Sadly, this being Hacker News, it won't catch much attention and will be quickly flagged by people who have too much karma.
But I think we are making progress, slowly, sadly too slowly, with the current summer we are having in Europe, of the impact of our past actions in the weather. And make no mistake, eating so much meat and drinking so much milk, is a huge impact we are inflicting on our planet.
Please do not comment with "I do X" or "In our house, we avoid doing Y" - it is not about you and me, it is about society. I am convinced, you are convinced, we need everyone to be convinced.
Everyone apart from a few stragglers agree the climate is changing. Most people agree the world won’t change its behaviour on its own to stop that.
So we can thus incentivise change (things like renewables being far cheaper than fossil fuel) globally, and adapt to reality.
There are a vocal minority whining about how we need to stop eating beef or milk annd stop using energy and there are those who make beef and milk more sustainable and make generating energy sustainable. I have time for the latter. The former can go hand out with the coal rollers.
How do you make beef and milk more sustainable? I'm honestly wondering. To me it seems similar to saying: we can make coal power plants more efficient. Equivalent to more "efficient" (however you want to define that) forms of animal husbandry.
It doesn't change the fact that you're still burning coal, while you could be putting up solar.
Far too many so-called environmentalists are far more concerned with stopping life rather than practical methods to reduce and eliminate harm, and they get ignored - and worse fought back against.
“If you build a solar farm generating 100MWh rather than an ethanol farm generating 50MWh that’s bad because the it’s a supper slope to banning beefburgers”
You are not stopping people from taking in calories.
In your analogy it would be the same as saying: you are not allowed to heat your home with a coal burner. Same as saying you are not allowed to eat beef. You can still eat lots of other stuff, just not beef.
The goal isn’t to eat beef, it’s calorie intake.
Now I am not saying that we should ban cattle farming or beef and dairy consumption. In the end I see this as a problem of our current system not being able to effectively reflect environmental impact in price.
Cattle farming has an environmental cost which is higher than other alternatives (chicken, soy etc.). This environmental cost is not directly passed on to the consumer.
All of the alternatives you listed will not succeed in our current system because the environmental savings they might have can not be passed on to the customer. On the contrary: usually lower environmental impact has a monetary cost associated, making prices higher for products from these initiatives.
It is not just a few stragglers, 30% of americans believe climate change isnt real, the us president is one of them.
Fighting climate change is not going to be successful without sacrifice, we tried that for the last decades and fossil fuel consumption has only risen.
Of course people dont want to do that and so instead deny it happening or that it will be magically fixed in the future.
Okay lets get this straight, animals do not contribute to global warming. The co2 they emit has been taken from the atmosphere from plants.
Methane breaks down to Co2 in the atmosphere on average in 9.6 years.
Animal rearing does not permanently affect the climate.
Increasing stock sizes does increase the methane level equilibrium but there are mitigations to this, there are additives to feed that can reduce methane emissions to 1%. Last I checked a few years ago, there were pilot programs to determine effects on animal welfare and product quality.
The problem we should be focusing on is fossil fuels.
> Methane breaks down to Co2 in the atmosphere on average in 9.6 years.
Despite which, over a 100 year period it has 25 times the warming impact as the CO2 it turns into.
> The problem we should be focusing on is fossil fuels.
Everyone should focus on whatever they know how to make a dent with, the "sustainable" emissions rate is 0.1% of the current rate which is essentially "we need to fix everything everywhere except for pick one of grassland or North Korea".
Animal-emitted CO2 isn't the problem, but methane.
The CO2 captured by plants and eaten by livestock gets converted in part to methane, a more more potent greenhouse gas. This does eventually degrade back to the original CO2, but on a scale of decades, it's currently too slow to prevent accumulation of methane.
It's probably not the tone. You only choose to hear that tone and close up. (From my experience)
I hold some fringe ideas, e.g. helmets are bad. So I have lots of experience with handling discussion where people close up for any rational argument. Because I am just wrong by definition. That really lets you explore how people react to ideas they do not support.
My point is that some issues, especially meat, makes people blame tone really fast. This is my view after experimenting with it for many years. I obviously care about your view otherwise I would not have commented, you see an attack/denial where there is not ment to be one.
I would much rather have Europe install ACs instead. Stopping meat, not installing ACs, degrowth all look like masochistic ways to show that we are repenting.
ACs are not going to stop storms, floods, droughts and the rising sea level. Fighting climate change requires sacrifice of current comforts for an easier life of future generations.
