Global Warming Issue: Why no decisive action?

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Re: Global Warming Issue: Why no decisive action?

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Straha wrote:You need to look for variety and do research ahead of time but you can, usually, get more calories for less money as a vegetarian. Lentils, rice, beans, most fruits (I'm personally fond of bananas), pasta, and a bunch of other food are dirt cheap, easy to make, and calorie rich. I live on a very modest income and after I switched I was surprised to find myself with more money. This doesn't hold with going Vegan, but you can easily cut all meat out of your diet and save money.
I was speaking mostly of fresh vegetables with a lot of flavor (onions, squash, etc.), though cabbage is usually relatively high in calories while being ridiculously cheap ($0.29/lbs on sale? hell yeah).
Which is another reason to go vegetarian. Beef requires five pounds of grain for every pound of meat produced. For chicken and beef it's roughly 2-3 pounds of grain per pound of meat. By going vegetarian you not only help stop global warming, you also stop environmental degradation by using a lot less land for your food. It's pretty cool.
While I think it is helpful, I do not think vegetarian eating is the holy grail of environmentalism; I'm trying to do my part on human population decline (my wife and I are probably going to max out at 2 kids, which will still put humanity on the decline, as my siblings are all childless and will almost undoubtedly remain so) and reducing energy consumption (more walking, more 3 R's, etc.) and so on.

The main problem,though, isn't so much entirely how we do things, but the scale at which we do them. Eating pork or beef in and of itself isn't terrible, but everyone wanting large amounts of animal meat at every meal causes a domino effect of problems. Driving a car isn't bad, but everyone wanting to drive enormous SUVs just to go down the block is problematic.

So, to that end, I'd like to more emulate the populations of American Indians in North America prior to European colonization: they definitely altered the ecosystems of North America to work for them, but they did it in such a fashion as to make it stable for a fairly long time and interconnected enough to not collapse populations of either humans or native biota. While we obviously can't recreate a Medieval society in the modern era, I would like to try to utilize a system that is more "organic" rather than the modularity we currently use; that is to say, I'd prefer it if we had better planning of human habitations that tried to both utilize nature and coexist with it. I remember Aly's suggestion of using a pair of wetlands with every farm field to capture runoff and use it to produce usable and sustainable fishstocks and wild areas; I would like to see more of that sort of thing, rather than humans trying to infinitely expand everything so everyone can live like upper middle class first worlders.

Sorry if I ranted there, but I just wanted to expand on some things.
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Re: Global Warming Issue: Why no decisive action?

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Simon_Jester wrote:
SpaceMarine93 wrote:
It's extremely, extremely hard to motivate an entire society to make radical changes to how they do things.
I agree with that sentiment. But it is still possible. So long as the hope that it is still possible, regardless of difficulty, we might have a chance in succeeding.We have to try. America, even the world's, future depends on the right people succeeding.

And I did suggest that we could use any mean necessary. ANY MEANS

We could, I don't know, establish a vanguard party like Lenin did, made up of ideologically similar people, intellectuals and organizers with merit, to unite all the divided factions into a strong coherent force that may effectively oppose those motivated by ignorance or greed in power.
Step back. Consider the problems.

1) A vanguard party works when you've got large numbers of people who are suffering enough to trust the vanguard as a way of solving their problems. Here, precisely the difficulty is that most of the society's problems are abstract; the people affected are those who will be alive twenty, fifty, a hundred years from now. You can't motivate a mass popular movement led by a cabal of technocrats that way, because you haven't given people anything to fight for. It's a lot harder to do it that way than to mobilize a revolution among a peasant class whose grandparents remember being actual serfs owned by the nobility and whose rulers regularly machine-gun demonstrators.

2) Setting up a network of propaganda and indoctrination like you describe takes decades- it would not have been possible to form the Tea Party twenty years ago, even if a somewhat larger percentage of the electorate believed the same things, because they weren't as ready to bash someone's head in BY ANY MEANS (echo there is deliberate) to get it.

3) One of the eternal problems with vanguard parties and "we don't have to tell people the truth to get them to follow us!" is... well. The best explanation I've seen Yudkowsky's site Less Wrong, which is very much NOT the be-all and end-all of anything, but is at least fairly well spoken on certain points of philosophy. He calls it dark side epistemology: the tendency to, as a way of protecting one's lies, to encourage people to stop thinking. To take an easy example, it's easier to get a creationist to stay a creationist after you've convinced them the scientific method is heresy and never to be allowed inside their brain where it might do damage. In general, any argument that revolves around "let's lie to people in the name of truth!" winds up with an entangling net of lies that force the liar to suppress the truth entirely; take that as a cautionary tale.

