UKC

Along with socialism (I joke not)....

It seems the most important thing in a lot of peoples lives quite simply is money.

In reply to The Ice Doctor:

I agree. Watching Galapagos on tv just now, China seems hellbent on eating the entire ocean's shark fins for voodoo and cash.

In reply to The Ice Doctor:

Not as long as we have little rays of sunshine like you mate.

In reply to The Ice Doctor:
Look on the bright side.

Renewables are no longer environmentalism, renewables are big business now and getting cheaper than fossil fuels.
Heard a comment today that subsidies kick started mass production and adoption far quicker than expected.

Concerns about urban pollution are mainstream - see congestion charges and city centre bans on highly poluting vehicles (not yet in uk?).

Enivironmentalism has got mainstream sucess which is far better than being a movement.

PS I think China is making green noises too.

In reply to The Ice Doctor:

No I don't.

The human race doesn't have the option of ignoring environmental issues. Easily accessible fossil fuels will dry up and oil will be increasingly expensive if we're having to get it out from under people's houses (and deal with all the disruption) or drill the remotest regions on the planet. As climate change f*cks everything up, we're going to need solutions to the problems as they arise.

It's a tragic failure of human intellect to frame environmental issues as political, issues on which we can choose to believe one thing or another according to how we see ourselves or how we choose to vote. It's just a load of facts, a load of practical problems that require solutions. We haven't got to the stage of the political arguments about who bears the brunt of the costs, we're still treating the problems themselves as if we've got a choice whether to believe they exist or not. It's totally mental. Great evidence though that the human brain has not evolved to think big, but is better working out ways to amass the greatest number of shiny metal tokens or how to get in bed with the hottest sexual partner.

In reply to Jon Stewart:


I suspect the reason environmentalism has found little purchase among electorates is that it tends to treat humans (or, at least, all those *other* humans) as unthinking automatons - as your own post betrays. Brexit and Trump's election would suggest that such misanthropy is unpersuasive. There are certainly some big environmental problems out there; just don't expect environmentalism to solve them.

In reply to stu7jokes:


I don't think lack of misanthropy is what characterized those unexpected wins. I think a better answer was that sexy, tasty, simple and on-the-face plausible 'solutions' to the hard problems won out because people are tired of feeling these problems.

Environmentalism on the other hand - is different. We are not really 'feeling the burn' of the environmental problems just yet, collectively we are the frog who has become a bit uncomfortable in the pot but are too lazy to exit and still can ignore the problem. Sure, some of us are feelin' it - and those who are feelin' it are doing something. The reason China has drastically reduced coal burning? Only because they are tired of feelin' the toxic smog in their big cities. In New Zealand, things are changing with respect to water pollution - but only because enough people are feelin' the bacterial poisoning from agri runoff a little too much. The tragedy and the comedy of this situation is that once we all feel the problems of climate change, once we all realize something needs to be done, immediately, forcefully and with urgency and forethought - that's when it's too late to do much other than save the family photo album out of the burning building. The fire will be out of control, and the house will keep burning.

I just so happened to be reading a natgeo in the physio office today. It was the climate change issue of 2015. One of the things that was so sad to read was all the hope that the Paris agreements would be a turning point, a huge shift in focus. It was hoped the US and China would strike a deal, and things would happen. Unfortunately as recent events have shown - the last thing on anyone's minds is the impending climate crisis.

The problem is overwhelming if you read the data, the results and know a bit of systems theory. What can you do? Well on the individual level - the best thing you can do is reduce as much as possible your dependence on animal agriculture and then focus on sustainable food sources. Depending on sources and variables - the highest or second highest ameliorated source of greenhouse gases, the other being transportation. Transportation there's a bit less you as an individual can do - avoid flying, invest in electric and renewable (even if invest simply means voting with your feet), carpool. Keep positive - one day the 'grandchildren' will be glad that you managed to save the 'family photo album' even though you couldn't save the house and could've just as easily saved nothing.

In reply to The Ice Doctor:


Slip me a tenner and I'll support it.

In reply to Scotch Bingington:

Bollocks to that, I'll do it for a fiver, bargain!!

In reply to TheDrunkenBakers:

And don't forget China's consumption of tiger penises, Rhino horn, Elephant tusk, and loads of other stuff with it seems, absolutely no thought about the future.

