Species Loss/Decline - News Updates and Discussion

[trashpony]

what does this refer to? solar panels in fields?

No. They are planning on building a 30m high convertor station the size of 7 football pitches on a unique wetland near me and ploughing through a Ramsar and SSSI to get to it. It will go under the sea and make landfall in Suffolk where they will lso be trashing the environment.

It’s not just here - there are lots of (poor, not very powerful) rural communities who are being affected.

The rest of Europe is building offshore. In the U.K., we have outsourced our energy infrastructure to national grid (profits £5bn a year, chief exec make £2m plus many shares) who have declared offshore economically unviable.

It’s more expensive but other countries didn’t sell their infrastructure to a venture capital firm.

 

[trashpony]

But also solar panels in fields are shit. I’m all for solar panels. They should be mandatory on all new builds. And the government incentives to put them on existing buildings are really badly thought through.

 

[Hotel Chocolate]

I don't know much about farming and farming regulation and farming practises and I expect I'm going to be heavily corrected after this post, but from my I understand the highlands of this country in Wales and Scotland mostly but also Yorkshire as with the Yorkshire Shepherdess are basically useless for arable farming. so unlike the rest of Europe Which kept them as wild forest we cut down all the trees and changed it into sheep farming areas. Now this was marvellous few 100 years ago or even for the last 1000 years when we had wear lots and lots of wool, but do we wear wool now? I think I've got a coat or two for weddings and funerals all black and a few scarves made with wool, but I can't even guarantee the scarves are made from wool, they're probably synthetic as well. I do eat lamb. but I don't know if it's from the same sheep. Instead of paying for these sheep farmers with heavy subsidies to farm unprofitable sheep couldn't we pay them to re-forest the uplands of this island? To plant trees? To reforest and rewild the uplands of Britain.

 

[Artaxerxes]

I don't know much about farming and farming regulation and farming practises and I expect I'm going to be heavily corrected after this post, but from my I understand the highlands of this country in Wales and Scotland mostly but also Yorkshire as we with the Yorkshire Shepherdess are basically useless for arable farming. so unlike the rest of Europe Which kept them as wild forest we cut down all the trees and changed it into sheep farming areas. Now this was marvellous few 100 years ago or even for the last 1000 years when we had wear lots and lots of wool, but do we wear wool now? I think I've got a coat or two for weddings and funerals all black and a few scarves made with wool, but I can't even guarantee the scarves are made from wool, they're probably synthetic as well. I do eat lamb. but I don't know if it's from the same sheep. Instead of paying for these sheep farmers with heavy subsidies to farm unprofitable sheep couldn't we pay them to re-forest the uplands of this island? To plant trees? To reforest and rewild the uplands of Britain.

Mostly accurate aside from missing out the grouse and private estate impacts of fucking the environment in favour Heather and shooting predators

 

[Hotel Chocolate]

Surely, they are the same as the sheep farmers?

Are they subsidised by the government?

Edit: I've just come across a statistic that says that the deer population in Scotland has doubled in 30 years and now is over 1,000,000 deer and that things of getting out of control. So, deer look like another major problem that needs to be dealt with.

 

[Artaxerxes]

Surely, they are the same as the sheep farmers?

Are they subsidised by the government?

Yes, or tax breaks. It’s not the same as sheep fames either.

Some of them are the government or the royals

 

[Hotel Chocolate]

Certainly end the tax breaks and any subsidies.

 

[Humberto]

Certainly end the tax breaks and any subsidies.

There are vested interests and lobbying in favour of keeping things as they are. But yeah it would be something along those lines, to start with, to make progress. These aren't really 20 cows and a small farm shop deals we are losing out to. Rather big corporations, almost monopolies. Subsidised by the state. And elsewhere in Europe by the EU.

 

[Humberto]

There's a good overview of the state of global biodiversity in this article, including a bit more on farming subsidies. The cut and paste looks a bit messy but there's some good info:

https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/cop16-forests-oceans-nature-dire-state-2024-10-18/

Plants and animals play significant parts in keeping nature humming, from cycling nutrients throughout an ecosystem to aerating soils and engineering rivers. Without plants and animals, the world would not be habitable for humans

However, more than a quarter of the world's known species, or a total of about 45,300 species, opens new tab, are now threatened with extinction, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN).

Agriculture drives some 90% of tropical deforestation, according to WWF, as jungles make way to soy farms, cattle ranches, palm oil plantations and other mass production of commodities.
Governments pay at least $635 billion annually in subsidies for agriculture
, opens new tab that are harmful to the environment, and likely several trillion dollars more in indirect subsidies, according to the World Bank.
Countries agreed at COP15 in 2022 to identify harmful subsidies by 2025 and to slash them by at least $500 million a year starting in 2030.
Environmentalists have also urged banks to stop offering credit to commodities sectors linked to deforestation. Between January 2023 and June 2024, banks offered a total of about $77 billion in credit to these firms, according to the Forest & Finance Coalition of research and advocacy groups.