4) Bear in mind that the rich, the powerful, the movers and shakers, are selected by an asymmetric process. They are probably better at social manipulation and the problems of management than you, because that is how they got rich, and stayed rich. Trying to beat wealthy interests at their own game is not necessarily a good strategy, and must be considered closely.
This is an absurd and empty caricature of Lenin's politics and what a "vanguard party" signified up to and past 1917 in Russia, and has no basis in historical fact. What happened didn't have anything to do with "dark side epistemology" or some such conceptual failings. And I say that as someone who does not consider himself a Leninist.

That said, I do think nothing will get seriously done outside of some kind of capitalist self-preservationist authoritarianism (which probably would wait too long and probably shift all the burden onto ze little people), or some transition to world socialism (not in the lame social democratic sense). It should be obvious by now that the world capitalist system has no intention of anything other than self-destructive self-replication without any conscious check or logical end.
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Re: Global Warming Issue: Why no decisive action?

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Illuminatus Primus wrote:It should be obvious by now that the world capitalist system has no intention of anything other than self-destructive self-replication without any conscious check or logical end.
That's because humans are animals that don't have much in the way of long-term planning built into us. If you look at human populations before the green revolution, we were undergoing the same Malthusian curves as lynxes and snowshoe hares. We've only just escaped it and now we're doing what literally any other organism on earth would do: exploit our environment until we hit a brick wall and start a die-off. It's just we're taking everything else down with us.
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Re: Global Warming Issue: Why no decisive action?

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Akhlut wrote:
Illuminatus Primus wrote:It should be obvious by now that the world capitalist system has no intention of anything other than self-destructive self-replication without any conscious check or logical end.
That's because humans are animals that don't have much in the way of long-term planning built into us. If you look at human populations before the green revolution, we were undergoing the same Malthusian curves as lynxes and snowshoe hares. We've only just escaped it and now we're doing what literally any other organism on earth would do: exploit our environment until we hit a brick wall and start a die-off. It's just we're taking everything else down with us.
Yawn, evil humans, despoiled paradise, yadda yadda yadda. I don't know why people in air-conditioned Western homes feel oh-so-profound when they belch this misanthropic noise. Chalking up human history to some abstract and unqualified "human nature" is truly vacuous. There is no capacity for almost all humans to have any active agency in social decision-making due to our form of social organization, so it strikes me as absurd to blame "humans" are a whole.
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Re: Global Warming Issue: Why no decisive action?

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Akhlut wrote:We've only just escaped it and now we're doing what literally any other organism on earth would do: exploit our environment until we hit a brick wall and start a die-off.
Because clearly human intellect is worth nothing, and humans should behave like other organisms without any shred of intellect? Seriously, I can understand IP is radical at times, but that "human nature" excuse is getting a bit lame. I asked this question many times, but I got no clear answer - just how many humans need to "die off" before humans start using the full potential of their intelligence? Is a "die off" necessary? If so, why?
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Re: Global Warming Issue: Why no decisive action?

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Illuminatus Primus wrote:Yawn, evil humans, despoiled paradise, yadda yadda yadda. I don't know why people in air-conditioned Western homes feel oh-so-profound when they belch this misanthropic noise.
My apartment doesn't have air-conditioning.

