RTE Climate change program What Planet Are You On?

_Brian wrote: »

There’s allot to like though.

According to that article I’m getting a cycle path to town here in rural cavan AND public transport passing my house so I don’t have to bring my car. When I’ve these things I’ll consider to eat less beef and might try oat milk. But I’ll wait for the promised cycle path and public transport first.

NcdJd wrote: »

You'd want to have the septic tank cleaned out before starting that diet. Only one day of the seven has spuds in it. Shameful. Nothing about the methane emitted from rice production or the fact that most of the ingredients are not grown locally in the country.

A lot of food consumed. I only have two meals a day but I suppose you'd need three of those dishes to feel full.

Re: WHO pulls support from initiative promoting global move to plant based foods

"[Willett and Rockström] also disagreed with the assertion that their diet would destroy culinary traditions around the world. “Flexibility to adapt to local diets is inherent in the reference dietary targets,” they wrote.

This is untrue. In the first place, the reference targets only allow for a very low intake of starchy root vegetables. In many parts of the world - including among the famously long-lived Okinawans, but also across Africa and those parts of the South Pacific still minimally impacted by dietary transitions to modern diseases - such foods are a major component of the diet.

Perhaps the thinking is that restricting such foods will increase dependence on grains, which they piously hope will be eaten as wholegrains. However, all these populations, as well as the Irish before the potato famine, were able to avoid epidemics of non-communicable diseases before any grains arrived as products of colonisation.

In the second place, whereas modern populations use cooking fats such as lard, ghee, tallow, and coconut oil the plan is to replace these with potentially very high intakes of polyunsaturated oils, despite recent evidence that polyunsaturated vegetable fats are toxic to beneficial intestinal microbes and associated with an increased risk of skin cancers.

In the third place, some regions are suited to the production of meat and dairy rather than plant crops; the detrimental effects of transitions to plant crops, with loss of topsoil, nutrients, and expense in fossil fuels, means that such transitions are unlikely to be sustainable (it is noteworthy that planetary health considerations in Eat Lancet were post-hoc justifications - the idea of what is a "healthy diet" came first, and not surprisingly, given the preponderance of vegans and vegetarians on the committee, it was a "plant-based" one.

I would have more sympathy with the statement "“We live in a world where more than 820 million people have insufficient food and many more consume low quality diets. Adoption of the dietary targets would greatly improve the nutrition and health status of most people on the planet.” if the authors had not completely undermined it by making their limited rations of animal foods entirely optional. A small increase in animal foods, as the Ethiopian minister pointed out, can make a huge improvement to the lives of children eating plant-based diets due to poverty. Wartime rationing in the UK aimed to put a minimal amount of affordable meat on everyone's table; sectors of the population unable to afford meat before could add it to the menu (wartime wage increases helped too). Civilian death rates declined as a result. Such a system for the developing world seems reasonable. However, it is not clear how eating less meat in, say, the UK or New Zealand puts more meat on the table in Ethiopia. The carbon cost of flying it around the world to the billions of people that need more meat surely rules that out, especially if production in the meat-exporting countries is meant to decrease.

I suggest that people eat whatever animal and plant foods grow near them, and use the whole animal - for example, using fats avoids the increased demand for palm and soy plantations that is an important cause of deforestation. Using offal as a source of micronutrients decreases the need for plant crops with a high water content, and thus a high land use and carbon transport cost per calorie. Feeding the inedible parts of plants to animals allows us to extract more nutrition from plants than we can purely by ourselves. And so on - the traditional way of doing things that was disrupted from the 1970s onwards by the flood of epidemiological scare stories generated in large part from Dr Willett's research, which were never really proven to be true by any experimental intervention, helping to drive a far more wasteful - and unhealthy - approach to cooking, eating and food production.

Buford T. Justice XIX wrote: »

An interesting one to keep an eye on next year, both in terms of NO2 emissions in Ag falling and how they frame Ag emissions as a larger proportion of much lower emissions.
https://twitter.com/franmcnulty/status/1316069921307066368?s=19

RandomViewer wrote: »

If the UK don't take to electric cars in large numbers I can't see the manufacturer's bothering making right hand drive models just for us,

_Brian wrote: »

Us and Japan

[Deleted User] wrote: »

All Tesla cars are monitoring all driving scenarios and reporting back unusual scenarios to tesla like strange junctions, driver behaviour etc

Its machine learning so the logic dosen't have to be programmed and it can learn itself.

They were saying the end of 2020 but have pushed it out again

Human error is the problem. Over 1 million people die on the roads each year. If you could eliminate human error through automation a lot of lives could be saved

emaherx wrote: »

First use?

There is over 1400 autonomous vehicles operating on public roads in the US.

NcdJd wrote: »

And don't forget all the jobs lost as technology advances. My job is in IT, most times a new phone system or new technology is rolled out people lose their jobs. We now have a program where we are using "bots" to do low end administration stuff, 5 people will lose their jobs at the end of the year when that's up and running.

NcdJd wrote: »

Don't mean that. I mean eventually with further automation and technical progress there will be a large part of the worlds population with no job opertunities. What do they do with these people? Universal wage i guess.

https://telecoms.com/484001/but-what-about-the-human-cost-of-automation/

emaherx wrote: »

I know but similar was claimed when modern diggers and many other types of mechanization appeared, yet employment has continued to rise.

Automation is pretty much what keeps me employed today in an industry that they've been claiming will end within the next 5 years for the past 50.

Bass Reeves wrote: »

That is interesting as Dacia are an Indian make of car and they drive on the LHS if the road. It amazing they are producing cars for Europe for the he side they do not drive

Buford T. Justice XIX wrote: »

An interesting development in similar programming in the UK.

https://twitter.com/PrysorWilliams/status/1316995287798480897?s=20