No. 4629Anonymous 19th January 2020 Sunday 12:45 pm4629GS guide to fighting climate change
The problem of climate change can sometimes seem insurmountable. However, there are little things you can do which can have a big impact.
Easy mode
-If you have a workplace pension, consider changing your fund preferences into one that looks after the environment
-Use public transport over the car
-Have meat free Mondays, become a 'flexitarian'
-Switch to a renewable energy tariff. This way your energy only comes from renewable sources. There's one I've found called Octopus Energy which is quite competitive price wise.
-Grow your own veg/fruit
-Reduce, refuse, reuse and recycle (on waste/plastic)
Medium
-Cycle or walk to work
-Become vegetarian
-Insulate your house or upgrade to an environmentally friendly boiler
-Limit air travel to only a few holidays per year and don't fly long haul
-Invest in businesses working to reduce/reverse climate change
-Don't east things out of season
-Home composting of organic waste
Hard mode
-Become vegan
-Install a heat pump
-Solar panels
-No air travel
-Don't use pastic
I think they were probably angry because you're giving your opinion in bad faith to someone who is making an effort, however misguided that effort may be.
I'm the one arguing for political activism as a priority over lifestyle changes, to be clear, but I still wouldn't behave that way towards people who are trying.
If you really care about climate change, you'd surely suggest some other course of action as a priority, rather than suggesting someone eats a steak (when they might be vegan for other reasons). But honestly it doesn't sound like you want to do that, you just wanted to knock someone who you felt was a bit of a poser.
Your post does sort of illustrate another pitfall of prioritising personal lifestyle choices, though, even putting aside my genuine belief that climate change is better addressed as a structural problem.
>I tried to explain to a vegan eco hipster that his avocado and asparagus were transported via ship from 3000 Kms away, so their carbon footprint was way bigger than the carbon footprint from a locally sourced beef steak. I also tried to explain him how his electrical scooter was way less fuel efficient than a bus or a subway.
You're badly wrong on both counts.
Sea freight is outrageously efficient, averaging around 60g/ton/mile. Shipping a typical 300g avocado from Mexico to Europe therefore produces about 120g of CO2 emissions.
Low-carbon beef production results in about 22kg of CO2e emissions per kg of meat, so your locally sourced 8oz sirloin results in about 5kg of CO2e emissions. Even factoring in road miles and refrigeration, an avocado has vastly lower CO2 emissions than beef per kilo or per calorie.
A bus of typical efficiency with a typical passenger load produces approximately 125g of CO2 per passenger mile. A Xiaomi M365 scooter has a battery capacity of 280wh and a range of 18 miles, giving us a power consumption of around 17 watt-hours per mile factoring in conversion losses during charging. Exceptionally dirty coal-generated electricity results in emissions of about 0.7g/Wh, giving us grid emissions of about 12g per mile in the worst-case scenario. Assuming that the scooter is simply landfilled after 3000 miles rather than being repaired or recycled, the embodied carbon of manufacturing works out to about 40g/mile based on a worst-case estimate.
Stop using this "arguing in bad faith" meme you've picked up from Twitter/Reddit, lad. It's a base fallacy that just neatly sidesteps addressing a potentially valid argument. I've only seen it used by by enthusiastic young lefties who don't understand the purpose of rhetoric, but it's a bad habit they need to grow out of.
Arguing in bad faith, as I understand it, is a term used in law and philosophy to mean when someone is arguing a position they don't really have any interest in so that they achieve some other ulterior goal.
I think that's exactly what that poster was doing. Did he really care about climate change, or did he just want to show up a hipster?
You're right, of course, pointing that out does nothing to address his arguments. People like >>4680 are apparently way more equipped to do that than me.
I do still think it's worth pointing out, though, because it's pointless to alienate people who are trying because you don't like them, personally. Again, as someone involved in the political side of things, I work with people who I don't particularly enjoy being around all the time -- but when I talk tactics or best approaches with them, I try to make the case in such a way that doesn't leave them humiliated and angry. If your argument is sound enough, there's no need for it, and I think it actually undermines the cause.
As I said, I just wanted to trigger the hipster. It's useless to argue with a fanatic, he will just distort the data, present fake data from dubious sources, or just get irrationally angry.
Even if he loses the argument, he will remove it from his memory and present the same debunked data the next time he argues with somebody. I have seen people pretending to agree when presented with evidence that their data was wrong, then using the same data five minutes later with a different interlocutor.
Arguing with people like this is just a way of poking fun at retards: they have nothing useful to teach you and they cannot learn anything from you because their mental blocks censor everything that does not agree with their ideology.