One-liners aside, it's an explanation of human action. No raindrop is responsible for the flood and all that jive. Humans, taking actions that are rational for individuals and small-groups, lead to large problems because we're unequipped for long-term planning as a whole due to evolutionary pressures that acted very well upon us prior to the 1900s. Now that we (for a given value of "we") have enough power over the environment to ensure constant food-supplies and a whole host of luxury items, we mass produce them because of a few basic features of human psychology rooted in the past. It used to be that humans could move around when a local ecosystem got trashed; well, now there are very few areas to move to that aren't trashed on an ecological level due to massive human numbers and a much easier time of destroying the world around us. Back in the 1200s, it was much more difficult to deforest 100,000 acres; now it can be done in a matter of months. It's done for the same reasons, though, based off of rational decisions for personal enrichment. Is that bad? Not necessarily, if we could and would couple it with long-term planning, but humans have a tough time of that because of inborn psychology that is extraordinarily tough to overcome (and to which I and probably nearly every other human is similarly crippled to some extent).
Chalking up human history to some abstract and unqualified "human nature" is truly vacuous.
Humans aren't blank slates, fit to have anything and everything written upon them to act as they are raised; humans have a large suite of basic features encoded into them because we are animals that used to live in relatively stable environments (stable here meaning that they existed in cycles that, while unpredictable, certainly existed, thus creating years of boon and years of famine that our ancestors had to survive). However, we're throwing the world out of that stability, yet our psychology isn't changing quick enough for us to make such changes to the world easily.
There is no capacity for almost all humans to have any active agency in social decision-making due to our form of social organization, so it strikes me as absurd to blame "humans" are a whole.
Such social organization arises out of human psychology, not out of the aether; social organization binds us due to human psychology, not due to some magical geas that forces us to accept it. Further, while agency in legislative or executive senses might be limited, everyone eats, everyone consumes products, and everyone makes waste of some sort or another and makes decisions on where it goes in some rudimentary fashion. Brazilians have agency to cut down the rainforests near them for cattle grazing or slash-and-burn farming, for instance. Americans have adequate agency to choose what to eat (most Americans, at least) and how to move about, and even the oppressed Syrian has a choice between whether to drink bottled water or tap water. So, while humans don't have total free agency on all decisions, most humans are still making decisions that do have larger repercussions on the biosphere as a whole.

Is it hopeless? No, that's why I'm seeking a master's degree in biology to do conservation work. Is it an uphill battle: yes, and if you don't think that it is, you're blind or stupid.
Stas Bush wrote:Because clearly human intellect is worth nothing, and humans should behave like other organisms without any shred of intellect? Seriously, I can understand IP is radical at times, but that "human nature" excuse is getting a bit lame.
I'm not trying to excuse our species' problems, but explain them.

And, to an extent, our intellect is our problem; we have the intelligence to figure out we can use coal and oil to power our cities, but not the restraint or long-term wisdom to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels for something that isn't as likely to kill us.

Plus, we breed way too much for reasons that are related entirely to our animal nature. Aly has done the studies on this and I can ask him to join our discussion to show the data, but a lot of seemingly complicated human action is brought on by human psychology that mostly occurs unconciously.
I asked this question many times, but I got no clear answer - just how many humans need to "die off" before humans start using the full potential of their intelligence? Is a "die off" necessary? If so, why?
I'd prefer a slow die-off of natural causes such as aging to 1-2 billion people spread across the globe fairly equally among the best farmland and centralized into cities that have plenty of greenspace mixed in. I do not hope nor think that a huge die-off all at once is either necessary or a good thing. I merely think that it shall be a consequence of our collective behavior if we don't figure out some solutions to our problems in the near future with regards to food security, global warming, and general presevation of the environment across the globe.

As for humans engaging in rational, long-term planning for the benefit of all species: I'm not entirely sure how to accomplish that one, comrade. I oscillate between cynical and optimistic all the damn time about what humans are capable of; we can do great things if we try to, but we're also more than capable of being stupid brutes. I sincerely wish there were an obvious solution to the problem but I'm either too dull or looking at too small of an area to come up with a solution for the world's ills.
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Re: Global Warming Issue: Why no decisive action?

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Illuminatus Primus wrote:
Simon_Jester wrote:
SpaceMarine93 wrote:I agree with that sentiment. But it is still possible. So long as the hope that it is still possible, regardless of difficulty, we might have a chance in succeeding.We have to try. America, even the world's, future depends on the right people succeeding.

And I did suggest that we could use any mean necessary. ANY MEANS

We could, I don't know, establish a vanguard party like Lenin did, made up of ideologically similar people, intellectuals and organizers with merit, to unite all the divided factions into a strong coherent force that may effectively oppose those motivated by ignorance or greed in power.
Step back. Consider the problems.

1) A vanguard party works when you've got large numbers of people who are suffering enough to trust the vanguard as a way of solving their problems. Here, precisely the difficulty is that most of the society's problems are abstract; the people affected are those who will be alive twenty, fifty, a hundred years from now. You can't motivate a mass popular movement led by a cabal of technocrats that way, because you haven't given people anything to fight for. It's a lot harder to do it that way than to mobilize a revolution among a peasant class whose grandparents remember being actual serfs owned by the nobility and whose rulers regularly machine-gun demonstrators.

