> Much like paper straws or canvas totes, though, well-meaning small changes miss the forest of structural change for the trees of lifestyle tweaking
This is my big takeaway from this article.
It is crazy how much well intentioned people do in the interests of sustainability, and how astoundingly futile or even counter productive it is.
At the end of the day, people would rather feel nice about themselves than make actual change.
At its base level things like urban design, our reliance on cars, subsidies on crop mono-cultures and the lack of proper introspection as a people hurt us far more than any of these specific problems.
Maybe we should start at the most basic question. Is food-waste even a bad thing to begin with. Food waste has been proven to not be the cause of malnutrition issues plaguing some parts the US or the world. If it is because of depleting water resources or land fertility, then crop-monocultures and mono culture subsidies are more at fault. Being sustainable is clearly more expensive, so it is certainly not a cost issue.
Across social, policy and organizational issues in the world, activists routinely assume a vague sense of what is "good" and then champion it, without actually looking into why something is good or what the word means in that context to begin with.
I know that not everyone is as utilitarian about how they go about things, but I often wonder if a concept even holds ground if it cannot be rephrased in a manner that makes sense in a utilitarian setting.
"It is crazy how much well intentioned people do in the interests of sustainability, and how astoundingly futile or even counter productive it is. At the end of the day, people would rather feel nice about themselves than make actual change."
We are currently in the "bargaining stage" of our grief[1] about how we've built our lifestyles on a failure to pay for environmental externalities.
People living modern, first-world lifestyles are (myself included) horrified by the idea that we can probably only afford to live like the global middle class - which is tremendously deficient in services, infrastructure, material possessions and their built environment.
And so, otherwise intelligent people propose very silly things like the idea that if you just sorted your garbage just right your role in this crisis (the crisis of modernity, in my opinion) has been absolved.
For what it's worth, the final stage of grief is paraphrased as:
"It's going to be okay."; "I can't fight it; I may as well prepare for it."
To be honest, I find views like yours not only fatalist, but dangerous. Fatalist because you don't seem to believe that developed-world standards of living are globally possible and so all genuine efforts will just be written off as band-aids. Dangerous because if people start believing this en masse, that prosperity is a zero-sum-game, then war is the only reasonable alternative.
> Dangerous because if people start believing this en masse, that prosperity is a zero-sum-game, then war is the only reasonable alternative.
It’s always been when resources are constrained. For all forms of life.
Single family detached homes with garages on quarter acre lots and annual beach/ski vacations are not going to happen for all 8B+ people. The ones that don’t have this are unlucky to have ancestors who lost wars.
Although, I might agree that it’s best (at least for me) if people don’t realize this or think about it in these terms en masse.
> Single family detached homes with garages on quarter acre lots and annual beach/ski vacations are not going to happen for all 8B+ people. The ones that don’t have this are unlucky to have ancestors who lost wars.
True, but from a resource utilization perspective those things are pretty wasteful. We could definitely meet somewhere in the middle, our options are not “everyone lives like kings and some are destitute” or “all live like kings”. The idea that anyone needs those things (or even deserves them more than anyone else) is the real enemy here.
I’d much be here today than a king say 500 years ago.
Not only do I have vastly longer life expectancy, the quality of life during which I’m alive is likely much better, both physically and spiritually, except the getting 100 servants part.
Just the average basic combination of smartphone in the pocket, microwave oven and small electric oven in the kitchen and electric heating in the home do the work of literally dozens of people 500 years ago. For a king to heat their castle at night (or anyone to heat their home) required hours of very hard work. Getting timely information of any kind would have required the same, and couriers, court philosophers and so forth, and to make a basic hot dinner was hours of work even for modest mealtimes.
> Single family detached homes with garages on quarter acre [...] are not going to happen for all 8B+ people.
Why not? There are ~7.7 billion acres of arable land on the earth. 0.25 acres per person would leave ~5.7 billion acres of arable land for agriculture.
Because it’s not just the land but the infrastructure that makes that land “livable”.
Installing sewers and electrical grids and internet and roads and grocery stores etc. is more prohibitive than land, even if that land was available for sale
I would argue that more technology is going to make our current use of those resources a lot more efficient going forward. Solar panels can mostly remove the need for an electrical grid for most people. Internet via StarLink (soon) will remove the geographical need for that. Roads are non-negotiable, sure, but they're pretty inconsequential. Things like DoorDash and Amazon are going to drastically reduce the number of grocery stores per capita going forward, or at least curb new construction.
No offense intended but this seems very naive to me. It feels very much like the promise of nuclear energy creating “energy too cheap to meter” from 50 years ago.
Technology will definitely help but think about it this way: people who live in those dispersed areas will likely be there out of necessity, not choice. How many people in say, rural Appalachia, are currently using Door Dash to regularly get groceries or can rely on solar to be off the grid? Grocery delivery doesn’t help much when you’re over an hour away because it drives up cost and limits the types of goods available. Those solutions already exist from a technological standpoint but they aren’t causing people to move en masse to these locations despite housing shortages elsewhere.
Maybe DoorDash wasn't a good analogy. I volunteered on a CSA in high school (Greater STL area, so fairly close to you), and honestly that model is surprisingly feasible. Supply chains produce a lot of greenhouse gas emissions, and the closer you are to your food production, the better it is for everybody involved.
If we are talking in absolutes, then no it probably won't reach everybody. However, the technology is becoming more and more practical to use, so its including a larger number of people as time goes on. Regardless, its a lot more practical than convincing billions of people to change their standards of living, especially in a country like America.
There are creatures that already live in that land. Are you seriously suggesting we just overrun the entire planet and turn it into suburbia as a solution to our problems?
Parent posters math is flawed. You can usually fit more than 1 person in a home and besides we can build apartment buildings up for 50 times the density with as nice an environment.
Because we’re changing our climate at an accelerating pace due to the energy used to move mass further and further distances (caused by less dense living).
Mormons, Hasidic Jews, Hutterites, the Amish. These are all US communities that have had fertility rates well above average for generations. Those are all culture bound groups. Even if they were forcibly assimilated
> The heritability of fertility makes world population stabilization unlikely in the foreseeable future
Mormons and Catholics still show a pattern of decreasing fertility in recent years; they just had higher fertility before so they are merely around the level that mainline Protestants were once at.
I agree that in the long run, the fertility trend will reverse itself. But in the medium term, it’s not an excuse for not fixing global poverty.
> Single family detached homes with garages on quarter acre lots and annual beach/ski vacations are not going to happen for all 8B+ people. The ones that don’t have this are unlucky to have ancestors who lost wars.
Think of all the areas of the world in which neither the winners nor the losers of the wars have the things you refer to. Your statement (a) is incorrect, and (b) reveals that you have a dangerous and unpleasant view of your homeland (You're American; I don't think there's any doubt about that!) as a land of prosperity that is somehow due to its military prowess.
Isn't it fairly well-established that the US has maintained its economic superiority for so long by NOT being bombed to hell like Europe after WWII and afterwards using military force to destabilize developing economies in south america, the middle east, etc etc.?
I'm no historian/economist/geographer, but isn't it sufficient to invoke having a huge empty continent with vegetation, climate and soil suitable for agriculture and human life activities in general, that only needed a bit of genocide to get rid of the low density previous occupants? N. hemisphere East-West wide continent and all that.
But we're not actually running out of those resources though. They just end up in forms that are much more difficult to utilize (they cost more), but the elements are still there. With enough energy and need it can just be reused. We're just nowhere near the point of that being necessary.
Can you point me to the rainforest and coral reef mines?
More seriously,
> They just end up in forms that are much more difficult to utilize
Right. And as the costs of, say, energy rise, people use less of it. Which means less mobility, less heating or cooling, less plastic, quite possibly less medical care.
Which means a drastic lifestyle change for the nonrich advanced-economy participants, no joining them for most everyone in less advanced economies, and more authoritarianism, war and civil unrest for everyone while the, um, "adjustments" settle in.
According to that, we should be just about out of antimony by now. Yet somehow the market for drugs and batteries still seems to be humming along. 2/10 fear porn.
And after 4 generations, less than 1% of the original material remains.
percent remaining = 100 * (r^generations))
Where r is expressed as a decimal 0 <= r <=1.
Even at 90% recovery, over 90% of the original material is lost after 22 generations. The highest recycling rate of any material in the US is lead (mostly from auto batteries). The USGS reports that rate as ~70%, though this may be the amount of recycled material in new production.
They are. If you kill a reef it’s gone for a really long time. And the rainforest needs time to grow back. What makes something renewable is that we take care to steward it. Forests in the US are renewable because the forest service surveys them and limits their uses so that they will continue to be available. In contrast the slash and burn agriculture that replaces the rain forest just consumes more land without replacement. The cattle farmers extract the resources from the soil and then move on. Nobody replaces the plant life they burned out. So it’s not a renewable resource in human time.
Also, the US Forest Service only manages national forests, and doesn't really focus on productivity.
An awful lot of forest land is managed by commercial foresters, with an eye towards maximizing the value extracted over long periods of time.
And then there is the management of small plots, which is also often done by commercial foresters, with an eye towards immediately extracting as much value as possible once they convince the landowner to let them do a cut.
>> Dangerous because if people start believing this en masse, that prosperity is a zero-sum-game, then war is the only reasonable alternative.
> It’s always been when resources are constrained. For all forms of life.
The comment you're responding to is saying that resources aren't constrained; we're just not using them effectively. That's a political problem and it can be solved only when people believe it can be.
The amount of energy required to move x amount of mass is a math problem, not a political problem.
We’ve already seen what happens to the world’s ecosystem when a very small portion of the world’s population lives a comparably luxurious lifestyle, and unless a breakthrough in thermodynamics is achieved in very short order, I don’t see how it can scale to the whole world.
All those new jet setters, car driving commuters, and air conditioned homes aren’t going to come without consequence. I’m not aware of any technological breakthroughs that can enable us to use resources without heavily altering the ecosystem.
Nuclear energy and solar power can/could solve most of the polluting energy problem and can work today. Increasing meat consumption and the need for more farmland to support it, I feel is a harder problem to solve.
>The amount of energy required to move x amount of mass is a math problem
If the energy isn't lost to friction then most of it can be recovered. Although I think it's impractical, the Hyperloop concept is one way to reduce friction. Instead of increasing transport speeds beyond current air travel, it could be used at the same speeds but much lower energy cost.
It's also somewhat misguided in my opinion. For some reason a large portion of the population have decided that it is categorically impossible to do anything about global warming from a technical or policy perspective. They have thrown up their hands and have decreed that we must all live awful lifestyles and shouldn't even try to innovate our way out of the problem. We are spending a tiny fraction of available resources fighting this problem, and it is not inconceivable that we could develop solutions which would change the state of the world dramatically if we actually threw money and talent at the problems.
My biggest source of hope for the climate crisis is that we got into our current state by expending enormous amounts of human labour. Those mines didn't dig themselves, those factories didn't build themselves, those highway networks didn't fill with cars by themselves.
It took effort to fuck things up, which means that with effort, we can un-fuck things as well.
and another group of people think some magic technology or wishful political thinking that doesn't exist right now can solve all our problems in the future.
We have technology right now to solve the problem. Carbon capture, planting trees, alternative energies, etc. We have just decided not to properly invest in deploying them or advancing them to make them more efficient. Green new deal might be a step in the right direction.
Carbon capture is one of the technologies I consider wishful thinking right now. It may well work but I haven't seen anything other than a handful of small scale trials yet people have been talking about it for twenty years.
"... you don't seem to believe that developed-world standards of living are globally possible ..."
I do believe that first-world, middle-class living standards, circa 2020, are globally possible ... just not in 2020.
By the time that those standards are globally possible without unpaid debits in the form of environmental externalities, there will be a new "first world" standard that we will then decide whether or not to borrow from the future to pay for ...
