The sustainability thread: tilting at windmills

[The guy from the Vale]

You do know that Swift was sarcastic in that proposal? There are reasons Swift was considered chiefly a satirist, and this was one of them.

[LongRider]

Not Darwinian,  just fucking cruel. Charles Darwin was not a Social Darwinist. 

[The Anti-Targ]

2 hours ago, Cubarey said:

Another alternate would br to let those societies that cannot grow enough food to feed their people to starve to death. Drastic alternative, even Darwinian but I think that a similar idea by Johnathon Swift was proposed that would have solved the food shortage in Ireland several hundred years ago.

Why though? It's not like there isn't enough food for those billion hungry people. It's literally unnecessary to apply food austerity measures of any sort because there is literally enough to go around. And it's not like that billion people would just shrug and accept their lot. So in the interests of economic, social and military stability the best approach is to get them the food they need. Hopefully those countries can eventually create the industries necessary to be able to trade for the food they can't supply to themselves, but wealthy country aid budgets would be well spent in compensating business who would need to supply the food at a below market price. In the long term it's a small price to pay for a more stable global situation.

It's really the corrupt leadership in some of these places that's a major barrier. So if selective culling were to be considered I'd suggest there would only need to be a few thousand deaths at most, though starvation would not be the method.

[Cubarey]

12 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

I guess this is as good a thread as any to mention this finding from a recent APEC report about Non-Tariff trade barriers in food and agricultural trade:

Part of the report talks about food security, and in particular the false assumption that food self-sufficiency = food security.

It's almost a crime against humanity to have the capacity to fully meet the basic dietary needs of everyone on the planet right now, yet 1/7th of the population does not have adequate access to food. Clearly it's not production that is a problem, it's distribution. Which means food trade needs to be opened up. The alternative to moving food from where it is most abundantly produced to the populations who need it, is to redistribute the population to the places where the food is produced. I would say that for the time being moving the food around is preferred to mass migration of people.

 

Another alternate is for let those societies that cannot grow enough food to feed their people to starve to death. Drastic alternative, even Darwinian but I think that a similar idea by Johnathon Swift would have solved the food shortage in Ireland several hundred years ago.

[Cubarey]

9 hours ago, theguyfromtheVale said:

You do know that Swift was sarcastic in that proposal? There are reasons Swift was considered chiefly a satirist, and this was one of them.

Actually Swift was mainly a political philosopher and commentator he used Satire as one of the tools he used to make his views. And obviously, if I am educated enough to make a reference to a 400 year old writing I am educated enough to understand that he had his tongue firmly in his cheek when he wrote that piece. My failure is in assuming that readers in this thread would understand that I was using hyprbole (a type of satire).

 

 

" Why though? It's not like there isn't enough food for those billion hungry people."

 

To put it bluntly because they cannot pay for the food. Feeding billions of people indefinately as charity is not a long term alternative. We need to attack the problem in three ways: 1, offer short term aid to prevent starvation, 2, require that such governments place into practice policies that would limit their population growth and increase their food production. If 2 and 3 are not done we are simply delaying the day that there will be a regional starvation event and guaranteeing that the number of people starving will only be larger.

 

 

[IheartIheartTesla]

On 12/1/2016 at 11:07 AM, Datepalm said:

 I think there's a slightly more insidious, rather than merely depressing quality to this, in that the making of sustainability is shifted, politically speaking, onto consumers. The effort and the blame and the guilt becomes on the individual consumer or household for having a car (because you live in a city with shit public transport,) or buying at walmart (because that's what you can afford,) etc, and not on the actual underlying, unsustainable economics and infrastructure.

I'm weirdly kind of with commodore here - systemic efficiency is much more significant, by orders of magnitude, but this is a way some of that pressure is getting moved off giant corporations, government and planners and onto whether or not you ate a burger is a way of watering down the politics of it. 

You know, for the first quoted part, I hadnt though about it this way before, but you are absolutely right. Maybe there is a greater societal aspect to this - we have to stop buying from companies that use Somalian child labor for clothes or we have to stop eating crap food saturated with HFCS and salt, rather than companies/government doing the right thing etc...Same thing with sustainability too.

For the second part, systemic efficiency is a big part of it, but I'm not sure disruptive technologies cant make an equally big impact. One example - if your laundry detergent was entirely made up of enzymes rather than surfactants, you'd probably pay $20 for a jug of it, but you could then run your wash at colder temperatures and save the planet. Or companies could sell it at slightly lesser profit....solutions like those exist (I should know, I work for a corporation), but institutional barriers to more expensive/less profitable products are huge.