No one cares, well done for acknowledging you're being a twat for the sake of being a twat.
Chipping in on 'good/bad faith', I've always understood it as a benefit of the doubt thing. You can interpret the same information completely differently depending on whether you think the other person is stupid or smart. Conversations are always a lot more interesting when people assume the latter, in my experience.
Not well, to be honest. I miss the time when people were not so polarized and extremized. Now it seems that everyone just wants to lock himself in his little subreddit to smell his own farts. It's sad, when I think about it. In the meantime, I just laugh at the clown world. Honk honk.
>>4659 Thank you for your efforts. Reducing food waste is also a big one. If it goes to landfill it lets off methane which is even worse than CO2.
Would you be able to grow your own veg in some large plant pots? Would you be able to rent an allotment? Community gardens also exist where you can volunteer and grow your own.
>>4664 Are you from the voluntary human extinction movement?
>>4665 People from the less developed world emit less CO2 emissions per capita than western countries. Castrate yourself.
>>4677 Reading an email emits a few grams so I assume that much.
>>4694 >Would you be able to grow your own veg in some large plant pots?
Yes I do, but yield is limited compared to what you can grow in good ground. There's also the environmental impact of plastic or terracotta pots to consider, and of shop-bought compost if you can't produce enough of your own to fill them.
>Would you be able to rent an allotment? Community gardens also exist where you can volunteer and grow your own.
I've been meaning to put my name down on the waiting list for one of the local allotments, but waiting lists just about everywhere are huge.
....We should be trying to force developers to set aside land for new allotments on larger new housing estates, but land is way to expensive for them to even think of volunteering. Allotments have a huge benefit to local communities, and councils should have more focus on expanding their availability, but they seem to be seen as archaic and burdens on their resources, god forbid they demand developers make a dent in their profit to create new ones.
I've got the pension thing down, only buying meat from the reduced section and never beef or lamb. Been on renewable energy two or three years now (do not use Green Star Energy they are fucking awful).
Don't grow much veg as the garden's growing wildflowers and insect habitats. Growing a lot of specialist stuff indoors though, mainly in reused or scavenged plastic containers. 2/3 of the outdoor property is paved or concreted over so I'm putting planters out on the concrete and building a green canopy over the paving. Earmarked a space for a greenhouse too, when I can afford that. Vermicomposting didn't work, there's too much waste for the worms to break down so I'll have to build a bigger one for the garden when it gets a bit warmer out.
Only ever walk or use public transport, I'm not flying anywhere. Solar panels and heat pumps I've looked into but they're way out of my price range. Switched to a green bank; Triodos. Direct debit to Greenpeace set up. Stopped buying "new" clothes (except for socks and underwear) not that that was a challenge, as a bloke. Stopped buying non-vegan beer, that was harder (barnivore.com is handy). Spent more time in the past year volunteering for XR than I have on my day job. Done quite a lot for other environmental concerns too, just helping out where I can. My Ecosia counter is up to 1061 which apparently translates to 23 or so trees planted on my behalf.
>>4700 >Growing a lot of specialist stuff indoors though, mainly in reused or scavenged plastic containers.
I was thinking of growing some things at home, what do you grow, and what have you scavenged to help?
I was growing basil on my windowsill but harvested the lot before Christmas as I was going away for two weeks.
>>4707 Mostly herbs and spices at the moment. Here's some garlic growing in plastic builder's buckets I picked up. They're caked with dried concrete but I hammered some holes in the bottom of two as pots, the ones underneath are the drip trays.
You can do something similar with the plastic takeaway boxes to make propagators; set one base with drain holes in the bottom inside an undamaged one with some cotton poked through as a wick to bring moisture up to the compost/soil the topmost one has in. Keeps it moist without drowning anything. Keep the lid on until the seedlings hit it then replace it with various other larger upturned transparent containers for the greenhouse effect.
Here's a 4AM idea for one of you two budding climate scientists, catalytic converters for cow arses.
Looking in to it there are significant problems with current level catalysation technology, methane catalysts still require temperatures of 600 C to work and even then aren't perfect, but given how adamant you all are that we can't eat steaks anymore because of methane I'm sure you can come up with a workable solution within the decade.
To break down the solutions, we have a few options, first we have to consider on what scale we're going to trap the cow farts, individually or on a factory scale. If individually we need a device that straps to their rumps, if on a factory scale we need to release shitloads of funds to wall in massive amounts of cow grazing land in an airtight building.