Much of this kind of attitude (where it can't substantiate claims concretely) is a type of fashionable nihilism masquerading as environmental concern. It serves as a kind of jaded virtue signalling too. This isn't to say that we shouldn't be worried about various aspects of the environment and human habits, or that we shouldn't individually and collectively push for better use of resources, but to simply claim we're lost as a species and discount all notions of us being capable of continuing to improve human well-being with better technology is both cheap and ignorant of centuries of real progress that have no reason for not being able to continue or improve in real ways..
"I can't fight it" and "I may as well prepare for it" doesn't have to mean war. It might instead involve abandoning an economy built on infinite growth, even at the expense of some material wealth.
Economic growth doesn’t necessitate consuming more resources. In fact, it often necessitates consuming fewer resources.
Netflix today has four times the annual revenue Blockbuster had at its peak. Which company consumed more natural resources? Which kind of car is more valuable, a Tesla Model S or a Ford Explorer? Which one consumes petroleum products?
Economic value is a measure of the value delivered to some customer, as measured by that customer’s willingness to pay for it. If I want to watch a movie, I don’t care whether or not somebody has to manufacture a hard plastic cassette or disk, in fact I’d rather they didn’t and they’d rather save the expense if there’s any alternative. If I want to drive somewhere I don’t fundamentally give a damn if the car is powered by the gasoline in the tank or by a hydroelectric dam in the mountains so long as I can get where I want to go in style and comfort. Efficiently allocating scarce resources is the entire object of the game—and if you add up everyone’s score at the end of the year, you have a measure of economic growth.
Have you ever tried to convince real people of that? Parents? Ones in developing countries in particular? Fusion and space colonization seem pretty easy in comparison, at least to me.
It's true. Humans seem unwilling to entertain any reduction in convenience. It's funny, because maintaining the status quo will result in a much larger inconvenience.
We are too smart for our own good, but not smart enough by half.
If you think that all 8 billion people can live with the environmental impact of a select portion of the human race who have already done irrevocable damage to the planet you are living in a fantasy. I hope that's not a guiding goal for you in life.
People just need to understand that we can have good life with less consumption. For us rich people it can be hard to see how you can still have good healthcare, education, worklife balance then but it's worth the effort to think it through and learn about examples in other countries.
>Fatalist because you don't seem to believe that developed-world standards of living are globally possible
I don't know about the rest of your comment but there's no question that current first world standards are not possible for all people. It's a very simple math problem. If everyone ate beef and drove cars and consumed carbon and participated in wanton habits at the current levels of the first world then the planet would be utterly and irreversibly ruined. It's not even close.
I understand acknowledging our unsustainable habits makes us uncomfortable. But for better or worse that doesn't change the truth.
Japan consumes less than half the energy per capita that the US does. The UK is even lower. Portugal's energy per capita is less than 1/3 of the US figure [1]. Japan and South Korea consume less than half the meat per capita as the US [2].
These are all highly developed countries. When we consider sustainability and the limits of global development, "American" too often stands in for "developed," and "upper-income-bracket Texan" too often stands in for "American."
Even among Americans, there are large differences between states in CO2 emissions per capita:
New York has only 1/3 the per-capita emissions as Texas. If the rest of the globe wants to be like Americans, it still makes a big difference whether they want to live like in Houston or like in New York City.
Japanese people, in general, are enamoured with the Edo period: from about 1600 until the latter half of the 1800's. Japan was a very poor country and it's refusal to do much international trade (or even talk to the outside world, really) didn't help matters. However this period is often considered to be the most enlightened for Japanese culture.
Poverty was rampant and people lived in a feudal society, but people were by and large comfortable. The minimalistic Japanese esthetic that exists even now is a carry over from that period. People's dwellings were very small, but in comparison to European standards things were incredibly clean. There are numerous writings from Europeans who almost universally remark on both the level of poverty and on the surprising level of happiness.
There is an interesting book (the name of which escapes me at the moment) where the author tries to enumerate some of the things that the Edo period Japanese got right and that could be used as a model going forward.
One of the things that I think we, as a more affluent generation/society, often get wrong is that we equate prosperity with comfort. Indeed, we also equate comfort with being better.
A friend of mine was eating grapes that he brought with his lunch. "You know how sometimes you eat a grape and it's got this amazing flavour and sweetness, but sometimes you eat a grape and it is virtually tasteless? I mean, even with the same variety of grape. Why is that?" I had to explain to him that eating grapes in February is not necessarily going to lead to tasty grapes because they aren't really in season anywhere.
Why are we flying unripe grapes from half way around the world? And why are we ever trying to buy and sell grapes that are over irrigated and over produced so that they no longer have any flavour? Well, the answer is that people want to buy inexpensive grapes in Canada in February.
But, is this actually a good idea? As a society, perhaps we would actually be better off if you could only buy grapes in Canada in September or October. Maybe you would have culturally relevant food as well, instead of fulfilling every whim of every person in society.
And maybe we don't need cars everywhere. I mean, how many families have 2 cars? How many have kids and therefore have 3 or 4 cars? Are we actually better off this way? And do you actually need air conditioning in most parts of North America? And do we need to keep our houses at 22 C, and have remote car starters so that our cars idle and are sitting at 22 C for when we dash into them and we have giant underground tunnels all heated to 22 C and we don't have to walk outside when we are shopping, and all the parking garages are heated so that we don't even have to run to our car and don't even get me started about taking a bus, or walking out of doors: It's winter out there!
Which is not to say that I am idolising the noble savage and thinking that we're all going to turn into Tarzan and swing from tree house to tree house on vines in a wonderful magical world where we don't need anything. It's just that I don't think the pursuit of riches is necessarily going to enrich our lives and culture. I've been rich and I've been poor and I've got to say that the rich are often the ones missing out.
It's funny you mention air conditioning in NA - we are moving towards more insulated, energy-efficient homes which tend to mean much less air movement through the home. The problem with this reduced air movement is a reduction in humidity movement which can lead to mold and other health problems. As we improve our impact with our housing air conditioning actually becomes more important although not so much for temperature control as for humidity control.
Overall it would be fantastic if more of the population could be happier without the newest shiny and an eye towards the durable, the repairable, and the least impactful but it takes a lot of effort to incorporate that process. I don't think it can happen without a broader cultural shift, particularly by those with the most wealth (who many first-worlders want to emulate even if only in one small aspect).
Not that I take say James Clavell as gospel but by feudal here do you mean upper classes could kill commoners or untouchables if they felt like it? This era doesn't strike me as a paragon of social mobility.
No. Feudal means that the land was managed by the samurai and all the rice produced on it was owned by them. The farmer class worked the fields and were paid for their production, but owned nothing. This was one of the big changes that was instituted by the Meiji restoration -- the samurai class was outlawed and farmers were allowed to own land (and have a name).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism is a useful reference. Of course Japan was not technically feudal, but the parallels with feudal Europe run deep, so most things I've read on the topic use that term.
One of the reasons I started avoiding conversations on HN of late is due to questions like this. It's appears to be a very shallow dismissal of what I was saying. I really don't mind if people disagree with me -- especially when I'm saying something as extreme as I have in this thread. However, you seem to be saying that the upper classes treated the lower classes terribly badly and therefore nothing can be learned from that era.
Indeed, when I say that Japanese people admire Edo culture, they are not only, or even principally, speaking of the noble classes. Indeed, most are referring to craftspeople, farmers, etc. In fact, you will even see a considerable amount of respect and gratitude toward the Yakusa who generally protected normal people against the excesses of the powerful. There is a reason for the huge number of Zatoichi movies out there, as well as all the ronin (disgraced samurai whose daimyo is dead, but who didn't commit suicide) movies where the protagonist wanders around and protects the common people.
When the Meiji restoration came about, the government was keen to take on European culture and technology which it viewed as being more advanced compared to the seemingly backward analogies in Japan. So suits and neckties came into fashion. Brick and stone were used to build buildings, etc, etc. Much of the appropriate cultural technology that had evolved to suit the climate and nature of Japan was thrown out the window.
Things like the natural life cycle of cloth was changed for example. Originally a parent would buy a kimono. When it was worn, it was taken apart and a kimono was made for the children from it. When it was worn, it was taken apart and cleaning cloths were made from it. When it was worn, it was burned as fuel. There was a general ban on burning firewood in parts of the Edo period because of over logging, and so people were very clever about how they got fuel.
Even now, if you go to a traditional futon store and try to buy a new futon the first thing the craftsperson will ask you is if you have old cotton from a futon or zabuton. In fact, if you do not, they may heavily encourage you to go away and ask your family for old cushions and what-not as they are very loath to use new cotton if they can avoid it. Again, this comes from the Edo traditions and is something that many people cherish in Japanese culture. It's also something that is slowly disappearing as the country becomes more westernised.
I hope you found the above interesting. I probably shouldn't complain about the quality of responses I get from crazy postings I make, but it's something I'm starting to feel more acutely these days. If you found what I wrote interesting, I hope you will find a way to encourage others to write something similar rather that to write in a way that may dismiss what they are saying out of hand. I'm sure that wasn't your intention, otherwise I would not have wasted my time typing all of the above, but I still had that feeling from reading the words that you typed.
One question I have about the recycling aspect you brought up:
Do you think this way of recycling is actually more efficient than on a larger scale?
E.g. would it be more efficient to gather worn kimono from more people and make cleaning cloths from it?
Or did I understand you wrong?
From what I understood, you are saying that the old way of doing it was better, but I cannot help but feel, that some things are better on a larger scale.
For me the problem with modern recycling is more the frequency and the percentage that is actually recycled, not the scale it is done at.
Maybe the scale contributes to the percentage problem, but I cannot imagine the frequency being caused by it.
The frequency to me seems to be caused by the marketing and the general mindset to always have the newest, shiniest toys, or to stay on clothing: fashion trends.
To your first point, I agree that some people seem to be dismissing an entire comment based on one small remark.
Do you think the system being a feudal one contributes to the way recycling and consumption was done?
To me it has more to do with the poverty and making due, what you have.
This cycles back to reusing things you already used beyond their lifespan.
I cannot imagine an interaction that is born solely of the governmental system, but please share your viewpoint.
Also: I don't think your viewpoint is too extreme. We should learn from our history and maybe we could even derive ways to move forward.
I'll answer you last question first because I think it's the source of confusion. My intent was to say that despite the Edo period of Japan being feudal, Europeans documenting the period were surprised to find that people were surprisingly happy in their poverty. I wasn't intending to say that feudalism contributed positively. I suppose it's an interesting question now that I think about it, but I don't really know the answer.
I think you are right that many of the things that are admired about the Edo period has to do with what's called "mottainai" in Japanese. In English you might say "Waste not want not". However there is more to it than that.
One of the things you might consider is that it is more efficient to use new cloth than old cloth -- because the industry is geared towards it. As you say, you can scale the industry towards making lots of new clothes cheaply. If you make clothes from old clothes, then it is not cheap. You need someone to do it. Similarly, if you recycle old cotton for new futons, it's a labour intensive process.
Maybe one day we'll have robots to do all of those things, but the attractive part of the idea is that it is a craft. It is precisely because it is not efficient that it is desirable. It provides a job. And it is more expensive. And people have less money and so there is less growth. But people have meaningful jobs doing crafts that they care about. So, is it actually less growth? It really depends on how we measure growth.
