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Mass tourism is being treated as unique when really, we're discovering that everyone cannot have a "good" standard of living. We can't all go travelling, we wo
by esotericn 8y ago
Mass tourism is being treated as unique when really, we're discovering that everyone cannot have a "good" standard of living.
We can't all go travelling, we won't fit in the same place and we'll boil the earth doing so.
We can't all have a car because we'll boil the earth. If we develop EV's and don't boil the earth, they won't all fit downtown.
We can't all live in the country, that's not sustainable either.
We can't all eat high quality meat as often as we want. We'll boil the earth and it'll require too much farmland, anyway.
I could go on.
We either eliminate these experiences, accept economic inequality, or watch the experiences be eliminated via attrition (e.g. cars devolving into gridlock, tourism devolving into queues and displacement, ...).
I find this to be an odd aspect of certain political movements at the moment - unwilling to accept that the Universe _is_ actually a big competition, and either some people lose, or we all lose.
It sucks. But what's the alternative?
It's perfectly reasonable to drag people out of poverty.
But the idea that everyone should be able to do the same things implies a set of "things" very different from what, say, the middle class families on my suburban street do today.
- conanbatt 8y agoThis view of things doesnt take into account that an absurdly higher number of people can travel and see multiple countries in their life, which was impossible 50 years ago. It is absolutely possible for every earth citizen to become a tourist, there is no economic impediment to do it.
- collyw 8y agoHe talked about environmental issues, not economic ones.
- conanbatt 8y agoEnvironmental issues are economic issues.
- pyrale 8y agoA totalitarian ideology is one that tries to creep into every aspect of our life, and rejects the exploration of alternative models.
- conanbatt 8y agoOkay.
- arbitrary_name 8y agoCapitalism has crept into every aspect of my life. I cannot leave my house without people trying to put ideas into my head. I am not free, because of property rights, and there are many laws to prevent me from behaving in c certain ways. I cannot sustain myself from gathering food, because the capitalists have harvested the fish and cut down the trees. Your freedom is a prison. Don't talk to me about totalitarianism.
- esotericn 8y agoI believe that I covered this in my comment. > We either eliminate these experiences, accept economic inequality, or watch the experiences be eliminated via attrition (e.g. cars devolving into gridlock, tourism devolving into queues and displacement, ...). Specifically, the last part. If everyone is a tourist, what it means to be a tourist is very, very different. Consider: We strictly have enough jet fuel and aluminium and so on to fly everyone about all over. What happens if we actually do that? Venice is bloody underwater, that's what. That said - I'm an optimistic physicist and engineer. Let's fix this, shall we? Right, I've invented and scaled electric aeroplanes and fusion power. Let's try again. What happens if we actually do that? Venice has more tourists than people. Bugger.
- NegativeLatency 8y agoYou could take another method of transport instead of a plane. Bus, train, bike, boat
- InitialLastName 8y agoPretty much none of those things will make it reasonable for someone from, say, Central African Republic to visit Venice.
- conanbatt 8y agoWhy?
- moate 8y agoLet's assume you're from N'Délé, in the North Central portion of the country. Let's also assume you've got twice the national average in wealth, or about $800 USD. Which of those methods is "reasonable" for you to use as a tourist. The bike is clearly out. You can take a ferry across the Mediterranean once you get to it, but that's a whole thing. There is no train and buses would be...a lot. A straight car ride is 104 hours, or just over 4 days each way. And again, you make $804 USD/year. Is OP's example helpful to the conversation: IDK, possibly? But the idea that it's reasonable for a tourist might be a bit much. IDK, who am I to say what's reasonable for people who make less in a year than I do in about 3 days. https://www.google.com/maps/dir/n'd%C3%A9l%C3%A9/venice/@25.0572731,-7.2468776,4z/data=!4m14!4m13!1m5!1m1!1s0x10d139a540e83b23:0x61dbd8f01bc61c6e!2m2!1d20.6481794!2d8.4101505!1m5!1m1!1s0x477eb1daf1d63d89:0x7ba3c6f0bd92102f!2m2!1d12.3155151!2d45.4408474!3e2 https://www.google.com/maps/dir/n'd%C3%A9l%C3%A9/venice/@25....
