What aspects of today's society will we be ashamed of in sixty years?

[jacob]

I'd love to see the numbers.

http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.10 ... 326/aa7541 (see paper for methods)

All impacts are in tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year.

Each child: +58.6
Driving a car: +2.4
Transatlantic flying (once annually): +1.6
Eating a meat-based diet: +0.8
Not recycling: +0.2
Using incandescent lights: +0.1

[C40]

ahhh come on, Rigger. Not every vegan is doing so for virtue signaling. Many do it because it's cheaper. Many do it because it's simpler. Many do it because (they think) it's healthier. Many do it because (they think) it will help them lose weight. Don't base your view of the whole group on just the annoying vocal ones.

The thing about vegans proselytizing is, when it comes to environmental improvements, proselytizing is needed.

They can't just buy and shut down a chicken farm. The one next door will simply ramp up production. Within the realm of stopping chicken consumption, they need to get closer to the root cause - to convince individual people to stop eating chicken. (I think) The annoyance I have with them is that many of them do it in a very un-persuasive and unreasonable way.


@GandK (K) - it seems like you just can't win. People get tons of pressure (and shame) from their family for not having kids. But, anyways, I guess those annoying comments you get are a good sign that overpopulation shaming is starting. (aside from the fact that they aren't your kids of course and in your case it doesn't make sense, but they don't know that)

[C40]

@Jacob - ahhh thank you, thank you. I'm saving that list and article.

[Fish]

I’m not interested in disputing methodology, but here is additional context for those too lazy to click Jacob’s link:

For the action ‘have one fewer child,’ we relied on a study which quantified future emissions of descendants based on historical rates, based on heredity (Murtaugh and Schlax 2009). In this approach, half of a child’s emissions are assigned to each parent, as well as one quarter of that child’s offspring (the grandchildren) and so forth.

And then from the abstract of Reproduction and the carbon legacies of individuals:

Under current conditions in the United States, for example, each child adds about 9441 metric tons of carbon dioxide to the carbon legacy of an average female, which is 5.7 times her lifetime emissions.

[Ego]

@Ego...

I have given my in-laws grief (in a kidding sense) for years about their vegan diets and at no point did they reference any of this. They approached it from a personal preference standpoint (which I think they did so as not to offend me) but I almost want to say "Why didn't you mention this?", because when I discussed this with them recently they were well aware of the research.

Crosspost... Perhaps this thread will give you some insight into your in-laws reasoning.

http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.10 ... 326/aa7541 (see paper for methods)

Jacob, that's a great study. I had no idea the impact of an additional child was so large. And air travel. I knew there was an impact.... but ....yikes!

I've got some areas to work on.

Here is the conclusion.

We have identified four recommended actions which we believe to be especially effective in reducing an individual's greenhouse gas emissions: having one fewer child, living car-free, avoiding airplane travel, and eating a plant-based diet. These suggestions contrast with other top recommendations found in the literature such as hang-drying clothing or driving a more fuel-efficient vehicle. Our results show that education and government documents do not focus on high-impact actions for reducing emissions, creating a mitigation gap between official recommendations and individuals willing to align their behaviour with climate targets.

[BRUTE]

what if humans killed 2 birds with 1 stone by eating their children tho

[Riggerjack]

That's not vegan!

[BRUTE]

All impacts are in tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year.

Each child: +58.6
Driving a car: +2.4
Transatlantic flying (once annually): +1.6
Eating a meat-based diet: +0.8
Not recycling: +0.2
Using incandescent lights: +0.1

so recycling, veganism, and energy saving lightbulbs are all lies? brute knew it.

[batbatmanne]

I think that one of the problems here is that most vegans are not vegan for environmentalist reasons. Most vegans are vegan because they have seen animals being treated badly and then slaughtered (in real life or some documentary) and so they decided that they didn't want to be involved with that sort of behavior if they could avoid it. I take this to be the "ethical" argument for veganism, although I prefer to think about it as something like "the argument from compassion," which is less an argument that appeals to the rational faculties than dutiful/emotional/aesthetic/whatever. Something like: "Gah!, can't you all see that all of these animals are suffering dearly? Why on Earth would you involve yourself in subjecting them to this if you don't have to? Please, try to have more compassion."

