makerofspoons

I'm a big fan of cricket flour, and I look forward to seeing more options like it on the market. It looks like they are on their way to producing some, I wonder what the barrier to doing so is if they are committed to getting over the 'ick' factor.

A carbon tax is how we do it. Calculate the carbon involved in producing the item and shipping it to you, then tax it. People will decrease their consumption of high-carbon goods.

Shaming what people spend on coffee smacks of the similar out-of-touch critique that millennials can't buy homes because they spend their money on frivolities like avocado toast. I like the authors concluding point that what this is really about is the constant need for these gurus to be producing content. On the other hand, some coffee shaming isn't all bad since the coffee industry is an unmitigated environmental disaster and individuals should be thinking about the impact of their consumption on more than their wallets: https://www.salon.com/2018/10/05/our-coffee-addiction-is-des...

I made no such assumption. There is nothing that can be done about the animals that are already here. But someone considering an animal for their mental well-being might be better served volunteering instead. The data shows adding an animal to your lifestyle increases your environmental impact considerably. Working in the community garden adds almost nothing and potentially would provide the same positive effect.

It is, however, a simple way for individuals to avoid growing their carbon footprint. Not doing something is easier than changing an entrenched lifestyle. It's the same as saying "don't buy a large home", "don't buy a large vehicle (or preferably any vehicle at all)", "don't travel" - you're not missing out on anything, you're simply avoiding a destructive behavior. If you have a dog or cat already there isn't much you can do about it at this point.

I wonder if the same feelings people have for pets could be instead replaced with volunteering in one's community, making human best friends and giving oneself purpose.

I'm not in disagreement with you on that last part- extravagances like amusement parks, gadgets, and restaurants should be appropriately taxed until the resources they consume come down to sustainable levels. Everything needs to be scaled back.

I'm not sure we should be encouraging people to own more dogs and cats- they have a substantial carbon footprint for being extravagances: https://www.salon.com/2014/11/20/the_surprisingly_large_carb...

When I was doing my thesis I was a big fan of Mathematica's right click -> copy as LaTeX feature. It saved a lot of time entering formulas and copying tables from the notebooks I was using for analysis.

Another good reason to drop Prime is the amount of waste it promotes: https://depts.washington.edu/sctlctr/news-events/in-the-news...

Is it not generally accepted that a personal car is a luxury? The vast majority of people in the world do not have one.

That cartoon is in the main article.

There are researchers starting to connect the dots on near-term human extinction. A good summary is 'The Uninhabitable Earth' by David Wallace-Wells: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-...

It is based on decades of fantastic scientific research into climate change and its impacts. The newer annotated version of this article provides citations: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-...

Because people don't like to confront the reality of the problem.

“It is worse, much worse, than you think.” - David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth

We don't have that kind of time. James Anderson, a leading atmospheric scientist who is famous for his research on ozone depletion by CFCs, says we have as little as five years: https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/23104/20190703/only-5-...

Mass famine, economic collapse, war, and ultimately the collapse of industrial civilization: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-...

Here in Denver there is a shop where I can buy a reusable glass bottle that they will refill for me when I bring it back to buy more (soap, shampoo, detergent, etc). Perhaps supermarkets could transition to this model for everything.

You could launch 3 Big Falcon Rockets per day for a year and only then equal the emissions for all the air traffic at Heathrow that occurs in a month: https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/8g0iaj/bfr_ai...

There are bigger fish to fry in terms of the environment.

I have yet to work with a commercial facial recognition product that produced a reasonable number of false positives or negatives when dealing with 'live' data like that of a security feed of a crowd. Is there a facial recognition model or tool out there that actually works in that use case? It seems like the Met's police got sold some technological snake oil that wasn't close to ready.

~70 years versus ~30 years, dying of cancer or old age vs. starvation or resource-motivated violence. They really are not comparable.

10 years is too soon- more like 20 in my worldview (still a very brief life for someone born today). Here are a few things I see in 20 years:

- Human population in decline

- Industrial output per capita in decline

- Food production per capita in decline

- Resources in decline

- Pollution will ultimately peak

We have not meaningfully deviated from the collapse predicted in 'The Limits of Growth': https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/02/limits...

It will prevent bringing a human being in the world to live briefly and then starve to death.

There is little time to raise 'the most awesome climate change fighters the world has ever seen'. By some indications and projections you'll just be birthing these children to live a short, brutal life.

Travel is very much high carbon, at least in the way Instagram influencers and their copycats do it (by airplane).

There have been a number of major reports published in the last few months that detail just how much environmental damage we have caused since industrialization. I believe the uptick in articles is a result of people becoming aware of the extent of the problem.

No mention about how they intend to address environmental concerns: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-airplane-supersonic-envir...

This is already happening to SaaS startups: https://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/aws-startups-conflict.html

Finding such a citation depends on what you call an ecological collapse. In 2019 we have an environment where global indicators of ecosystem extent have declined by 47% from baseline. If the stock market lost 47% of its value in 150 years, it would be in a state of ongoing collapse. 85% of wetlands were lost between 1700 and 2000- I would certainly say that is an ecological collapse.

I propose Amazon and consumers pay for the environmental damage shipping these products using fossil fuels causes.

Increased use of airplanes is one factor in why US greenhouse gas emissions grew last year after years of decline: https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/1/11/1817711...