[Ice Queen]

I try to do my part for the environment. Our borough recycles pretty much everything, right down to collecting everyone's leaves and tree branching and mulching them--then in the spring they give it away free to any borough resident who wants it. I use only reusable grocery bags, but the plastic bags I do get I donate to our local plarners. They knit the bags together to make weather-resistant sleeping mats for the homeless and people in disaster areas. 

We just moved to a new house, so the first order of business in the spring is to build a rain barrel and a compost pile. Having a rain barrel saves roughly 400 gallons of water in one summer. We have mice (everyone around here does), but that just comes with the territory. The roof here is only a few years old, but if Elon Musk's solar roof tiles ever come to fruition, I'm willing to redo it. 

I'm a gardener, and I always plant a native plant garden. They use far less water because they're adapted and evolved for the local ecology, but the wildlife and insects also rely on them for food and shelter. The bees love it. 

One thing I do need to do is buy a more fuel efficient car. I have a 2002 Honda Accord EX. It's a V6 and not particularly fuel efficient at all. If they ever get the price of electric cars down to no more than I'd pay for a Civic, sign me up. Otherwise, I guess it's another Honda, but a Civic instead of an Accord. 

[Ice Queen]

On 12/1/2016 at 11:04 PM, The Anti-Targ said:

Why though? It's not like there isn't enough food for those billion hungry people. It's literally unnecessary to apply food austerity measures of any sort because there is literally enough to go around. And it's not like that billion people would just shrug and accept their lot. So in the interests of economic, social and military stability the best approach is to get them the food they need. Hopefully those countries can eventually create the industries necessary to be able to trade for the food they can't supply to themselves, but wealthy country aid budgets would be well spent in compensating business who would need to supply the food at a below market price. In the long term it's a small price to pay for a more stable global situation.

It's really the corrupt leadership in some of these places that's a major barrier. So if selective culling were to be considered I'd suggest there would only need to be a few thousand deaths at most, though starvation would not be the method.

Exactly correct. Modern famines aren't caused by a lack of food. They're caused by corrupt governments restricting or denying citizens access to food. 

[Pecan]

5 hours ago, Crazy Cat Lady in Training said:

Exactly correct. Modern famines aren't caused by a lack of food. They're caused by corrupt governments restricting or denying citizens access to food. 

It's markets though too right? Farm subsidsidies in the US, for example, destroy markets for commodity crops in the third world. And these markets have enough trouble given the lack of infrastructure in typical third world countries. 

[Ice Queen]

1 hour ago, Pecan said:

It's markets though too right? Farm subsidsidies in the US, for example, destroy markets for commodity crops in the third world. And these markets have enough trouble given the lack of infrastructure in typical third world countries. 

Yeah, don't get me started. But the point is that there's more than enough food to feed every man, woman and child on the planet several times over. Outrageous food prices falls under restricting access.

[The Anti-Targ]

1 hour ago, Pecan said:

It's markets though too right? Farm subsidsidies in the US, for example, destroy markets for commodity crops in the third world. And these markets have enough trouble given the lack of infrastructure in typical third world countries. 

Well yes, subsidies do distort markets and lead to inefficiencies in production systems. We became the most efficient farmers in the world after all farm subsidies were eliminated in the 1980s, and hence from the arse end of the world almost as far away as you can get from major centres of population we export $billons of food and make a decent profit from it. We produce almost 10 times the amount of food we need for our population, so if we couldn't produce efficiently and profitably we'd be in trouble economically and environmentally.

[Galactus]

The problem is that food, economically speaking, is a bit of a sucker's game. (basic foodstuffs that is) 

Basically the reason is the fact that it's a neccessity, which means that the richer people get, the less they spend proportionally on food, while at the same time the costs for actually running a farm goes up way faster than the profits. 

[maarsen]

On 2016-12-06 at 10:35 AM, Crazy Cat Lady in Training said:

I try to do my part for the environment. Our borough recycles pretty much everything, right down to collecting everyone's leaves and tree branching and mulching them--then in the spring they give it away free to any borough resident who wants it. I use only reusable grocery bags, but the plastic bags I do get I donate to our local plarners. They knit the bags together to make weather-resistant sleeping mats for the homeless and people in disaster areas. 

We just moved to a new house, so the first order of business in the spring is to build a rain barrel and a compost pile. Having a rain barrel saves roughly 400 gallons of water in one summer. We have mice (everyone around here does), but that just comes with the territory. The roof here is only a few years old, but if Elon Musk's solar roof tiles ever come to fruition, I'm willing to redo it. 

I'm a gardener, and I always plant a native plant garden. They use far less water because they're adapted and evolved for the local ecology, but the wildlife and insects also rely on them for food and shelter. The bees love it. 