My cupboards are currently full of dishes I hate. I mean, it's really true. I bought them at the 100 yen store when I moved back to Japan most recently because they were place holders for when I had time to buy something I liked. But, actually, I think this was a mistake. I should have bought things I liked and done without if I couldn't find something. A bowl will last a lifetime. It will last several lifetimes. Why are we making bowls over and over and over again? Why are we not making bowls to make up for the extra population and then basically having people trade up to nicer bowls. Nobody I know has nice bowls. And yet if I go to the "recycle" shops (used goods which are mostly filled with stuff that they picked up from estate sales), I can get truly wonderful pieces for nearly the same price as the junk I got at the 100 yen store. How is that possible? Because we're optimising our processes for the wrong kind of growth (IMHO).
I often buy canned coffee (because I'm a lazy sod). I can't help but think what the process is. I want coffee. What's the first thing I need? Aluminium. Because I'm going to smelt me a can. And the can costs about 10 cents of the $1.20 that the coffee costs me (my friend actually engineers the machines that make the cans -- I asked him). So it costs "nothing". But isn't that kind of crazy? Why am I creating a can for such a transitory experience? And don't get me wrong -- the can is a thing of beauty. In the Edo period, I bet you could trade one for a house! But... I don't really need it. And this can, that is a problem for me when I can't throw it out accounts for just under 10% of the economic growth that happens when I drink the coffee. But I don't need it. I'm just lazy.
> Fatalist because you don't seem to believe that developed-world standards of living are globally possible and so all genuine efforts will just be written off as band-aids.
If everyone lived like the average american we'd be in deeeep trouble. We went way too far past equilibrium and the only reason we're still able to make somehow it work is because the majority of the world hasn't make it as far as us.
We can do better. The collective we can do better than that.
There are a number of currently less than popular steps that are obvious short / middle term answers.
* Nuclear power (cleaner, cheaper energy)
* Waste Reducing Nuclear designs ('breeder' reactors)
* Population design (reducing humans on Earth)
* Fund better land / farming use.
* Tax misuse.
Longer term I feel that as a species we need to take bigger steps.
* Colonies in space (orbit, moon, other planets)
* Establishing at least robots in the 'belt
* Building world ships to distribute backups
* Solar collector rings for more power
The problem with solar rings is that while they're great at focusing the sun for industrial uses like power plants or maybe solar forge operations, they're also great at delivering lots of energy to places that don't desire it. Like the evil villain in a cartoon, movie, or distopian dictatorship. I think they should be staffed the same way that other dangerous engineering operations should be staffed. Engineers and security forces working as part of the largest collective governing units (at the present time, that would probably be the UN or one of the permanent members on some UN security councils).
Entirely unnecessary. Native population growth rate is negative in every affluent country in the world, and they maintain their populations only via immigration.
Focus on improving the quality of life in third world nations (via investment, education, etc.) and growth rate will naturally fall, like it has everywhere else.
This is true, however it's also about fairness. It's fair for a pair of adults that love each other to replace their generation (at least until we're much closer to effective immortality). It's much less fair for some portions of the population to have VAST NUMBERS of offspring.
Though 100% social security and retirement security as a right has been theorized (at least in science fiction if not reality) to greatly discourage using kids as a retirement insurance policy.
I'm right up there with you on increasing global prosperity and raising the bottom though. That'll fix so many ills that achieving it would be a true benefit to everything.
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Additionally - cheaper energy (my first two unpopular points) should be one of the theoretical routes to getting to this kind of outcome. Having enough energy means that all sorts of other things become economically viable.
Second: I'm starting to think that grief is less about loss than it is about model change.
The more deeply embedded, and identity-providing that model is, the deeper the grief.
This seems to follow a continuum, with benign instances ranging from humour (often based on violated expectations when in an open mental state) and surprise, to anger (feeling agency against change), fear (lack of agency, but an option to withdraw), panic (disordered action), and ultimately depression or freezing (no sensible action).
Individually, adapting to major shocks means rescaling expectations and rewriting our own world models and life plans.
Collectively, it's all of that plus the challenge of coming up on a social basis a new set of tribal myths to replace the old standard.
(This is mostly my own construct, though it borrows heavily from a few sources, notably Kubler-Ross, as well as others. I'd be very surprised if there were no similar extant concept in circulation.)
Alvin Toffler expresses a quite similar notion toward the end of Chapter 8 of Future Shock, "Information: The Kinetic Image":
Change, roraring through society, widens the gap between what we believe and what really is, between the existing images and the reality they are supposed to freflect. When this gap is only moderate, we can cope more or less rationally with change, we can react sanely to new conditions, we have a grip on reality. When this gap grows too wide, however, we find ourselves increaingly unable to cope, we respond inappropriately, we become ineffectual, witdraw or simply panic. At the final extreme, when the gap grows too wide, we suffer psychosis --- or even death.
The passage continues for another five paragraphs, recommended. One of the sources is Harold D. Lasswell's work on education, learning, and relearning, particularly concerning the limits on this.
I've long been a fan of applying K-R to existential threats and Big Problems:
This doesn't hold up in the face of technical advances. As others have mentioned, cheap energy (e.g. fusion) provide very real solutions to many of the problems we face, and will make it realistic to continue to improve lifestyles across the globe. Of course our politics might get in the way and we could still be doomed, agreed, but that's a very different conversation. The idea that a western lifestyle for everyone is "impossible", and that "we can probably only afford to live like the global middle class" etc, needs more than just a nice ring to it.
I hate to be that guy, but: "citation needed."
Otherwise I do agree on recycling being mostly a boondoggle. But, again: politics. There are ways.
The denial stage of grief is where we hope for miracles (nuclear fusion) so that we don’t have to face reality (the lack of sufficient resources to sustain our energy- and resource-intensive lifestyle).
We have been using plastics for less time than fusion has been “just around the corner.” Going back to a plastics-free lifestyle will be easier than magicking up fusion power.
Yes, I guess this is getting confusing but the fusion bit is a counter argument to "we are definitely doomed." If we harness fusion, we're clearly not doomed, ergo that statement is false. It doesn't mean we necessarily need fusion for salvation.
The point is: the claim is just that, a claim. A big, sweeping, depressing claim, without any actual evidence to back it up, and which doesn't hold up against a bit of critical analysis.
To be clear: I'm not saying we need fusion to keep our environment inhabitable for humans. Personally, I'm bullish on more effective use of the resources we already have, first and foremost through pigovian taxes. I'm pessimistic about the politics required to achieve that. But I disagree that we're doomed. That's patently false.
If sky god sends us food from the heavens then we are not doomed. Anyone saying we are doomed is clearly making claims without any support because we know there is at least one path that is not doomed!
We are essentially doomed, because we have an economy geared around infinite expansion. No level of Pigovian taxation is going to suppress that. Taxes will lead to the house-for-every-family, bedroom-for-every-person, and tv-in-every-room lifestyles being unattainable and then people start rioting.
To produce food sustainably we need to find sources for phosphates other than mining. To produce anything out of metal we need to find sources of metals other than mining. We can’t keep going on the assumption that Earth’s crust has limitless supplies of resources, because we need that land to live on and grow food.
As for the politics required to get Pigovian taxes accepted, it’s very easy to run negative campaigns to scare people such as the Murdoch campaign during the Gillard Government in Australia telling people that the carbon pricing scheme was going to make a lamb roast cost $100, and that people wouldn’t be able to afford to turn on the air conditioning in Summer.
Nuclear fission power can be almost as clean today as nuclear fusion will be. Fusion power plants will still be radioactive. Not using fission is a political and social issue, not a technical one. I'm not sure people would accept nuclear fusion either if we had it. Maybe if we can invent a different name?
Actually, not even. We’ll all die, it’s not going to be okay. But we must tell ourselves it’s going to be so, because that is the best use of our time while we have it.
The author points to low wages as a real reason why people go hungry:
> By focusing on food waste, corporate actors wash their hands of their responsibility to ensure their workers are paid — and therefore fed — just as fast as they punt responsibility for environmental action to consumers. Food waste’s anti-hunger bent doesn’t only divert food from landfills — it diverts our attention from food justice.
And earlier in the article:
> anti-hunger networks like Feeding America are largely bankrolled by shiny corporate interests like Walmart and Kroger. On its own, this seems uncontroversial. But in light of the fact that these same companies notoriously undermine worker protections and pay workers measly wages — while consistently lobbying Washington to keep wages suppressed — claims to fighting hunger are straight-up deceitful.
pretty much ignoring the fact WalMart started a trend when they pushed their wages up in 2015 to nine dollars a hour and have reached eleven or more depending where you are. This in turn led to Target trying to out do WalMart by going a bit higher each time.
The unwritten effect is that many smaller businesses who cannot handle the wage pressure were put into a bit of bind and some people employable at minimum wage won't make the cut at higher wages when people who would not have considered the job before enter the market.
* I only commented because people tend to herd mentality jump on anything negative about Walmart when in fact they do far better than much of the retail environment out there.
> At its base level things like urban design, our reliance on cars, subsidies on crop mono-cultures and the lack of proper introspection as a people hurt us far more than any of these specific problems.
With the current ordering of our society, most people do not have the power or economic freedom to effectively advocate for change in our urban design, reliance on cars, or subsidies on crop monocultures.
Do you really think the people making small changes in the ways that they have access to would reject more significant structural changes? This seems like a complete caricature to me.
If you might be very near some threshold where the outcome can go from bad to good, then this kind of microoptimization in the face of macrowaste can make sense. Otherwise, it's actually more wasteful to do small things when the big things don't change.
The urge to "do my part" is a strong and important one, but in some contexts it leads to a more wasteful outcome.
The counterargument might be the idea that the small and individual changes signals that people are willing to put effort and money into the cause.
Which eventually will enable new policies that do a better job of changing the big things.
Such as - I guess that the biggest, environmental, advantage of an electric car is signalling that hey, I'm willing to put many thousands of dollars and tolerate an reduced range - partly because I value the environment.
Doesn't matter if an electric car actually is better for the environment (buying a new car seldom is) - it signals a will and desire. Both of which are paramount for policy-makers.
Walk the walk and talk the talk in small ways on a daily basis, and learn about and push for policy changes to try and encourage big changes.
Or, to put it differently: on average, the people I know in my life who think about straw-waste reduction (and similar activities) positively are the ones also wanting larger changes. The people I know with disdain for "straw bans" and "plastic bag bans" also don't care about, or aren't aware of, the larger issues. They use the argument that "it's an irrelevant fix" as a shield to avoid thinking about the actual larger problems.
My experience is the opposite. The people I have seen that care about the straw ban tend to pat themselves on the back and virtue signal about it, while doing nothing else.
The skeptic in me believes the whole thing has been promoted to make people feel better and keep on consuming. Just like "recycling" where most just goes to a landfill or worse.
It's just another way to punt the problem to the end user instead of dealing with it in a systematic manner.
I think you’re both right. As Slavoj Žižek concisely put it:
>It’s in the commodity itself the price of your leftist, honest, resistance to consumerism is included.[0]
Some hope for a consumerist or market solution because that is the easiest way to feel like a part of the solution and not part of the problem. Individual responsibility is a concept shared by both groups to varying degrees. This is exploited by the market to create a market for products advertised as solutions. These market solutions may not go far enough, but it signals a willingness to put your money where your mouth is. That it ends up being ineffectual or even counter productive is a cruel irony of consumerism and its way of serving its own ends and not necessarily those of any individuals market participants. It’s almost like the market is a means to its own end and any consequences bad or good are incidental to the goals of the participants. If we’re trained to shop on price or quality it seems that every kind of solution the market can provide will inherently be a marketable solution. As in a product or service or other good.
I guess what I mean to say is that the other group which is advocating for larger societal changes may not ever see progress. Social and legislative changes take time and effort. It seems the effect is much larger when these social changes are made in this way. Perhaps that is why regulatory capture is an important business concept. For market participants it is an existential necessity to make sure they can continue to participate in the market. We have misaligned incentives everywhere. It’s in the markets’ interest that we only see market based solutions as viable or possible or realistic. That makes us discouraged from pursuing other ways of signaling our desires and intentions and keeps us locked in as market participants. We never get better because we settle for less.
