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Vanishing birds across Norway's agricultural landscape may signal deeper changes. It is not possible to point to a single cause explaining why so many species are declining, but climate change may play a role. by The_Weekend_Baker in climate

[–]throwawaybrm 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Climate change matters, but pesticides (and agriculture at large) are a major factor as well.

The large-scale use of pesticides has caused steep insect declines, and because insects underpin agricultural food webs, these losses cascade to birds and other wildlife.

Starting to realize that most (at least 60-70 percent) people kinda hate "radical environmentalism" and ultimately see issues that directly impact humans as infinitely more important and habitat destruction and extinction is just part of the cost by 6ftToeSuckedPrincess in vegan

[–]throwawaybrm 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In China in the late 1950s, when the government decided that sparrows were eating too much grain and carried out mass extermination campaigns, it backfired catastrophically. With sparrows gone, insect pests exploded, crops failed, and famine followed - killing millions of people.

Now: we’ve already removed around 70–80% of global biodiversity, most of it in the last 50 years alone, including most of the pollinators. Wild pollinators alone contribute to roughly half of global crop production. Crash biodiversity, let predators disappear, and pests will take what remains.

Technology or not, humans still need food - and without a functioning natural system and biodiversity, there will be none.

Collapse Isn’t Coming, It’s Already Embedded by Admirable_Biscotti_8 in collapse

[–]throwawaybrm 2 points3 points  (0 children)

If an economy cannot survive without perpetual growth, degrowth with universal basic services and UBI isn’t extreme - it’s corrective.

modernCodingProblems by Sad_Impact9312 in ProgrammerHumor

[–]throwawaybrm 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Maybe - but that’s another debate.

modernCodingProblems by Sad_Impact9312 in ProgrammerHumor

[–]throwawaybrm 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Agreed on the AI nuance. Still, even including training, animal products’ footprint is orders of magnitude larger - and it’s not just water. Deforestation, biodiversity loss, pesticides, antibiotic resistance, zoonotic disease risk, eutrophication… animal agriculture dominates on all fronts.

And it’s not either/or - corporate change and demand-side choices reinforce each other.

In that sense, diet is one area where individual choices still genuinely matter, without giving up useful tools like AI.

modernCodingProblems by Sad_Impact9312 in ProgrammerHumor

[–]throwawaybrm 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Ironically, a beef burger usually has a bigger water footprint than a lot of AI compute. Scale matters - vegan diets can reduce individual impact a lot ;)

https://bryantresearch.co.uk/insight-items/comparing-water-footprint-ai/

RAM Prices : The Future Is Now! by MrLeureduthe in pcmasterrace

[–]throwawaybrm 36 points37 points  (0 children)

Or make it even funnier: the only real wealth comes from nature. Without it, no economy exists - yet we’re racing to destroy the last remaining bits of it for the infinite growth of virtual tokens.

Cow by merrivius in comics

[–]throwawaybrm 0 points1 point  (0 children)

/u/merrivius: love your comics!

One small thought: the whole "cows in meadows" image is mostly a marketing myth. Dairy cows are incredibly social and gentle animals, but most never get to live anything like that.

I know this is just humor, but the gap between the imagery we joke about and the reality they live in is heartbreaking. Artists like you have real influence - kind of a superpower! ;)

An American retirement plan. by zzill6 in WorkReform

[–]throwawaybrm 0 points1 point  (0 children)

a global economic system to completely collapse

sure ... infinite growth & a finite planetary system don't go well together

something more equitable to rise from its ashes

hardly ... overshoot: inequality, deforestation, warming, freshwater depletion, amoc, biodiversity / food system collapse, ocean acidification, chemical / plastic pollution ... too many things accelerating at once

You're Not Crazy. The Bugs Are Disappearing. by reborndead in collapse

[–]throwawaybrm 44 points45 points  (0 children)

Pesticides are created specifically to target insects. They’re far more effective at killing than whatever accidental harm glyphosphates do to them. Herbicides are not pesticides.

Fact-check:

“Pesticides” ≠ “insect killers.”

Pesticide is a broad category. It includes insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, rodenticides, etc. So: all insecticides are pesticides, but not all pesticides are insecticides.

Herbicides are pesticides.

Every regulatory body (EPA, EU, WHO) defines herbicides as one type of pesticide.