- thieving_magpie 8y ago>Mass tourism is being treated as unique when really, we're discovering that everyone cannot have a "good" standard of living. I've read this 5 times. I can't figure out the relation between tourism and everything else in your post. Are you just expounding on the fact that not everyone lives an equal life in the world or is there a greater point I'm missing?
- esotericn 8y agoA distilled form: Tourism is not a special case. The same issue applies to tons of activities. We either limit these activities to a privileged few, or the activities cease to exist in their original form. Everyone loses in the latter case.
- mijamo 8y agoI think this is just wrong and some kind of modern malthusianism. IMO the logical outcome would be that the most trendy destinations will get more expensive, thus overpricing many tourists and regulating itself, and that it will open a new opportunity for many places which are not today super touristic. SO everybody will be a tourist, just not at the same place. It is already happening actually, you have much more touristic places than it used to be and the potential is huge. I mean just look how many tourists you can fit in France or Italy and imagine if Asia and Africa scale tourism in the same way. Many costs are under/mis-used. The brazilian cost could be much more used than it is right now. This has also already happened before. When Spain got more expensive, tourism grew in Tunisia and Turkey, and there is still a lot of potential there. Eastern Europe also still has a lot of underused potential. New touristic places just appear naturally when you have a market. Not everybody goes to Tahiti, but there is potential for some destination for everybody.
- nine_k 8y agoRaising the price = limiting to the privileged (moneyed) few. Running a lottery = limiting to the privileged (lucky) few. Creating a reserve / national park / protected area = limiting access to the privileged (science-related, or just well-connected) few. There's no way that everyone who would not mind to visit a carnival in Venice could fit the city, if getting there was free and instant. This is a fact of life, and I personally am fine with it. People have different priorities, so let them (us) choose what group of limited few we can concentrate on entering. For what I cannot afford to access, VR helmets exist.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- l_t 8y agoWell, we can certainly get better as a culture about promoting moderation and social consciousness over greed and winner-takes-all mentality. Competition will always exist, and we should accept that, but it's not a binary thing, it's a spectrum. I for one would be happy to see our society move to a less competitive, more collaborative mode.
- andrepd 8y agoYou've summarized succinctly my position. I agree 100%.
- js2 8y agoThis is reductio ad absurdum, isn't it? You could implement a fair system giving everyone the equal opportunity to access (e.g. a tourist destination), even if not everyone gains access (via some sort of lottery). There's also enough places and opportunities on the planet that not everyone will want to do everything, certainly not all at once. So you could implement cap and trade.
- lmm 8y ago> You could implement a fair system giving everyone the equal opportunity to access (e.g. a tourist destination), even if not everyone gains access (via some sort of lottery). A lottery is inherently inefficient (someone who really wants to go somewhere gets the same chance as someone who only barely marginally cares) and likely to lead to a black market. > There's also enough places and opportunities on the planet that not everyone will want to do everything, certainly not all at once. So you could implement cap and trade. That's a better idea, and seems like what some of these places are already implementing (the article mentions Easter Island; Nepal does something similar for Mt Everest).
- umanwizard 8y agoWhat do you think reductio ad absurdum means? Your comment is worded as though it's some sort of logical fallacy to be avoided.
- js2 8y agoI misused the term. Thank you for the correction.
- mc32 8y agoMaybe Bhutan provides a glimpse of what tourism can be. Put a cap on the numbers and charge a significant fee for a tourist visa. I’m sure this might seem extreme, but with more people getting into midfle class and affording the yearly foreign vacation, something has to be done. It’s completely unsustainable. Not only does the environment suffer, but the locals also have no sense of what their locale is like normally without tourists. Thay don’t get to experience their own baseline.
- geezerjay 8y ago> Maybe Bhutan provides a glimpse of what tourism can be. Put a cap on the numbers and charge a significant fee for a tourist visa. I’m sure this might seem extreme, That doesn't sound extreme at all. In fact, charging for entrances is a basic technique to moderate demand. The question is what would be the economic impact of such a measure, because the tradeoff between charging admission and restricting access, thus restricting other sources of income and therefore jobs, might not be positive for an economy.
