Comment by epolanski
15 hours ago
You're dragging heavy nets on the sea floor releasing heavy amounts of carbon dioxide and destroying ecosystems that are net contributors to decarbonization like seaweed, seagrass, etc. A single boat with a single net can do insane damage in a single day.
The problem is: when it comes to industrial food production, both fish and meat are insanely taxing on the environment.
But people, we, *don't want to accept that how they eat destroys the planet*
I can understand that. I already have many thoughts and problems, do I also have to feel guilty for what I consume and eat?
But it's the reality, and focusing on transport alone is the narrative that keeps accelerating how fast we kill the planet.
I'm glad you put the industrial qualifier on your food production comment. Eating meat is completely fine when doing it in moderation and buying only from local sustainable farms. However, industrial international scale meat production is a huge blight on the earth.
Interesting, thanks for explaining. I'm vegetarian and thereby don't eat fish, but I didn't know fishing had such an impact on the environment.
You raise some interesting points.
And the ideal, carbon-neutral reality is difficult to stomach: We humans just go back to the old ways (maybe the stone age is about the right period), wherein:
We build some stuff out of rocks (which themselves are difficult to form without even so much as copper tools). We use trees and plants where we have them (and we tend to die off when the use becomes unsustainable).
We grow and produce what we can on our own, and we do not tend to travel very far to trade for other things.
When the weather regionally turns ugly for a season or two, as it must eventually do, we have no fallback plan other than to starve until our numbers decrease to something that can be sustained (which may be zero).
We did all that stuff once. I don't think anyone really wants to go back to those methods.
So we do change what we can, where we can tolerate that change: It may be contradictive in some ways to charge up an EV at home with solar power and then make a special trip in that EV to pick up some cheeseburgers, but it's still an improvement over changing nothing at all.
And sure: We can do even better than that. We can build neighborhoods that are safe and efficient to walk or bike in so that it's more practical to get a cheeseburger without driving, and promote more of them by actually choosing to live in them. We can choose to eschew cheeseburgers altogether. There's lots of things we can do. There's a lot that we are doing.
(And I'm going to think about many of those ways this afternoon, in just a couple of hours after the weather dries up some, as predicted by our amazing computing-machines. I'll wash my hands with clean running water from the pipeline that runs all the way to my kitchen both before and after I get some prefabulated burger patties out of my grid-powered freezer and fire up the propane grill.
I'll do all of this while I bask in the unbridled decadence of not having had any opportunities to form memories of nearly running out of food as the yet another winter tirelessly wore on.
After that, I think I might work some on getting networked audio happening with Dante on my Linux desktop. I've got time for that kind of thing, since I'm not out tending the fields and chasing away the thieving poors with a stone hoe.)