Now the most cost effective solution is obviously the individual scale, so let's look at that. Building a device that can seal around flesh is easy, we already have gas masks, these are just larger versions of those. We can either catalyse the methane in situ or capture it in absorbent filters to be processed elsewhere, changed weekly, daily or even monthly.
The chemical problems: discovering a catalyst that can break down or alter methane, discovering a filter that can absorb methane.
The mechanical problems: allowing waste matter to be expelled while retaining or transforming waste gasses. There's an obvious solution here with mechanical pressure plates and whatnot, but as I understand it methane is lighter than air so should send 90% of its molecules upwards, whereas cow shit will fall straight down. We could solve this problem simply by shaping the device like a plague doctor mask, with an open bottom. We'll capture or catalyse 90% of the methane while allowing cow pats to escape the cow and device without significant levels of soilage.
The social problems: no farmer is going to want to chase down every cow every day to change the filters. Good luck with this one.
>>47676
It's burps, too, so enjoy your cattle in gimp masks.
>>4767 Didn't I also see that stirring a bit of charcoal into cattle feed has a substantial reduction in methane?
Of course, we'd probably source the charcoal by burning down rain forests.
I still find it vaguely amusing that the ironic elephant in the room everyone constantly skirts around is how this ethical vegan future we must adopt necessitates a bovine genocide, merely for the crime of farting too much. I don't know if I'm the only one, it's just some really nice existential black humour I think.
>>4769 I'm fairly sure that number we'd have to kill or let die in a short space of time if we stopped eating and milking them would be much smaller than the amount we kill for food as a matter of course in a relatively short amount of time.
That's generally not how cattle farming works, no. You get a lot more beef than you'd imagine from a single bull, and you keep most alive for breeding/dairy production.
Red meat I can agree we generally need less of as a whole (though I'd also imagine it's a very middle class problem, as a poorlad I would mostly exist on chicken, if that and even now I very rarely eat beef outside of a very occasional Sunday roast) but dairy is an entirely different matter. There simply aren't any good alternatives, stuff like almond milk is demonstrably worse for the environment and ecosystem.
We artificially inseminate cows to produce their young and stimulate milk production - the resulting males we just shoot in the head because there is no market for veal in this country, while the females are then pumped full of growth hormones and the cycle is repeated. It would be far less cruel to exterminate the lot of them; dairy herds are not wild animals that roam the countryside, they are genetically bred within a narrow window, for food production.
>>4771 If we kill, or otherwise allow to die, the current generation of cattle all in one go then that's Y deaths. If we carry on as usual, when the second generation dies that's 2xY deaths. It's very simple. For food or dairy.
>>4774 Use it with your porridge to make double porridge. I made this once - it was really nice. What put me off buying oat milk again was the strange singles ad on the side of the box, something about a vegan friend looking for a boyfriend, heavily implying you.
I think grains may become my 'special interest'. Cerial grains are simply grass seeds, according to wikipedia. Facinating! I've been interested in finding a supplyer of various flours and coarse grains for a while now - making ship biscuits, country cakes and other such old fashioned recipes really appeals to me.
>>4775 If they're a special interest you should probably learn to spell the most simple one that you've been seeing on the side of your breakfast since you were a wain. I agree though, oat milk even tastes the best of all the milk substitutes.
It also tastes fine in tea - once you get used to it. It has a very different mouthfeel however, and you need some good thick stuff otherwise you need to add loads.
I feel like dairy milk is just something you get habituated to, like the way you notice tapwater from different areas when you move around.
>>4778 >I feel like dairy milk is just something you get habituated to, like the way you notice tapwater from different areas when you move around.
I've noticed a difference between supermarket milks, before - enough to ruin tea (until you get used to it, like you say). Sainsburies seems to be sweeter. Every time i have a Tesco milk I can't get the idea out of my head that it's full of cyst liquid - kind of salty. Co-Op is obviously be best because it's the one i'm most used to (well, Gold Top is the best but it's pretty expensive).
It's piss-easy to make - one cup of rolled oats, three cups of water, blend for 30-40 seconds and strain through a coffee filter or a fine sieve. Add salt and/or sugar to taste. If it has a claggy porridge texture, you've blended for too long.
I like Partly the best, and it seems most people do because it keeps selling out at the local Sainsbury's. There's a 'full fat' version that's the best imo. I suppose the benefit to buying it is they add minerals to make it an actual milk substitute, if your diet would otherwise be lacking (as it probably would be if you're vegan).
It acts as a water reservoir, so it'll help prevent the soil from getting either too wet or too dry. It's not necessary, but it'll improve your chances of success.