- Symbiote 8y agoA much more moderate example is Cologne's "Culture Tax", which adds a few euros to the price of a hotel room, but not for business travellers. https://www.stadt-koeln.de/politik-und-verwaltung/steuern-gebuehren/tax-promotion-and-advancement-culture-frequently-asked-questions https://www.stadt-koeln.de/politik-und-verwaltung/steuern-ge...
- xkcd-sucks 8y ago"We" can maintain a high standard of living if the "we" is sparse enough. If you think as a nation-state citizen, a solution could be restricting immigration. If you think as a globalist, the solution is reducing population.
- coldtea 8y ago>It sucks. But what's the alternative? It's perfectly reasonable to drag people out of poverty. But the idea that everyone should be able to do the same things implies a set of "things" very different from what, say, the middle class families on my suburban street do today. Exactly. The "eternal growing of the economic cake" which the majority of the related policies are based on, ignores limits to growth (e.g. energy, rare materials, food, etc.) and doesn't care about externalities. Under that model 10 billion people could all live like middle class Californians eventually. (Religious-like faith in technology, and "it worked thus far so it will work forever" wishful thinking also play a role - it also helps to ignore the law of diminishing returns and low hanging fruits). Under reality, there will be huge cutting back and, quite possibly, big human toll, before we reach a livable equilibrium.
- hueving 8y agoFood is cheap enough we throw away a ton of it and energy could scale significantly further quite easily if there weren't an anti-science political barrier to nuclear.
- txru 8y agoIt should be fun telling the Japanese government that shutting down all of their nuclear plants in the last few years is 'anti-science'.
- isostatic 8y agoWhy are they shutting them down?
- newnewpdro 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
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- maxxxxx 8y ago"It sucks. But what's the alternative? " Ideally we would stop breeding and keep world population at a certain number. In reality population will probably keep growing and we can only hope that technology will help avert a disaster.
- narag 8y agoIt's interesting that the two comments that touch the overpopulation side are being downvoted. Why? Does the people downvoting care to explain? There's a huge contradiction here. Either you do "something" to control population or else all the measures to control climate change are stillborn. We are struggling with the current population!
- spiralx 8y agoBecause world population is already forecast to peak and then decline over the next few decades, economic development has already "done something" about this issue, unless you're proposing mass murder or something equally implausible.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoWould paying people in countries with high birth rates to not have children be exploitative?
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- ufmace 8y agoI would guess that a lot of the sub-populations with the highest birthrates are disconnected enough from the global economy for money to be meaningless for them.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago> We can't all eat high quality meat as often as we want. We'll boil the earth and it'll require too much farmland This is defeatist. Technology decoupled agricultural output from the natural fertility of farmland, thereby allowing less farmland to make more food; technology now looks close to decoupling animal meat from sentient animals.
- friday99 8y agoTechnology hasn't magically decoupled inputs from outputs. You should look into some of the analysis by Vaclav Smil. He has very well researched assessments of the limits of energy.
- siruncledrew 8y agoMost of the places that are top tourist destinations don't have the capacity to handle such a high volume of people. It's just not how they were designed (and they had no reason to anticipate a huge surge in population and transportation hundreds or thousands of years ago). In order for places we hold dear to avoid being trampled into the ground by people like herds of buffalo, there has to be some sort of gatekeeping that takes place to protect them. In theory, it would be fantastic if places could be open and appreciated by people from all over, but what happens in reality is more people creates more chaos. We can't expect that people will follow common behaviors and understandings because, if they did, then there wouldn't be a need for rules and oversight in the first place. There's many beautiful places in the world and we should do our best to keep them beautiful for future generations to enjoy. Unfortunately, there's unavoidable costs to doing so, and not everyone will be able to get things the way they want. A finite reality with infinite intentions are going to end up at odds with each other.
- CaptainZapp 8y agoBotswana does its gatekeeping by maintaining relatively high prices. In addition: Quotas to the game parks are strictly limited and enforced. You can go cheaper (but never cheap) by joining an organized camping tour, which is actually a huge plus. Camping tour groups get assigned places in the middle of the game reserves (they must apply for permits 18 month in advance and leave the sites in pristine condition). You can visit the parks individually with a reservation, but are only allowed camping in the entrance area. The kicker is that if you stay in a very expensive lodge, which can be north of 1000$ a night you will never be sleeping in a park, since commercial exploation is illegal. It is an expensive country for tourists by design. They rather have a small, but well heeled number of visitors. And while people may moan that it's unfair it's probably the best way to drive "quotas". That, and limited supply of the main attractions.
