9 ms·

There Might Be No Way to Live Comfortably Without Also Ruining the Planet

43 points by SirLJ 9y ago

WheelsAtLarge 9y ago
The problem is the population size. There's no way the environment can recover from 7+ billion people using the resources we need. Additionally, the term comfortably is relative, the more we have the more we think we need to live comfortably. Ask a hunter-gather what he/she need to be comfortable vs an upper-middle-class individual in New York and you'll get an extremely different answer. I see a future where we get our food directly from the sun and with most animals and plants destroyed- pets and house plants will likely be the survivors we pick. Very sad!
- perl4ever 9y ago
  If we really have a problem with too many resources being used, then we "simply" need to decide what is acceptable and tax energy accordingly. Making assumptions about what people are entitled to, or what standard of living is possible would be a big mistake because it could lead to far worse outcomes than simply forcing the market to provide the solution.
  - collyw 9y ago
    Faith in the markets is working well for global warming so far /s
    - ZeroGravitas 9y ago
      I have reasonable faith that markets could get global warming under control without most people noticing any decrease in their standard of living, quite possibly seeing a big increase. Getting impatient for people to actually try markets rather than continue the petro-gangster status quo though.
    - jdietrich 9y ago
      The market is astonishingly good at solving problems if you make the status quo more expensive than the solution. If we abandoned cap-and-trade in favour of a carbon tax, we would undoubtedly see huge reductions in carbon emissions. The problem with our current system isn't that the market is failing to respond to incentives, but that we haven't set the right price. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_Rain_Program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_Rain_Program
      - WheelsAtLarge 9y ago
        I'm a fan of the market system but there are limits. It works well for solving one variable with it but our environmental issues are many and no one has found a business model that works to save it. Also, when the market solves for one issue it goes to extremes and often causes other unintended consequences. The market alone is not the answer but a combination of the market system plus our political system. But in reality it's just a matter of everyone understanding the problem and trying to help. Every resource we take from the environment has an impact no matter the size since it's multiplied by billions.
      - cannonedhamster 9y ago
        Markets only work when the government regulating them isn't subject to regulatory capture.
  - Pica_soO 9y ago
    Definitely, its way more important to protect a thousand little fiefdoms at all costs, then to solve a true problem. Imagine how the CEOs would feel if there companys where shut down just because they where considered taxwise energy waste. Why doesn't anybody ever think about the needs of CEOs ? Seriously - market aside- its obviously a lot of humans need companys and hierarchical structured society to upkeep there ego- so what solution is there to keep those afloat, while ending the ecological suicide that is capitalism?
- jdietrich 9y ago
  The average American uses twice as much energy as the average Briton, five times more than the average Brazilian and eleven times more than the average Indian. Is the problem that we've got too many people, or is it that the resources we have are being distributed completely unequally? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_consumption_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_co...
  - jotm 9y ago
    The problem is that everyone strives to get to the American level. Nothing wrong with public commute and having your own garden/mini-farm. Really easy, too.
    - cellularmitosis 9y ago
      Indeed, I think much of the problem stems from everyone needing a job, and not having enough time. If I were unemployed, yet housing were free and groceries were free at the local walking-distance market, I probably would not own a car and could entertain myself indefinitely with a laptop, earbuds, library card, barbell, and soldering iron. I could live happily on a tiny fraction of my current energy consumption. With further automation in farming and self driving 18-wheelers, this reality is not that far fetched.
  - Turing_Machine 9y ago
    The "problem" (to the extent that it is a problem) is that Britain has 65 million people on an island smaller than the U.S. state of Oregon, most of which has an extremely moderate climate. The U.S. is orders of magnitude larger (i.e., more transportation costs) and has significant regions that require large-scale heating or air conditioning to make habitable. Some require both. Also, Canada uses even more energy per capita than the United States, for pretty much the same reasons.
    - jdietrich 9y ago
      >significant regions that require large-scale heating or air conditioning to make habitable. Some require both. People only moved to the really hot parts of America in significant numbers because of the invention of air conditioning. They abandoned vernacular architectural techniques that kept buildings comfortable using passive cooling. The entire population of the US could comfortably fit into the climatically mild parts. Vast areas of the US never get particularly cold in winter or particularly warm in summer. As with suburban sprawl, the human geography of the US is built around wasteful energy use. Those trends were established over time and they can be reversed over time. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/thermal-delight/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/thermal-delight/
westurner 9y ago
