Designing for the future and seeking new ways to be mindful of the climate is great, but this person has taken the concept several iterations too far. Once you start getting hesitant about using mealworms to consume plastic waste because it feels "very capitalistic", you're just shooting yourself in the foot.
> Hedström has proposed factory-like systems that would feed plastic waste to mealworms on an industrial scale, but he grapples with the ethical and practical problems in doing so. (It takes a colony of three to four thousand mealworms a week to digest a coffee cup.) “It’s very capitalistic or, like, it’s a very human way of thinking,” Hedström said. It doesn’t feel like symbiosis if one of you is being farmed.
This is a good example of ideology gone too far. Taken to the extremes, even good intentions start getting weirdly misaligned.
> This is a good example of ideology gone too far.
What does "too far" mean here? What boundary exactly has been crossed? It's not as if he canned the idea - further, it's not as if anyone is actually building it anyway.
mealworms don't have feelings, and extrapolating "capitalism" out of that has little basis outside of a vaguely leftist geo-hippy reaction to capitalism.
edit: and to be clear, i'm not a huge fan of capital, but the idea that this is some ruthless capitalistic evil is straight laughable.
I agree, though it's consistent with the extremes to which non-harm gets taken in many Eastern religions, which according to the article were a strong influence on his ethics. Not eating root-vegetables, etc.
The only cure for this is to drop the person off 500km from civilization, preferably in northern Canada (with gear and a guide of course) and have them hike and bivouac their way back. After that experience all notions of negotiating equitable terms with meal worms will be forgotten.
I think kids act like this because society has created this problem, and continues to ignore it because it's financially expedient.
There's a great deal of frustration about their impotency to affect environmental change - hell, any change that would result in less money for the wealthy. Pessimism and hyperbole is a natural outcome.
I recall how just recently we were reading reports on rapid improvement in emissions due to reduced commuting in the wake of COVID. The air was getting cleaner. Animal populations were recovering around places where the usual human activity was subdued.
But now we are herding people back into the offices after 2-3 years of alleged spectacular productivity gains while working remote - because being in the office is “more productive”, and any talk about the emissions and environmental impact is getting completely lost in the noise of the celebration to this “return to normal”.
Apple, Amazon, and the rest tout their marginal green initiatives while signaling that those who fail to make the energy guzzling and pollution spewing daily commute from however far to the office - will need to find new jobs.
Kids on reddit are usually not yet broken and jaded enough to swallow ladle-fulls of hypocrisy like the rest of us “adults with responsibilities and 401Ks” can.
>any change that would result in less money for the wealthy
The majority of CO2 emissions aren't from wealthy nations but developing nations - this might not be true in per capita terms, but the atmosphere doesn't care about per capita terms.
A molecule is a molecule, and if you want fewer of them in the atmosphere, then you can't blame the wealthy - there simply aren't that many of them. It's the regular people who would need to cut back, and that's especially unfair when it's being asked of people whose economies never fully developed in the first place.
My perception of the elites in western society is that most could not be more clear about the existence and threat of climate change.
It's popular to mock them for using private planes or using their yachts, but that sort of activity is dwarfed - by orders of magnitude - by cement production in China, or steel from India.
My point is that, whether they do so intentionally or not, wealthy folks(not just western mind you) exert influence and shape policy. This includes financial as well as political capital garnered.
> “In this way,” says Starr, “we could really incentivize the Americans who are driving and profiting the most from climate change to decarbonize their industries and investments. It’s divestment through self-interest, rather than altruism. Imagine how quickly corporate executives, board members and large shareholders would decarbonize their industries if we made it in their financial interest to do so. The tax revenue gained could help the nation invest substantially in decarbonization efforts.”
And your conclusion is... that there's nothing we can or should do?
Mine is that the wealthy should risk their money in order to invest in more sustainable economies for those less developed nations. That would solve the problem, right? Wonder why they won't do it...
> any change that would result in less money for the wealthy
>the wealthy should risk their money in order to invest in more sustainable economies for those less developed nations. That would solve the problem, right?
No. This seems incoherent to me - you are blaming the wealthy for inaction due to their greed, then claiming those same greedy people would be able to solve the problem if they invested in developing economies.
It seems far more likely that they would just use those investments as new avenues for control / extraction, as we've seen for centuries. Or are you expecting those greedy wealthy people to just start being altruistic?
I'm not claiming to have a solution. It's very tricky and I doubt a neat solution exists, unless we stumble unto some incredible new technology. It's about tradeoffs instead, and then that becomes a political question. The answer isn't "blame the rich."
"Climate Change" has become the scapegoat for any disaster, be it fires, floods, etc. Governments love to pass the buck when it comes to blame... accepting no responsibility for incompetence.
No I am not. Floods have happened since the beginning of time. Blaming poor preparations, poor responses and high casualty rates on mysterious forces outside our control is exactly what governments are doing (including in the linked article).
Climate Change did not cause that flood, nor did Climate Change kill those people. The government of Libya did - anything else is a misdirection.
We see this everywhere. Wildfires, hurricanes, floods, etc. These things have always happened - yet our responses and preparations are lacking - therefore "what could we possibly do? climate change!" is usually the answer. Never do we accept responsibility for our actions, such as decades of mismanagement, reduced budgets, indecisive leadership, and worse.
The root cause of these floods was actually identified - decades of mismanaging their dam infrastructure. But, somehow, when the rotting dams finally gave way it's suddenly Climate Change at fault - not the incompetent Libyan government.