- zanny 8y agoAt least a few of those have evolving technical solutions. We can all travel in a more sustainable way if we can do full body VR immersion wherever we want to go. We don't need cars if we have fleets of autonomous vehicles to pick us up and drop us off wherever we want to be on a whim. We can all live in the country if you don't need to commute either yourself or property to and from where you live (the infrastructure to maintain sparse development is much more a hindrance on low density living than just building dwellings). And we can eat all the meat we want if we are growing it ourselves from cultured cells rather than having to make the rest of the animal for years to get just the muscle we want to cook. No, those aren't the experiences we have today, but I'm not consuming all my performance entertainment as live acts in a theater because doing so would have been unsustainable for the scale you want to produce at. We evolved the technology into film and later television and now we watch what we want, when we want, where we want. The marginal cost of that entertainment went from stadium sized buildings with productions that took years to refine and practice with crews and casts in the hundreds able to perform for a thousand at most to millions of people being able to repeatedly enjoy hand crafted frames and sounds for the marginal cost of cents of power and wire. A hundred years from now mankind won't lament missing out on driving any more than most people don't crave horseback riding today. Because we innovate our way to better solutions. And its insane hubris to think mankind is anywhere close to the potential limits of physical science that we won't dramatically, in ways we can't even comprehend or imagine, refine our condition in the decades to come, and for centuries thereafter if we at last that long.
- esotericn 8y agoI agree with a lot of this. That said: > if we can do full body VR immersion wherever we want to go At this point we're basically post scarcity. You plug yourself into the wall, hook yourself up to the IV and that's that. The rest of your post (and all of mine) becomes irrelevant. It's pretty much an "all bets are off" scenario. :P
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- dagw 8y ago
- frgtpsswrdlame 8y ago>We either eliminate these experiences, accept economic inequality, or watch the experiences be eliminated via attrition You're not thinking broad enough! It seems to me that you view the determination of what can be done as derived purely from economics. I have money so I can do what I want, you don't so you can't, and you view that as natural. But economic determination of our freedom is as unnatural as the world it takes place in. Basically, why? Why should it matter that you have more money when we determine who can eat meat and travel? Check out Walzer's idea of complex equality, there are certain things that just shouldn't be linked to your existing wealth. >unwilling to accept that the Universe _is_ actually a big competition, and either some people lose, or we all lose. Hmm? The Universe isn't a competition! And there's no reason that some people have to lose. It seems to me that you just assert all these things as true and natural and unmovable and so from that follows this necessary society where many people aren't very free but you are relatively high up the heap and so are pretty free. But those things don't seem true or natural or unmovable to me, they seem completely fluid and it doesn't seem so wrong to take some of the freedom you enjoy away from you and give it to other people who have a lot less.
- esotericn 8y agoIt took me a while to interpret this, but I think I see what you're getting at here. You're right that the competition dynamic doesn't have to be the one we choose. So I suppose there's a fourth option which involves some sort of other distribution mechanism. You're still going to have a privileged group though, unless you choose to eliminate experiences (e.g. there's no way of fairly distributing private jets, they're not private any more if you do that).
- frgtpsswrdlame 8y agoYes, even if we just switched to pure lottery for traveling, we'll have a privileged class of people who win that lottery and get to travel somewhere they like. However, this inequality is at least independently distributed from other forms of inequality. To me that's already an improvement. There's also lots of other areas where I think competition could be entirely eliminated. Take healthcare, there's basically no need for that to be a competitive system.
- ip26 8y agoAt least currently, to me tourism would seem to be a distribution problem first. Ten thousand people visiting Paris is a much bigger impact than 2,500 spread across Paris, San Francisco, Venice, and Rome. Limits, such as a lottery, might drive people to disperse more and find a greater variety of great places to see. But then, I'm more drawn to cozy small towns than the Eiffel Tower.
