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Everyone knows that we're eating up our resources and dump the rest into the seas all the while doing so. The result is that a lot of things available today wil

by hga 10y ago

Everyone knows that we're eating up our resources and dump the rest into the seas all the while doing so. The result is that a lot of things available today will be luxury super rich items in the not too distant future. Not sure how old you are, i.e. did you live through the '70s "Limits to Growth" Zeitgeist era? If not try, say, watching the 1973 movie Soylent Green, where the two protagonists just marvel at a jar of strawberry preserves they found in the dwelling of a rich person, and then go to your favorite grocery store's jams and jellies section.... Maybe someday we'll see that future you envision, but having already lived through at least one cycle of this, not to mention the ongoing global cooling -> global warming -> climate change one, I don't worry quite so much (and by now have a lot more than just these surface level observations to base that on). ADDED: And this was a major theme of Heinlein in his '50s juveniles, most directly his 4th, published in 1950, Farmer in the Sky, but also see his last really good book, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress in 1966, where it was plot significant that the moon colony (or was it colonies?) grew wheat and shot it back to the Earth using a mass driver.

chronic6l 10y ago
I'm probably one of the people you hate. Global warming is real and is accelerated by humans. I still don't give a damn. I will throw all my waste in the trash and drive gasoline vehicles. I'll let someone else fix it.
- logfromblammo 10y ago
  I'll care about the Earth when I can feel like I can actually own a piece of it. I have no skin in the game, really, other than some vague dread of total environmental collapse. Ted Turner, now, he has a great reason to be an environmentalist. Let the burden of environmental protection fall primarily on those who claim the most ownership of it. If Ted wants me to separate my recyclables and watch TBS on a TV constructed from recycled material and powered solely by renewables, he can damn well pay me something to do all that. You don't ask the team that loses by 50 points every game to start playing with their shoelaces tied together. And you don't ask the poor to sacrifice for the benefit of the rich. Developing nations are going to burn coal, and non-rich people are going to eat from disposable paper plates and then not recycle them. Environmentalism is a luxury, and only those who already have a sense of economic security will buy in to it. But as long as I have an "at will" job and no more attachment to the land than a one-year lease, I'm not going to feel all that motivated.
  - Nydhal 10y ago
    Well some might consider their children as "skin in the game" but still. As far as I am concerned having children is also a luxury. At least it should be considered so, from my moral perspective.
    - logfromblammo 10y ago
      Kids are not inextricably attached to any particular part of this planet. And many parents have no piece of it to give to them after they die, anyway. If I have kids, they would be in roughly the same situation I am in. The situation is roughly analogous to the entire world being a city block filled with apartment buildings. A few people own all the buildings. Most people rent apartments from them. The buildings are not extraordinary. They need maintenance and repair, or they will deteriorate. But for whatever reason, the building owners are not responding to maintenance requests in a timely fashion. (But woe to you if your rent check is even half a day late!) Some tenants, alarmed by the state of their surroundings, spend their own time and money, over and above their monthly rent, to do repairs. But none of the tenants can address all the problems on their own. At most, they can patch up a cracked window, re-wrap the ductwork with better insulation, tighten plumbing connections. No one has the resources to both pay the rent and also pay extra for all the repairs they might want. Some tenants do nothing, because it is the landlords' responsibility to maintain the properties. Also, they don't have enough money to spend on it, anyway. If the landlords want to be slumlords, then surely it would be possible to move to a better-kept building when things get too bad. Except--whoops!--the landlords that do invest more in maintenance are not accepting new tenants. The properties for sale are too expensive for any slum-renter to buy. In analogy form, the solution seems obvious, does it not?
  - kefka 10y ago
    And you have at most a 110 year lease on the matter of your body. I'm going to try to leave this place better than it was given to me. Even if it is a small corner.
  - davedx 10y ago
    This is a prevalent theme of Naomi Klein's "This Changes Everything" (https://thischangeseverything.org/ https://thischangeseverything.org/) That the current system as it stands is not built to let us combat climate change, and we need to change the system too.
- mojoe 10y ago
  the tragedy of the commons
SwellJoe 10y ago
Have you considered the possibility that those scary predictions were only wrong about the timeline rather than the eventual outcome? Humans are very bad at reasoning about things that happen at earth scale and over long periods of time.
- sqeaky 10y ago
  That might be reasonable to consider if we didn't keep getting better at making the resources we need and making them accessible. For something like 14 of the past 15 decades food production per capita has gone up worldwide despite a preposterous increase in population. Some things are losing out, like the rainforests and it sucks. But them being cut down is not an existential threat to humanity. If can encourage even more globalization and event better trade maybe we can feed those still starving before they cut down all the rainforests for subsistence farming. Sadly we have to trust that we can come up with some difficult but possible technical solutions to big problems. How are we going to capture CO2. If we can do that we can mitigate wars caused by droughts caused by climate change.
- hga 10y ago
  Yes, I both can and do do math, "Humans are very bad at reasoning about things that happen at earth scale and over long periods of time" is not a true let alone useful statement. Although I'll grant it's demonstrably true of the doomsayers who made and continue to make such confident predictions while not accounting for many things, most especially human ingenuity (look at Paul Ehrlich for example). They tend to have little or no grasp of the market mechanism ... well, they tend to be central controller types, without realizing the information theoretic limitations of that approach. For example, when faced with externalities, they invariably go high without even considering low (one example I remember reading was some European country requiring plant water intakes being downstream of outflows, and that's about as simple as you can get). Anyway, one of my points there is that the demonstrated inability of those guys to predict the future should not be extrapolated to the rest of us ^_^. Plus we haven't tapped the tiniest fraction of the the Solar System's resources, and much of the Earth's remain their for the picking, at some cost in money, and as of late in the West, to the fashion sense of our elites (although I grant you coal is nasty stuff). Yeah, some day we'll run out of resources in the Solar System, but that's so so far in the future, we probably have to worry more about the Singularity, or too many nuclear wars ... see The Moat In God's Eye for a look at that, which has one co-author who thought well and deeply of the '70s Limits to Growth garbage. (And even took advantage of it to be able to write more realistic SF, if you freeze most scientific developments....)

