Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

pile-o-stone wrote: »

I'm not convinced, especially with the rise of Trump and others who are pushing a climate change denial program based on an argument that we pay more for Green energy, and who are gaining traction with this argument.

I watched Cowspiracy last night and even environmentalist like Greenpeace are refusing to tackle the World's biggest polluter - the livestock industry - because of fear f losing corporate sponsorship and getting dragged through the courts by the huge meat industry lobby groups. Livestock farming and it's associated problem with water usage, pollution from their feces creating dead zones in lakes and seas, use of land for growing their feed, destruction of the rainforests to allow them graze is destroying the planet yet everyone conspires to ignore it.

Instead we are shepherded to look at 'fixes' like installing renewables, when the main problem goes unchecked.

Yep, it's a mess, and fighting people like Trump will mean things take longer, and therefore the cost/impact will be worse, but we will win. Even in the US where Trump and his team are trying absolutely everything to prop up FF's, RE is winning out. And when Motor Trend puts a Tesla as the best medium sized sports sedan, it's game over for the ICE too.

Regarding meat, I've kinda been looking forward to insect based 'meat'. But we may find that lab grown protein, and plant based products win out:

Most 'meat' in 2040 will not come from dead animals, says report

Almost half the world’s crops are fed to livestock, but only 15% of the plant calories end up being eaten by humans as meat. In contrast, the report says, cultured meat and vegan meat replacements retain about three-quarters of their input calories.

But just to be clear, I'm not suggesting we aren't facing a near disaster, just that we will do the right thing (possibly for the wrong reasons) in time to reduce the disaster by a few percentile points.

1961Nick wrote: »

And there we have it..."population size & growth" as the root cause. I doubt there are any politicians brave enough to suggest that this is something we should address?

It's already been addressed, and we seem to have reached peak child*. The problem is that the population will still grow considerably further due to the higher numbers of young simply living longer than before.

*The population is roughly 7bn, with 2bn in the 0-15 age group, 2bn in the 16-30 age group, and 1bn in the next 3 age groups, 31-45, 46-60 & 61-75.

The stability in the first two age groups will remain, however as the world population lives longer the world population will grow as those 2bn steadily move into each of the other age groups and a further 1bn make it intp the 76-90+ group. Total approx 11bn.

The main drivers to control birth rate, was the expansion of education for young girls and women, both sexual education, and general education, since girls suffer the most from deprivation of education in the poorest communities. Whilst many countries, especially in parts of Asia still have higher birth rates than are sustainable, populations such as in the EU balance these out as they now have slightly negative birth rates.

So the problem is clearly one of population growth, but just like AGW having a lag between CO2 levels and climate impacts, we now face the same problem of waiting for a relatively stable birth rate to finish impacting on population, mainly due to better health/medicine leading to longer life expectancies.

To impact the future population total, and prevent us reaching 11bn, we would now have to implement negative birth rates (less than 2 and a bit per woman), but then we also have to consider the economy as it becomes top heavy with less young workers and more older retirees. No simple answer, but the natural adoption of western world slightly negative figures might be a very, very long term solution. Till then, it is what it is, and we have to adjust to cope with 11bn. Probably 11bn vegans!

1961Nick wrote: »

Once migration as added, I believe the population of Europe is still growing?

That has nothing to do with world population, that's just an issue of global population shifting. If I recall correctly Italy has, or had a massive problem, with a birth rate down in the 1.4's. Even with immigration, and higher birth rates among immigrants (taking the national average up into the 1.6's) they faced an economic disaster, and had to launch all sorts of programs to encourage people to have children.

If you are concerned about EU population and migration, then you'll have to stop making excuses about tackling AGW, and get on with it, as economic migration and refugee's will boost our numbers massively as large parts of the warmer world become unliveable, or crops can't be grown reliably. Yet another cost of AGW, that makes the expense of tackling it, less than the cost of inaction ...... a simple decision for any true economist.

There's no reason why we can't provide adequate energy for 11bn people whilst being carbon neutral. Food is a bigger problem, but I'm sure we'll manage with better programs, less land used to grow crops for meat production, and less food waste. But there is no choice, we're gonna hit 11bn, whether we like it or not, so whilst population is 'the problem' it's one we can't really tackle anymore than we currently have.