Restoring nature is our only climate solution
A review of available techno-fixes leads to two unavoidable conclusions. First, our problem is not just carbon emissions per se; it’s also how we humans inhabit our planet (too many of us using too much stuff too fast). And second, we need non-technological ways of addressing the climate crisis.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2026-09-22/restoring-nature-is-our-only-climate-solution-2/Open linkView original on piefed.social
56 replies
A big part of deforested land is used for animal agriculture. Watch how many people instantly tune out when the topic is brought up, though.
Stop eating animals.
did you try that?
Yep, it's completely unnecessary to eat animals. Also cheaper and healthier. And food lasts longer in or out of the fridge.
i love when they pose this as a gotcha lol. like, "yea years ago, wish I'd done it sooner!"
Unfortunately I spent half my life eating animals, until I realized how harmful it was to my body and the climate.
And then I realized how entirely unnecessary it was the whole time. It's amazing how people throw away money just to harm themselves and the planet.
very well put
it hasn't stopped deforestation.
It has significantly reduced it
no, it hasn't.
sparkling analysis.
you don't know what anyone else needs
Oh, that's bad. Whenever you have people move out of cities and into nature, they build wide 1 story buildings, have lots of kids, cut down all the trees, and those kids grow up to build more 1 story buildings for their families.
We need people building tall structure in urban settings, so we can scale up without cutting down the trees in between our homes.
Yeah, this article is really fucking strange.
I fully agree with the seeming goals - restore nature, reduce human footprint, smarter use of resources - all valid, noble, and needed. But some of the proposed methods are simultaneously counterproductive and scientifically ignorant.
'Wind is intermittent so it can't be used' therefore we need 'household bike generators'...
Human power cannot come anywhere close to our energy needs.
We'd be lucky to get 1000 kcals per day of useful locomotion from a human powered generator. That's basically the equivalent of a very fit person biking for 20 miles (32 km) per day, into a machine that captures that energy with perfect efficiency. That would translate into about 1.1 kWh per person, per day.
Compare that to actual electricity consumption per capita. The world total is 3.9 MWh/year per capita, which translates into 10.6 kWh/day. Developed/Western countries use even more: North America uses 36.6 kWh/day/person, Europe uses 16.8 kWh/day/person. And that doesn't include direct combustion of fuels (biofuels, fossil fuels) for heating or transportation, either, and only represents grid electricity usage.
Tell that to the article author and their rather unhinged view of our energy future.
To be clear, I completely agree with you. I was responding to the article itself which starts out as reasonable-sounding directives to re-wild ecosystems to build climate resilience and then devolves into this strange science-denying anarcho-ecologism.
The bike generators are suggested seemingly seriously and are such a glaringly implausible idea that it sullies the entire piece.
I wasn't disagreeing with you, just backing you up with some calculations.
Anyone who has ever done the "hmm I wonder if a human in a hamster cage could power human energy needs" thought experiment very quickly runs into the answer "no, and it's not even close."
do you have any source for that number about the amount of power genrrated from a human please? also a source about the efficiency with which different forms of generation translate to energy?
Also I find it devastating that places like the global north and oceania use some of the largest amounts of energy but the people st the Equator will oay the highest price for this in the next 50-200 years....
It's just a simple calculation of how much endurance athletes, like marathon runners, can expend in energy, compared to the actual percent of energy used to drive a turbine. But if you actually look at the power produced on the machine itself, you have to grapple with human efficiency being only at about 30%.
Among cyclists fit enough to hook up a fitness tracker to their workouts, 150 W is probably about the average power output people can maintain, for about an hour. That's 150 Wh.
Train them up to where they can average 200W for 2 hours per day, and you're basically hitting 400 Wh/day. That's less than 1/3 of the number I made in my previous comment of assuming perfect efficiency instead of 30% efficiency.
This article breaks down the assumptions of what is feasible for 8 hours per day, estimates that the typical person can cover 2.4% of their electricity needs by cycling 8 hours per day, every day.
This thread shows some similar analysis, including a television program where they got 80 cyclists to power a home for 4 hours.
There's just no feasible way around it. You're better off taking that human food, setting it on fire, and boiling water for a steam turbine, rather than increasing humans' caloric consumption to support large scale human-powered generators.
thanks
This sentence never appears in the article, and it's content is never implied. So what are you talking about?