by hga 10y ago

chronic6l 10y ago

I'm probably one of the people you hate. Global warming is real and is accelerated by humans. I still don't give a damn. I will throw all my waste in the trash and drive gasoline vehicles. I'll let someone else fix it.

logfromblammo 10y ago
I'll care about the Earth when I can feel like I can actually own a piece of it. I have no skin in the game, really, other than some vague dread of total environmental collapse. Ted Turner, now, he has a great reason to be an environmentalist. Let the burden of environmental protection fall primarily on those who claim the most ownership of it. If Ted wants me to separate my recyclables and watch TBS on a TV constructed from recycled material and powered solely by renewables, he can damn well pay me something to do all that. You don't ask the team that loses by 50 points every game to start playing with their shoelaces tied together. And you don't ask the poor to sacrifice for the benefit of the rich. Developing nations are going to burn coal, and non-rich people are going to eat from disposable paper plates and then not recycle them. Environmentalism is a luxury, and only those who already have a sense of economic security will buy in to it. But as long as I have an "at will" job and no more attachment to the land than a one-year lease, I'm not going to feel all that motivated.
- Nydhal 10y ago
  Well some might consider their children as "skin in the game" but still. As far as I am concerned having children is also a luxury. At least it should be considered so, from my moral perspective.
  - logfromblammo 10y ago
    Kids are not inextricably attached to any particular part of this planet. And many parents have no piece of it to give to them after they die, anyway. If I have kids, they would be in roughly the same situation I am in. The situation is roughly analogous to the entire world being a city block filled with apartment buildings. A few people own all the buildings. Most people rent apartments from them. The buildings are not extraordinary. They need maintenance and repair, or they will deteriorate. But for whatever reason, the building owners are not responding to maintenance requests in a timely fashion. (But woe to you if your rent check is even half a day late!) Some tenants, alarmed by the state of their surroundings, spend their own time and money, over and above their monthly rent, to do repairs. But none of the tenants can address all the problems on their own. At most, they can patch up a cracked window, re-wrap the ductwork with better insulation, tighten plumbing connections. No one has the resources to both pay the rent and also pay extra for all the repairs they might want. Some tenants do nothing, because it is the landlords' responsibility to maintain the properties. Also, they don't have enough money to spend on it, anyway. If the landlords want to be slumlords, then surely it would be possible to move to a better-kept building when things get too bad. Except--whoops!--the landlords that do invest more in maintenance are not accepting new tenants. The properties for sale are too expensive for any slum-renter to buy. In analogy form, the solution seems obvious, does it not?
- kefka 10y ago
  And you have at most a 110 year lease on the matter of your body. I'm going to try to leave this place better than it was given to me. Even if it is a small corner.
- davedx 10y ago
  This is a prevalent theme of Naomi Klein's "This Changes Everything" (https://thischangeseverything.org/ https://thischangeseverything.org/) That the current system as it stands is not built to let us combat climate change, and we need to change the system too.
mojoe 10y ago
the tragedy of the commons

SwellJoe 10y ago

Have you considered the possibility that those scary predictions were only wrong about the timeline rather than the eventual outcome? Humans are very bad at reasoning about things that happen at earth scale and over long periods of time.

sqeaky 10y ago
That might be reasonable to consider if we didn't keep getting better at making the resources we need and making them accessible. For something like 14 of the past 15 decades food production per capita has gone up worldwide despite a preposterous increase in population. Some things are losing out, like the rainforests and it sucks. But them being cut down is not an existential threat to humanity. If can encourage even more globalization and event better trade maybe we can feed those still starving before they cut down all the rainforests for subsistence farming. Sadly we have to trust that we can come up with some difficult but possible technical solutions to big problems. How are we going to capture CO2. If we can do that we can mitigate wars caused by droughts caused by climate change.
hga 10y ago
Yes, I both can and do do math, "Humans are very bad at reasoning about things that happen at earth scale and over long periods of time" is not a true let alone useful statement. Although I'll grant it's demonstrably true of the doomsayers who made and continue to make such confident predictions while not accounting for many things, most especially human ingenuity (look at Paul Ehrlich for example). They tend to have little or no grasp of the market mechanism ... well, they tend to be central controller types, without realizing the information theoretic limitations of that approach. For example, when faced with externalities, they invariably go high without even considering low (one example I remember reading was some European country requiring plant water intakes being downstream of outflows, and that's about as simple as you can get). Anyway, one of my points there is that the demonstrated inability of those guys to predict the future should not be extrapolated to the rest of us ^_^. Plus we haven't tapped the tiniest fraction of the the Solar System's resources, and much of the Earth's remain their for the picking, at some cost in money, and as of late in the West, to the fashion sense of our elites (although I grant you coal is nasty stuff). Yeah, some day we'll run out of resources in the Solar System, but that's so so far in the future, we probably have to worry more about the Singularity, or too many nuclear wars ... see The Moat In God's Eye for a look at that, which has one co-author who thought well and deeply of the '70s Limits to Growth garbage. (And even took advantage of it to be able to write more realistic SF, if you freeze most scientific developments....)