I would eat roadside food in Thailand but never India. On one of her recent visits, my Indian colleague picked up campylobacter from street food and and needed treatment. As a delicate European I feel it would be like painting a target on my back.
I picked up campylobacter in the UK and Legionnaires’ Disease in France.
I seem to be too delicate even for England!
Exactly right Badger. The ‘too many people’ argument is both false and dangerous, because it is a distraction.
The problem is over-consumption by a relatively small number of people.
If everyone with an annual income over 110,000€ simply changed their lifestyle to roughly the European average, world emissions would immediately fall by a third.
The world can sustain consumption by its whole population at around the average level of a wealthy European country in the 1960s.
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I have eaten roadside food everywhere I have been in the ME and Asia with no discernible bad effects, I think though that I have a bit of old cast-iron drainpipe instead of a digestive tract.
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George Monbiot on how more frequent and more deadly pandemics are no accidents - but manifestations of capitalism-driven climate/ecological breakdown.
This threat is bookended by grotesque cruelty: the poultry, mink and pig farms whose horrors we have somehow normalised and accepted.
Mr Monbiot very gently blames ‘The Economy’ but I think it is people who are to blame.
I am a veggie person but strongly advocate all animals in the food industry should be free range, drug free and humane. Carnivorous folks will pay more and can consider themselves a less selfish part of the eco chain. The world doesn’t have to all go veggie but definitely less than 20% carnivore.
As for mink and the fur trade ?!#*%#!
When, and it is no longer ‘if’, AGI occurs, we have to wonder what it will make of our maintenance of and place in this beautiful planet.
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But capitalism systematically rewards any people that can sell lots of things at a profit, whether or not what they sell or how they produce it is actually bad for other people, or the planet.
The naive argue that it’s not these sellers and profiteers, but people’s choices that are damaging - a fantasy of choice-based-on-full-information, clearly belied by the fact that Big Oil, Big Tobacco, Big Pharma, Etc, Etc, are continually shown to have concealed from buyers the harm their products do.
A system really based on free choice would show pictures of factory farming on every advert for meat, eggs, etc… Given genuinely good information, and genuinely free choice, most people choose to do the good thing - because most people are good. The system isn’t.
Moreover, even naive apologists for capitalism can’t suggest any market mechanism that would have mitigated disasters decades or centuries in the making - like climate/ecological breakdown.
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Quite so. The ‘free market’ that is nor free and where market means marketing.
I was recently reading about the Purdue family pharma company behind the OxyContin scandal. Bought their way off that hook I see. What I find mind crushing is how many people knew and for how long, the addictive effect of this drug and the harm it would do, and did not stop ‘pushing’ it.
Perhaps, if money was taken completely out of the equation, we might have a good system with all good people. I’ll ask he chatbot…
PS.
governments and corporations have teamed up to turn the apocalypse into a money-making opportunity. They have rushed to put forward false solutions to the climate crisis: from the push to replace fuel-engine vehicles with electric ones, to so-called climate-smart agriculture, to protected areas for nature conservation and massive tree planting projects for carbon offsets.
_ All this trickery is called “greening” and it is designed to profit off of climate fears, not stop climate change. While guaranteeing high returns, this deception is tantamount to the genocide of the hundreds of millions of people who will perish from the effects of climate change within the next century because things are that bad._
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“If we can make one transformative movement in the 21st century, it’s to gain a greater respect for caring for life – for all of life, ourselves included.”
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A helpful answer from the AI chatbot Bing to a question by Aaron Mok and Sindhu Sundar in Business Insider
Will we ever be able to end climate change?
This reminded me so strongly of a semi-plagiarised essay by a 12-year-old - quite uncannily nostalgic (I used to be an English teacher).
Rather confirmed my impression that the fears of AI imitating humans are over-hyped - and a distraction from its real dangers…
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Or ‘greenwashing’. The big issue with supposed technological solutions and carbon-offsetting is that they are based on the idea that we can / have to preserve the lifestyles of the wealthy and privileged and the economies that feed them. Carbon-offsetting, in particular, is explicitly about enabling frequent fliers, etc, to carry on while others clear up the mess.
But in fact most climate scientists and other environmentalists believe that none of the ‘greenwashing’ solutions are adequate - and that it’s precisely our lifestyles and economies that we have to change.
This is a bit worrying.
The ongoing ecological decline is giving rise to many new ethics to navigate.
I agree. And now..
The difficulty lies in that those with the money and the power are less likely to agree to compromise. They will just build higher walls.
Maybe I am an alarmist but is it beginning to sound inevitable?
The endangered will be people. An international refugee law is already sorely needed. Witness the political reaction of countries to the current, relatively small compared to what may come, refugee migration.
We need to find practical ways, now to peacefully support and absorb large numbers of refugees. Being less xenophobic, self defensive and using less inflammatory language about migrants will be a good start.
Sadly I think you will find the exact opposite happens, indeed is happening.
Unfortunately political thinking is shifting from “how do we prevent global warming” to “how do we live with global warming”. It is unfortunate because the answer to the latter question is “by allowing a very large number of people to die”.
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Skeptical Science* is updating its series of rebuttals of common myths propagated by climate-science-deniers…
*Hate the American spelling, but guess we have to use it as it’s in a name ?
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I think it depends what you mean by ‘it’. Already inevitable, I’m sure, are more and more extreme weather events that will indeed lead to massive disruption - crop failures, wildfires, floods, migrations, social breakdown, more authoritarian governments, wars, pandemics, etc.
But the scale of these disasters is not set in stone - the more we do, the less severe and widespread they will be - always bearing in mind that, although we should green our own lifestyles as much as we can, the most important action we can take is to become politically active in support of left/green policies and parties.
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I see the Yanks rendered a small part of Ohio uninhabitable the other day, by carrying out a controlled burn/explosion of a derailed freight train carrying some dangerous chemicals.
Alas, they either didn’t read the freight manifest properly or it wasn’t accurate as there was some other nasty stuff in there and now they’ve poisoned the air with vinyl chloride etc. Fish in the local rivers and livestock dropping dead.
BBC News - Ohio train derailment: Rail firm pulls out of meeting with residents