"A good life for all within planetary boundaries" (2018) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-018-0021-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-018-0021-4 > Abstract: Humanity faces the challenge of how to achieve a high quality of life for over 7 billion people without destabilizing critical planetary processes. Using indicators designed to measure a ‘safe and just’ development space, we quantify the resource use associated with meeting basic human needs, and compare this to downscaled planetary boundaries for over 150 nations. We find that no country meets basic needs for its citizens at a globally sustainable level of resource use. Physical needs such as nutrition, sanitation, access to electricity and the elimination of extreme poverty could likely be met for all people without transgressing planetary boundaries. However, the universal achievement of more qualitative goals (for example, high life satisfaction) would require a level of resource use that is 2–6 times the sustainable level, based on current relationships. Strategies to improve physical and social provisioning systems, with a focus on sufficiency and equity, have the potential to move nations towards sustainability, but the challenge remains substantial. > "Radical changes are needed if all people are to live well within the limits of the planet," [...] > "These include moving beyond the pursuit of economic growth in wealthy nations, shifting rapidly from fossil fuels to renewable energy, and significantly reducing inequality. > "Our physical infrastructure and the way we distribute resources are both part of what we call provisioning systems. If all people are to lead a good life within the planet's limits then these provisioning systems need to be fundamentally restructured to allow for basic needs to be met at a much lower level of resource use." Perhaps ironically, our developments in service of sustainability (resource efficiency) needs for a civilization on Mars are directly relevant to solving these problems on Earth. Recycle everything. Survive without soil, steel, hydrocarbons, animals, oxygen. Convert CO2, sunlight, H20, and geothermal energy to forms necessary for life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Mars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Mars Algae, carbon capture, carbon sequestration, lab grown plants, water purification, solar power, [...] Mars requires a geomagnetic field in order to sustain an atmosphere in order to [...]. "The Limits to Growth" (1972, 2004) [1] very clearly forecasts these same unsustainable patterns of resource consumption: 'needs' which exceed and transgress our planetary biophysical boundaries. The 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (#GlobalGoals) [2] outline our worthwhile international objectives (Goals, Targets, and Indicators). The Paris Agreement [3] sets targets and asks for commitments from nation states (and businesses) to help achieve these goals most efficiently and most sustainably. In the US, the Clean Power Plan [4] was intended to redirect our national resources toward renewable energy with far less external costs. Direct and indirect subsidies for nonrenewables are irrational. Are subsidies helpful or necessary to reach production volumes of renewable energy products and services? There are certainly financial incentives for anyone who chooses to invest in solving for the Global Goals; and everyone can! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth [2] http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/ http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-develop... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Power_Plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Power_Plan
gaius 9y ago
These include moving beyond the pursuit of economic growth in wealthy nations, shifting rapidly from fossil fuels to renewable energy, and significantly reducing inequality. The one thing not mentioned is that only actual solution: managing populations. The number of people on the planet has nearly doubled just in my lifetime! Also on HN today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16339467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16339467 But making more people is not a problem the human race has.
- collyw 9y ago
  I watched a video last night that was full of optimism. Pointed out that as countries got richer less children died and people had less children. So eventually the population will level off. It seemed to overlook the fact that we are currently using up resources 1.5 times faster than they are being replenished (amongst many other related problems). https://youtu.be/QsBT5EQt348 https://youtu.be/QsBT5EQt348
  - naasking 9y ago
    The rate we are using resources is also decelerating with increased efficiency through technological advancement.
    - collyw 9y ago
      Have you got any numbers on that? I am aware that things are becoming more efficient, but we are still adding a lot of people to the world. And more and more people are moving from relative poverty to more western lifestyles and corresponding increased levels of consumption.
      - naasking 9y ago
        There is some debate surrounding this, known as Jevon's paradox. There have also been some papers where the rebound effect has been studied and found to be low to moderate, so efficiency improvements do have a positive impact: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421500000215 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142150... Indeed the population is still increasing, but population growth is decelerating. Population will likely plateau within the next 70-80 years, and then possibly decline.
anfilt 9y ago
Depends on the resources. I would say if we can get a handle on the energy. That goes a long way. For building materials we are not going to really run out of steel, clay for bricks, and concrete. Wood is renewable if managed properly. I remember reading something that said the population will peak around 10 to 10.5 billion, and not really grow beyond that. So when it comes to housing for that many people there is plenty of land. That mainly leaves food. I have heard some people say meat is quite inefficient, but how much land do we need to feed 10.5 billion people? It would be interesting to see other resource like copper plotted as how much is needed per person vs world supply. I do know aluminum is 3rd most abundant element in earths crust and iron is the 4th most abundant. Really, for energy we should just be using renewable, and nuclear. Also when reading about how much the fuel for nuclear is actual used only like a few percent we need better reactors.
- jdietrich 9y ago
  >concrete Concrete is staggeringly carbon-intensive. You need to burn a lot of fuel to produce cement, which itself emits carbon during the calcination process. Every ton of cement produces about 900kg of CO2, making up about 5% of global carbon emissions. http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2012/05/09/emissions-from-the-cement-industry/ http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2012/05/09/emissions-from-the-c...
  - sunstone 9y ago
    If you do some quick and dirty calculations of a 3000 sqft concrete house with 5 people lasting 100 years then the CO2 burden comes out to around 43kg/yr/person. An average american produces about 1000kg/yr so that's around 5% of a person's total CO2.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - jotm 9y ago
      Ha, and they're living in some shabby plywood houses, at that.
SlowBro 9y ago