So of course we are not going to do anything about it, when it is much easier to deny it exists or pretend that it is going to magically fix itself in the future.
I’m reminds of that tweet about how America will bomb a country and then go back in 20 years and make a movie about how sad doing it made the soldiers.
In October the finance ministry, in its annual report on the issue, estimated that in 2018 immigrants from non-Western countries and their descendants drained from public finances a net 31bn kroner ($4.9bn), some 1.4% of GDP. Immigrants from Western countries, by contrast, contributed a net 7bn kroner (see chart). Data on immigration’s fiscal effects were what “changed the Social Democrats’ point of view”, says Torben Tranaes of the Danish Centre for Social Science Research.
Muslims are at the core of the issue. This year was the first time the ministry reported separately on the contributions by people from 24 Muslim countries. They account for 50% of the non-Westerners, but 77% of the drain. Alongside that worry are fears that Muslims bring notions about democracy and the role of women that Danes find threatening. Muslims are welcome, says Mr Tesfaye, but, “We can’t meet in the middle. It’s not half sharia and half the Danish constitution.”
The ever-advancing big tech dystopia where individuals are pervasively tracked, quantified, and siloed. A destroyed economy squashing mobility, making the basic necessities uncertain, and future wealth questionable. Terrorist gangs abducting people in their homes based on what AI says, and executing people in the streets for protesting about it. All things that make for warm fuzzy feelings about bringing children into this world!
As a parent, I will say that the reelection of destructionists has basically guaranteed that my son's life will be markedly worse than my own. This was our chance to pull up out of the death spiral, but instead we chose full speed ahead, downward. The only sane way to analyze the fascist movement is as the death throes of our society, rather than latching on to any of their conflicting purportedly-constructive plans they chum out to fool the gullible.
The interesting thing is this is Spain's second wave of doing this, and the economic studies on the first wave of it showed visibly positive results. Spain's economy moved in growth, and with a size larger than many other European nations in similar background conditions of flat to negative population growth, but tighter immigration allowances.
Horrible fiscal ticking time bomb that ignores the fact that regularization means naturalization over the next 10-15 years and so access to EU healthcare system.
The biggest drag on government budgets in EU are socialized healthcare and retirement costs. At this point we know healthcare costs are severely backloaded, with most spending coming out of the last 10 years of someone's life. Regularizing now allows them to show a fiscal boost now and for next 4-5 years(edit: maybe even like 10-15 years) and accumulate a massive liability as they age.
Think about it this way: If you regularize a 30 year old illegal migrant right now with a path to citizenship over next 10-15 years, the government NPV is positive over a 15 year horizon(whilst he works) and then will go flat to negative as he starts using the healthcare system whilst retired.
They contribute to GDP spend, but from the fiscal point of view they are a drag. As for actual percentages per country, I think it heavily varies. In EU i think family spending is like 3% of GDP.
The hope is that this drag will either generate higher cash flows later (i.e money spent on education now will allow them to create value for economy later) or reduce outflows later (i.e a child that gets braces and dental health care now won't spend their whole adult life dealing with teeth issues on taxpayer's dime).
The latter half of careers, and certainly 30-55 is generally the period of highest productivity of working careers. Its even higher value for the economy when wages do a catch up slowly over their time. I think it is politiczed fear mongering to suggest that the economic balance is negative in that kind of exchange.
Legal immigrants if this change goes through - and if the minimum wage of these nations doesn't support any citizen living through their life perhaps the minimum wage should be increased and non performant businesses that can't support it will be shed
You're mentally stuck in 2009-2015. The world has moved on and Spain is now significantly outperforming Germany in growth (obviously not yet in wealth, which is the integral of growth over much longer time periods). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-YZeqk8NCQ&t=456s
I have no doubt that this has positive effects on the national economy as a whole (you get workers, on demand, without really paying for raising, educating, training them), but it is not really sustainable because population growth is low/negative pretty much everywhere, and it also leads to significant pushback from cultural friction and local workers (that dislike competition).
You could argue that the whole rise of somwhat radical rightwing parties all over Europe is mainly the result of policies like this during the last half century...
As I see it, the root of unhappiness in voters is nonperformant housing markets and unaddressed growth of inequality where wages are not sharing in growth of profits. This creates a raft of difficult issues. And the rightwing indeed has an effective playbook to exploit these unaddressed shortfalls while blaming immigration. And the center left parties seem unwilling or unable to address the root problems.
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