Sorry kind of all over the place and no real conclusion. Change is coming either way so might as well pull all the levers that make sense for your ethical and ecological framework and hope for the best.
>[T]his readiness to assume the guilt for the threats to our environment is deceptively reassuring: We like to be guilty since, if we are guilty, it all depends on us. We pull the strings of the catastrophe, so we can also save ourselves simply by changing our lives. What is really hard for us (at least in the West) to accept is that we are reduced to the role of a passive observer who sits and watches what our fate will be. To avoid this impotence, we engage in frantic, obsessive activities. We recycle old paper, we buy organic food, we install long-lasting light bulbs—whatever—just so we can be sure that we are doing something. We make our individual contribution like the soccer fan who supports his team in front of a TV screen at home, shouting and jumping from his seat, in the belief that this will somehow influence the game's outcome. [2]
Exactly, this kind of microoptimization often becomes worse due to other logical fallacies like sunk-cost and confirmation-bias which can cause the societal costs of addressing the "small thing" to snowball.
We would likely be better off if we put all focus into the big things and completely ignored the small things.
One thing that small (token if you like) changes do is influence the cultural conversation. They keep the idea that trying to be responsible custodians is important at the forefront. This influences people's decisions and behavior. New generations grow up surrounded by these reminders and internalize the values without even thinking about it.
Collective action through widespread unity and organization. In other words, revolution. This method has successfully evolved society time and time again.
I completely agree. And I would argue that small changes aren't "wasteful" in this context since they start conversations and demonstrate commitment and credibility.
Hopefully you are on the winning side, otherwise you may be re-eduacated, disappeared, thrown in a camp, hung, shot, beheaded or otherwise exterminated. at the very least will suffer the tyranny of the majority.
I don't necessarily disagree, but you're making the assumption that democracy is a given and immutable. "Peaceful" revolution through democracy can very easily become exactly what you're describing because it also relies on the defeated side to comply with the decision (to a certain degree, there's obviously more nuance).
Food waste directly causes artificial inflation of food demand, which is reflected in excess agriculture, agriculture being one of the greatest source environmental damage currently. Emissions (throughout the entire supply chain from the farm to the table), soil compaction, runoff and other pollution are all externalized by Big Ag (meaning we as the people of the world pay the cost) and we amplify this when we waste food. That’s not even getting into the excess waste management involved or the direct hit to our GDP from food waste. It’s a big deal.
> At the end of the day, people would rather feel nice about themselves than make actual change.
This. In many many places you see people like that. Many NGOs and charities don't help solving the problems at all if not aggravating them. It makes me doubt if the people running them are actual well intentioned people or just selfish in a different way.
Much of the work of charities and NGOs goes on behind the scenes. The public facing efforts, esp. with regards environment and other indirect causes (tho also in cases such as e.g. homelessness, social welfare, human rights), are generally attempts to raise funds or, more importantly, to shore up support and public sentiment for advocacy efforts with government, industry, and other power brokers.
It is rarely, if ever, about feeling nice about yourself. In fact charity work generally demands being confronted daily with what you like least about the world. My personal experience working for an environmental NGO is that, while not entirely thankless, it is exhausting and often depressing work.
Our charity is one of the many asking individuals to take small actions in their daily lives. It's a small request and direct outcomes are difficult if not impossible to measure, however our org has been directly involved in any number of environmental policy changes across the many businesses and even cities that we work with. These efforts bubble up. From little things big things grow.
The more local the more likely
it will go to measurable impacts (your local homeless shelter). If an ngo spents 10 times more in marketing compared to your donation it might be too big.
Being selfish and well intentioned are not incompatible, as long as being selfish includes the well being of those you care about and those you care about includes many people.
The many people bit is problematic due to our brain's make-up.
GP is probably thinking of Dunbar's number[0] and making a distinction between caring concretely about specific individuals and caring more abstractly about the plight of many strangers. It's possible to "care" about the health and well being of arbitrary groups of people, but it really takes knowing and understanding their specific problems to make actual care effective.
Dunbar's number has to do with the ability to maintain "stable social relationships", not "care". And I reject the notion that a recognition of shared humanity takes place in the abstract.
Please don't twist my words. I said nothing about the recognition of shared humanity, nor was I attempting to make any sort of deep philosophical stand. I was merely attempting to answer your specific question about the OP's viewpoint as I understood it.
The worst part is that all of these problems are more or less easy to solve economically. Just tax the externalities. A gas tax that pay for carbon offsets for each gallon of gas would not actually add all that much at the pump. Barely anything, in fact, about $.10/gallon according to [this source](https://greengasmovement.org/faq/).
It's kind of incredible to me that we've banned plastic straws, but we aren't willing to add 10 cents / gallon to the cost of gas.
$.10 a gallon adds up if you're a trucking business that buys 100,000 gallons a day. That's the point where business starts to lobby against the tax. And exempting businesses from the tax makes it pointless.
Yes, if the goal was to actually reduce emissions, that would mean we need to reduce energy usage, and that would mean less moving around for less amount of mass. And that means incentivizing people to stay put, I.e. taxing fuel.
But that isn’t the goal; the goal is to look and feel like something is being done, but to not let it affect one’s quality of life.
> It is crazy how much well intentioned people do in the interests of sustainability
Maybe I am just too pessimistic. But I see most those people not as "well intentioned" but as "wanting to be part of the group". And to be part of the group, you have to play that game. Like it or not. After all, as humans we are very social animals and most of us need that group recognition.
>Maybe we should start at the most basic question. Is food-waste even a bad thing to begin with.
Yes. Having more than enough food is better than not enough, but to have obscenely more than necessary, and to have the excess go to landfill is 'bad'. To have that excess go to somewhere productive is 'better'. It might not defeat poverty, as the article points out, that is a systemic issue. But it can have positive environmental outcomes. e.g., if food is consumed more efficiently, we need less land for crops; we have waste decomposing as compost which releases less greenhouse gasses than as landfill.
The article does a good job of straw-manning attempts at making the situation better, including the grass roots collective effort of consumers to be more mindful (how is this a bad thing?), but there are coincident economic incentives and environmental outcomes to less waste, and that is a 'good' thing.
> people would rather feel nice about themselves than make actual change.
Alternatively: people desperately want actual change, but are prevented from seeing it by structural details of their government that they can't fix alone. At least... eliminating microplastics and wasted food, or buying renewable electricity and using it to power a personal vehicle, or eating less meat, or taking transit... these are things we can do, if not to fix the problem at least to demonstrate our commitment to its solution in a way that other people can see and hopefully emulate.
I mean, look: addressing climate change requires extensive government action, period. Everyone knows this. But all I can do is vote. After that, what? Is your position that the rest of us should just shut up, eat steaks and buy pickups until the rest of "you" get around to agreeing with us?
We should not ignore the value of signalling. There is little impact you can have as an individual. Reducing food waste or recycling have almost no direct impact but, it shows that you care and people respond. Politicians, and companies respond. It’s almost like voting.
Every single person I know that shows they “care” would be outraged if tax on fuel was sufficiently increased to curb their travel habits (e.g. instagramming from Bali with a paper straw).
Hence no politician gets voted in who can actually accomplish the goal of reducing energy and resources usage, because that’s not really what the populace wants. They want to continue consuming and continue feeling good about themselves.
At the end of the day I just personally hate spending money on food that sits in the fridge unused then gets thrown out. Or gets cooked and thrown out because we cooked too much.
Only thing worse would be setting money on fire directly.
There was a comment on HN a while that really made me think, essentially saying it's better to always have healthy food available, even if you sometimes have to throw some out, than to have to resort to less healthy processed or fast food because you don't have readily available healthy food.
Get a compost pile or wormery or chickens (or, here, we have council-provided food waste bins). Nature creates vast amounts of ‘waste’ and excess. One tree produces ten thousand acorns and maybe zero will germinate. Waste food matter is energy and future soil, it’s not ‘bad’ per se.
You've never thrown out food? I'd be curious to find out what percentage of people can honestly make that claim. Sometimes you make something that doesn't turn out very well...with the best of intentions, you put it in the refrigerator intending to finish it off, but after a week or so it's just not edible anymore.
When I was living alone as a single person it was pretty easy for me to avoid wasting food. I knew my own habits and my own level of hunger so I was able to effectively control my food buying and preparation. Since moving in with my wife, however, and especially since having kids it has been harder and harder to accurately predict our food requirements and minimize waste. I'm sure the larger the population a single entity is providing food for the harder this line is to walk.
Nope. I'm a great cook and baker. I've always eaten everything I've made. But I don't make more food until I've finished off what I've already prepared.
In my family, I’m often surprised by what cool idea they have to reuse most food left over by combining multiple left overs or a left over with something else fresh. It opened my eyes that this is not a fixed state but what you do with it.
While I wholeheartedly agree with the thesis that people too readily engage in “sustainability theatre” as an excuse to avoid meaningful lifestyle change, I would also not want to lose sight of the many valuable things that individuals can do to make the world a better place. It’s too easy to sink into apathy if you think change can only be done by others or large groups.
Spread out suburban and exurban living probably negates most of those savings via the extra use of energy in extra concrete, asphalt, energy to move water, sewage, utilities, and people that much further. I would think without dense living, not much else can really matter.
Why would you claim using totes bags and paper straws would help with malnutrition and water table depletion?
Plastic bags and plastic straws are frowned upon because of how permanent they are and one of the most single use items we use that we live reasonably without.
I feel like you want people to make even bigger changes than what they're being led too. I'm happy with consistent, small victories.
> Across social, policy and organizational issues in the world, activists routinely assume a vague sense of what is "good" and then champion it, without actually looking into why something is good or what the word means in that context to begin with.
Now imagine what happens if you give those well-intentioned but under-informed activists real power. One saw a lot of problems like that in the post-Stalin Soviet Union and Eastern Europe: folks who (mostly) genuinely wanted to do good, or at least (generally) didn't wish to do harm, but who instead wrought a great deal of economic (and more) harm to their countrymen.
One sees the same phenomenon in large companies, most of whose executives really do want to do good or at least don't actively wish to hurt anyone, but whose decisions often result in unintended ill consequences both to themselves and others.
My pet theory is that anything people personally touch or see feels 1000x more important to them than the unseen.
So things like straws, shopping bags, and your personal home trash becomes the focus, while vastly bigger problems that are out of sight/touch. are out of mind.
>At the end of the day, people would rather feel nice about themselves than make actual change.
Almost, but not quite. At the end of the day, there are people making extraordinary amounts of money from the status quo, and those people would rather have the general population squabbling over minutiae than demanding systemic change that would actually resolve the problem (and subsequently cause those people to lose an awful lot of money).
>> It is crazy how much well intentioned people do in the interests of sustainability
I just don't see this. Paying a few dollars more or (gasp!) going without a straw is low-effort virtue signaling.
In aggregate I don't see people voluntarily avoiding car or airplane travel, living in tiny, centrally-located shared apartments or skipping fruits and vegetables that are not grown locally (i.e. just potatoes and carrots 8 months per year). We are not going to shift the needle without fundamental change at the point of consumption. Regardless of where you stand this is where we should be deciding collective next steps.
It's bad because producing the food requires enormous expenditures in resources, energy, and ecology. Every morsel you eat was transported on diesel, created by the labor of humans, and cost many animals their lives through habitat loss and environmental poisoning.
Do you get a “power trip” when criminals go in prison? I know it’s a whole different level, but have you considered some people genuinely think that this is a bad thing (albeit a minor one IMO as the post explains) in our society?
As someone who has experienced hunger and malnutrition, it is entirely a product of capitalism and not a specific detail in the food production chain.