Permaculture seems to be the answer. It’s not that there aren’t sufficient resources for a comfortable life, it’s that the way those resources are used is incredibly poor. Some Permaculturists estimate the globe actually has a carrying capacity of 50 billion people, were it managed better. I like the study of permaculture in part because it treats human beings as part of the solution, not the problem. Get more people moving in the right direction for positive change. It is a way of love, not fear.
jdietrich 9y ago
I think that the analysis in the linked article is fundamentally flawed, because it assumes a simple one-dimensional axis of more or less resource use and a direct relationship between using more resources and creating better lives. Most of their social performance indicators aren't inherently resource-intensive. Education, social support, democratic quality and equality have no direct ties to environmental resources. Life satisfaction and healthy life expectancy are only weakly tied to resource use - Cubans live about as long as Americans, the Bhutanese are more satisfied with their lives. Good sanitation and nutrition can easily be achieved at a very low resource cost; in the case of nutrition, excess intake of high-calorie and high-carbon foods is now an equal or greater cause of mortality than malnutrition. Reducing meat consumption in the developed world would massively reduce resource use while also increasing life expectancy. Britons have never eaten a healthier diet than during wartime rationing. That leaves us with income and access to energy. I can't really address the issue of income; I have no idea if it's possible to maintain current levels of economic growth while reducing resource use. The issue of access to energy is more straightforward. We know that we can produce close to our current levels of energy with entirely sustainable means. Energy consumption has diminishing marginal utility - getting an electric light in your house makes a huge difference to your quality of life, but trading up from a subcompact to an SUV doesn't. There are some big outliers on the plot of social progress vs energy use. I think that this research has taken a really elaborate route to arguing "countries with high living standards tend to use lots of natural resources, ∴ high living standards require lots of natural resources". I don't dispute the correlation, but I think that the causal relationship is almost entirely illusory.
- maxander 9y ago
  As mentioned in the article, the relationship between most of the social goods and resource use is complicated. Education requires a certain percentage of the workforce to be teachers, the management of a sufficiently large organization, a bunch of buildings and moving of students around, etc, each of which in turn requires a set of other things. It would be incredibly difficult- and the authors don't try- to trace all of these all the way back and get a final accounting of the natural resources being used. But if you don't do that, neither can you say that they don't require a certain amount of natural resources. Education might turn out to be as resource-intensive as the airline industry, somehow. Tl;dr I guess, "no direct ties to environmental resources" != "no significant environmental resource requirements." On the other hand, of course, the whole article is observational based on existing societies with present-day technology; change society or the available technology, and resource requirements would presumably also change (also in ways we don't know.)
coldtea 9y ago
Sure, but first define "comfortably".
badcede 9y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c
edem 9y ago
There just have to be much less people on the planet and it will be ok. Simple as that.
diyseguy 9y ago
I have also suspected that it's not possible to live a comfortable lifestyle (e.g. all the modern conveniences most Americans enjoy) without indirectly relying on slave or poverty labor somewhere else
- gaius 9y ago
  Oh, it would be perfectly possible - remember when "mod cons" were invented, most if not all of them were manufactured on-shore. If the human race comprised only a billion or two people, the whole world could easily live at that standard indefinitely.
- Zigurd 9y ago
  The world is running out of slaves and poverty workers. We'll know pretty soon what happens when there's nowhere to go for the next cheap labor pool.
rasengan0 9y ago
It's nice to know we're all gonna die with generational suffering down the road. I'd like to know what Vietnam is doing and how might that model be improved. Data --> ML --> policy, etc With all this bickering on who's right or wrong, it is no wonder that nothing will change and humanity will go the way of the cynical comedian: https://youtu.be/7W33HRc1A6c?t=2m39s https://youtu.be/7W33HRc1A6c?t=2m39s
stuntkite 9y ago
I just don't buy it, there is so much waste and the gap between what the 0.001% have and everyone else is so big. I've played enough simcity to know it's tough and takes planning, but you can balance the needs of everyone and not go bust. Many people are coming to realize that the consumer wealth dream being sold to them does not actually contain comfort, satisfaction, or personal fulfillment. Greed, corruption, and willful ignorance/incuriousness however are a cancer on the system that makes for a race condition that keeps us from actively investing in that balance. It's hard not to be apocalyptic, but it's even crazier to think that our collective consciousness can't figure out a way to arrest that cancer before we all end up eating jellyfish out of acidified plastic oceans supplemented with snowpiercer cockroach bricks. The corruption rife ganges river sanitation project[1] is a great example of a massive opportunity to increase quality of life for a staggering amount of people sucked dry financially by said cancer. There are ways to NOT do that. We have the ability to figure out how. We also at this moment, still might have enough time. [1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/what-it-takes-to-clean-the-ganges https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/what-it-takes-...
drallison 9y ago
Julia Steinberger (Leeds) wrote: "Radical changes are needed if all people are to live well within the limits of the planet" but she got the timing wrong. Now, I fear, we are too late. Consider: what is the likelihood that we can reach a global consensus on population control which will have any significant impact in the next 25 years? What social structure will suddenly appear which will change our value system? Who among us is going to be willing to give up our automobiles? And so forth. How can we have a future when we have a President who does not believe what scientists are telling him? How can we support leaders who have no understanding of the physical world? These are existential questions that need to be resolved quickly or all is lost. And they are being ignored.