2) Setting up a network of propaganda and indoctrination like you describe takes decades- it would not have been possible to form the Tea Party twenty years ago, even if a somewhat larger percentage of the electorate believed the same things, because they weren't as ready to bash someone's head in BY ANY MEANS (echo there is deliberate) to get it.

3) One of the eternal problems with vanguard parties and "we don't have to tell people the truth to get them to follow us!" is... well. The best explanation I've seen Yudkowsky's site Less Wrong, which is very much NOT the be-all and end-all of anything, but is at least fairly well spoken on certain points of philosophy. He calls it dark side epistemology: the tendency to, as a way of protecting one's lies, to encourage people to stop thinking. To take an easy example, it's easier to get a creationist to stay a creationist after you've convinced them the scientific method is heresy and never to be allowed inside their brain where it might do damage. In general, any argument that revolves around "let's lie to people in the name of truth!" winds up with an entangling net of lies that force the liar to suppress the truth entirely; take that as a cautionary tale.

4) Bear in mind that the rich, the powerful, the movers and shakers, are selected by an asymmetric process. They are probably better at social manipulation and the problems of management than you, because that is how they got rich, and stayed rich. Trying to beat wealthy interests at their own game is not necessarily a good strategy, and must be considered closely.
This is an absurd and empty caricature of Lenin's politics and what a "vanguard party" signified up to and past 1917 in Russia, and has no basis in historical fact. What happened didn't have anything to do with "dark side epistemology" or some such conceptual failings. And I say that as someone who does not consider himself a Leninist.
IP, I'm trying to educate a silly child in basic moral philosophy as applied to politics. I am not trying to provide a detailed analysis of communism in Russia, except perhaps as a useful illustration of what some of the child's ideas might look like if put into practice by adults.

Now, the child started this with: "We could, I don't know, establish a vanguard party like Lenin did, made up of ideologically similar people, intellectuals and organizers with merit, to unite all the divided factions into a strong coherent force that may effectively oppose those motivated by ignorance or greed in power."

There's that phrase: "vanguard party." Now, to me, a good working definition of a "vanguard party" would read something like this:

'A group of people (who consider themselves to be) more enlightened than the average member of their culture, and who therefore take it upon themselves to lead revolutionary changes in that culture, while keeping control over the party's "platform" of objectives and tactics within the party. The party may recruit from outside, and must in order to survive, but it keeps its own council on matters of doctrine. It does not ask the masses what kind of government they'd like; it decides for itself based on ideology what the government should look like, then sets out to create such a government by whatever means are available and necessary. It does this on behalf of the people, but the people are not consulted in the matter, because they lack the revolutionary consciousness (or equivalent in non-Marxist terminology) to know what's good for them.'

That strikes me as a reasonably faithful representation of what I know of Lenin's original thoughts on the definition of 'vanguard party.' Any problems with this definition so far?

But (and this is important) such a definition of "vanguard party" can be generalized. Because "vanguard party" in a generalized political sense does not necessarily mean the vanguard party of Lenin's Bolsheviks. You can have, for instance, a radical Islamic "vanguard party" which adopts some of the same attitudes about revolutions as Lenin's Bolsheviks. Substitute the tenets of Wahhabism for Marxism, and "piety" for "revolutionary consciousness," and while the substance of the ideology is changed the organization stays much the same.

This despite the fact that any decent Bolshevik (hell, any decent socialist in general) would be utterly hostile to Islamic fundamentalism and vice versa. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, over and over, we've seen that the tactics of radical revolutionaries can closely resemble other even when the revolutionary ideologies are as different as night and day. Tactics are not the same thing as policy.

So let us ask, in the general case, what issues come to mind as potential problems with the scheme "let's make a vanguard party to promote our ideology!"


As I mentioned in (1), one thing you need is for the masses to be desperate and unhappy enough to follow a revolutionary party's lead. In times of relative peace and prosperity for themselves, people will not be much interested in revolution. For Russian workers and peasants, this condition was met- was met very well by the time World War One had dragged on a few years. The people were desperate, and the times were ripe for revolutionary change.