Our economic system is highly inefficient, and waste is a necessary part of maintaining profitable prices. This includes starvation, homelessness, and unemployment. Scarcity must be maintained.
Malnutrition, or simply hunger in more plain terms, is prevalent across every type of community in the US and the world. The ghettos of cities, trailer parks and economically depressed rural areas, dilapidated suburbs, and the often overlooked Native land reservations.
Just to get an idea of the inordinate balance of resources, consider that there are 552,830 homeless people in the US as of 2018 and 17,019,726 vacant homes. Billionaires hoard absolutely massive amounts of value generated by workers and do nothing with it or just let it sit in their portfolios.
This mode of production is obscenely inefficient and long due for an overhaul.
Sure, but before we overhaul the system in the United States (3% of population malnourishment), let's overhaul the system in countries where the population malnourishment is above 15% and bring them down to less than 5%. (http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SN.ITK.DEFC.ZS?most_rece...)
The mode of production in the US might seem highly inefficient if you have not lived in a different country for a prolonged period. But I can assure you, it is incredibly efficient.
> As someone who has experienced hunger and malnutrition, it is entirely a product of capitalism and not a specific detail in the food production chain.
This would be relatively simple to demonstrate: simply show that capitalist societies all experience significant hunger and malnutrition, and that non-capitalist societies do not.
As TOGoS mentioned, capitalism currently dominates the world. Although it seems like his comment has been hidden, even though he is telling the truth. I expected my own comment to be voted down as it criticizes capitalism.
The majority of human history takes place in the mode of production of the hunter-gatherer society. This is before the agricultural revolution and the advent of agricultural civilization.
Economists describe this as early communism. The definition of this model is based in large part on the study of the Iroquois Confederacy. This, along with evolutionary models of food sharing, highlight a meat sharing system that is enforced communally. There is personal property, but private ownership of land and essential resources is nonexistent. The community owns the means of production as well as essential resources, and they dictate their distribution by need and not by profit.
In modern society, this would manifest as collective ownership of the means of production by the working class. The means of production are capital that is used to produce goods. Land, water, corporations, factories, etc. As workers exist worldwide, collective ownership would take the form of a global socialist state owned by the workers. This is the purpose of the world revolution.
As communities become organized around sustainability using vast amounts of capital created by workers under capitalism, the global state becomes redundant. At this stage, the economic structure returns to its original state, which is communism.
It's not a ideological debate, calling someone Marxist is as redundant as calling a physicist a Newtonian or a mathematician a Pythagorean. Capitalism itself as we know it was defined by that era of economic science. Of course we should remain skeptical and critical, as many ideas from that era turned out to be wrong. What's difficult is constantly working against decades of Cold War era propaganda and disinformation.
The primary American defense against the words socialism or communism is the idea that society is somehow built around personal character flaws and not laws of economic and political science. The capitalist is not inherently greedy, he simply follows the forces of economics. Communism is not some "ideal society" that works on paper but is undermined by human greed. It describes the majority of human history, and it requires a world revolution to exist again. Any nation that describes itself as "socialist" yet participates in the global economy is simply capitalist and masquerading as something else.
With respect to the ‘early communism’, there is a very large caveat. These ‘communal’ groups where ethnically, racially, and culturally homogeneous ‘small’ (by modern standard) people groups who where by in large extended families. There is no comparison possible between that type of grouping and modern human society. Humans might be willing to miss a few good meals to ensure my kids or parents where provided for, but En masse won’t lift a finger for their neighbor neighbor, let alone someone in the city or state next door. Hence why leftist social policy at scale has always relied on strongman authoritarian leadership in actual practice.
TL;DR Hairless monkeys are in-group favoring, mammalian magpie-like hoarders. Why would you expect something like ‘global good will’ to magically be embraced by the multitudes.
Capitalism currently dominates the entire planet (yes, the United States exerts its power everywhere, even to places that don't welcome it [1]). Of course it's going to be challenging to make such a comparison.
I've been working on this problem for a few years now. The problem is systemic. You can solve the retail/consumer level issues but the big problems are market-level.
Here are a few facts often overlooked because they aren't surface-level.
- 1.3 billion metric tons (2,866 billion pounds) of food worldwide are produced and not consumed each year, representing approximately one-third of total food production by volume (FAO, 2011).
- Most importantly, nearly 40 percent of losses in North American fruits and vegetables occur at the farm and distributor level...before it gets to the consumer.
- USDA ERS: "The inelastic nature of fresh produce demand causes prices to fluctuate rapidly due to changes in supply. Prices fluctuate daily and can often cause the value of edible product to drop below the marginal cost of production. Depending on where and when the price fluctuations occur, produce could be left in the field, discarded at a packing shed, or dumped from the back of a truck."
- Growers today earn roughly 30 cents for every dollar their products command at the end-customer point.
It's a market system problem. It's a middleman problem. It's an incentive problem.
It's going to change but it will take time and a willingness to ignore sexy-looking things like Imperfect Produce and the like.
Loss is also slack in the system. The alternative might be food shocks when demand is underestimated and we run out of food. That is much much worse than some food getting thrown away. Food shortages are society-destroying levels of bad and some food waste is an acceptable price to pay to avoid them.
Until we get matter replicators, I don't think we can have just-in-time inventory for food.
Where do you get these numbers and what count as a loss?
Because what you are describing is ~50% of our Food produced are lost in the value chain. And being in the food industry I have never heard anything like that.
I am assuming they are figures strictly for Fresh produces such as fruit and veg?
Regarding the 40% loss rate pre-consumer - can you share any details of products and/or distribution methods which are succeeding in reducing that rate?
Honestly, not many. It's a marketplace problem. There is always demand somewhere for a product that fits X taxonomy (eg. not perfect or at a lower cost due to market flucutations).
The issue is that the market is so gummed up with middlemen that exposing the supply and demand marketwide in real-time is difficult. That's what I've been working to reverse engineer.
One of the biggest improvements has come from on-site freeze packaging and the general improvements in cold storage tech.
You can either increase the speed of info in the market or decrease the "cost" of lagging info in the form of increasing shelf life. Both reduce waste.
Can you clarify how ignoring things like Imperfect Produce helps? I'm open to it, but my impression was that Imperfect emerged simply because there was perfectly edible food being discarded because it looked off (anyone who has lived in an area anywhere near industrial agriculture already knew this due to experience with someone showing up at a soccer game with a bunch of fresh strawberries that looked weird but tasted better than anything at Safeway).
My understanding is that Imperfect Produce is, or at least is accused of, taking food that would have been donated to food banks or processed. So those weird looking strawberries were going to be made into Jam, not discarded.
Imperfect created a market for a good that already had a market and generally purchase from post-producer sellers. They aren't large enough to make a dent in the producers' waste.
Theoretically it (or something like it) could create a viable market for the food whose cost goes below market price or is not pretty, but it would have to do it at the wholesale level. Not cases of produce but dozens of truckloads a week.
In their particular case they are trying to make produce a D2C product so they have two challenges: a) build a market for a good and b) make D2C perishable profitable. For reference on b, see Blue Apron.
Got it. No idea if those accusations are true or not but that is at least a potentially valid reason to ignore Imperfect as an effective solution to food waste.
It's a gimmick. If it were meaningful it would cost less than regular, as it already does as non-gimmick farmstands and low-end grocery stores that rich yuppies don't go to.
Simply put, the premise of Imperfect Produce is incorrect. Except for some leafy greens (lettuce juice, anyone?), we have useful economic uses for second-tier produce.
The food industry isn't dumb. Where do you think all the produce at Asian markets come from?
With regards to Asian market produce, I think this is not necessarily always true. It's a mix of second-rate produce and very different (and perhaps very local) supply chains.
You can almost think of Asian produce markets as farmers markets.
I used Imperfect Produce for a while and I'm not sure if it's actually helping that much. A lot of the produce didn't actually look different and they had a pretty consistent rotation of products which implied to me that it might not be excess. Kind of like how most outlet stores actually plan and manufacturer products specifically for the outlet.
Given the nature of how food is produced - you have a field that grows stuff basically - might not overproduction be a good thing? Better to leave some potatoes in the ground in a good year than let people go hungry in a bad one?
A great example of why a post-scarcity economy will never happen. Only a miraculous invention (Replicators) will ever push production beyond a human consumption demand curve.
This article is pretty off the mark. Yes, eliminating food waste will not solve the climate problem. However, eliminating food waste will absolutely help the climate problem as well as reduce needed landfill space, and provide valuable compost.
There is very little downside to encouraging people to waste less food and to divert food waste from the trash into compost. Many people already have compost programs in their city, so it is trivial for them to stop throwing food in the trash. Food waste in landfills breaks down super slowly and releases methane into the atmosphere. This is not good. It's much better to use the food waste to make compost or to use an anaerobic digester and make carbon negative methane.
I never get the argument that because we are not solving the entire problem at once we shouldn't make any step in the right direction. Changing mentalities is a big deal. Eventually it can trickle down to our entire way of life and make for a smooth (r)evolution, with no one missing the old world.
Token solutions that make people feel good but accomplish little or often make things worse distract attention and resources from real problems and significant problems.
Got any evidence to back that up? You’re implying that wasting less food is somehow either distracting or taking resources away from real problems. In my experience it’s the people doing nothing that are so quick to point fingers and find fault with every attempt at improving our situation.
Politicians spending time advocating for, writing legislation, promoting, debating, and bragging about such things is all an enormous distraction which fools people into thinking something is being done and satisfies people would would have been disadvantaged. If politicians literally did nothing all day people would be upset and force action.
Instead politicians do the absolute minimum to seem like they are doing something when they are not.
The reason abortion, alternative identity/sexuality, the NEA, gun restrictions, extreme social benefit changes, etc dominate political attention is precisely because nothing of consequence will ever actually happen while people cheer for their cause and their team.
Kicking stones when mountains need to be moved isn't progress and should be reviled instead of celebrated.
Plastic straws are a good example. I was asking more specifically about wasting less food though, at an individual basis I don't see how this can really be a bad or distracting thing.
Recycling. All that effort to recycle and educate people about recycling and laws and bullshit, all to send it back in containers to China to be dumped in a landfill so that people wouldn’t feel like all their consumption was damaging.
All of that energy and time could have been used to educate people about reducing their consumption of materials, energy, and space. But maybe that’s not what people want anyway.
It's easier to tear something down than to build something. This is why people write articles like this.
They acknowledge the problem, claim to be on the 'correct' side of the issue and do nothing! It's not their fault all the options are bad.
People like this continue the status quo while acting like they want to move to better solutions.
Good is the enemy of perfect. I see it all the time now in all ranges of things but especially in politics and climate change. People want to have their way and if they don't have their way they would prefer nothing at all.
Another option: I saw a program about a factory in China that takes waste fruit and veg. They mash it up and feed it to billions of cockroaches. The cockroach excrement is used as fertiliser and the cockroaches are fed to chickens.
It's very low tech. The greatest expense seemed to be a team of people picking plastic rubbish out of the incoming waste.
> Many people already have compost programs in their city, so it is trivial for them to stop throwing food in the trash.
Really? I live in NYC and have never seen compost anywhere, except perhaps a community garden I'd have to walk to 20 blocks away, that is usually closed and locked? It's certainly not in my building or on the street or in any lunch restaurants I go to.
Even with high-end sustainable chains, it seems you can't trust composting actually happens [1] -- and in any case, they make up a tiny tiny sliver compared to traditional fast food.
I'm not sure where you live but "trivial" composting would appear to be a rare exception in the US. Since you seem to have it wherever you live, I'm curious how your city has made composting trivial for residents? What is the blueprint other cities should start following?