43 points by SirLJ 9y ago

The problem is the population size. There's no way the environment can recover from 7+ billion people using the resources we need. Additionally, the term comfortably is relative, the more we have the more we think we need to live comfortably. Ask a hunter-gather what he/she need to be comfortable vs an upper-middle-class individual in New York and you'll get an extremely different answer. I see a future where we get our food directly from the sun and with most animals and plants destroyed- pets and house plants will likely be the survivors we pick. Very sad!

perl4ever 9y ago
If we really have a problem with too many resources being used, then we "simply" need to decide what is acceptable and tax energy accordingly. Making assumptions about what people are entitled to, or what standard of living is possible would be a big mistake because it could lead to far worse outcomes than simply forcing the market to provide the solution.
- collyw 9y ago
  Faith in the markets is working well for global warming so far /s
  - ZeroGravitas 9y ago
    I have reasonable faith that markets could get global warming under control without most people noticing any decrease in their standard of living, quite possibly seeing a big increase. Getting impatient for people to actually try markets rather than continue the petro-gangster status quo though.
  - jdietrich 9y ago
    The market is astonishingly good at solving problems if you make the status quo more expensive than the solution. If we abandoned cap-and-trade in favour of a carbon tax, we would undoubtedly see huge reductions in carbon emissions. The problem with our current system isn't that the market is failing to respond to incentives, but that we haven't set the right price. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_Rain_Program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_Rain_Program
    - WheelsAtLarge 9y ago
      I'm a fan of the market system but there are limits. It works well for solving one variable with it but our environmental issues are many and no one has found a business model that works to save it. Also, when the market solves for one issue it goes to extremes and often causes other unintended consequences. The market alone is not the answer but a combination of the market system plus our political system. But in reality it's just a matter of everyone understanding the problem and trying to help. Every resource we take from the environment has an impact no matter the size since it's multiplied by billions.
    - cannonedhamster 9y ago
      Markets only work when the government regulating them isn't subject to regulatory capture.
- Pica_soO 9y ago
  Definitely, its way more important to protect a thousand little fiefdoms at all costs, then to solve a true problem. Imagine how the CEOs would feel if there companys where shut down just because they where considered taxwise energy waste. Why doesn't anybody ever think about the needs of CEOs ? Seriously - market aside- its obviously a lot of humans need companys and hierarchical structured society to upkeep there ego- so what solution is there to keep those afloat, while ending the ecological suicide that is capitalism?
jdietrich 9y ago
The average American uses twice as much energy as the average Briton, five times more than the average Brazilian and eleven times more than the average Indian. Is the problem that we've got too many people, or is it that the resources we have are being distributed completely unequally? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_consumption_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_co...
- jotm 9y ago
  The problem is that everyone strives to get to the American level. Nothing wrong with public commute and having your own garden/mini-farm. Really easy, too.
  - cellularmitosis 9y ago
    Indeed, I think much of the problem stems from everyone needing a job, and not having enough time. If I were unemployed, yet housing were free and groceries were free at the local walking-distance market, I probably would not own a car and could entertain myself indefinitely with a laptop, earbuds, library card, barbell, and soldering iron. I could live happily on a tiny fraction of my current energy consumption. With further automation in farming and self driving 18-wheelers, this reality is not that far fetched.
- Turing_Machine 9y ago
  The "problem" (to the extent that it is a problem) is that Britain has 65 million people on an island smaller than the U.S. state of Oregon, most of which has an extremely moderate climate. The U.S. is orders of magnitude larger (i.e., more transportation costs) and has significant regions that require large-scale heating or air conditioning to make habitable. Some require both. Also, Canada uses even more energy per capita than the United States, for pretty much the same reasons.