In the developed world, particularly the US, the time is not ripe for revolution. Too many people are too content to risk dying in a revolution. People still have a lot to lose, and would like to think they will soon have more to lose. The fact that there are long-term structural problems with the society, and that these problems may be impossible to resolve without revolution, is not enough to make revolution possible.


And as I mentioned in (2), creating vanguard parties and propaganda machines takes a long time. It took fifteen years from the writing of What Is To Be Done to the Bolshevik Revolution, and that was under very favorable conditions. Czarist Russia was arguably a place where only vanguard political parties which organized in relative secrecy and kept their own council could thrive, because overt mass-action parties devoted to peaceful, non-revolutionary change were banned or neutralized by the monarchy. Much as mushrooms will grow in darkness, where grass will not, revolutionary vanguard parties can grow where the typical political parties of a democracy cannot.

And while we're on the subject of favorable conditions, World War One probably accelerated the revolution by years, by bringing the Czarist system to a state of utter collapse that made a mockery of attempts to fix it by peaceful political processes during the tenure of the provisional government. Even so, we have that period of fifteen years or more between the formation of a vanguard party and the circumstances that permitted it to succeed. Similar lengths of time apply in most other states that experienced a communist revolution, or other ideological revolutions.

Now, I doubt the silly child who started this discussion has the attention span to participate in such a process. He strikes me as the sort of person who will get impatient when the world isn't fixed in a span of two months and rage-quit. There are people on this thread who I do respect enough to think they could participate in such a project- but the person I was writing to isn't one of them, which colored my original response. I wouldn't have made such a point of (2) if I were talking to, say, Stas Bush, because he's got a damn brain.


And then there's what I mentioned in (3), which you dismiss as inapplicable to what happened to the USSR. And I must apologize for that, because I should have done a better job explaining what I was talking about in the first place. I allowed myself too much indiscipline on account of the low intellectual and political caliber of my audience.

To make my point more clear: there is a fundamental problem with the concept of a vanguard party. It may not be unresolvable, but it's still a problem, and it plagued communism throughout the 20th century in all its forms that I am familiar with.

Vanguard parties are great for leading a radicalized populace against an authoritarian government that oppresses their ideas, and staging a revolution which throws out the remnants of the ancien régime. That's what Lenin designed his vanguard party to do- to cultivate revolutionary attitudes, to imbue a cadre of leaders with the idea that revolution was necessary and that mere trade-unionism and a fondness for regular elections wasn't enough to fix what was wrong with the country. Which worked: they got their revolution. The Party has triumphed.

[The Party may be communist, or may be something else entirely, as long as it is revolutionary, remember that]

At which point, Lenin's original question, "what is to be done?" is answered- you've taken "what is to be done" and done it. The next question, phrased much the same, is "what do we do now?" Now that the revolution has driven out competing social control mechanisms, and the vanguard party is firmly in power, what does it do?

Which is where the problem sets in. A vanguard party, by nature, will come to regard itself as the guardian of correct political thought, because that's the entire point of its existence in the first place.

So what happens when the guardians of correct political thought run into five million peasants who are all complaining that they don't like some of the Party's new laws? Are they going to stop and listen to these people, these unenlightened masses who have not been awakened by the flame of revolution, who do not and cannot understand the profound necessities which any Party man worth his membership card would perceive?

Remember that these are the very same peasants in whose name the Party fought and won the revolution. And that the Party was founded and organized as a vanguard specifically because the peasants lacked awareness of the need for revolution. The Party's job was to educate those peasants and form them into a revolutionary army, not to stop and listen to them. Naturally, of course, the Party recruits promising members from the peasants, they aren't a hereditary aristocracy or anything, but non-Party members who basically just sat on their asses while the Party did the hard work? Why care what they think about such matters? Push them aside, and on to business!

This kind of thinking is very common- as I said, it has been a terrible plague on 20th century communism. It also afflicts other revolutionary movements, like Islamic fundamentalism- the Iranian fundamentalist government has done many things that made a lot of Iranian citizens unhappy, because it (being run by theocrats) perceives necessity where ordinary people perceive a senseless waste of time. In a somewhat different form, it even afflicted the earlier French Revolution- which was not led by a vanguard party but managed to fall prey to some of the same problems, as the champions of revolutionary virtue who saw the necessity of mass guillotinings and the massacre of resistance in the Vendée. Letting them secede from the revolution was not an option, for instance- one cannot allow the forces of reaction a foothold!

