What Does Sustainable Living Look Like Maybe Like Uruguay

Metadata

• Author: Noah Gallagher Shannon
• Full Title: What Does Sustainable Living Look Like? Maybe Like Uruguay
• Category: articles
• Document Tags: #planet
• URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/05/magazine/uruguay-renewable-energy.html

Highlights

• Since electricity makes up about 25 percent of the United States’ five billion or so tons of yearly emissions, it more than likely begins with decarbonizing the grid. Next comes a push to electrify the transportation sector and regulate industrial production; each contributes about 27 and 24 percent of emissions, respectively. Then come several smaller cuts, to the buildings we live in and the appliances we use, from policies already having success in Europe and Canada: replacing gas-burning furnaces with electric heat pumps, updating building efficiencies and banning air-conditioners and fridges that use hydrofluorocarbon. (View Highlight)
• For years, he had been arguing that the “blind obsession to achieve growth with consumption” was the real cause of the linked energy and ecological crises. In speeches, he pushed his people to reject materialism and embrace Uruguay’s traditions of simplicity and humility. “The culture of the West is a lie,” he told me. “The engine is accumulation. But we can’t pretend that the whole world can embrace it. We would need two or three more planets.” (View Highlight)
• This is one reason developing nations have been slow to adopt renewable energy — spikes in oil costs looked more palatable, especially after subsidies, than an expensive investment with a long payback period, which carried with it the difficulty of securing financing and the baggage of colonial schemes. (View Highlight)
• Within this system, no single food is as destructive as beef. Livestock as a whole are responsible for 14 percent of total global emissions, with cattle said to be the most polluting. (View Highlight)
• “The goal shouldn’t be carbon neutrality, but how to make it sustainable,” (View Highlight)
• Baethgen thought many of the answers for a sustainable cattle industry lay within the land itself. He explained that grasslands function a lot like forests: The grasses pull carbon from the air, converting it into plant matter through photosynthesis. As cows graze, bacteria in their stomachs help break the fiber down, a metabolic process that builds protein-dense muscle but also methane as a byproduct, which gets burped out. This cycle becomes problematic, Baethgen said, only when these ecological processes fall out of balance. “When grasslands are overgrazed,” he said, “the soil becomes degraded, and it doesn’t absorb and store as much carbon.” The same was true for undergrazing. As fields grow thick with woody stalks, the cows simply avoid eating them and the regenerative cycle breaks down. (View Highlight)