The verbatims:
And further down:
Next paragraph:
Bit of a far cry from 'the content is never implied'.
Thank you, precisely my point. Nowhere does it say anything like or implying, the combination you mention, which was ‘Wind is intermittent so it can’t be used’ therefore we need ‘household bike generators
In relation to the 3 segments you provide:
Edit: Several, to make things clearer @[email protected]
You turned
human-powered air compressorsintohousehold bike generators.One is a manual tire pump that has existed for generations, the other is a person-sized hamster wheel for the purposes of charging an e-bike.
You missed some words when reading, please try again
To my knowledge deforestation does not take place because people move out of cities and into nature.
That chart only shows a breakdown of foods.
It's missing development for real estate.
But, yeah, animal agriculture is worse. But even if we all became vegetarian (we should!), that won't stop deforestation from humans building homes.
That chart doesn't (and can't) account for deforestation caused by rural migration and/or sprawl caused by single-family homes.
There was a week during covid up here in Canada where even the main street was empty during "rush hour" and it was quiet like being in the forest. I remember thinking that this gives a chance for the earth to breathe for a bit and I swear I could feel it healing.
Yeah, that was one of the best weeks of my life.
I was praying humanity would see how calm it was when we turned off the capitalism machine, and we'd decide collectively to keep it off. Unfortunately, humans are dumb
When I lived in Taipei, Taiwan, there was a military exercise in that area with civilian curfew for a whole day. Finally the constant traffic roar went silent and I could keep my windows open and listen to birds and insects. A pleasant curfew.
It's rather simple really. Either we restore nature, or nature will do it herself. She will not do so gently.
Hard to take the article seriously when it dismisses renewable energy in favor of household bike generators of all things.
This is in no way practical. Restoring ecosystems is a very important task for building climate resiliency and mitigating some of the damage, but we'd effectively lose the ability to do anything by hampering energy production to such a degree. Hard to make a bunch of pyrolysate to regen the soil when the ovens are pedal-powered.
If we ban meat consumption, we get a lot of land back. Seems doable.
The article makes the point several times that the oceans have greater capacity for carbon capture than land.
So, yes, you're right that we need to ban meat and reforest those spaces.
And also, we desperately need to ban fishing to get that carbon sequestration capacity back from the oceans.
If we ban meat consumption, Republican penises will shrink, and we can't have that!
Wait now, if you're going to have ONLY ONE solution to global warming affecting climate, it's obviously to stop or reduce the production of fossil fuels. Don't anyone skip that. Carry on.
Of course reducing and then stopping the extraction of fossil fuels is something we can't do without. Still, if you take a look at the article you will understand what it's about:
Techno-fixes are all ways to maintain our lifestyle with less effects on the environments. If we're going to clean a wine stain, the first thing to do is to stop pouring wine on the stain.
This article makes a lot of good points, but
It's obvious the author isn't very educated on renewable energy.
Energy storage isn't batteries. Renewable energy storage is hydroelectric dams. Solar and wind during the day, and hydroelectric dams operate only at night. If your hydro is running during the day, you've done fucked up and need batteries
Do it right, and no batteries are needed, which drastically alters the rare earth materials needed.
But, yeah, we do also need to reduce our energy usage and our population too.
Batteries are energy storage. Dams tend to be extremely damaging to river ecosystems.
We can't really expand on hydroelectric dams; we already have dams in just about all locations where they make sense. If there's no convenient hydro dam near you you're probably going to have to go with something else for storage.
Also, those dams are usually used for power generation; for storage it's more common to use pumped hydro where you store energy by pumping water to a higher reservoir and release it by letting it flow to a lower one. A major downside is that pumped hydro only works in select locations; not every hill is suitable for installing a pair of large cisterns.
Another option is compressed air energy storage, which stores energy by compressing lots of air in large tanks and then releases it by letting the air back out. Cleverly designed implementations can even make use of the thermal changes the air undergoes at its density changes. They also need specific local conditions; huge high pressure tanks are hard to build so we usually use things like salt caverns as tanks. One interesting option is to use depleted natural gas fields.
There's also other options like flywheels, which should be a bit less picky about location.
