[Coral-List] Stop flying????!

Wed Mar 11 17:27:10 UTC 2020

Exactly!  7.8 BILLION people eating every day, in some places way too much food, and more and more people are adding more animal products to their diets as their standards of living increase. This is a CRITICAL component of climate change and environmental deterioration. Until we stop and reverse the numbers of people on Earth, reduce the many, many  billions of food animals to maybe a few million or fewer so that there is space for other than humans and your food animals, coral reefs and other ecosystems will continue to decline and ultimately be doomed. 3.5 BILLION people (half of what population Earth today) has been estimated based on thermodynamic calculations to be a maximum reasonable number of humans with equality standards of living for all. Sadly, people are too selfish to do the right thing because "I just can't give up cheese" or "I love my steaks medium rare", etc. People DO NOT need to eat dead animals or depend on animal excretions for nourishment as the many millions of healthy vegans around the world demonstrate. But even 7.8+ billion vegans is too many people for the Earth to sustain without affecting the health of nature. Food plants take up natural resources as well. Deforestation for palm oil and other food crops is just as harmful as deforestation for grazing cattle and raising soybeans for cattle. Every new mouth on Earth demands more food production, and more land use for food production. So we need both to control birth rates, stop trying to prevent every death, and reduce our consumption of animal products as recommended by IPCC 2019 April report. 

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-----Original Message-----
From: Coral-List <coral-list-bounces at coral.aoml.noaa.gov> On Behalf Of frahome--- via Coral-List
Sent: Tuesday, March 10, 2020 7:15 PM
To: Coral List <coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov>
Subject: Re: [Coral-List] Stop flying????!

 The reason is that 7 billions of people eat and a good fraction of this eats a lot of animal products. If even a small fraction of 7 billions of people will start flying at their "heart's content" we would be doomed. I see many scientists on this list feeling self-entitled to be the elite that should be allowed to fly.On an emissions point of view, stop flying is the best thing you can do, go vegan or close to it, the second. (The second has many additional benefits too). This is what data say (I have not the exact data by hand right now but to have a rough idea 1 overseas flight emits what a vegan diet saves over a year compared to an omnivorous diet).
The huge impact of aviation in the context of the Paris agreement, hiding behind the current 2% "myth" has been explained many times. Please go and look it up carefully.Here a recent (and ground-breaking) court sentence that declared illegal the plan to expand Heathrow Airport because it would go against the commitment taken by the Paris agreement:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/27/heathrow-third-runway-ruled-illegal-over-climate-change?fbclid=IwAR0shFjf3h7W-eER_f3glJDq1PcY0_e5kystxptAowVJuO-NooN7Jdo2_h8
Travel to your heart's content but not by plane.Francesca

    On Tuesday, March 10, 2020, 06:52:03 PM GMT+1, Alina Szmant via Coral-List <coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov> wrote:  

 Great if people want to stop flying. But ALL aviation is only 2 % of global fossil fuel emissions while animal agriculture produces 30 % of global emissions,  and animal agriculture account for 60+% of land use which means deforestation and habitat destruction, lots of pollution and animal suffering.  So go vegan and travel to your heart's content.

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

-------- Original message --------
From: Sue Wells via Coral-List <coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov>
Date: 3/9/20 9:14 AM (GMT-05:00)
To: coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov
Subject: Re: [Coral-List] Stop flying????!

Well done, Mark.  Yes, we must reduce our travel significantly - once the virus peak is over there is likely to be a rush to take holidays and hold meetings and the skies will be full of planes again.  You rightly question whether enough effort is being made to enable "virtual" attendance at coral reef meetings.  I know that people are looking into this, and hope that some solutions will soon be on offer.

In the meantime, my recent positive experience might be of interest. Over the course of 4 days in February, from the comfort of my office in Cambridge, I dialled into two international meetings, one in Washington DC on MPAs and one in Germany on protected areas more generally.  Both were fairly small (DC had 65 participants, with 5 dialling in; Germany probably less than 50 with c. 3 dialling in) and involved plenary sessions with break-out discussion groups.  There was a joint session when the two meetings "met" virtually, with others dialling in remotely.  The meeting in Germany used "global.gotomeeting.com" and the DC meeting used "webex" - both systems seemed to work fairly well for those dialling in.

Overall, the presentations worked well (as is the case with webinars), and I could follow the plenary Q&A sessions and for the most part get noticed if I wanted to ask a question myself.  Ironically the one session when the presentations did not work was the MPA one on technology, but this turned out to be "human error" rather than anything technical with the dialling-in system.

One big advantage was that I could attend both meetings, unlike other participants.  With the time zone difference, this led to some long days but it was worth it.  I could provide feedback from one meeting to the other - particularly useful for the discussions on the CBD post2020 target for protected areas which evolved as the meetings progressed.

So what did I miss? Break-out groups were of course not possible to join, and I did miss the social side (catching up with old friends and making new
ones) and networking.  I would not want to do it for every meeting.

But in some ways I achieved as much as I did by participating in person last year in another meeting on protected areas, held in a mountainous part of Italy.  In line with my aim not to fly when overland transport is available, I used trains and buses.  I spent 2 days and 3 nights (c. 60 hrs) at the meeting location, and over 3.5 days and 2 nights (some 70 hrs) travelling.  Admittedly, there were some unusual aspects to the trip, which coincided on my way back with temperatures of 40oC in France and a major disruption to train services due to an accident But it gave me some real insight of what travelling will be like once the effects of climate change fully take hold.  International conservation meetings should definitely no longer be held in remote locations, however beautiful the surroundings, unless absolutely essential.

As Mark says, we need to reduce travelling, keep flights to a minimum/those that are essential and unavoidable, and use the rapidly developing technology more effectively to keep in touch with each other.

Sue Wells

Sue Wells

95 Burnside

Cambridge CB1 3PA

Mob: 07905 715552

e-mail:  <mailto:suewells1212 at gmail.com> suewells1212 at gmail.com

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