The environmentalist and health aspects of veganism usually just fall neatly into the "if you don't have to" part of the equation. It is convenient for vegans that their diet is both better from an environmentalist and health perspective, and most have picked up on the fact that other people who don't share their compassion for animals might nevertheless care about these things, so they appeal to these instead. Veganism was never meant to sit comfortably alone atop environmentalism, although some vegans seem to have wed their compassion for animals and their compassion for the condition of the environment in what I can only describe as a kind of mystical world view that is not very persuasive.

If, in 60 years, "we" are ashamed of the animal agriculture industry of today, then I hope it is because we are all much more compassionate, rather than because we wished to save a ton of CO2 emissions per person per year, or whatever.

[jacob]

so recycling, veganism, and energy saving lightbulbs are all lies? brute knew it.

No, they're not wrong. They're just totally inadequate. Recall the quote Ego posted above from the other thread. There are some things some of us know but don't say out loud because the resulting conversation is unpossible. I suspect wise men decided that change is better by starting with small steps instead of explaining the enormity of what is actually required because most people would just give up already. At least that's the strategy also used in weight loss, financial planning, etc.

[Fish]

@brute - From the “Reproduction and the carbon legacies of individuals” paper (PDF), this is the conclusion that the authors intended:

Clearly, the potential savings from reduced reproduction are huge compared to the savings that can be achieved by changes in lifestyle. For example, a woman in the United States who adopted the six non-reproductive changes in Table 3 would save about 486 tons of CO2 emissions during her lifetime, but, if she were to have two children, this would eventually add nearly 40 times that amount of CO2 (18,882 t) to the earth’s atmosphere.

This is not to say that lifestyle changes are unimportant; in fact, they are essential, since immediate reductions in emissions worldwide are needed to limit the damaging effects of climate change that are already being documented (Kerr, 2007; Moriarty and Honnery, 2008). The amplifying effect of an individual’s reproduction documented here implies that such lifestyle changes must propagate through future generations in order to be fully effective, and that enormous future benefits can be gained by immediate changes in reproductive behavior.

[7Wannabe5]

@batbatmanme:

Compassion focused at a distance can become problematic. Thoughtful people who have experience with producing food need to be brought into the discussion in order to avoid unintended consequences of well meant policies or practices. For instance, absent hunting or predation, deer in my region will most likely die from starvation or automobile strike. So, if a soybean farmer built a fence, the decision to build that fence would directly starve some deer in order to feed some humans.

[Ego]

For instance, absent hunting or predation, deer in my region will most likely die from starvation or automobile strike. So, if a soybean farmer built a fence, the decision to build that fence would directly starve some deer in order to feed some humans.

Deer? They are a convenient distraction. In the US we're talking about beef cattle, chicken, pigs and turkeys that would not have existed if not for the meat/dairy/egg industries. If they did not exist, their suffering would not exist.



Deer are indigenous and natural to the region. If they are suffering as a result of human action, we should do something about that too.

[batbatmanne]

Compassion focused at a distance can become problematic. Thoughtful people who have experience with producing food need to be brought into the discussion in order to avoid unintended consequences of well meant policies or practices. For instance, absent hunting or predation, deer in my region will most likely die from starvation or automobile strike. So, if a soybean farmer built a fence, the decision to build that fence would directly starve some deer in order to feed some humans.

Certainly we should be aware that our actions can have many intended and unintended consequences, and we should consider these when implementing policy. I'm not an ethical consequentialist, so I'm not very much into trying to determine whether shooting some deer vs letting some starve is going to be better or worse from the deers' perspective in order to decide what should be done. I am much more about letting the deer and nature sort that out for themselves--a policy of non-interference. For what it's worth, I also extend this policy to interference in a positive regard: I don't think that we should feed the ducks. Some vegans would argue that this too indicates a lack of compassion in me. It might be said of them that they would ideally turn the entire world into a giant zoo (preferably of the petting variety). We needn't wonder how they would feed the lions, a significant number of vegans are enamored by domesticated cats and make feeding them the sole exception to their principles. Perhaps they should lose their vegan cards.