And lastly, not every battery needs lots of rare earth metals. Sodium batteries are currently starting to hit the market; they are more stable and less reliant on rare materials than lithium batteries. They are also bulkier but that's not much of a concern for a grid-level storage facility.
You missed my point. If the dams are running during the day, you done fucked up.
Why? Plenty of dams are perfectly capable of producing power 24/7. It may not even be possible to let the reservoir fill up during the day and drain it during the night, especially during a drought or flood period where the amount of incoming water very much dictates what you do with your dam and when.
You make a lot of assumptions about how dams are operated. Those assumptions aren't always true.
The phrase "e.g." means "for example" and is used to describe a subset of the previous term. It doesn't need to mean the exact same thing.
We can say things like "humans consume resources (e.g., fresh water)" and that would be a valid sentence.
Plus it's fair to expect that in the next 10 years, the vast majority of grid scale energy storage worldwide is going to be electrical batteries. Gravity storage just can't compete except in very limited geographical and geological circumstances.
*cries in alluvial plain*
The "solution" is climate change, which will collapse civilisation sometime this century. There's zero paths that lead to sustainability with 8-9 Billion people all trying to consume more (consumption is just energy density)
I think the author makes an argument for what next though.
After that, who knows, the biosphere will have changed considerably so hopefully there's no more, or very little agriculture, simply because there's not that weather stability ag. needs.
it's not just me saying that, it's human behavioural experts
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2006923-understand-faulty-thinking-to-tackle-climate-change/
Ya . This is my proposed solution too. ...Though truthfully speaking I am skeptical.
Climate chsnge is caused by humans and because if this it cant go on forever ...cause humans die...and with eniugh fucking around with our climate wee will all go extinct...
If enough people die then certainly there will have to be a permanent change amongst humanity that makes climate change impossihle ever r again right?
Humanity said 'Never Again' back in 1945 when the Holocaist was finished ....but there have been dozens of genocides AFTER that particular one (theres even a couple of them happening right now as I type this) .... so.... Are humans just 'A-OK' with easily avoidable mass death events happening again and again and again? Like how do we kniw that humans will do everything it takes to avoid ANOTHER mass extinction from climste change some 400 or 1000 years into the future? Because it certainly seems like we are based on how our species has behaved over the last couple of millenia.
I'm glad to see pushback on this article. I expected, frankly, knee-jerk reactions, but i'm pleased to see that people see through a lot of the bullshit.
The aspect I wanted to discuss: We're not losing our forests. At least not in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forests_of_the_United_States
We started out with a billion acres of forest in the US before Europeans came. We've lost about a quarter of that, but most of that was before a hundred years ago - for various reasons, it's pretty stable, and we're not only growing new wood for the most part instead of chopping down old growth, we're gaining forest instead of losing it.
I think we're - overall - doing a not bad job on the forestry front.
We need to keep moving away from petrochemicals (i.e. not just oil/gas/coal for power/transportation, but working towards finding replacements for all this damn plastic, too), and keep improving alternate energy sources.
I have some hope on that front - for a tiny example, studies have looked at electric vehicles with higher miles, and the batteries are lasting much better than was feared (90% after 90k miles is not bad), and with new battery tech we should be able to better store wind/solar energy for use when it's needed. There is some great news along those lines.
We need to get rid of regresive politicians who are keeping polluting energy alive (along with shitting on human rights), and to do that we need to focus on getting rid of our oligarchs powering that system.
But on the actual "nature" frnt, things are not bad in many ways (while not being great in others, sure).
The US has pushed it's deforestation onto other countries though. It gets most of it's building lumber from Canada for example, and food products imported from the south like palm oil drive deforestation in far more vulnerable ecosystems.
There is no climate solution. The planet's own dynamics now dominates. Stopping burning now (we won't) won't make a difference. Better luck next species.
How would burning organic material capture carbon more than releasing carbon?
Pyrolysing is different from combustion. In pyrolysis, oxygen levels are kept very low so the substance does not burn, it merely loses a lot of volatile content and rearranges.
Charcoal is the result of the pyrolysis of wood, and it is formed in small amounts when wood is burned in open air. Pyrolysing a log would turn the entire thing into charcoal, which the author suggest could then be used in building materials to trap the carbon.
Humans are nature.
Nature created us. Nature will destroy us. Nature will carry on long after us.
Life...finds a way. Every physical science will tell you that a balance is always met.