New York City has many, _many_ composting options: the city offers organic waste pickup (I don't know the details, but you'll see the brown and orange containers on trash pickup day), some food co-ops and green markets accept compost and, as you've mentioned, some community gardens also accept it.
Most/all? Whole Foods also have a dedicated compost receptacle -- I have no idea what their policy on people depositing compost from outside the store is.
Thanks, that's all very interesting. I can see how, if you're super-dedicated, you could save your organic trash and make a trip to bring it somewhere once a week or something.
However, I'll stand by my point that it's anything but trivial. The city may offer organic waste pickup in theory, but not to my apartment building or any I've ever lived in. I've never even heard of it residentially.
So spending, say, 20 minutes a week saving it and hygienically transporting the incredibly smelly contents on your subway commute, all for a small bag of apple cores, orange rinds, wilted greens and meat trimmings and such... seems like kind of an insane level of effort for a tiny return, no?
I only see composting happening realistically at scale if a law is passed requiring every apartment building to provide a compost receptacle. And I'm honestly not sure how that could be made to work hygienically. Until then...
We have two compost haulers available to us in my midsize Midwestern city. The provider we use gives us a cart that's the same size as our trash and recycling carts, and accepts a wide variety of compostable waste (not just food scraps). We fill up the compost cart much quicker than the trash cart.
I guess it all depends on your perspective and which option you pursue. I've done exactly what you've described and not found it to be a waste of time at all -- it can be a good way to get involved in your community. For instance, in my old neighborhood I found it very satisfying to take my waste to the community garden and participate in rotating it through the various stages of decomposition and then distributing the end result around the garden.
When I was living in Manhattan, I would take compost to the Fourth Street Co-op and it was a good excuse to get exercise, buy inexpensive organic food and interact with people. (You don't need to be a member to shop there and freelance life can get lonely.)
Industrial compost sites and anaerobic digesters are likely a bit smelly. People also may gripe about having a compost bin in addition to a recycling and trash bin.
Yea, smell issues are from transport of the food waste to the facilities. If you have a facility accepting waste, there will be trunks bringing in smelly stuff on a regular basis.
This article conflates "clean your plate" with taking actionable steps to minimize food waste where you have mid-level influence.
To steel man the author's arguments, the large, systemic food issues in the United States will not be solved merely by trying to keep food from spoiling in your home. Corporations trying to shame people for wasting food is the same as them shaming us for littering, when its the system that sells single use plastic that is to blame.
But lets get past the author's dismissal of books and studies, and talk about what actual, motivated humans are doing to effect change. There are currently student groups across the US at universities who have advocated with their dining service providers to create a pipeline where in excess food from the dining service is packaged in food safe containers, brought to food rescue organizations, and then fed to people in need. This isnt "cast off" food either, its high quality prepared food. In the city I live in my spouse has started working with a local school district to get them to take the excess meals from school lunches, package it, and then allow school children to take it home. If you work at a company that has a cafeteria, there is a decent chance that the food service provider is already competing for the contract on not just the basis of cost, but on the steps they are taking to minimize food waste. That comes from just better planning, but also from the hierarchy of feeding first people, then animals, and then composting when it comes to excess food.
You dont have to try to solve poverty in the US, or fix the entire system, to make actionable change. Connecting the right people, and providing the right training, could be all it takes to have your job start directing a few hundred meals a week to people in need in your own community.
Source - Spouse co-founded a national organization to redirect food waste in colleges across the nation
Do these programs have an overarching name or a good reading point I could point others to? I think it's in the realm of the possible for me locally but I'm not going to be able to get it off the ground if I have to pull together success stories, plans, etc.
Check out food recovery network for the college organization, and then food rescue us if you want to kick things off from the ground level since that's more their specialty. If you want more specific guidance PM me a contact and I can put you in touch with some folks.
Unfortunately a lot of these measures, it seems, are brought up because they’re “photogenic”, they lend themselves to inculcation of kids (like banning straws).
But, in the end it has very minimal impact on the effects we’re trying to suppress but on the other hand is very good at getting people used to doing things without thinking through issues independently. It primes kids for ready-made ideology.
Why is causing people - kids or otherwise - to contemplate their footprint on the earth or their impact to other people a bad thing?
I’ve never been a straw user, but frankly we bought some reusable metal straws (my partner uses them), some reusable portable utensils, and regularly carry our portable coffee cups when we go out in public. All things that can fit in a purse or bag. We don’t find it an inconvenience and we like that perhaps in a small way we are reducing the amount of generated waste.
Because we give false measures and waste time and energy on things which are either insignificant or end up being detrimental.
Frequently we end up with a solution which is even worse for the environment. For instance, we switched from single use plastic bags to multiple use plastic bags in new york. I spent $8 dollars on buying 4 multiuse polypropylenes bags, not a big deal, but 2 of the four bags are already beginning to rip after 5 or 6 uses. In order for the the reusable bags to be as environmentally friendly as the single use bags they need to be reused atleast a couple of hundred times. So my grocery shopping is now a couple of bucks more expensive for me (whatever) and environmentally less friendly.
Straws are likely the same deal, plastic straws are probably more environmentally friendly than their metal straws.
Straws are likely the same deal, plastic straws are probably more environmentally friendly than their metal straws.
No, they're not. Full stop. It's not just the production of the straws that matters, it's their post-use effects. They can choke birds and fish, pierce stomachs or guts, and eventually become microplastics that get eaten by plankton and fish since the plastic doesn't degrade on a timeframe relevant to human or even generational lifespans.
Tons of plastic waste ends up in the ocean, with the bulk coming from China and Southeast Asia. However, the concern with straws is the harm they cause to local wildlife at their macroscopic sizes.
Throwing it in a bin reduces the amount of trash that ends up in the ocean, but wind, homeless, gravity, can all result in trash ending up outside of the bin and on a path into the water.
> but wind, homeless, gravity, can all result in trash ending up outside of the bin
Tossing out "homeless" for a reason trash ends up in the ocean really undermines your point and makes you seem like an asshole. Maybe I'm naive, but I've never seen _anyone_ intentionally take things out of the trash and toss them somewhere else. I can't imagine this happening (caused by any human) on a scale where it is worth mentioning before mentioning negligent littering.
I see it happen at least once a week in Santa Monica. When a homeless person digs through a trash bin and leaves all the waste on the sidewalk, it's the equivalent of hundreds of people littering.
Are you aware that metal straws share all of those issues, notably that they do not degrade on human-relevant timeframes either? The difference is recycling them is a lot more costly than recycling plastics in terms of energy/heat needed.
I was not aware that metal straws turned into microplastics. This is new to me. I suppose the scientists behind these amazing devices will win Nobel prizes for this accomplishment.
Sarcasm aside, metal straws don't float, and fish and birds don't try to eat them. And unless you have some fancy expensive metal straws, in a corrosive sea salt environment the ones generally available rust in a matter of years.
the purpose of a metal straw is not to be used once then thrown away. sure, if people began throwing away their metal straws after a single use it would be as bad as plastic straws, but that's not why people use metal straws.
No, they're not. Bioplastic straws are not any more biodegradable than regular straws. The "bio" part of bioplastic identifies the inputs for the plastic.
Compostable straws can be made of bioplastics, but require high temperatures to biodegrade, meaning generally temperatures not found in nature (outside of volcanic areas).
I'm a little dumbfounded by this as well - I have reusable grocery bags going back at least fifteen years that are still very usable. The more recently acquired ones are even better and I fully intend to be using them for another 15 years - and none of them cost me more than a few dollars each and/or were given to me as freebies. This is for weekly shopping for a family of five plus 4 pets so it isn't like we are gentle on them either.
> Because we give false measures and waste time and energy on things which are either insignificant or end up being detrimental.
My kids are so indoctrinated into these habits that my four-year-old asked me which trash bin to use for a tiny spec of crust from her eye (compost was the correct answer). These habits—even over a lifetime—will have a negligible impact. But I'm confident that my kids will factor environmental issues highly for decisions (such as voting) that actually do matter.
I bought a reusable bag/container from Walmart for $20. I used it at least a hundred times over the course of a couple of years. It was in perfect condition when I switched cities and donated it to someone. Another smaller one for $15 was used twice a week for 3 years.
Those bags require even more uses to be made of them before they break even vs. plastic bags, let alone end up being a benefit. I would find it hard to believe that on average they are a net gain.
I think one of the problems is that people very much overestimate how big a problem "plastic bags at the grocery store are", because they're big, and white, and loud when they move around, and they're something so many people deal with. But they're also whisps of plastic nothingness. Save up all the bags you shop with, and see how long it takes for them to equal the mass, of, say, this: https://www.amazon.com//dp/B07HKV9339 You're going to be saving for a long time... and you're going to be saving long past the point where your best efforts have squashed those bags into the same apparent volume.
Plastic bags and straws aren't the problem. "Solving" the not-a-problem is burning people's limited give-a-damn on pointless wastes of time, and psychologically rewarding people for doing useless things to their own detriment that helps nobody.
I think you and I are optimizing for different values. I don't know about yours, but I have two (among others):
1. Restructure society to become carbon neutral.
2. Restructure society to end throwaway culture.
I understand that to some people 2 is a secondary value derived from 1. For me, both are independent primary values, not derived from any other deeper value, or from each other.
I am fairly certain that, while local moves towards the two values sometimes seem in conflict, I think on the global scale, they are roughly in the same direction. So yes, I will buy cotton bags every half decade or so, so I don't use and throw away a minuscule volume of plastic bags, that are a symbol of the throwaway culture.
Yes, that's true, I only care about actual damage to the environment. I do not care about curtailing actions that don't particularly harm it, and I would resist attempts to force people to curtail those actions just to make other people feel good.
It is not clear to me if you are advocating for everyone to not use plastic bags. If you choose to do net very-slight harm to the environment to take a stand against some thing you find aesthetically displeasing, that's find by me, because we're talking negligible values on all sides here. No sarcasm; I truly have no objection. We all tend to spend much greater on things much sillier. And you're putting your skin in the game, at your expense. No sweat.
If you are advocating that everybody should do so, that is at the very least questionable, though, and downright wrong at the government level. If the government is going to decide that environmental damage is a concern it has, which is fine, then at the very least they could use those powers to actually help the environment, rather than helping some particular people's sense of aesthetics, and their sense of aesthetics at other people's actions no less, while failing at their stated goals.
The bags are an example, it's very recent thing so near the top of my mind.
My point which I articulated poorly is that when we push environmental friendly things we should push for things which are more/actually effective, e.g. make sure you use your car for as long as possible, and build smaller, well insulated, energy efficient homes.
It's a little like Mr. Obama's Cash-for-Clunkers programme, which sounds awesome at first, right? We got all those old polluting cars off of the roads! Except that they were by and large replaced with new cars whose manufacture caused far more pollution. And the programme expended funds which would have yielded a better result elsewhere.
I don't carry any water for plastic straws — haven't used them regularly since I was a kid — but it's easily imaginable that the political capital expended to ban them would have yielded better results for the environment elsewhere.
Heck, it's very possible that your metal straws themselves caused more environmental damage than the average man's lifetime straw consumption. Or not.
These sorts of ad hoc programs are what happens when we have leaders unwilling to consider a carbon tax, which would incentivize market-selected solutions without picking winners.
Also, Cash for Clunkers was as much (or more) an economic stimulus program as an environmental program.
Nasrudith - I suppose I should caveat all this and say that I sincerely appreciate the thoughtful response to my query. Thank you for the civil discourse. That stated - this point about "instead of anything actually productive" - the issue there is, I can only do what I can do. That is, I can vote in ways I think are good for the planet. I can choose products with minimal packaging. I can compost and use my metal straws and reusable shopping bags. BUT, I can't make the US agree to the Paris agreement and I am not an executive at an energy company or what have you. Thus, each of us can only do our small part. Is that signaling? Well yes, it signals that I'm trying.
