fuel farming are usually combined. The other main source of bio fuel is from the lumber industry.
I am not vegan, will never be, but I have known vegans for more than two decades and they are doing fine. We need to make it easy to make the right choice about food, and one way to do that is to stop making meat meat meat the ONLY cool thing. I am fine with vegans serving me tasty food, they make alternatives easier. If you do not want to be a full time vegan just switch to 3 out 7 days of the week or something like that.
I gather this is a vague snarky comment loosely implying that vegans don't get enough B12. If so, it's a profoundly ignorant point that shows you don't have any knowledge of a typical vegan diet nowadays.
Yep, B12 is a solved issue. It's pretty cheap to supplement.
I do want to mention that you do also have to look out to get enough of : Omega 3, Calcium, Iodine, Iron, Selenium, Protein.
Takes a bit of work at the start to adapt but it's very doable, and it's not like Omnivores don't have comparable deficiencies from not eating enough plants and fruit. Not to mention other problems that come with eating animal products...
I only supplement with Omega 3, Vitamin D, B12, Iodine (although sometimes I go for wakame). Have been on a plant-based diet for around 4 years now, feeling healthy.
I know people who only eat chicken and beef, I'm pretty sure they need iodine way than you do. I don't have the issue, the main animal I eat (besides eggs and cheese) is fish, but I would bet you are healthier than a large part of omnivores.
Algae oil is the source of fish oil. Eat want you want, but don't be mad some fellows fetch their nutrients from the raw source instead of multi-staged passage within various other animals.
> [EPA and DHA] are originally synthesized by microalgae at the base of the marine food chain, not by the fish. As microalgae move up the food chain, fish acquire the omega-3s and accumulate them in their tissues [note from me: along nasty substances]
A lot of vegans eat fake meat and dairy which shares many of the environmental problems of meat, such as needing a lot of inputs so a lot of plant material relative to the final product.. It also adds energy use, transport, packaging etc.
There are also environmentally beneficial meats. So much so that when rewilding we sometimes need to add the same animals back (as is happening in Scotland - rewilders are breeding cattle that look like wild ones to make it "natural"). In the UK you can buy venison from wild animals that need to be culled to to preserve the environment.
Beyond Meat is one such product, and it generates a lot fewer greenhouse emissions.
> Based on a comparative assessment of the current Beyond Burger production system with the 2017 beef LCA by Thoma et al, the Beyond Burger generates 90% less greenhouse gas emissions, requires 46% less energy, has >99% less impact on water scarcity and 93% less impact on land use than a ¼ pound of U.S. beef.
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