Yesterday I found myself examining where the blackberries in the SM came from. Having discounted non-UK berries, I was left with West Sussex or Perthshire. My UK geography isn't bad but I struggled to work out which of those large areas would involve travelling a smaller distance to east Lancs
My wife has a packet of strawberries here. Grown in Somerset, packed in Leeds, probably then sent to a central distribution hub to be shipped out to our local shop, before being delivered to our door. Bloody things have done more travelling than I have in the last month.
If you can keep your head, while those around you are losing theirs, you may not have grasped the seriousness of the situation.
The market won't solve the problem on its own. But it is the case that the market sells what people buy and if people in numbers decide to buy or not to buy something, the market moves to meet them. You can buy toothpaste with no plastic beads. Its a bit niche but its readily available if you look for it. If lots of us did so, the SMs and others would find it suits them to sell it.
Don't buy strawberries after the end of June. Don't ever buy blackberries at all - there'll be a hedge nearby that can provide all that you require including some to bottle or freeze for Christmas if you really want. If we all on here have garden space, using some of it - any of it - to grow soft fruit, fine beans and that sort of stuff that is usually flown here air freight out of season is one of the best things you can do with that space.
Heat pumps have been in use for decades - the technology they rely on has been in extensive use for more than a century. It is well understood, including what the problems are (and there are some). The inertia created by the argument is a far greater problem - I don't want to get a heat pump in case it turns out I could have got a better one had I waited a year - right, in the meantime you are burning a flammable toxic gas that is causing vast problems right across the world. Stop hivvering. Do some proper research. GET ON WITH IT. Stop letting perfect be the enemy of good.
Diesel cars - very good example of how wrong Governments can be and why you should not rely on them telling you what's safe or what's good. They are lobbied remorselessly and make poor choices based on what the friends of the Minister say. Hydrogen is today's example. The information is there if you want it. But if you listen to the Government you'll hear what Centrica want you to hear. A dose of healthy scepticism and some common sense will serve you better.
Gardening on the edge of Exmoor, in Devon
“It's still magic even if you know how it's done.”
Neither is the planet in my opinion in need of saving. .. but in some form I think the planet will be OK and even if it is not as pleasant an environment in future it is likely to still be a planet able to support life of some sort (just not necessarily 8billion + human beings).
I don't think a human-created mass extinction event of other species and people is remotely 'ok'. You are talking about avoidable planetary genocide. This is what people mean when they say "save the planet" - they mean "save the life".
"not as pleasant an environment"
The poor go first and suffer most, of course. The developing countries, the children, those on lowest lying land, those in already dry regions, those in war-prone areas already fighting over land resources.
The human created mass extinction event has already started. I'm just making the point that the "you" in the question title of this discussion have very little impact on how that event plays out compared to the nearly 8000,000,000 total population of people on the planet. I think it is great to take options that cause less damage to the life on the planet and spend a good amount of time trying to make the garden here and surrounding farm more nature friendly, but I'm not going to delude myself into thinking that my individual choices will actually "save the planet".
I agree with you that the true burden of climate change is being forced onto the poorest people and think those living in areas of the globe with a more moderate climate need to seriously reform how economic migration is allowed from the areas that are becoming uninhabitable. Ireland used to support a population of over 8million and export food using sustainable food production techniques in the mid 1800's but famine and economic decline led to the population dropping to about half that by the mid 1900's. We have legislation here that wont even allow Irish people not from and working in a specific rural area building a new home so we are a very long way from allowing people make the land fully productive in a sustainable way. I have read figures that Ireland currently produces enough food for 40million people and if that is the case it could support even more if the majority of agriculture had not been pushed towards beef and milk production. There are answers to the planet's problems but do political leaders have the appetite to adopt any of them?
I'm not sure the market works that way so much anymore. The market has a marketing machine that tells you what you want/need as it always did - fine - but now the market targets you rather than you going to the market. That is why Google and the like collect data. They sell that data so marketing can be specific to you. This isn't 100 years ago where you heard from a neighbour or read the ad in the paper. It is in your face 24x7 (unless you turn the ads off). The market drives what you think you want, not necessarily the other way round. The internet is a vast marketing machine that sells everything from politicians to pigs. Google realises that, and Zuckerberg will turn it into immersive 3D.
But irrespective, the market today like the market 100 years ago or 200 years ago, doesn't care. We are where we're at because of the market - the market provided what was needed at a profit and didn't care about the future. It will continue to do the same.