  - jdietrich 9y ago
    >significant regions that require large-scale heating or air conditioning to make habitable. Some require both. People only moved to the really hot parts of America in significant numbers because of the invention of air conditioning. They abandoned vernacular architectural techniques that kept buildings comfortable using passive cooling. The entire population of the US could comfortably fit into the climatically mild parts. Vast areas of the US never get particularly cold in winter or particularly warm in summer. As with suburban sprawl, the human geography of the US is built around wasteful energy use. Those trends were established over time and they can be reversed over time. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/thermal-delight/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/thermal-delight/

westurner 9y ago

"A good life for all within planetary boundaries" (2018) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-018-0021-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-018-0021-4 > Abstract: Humanity faces the challenge of how to achieve a high quality of life for over 7 billion people without destabilizing critical planetary processes. Using indicators designed to measure a ‘safe and just’ development space, we quantify the resource use associated with meeting basic human needs, and compare this to downscaled planetary boundaries for over 150 nations. We find that no country meets basic needs for its citizens at a globally sustainable level of resource use. Physical needs such as nutrition, sanitation, access to electricity and the elimination of extreme poverty could likely be met for all people without transgressing planetary boundaries. However, the universal achievement of more qualitative goals (for example, high life satisfaction) would require a level of resource use that is 2–6 times the sustainable level, based on current relationships. Strategies to improve physical and social provisioning systems, with a focus on sufficiency and equity, have the potential to move nations towards sustainability, but the challenge remains substantial. > "Radical changes are needed if all people are to live well within the limits of the planet," [...] > "These include moving beyond the pursuit of economic growth in wealthy nations, shifting rapidly from fossil fuels to renewable energy, and significantly reducing inequality. > "Our physical infrastructure and the way we distribute resources are both part of what we call provisioning systems. If all people are to lead a good life within the planet's limits then these provisioning systems need to be fundamentally restructured to allow for basic needs to be met at a much lower level of resource use." Perhaps ironically, our developments in service of sustainability (resource efficiency) needs for a civilization on Mars are directly relevant to solving these problems on Earth. Recycle everything. Survive without soil, steel, hydrocarbons, animals, oxygen. Convert CO2, sunlight, H20, and geothermal energy to forms necessary for life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Mars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Mars Algae, carbon capture, carbon sequestration, lab grown plants, water purification, solar power, [...] Mars requires a geomagnetic field in order to sustain an atmosphere in order to [...]. "The Limits to Growth" (1972, 2004) [1] very clearly forecasts these same unsustainable patterns of resource consumption: 'needs' which exceed and transgress our planetary biophysical boundaries. The 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (#GlobalGoals) [2] outline our worthwhile international objectives (Goals, Targets, and Indicators). The Paris Agreement [3] sets targets and asks for commitments from nation states (and businesses) to help achieve these goals most efficiently and most sustainably. In the US, the Clean Power Plan [4] was intended to redirect our national resources toward renewable energy with far less external costs. Direct and indirect subsidies for nonrenewables are irrational. Are subsidies helpful or necessary to reach production volumes of renewable energy products and services? There are certainly financial incentives for anyone who chooses to invest in solving for the Global Goals; and everyone can! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth [2] http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/ http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-develop... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Power_Plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Power_Plan