One thing I do need to do is buy a more fuel efficient car. I have a 2002 Honda Accord EX. It's a V6 and not particularly fuel efficient at all. If they ever get the price of electric cars down to no more than I'd pay for a Civic, sign me up. Otherwise, I guess it's another Honda, but a Civic instead of an Accord. 

Just curious, but how do you plan to build a rain barrel?

[Ice Queen]

6 minutes ago, maarsen said:

Just curious, but how do you plan to build a rain barrel?

 

It's actually not that difficult. You can use large trash cans or buy the big 55 gallon ones if you want. You can connect two or more together, too, and add electric pumps.

A basic one involves cutting a piece of the lid to let rain into the barrel or can. I put mine under the gutter and let the water flow from the gutter. Cut a piece of screen to put over the opening in the lid to keep out debris and keep mosquitoes from breeding. Further down the barrel, you can install a spigot. Works great.

A more complex one involves building an elevated stand and connecting several together using PVC pipe and attaching a garden hose and pump. Even this one would cost less than $100 to build.

I usually use mine in the winter, too. We get a lot of snow and I let the snowmelt flow into the barrels. Using just a single barrel year round saves me around 1,500 gallons per year.

[IheartIheartTesla]

I'm too lazy to google it, but I believe there are questions about the legality of privately owned rain catchment systems in the more drought-prone regions of the US (maybe the Southwest?) I checked Michigan laws, and there is no laws here preventing a rain barrel.

Talk to me like I'm stupid, but how exactly does a rain barrel save you 400 gallons of water? Do you mean you don't use that much city/county water? Which I presume has some environmental costs to produce from source.

[Ice Queen]

17 minutes ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

I'm too lazy to google it, but I believe there are questions about the legality of privately owned rain catchment systems in the more drought-prone regions of the US (maybe the Southwest?) I checked Michigan laws, and there is no laws here preventing a rain barrel.

Talk to me like I'm stupid, but how exactly does a rain barrel save you 400 gallons of water? Do you mean you don't use that much city/county water? Which I presume has some environmental costs to produce from source.

Gardening uses up a lot of water depending on how much space it takes up, what plants you have, and local conditions like rainfall. Gardening and lawn watering comprise 40% of the average homeowner's water usage. 

Spring and fall here are usually very wet, so storing that water saves a lot when summer hits, especially in years when we don't get a lot of rain (like this year). As I said, you can use a barrel to store snowmelt, too. If you can catch that runoff you can help reduce the amount of storm runoff, with all the pollution, that goes into our streams, creeks and rivers.

Water is expensive. My water bill runs over $100 per month for three people. The more you can save by storing it, the better. Rain water is better for plants anyway. It's soft water, and plants are adapted to the slight acidity, as is soil. It also doesn't have all the compounds (salts, etc.) in it that tap water does, so your plants are healthier. You can achieve the same effect by putting tap water in a 2 liter pop bottle and letting it sit for a week. The contaminants sink to the bottom leaving the water softer and purer. You can use it for other things, like washing your car. 

 

[Dr. Pepper]

Why would some areas ban rain water collection?  

[Ice Queen]

1 minute ago, Dr. Pepper said:

Why would some areas ban rain water collection?  

I was wondering that, too. 

[Dr. Pepper]

I found this.  It seems much of the law is outdated in states that have or had banned personal rainwater catchment systems and need updating as studies come in.

http://www.ncsl.org/research/environment-and-natural-resources/rainwater-harvesting.aspx

Quote

In some states, especially those out West, previous water law stated all precipitation belonged to existing water-rights owners, and rain needed to flow to join its rightful water drainage. In other states, legislators must ensure water-quality standards and public health concerns are met when considering rainwater harvesting legislation.

 

[Datepalm]

Yeah, there's arguments about rainfall as filling up aquifers and streams...the bigger problem with rainfall and urban areas is usually that it gets wasted though. Large areas covered in asphalt, houses, etc, means that rainwater doesn't make it into the dirt but gathers into drainage systems and creates surges at specific points - so more flooding, and that water is more polluted, and hotter (having run across a bunch of asphalt before it got anywhere) which messes up drainage patterns (leading to more floods) and the ecosystem, and water shortages because more of it is a storm surge running out of it's local fresh water system and out to sea (in a coastal area) or quickly away in a big river. I can imagine that there are specific locations (maybe smaller/mid sized towns) where they want people to keep their hands off of the rainwater and have it make it into the ground, and that may be the more overall sustainable solution, but it sounds like a case by case thing. By and large the problem is the opposite. Private rain barrels would then have a slight positive impact, moderating storm surges and keeping more rain water local. (And of course the big bonus is lower household use.)

Incidentally, I learned today that there's a word for the smell of rain. Petrichor. Ah, English.

D33