And who knows? Maybe this is really necessary, maybe you do have to break a million screaming eggs to make that omelette. But what I know is that among revolutionaries, the perception of necessity often outruns the reality. The psychological pressures within a revolutionary vanguard are strongly in favor of going too far, and rarely in favor of going not far enough.

So talking about the way that revolutionary vanguards, once in power, tend to assume absolute power and become corrupted accordingly, is vital. It should not be overlooked by anyone talking about revolution and vanguard parties, especially someone whose political thought process is as simplistic as "this is bad, we must stop it by ANY MEANS," with capitalization included. Someone who has no clear visualization of what "ANY MEANS" looks like, or of the ways it can backfire.

Maybe you do not need this bit of education. I think the child I was talking to did.


And then there was my final point, (4), again aimed at SM93. That point raises a problem for anyone who thinks that you can copy the means of bad men to defeat them- all to often, they got where they are by being better at their methods than you are. If you're so good at manipulating public opinion, good enough to overpower them by using the same basic methods, why haven't you already done it?

Getting into a head-on confrontation with a ruling class in the areas the ruling class has to be good at in order to rule at all is a losing game. Any wise reformer will be looking to create asymmetry in their favor, not symmetry.

Which is not to say that someone with real political sophistication wouldn't already know this- I only brought it up because such sophistican was lacking in the original poster's arguments.
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Re: Global Warming Issue: Why no decisive action?

Post by Straha »

Akhlut wrote: While I think it is helpful, I do not think vegetarian eating is the holy grail of environmentalism; I'm trying to do my part on human population decline (my wife and I are probably going to max out at 2 kids, which will still put humanity on the decline, as my siblings are all childless and will almost undoubtedly remain so) and reducing energy consumption (more walking, more 3 R's, etc.) and so on.

The main problem,though, isn't so much entirely how we do things, but the scale at which we do them. Eating pork or beef in and of itself isn't terrible, but everyone wanting large amounts of animal meat at every meal causes a domino effect of problems. Driving a car isn't bad, but everyone wanting to drive enormous SUVs just to go down the block is problematic.
It might not be the holy grail, but it's damn near close to it. Going vegetarian immensely cuts down on land use, water use, fertilizer, oil used in transportation, C02 Emission, and greenhouse gas emission. It is also cheap, very healthy, and (get this) easy to do and practically a universal option in the first world. In other words, if someone wants to become an active environmentalist it's not only an easy first step, it's an easy first step with a multitude of benefits.

Moreover, the consumption of meat is the problem of scale you talk about. Most plant agriculture in the first world is done to support the meat industry. The raising of plant matter for human consumption makes up only twenty to thirty percent of agriculture done in the first world. If we were to cut out meat from our diets and replace it with an equal (or, even, greater) amount of plant matter we would consume, at most, half of the resources we use today. Probably a lot less if we engaged in even a minor shift towards hydroponic gardening. Which is to say nothing of how much we would cut down transportation costs across the board. Leaving meat on the table, even if we cut down to half or a quarter of the meat we previously ate, still leaves us consuming far more than we need

In short, to be a committed environmentalist without being a committed vegetarian/vegan is absurd, and counter-productive.

P.S. IP, have you read Empire yet?
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Re: Global Warming Issue: Why no decisive action?

Post by [R_H] »

Straha wrote:
Moreover, the consumption of meat is the problem of scale you talk about. Most plant agriculture in the first world is done to support the meat industry. The raising of plant matter for human consumption makes up only twenty to thirty percent of agriculture done in the first world. If we were to cut out meat from our diets and replace it with an equal (or, even, greater) amount of plant matter we would consume, at most, half of the resources we use today. Probably a lot less if we engaged in even a minor shift towards hydroponic gardening. Which is to say nothing of how much we would cut down transportation costs across the board. Leaving meat on the table, even if we cut down to half or a quarter of the meat we previously ate, still leaves us consuming far more than we need

In short, to be a committed environmentalist without being a committed vegetarian/vegan is absurd, and counter-productive.
You and I know that the majority of people aren't going to go from meat eating to vegetarian for environmental reasons. However, the authors of a University of Chicago study found that a typical American eating 20% less meat would prevent about 1500kg of CO2 from being emitted. Link

Researchers from Cornell came to the conclusion that:
Both the meat-based average American diet and the lactoovovegetarian diet require significant quantities of nonrenewable fossil energy to produce. Thus, both food systems are not sustainable in the long term based on heavy fossil energy requirements. However, the meat-based diet requires more energy, land, and water resources than the lactoovovegetarian diet. In this limited sense, the lactoovovegetarian diet is more sustainable than the average American meat-based diet.