>An analogy is "Why would promoting handwashing to combat aids be a bad thing? It gets people focused on health."
Well? Do tell. While hand washing or eliminating plastic bags or eliminating plastic straws might not be the end-all be-all of good environmental stewardship or good health practices, I'm a bit dumbfounded how they can be seen in a negative light. It's flu season, be cognizant of hand washing and cover your mouth when you cough - how's that a harmful message again?
> It's flu season, be cognizant of hand washing and cover your mouth when you cough - how's that a harmful message again
Well, you don't get to say you're helping to combat aids by giving out that type of advice. If you try, you are "promoting bikeshedding and signaling contests" instead of doing anything productive [to solve the AIDS problem].
Straws are neither here nor there. More power to you on whatever choice you make.
The point is these measures solidify indoctrination. Let us tell you what to do. “We’ll think it through for you. Here is what’s good.” And as kids grow up they grow up trusting these voices telling them what’s best for them. It undercuts their critical thinking skills. It’s one big “YEA”.
Rarely are they asked to follow the rabbit hole or all the unintended consequences. But it makes people feel good about “having agency” and “doing good”.
My opinion for what it's worth is all societies do what you are complaining about. Historically most have been far more rigid with barely any introspection.
My understanding is that a lot of people had this attitude when seatbelts were first introduced as being required for vehicles. And I see it now with respect to things like straws and mandatory bicycle helmet laws. It has always come across to me as very, "Old man yells at cloud" talk. Eventually you or your children won't even miss straws and the world will be better off for having banned them. We all play a part in making things better and it's very hard to argue that not being able to use straws is a bar thing.
kinda offtopic, but I really object to lumping seatbelt laws and helmet laws together. mandatory seatbelt use is as much for the safety of people outside the vehicle as those within it. unrestrained human bodies can become dangerous projectiles in an accident.
mandatory helmet laws are dumb nanny stuff. if someone wants to split their skull on a curb, it's their own business. riding a bike/scooter at low speeds is not particularly risky anyway, and such laws add friction to a healthy and environmentally friendly means of transportation.
It seems to me that at least as big a problem in today's world is too much scepticism. Most of the time, the experts are correct. People question the science on climate change, the benefits of vaccination, whether the moon landings happened, whether the Earth is round, all based on the flimsiest of evidence.
People like to pick on straw bans but the reason they're a thing is because plastic straws represent a substantial portion of the trash found on beaches and in waterways. And like plastic trash bags, plastic straws don't degrade, they just get ground up into smaller and smaller pieces.
They can also choke fish and birds if they get caught in the throats, or poke holes in the stomachs/guts of fish and birds.
Plastic straw bans may not make much sense in the Midwest, but they do matter in coastal areas.
Looking at the composition of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, plastic straws don't qualify as a line-item in this[1] 2014 study (either by mass or count).
70.4% of the mass found in the gyre is from fishing-related items (with a whopping 58.3% of mass from fishing buoys alone).
Straws and plastic bags are targeted because they are the low hanging fruit that is easy to change. Because people are highly resistant to change, even when it's just a mild inconvenience, and addressing a small part of the problem is better than doing nothing at all.
What country do you live in ? Are straws necessities there ? I live in France and I can't remember the last time I used a straw - must have been a couple of years ago...
My teeth hurt if I drink icy beverages without a straw. I think it can also contribute to tooth staining, and probably cavities if it's a sugary drink.
There are people with disabilities that make it difficult to impossible for them to drink without using a straw. Until plastic straws were banned, they were transparently accommodated by the existing systems.
Now, they're shamed for or outright prevented from using the accessibility devices that allow them to actually, y'know, consume necessary and lifegiving liquid.
Straws were originally introduced for public health reasons, so that your mouth need not touch a surface previously touched by someone else's mouth (and which was not well-cleaned).
I'm not aware of any studies confirming or denying their advantage in the era of modern food safety standards.
So in what way have you been harmed then, if you are using a reusable straw rather than one that would otherwise end up in a landfill or require recycling? We have metal and silicon ones we use - chances are our family will never need a disposable plastic or paper straw ever again, so I fail to see how we’ve been harmed in this ban.
At the same time, I don't miss them. Turns out that I never really needed them in the first place. Sure, some people might need them, but I imagine the vast majority of people don't really need to use a straw.
It's a bit unfortunate for people with mobility issues who needed straws though. They benefited from it being a common thing and how they'll need to pack their own or something.
Same. All cold brew coffee lately seems to come without straws and I don't miss them. I do carry around a reusable straw, one of the singular swag items from a conference that I've used. It's really a small trade-off from what, for me, must have been 1000 plastic straws used annually.
You drink 3 cold brew coffees a day? Your environmental impact would be so much better just skipping one coffee a week than all of your plastic straw usage.
This is what bothers me is that it prohibits me from using straws for a nonissue.
That one-time use plastic straw - an object that no one strictly needs and has many alternatives - will persist in the environment indefinitely and will cause harm to ecosystems.
You can think that's OK (I guess), but you can't pretend that preventing permanent harmful waste is only about feeling good. It's about preventing permanent harmful waste. Feeling good can be a little bonus I suppose.
No it won't if it's in a properly managed landfill. This is the misconception that anti-plastic fanatics have. Plastic doesn't kill fish when it's trapped underground forever.
Straws in the ocean were dumped there by careless people. Since you care about the environment, there's no way you're using a paper straw so you can continue dropping it into the stormwater drain without the problems that you used to cause when you dropped plastic straws into the drain. The very people who choose paper straws are the ones that can't make any difference because they weren't the problem in the first place.
Santa Monica also has a complete ban on plastic straws, and LA City has a ban on providing them to dine-in customers unless specifically requested (https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-plastic-straws-...). LA County has a similar rule but allows for the business to ask the customer if they want a plastic straw.
San Francisco. Non-plastic straws only (so paper or even bamboo is fine), although there are a few businesses trying to work through their existing plastic stock on the down low.
If we lived in a world where 0% of food was wasted, we would be living in a world with 0% safety margin for a supply shock (aka famine).
For this reason alone, I don't mind food waste too much.
It's also a reason (although I think corn ethanol is more wasteful than useful on the whole) for the government to support corn ethanol. If famine arrives, divert the dent corn from the refineries and have everyone eat more grits.
Yeah, I don't know what number people really want to see here. Do you like pretty much always being able to get bananas and not having to murder anyone for the last loaf of bread? Then you like at least some food waste. No one can ever seem to articulate what the ideal amount of surplus really would be.
I'm not sure what the right authoritative source would be, but here's one from Iowa that claims "Traditionally, grits are made with southern dent corns": http://blog.seedsavers.org/blog/true-grits. I think the issue might be that true "flour corn" was originally grown only in the Southwest and is rare in the US these days. Most commercial corn meal these days is made from "dent" rather than "flour", which might cause the two to be confused. Carol Deppe's book "The Resilient Gardener" has a nice chapter on which corns are most appropriate for different cooking purposes.
There is some margin in food inventory, but food lead times are long (several months) and stocks (grain silos, grocery store inventory) are small relative to the rate at which they are consumed. Increasing production capacity also takes time in addition to the existing lead time.
These reasons dictate that it's more useful to think of food distribution as a flow than as a stock. In this sense thinking of calories produced divided by calories consumed straightens out thinking in the long term.
Thanks for the considered and thoughtful response.
I don't have much to add at the moment, but do still think that reducing waste (reducing the numerator, in the calorific viewpoint you suggest) is a reasonable goal - both in the supply chain and in consumer behaviour.
The lead times concern (especially during a food supply shock) is valid - the only analogy I can think of just now is backup stored energy; i.e. considering canned food as 'batteries'. Enough to survive off-grid for a while in an outage (and ideally rechargeable over longer time periods).
The food production system as a whole produces more food than humanity as a whole consumes. If you can and freeze your leftovers as an individual it does not change this.
At a system level- farms, silos, and grocery stores have no interest in storing any more stock than reasonable, and continually stuffing a growing stock into a larger warehouse/silo is wasteful.
If wide swathes of citizens changed their behavior to habitually can and freeze more leftovers, and waste less, it would be a good thing, and farms would decrease production, I agree. But it misses the point I made.
>At a system level- farms, silos, and grocery stores have no interest in storing any more stock than reasonable
That sounds like an economic failure. On one hand we have futures and maple syrup reserves to keep prices up during shortages, but we dont have reserves to address "0% safety margin for a supply shock (aka famine)"?
I would expect excess farm production to be stored for famine, as a stability control function of government. The farms still produce, still get their money, and the government has a safety net for keeping the peace during chaos.
Like I said in my unpopular comment, I dont buy it. I dont buy that canning, freezing, and drying food cant lead to a long term storage reserve. Is it a geographic size issue, that the warehouse space cant possibly exist?
Lett's say famine hits for one or two years, and we actually do get better about wasting food. Two years of famine year food usage is 1.33 years of current food usage. Its not possible to reserve that much food for the current population of a country, even dried? It sounds more like we just dont want to, the benefit doesnt outweigh the effort, or nobody wants to pay for it.
Your solutions can exist. Whether they should or not is an economic tradeoff problem. Production is not free, storage is not free either. Neither one of us have been arguing with hard data yet regarding total $ costs, or evaluation of long-term risks, but the tradeoffs do exist.
The U.S. grows 13 billion bushels of corn per year (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_production_in_the_United_...). Of this, it looks like about 1 billion bushels go to feeding U.S. residents directly. I tried to lookup the volume of corn silos in the U.S. to get a good figure for how many years' worth of consumption we keep lying around, I haven't found anything yet.
And this is all looking at a pretty low-level survival grain- canned foods are a bit more expensive to store, then fresh produce, then frozen foods, then fresh meat, etc. (approximately). These foods are also more expensive to produce.
Id be curious to see an estimate of cost to store 1 year of sunflower, pepita, dried salmon, dried seaweed, dried spinach, dried blueberry. I am imaging a really gross salmon trail mix can, you eat one can a day.
What is the main enemy of storing what is basically mass birdseed? Light/heat spoiling the fats?
> This creative accounting suggests that wasting less food would somehow undo all of the harms of food production. But the nutrient cycle does not care whether or not you clean your plate.
This nails it. Unfortunately people who compost their food waste are a negligible minority, especially in the city. I collect the food waste of a local restaurant every week, and it goes to the compost pile. I collect waste from the butcher and it goes to my dog and cat, and what they don't eat goes back to the chickens. The chickens pick through the compost pile for worms and insects and whatever proteins they find, and the compost that's left will eventually feed the garden beds and the vegetables and fruits we'll eat in the summer.
The problem comes from most first-world people lifestyles, it's an accumulation of consumerism and damaging things, like buying products with (plastic) packagings, non-necessary products (like cosmetics), non-seasonal vegetables/fruits, having pets for example (1/5th of meat and fish production is used for pets food)
Don't forget eating too much meat, which is responsible for most of the other 4/5th's.
I'm not saying everyone should be vegetarian but for most people eating 50% less meat would be a lot more impactful than avoiding plastic packaging or imported veggies.
Yes, but the fault lies with both personal decisions and large corporations. The argument you've made is most often made in bad faith to guilt consumers into ineffective actions, shifting the blame from the systems that mould wasteful lifestyles to the "weak" individual who is trying their best.
Most of the items you listed are necessary or can be made to have little impact, e.g.:
>plastic packaging
Agreed here, most of it is unnecessary. However, it is a systemic issue - buying goods (especially groceries) that do not come in plastic requires significant effort i.e. shopping at bulk food stores or farmers' markets.
>cosmetics
Sure, a lot are unnecessary, but I'd hate to go into work where nobody wore deodorant, showered, or washed their hands.
