Environmentalists Exclusively Use the Microwave

https://www.worksinprogress.news/p/notes-on-progress-an-environmentalist

by bswud • 2 years ago

10 5 2 years ago

nkurz• 2 years ago

Decent article, but flagged for the misleading title change. The subtitle might be better: "Why being an effective environmentalist can often feel like being a bad one"

jacknews• 2 years ago

I'm sure microwave is not always the most efficient way to cook, even for the things it actually can cook. Pressure cooking seems way better for many cases.

But anyway, I think we're about to enter an age of abundant sustainable energy, and energy efficiency is going to be much less important than material and 'environmental' efficiency.

It will matter far more that the avocados sourced from Chile are grown sustainably in a way that matches the local environment, how they are packaged, etc, than how much transport energy is needed to bring them to market.

xg152• 2 years ago

Seems to me, the two will still be correlated however. E.g. if the entire world buys their bananas from one place, because the price is the cheapeast or whatever, then this will require a massive concentration of agriculture in that location impacts for the local environment - and those local impacts can have global effects, e.g. in case of large-scale deforestation.

I don't have data, but it seems to me, local agriculture avoids those problems, simply because it introduces more variablility and spreads the environmental burden over a larger area.

metalman• 2 years ago

humans now extract hundreds of billions of tons of material from our ecosphere,and the rate of extraction is accelerating,as is the fate at which we create and liberate green house gasses anything that does not directly address this juggernought in terms of implimentable direct measures to reverse this ,should be "nuked" how I loath this kind of Phd grade triumphent virtue signalling

xg152• 2 years ago

I think the charitable interpretation of this article is as a case of overfitting on the proxy metric [1]. If you care exclusively about reducing CO2 emissions, then her arguments have a point. But that's not how it works in reality: Even in environmental science, CO2 emissions are only one problem, next to other greenhouse gases, ocean acidification, biodiversity loss, etc. Optimizing for CO2 emissions at the expense of the other goals does not solve the environmental problems.

Apart from that, even the most idealist and selfless people have additional goals that have to be weighted, such as living healthy, reducing non climate-affecting pollution and environmental hazards, reducing harm to animals, reducing exploitation and inequality, etc. Again, ignoring all those other goals is unrealistic: We could probably make great progress on CO2 reduction if we permantly moved into a covid-style total lockdown - but no one wants to live that way. Maybe hormone and antibiotics-fueled factory farming produces more meat per CO2 unit, but what does that help if it also degrades the soil, increases the chance of superbugs and lowers overall health?

There is a less charitable interpretation of the post however, which is that this is a classic muddying-the-water piece. I think there are at least some indications of that.

I don't see any obvious problems with her data, but I find it puzzling that she jumps right to the most controversial and counter-intuitive explanations that can be supported by the data and even misrepresents findings as against conventional wisdom that really aren't.

The main finding seems to be that the environmental impact (in terms of CO2 emissions!) of food choices is completely dominated by what kinds of food you eat, to the point that other factors about how it is produced become negligible. That's all well and good and an important finding - but she then makes it sound as if optimizing the other factors would actually be harmful.

E.g., what the data tells is that, if you have the choice between having an organic, locally-sourced steak or having no steak at all, you should by all means skip the steak completely (or replace it with a plant-based or lab-grown one).

But for a variety of reasons, people may not be ready to ditch their steak in the medium-term - and if the choice is between an organic, locally-sourced steak and one shipped halfway around the world, the local one would be the winner.

Yet her writing implies that choosing industrially-produced, nonlocal food itself would be the environmentally-conscious choice. (She doesn't even bother to tell whether her processed, plastic-packaged, shipped-3-times-around-the-globe microwave fastfood dinner is actually meat-free or not, even though according to her own arguments, that would be the important factor and not the fact that it's fast food)

Similarly with the microwave: Yes, a microwave is clearly more environmentally sustainable than a wood stove, no question. So is a standard electrical stove. What would interest me more would be the comparision in efficiency between a microwave and an electrical stove.

(There are in fact lots of people in the world who still use wood or gas stoves: Mostly poor people or people in developing countries. How about contributing to reduce global inequality so those countries can put up a proper electrical grind and upgrade their citizens to electrical stoves - or microwaves?)

What I do take away from the post is the reminder that climate change is not in any way a "nice" problem - it does not always align as well with our other goals as much as we'd like it to. E.g., fighting climate change may actually require us to live less healthy or less sustainable in other ways. But before bringing out the trolley problems and impossible choices, I think it would be more useful to conentrates on the areas where the goals are aligned first, especially as we don't seem to make progress even there.

[1] https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2022/11/06/strong-Goodhart....

Environmentalists Exclusively Use the Microwave

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