Every doomsday activist that makes a big, bold claim invariably turns out to be wrong.
The reason pessimists often sound smart is that they can avoid being ‘wrong’ by moving the goalposts. When a doomer predicts that the world will end in five years, and it doesn’t, they just move the date. The American biologist Paul R. Ehrlich – author of the 1968 book The Population Bomb – has been doing this for decades. In 1970 he said that ‘sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come. And by “the end” I mean an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.’ Of course, that was woefully wrong. He had another go: he said that ‘England will not exist in the year 2000’. Wrong again.I wish I could reach back to my younger self and hug her.
just 54% [of humans] have a safe toilet, and just 60% have clean fuels. We must ensure access to these resources, but regardless of what metric we’re looking at, the trend is consistently upward. Every day, 300,000 people get access to electricity and a similar number get clean water, for the first time. This has been the case every day for a decade.
When weighing up the price of taking action, we tend to compare it to the alternative of investing nothing at all. But that’s wrong. There are societal costs to not taking action that we forget to factor in. We might think that spending hundreds of millions of dollars is expensive. But that’s because we ignore the alternative: the costs of not fixing the problem.
Every day I come across motivated and thoughtful people trying to do their best for the environment. They think about the environmental impact of almost every decision they make. Or they home in on some things that they think will make a huge difference. What’s heart-breaking is that this energy and stress is often wasted: what they’re doing makes almost no difference, and, as we’ll see later, occasionally makes things worse.
Death rates from disasters have actually fallen since the first half of the 20th century. And not just by a little bit. They have fallen roughly 10-fold.
Anyone that trusted the Netflix documentary Cowspiracy would believe that cutting out meat will stop the climate crisis. The film claims that more than half of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions come from livestock. This is nonsense. The actual number is just under a fifth.
What’s most frustrating about the opposition to genetic engineering is that, once again, it often hurts the poorest the most.
Eating organic – it is not always better for the environment
organic farming tends to give us lower crop yields, which (yes, you know where I’m going) means we need to use more land.
organic farming was worse for the pollution of rivers and lakes.
study in the US investigated the 10 most common pesticide residues across 12 food groups. They found that all foods had pesticide levels well below the limits. The majority (75%) of foods were less than 0.01% of the limit. This means residue levels were a million times lower than the threshold that would have observable effects on our health.
for many foods the plastic is there for a reason: it keeps our food safe and fresh, and it stops us from throwing it in the bin, which makes a much bigger difference.
He started a degree in aerospace engineering, but like all the best entrepreneur stories, he dropped out to start his own venture.
Europe and Oceania combined contribute less than 1%. It’s hard to accept these figures. It tells a story that we don’t really want to hear. As a European, I want to think that we can play a big role in fixing this problem by cutting back on our plastic wrappers, ditching our single-use shopping bags, and recycling our used milk cartons. Sadly, this isn’t true. If everyone in Europe stopped using plastics tomorrow the world’s oceans would hardly notice the difference.
I’ve done some back-of-the-envelope calculations, and estimate that rich countries would contribute between 1.6% (in the best case) and 10% (in the worst case) of ocean plastics through shipping waste overseas. The most likely figure probably falls somewhere in between.
Most of the evidence – or maybe the lack of evidence – suggests that the plastic particles themselves are not a big concern for human health.
At the moment, I am not very worried about the impacts of plastics on human health, but I admit that the evidence is not clear enough to have a strong opinion either way.
Plastic straws really don’t matter
I’m not an advocate for plastic straws. I don’t really care about them. But I do care about ineffective policies, especially if they take the place of ones that could really make a difference. Plastic straws are just not a big deal in the scale of the world’s plastic pollution.
My one request is that we quickly move past the paper straw phase.
the occasional plastic carrier bag is not that big a deal.
In fact, in many ways, a single-use plastic bag is better than some alternatives. You’d need to use a paper bag several times, and a cotton one tens to hundreds of times to ‘break even’ with the plastic carrier.
you should be focusing much more on what you put in the bag than the bag itself. It will have a much bigger environmental impact.
A well-managed landfill, deep in the ground, can be a very effective environmental solution.
Most people think landfills are awful, but they could be effective storage sites for carbon
Think about it in terms of trees. When we burn wood or leave it to decompose, it emits CO2. If we bury it instead, this carbon is ‘locked in’ and we have taken some CO2 out of the atmosphere. This is called a ‘carbon sink’.
Some decomposition still happens in landfills, but mostly from organic matter such as food waste and paper.
I still get the instinctual pull towards ‘natural’ solutions. Working against it takes repeated, and sometimes uncomfortable, effort. Yet it’s something that we need to overcome. The fact that our intuitions are so ‘off’ is a problem. At a time when the world needs to eat less meat, we’ve seen a pushback against meat-substitute products because they’re ‘processed’. When we need to be using less land for agriculture we’ve seen a recent resurgence in organic, but more land-hungry, farming. When more of us need to be living in dense cities I hear more people dreaming of a romantic life in the countryside with a self-sufficient garden plot.
Lab-grown meat, dense cities and nuclear energy need a rebrand. These need to be some of the new emblems of a sustainable path forward.
We want to believe in ‘people power’ – that if we all just pull together and act a bit more responsibly then we’ll get there. Unfortunately, to make real and lasting progress we need large-scale systemic and technological change. We need to change political and economic incentives.
get involved in political action and vote for leaders who support sustainable actions.
One positive policy change can almost immediately trump the individual efforts of millions of people.
No comments:
Post a Comment