COP26 / Climate Action

[waters44]

Yep I understand all that which is why I added the caveat straight away. It was just really to put into perspective how bad for the environment flights are as I never really appreciated that before.
 

@johnnyboy Smol! That’s it yep. 

[Tommy!]

I do some good things apparently, I have to go on what I'm told and people are notoriously full of shite, but not for any great altruistic motive. I generally try and walk or cycle, or public transport if I can't, everywhere I go but it's just so I can have a drink. 

I live as sustainably as possible and grow as much of my own fruit and veg as I can, but that's just because I enjoy it. I store and reuse rain water for it all, but it's because it's better for the plants than tap. 

As a result I eat less meat, and when I do I tend to go on my bike to the local butchers who sources from the local area, but it's mainly because the quality is great and I can get the nice stuff like liver and rabbit and it's next to a pub I can have a few pint in.

I'll try and use a log fire in evenings in winter as I only really need to heat one room, and generally source the wood from the local area that's being coppiced for a reason or cut down from someone's garden and for landfill, but it's cheaper and nicer to look at while I'm having a drink. 

I'll recycle as much as possible, but that's more because I understand it to me more efficient than to make a active effort to save the planet. 

I think the only thing I do that is actively environmental in motive is getting peat free compost if I don't have enough of my own, but I generally avoid compost and use a rotted manure as a soil conditioner because it's better anyway. 

Edited November 10, 2021 by Tommy!

[Keith Houchen]

5 minutes ago, waters44 said:

Yep I understand all that which is why I added the caveat straight away. It was just really to put into perspective how bad for the environment flights are as I never really appreciated that before.
 

@johnnyboy Smol! That’s it yep. 

Yeah I get that. My issue isn’t so much with flights, but with private jets. I haven’t flown in years but every flight I’ve been on would have flown whether I’d booked a seat or not. I know that sounds dismissive and I accept that. I’m all for a levy on frequent flyers and a ban on private jets. 
 

And again, without meaning to sound flippant, the thing I’m doing that impacts the planet the most is to not have children. 

[Briefcase]

1 hour ago, Keith Houchen said:

That’s only a fact if you cherry pick which bits you want. The US Grand Prix involved a hell of a lot of transatlantic flights. Even if every race was held at the same track, you have to factor in how those in attendance got there etc. 

Hopefully international breaks for football are scrapped to help save the planet, pointless flying all the way across the world for a friendly. 

Any excuse really to get rid of them is good for me. 

[Your Fight Site]

I think I’m with a lot of people here where I just feel utterly useless in the grand scheme of things.

I remember reading a textbook in a science class at school. Can’t remember what year, would have been the late ‘90s/early ‘00s though, and it mentioned in that about fossil fuels like oil being finite and will be exhausted in around 50 years at their current rate of consumption. It sounds selfish, but I remember 10 year old-or-so me thinking, “That’s going to be in my lifetime. The world is going to be in turmoil in my lifetime. Why is this not a big deal?”

And I think that’s the problem. The people who are contributing to this 80 mile an hour drive towards irreversible climate change are the ones who aren’t going to live to see it. The geriatric world leaders and companies CEOs, they don‘t care about the legacy they leave, so long as they amass as much wealth as possible in their lifetime before checking out, and making empty promises in the meantime. No one gives a shit about the generation that will be around to see the damage and fallout. You get these world leaders gathering, and CEOs saying they’ll pledge a portion of their revenue, but no tangible action comes from it. Goals are set and then world leaders gather to review it and go, “Oops, we missed it” and then just carry on instead of going, “Shit. We missed this first goal. We’re in a bad shape and more action needs doing to get back on track!” There doesn’t seem to be any kind of wake up moment where some actual action happens because the right people realise, shit, if we mess up the planet we literally live on and off of, then there’s not exactly anything else we can do.

It absolutely boils my piss that people will happily watch the world burn because there’s no financial incentive for them to not do so. All the while we’re told to eat less meat, shower less, or whatever whilst all our rubbish is chucking into bins and then thrown into landfills and fossil fuel companies continue to go about their business and pay off delegations or museums to green-wash their image instead of using that money to do some actual good.

Edited November 10, 2021 by Your Fight Site

[Hannibal Scorch]

20 minutes ago, Your Fight Site said:

And I think that’s the problem. The people who are contributing to this 80 mile an hour drive towards irreversible climate change are the ones who aren’t going to live to see it. 

Brexit in a nutshell. And, to a lesser extent Furlough and all the wasted money during Covid.

[air_raid]

4 hours ago, Hannibal Scorch said:

If you don’t understand climate change

Big leap.

[ReturnOfTheMack]

2 hours ago, Keith Houchen said:

 

And again, without meaning to sound flippant, the thing I’m doing that impacts the planet the most is to not have children. 