Anyway, I'm not interested in turning the world into a giant zoo. I take the example of unintended consequences of hunting policies to be a red herring in light of the subject of this thread. What I hope people are ashamed about in 60 years is subjecting tens of billions of animals every year to a life of pain and misery, followed up by untimely death via slaughter, all because we value our palate and the status quo more than their suffering (and our environment and health). The scale of the number of animals effected and of the harms perpetrated by this are orders of magnitude greater compared to hunting land animals. This is the paradigm for how humans value other creatures in today's society. Whatever amount of this suffering that is lacking in our consumption of marine wildlife is made up for in the ravaging of marine ecosystems that follows from this practice as well.

[bryan]

So.... how likely is it that having children (particularly having more than one or two per couple) will be seen as a shameful thing in the future? Especially world-wide?

I could see this as a possibility.. but maybe not in sixty years (more like 160). Even then, it could be less shame and more "it was a different world back then."

I could also see the prevalence of eating a "non-soylent" (the movie/concept, not the current product) meal (i.e. meat or produce not local) of such incredibly low quality (e.g. McD's) as being shameful. I could also see it as "back then food actually had taste and texture!"

The driving culture we have had so far is pretty barbaric. Sixty years from now all the deaths and wasted time/energy will look pretty ridiculous.

Generally, such a physical-based, high turnover, high plastic consumer culture (e.g. buying upgrades to your appliances or cars or cookware etc.) will look like an epic waste.

And now I see @jacob's post/source. I guess it lines up pretty nicely with my thoughts? Though we are all too focused on energy/pollution/sustainability in this thread. Maybe we need more answers along the lines of "looking at your smartphone/instagram all the time."

[Riggerjack]

Well, I think we've all said about what we have to say about vegans and veganism.

Let introduce a new area of shame: central sewage processing.

Hah! You didn't expect that, did you?

I own 3 houses, 2 are currently on central sewer, the Whidbey house has its own onsite sewage processing, better known as a septic system.

With a septic system, gray water and black water go into a central tank, sits for a few days, feeding anaerobic bacteria, and then flows to a second tank, where the same thing happens, then the effluent goes into a drain field. In my case, that is a large underground chamber where it spills on the biomat, feeding aerobic bacteria, then filters into the ground water. Slowly, it filters through the ground, until it gets pumped back up as drinking water at my well, or goes to a stream, or drops down to sea level.

That's a bit horrifying, isn't it?

But I was there for the installation of the system, and have gone out and inspected at all the inspection ports, and what I saw was not at all what I imagined. For one thing, the vast majority of our waste is gray water. For another, by the time it clears the tanks, effluent is clear, with little smell. There was no smell or effluent in the drain field. But consider that nothing goes to the drain field any faster than you use water in the house. So if my wife did laundry, and ran the dishwasher while showering (never happen, my wife hates changes of water pressure in the shower), then about 3-4 gallons per minute would go to my drain field, where it would feed bacteria.

Contrast this with central sewage. Everything goes into a pipe, where it gets dumped in the first pond. (Just like my primary tank) After enough time, it gets pumped to a second pond, that has a big pump, to add oxygen. This is like my second tank and drain field in one. Then it gets pumped into the river.

Wait, I hear you say, pumped where? Directly into the river. Almost all sewage plants are right on the river fronts. That's where the lowest local point is, so it works with gravity, and rivers do such a fine job of making all that water go away.

Now effluent is not drinking water. There will be some dissolved chemicals the bacteria can't use. Of primary concern is bioavailable nitrogen.

Bioavailable nitrogen is the pollutant that causes such havoc in water systems, because it is basically dumping fertilizer. This causes massive growth in aquatic plants, which increases dosolved oxygen. But, the dumping isn't constant, and the growth/death rates of the aquatic plants is faster than the nitrogen cycle, causing a huge buildup of dead vegetation, causing a massive spike in bacteria growth, which again has a faster growth/death cycle faster than the fertilizer cycle.