In reply to Big Ger:

You're on! I'm nothing if not cheap.

In reply to The Ice Doctor:

I don't think the environmental movement is dead. I think that it is quite strong in fact. Just may be not strong enough. I think that we are probably past the tipping point now and speeding towards global warming, we had our chance and missed it.
I don't believe that Trump and Brexit were anti-enviroment votes (it is amazing how much stuff gets blamed on those two) I think they were the desperate votes of desperate people sick of being told by rich f*ckers that they had to tighten their belts (so they believed rich f*ckers who said all we have to do is keep poor people out. I never said it was sensible).
How all this will pan out over time is anyones guess but there will be upheaval.

May you live in interesting times

In reply to Duncan Bourne:
It's not dead, it's just that the sun is behind a cloud, and the wind has dropped to nothing, so they've no power for today.

In reply to The Ice Doctor:

There is no business to be done on a dead planet.

In reply to Dave Perry:


http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/38477032

In reply to The Ice Doctor:

I am not dead yet! You are right, though, greed and stupidity rule.

CB

In reply to stu7jokes:


Environmentalism may not directly solve them but someone has to set the ball rolling and kick up enough of a fuss for enough people to sit up and take notice so that governments have to get off their backsides and solve them. Varying degrees of success, though, obviously.

In reply to The Ice Doctor:


You asked a good question in your thread title (to which I don't know the answer). Nice one.

However, I'm confused by your next comment that "It seems the most important thing in a lot of peoples lives quite simply is money":

1. are you saying that people ignore the environment because they prefer money?

2. maybe lots of people find not money, but the things money buys to be "the most important thing" because they are struggling to live, eat, keep a roof over their head, feed and clothe their children?

You might explain a little more? Thank you.

Edit, spelling

In reply to The Ice Doctor:


It is. A protest against fuel prices or energy bills will trump raising investment in more sustainable energy sources every day of the week.

In reply to Dave Perry:


It's easy to blame this on "China", but it isn't China as a country at fault, it is individuals (probably wealthy and vain). Along with many bent and corrupt nationalities engaged in the supply from source to final destination.

In reply to bouldery bits:


But there's plenty of opportunity on a dying one and anyway, people do business and people die faster than planets.

Really long term thinking has never been the average bald ape's strong suit.
jk

In reply to jkarran:

Exactly my point I'm afraid mate.

In reply to The Ice Doctor:

No. The most important environmental problems have moved into the mainstream, whether for good or ill. Some - say, use of CFCs - have been tackled well (if a little belatedly...) while others, such as global warming, are accepted by most if ignored by some (China, for example).

I was having an idle mooch about such things earlier, before I'd seen this post. Back in the early 1980s I did a degree in Ecology. When I told most people what I was studying the general reaction was that it was some kind of activism to do with what was then called the Ecology Party (now the much better known, and better understood, Green party) and yes, the degree course would have been better called Ecological Science. Back in the day, the general understanding of the environment by nations was that as long as you didn't chuck your muck in your back yard that'd be fine; that maybe in the UK some of our watercourses were a bit niffy* but nobody sane could ever conceive of salmon swimming in the Mersey; and that slag heaps and the like were just a reminder of our great industrial past**. Now, the world's atmosphere and oceans are acknowledged to be everyone's problem; the purity of drinking water is seen as important around the world, and whilst more could always be done the purity of rivers and streams in the UK has improved to the point where salmon have been seen in the Mersey***; and heaps of polluting waste from mining and other activities are being, of have already been, reduced or removed or greened over or all three.

So whilst you may be right that money is what matters most to people - and to be honest, it almost always has - environmental issues have gone from the fringe to the front and centre of the stage. There is no longer any need for a 'movement' when they've already moved.

All of this is, of course, no excuse for us as individuals to continue to do what we can to reduce, re-use and recycle, and to pressure our politicians to live up to their environmental responsibilities. It's just that now when we do so, they don't regard us as part of the lunatic fringe.

T.

* I grew up in St Helens. The canal and Sankey river were, frankly, dirty beyond disgusting.
** Specifically, I grew up in Haydock. Slag heaps were a great playground.
*** They must surely have been lost.