Yes, and no. Responsibility and preparation (as well as avoidance measures) are lacking, yes, but also our self created climate change is responsible for increased frequency and strength of occurrences... doesn't help if these happened also before, and lacking similar if not more responsibility. Mixing two things.
> Climate Change did not cause that flood, nor did Climate Change kill those people.
It is all a probability game so you can't never say certainly, but it is very probable that flood wouldn't have happened, at least not that strong, without that much more energy, moisture etc in the atmosphere, so you are very likely wrong.
All people are not likely to die within a decade, but many more will die as a result of climate change than would have if we could stop climate change now. That effect is already happening.
Give it some more decades... the ""good"" thing about the WWs was that humanity finding its sanity the one or other way, could just stop with it. What veterans may have to say could pale soonish vs unstoppable new hell.
> When I go on reddit the kids seem to think they'll all die within a decade.
Here's the thing: they're kids. They're not capable of having the same measured responses that adults have.
If they were, they're be much more reasonable about the growing uncertainties of food and water security in the richest empire in human history. They'd be calmer about the real-time collapse of natural and social systems that every other generation has depended upon for every need. They would know what the upper limits of their future problems would be by rationally predicting the effects of impossible-to-predict catastrophic changes on earth, like you and I do.
Do you think their lives may be materially affected within a decade? And how many decades of climate change does a child today have to look forward to? I'm not a child, but I'm not quite old either and I'm pretty displeased about the near future; I can't fault children for being pissed or nihilistic about what they've got coming.
Actually it is likely our civilization will collapse over the next few to at most a dozen years. This was the hottest year ever, South America hit over 100 degrees during their winter recently. The sun cycle is just getting to its hot phase now in September. Next year will make this year look like a fond memory. The release of civilization ending methane hydrates from the arctic ocean is already underway and is about to commence a rapid acceleration next summer or the one after during this upcoming El Nino hot cycle. The flip to a new climate system happens over only about a dozen years over the last millions of years. We are now deep into this catastrophic cycle. https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/ The things that will get us are the fact that arctic cold snaps aren't kept up north anymore, so a risk is a cold snap in May, early June wiping out summer crops. Second risk is dangerous combination of heat and humidity will hit. The issue is that while we still have ice cover we have some extra reflectivity and it takes lots of energy to melt ice the last degree, compared to moving water up any degrees further, so the Arctic ice has provided a buffer, and now it is mostly gone, there isn't old ice any more just a thin recent coat on the arctic ocean. https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/how-is-climate-... And big oil and knowledgeable scientists knew this would be an issue back in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Exxon went all in to fund confusing misinformation starting in the 1970s.
This Arctic-News site is very interesting: the alarmism in there, with statements for example that the earth could become uninhabitable already in 2026, seem to me like perfect future fodder for continued climate-change denialism as soon as, well, 2026.
Luckily the style of display and a few slips in the pseudo-scientific wordage of the presentation kind of spills the beans for the awake reader.
But mark my words, no matter how many of the direst predictions become true by 2026, someone is sure to find one or several corners of the world where the prediction does not quite match, and they will then turn it around and state the very untrue: "all climate alarmism is lies! see, look at this website!".
It is very hard to get the general public to understand that if you cannot predict precisely the bad thing that will happen, then you are not in a position to propose actions to prevent what you can still estimate will certainly be bad.
in most people's experience, a bit if complacency is reasonable, things usually work out not as bad as you'd expect.
Worst of all, this complacency can I think be directly traced back to the comfort and easy-does-it outcomes afforded by one century of cheap-as-hell usable and plentiful liquid oil energy :-G
After a dozen years, if most measures of living standards have continued increasing as they have for the last few centuries, what conclusion will you draw from that?
I ask because I recall hearing these exact catastrophic arguments (methane hydrates, changes in albedo) more than a dozen years ago.
An apocalypse is a revelation is a paradigm shift is a singularity: in all cases, you cannot know what you'll find on the other side. That doesn't mean you can't, or that you needn't, fear it.
Asking for a simple yes or no to a direct yes or no question is way too demeaning for such a sophisticated person as yourself, I suppose. I now realize the errors of my ways and apologize profusely; clearly I am not worthy.
A simple yes or no is an insufficient answer for a question so complex in its context. Would you rather I toss off a foolish lie than answer in a way that at least strives to be worth your time?
It's a question oversimplified to the point of meaninglessness, as you well understand. Hence my preference for answering not the question you did ask, but the one you would better have: "Why are they so afraid?"
> For his final presentation at architecture school, Hedström proposed Inxect Island, an apartment complex built around mealworm farming, sustained by ocean-borne plastic, on a decommissioned oil rig moored outside Tórshavn.
This sounds more like the set of a Balenciaga runway show than an a helpful vision for the future. Complete with a dash of "zey vill eat zee bugs", it's hard to tell whether or not this is satire.
Architecture school is all about the fanciful. Whether or not the proposals will work in real life are secondary to the creative process that gets you to them (aside from purposeful courses like Structures or Materials). That something like this was proposed for an architecture final crit doesn't surprise me. The real accomplishment here is this student getting his way into a New Yorker featured article.
Every once in a while, you'll hear something in a final crit like, "Uh, do you realize all your structural loads are coming down on to that one point?" Always good for a chuckle when someone brings up the practical failings of a design.