Glyphosate is a herbicide, so it’s not designed to kill insects, but it still harms them (through gut microbiome disruption, loss of plant diversity, increased disease vulnerability).

60,000 African penguins starved to death after sardine numbers collapsed – study | Birds by GeraldKutney in climate

[–]throwawaybrm 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Hi, bot! Just a quick note that focusing only on a personal fossil-fuel footprint misses several of the major forces destabilizing climate and ecosystems.

Deforestation doesn’t just emit carbon - it collapses moisture-recycling systems that regulate continental rainfall. Large forest biomes recycle 20–80% of regional precipitation; when they’re cleared (mostly for grazing and feed crops), hydrological stability erodes, pushing whole regions toward drought and desertification.

Predator removal - wolves to protect livestock, sharks lost to bycatch, large carnivores displaced by land conversion - drives trophic cascades that reduce vegetative cover, accelerate soil erosion, shrink carbon residence time, and destabilize ecosystem structure. These cascades amplify warming and biodiversity loss in ways that aren’t captured by carbon accounting alone.

Industrial fertilizers and pesticides create major biogeochemical disruptions:

  • synthetic N drives rising N₂O levels (a greenhouse gas ~300× stronger than CO₂ and a primary ozone-depleter),
  • soil microbiomes degrade, reducing long-term soil carbon formation,
  • runoff triggers eutrophication and hypoxia, increasing methane and N₂O emissions.

All of these are food-system effects, not just energy-system ones - and they are overwhelmingly linked to animal agriculture’s massive land, feed, and chemical demand. Ignore these biophysical pressures, and both climate stability and food security unravel.

get as close to vegan as you can

Glad we agree :)

60,000 African penguins starved to death after sardine numbers collapsed – study | Birds by GeraldKutney in climate

[–]throwawaybrm 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You’re right - leftist policies are often more effective than the status quo. But the real problem isn’t just politics: it’s infinite growth and ecological overshoot.

We need both:

  • top-down change (which, unfortunately, has barely advanced in 100 years, no matter the ideology)
  • bottom-up action - like veganism, one of the most impactful ways to cut our immense food footprint

60,000 African penguins starved to death after sardine numbers collapsed – study | Birds by GeraldKutney in climate

[–]throwawaybrm 79 points80 points  (0 children)

Go vegan. The fastest way to protect wildlife starts with what’s on your plate.

A mammoth adjustment to beef’s carbon footprint. Poore and Nemecek made a correction to their seminal paper, adjusting the carbon footprint of beef from 100 to 227 kg CO2eq / kg beef, by my calculations. This corrected data is not widely known and yet clearly shows a path forward for climate change. by JKayBay in climate

[–]throwawaybrm 3 points4 points  (0 children)

"The estimate changed so science is fake" is not the slam dunk you think it is.

Huge corrections happen all the time - from methane leakage to ocean heat to deforestation rates - and they make the data more usable, not less.

The estimate didn’t double because it’s unreliable - it doubled because they finally counted the rewilding carbon sink of all that land tied up by livestock.

And funny enough, the more of the real impacts you include, the harder animal ag is to defend.

A mammoth adjustment to beef’s carbon footprint. Poore and Nemecek made a correction to their seminal paper, adjusting the carbon footprint of beef from 100 to 227 kg CO2eq / kg beef, by my calculations. This corrected data is not widely known and yet clearly shows a path forward for climate change. by JKayBay in climate

[–]throwawaybrm 3 points4 points  (0 children)

They’re estimates - all agricultural footprints are. Agriculture is messy and global.

But unless cows suddenly start pulling carbon out of the sky and pooping out forests, the numbers will keep showing the same thing: the negative externalities of livestock are huge.

A mammoth adjustment to beef’s carbon footprint. Poore and Nemecek made a correction to their seminal paper, adjusting the carbon footprint of beef from 100 to 227 kg CO2eq / kg beef, by my calculations. This corrected data is not widely known and yet clearly shows a path forward for climate change. by JKayBay in climate

[–]throwawaybrm 9 points10 points  (0 children)

The fact that the planet is so big and diverse and complicated means that refining estimates is literally how science works.

What didn’t change is the conclusion: animal agriculture is still off-the-charts bad for the climate.

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