In reply to The Ice Doctor:

I don't suppose there will be a really strong, nationally supported environmental movement until people realise they are staring down the barrel of a gun and the evidence of man's destruction of the planet is brutally rammed down their throats. And I think focusing on whether VWs are as green as VW say (ridiculous, no car is environmentally friendly) , which is all that seems to make the news, is a huge distraction when the real problem, thousands of times bigger, is man's obsession with stuff. The amount of crap people buy from shops with huge carbon footprints made in factories with huge carbon footprints and transported across the world only to end up in an incinerator or on landfill is shameful. But it is what makes the exchequer happy so governments love the trade in stuff. It will not end soon.

In reply to Moley:


Very true. There is a small but growing movement that takes our claims of reducing pollution and becoming cleaner and greener in the West, and scrutinized them a bit further by applying the emissions of our imports (i.e. our "true" emissions are those that we directly emit, combined with those of the products that we import) - with this analysis, it became clear that we never really reduced anything. We never became cleaner or greener in our methods, we simply offshored our pollution.

Further reading on the subject: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-13187156 (there have been more recent articles, but I couldn't find them)

In reply to SenzuBean: lots of coulds and nights in that article. I saw a rather better set of numbers re. Pollution from continued from old vehicles compared to that from manufacturing new vehicles in the electric vehicle thread.

I don't think cost is a very good reason for not going to renewables. I'm on 100% renewable power and my cost is lower than yours per kWh. Sooner or later you have to some money on new infrastructure.

In reply to wbo:


Indeed, because it's highly complex - we have no idea how much exactly China emits, especially for a given product. How much emissions does it take to manufacture something complex like a computer? It's thousands of components, each that has been through multiple production lines (ground -> ore -> metal/raw material -> simple forms -> complex forms) at least. There are transport costs for each of these stages, and building emissions for the factories - etc. Whether or not we've made an improvement is rather irrelevent, the point is that our claimed improvement is much smaller in magnitude when 'embedded' emissions are included.


It'd be good to see them. I've seen similar numbers, and recall that you only began to make any gains around the 5-7 year mark of owning an electric car (and fairly heavy use of it too). This I think (?) excluded the fact that electricity is still produced from non-sustainable sources.


I'll be the first to agree that cost is not a valid reason. Or at least the cost after you've "externalized" as many indirect costs as you can. The cost of our lost environmental heritage is arguably priceless.

In reply to bouldery bits:


A bit of perspective helps. Even if humanity set about trying to deliberately destroy all life on the planet it's almost impossible that we'd succeed. I wouldn't even give us much chance of a vastly easier goal such as destroying all macroscopic, visible life or all animal life.

The worst we'll do in the medium term is trigger a wave of mass extinctions accompanied by global human misery and suffering.

That sort of thing was bad for the dinosaurs but panned out very well for life in general. Evolution is ever alert for the call to action.

Honestly talk of killing the planet is a nonsense. If we hold it together for a few centuries more it might become a genuine worry.... A few millennia after that and people will be genuinely worried about the more than just the life on the planet...

In reply to wintertree:

Talk of the planet being anything but dead when it's only inhabited by nettles, jellyfish and roaches is even more total nonsense from most important perspectives - i.e. perspectives including the human perspective.

In reply to SenzuBean:


You don't understand "dead" very well, do you?

I doubt humans could get close to reducing species to even a thousand times what you list.


Are humans that important? Or in the long run is it life and conscious self aware life that is important? We are no threat to life, and life will rediscover consciousness in its own time.

In reply to The Ice Doctor:

I think movements come in waves. Sometime they're stronger and bigger, sometimes they shrink a bit. I think the environmental movement had definitely shrunk somewhat over the past 5 years or so. But I spoke to someone today who said it's starting to grow again. In fact in the past two weeks there has been a series of coordinated actions against fracking.

In reply to wintertree:


A couple of ways spring to mind. An all out nuclear war would be pretty damaging, possibly triggered by the energy crisis. Secondly, run away climate change. The most pessimistic forecasts suggest ending up with a climate somewhat like Venus, not a place where scientists believe life could exist. And of course we could easily end up with both of these and other problems too.




What makes you think that? After all it's only happened once so far in 4.6 billion years. And that was only down to the chance collision of a stray asteroid 65 million years ago.

In reply to stp:


Nowhere near enough to kill all life. I don't think the current arsenal and resultant short term "nuclear winter" could even kill all the humans unless you rounded them all up at the ground zeros first.


Have you looked at the falls in price per kW of solar over the last decade? One of the great successes of environmental lobbying groups. It's still falling.