The major threat to future survival and to US natural resources is rapid population growth. The US population of 285 million is projected to double to 570 million in the next 70 y, which will place greater stress on the already-limited supply of energy, land, and water resources. These vital resources will have to be divided among ever greater numbers of people.


Link

Keep in mind also that the UN's "Livestock's Long Shadow" report (which claimed that milk and meat production was responsible for more emissions than transportation) calculated the milk and meat production emissions differently than transportation emissions.
The meat figure had been reached by adding all greenhouse-gas emissions associated with meat production, including fertiliser production, land clearance, methane emissions and vehicle use on farms, whereas the transport figure had only included the burning of fossil fuels.
Link

In my opinion, encouraging people to eat less in general (and less meat), while reducing the fossil fuel dependency in agriculture would be an excellent start at reducing emissions.
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Straha
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Re: Global Warming Issue: Why no decisive action?

Post by Straha »

[R_H] wrote:
You and I know that the majority of people aren't going to go from meat eating to vegetarian for environmental reasons.
I know, and it's certainly not why I went Vegan. However, the point I was making was a rather simple one regarding people agitating for change whilst not living their 'principles' in their personal lives, in a way that is simple, easy, and effective. Also, I agree, in large part, with Gary Francione in that we shouldn't advocate half-measures and should, instead, advocate ethical veganism (when the issue comes up) because advocating anything else is unethical and counter-productive in the short and long term.
Researchers from Cornell came to the conclusion that:
>SNIP<

Keep in mind also that the UN's "Livestock's Long Shadow" report (which claimed that milk and meat production was responsible for more emissions than transportation) calculated the milk and meat production emissions differently than transportation emissions.
In other words, not only is it impossible for us to engage in a sustainable nonvegan diet but the amount of emissions saved by such actions are underestimates. Woo. :-P

So, if you give a crap about the environment there you have it: give up meat.
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Re: Global Warming Issue: Why no decisive action?

Post by Simon_Jester »

Straha, I must have missed the point where you addressed Akhlut's issue about cost per calorie. Would you mind repeating that for me?
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Re: Global Warming Issue: Why no decisive action?

Post by Straha »

That it's largely a myth. If you plan ahead, do a little research, and diversify your food input you can get a lot more calories from plant sources for less cost.
'After 9/11, it was "You're with us or your with the terrorists." Now its "You're with Straha or you support racism."' ' - The Romulan Republic

'You're a bully putting on an air of civility while saying that everything western and/or capitalistic must be bad, and a lot of other posters (loomer, Stas Bush, Gandalf) are also going along with it for their own personal reasons (Stas in particular is looking through rose colored glasses)' - Darth Yan
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Re: Global Warming Issue: Why no decisive action?

Post by SpaceMarine93 »

Now, I doubt the silly child who started this discussion has the attention span to participate in such a process. He strikes me as the sort of person who will get impatient when the world isn't fixed in a span of two months and rage-quit. There are people on this thread who I do respect enough to think they could participate in such a project- but the person I was writing to isn't one of them, which colored my original response. I wouldn't have made such a point of (2) if I were talking to, say, Stas Bush, because he's got a damn brain.
Which is not to say that someone with real political sophistication wouldn't already know this- I only brought it up because such sophistican was lacking in the original poster's arguments.
Well excuse me for opening my big dumb mouth. I do admit I don't think I have sufficient knowledge on these problems. So I guess you are right. I will read up some more first before proposing anything from now on
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Re: Global Warming Issue: Why no decisive action?

Post by Straha »

So, my burning question, do you eat the flesh of animals?
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Re: Global Warming Issue: Why no decisive action?

Post by Simon_Jester »

SpaceMarine93 wrote:Well excuse me for opening my big dumb mouth. I do admit I don't think I have sufficient knowledge on these problems. So I guess you are right. I will read up some more first before proposing anything from now on
That you perceive problems clearly is a good sign. But it doesn't do a lot of good without the grounding to understand what a viable solution to a problem looks like- instead, it just becomes a launch pad for one overreaction after another.
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