gaius 9y ago

These include moving beyond the pursuit of economic growth in wealthy nations, shifting rapidly from fossil fuels to renewable energy, and significantly reducing inequality. The one thing not mentioned is that only actual solution: managing populations. The number of people on the planet has nearly doubled just in my lifetime! Also on HN today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16339467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16339467 But making more people is not a problem the human race has.

collyw 9y ago
I watched a video last night that was full of optimism. Pointed out that as countries got richer less children died and people had less children. So eventually the population will level off. It seemed to overlook the fact that we are currently using up resources 1.5 times faster than they are being replenished (amongst many other related problems). https://youtu.be/QsBT5EQt348 https://youtu.be/QsBT5EQt348
- naasking 9y ago
  The rate we are using resources is also decelerating with increased efficiency through technological advancement.
  - collyw 9y ago
    Have you got any numbers on that? I am aware that things are becoming more efficient, but we are still adding a lot of people to the world. And more and more people are moving from relative poverty to more western lifestyles and corresponding increased levels of consumption.
    - naasking 9y ago
      There is some debate surrounding this, known as Jevon's paradox. There have also been some papers where the rebound effect has been studied and found to be low to moderate, so efficiency improvements do have a positive impact: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421500000215 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142150... Indeed the population is still increasing, but population growth is decelerating. Population will likely plateau within the next 70-80 years, and then possibly decline.

anfilt 9y ago

Depends on the resources. I would say if we can get a handle on the energy. That goes a long way. For building materials we are not going to really run out of steel, clay for bricks, and concrete. Wood is renewable if managed properly. I remember reading something that said the population will peak around 10 to 10.5 billion, and not really grow beyond that. So when it comes to housing for that many people there is plenty of land. That mainly leaves food. I have heard some people say meat is quite inefficient, but how much land do we need to feed 10.5 billion people? It would be interesting to see other resource like copper plotted as how much is needed per person vs world supply. I do know aluminum is 3rd most abundant element in earths crust and iron is the 4th most abundant. Really, for energy we should just be using renewable, and nuclear. Also when reading about how much the fuel for nuclear is actual used only like a few percent we need better reactors.

jdietrich 9y ago
>concrete Concrete is staggeringly carbon-intensive. You need to burn a lot of fuel to produce cement, which itself emits carbon during the calcination process. Every ton of cement produces about 900kg of CO2, making up about 5% of global carbon emissions. http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2012/05/09/emissions-from-the-cement-industry/ http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2012/05/09/emissions-from-the-c...
- sunstone 9y ago
  If you do some quick and dirty calculations of a 3000 sqft concrete house with 5 people lasting 100 years then the CO2 burden comes out to around 43kg/yr/person. An average american produces about 1000kg/yr so that's around 5% of a person's total CO2.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - jotm 9y ago
    Ha, and they're living in some shabby plywood houses, at that.

SlowBro 9y ago

Permaculture seems to be the answer. It’s not that there aren’t sufficient resources for a comfortable life, it’s that the way those resources are used is incredibly poor. Some Permaculturists estimate the globe actually has a carrying capacity of 50 billion people, were it managed better. I like the study of permaculture in part because it treats human beings as part of the solution, not the problem. Get more people moving in the right direction for positive change. It is a way of love, not fear.