If you have a forecast like that from actual scientists I'd be keen to see it. For starters I'd love to know where the extra 89 atmospheres worth of gas will come from.... Tosh.


Speak for yourself. We are only just starting to understand extermophile life on earth and in near earth orbit. Hydrothermal vents are similar in many ways to Venus in terms of extremes. Venus is more extreme in most cases but the real problems on Venus are related to the sulfuric acid and the paucity of certain elements, not problems connected with anthropogenic global warming.

A credible scientist would know enough to recognise that we do not understand the limits of life based on known terrestrial biology, let alone that based on unknown terrestrial or even non-terrestrial biology.


It's what life does. There are other species now that we are learning are moving in that direction. We're going to make machines that do it. Everything from the composition of the universe up seems intended to lead to life and beyond.


You don't know that, and nor does anyone else.


There are been plenty of mass extinctions over the aeons. It wasn't simply dinosaurs *bang* humans you know.

In reply to stp:

>it's only happened once so far in 4.6 billion years.

Lol.

In reply to wintertree:


You didn't read my reply either :p


Humans are important to other humans - which at least I am one of, don't know about you though...
We are a threat to life, we also have a huge responsibility as the only species that can understand planet-scale issues and plausibly prevent/fix them - we are letting the team down.

In reply to The Ice Doctor:

My follow-on comments now that I remembered them:

The other reason why the environmental movement is in grave danger I alluded to earlier. But to make it more 'predictive' - I can say that because of our current economic situation, most people do not simply have the resources to pursue the few environmental issues they know about. While I'm not saying it's gospel or a fact, I do think it grasps an important truth - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
Our friend Maslow says that humans will/must focus on physiological needs first. That means all humans who do not have their physiological needs satisfied (that's those few billions who are starving, or don't have clean drinking water) - cannot help with solutions; they are pre-occupied with their own survival.
The next tiers (which perhaps are not so distinct) are safety (which includes financial security, knowing you have a home, knowing you have a job), love/belonging and esteem which again - are needs not fulfilled by a huge proportion of the Earth, including those in the West. The rise of zero hour contracts, heightened job competition, the current and next generation being increasingly forced to never even consider the prospect of buying a home - these are all at the safety level.
Only at the very highest level of the pyramid, do you have self-actualization - where the altruistic behaviors (such as environmentalism for things you know about but don't concretely affect you) live.

Only once the environmental problems meet people on the pyramid - will change occur. So either we need to shift people to the apex of the pyramid by satisfying these needs, or we need to wait until the environmental crisis drip down and meet people at the safety/physiology levels (which again, is more or less what's happened - except unfortunately at the lowest levels you are least capable of solving problems)

In reply to SenzuBean:


I read and r-read it just fine. Perhaps I don't understand it. You appear to be saying the planet is effectively dead without humans and that saying otherwise is a nonsense. Feel free to clarify my misunderstanding.

In reply to wintertree:


Yes. It is effectively dead to humans - and as a human - that viewpoint is important (for most people it's the most important viewpoint). Somehow you ignored this implicit context of the original message you replied to.

In reply to SenzuBean:


Ahahaha. That's an absolute classic. I try not to look for lurking "implicit context" in things and assume people mean what they say.

In terms of what you claim you meant, the concerns of people are not perhaps well aligned with the concerns of environmentalism , about which the OP posted.

In reply to SenzuBean:

The human species has only the responsibility it places on itself. We are a single species that has evolved in the past few hundred thousand years, on a single planet a few billion years old in a universe twice as old. In few billion years our solar system will be destroyed, all life obliterated to it's smallest constituent parts. The universe may or may not destroy itself, go dark, keep expanding, become a giant black hole etc..etc.. either way as a species will be gone.

The importantance we place is our own. Live will change and involve. After every previous extinction, be it a sole predator on a small island or a dominent species across the whole planet... it allowed new openings for previously struggling life forms. You get the same in the plant world, not just animals. Just think of the plant diversity if humans were wiped out tomorrow and stopped growing millions of acres of cereal crops and mono culture grass tomorrow.

I'm all for protecting resources, reducing pollution, saving rare species... But let's not pretend we are any more important than we are in the universal scheme of things.

In reply to The Ice Doctor:

Looking at our world today I can say yes. However, if only man will ponder things carefully. Man will realise that money isn't the most important.