These dead and decaying bateria then cause a drop in dissolved oxygen. This results in fish kills.

I started looking into this when I couldn't go fishing at my usual camping spot on the hood canal. The hood canal, in the Puget sound had such low oxygen, the deepwater fish were swimming, eyes bulging from pressure change, within 20 feet of the surface. Dead fish floated up to the beaches. Most inland saltwater fisheries have experienced this and more.

This is nothing new. We have been doing this for decades, and blaming landowners for using too much fertilizer. Or soap (soap is high in nitrogen, has a short shelf life, and sure makes a good villain, in that we can blame soap, and nobody will change anything.)

Now that may seem a bit paranoid/conspiracy theorist, but it is the only way I have found to understand the actions, and inaction, of our local governments.

Here is a link to a study of nitrogen in the Puget sound:
http://www.ecy.wa.gov/programs/eap/Nitr ... easonality
You see how the discharge from central sewage processing accounts for between 60-80 percent of the nitrogen problem?

Let me say that again, 60-80 percent. 60 percent in the winter, when it isn't as bad, and 80 percent in the summer, the worst time to dump fertilizer into the river.

So it's fair to say we know why we have a problem, and where it's coming from.

http://www.ecy.wa.gov/puget_sound/whatyoucando.html

The the dept of ecology sums this up on the "what you can do" page: "Puget Sound faces many threats. More than 60 percent of water pollution comes from things like cars leaking oil; fertilizers and pesticides from farms, lawns and gardens; faulty and aging septic systems; pet waste; and fuel spills from recreational boaters."

Hmm. Yeah, probably better not to mention sewage processing plants.

In the future, someone will have to explain why we built our cities with the intent to shit in the rivers. But the embarrassing part will be why nobody has a problem with it.

[Ego]

@Riggerjack, You left out the best part. All septic systems need to be de-sludged every so often. The company you use to haul away this sludge then dumps it... guess where... at the wastewater treatment plant.

[Riggerjack]

Yeah. That is the health department solution. For an idea of the volume we are talking about, there was 4 inches of sludge at the bottom of our primary tank after 2 people used it for 3.5 years.

A proper system would include a parallel set of tanks and a valve just switch out tanks every 5 years by turning the valve, and let the resting tank dry out. After 5 years you would have dry, clean, compost. This would add about a grand to installation costs, and save 500 in pumping fees every 3 years.

[7Wannabe5]

@Ego@batbatmanme:

There is virtually no place left on Earth where wildlife is not managed by humans. Raccoons and deer ate approximately 2-5% of corn and soybean crops in the Midwest last year. Deer love soybeans. Raccoons love sweet corn. Soybean farmers have been pushing hard for extended hunting season and permits.

This is not a red herring. Humans can't reproduce as nearly as quickly as deer, so we can only win a competition for nitrogen in plant form against them by hunting them. There are only 300,000 cows in Michigan and there over 1,000,000 deer. The DNR recently dropped the age to acquire hunting license from 14 to 12 because the majority of hunters are over the age of 40 because kids today prefer video games. Deer breathe and fart and produce CO2 too. So, not hunting a deer might be calculated to be as bad for an individual's footprint as giving birth to a human child.

That said, I am in favor of the whole concept of factories being abolished including factory farms. What member of any species besides the likes of Rockefeller and Bezos was ever made happy by a factory? I vote for the whole era of industrial production of everything as shameful.

@Riggerjack:

I agree that human waste should be cycled to fertilize crops grown in the home garden. I would also note that all surfaces that are paved or otherwise denuded of humus by humans will serve towards increasing runoff to rivers. The science behind the destructive process you witness in fishing area can be reversed to create healthy aquaculture in even a small backyard.

[Ego]

@Ego

There is virtually no place left on Earth where wildlife is not managed by humans. Raccoons and deer ate approximately 2-5% of corn and soybean crops in the Midwest last year. Deer love soybeans. Raccoons love sweet corn. Soybean farmers have been pushing hard for extended hunting season and permits.

Back to where we started. If we were to eat tofu rather than feeding the soybeans to meat producing animals then we'd need 97% less farmland.