jdietrich 9y ago

I think that the analysis in the linked article is fundamentally flawed, because it assumes a simple one-dimensional axis of more or less resource use and a direct relationship between using more resources and creating better lives. Most of their social performance indicators aren't inherently resource-intensive. Education, social support, democratic quality and equality have no direct ties to environmental resources. Life satisfaction and healthy life expectancy are only weakly tied to resource use - Cubans live about as long as Americans, the Bhutanese are more satisfied with their lives. Good sanitation and nutrition can easily be achieved at a very low resource cost; in the case of nutrition, excess intake of high-calorie and high-carbon foods is now an equal or greater cause of mortality than malnutrition. Reducing meat consumption in the developed world would massively reduce resource use while also increasing life expectancy. Britons have never eaten a healthier diet than during wartime rationing. That leaves us with income and access to energy. I can't really address the issue of income; I have no idea if it's possible to maintain current levels of economic growth while reducing resource use. The issue of access to energy is more straightforward. We know that we can produce close to our current levels of energy with entirely sustainable means. Energy consumption has diminishing marginal utility - getting an electric light in your house makes a huge difference to your quality of life, but trading up from a subcompact to an SUV doesn't. There are some big outliers on the plot of social progress vs energy use. I think that this research has taken a really elaborate route to arguing "countries with high living standards tend to use lots of natural resources, ∴ high living standards require lots of natural resources". I don't dispute the correlation, but I think that the causal relationship is almost entirely illusory.

maxander 9y ago
As mentioned in the article, the relationship between most of the social goods and resource use is complicated. Education requires a certain percentage of the workforce to be teachers, the management of a sufficiently large organization, a bunch of buildings and moving of students around, etc, each of which in turn requires a set of other things. It would be incredibly difficult- and the authors don't try- to trace all of these all the way back and get a final accounting of the natural resources being used. But if you don't do that, neither can you say that they don't require a certain amount of natural resources. Education might turn out to be as resource-intensive as the airline industry, somehow. Tl;dr I guess, "no direct ties to environmental resources" != "no significant environmental resource requirements." On the other hand, of course, the whole article is observational based on existing societies with present-day technology; change society or the available technology, and resource requirements would presumably also change (also in ways we don't know.)

coldtea 9y ago

Sure, but first define "comfortably".

badcede 9y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c

edem 9y ago

There just have to be much less people on the planet and it will be ok. Simple as that.

diyseguy 9y ago

I have also suspected that it's not possible to live a comfortable lifestyle (e.g. all the modern conveniences most Americans enjoy) without indirectly relying on slave or poverty labor somewhere else

gaius 9y ago
Oh, it would be perfectly possible - remember when "mod cons" were invented, most if not all of them were manufactured on-shore. If the human race comprised only a billion or two people, the whole world could easily live at that standard indefinitely.
Zigurd 9y ago
The world is running out of slaves and poverty workers. We'll know pretty soon what happens when there's nowhere to go for the next cheap labor pool.

rasengan0 9y ago

It's nice to know we're all gonna die with generational suffering down the road. I'd like to know what Vietnam is doing and how might that model be improved. Data --> ML --> policy, etc With all this bickering on who's right or wrong, it is no wonder that nothing will change and humanity will go the way of the cynical comedian: https://youtu.be/7W33HRc1A6c?t=2m39s https://youtu.be/7W33HRc1A6c?t=2m39s

stuntkite 9y ago

I just don't buy it, there is so much waste and the gap between what the 0.001% have and everyone else is so big. I've played enough simcity to know it's tough and takes planning, but you can balance the needs of everyone and not go bust. Many people are coming to realize that the consumer wealth dream being sold to them does not actually contain comfort, satisfaction, or personal fulfillment. Greed, corruption, and willful ignorance/incuriousness however are a cancer on the system that makes for a race condition that keeps us from actively investing in that balance. It's hard not to be apocalyptic, but it's even crazier to think that our collective consciousness can't figure out a way to arrest that cancer before we all end up eating jellyfish out of acidified plastic oceans supplemented with snowpiercer cockroach bricks. The corruption rife ganges river sanitation project[1] is a great example of a massive opportunity to increase quality of life for a staggering amount of people sucked dry financially by said cancer. There are ways to NOT do that. We have the ability to figure out how. We also at this moment, still might have enough time. [1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/what-it-takes-to-clean-the-ganges https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/what-it-takes-...

drallison 9y ago

Julia Steinberger (Leeds) wrote: "Radical changes are needed if all people are to live well within the limits of the planet" but she got the timing wrong. Now, I fear, we are too late. Consider: what is the likelihood that we can reach a global consensus on population control which will have any significant impact in the next 25 years? What social structure will suddenly appear which will change our value system? Who among us is going to be willing to give up our automobiles? And so forth. How can we have a future when we have a President who does not believe what scientists are telling him? How can we support leaders who have no understanding of the physical world? These are existential questions that need to be resolved quickly or all is lost. And they are being ignored.