>Non-seasonal fruits/vegetables
Depends on the fruit/vegetable. Where I live in Canada buying non-seasonal/local is essential - otherwise I'd be eating apples 6 months of the year. Fruits and vegetables that can be transported by ship often have a lower impact than locally-grown.
>Having pets
Most pet food is made from by-products that would be wasted by the animal murder industry. I'm vegan, but as long as people eat meat (which, let's be real, they will) owning pets brings huge positive impact to peoples' lives, with little impact - as long as you're not feeding your dog steak.
The point is really honestly not to guilt people, it's really about the environment and a common shared effort, almost all the pollution is more or less directly coming from end-users, consumers, thus we have a huge impact. The other day I discussed with someone at supermarket in front of fruits, about reusing plastic bags, or bringing reusable bags, they told me they do reuse those small plastic bags, for picking their dogs poop. Now with a bit of distance, you realize the nonsense: poop, which is more or less good fertilizer, wrapped in plastics, all that thrown in the common bin, collected by trucks, and brought in the incinerator. And this multiplied by a bunch of people
Yes pets food is often made of secondary parts, but it's still an accelerating factor in fishing/animal farming (some suggest insects (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_food#cite_note-8) maybe), we also always forget the indirect cost and pollution, like the transport, the packaging needed to feed daily those 1 billion pets or so worldwide, and their other services, let alone side-effect like feral-cats, ... Yes in some cases pets are useful, but not all
For cosmetics, just see how uncommon has become a basic soap bar, which is however the most efficient cleaning product, and likely less polluting
Ok for fruits in winter, I can understand you as a huge fruit eater (I'm in the South of France), it's still a win-win to eat seasonal, seasonal fruit/vegs are much more nutritive. I think apples is not the best example as with a few variety you can cover the whole year, maybe not locally in Canada though, your gray Canadian apples are excellent tho
The line from Fight Club really hit me hard and sunk in deep when I saw the movie as a teen:
"We work jobs we hate to buy shit we don't need"
Want to feel less stress as work? Consume less. Want to have a smaller impact? Consume less. Want to have freedom to splurge on things that you do actually care about? Consume less.
I see many good points to think about, but it seems pretty strange to have a whole article on food waste and to talk about a “shitty system” without a single mention of meat, which is by far the largest source of food inefficiency in our system...
> There is a rosy assumption that wasting less food would make it back up the supply chain in the most impressive game of telephone ever and signal to farmers to grow less food. But that seems unlikely in an agricultural paradigm staked by subsidies that incentivize the overproduction of four or five commodity crops
It’s a decent point that we have incentivized a few crops and over-produce it. However, it’s not like supply and demand is magical. A reduction in demand can and will telephone through the system and lead to less production, it’s not an assumption or particularly impressive, it happens routinely.
Food waste happens because food is cheap and abundant. Food is cheap because it’s cheap to produce. It’s cheap to produce because a large portion of field and dairy workers are undocumented immigrants that get exploited for cheap labor. People don’t care how the food got put in front of their plate. People don’t care about the process of food production or the environmental impacts. People simply care that it’s cheap and tastes good. People won’t change their habits unless they really have to. Food waste is a by-product of a system that takes advantage of people with limited choices. Food waste is just a symptom of a larger problem.
Food is cheaper than at any other time in history. Make food expensive again and watch the wastage plummet. How to make food expensive?
- Stop subsidising farmers to over-produce
- End intensive farming of animals
- Ban imports from any country that refuses to do the same
In the process, you’d go a long way towards solving a whole bunch of environmental issues. The meat you’d produce would admittedly have a bigger carbon (and land) footprint, but the cost would make people eat less of it. Animal welfare would be massively improved.
People don’t value things that are cheap. This is one of those issues where no politician can admit the real cause, so they have to resort to posturing.
I think an important question is how much slack does the system need?
Such huge overproduction of food seems wasteful until there's a risk of famine. As the effect of coronavirus on supply chains is currently demonstrating, there are potentially giant hidden costs to maximizing efficiency at a certain point in time.
I agree with drastically decreasing meat consumption, but food production in general is, AFAIK, a relatively minor portion of total greenhouse emissions (especially everything that is not meat and especially compared to how important food is sustaining human life).
Actually, Agriculture, Forestry, and Other Land Use is 24% of global greenhouse gas emissions (2010 numbers). That is second only to Electricity and Heat Production at 25%. So it isn't relatively minor, but it is, as you point out, an important activity.
Thanks for this! I think I saw a graph where food production was only 9% and so was quite a bit smaller than the categories of industry, transportation, and electricity, but that could have been American rather than global.
For the sake of this discussion, it seems odd to include forestry with agriculture, but in any case agriculture is a more substantial part of global emissions than I thought.
Food may be cheaper than ever but there are also hundreds of millions of people who can barely afford to eat.
Any plan to intentionally raise the price of food across the board will result in millions of people being at risk of malnutrition or starvation. It's not something to suggest lightly.
The best plan for the climate is to kill all humans. But I don't think that's what we want.
In the developed world, food is so inexpensive that it is cheaper to wildly overproduce and ignore wastage. If you could eliminate poverty, you'd just end up with higher food production and the same rate of food wastage, resulting in more wasted food overall. Efforts to reduce poverty and food waste, running in parallel are what we need. Articles like these do not help.
In the developing world, most of the food wast that occurs at the source (farm/distribution) is unintentional and would be reduced with better infrastructure, policy, property rights, etc. Building a modern cold-storage warehouse in these locations is not a solution!
I was being somewhat tongue in cheek. I’m not actually saying that “expensive food” should be a goal.
I was simply trying to point out that it’s ridiculous to complain about food waste without doing anything to change a system that incentivises massive overproduction.
Why are so many things that have such a high environmental cost (water, gasoline, food, etc...) so heavily subsidized to the point where gross waste is inherent?
Because that having necessities like water, food and transportation be cheap enough that even the poors can buy enough to meet their needs is a net positive to the quality of life of a society. The trade-off is that makes them cheap enough to waste to varying degrees.
This sounds like the food version of the solutions NIMBYs propose for housing costs.
"housing is expensive because of all the skilled workers moving to SF? The solution is obviously to block all new office construction so companies move elsewhere!"
I'm involved in a volunteer organisation in my city that takes excess food from supermarkets and bakeries and reuses it, if you signup to be someone to collect the food you can either keep it for yourself or redistribute it by taking it to a shared fridge for homeless people. There is often far too much for a single household so it usually taken to these fridges or shelters. I work directly as someone who collects the food and also on programming related tasks to keep the organisations website and apps running to coordinate pickups. There are 30,000 people involved in this initiative in cities all over Europe. While it may not "solve climate change" or "solve homelessnes" it has a direct impact on my local community, we can all only work in the frameworks we're given while rallying and voting for bigger systematic changes at the same time. The idea that one activity somehow cancels out or distracts from a bigger issue is bullshit, humans are capable of caring about and being involved in multiple causes.
Its too early to add more "Mickey Mouse math" to "food stuff" waste, but humanity will need to figure out the math/processes to a self-sustaining food supply for space exploration and habitation, so the authors timing couldn't be better.
Humanity has a valid excuse to cord-cut from much of the 20th century AG and water systems and see what combination of solutions that automation, more time (fewer jerbs) and scientific leaps bring to the table in the way of working models.
Even if we don't get to explore space, we should at least get to see the quality of ingredients go up exponential as we start eating more "fresh off the vine" food in our daily meals as a byproduct of the research.
If they can get the angle right and ride the coat-tails of space expansion, they'll cut thru decades of red-tape to bypass the existing infrastructure and entrenched investors to clear a path for sustainable agriculture research.
> In her 1998 book Sweet Charity? Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement, sociologist Janet Poppendieck controversially argued that, rather than seriously addressing the problem of hunger, food shelves and other nodes of the charity-based “emergency food system” unintentionally served to perpetuate it in their feeble attempts to mend the holes in the social safety net wrought by Reagan-era bootstrapping and Clinton-era welfare reform. Rather than focus more structurally on workers’ rights and economic justice issues, organizations and institutions coalescing around fighting hunger concerned themselves with addressing immediate needs in ways that did not rock the boat politically.
If bad building and furniture regulations were causing home fires, we would of course want to focus on improving those. But we would still need fire fighters.
If we continually needed more firefighters, and the government either refused to hire them or couldn't afford them, so a volunteer group took up the cause and got people to donate money for trucks and volunteer their time to fight fires...this would cover up the problem sufficiently so that it would seem like "we only need to have enough firefighters to get to zero casualties relating to fire". Which means that we would not have a focus on improving the bad building and furniture regulations.
Sometimes you need people to see how bad things truly are, before you can get the resources to fix them at the root.
Yes, there are limits. The food system sucks. But it sucks because people had become mindless about the system, the junk they're stuffing into their mouth, etc.
If being aware of waste wakes some of them up then that's a step in the right direction. Sleeping people can't care.
I think I know how to fix food waste :): Everyone learns to cook and eat their own food. We decentralize the food system. It's disturbing that we come to rely on other people's cooking our food. When I buy and cook my own food, I find it very hard to not waste food. There's a lot of planning to budget my own food for the week. For businesses, they need to plan for change in volume as well as making money. Then it's an easy call: optimize for money, food waste is not a problem.
The foodservice industry is huge. Recently, there's a new trend: software eats the food industry. We'll continue to waste more food as we try to make more money.
Most great dishes are invented by the people, not corporations or governments, except maybe Pad Thai. We'll have more great food if we put our own creativity into food. We don't have to declare war on anybody. We just cook our own food.
Complete nonsense article. Only a US person, or generally someone who is unfamiliar with the history of food rationing, could've written something like this.
Ideally, if eating less food, they should produce less food.
Even better, though, rather than throw it away, diverting it to people who lack sufficient food would be nice.
You do have a point that occurred to me before... By the time you've purchased too much food and have it on your plate, it's not actually better to finish eating it versus throw it away. There's no advantage to obesity.
The easiest way to eliminate food waste would be to eliminate fresh produce, meat, and baked goods. If it can't be canned or frozen, process it and pump it full of preservatives until it can.
Except for all the extra packaging needed....not to mention the energy overhead of the processing operation and the fact that a world with only preserved food would suck......like really hard.
I'd like to see a comparison of the energy costs of canning versus maintaining the refrigeration chain needed for fresh, my gut tells me that canning is a centralized process and therefore more open to efficiencies than refrigerated trucks and storage.
But anyone who's worked produce can tell you a lot of stuff gets thrown away at each step before it reaches the consumer.
Most people won't even sacrifice food they like to avoid the suffering of conscious beings. The "environment" is even more abstract. It's a non-starter.
A very effective way to reduce food waste is to make sure produce is not damaging during shipping and handling. You just need to wrap individual fruits and vegetables in a lot of plastic.
This is my big takeaway from this article.
It is crazy how much well intentioned people do in the interests of sustainability, and how astoundingly futile or even counter productive it is. At the end of the day, people would rather feel nice about themselves than make actual change.
At its base level things like urban design, our reliance on cars, subsidies on crop mono-cultures and the lack of proper introspection as a people hurt us far more than any of these specific problems.
Maybe we should start at the most basic question. Is food-waste even a bad thing to begin with. Food waste has been proven to not be the cause of malnutrition issues plaguing some parts the US or the world. If it is because of depleting water resources or land fertility, then crop-monocultures and mono culture subsidies are more at fault. Being sustainable is clearly more expensive, so it is certainly not a cost issue.
Across social, policy and organizational issues in the world, activists routinely assume a vague sense of what is "good" and then champion it, without actually looking into why something is good or what the word means in that context to begin with.
I know that not everyone is as utilitarian about how they go about things, but I often wonder if a concept even holds ground if it cannot be rephrased in a manner that makes sense in a utilitarian setting.