- dagw 8y agoTen thousand people visiting Paris is a much bigger impact than 2,500 spread across Paris, San Francisco, Venice, and Rome. Have you been to Venice? 2500 people visiting the bits of Venice people want to visit has a much bigger impact than 10000 people visiting Paris or Rome.
- skh 8y agoThe solution is to have far fewer people. If the population of the planet were far less then there would be enough resources and space for everyone without destroying the planet.
- groestl 8y agoThis seems to be were we're heading at currently [0]. [0] https://www.gapminder.org/topics/fertility-child-mortality/ https://www.gapminder.org/topics/fertility-child-mortality/
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- senorjazz 8y ago"today a man on the internet from rich country with good job and a good standard of living says bollox to the rest of you, I've got mine, feed on my scraps" :-\
- esotericn 8y agoI think that's an unfair assessment. Care to argue with my points? I don't think it's a particularly nice state of affairs either.
- screye 8y ago> We can't all have a car because we'll boil the earth. If we > develop EV's and don't boil the earth, they won't all fit > downtown. > > We can't all live in the country, that's not sustainable > either. You hit the nail in the head. The only way for 7+ billions humans to live sustain-ably on planet earth, is to accept high density living and shared spaces. High density living in the form of apartments with common gardening, grilling areas, shared yards and complete reliance on public transportation. I would love to see card become an entirely rental / on demand thing. It would take a lot to make such a massive cultural switch, but it is the best thing we can do for sustainable living.
- llukas 8y ago> High density living in the form of apartments with common gardening, grilling areas, shared yards and complete reliance on public transportation. Did you just describe most of EU and some of east coast US cities? ;)
- ant6n 8y agoYou don't need extremely high density, and you can still grill on your own balcony (or little terasse). Theres an important density threshold which allows communities to be walkable and servable by rapid transit. Many areas of Montreal are comfortably above that threshold by using triplexes, even just duplexes.
- isostatic 8y ago20 houses per hectare is low density, with a decent garden and local roads. At that level you can fit 20,000 houses, or 50-70k people, within a short 2km walk of a station, and a few local shops around the place too, and on average you’re about 800m from the edge of town. Have 1 town every 10km (so 6km of country between them) and that’s a 6:1 country:town ratio and a density higher than that of even the Netherlands.
- hueving 8y ago>We can't all live in the country, that's not sustainable either. Why is this viewed as such a given that you state it without any evidence? Once people stop commuting for jobs, it's very feasible for everyone to spread out and live cheaper in smaller cities/towns and rural areas. Someone who lives in the East Bay and commutes to Sunnyvale every morning has a much larger carbon footprint than someone working remotely from Yuma.
- tolmasky 8y agoSo there for some reason seems to be a melding of the ideas of raising quality of life and eliminating inequality, which don't necessarily have to be the same thing. I do not think it is unreasonable that 100 years from today the lower middle class has access to everything the upper class of America has today (from a material perspective), while there may still exist an upper class that can do even more (travel to Jupiter or something? I dunno.) I'm aware this is not a new idea, just wanting to make sure we restate as much. Separately, while I concede that some of these aspects may very well not scale, there isn't enough attention paid to the idea that some may scale better. First world countries tend to have lower brith rates than third world ones. Perhaps if we raised the quality of life enough across the globe, we'd actually level off the population demands dramatically as a result. Similarly, while some people certainly do want cars, what most people actually want is to get from point A to point B. If we can get to a world of self driving cars, the grid lock problem may disappear and be replaced with a perfectly feasible alternative that's actually safer. So yeah, I think its quite possible that not everyone will be able to do the same "set of things", but I don't see how that has any bearing in trying to make any particular thing more accessible to everyone. I assure you a new "thing" will pop up that will still be only accessible to a few. That's the way its been so far in history anyways, not sure what's special about now.
- esotericn 8y agoI agree with this for the most part. I suppose the main thrust of what I wanted to get at was that the concept of reducing inequality is problematic, there's a hard limit somewhere and we're starting to see the first signs of that. Raising the baseline is certainly possible and a good aim. But as you say, there will always be some 'thing' that some can do and others can't. Maybe there's a state in which the more damaging things aren't desirable and most people can do most things they want. I hope so. I have the sense that a _lot_ of things that people want are basically status markers. And if that's true, then we can't really make everyone happy, because it's inherently hierarchical.