'...Diesel cars - very good example of how wrong Governments can be and why
you should not rely on them telling you what's safe or what's good...'
I would say in my simple view that that's because the model is wrong. The market cannot lead. Govs, as with Covid, need to assemble the expertise to assess where we're going and plan the way (it is even beyond individual Govs now - the world has shrunk that much) - not wait for the market to create 'a solution' that may be good or bad - but largely not thought through. The speed of change is alarming isn't it? The world took 100 years to really bugger things up - but now we have 7 billion people, with lifespans that are ever increasing ( so more requirements in energy, devices and food) and two burgeoning economies that have over a third of that population mass. Can we afford to randomly move on and just hope the solution is good when past performance for man over the past decades shows in general the solution the market provides is bad? But we can't afford inertia either.
As for hydrogen - no idea if it's good or bad - but I heard the head of JCB say they're going that way as battery didn't work in their larger machines (https://www.jcb.com/en-gb/news/2020/07/jcb-leads-the-way-with-first-hydrogen-fuelled-excavator). But is that good or bad or just the market? And what is the ramification of 1.4 billion EV car batteries anyway? Then push that estimate forward to cover China and India growing economically. Then add the same household batteries (for solar), then mobile phone, tablet, laptop...
Currently the UK has 400+ cars per 1000 people, China 210, India 28 if the wiki data is to be believed. Does battery scale to that, let alone to what those figure will be if their economies continue to grow.
The Wright brothers' first flight was in 1903. 66 years later we had the first moon landing. If we can achieve that in such a short period of time we should be able to sort out the mess we have created since that first moon landing.
In Victorian England London was swamped with horse poo, ditto Paris, New York...major cities all suffered. We moved from horses to mass produced cars and where the average person couldn't afford a horse, the world (all but) can now afford a car. And what did that solve?
About the same time Bakelite came on the scene didn't it? Try going to the beach - any beach - anywhere in the world and not finding plastics.
As for your flight analogy - I'm not disputing man is very ingenious - just that the product of that ingenuity isn't thought through. It can't be left to the market.
@steveTu - It's where free market ecomonics gets you - slap bang in the middle of all this - an intentional, gleeful and repeated "bonfire of regulations": the "no-one can tell us what to do" mode of non-co-operative eco-political mess. "Make ME great again / make America Great Again / Britain First / ME first". Except we are all connected and good will is all that's holding the system up.
I'm no Greta fan, but I totally follow the frustration. All COP26 seemed to be to me was a bunch of politicians trying to get air time to say how good they will be - so they can fly back home with glossy photos on the front of their newspapers.
It's a problem as it's been left so long - we don't appear to be able to wait, but we need solutions that won't cause more problems in 10..20...30...100 years. How is that resolved - just follow the market again? I'd even appreciate it if they said we have to follow the market now, but we'll put in place (like manufacturer forced recycling) processes to assess what we're doing and where we going and what the ramifications are. So at least we're not in the same boat in another 20 years and looking for guidance.
I read somewhere that bringing up children with a sense of obligation rather than a sense of entitlement would be far better for the planet and society. It would take quite a switch in mindset to do that, but it would be a start.
Posts
Don't buy strawberries after the end of June. Don't ever buy blackberries at all - there'll be a hedge nearby that can provide all that you require including some to bottle or freeze for Christmas if you really want. If we all on here have garden space, using some of it - any of it - to grow soft fruit, fine beans and that sort of stuff that is usually flown here air freight out of season is one of the best things you can do with that space.
Heat pumps have been in use for decades - the technology they rely on has been in extensive use for more than a century. It is well understood, including what the problems are (and there are some). The inertia created by the argument is a far greater problem - I don't want to get a heat pump in case it turns out I could have got a better one had I waited a year - right, in the meantime you are burning a flammable toxic gas that is causing vast problems right across the world. Stop hivvering. Do some proper research. GET ON WITH IT. Stop letting perfect be the enemy of good.
Diesel cars - very good example of how wrong Governments can be and why you should not rely on them telling you what's safe or what's good. They are lobbied remorselessly and make poor choices based on what the friends of the Minister say. Hydrogen is today's example. The information is there if you want it. But if you listen to the Government you'll hear what Centrica want you to hear. A dose of healthy scepticism and some common sense will serve you better.
“It's still magic even if you know how it's done.”