Myself and Mrs Mack decided not to have kids, and this is one of the main reasons. 

[Keith Houchen]

1 minute ago, ReturnOfTheMack said:

Myself and Mrs Mack decided not to have kids, and this is one of the main reasons. 

I should clarify, I do believe that there is enough resources for everyone on earth currently, but capitalism denies them those resources. And when people talk about population controls, they invariably mean brown people and/or poor people. 

[ReturnOfTheMack]

1 hour ago, Keith Houchen said:

I should clarify, I do believe that there is enough resources for everyone on earth currently, but capitalism denies them those resources. And when people talk about population controls, they invariably mean brown people and/or poor people. 

Oh I agree fully. But our worry is that the environmental crisis won't be improved due to the amount of dickheads in positions of influence and power who just think it doesn't matter/won't effect them. So we decided that it wouldn't be fair to bring more people into the world, especially as we have enough nibblings to balance it out for us in terms of happy grandparents...

 

Plus, at heart, we are both too fond of flying to Greece every year to give that up instead. 

Edited November 10, 2021 by ReturnOfTheMack

[BomberPat]

36 minutes ago, Keith Houchen said:

I should clarify, I do believe that there is enough resources for everyone on earth currently, but capitalism denies them those resources. And when people talk about population controls, they invariably mean brown people and/or poor people. 

100%, this is a pet issue of mine.

"Overpopulation" is a myth. Someone once compared it to the crowded slums of Victorian London - contemporary critics said that they were in such a poor state because they were full of poor and homeless people, that they were breeding like rabbits, and effectively painting the whole thing as a moral issue, that the poor were to blame for their poverty and that this infected their environment. There were fewer people in Britain then than now, but poverty and homelessness was still blamed on overcrowding and there just being too many people altogether. Later social reformers realised that the issue was a lack of resources - social housing did away with the vast urban homelessness and the doss houses.

The issue is that too few people own too many resources and too much land, and too many people own too little. An equitable society would do away with the worst outcomes of "overpopulation" - poverty, starvation, unnecessary disease. There's always a sinister hint of eugenics to anyone who seems to think that reducing the number of humans (without ever really going into detail as to how they'd approach such a thing) would be preferable to reducing the level of inequality between groups of those humans. There's also a lot of fairly pointless false equivalencies - if you look at CO2 emission per Capita (CO2 Emissions per Capita - Worldometer (worldometers.info)), Qatar is at 37.29 and the DR Congo at 0.08 despite the latter having a population almost thirty times larger. How many Congolese kids do you have to do away with to offset the emissions of one Qatari? Is that the kind of sum you want people contemplating when it comes to "overpopulation"?

And above all else, "overpopulation" tends to conjure images of just having too many kids. And that, in turn, tends to conjure up images of foreigners and minorities doing that, because people are pricks, and don't tend to turn that criticism on themselves. You hear racists bang on about immigrants having too many children, but not about Jacob Rees Mogg's six kids. Because as Keith said, we mean brown people and poor people when we talk about overpopulation, not the wealthy and privileged. 

But all of that's bollocks anyway. The global birth rate is less than half what it was in the 1950s, and falling. And that's not because there was a "baby boom" in the 1950s, because outside of white people in Europe and the Anglosphere, there wasn't a "baby boom". The birth rate has been consistently declining, and shows no sign of stopping - drastically declining in the developed world, but still declining at a steady pace everywhere. Half of the world are at below replacement fertility rates (i.e., enough to maintain a steady population without inward migration), and drastically lower in some (like Japan, who are struggling with the impact of an aging population with limited replacement), and projected to drop further. UN projections suggest that by 2050 the global fertility rate will be below replacement levels. It would take a while after that for population levels to actually start to noticeably decline, because the reason the global population is increasing year on year is because people live longer, not because more of them are being born - and that introduces a new set of problems in dealing with an aging population.

And not to muddle up my political causes too much, but it's insanity to see so much of the world attempting to retreat into isolationism and petty nationalism while dealing with population decline and an aging population that can only be reasonably assuaged by inward migration. But then, there'll be plenty of that when we're overwhelmed with climate refugees anyway.

[Mr_Danger]

7 hours ago, Hannibal Scorch said:

Morning Piers. I mean… not even sure where you start with a post like that.

Probably by not comparing him to Piers Morgan. If you did that to me I’d kill and cook the first cat I could find just out of spite.

[Hannibal Scorch]

18 minutes ago, Mr_Danger said:

Probably by not comparing him to Piers Morgan. If you did that to me I’d kill and cook the first cat I could find just out of spite.

All cats are cunts

[quote the raven]

Can we invent our way out of this? with massive carbon capture or another method? 

 

Edited November 10, 2021 by quote the raven

[Keith Houchen]

Excellent post, @BomberPat