- drb91 8y ago> I find this to be an odd aspect of certain political movements at the moment - unwilling to accept that the Universe _is_ actually a big competition, and either some people lose, or we all lose. Life is competitive, yes, but it is not just that. You could reduce all of human history to competition, but obviously we put a great deal more meaning into it than that. Why give up now?
- abraae 8y agoThe only practical solution, given human nature, is your second option: "accept economic inequality". Humans being what they are, people just won't accept being told that they can't fly to New Zealand for their 2 week adventure holiday. However if the price of the tickets reflects the cost to the environment - say it costs $10K instead of $2K - then the environment can be protected, and the lucky few can continue to indulge, while others must forgo or get there by e.g. deck handing on a yacht (by which I mean a sailboat, not a Larry Ellison style super yacht).
- crooked-v 8y agoI think part of the problem here is that you're automatically assuming that a "good" standard of living must involve driving cars, eating meat all the time, and traveling in inefficient ways.
- esotericn 8y agoI agree that the terminology choice wasn't great. I think the points stand whether you call it something else though. Basically, the lifestyle that lots of people aspire to (whether it's viewed by me, you or anyone else by a good ideal or not) isn't achievable at scale. That's what I tried to get at with the 'eliminate these experiences' bit. Reducing their desirability so that they sort of fall out of existence is one way of doing that. For cars, you'd do it by making other forms of transport better, for example.
- Chathamization 8y agoOne mistake people make is pretending that every choice we make is a hard one with no good answers. Sometimes there are good decisions and bad ones, and we end up making bad ones even when the good ones are obvious. We often see this happen with individuals, it shouldn't be too surprising that this happens with societies as well. A few years back when I looked at solutions to "cooking this planet" that didn't involve anything that would cause much disruption to most people's lives. The reason we're not solving the problem isn't because of the hard choices we have to make. It's because a few industries that might make less money if we fight climate change try to stop efforts to combat it, politicians who get money from these industries say climate change is a hoax, the public at large is largely too apathetic to remove politicians who don't act, people who oppose all collective action oppose collective action to fight climate change, the media doesn't report on it because it doesn't get ratings, etc. Could we have everyone's standards are close to the current standards enjoyed by developed countries without destroying the planet? Maybe, maybe not. It's insanely premature to pretend that we know it's impossible. Not only have we not seriously tried to solve the problem, but a large part of the U.S. is actively opposed to even stopping the problem. "There's no solution" is an easy way to absolve us from our failures.
- graeme 8y agoCould you elaborate? Not cooking the planet requires moving to zero emissions AND taking them negative by a large margin beyond what simply planting forests would do. How csn we do this easily?
- Chathamization 8y agoHere's a decent breakdown: https://thinkprogress.org/the-full-global-warming-solution-how-the-world-can-stabilize-at-350-to-450-ppm-326e6ecb950b/ https://thinkprogress.org/the-full-global-warming-solution-h...
- grkvlt 8y ago> voluntarily switch to a low-carbon, low-oil, low-net water use, low-net-material use economy What about this is not hugely disruptive to lifestyles and standards of living? Its hardly an 'easy' solution to tell people to give up many modern conveniences or radically change behavior...
- Pharmakon 8y agoThe alternative is simple, just practically unachieveable without a world dictatorship or mass casualties; fewer people could enjoy all of what you describe, billions of us can’t. The problem is one of choosing who gets to reproduce, and doing so without touching off wars, rebellions, and religious violence. I somehow doubt we’re up to the task as a species.