In reply to The Ice Doctor:

The 'environmental movement' - as you call it - is far from dead. Socialism, however, whether it be the state capitalism of Russia or China or the pathetic attempts of the so-called 'Labour Party' to reform a system that can only ever work in the interests of a minority was never anything but a dead end. The abolition of the wages system and it's profit motive remains the only viable alternative to capitalism.

I don't think it's the money that matters to most people, but rather the fact that within the money system it's hard to live without it.

In reply to wintertree:

Plus the dinosaurs took millions of years to wipe out.

I think we're a little bit more adaptable than that.

As environmental pressures ramp up we will also have to ramp up the way we deal with them.

I don't think it's impossible to save the planet, just very hard to do it and keep the present lifestyles up.

In reply to The Ice Doctor:

No.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/39492087

In reply to wintertree:


There is always implied context in communication. One example is when scientists/engineers talk - when they say stuff like 'evolution is true', the implied context means that 'true' is something more like 'this is the only hypothesis we have at the moment that matches the data so faithfully and provides such powerful explanatory power that it has explained data that came after it equally well. There is of course a miniscule chance that this hypothesis is wrong, but it's among the most unlikely of hypotheses to be overturned'.
Similarly when humans talk and say stuff like "If we keep going like this we'll kill the planet", there is an implicit context that humans only desire outcomes where humans are alive (i.e. not all people are misanthropic, most are not).

There always must be an implicit context - information theory requires it. No message can be decoded without context.

In reply to summo:


We have a chance to live and prosper for trillions of years - the physics allows it. The question is whether we want to aim for that chance, or to squander it and die in hundreds of years instead of the trillions that a more careful approach would potentially allow.


The question is not whether we are important or not - it's whether we want to be important or not. If we wish to be important, then we can achieve importance - and if so then we should act that way. If we do not wish to be important - then that's unfortunate, as we chose a 'loser' attitude - sure, have a loser attitude, but it's a damn waste of a fine opportunity as the first on Earth to potentially safeguard all of Earth's life and allow it to explore the universe.

In reply to SenzuBean:

There's implied context and then there's sloppy wording. Your jibba jabba about information theory doesn't change that.

Calling a planet that would be packed with life at all scales "dead" is sloppy wording, and creates a degeneracy between the views of human centric people who think life will continue excepting humans, and between the non-negligible fraction of people who think we can destroy the majority of life on the planet. Both views can be seen on the thread.

In reply to SenzuBean:

Any evidence? The universe will have expanded vastly by then and all potential fuel used up by all the Sun's. It's likely to a big black expanse in a lot less than a 1 trillion years. Unless you are implying multi verse theories and wormholes, where we take the many thousands of species of life with us?


I think you are placing humans in some God like status. There are many earth related and cosmic disasters that could wipe us out in the next few hundred years. (Excluding climate change). To think we will survive as a species forever and save guard all life forms is the stuff of Hollywood.

If you want science reality, in 200years we will have DNA cracked and can probably build things at a cellular level that we killed now and preserved in seed banks or froze. It's likely to be achievable before then. We could flee this wrecked planet to another solar system and just start making life, that is real conservation?

In reply to The Ice Doctor:

No, I don't think it is dead. I've always found that most people, even never-leave-the-city people, are aware of its importance and mostly want to do the right thing.

One other thing: while climate change is a true global emergency, I do regret that conservation (of landscapes, as well as species and habitats) seems to get less attention than it used to.

In reply to SenzuBean:
Spoken like a true environmentalist. Data is interpreted and argued over, not "read". Really, anyone who thinks their ideology flows directly from the data is welcome to an end of the world of their choosing.

In reply to summo:


Who knows - we do not. To assume that it's ultimately futile to try and survive and prosper is to assume that we can never achieve anything.
Regardless of that - we owe the future generations the same opportunity at life that we have had. We are currently not doing that - future generations are going to enter a world largely empty of the natural heritage we have now.


I think you are placing humans below cockroaches.


That is clearly the riskier position than not endangering ourselves and our co-habitants in the first place. Yes it's possible, but we do not need to take that route (although I suspect we will).

In reply to stu7jokes:


Spoken like a true cynical misanthrope.

In reply to SenzuBean:

admiring your honesty

In reply to SenzuBean:

We do know. It is a certainty our Sun will destroy all around it. Our planet is built from the left overs of previous Sun's. The very early universe was only Sun's etc.. .

