Didn't said that we can substitute industrial ammonia but it could definitely reduce it's use. Changing the way we eat it's definitely an opportunity to reduce major sources of c02 emissions.
There are ethical ways to implement it for instance give more education to women [1].
Consuming less meat should be a priority for us wealthy countries.
Overpopulation is a problem but carbon inequality is much worse [2]:
"
. The richest 10% of the world’s population (c.630 million people)
were responsible for 52% of the cumulative carbon emissions –
depleting the global carbon budget by nearly a third (31%) in
those 25 years alone (see Figure 1);
• The poorest 50% (c.3.1 billion people) were responsible for just
7% of cumulative emissions, and used just 4% of the available
carbon budget (see Figure 1);
• The richest 1% (c.63 million people) alone were responsible for
15% of cumulative emissions, and 9% of the carbon budget –
twice as much as the poorest half of the world’s population (see
Figure 1);
• The richest 5% (c.315 million people) were responsible for over a
third (37%) of the total growth in emissions (see Figure 2), while
the total growth in emissions of the richest 1% was three times that
of the poorest 50%
"
>It’s a common fallacy of tech people to think that all problems are of a technical nature, and that if we could just have the right technology they would go away and we would be living in a utopia. The fact is, the problems are with human behavior and any technology created will serve to further that behavior.
I agree with you. This can be applied to the solutions we are looking to solve climate change.
I agree although I would add that many of the creative jobs although technically challenging have useless or even destructive goals. Just look at the attention economy and the surveillance industry.
We try not to contemplate this fact by occupying our lives to the limit and by focusing on the "how" instead of the "why". We engineers are probably the ones who do this the most.
Funny by coincidence I bought this book just a few hours ago :)
Also we could redistribute the tax as a sort of UBI. This way not only product that pollute would be more expensive, people would have the ability to say no to crappy jobs.
Yes, the author focuses on a possible shortage of resources as the cause of the problem, but the Forester effect certainly played a decisive role in the case of the chip shortage.
Anyway, we live in a very fragile civilization, and we have to shorten the supply chains or we will have big problems in the future.
Is on this kind of measures where jevons paradox or the rebound effect kicks in. We will inclined to eat more meat because is more sustainable, and with that we neutralize the gains.
Also meat from Brazil is many times dependent on Amazon deforestation, so although I love picanha, I will not eat it anymore.
For those in Europe please press your government not to ratify the EU-Mercosul agreement that will increase the trade of soy meat and ethanol in exchange for Europe export more cars to America Latina. We should avoid meat and individual transports and try to invest in the local economy so this agreement doesn't make any sense
I loved the "good parts” of JS back in 2010. I think I don't need most of this new syntax and yet sometimes have the feeling I'm losing the train when I see this “C#” code base. Curiously, that was the technology I used to work before.
As Ursula Le Guin, I'm not an economist, but I live in one.
Didn't mean to be literal, but I find ironic the use of the term, because it reminds me of rough which in portuguese, my native language is "Grosseiro"
I don't think everyone agrees that growth is a problem. Is the way our societies are organized and it is very difficult to reason against it.
Another aspect that western societies have difficulty to reason about is to think in negative terms. Nassim Taleb calls this “Via Negativa”. We normally think about solving problems by doing things (adding), but we can also solve the same problems by avoiding doing harm (subtracting). But avoiding doing harm normally doesn't make a profit, it doesn't contribute to growth.
Health is a perfect example of this, most of the modern diseases could be preventable by eating less, sleeping more, and having a less stressful life.
Gross Domestic Product, is a very gross way to measure progress as the name implies.
Robert Kennedy said in respect of GDP “It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life really worth living.” [1]
You have alternatives like the genuine progress indicator (GPI) that includes aspects such as pollution, criminality and health to the GDP. Most of all we can have many measures, we should not reduce progress to only a number.
Environmental decoupling is the notion that we can have growth and preserve nature. For now is just a myth
edit:typos