- scythe 8y ago>We can't all go travelling, we won't fit in the same place and we'll boil the earth doing so. Not every city is as famous as Venice. No, everyone can't go to Venice. Everyone can go somewhere, though. > If we develop EV's and don't boil the earth, they won't all fit downtown. Gridlock is a rounding error compared to air pollution. Sure, congestion is bad. But it doesn't deserve to be compared to the worst environmental crisis ever. (After all, studies showing induced demand are also showing that people choose to sit in traffic -- they can't hate it that much.) > We can't all eat high quality meat as often as we want. We'll boil the earth and it'll require too much farmland, anyway Lab-grown meat is an easy fix. We don't eat very much "high-quality" meat to begin with, at least, not most of us. Most of us eat Taco Bell, which is already only 30% meat or whatever. > We can't all live in the country, that's not sustainable either. No, but it's possible for a significant fraction to live in well-designed small towns. Obviously cities are necessary; we've never been without them. But you can fit a lot more people into three-story houses on 1/12 acre lots (33' by 110') than into one-story houses on half-acre lots. We have a lot of the latter these days. There's no need to jump all the way to small apartments in mid-rises on car-free streets. (But building some of these is good because there is clearly some demand from people who would like to live there.) >But the idea that everyone should be able to do the same things implies a set of "things" very different from what, say, the middle class families on my suburban street do today. I don't disagree with the general claim, but most people's predictions are far too dire. These problems are much more addressable than some people seem to think. They won't be, if population continues to skyrocket, but at current loading, the Earth will be okay. (Unfortunately, some surveys indicate that people are choosing not to reproduce because they're unhappy. If we make those people happy, the population problem could come back. That's my greatest worry in the long-term.)
- SquirrelOnFire 8y agoIf you make energy cheap and non-carbon enough, do you still think this is true? If the promises of the 4th gen nuke plants are realized, or controlled fusion is achieved for example, and electricity hits 5% of current price to produce (VERY hypothetical, I know), then suddenly mitigating the costs of what we do drops dramatically. CCS becomes feasible, as does creating fuel from carbon captured from the atmosphere. Still think we'd boil ourselves?
- nostrademons 8y agoIt'd be really interesting to figure out what we actually can all do, though, based on first principles and some basic math. Right now there's a lot of rhetoric on both sides, either of the form "The universe is scarce. Either we compete over natural resources, or we die" or "There's plenty for everybody! Let's guarantee everyone a middle-class American lifestyle as a basic human right." I suspect that both extremes are quite inaccurate, and being manipulated for political gain. Two surprising ones that I've found: We can feed everyone on earth. Current daily food production per capita exceeds the recommended 2500 Cal/day in all regions [1], even in Africa, and exceeds 3500 Cal/day in some regions (North America, Europe). With current technology, we could feed the expected 2050 population of 9B. We may not be able to feed them meat, because it takes roughly 25x as much energy to produce beef than corn, and roughly 6x as much for chicken or pork. [2] We also need to fix severe distribution and supply chain leakage problems to get the food to where it needs to be. We also can produce enough renewable energy to give everyone a developed-world standard of living, subject to construction & storage costs. Energy use in the U.S. was 4.1 TWh in 2016 [3]; divided by 8760 hours/year, that's a mean power usage of 472.2 GW. (Peak power generating capacity in the U.S. is about 1100 GW, so that implies 50% utilization, which is about right.) Scaled up to 9B people (30x), that implies a global energy consumption of around 14 TW. Solar flux on the earth is 1.361 KW/m^2 [4], so at 10% efficiency, that requires an area of 104,010 square kilometers covered by solar panels. This sounds large, but laid out into a rectangle, it's only about 250 * 400 km. Such an array could easily fit into the Mojava, Sahara, or many other deserts on earth, with plenty of room left over. We likely can't all live in the country - total habitable acreage on earth is about 15.77 billion acres, so with 9B people, each person gets about an acre and a half, and that has to include all the public commons, infrastructure, industry, etc. as well. We also probably can't all have a car - we could if we all lived in the country, but if you take say SF's density (20K/mi^2), give everyone a car, and multiply that by the space the car takes up in parking (say 200 ft^2) and roads (depends on density, but let's say equivalent), you're looking at 8M ft^2 taken up by vehicles alone out of a total available space of 27M ft^2. If everybody used motorcycles, pods, or scooters to get around, it could work, though. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/food-per-person https://ourworldindata.org/food-per-person [2] http://www.pnas.org/content/115/15/3804 http://www.pnas.org/content/115/15/3804 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#Consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#Co... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_constant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_constant
- newnewpdro 8y ago> It sucks. But what's the alternative? Fewer people.