Sun's energy source is finite and black universe in a lot less than a trillion years is quite likely if it lasts that long of course.


Man should do what he wants to preserve his environment for benefit of all species including ourselves. But let's not pretend we have a duty to save all life for a trillion years.

No matter what we do life will evolve and in a billion years time there will likely be unimaginable species on earth. But if none gains the intelligence to leave the planet all will be destroyed. Philosophically does or doesn't it matter what we do?

The only reason we want save things is man thinks he is special. Life existed on earth for a very long time before us, we are just a blip and it will continue with or without us. We can preserve what we have now if we like them or they make us secure or feel better, but I don't think it matters in the big scheme of things.

That doesn't mean I don't help the environment, but it is a personal choice because of what I enjoy, not because I think it is critical to the survival of life in the universe.

In reply to The Ice Doctor:

Only the Yanks...


"I haven't been in a science class in a long time, but the Earth moves closer to the sun every year -- you know, the rotation of the Earth. We're moving closer to the sun." "We have more people ... you know, humans have warm bodies. So is heat coming off? Things are changing ... but I think we are, as a society, doing the best we can."

http://www.ydr.com/story/news/2017/03/29/sen-wagner-blames-body-heat-earth-...

In reply to summo:


There is some speculation that certain bacterial life would survive ejection into space (on a lump of rock), in a sufficiently large meteorite impact, and could then survive in space waiting for another planet to come along.

In reply to wintertree:

Tardigrades are next to indestructible.

In reply to The Ice Doctor:

The environmental movement and socialism are only suppressed as much as the populist right wing narrative allows it to be. Neither are dead, but are in need of change and modernisation.

Who or what is the driving force behind it, and why has it become 'populist'? It's a complex minefield of claim and counter-claim based on the rationality of knowns (such as science) versus the arbitrariness of the unknown (belief and ideology). Adherence to belief and ideology can breathe life into the implausible by using lies, disinformation and bogus factoids in order to conserve traditional means of wealth accumulation, no matter the human and environmental cost.

The UK media is overwhelmingly right wing in its overall outlook and is, in my opinion, largely responsible in planting the seeds and nurturing the pervading narrative, as a rightist political influence (oligarch media ownership means that it is in their interests to be ideologically influential). This is swamping a weakened left, which for many reasons, is in turmoil and disarray with little or no influence at all on public sensibilities. If the popular media tells you that you are in disarray and that you have a crap leader, you start to believe it.

Personally, like most people, all I want is the truth - not some quasi-religious belief system telling me what to think and do. To that end, I find it 'grounding' to read up on the actual science of the environment in specialist journals and published papers. I never, ever take anything published in the popular media seriously, unless it is well referenced.

Socialism is more subjective, and my own opinion for what its worth, is that it is no longer based on the strength of 'community with common purpose', that perished with the death of heavy industry. However, 'community' and 'the left' are still endemic social strengths, but subdued by enforced fragmentation. Fragmentation is the problem; it is seen by the right as a weakness, and is currently exploiting that to the full in order to embolden self-interest.

In reply to summo:
What about the things they eat though?

In reply to SenzuBean:

I think you have hit the nail on the head. Life for many in the developed world has been turned upside down since credit crunch - austerity is hurting, automation is hurting, immigration is hurting, Brexit is hurting, wars are hurting, the consolidation of wealth is hurting. People are worried about their jobs and employers are exploiting that to screw their employees over. The gap between rich and poor is widening. Quality of life is deteriorating. Social media gives the un-educated masses a platform to whinge and make things seem worse than they are. Unfortunately, environmental issues tend to be 'long term' and people can't or don't want to see the impact of their actions today . I've been involved in two fights in one of my local facebook groups recently on the subject of chinese lanterns - people simply cannot accept the anti-socialness of them "we always do them to remember my gran". Even when the alternative of planting a tree is suggested they won't do it, they've got to keep importing lanterns from the far east, burning some fossil fuels in them and leaving them to litter the environment. Dicks.

In reply to wintertree:

I think your whole line of reasoning is based on a kind of denial. The prospects are so gloomy and depressing that we search for ways to make it alright. We probably won't kill all forms of life on the planet, some kind of extremophiles will still exist no matter what we do, therefore no need to worry or feel bad about it. Everything is going to work out just fine. So feeling better about it we can live our lives, without concern for the negative impacts our way of life is having on the planet.

I'm not singling you out or being critical by the way. I think we all do this in one way or another. I know I do. I think it's a basic psychological coping mechanism, without which we'd all end up feeling pretty miserable.

In reply to Toerag:


Fair point. Bacteria need energy to survive too, usually through mutually exclusive relationships, like our own.

In reply to stp:

In the west we are the privileged global minority. We can spare the time and energy to even consider saving an animal on the other side of world. If you biggest concern is the next harvest, drought, disease then saving the poster child's of wwf is the last thing on your mind.

Also we won't be around forever, when we go a whole host of other species will evolve. Who knows maybe even a few more species evolve from apes, as we know their traits are highly adaptable.

In reply to elsewhere an everyone else blaming China:


You do realise China is the biggest investor in domestic renewable energy in the world? They also own the world's largest wind turbine manufacturer and the six largest solar-module manufacturing firms. They may have a lot of coal but they'll soon be the world leader in green energy and we'll be left behind once again.

In reply to stp:


No. I am not in denial, for example I understand that there are likely to be very large shifts in the Earth's climate ahead, and I can see recent trends as the exceptional events that they are.


This is where your reasoning is bad. There are no credible studies that I am aware of suggesting that we can wipe out all non-extremophile life; at worst we are talking about a mass-extinction event. However, mass-exctinction events are nowhere near to ending all macroscopic life. They're likely a major factor in the long-term evolutionary process as well.


No, it really isn't - not for people and not for a lot of plant and animal species. A lot of people are already suffering as a result of the political and environmental consequences of our wantonly unsustainable use of resources. Perhaps we'll reign ourselves in in time on the energy/CO2 front, but to be honest if we get some magical clean energy solution tomorrow we'll just use it to mess the planet up in other ways, likely through large scale desalinisation and irrigation of deserts and another population boom.

My point on here has simply been that people who say we are going to "kill the planet" or "wipe out all life" are well wide of the mark - there is an arrogant assumption from many that we are far more important to the planet than we are. Understanding our place in the world is an important part of managing it. As I said before it's unlikely that anything short of an extreme and deliberate global effort could kill all the humans on the planet.

In reply to wintertree:

A natural disaster like a super volcano, meteor, massive cme followed by disease would come close, but there will always be pockets of humans who survive. We might even manage it ourselves part way through the rise of super bugs and untreatable infections. Wiping out 75% of the population probably wouldn't be a bad thing if the human species wants to survive long term.

In reply to galpinos:
I know they already dominate solar, wasn't aware of turbine market share. I think you're right - they have an eye on the future.

Should have said environmentalism getting a toehold in China to make it clear not just making green noises.

In reply to Duncan Bourne:

What Trump doesn't connect to is the relationship between environmental issues and war. That's the connection the politicians need to make. Syria was a crisis made in an environmental cauldron when drought hit that northern area of Syria and the political forces ignored the plight and instead scewed up the problem by adding on punitive land reforms, religious and tribal intolerance coupled with a zero political mechanism for change to address a root environmental problem.

Environmentalism will raise itself - but yes it is dying in people's heads exampled by international yo yos at the top who are as linear in their thinking as Trump, Putin, May and that unfortunately is what is happening and we are likely to underplay it as we focus on business relationships[ e.g. with having Brexit} . We do need to revive its place on the political agenda as I think it is in danger of falling off.

In reply to The Ice Doctor:

I've just voted for a green local counsellor in Scotland but I feel this is the most powerless election as regards green thinking in recent times in the UK. Simply because national and international signatures just wipe out in a single stroke years of cultural change.Anyone else feel Like this? Almost like starting at the bottom again politically!

In reply to wintertree:

Agreed, as has been pointed out in here several times, but this 'killing the planet' still persists, and is clearly wrong.

We are just killing the ability of our species( and a few others) to survive on this planet. Some life will go on, the planet will go on.

Also as has been pointed out, that the UK meeting its environmental targets is statistically irrelevant in the bigger scheme. I'm not sure that it would even be noticed in the worldwide figures if the UK shut down all it power stations and stiopped using cars altogether,

'And setting a good example' for other nations does not seem to be working.

Politics is not going to fix this, it will have to be a technological fix in my view.