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We need to stop consuming like there is no tomorrow. This is driven by advertisement convincing consumers they should buy products they may not need. Secondly w

by acd 7y ago

We need to stop consuming like there is no tomorrow. This is driven by advertisement convincing consumers they should buy products they may not need. Secondly we need to make products which lasts a life time. I see root cause that we need to remodel the economy from market economy consumerism to a circular sustainable economy. Most current economists is saying expand expand expand, but that increases co2 levels due to increased energy consumption of manufacturing which we cannot sustain. Thus we must use things which are long term sustainable and circulate and repair these things. Remove co2 out of the sky is also a good thing. The best thing I can think of then is to lower the temperature of the earth because then the oceans will act as a Co2 buffer sink. Think like carbon beverage, when you cool cans during production for putting carbon in them you cool them. If you heat a can they release stored co2. The same process with the oceans but at a much bigger scale.

philbarr 7y ago
How would this "circular sustainable economy" work? People tend to think of there being only two versions of the economy available - the government tells us what stuff to make, or free markets determine what we make. We would need a way of incentivising re-use, and of incentivising companies to make things re-usable. Currently the only way to make more money is to make and sell more stuff.
- lm28469 7y ago
  > We would need a way of incentivising re-use, and of incentivising companies to make things re-usable. That's what happened pre 50s. My mother still uses the sewing machine my grandma was using and it was made in my country, not in buttfuck nowhere SE asia. As it turns out making long lasting products isn't the most profitable thing so we shifted to producing to the least reliable standards people would still accept
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    People shifted to buying the cheapest products available.
    - OJFord 7y ago
      No, far cheaper products became available.
      - lotsofpulp 7y ago
        Obviously, if people are buying them. The point is if consumers prefer cheaper, lower quality products, then how is a business offering more expensive, higher quality products supposed to survive?
        OJFord 7y ago
        My point is that the cost of the cheapest got lower, due to industrialisation & globalisation, rather than a shift in habits as people started to think 'actually sod this expensive stuff that lasts a life time, gimme cheap & disposable'.
        lotsofpulp 7y ago
        Oh, I see what you mean. But I think people do choose to cheap and disposable for things they think they won't need. The rule of thumb for household tools is you go to harbor freight and buy the cheapest thing, and only go higher end if and when it breaks or can't do the job. Similar with electronics that keep changing or furniture if you keep moving. I myself don't see any value to furniture of better quality than IKEA, since my kids won't want it, and I don't gain any utility of getting something of higher quality. There's also probably some confluence with people's buying power stagnating forcing them to buy cheaper goods.
- vnorilo 7y ago
  We'd need to increase the price of materials compared to labor. Correct taxation of negative externalities would work towards this. I (like everyone else in my neighborhood) have super cheap, barely servicable tools in my shed that I have used once or twice. There's no way that's a reasonable allocation of resources in comparison to neighbor sharing, renting high quality tools or hiring a pro who owns such, but price and convenience heavily push me towards owning disposable crap, and I have to consciously fight it.
- dd36 7y ago
  One way I recall from college is “producer responsibility”. If you produce it, you’re on the hook for its safe disposal. You can bake disposal deposits or some other such mechanism into the price. Such a mechanism would help deter cheap plastic junk (Chucky Cheese prizes).
  - smt88 7y ago
    > If you produce it, you’re on the hook for its safe disposal I'd prefer laws that producers are on the hook for enabling safe disposal. This would cover the plastic junk issue, because most of those things cannot be recycled. Some can be "downcycled" (recycled into something less valuable), but that's still not great. The problem with your proposal is that lots of products (like batteries) can be safely disposed, but a consumer could do something malicious, like throwing them into a river. A manufacturer should be responsible for producing products that are easy to use safely, not for the actual safe use. We see the same thing in other industries: auto makers have to include seatbelts, but they can't be sued if someone chooses not to use one.
- incangold 7y ago
  The U.K. will soon charge manufacturers for the recycling of their packaging: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46261129 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46261129
  - distances 7y ago
    That's from 2018, did it go into effect?
- Super_Jambo 7y ago
  Switch the limited liability companies from their current blacklist based regulation to whitelisting allowed behaviour. Focus this entirely on creating highly competitive markets & fostering innovation in technology, logistics and production. Markets should be full of small companies making a specific product or service as efficiently as possible. Comparison of different products should be simple, pricing should be transparent. Basically the market for products and services should resemble as closely as possible the stock market. It's really telling that the only market the wealthy class needs to care about has incredibly tight regulation on how you describe the 'product' (Accounting standards, auditing, what the CEO tweets...). Meanwhile the markets every day consumers & workers lives are ruled by are wall to wall lies and deception. Our current low-regulation markets are basically designed to innovate in manipulating voters, consumers and workers. Where our most profitable industries main focus is buying off their regulators, competitors and focusing on creating moats and monopolies. In my view a good first step would be to bring in tight regulation on political spending & lobbying. Followed by regulating advertising with a view to nationalized product discovery. Basically if even Amazon can't stop fake reviews we should make it a publicly funded good. Let every company freely list their products and (as with listed companies accounting regulation) any product produced by a big company should have stats which are directly comparable to their competitors products & legally binding. We could also require companies to list the CAD files for replacement parts they no longer make.
  - emiliobumachar 7y ago
    > Comparison of different products should be simple Could you elaborate on this bit please? Do we regulate away all but one way to differentiate a product? How do we decide which one?
- edanm 7y ago
  > People tend to think of there being only two versions of the economy available - the government tells us what stuff to make, or free markets determine what we make. Then people are wrong. Almost no economy is purely one of the other - even the most "free market" economies have lots of government regulation, government spending makes up huge parts of their economy, etc. > We would need a way of incentivising re-use, and of incentivising companies to make things re-usable. Currently the only way to make more money is to make and sell more stuff. Totally doable in a completely free market way. You tax externalities. This is basic stuff - economists generally agree that if you set up a carbon tax, people will use less carbon.
  - philbarr 7y ago
    The OP implied there was a third way. I didn't mean only one way or another.
  - AtlasBarfed 7y ago
    Taxing externalities reduces to a blame avoidance game in the political arena. If you think America has "free markets" you haven't been watching the steady march of monopolies and cartels in virtually all sectors. Corporations own the political process in America to avoid these well past the point of usefulness to reducing emissions/concentrations. The toothless and ineffective Paris accords show this is roughly the same for even "progressive" economies like Europe. The privileged will risk complete destruction over the surrender of advantage. That cute quote is frightening accurate when applied to modern partisan republican politics, think tanks, and especially the billionaire donor class, and has been for 40-50 years now with respect to environmental policy. The only hope right now is the near-miraculous development of solar/wind/EV tech that can challenge and hopefully fundamentally undercut the viability of fossil fuels. The article's suggestion for mass investment in sequestration technologies is warranted. But if externality taxing was actually something politically doable as opposed to some policy dream by an economist, then we would have had a carbon tax on gasoline two decades ago, which any look at the cost of sequestration of carbon generally leads to a 3-10$/gallon tax. And we are probably a decade from it now. I do agree that it is basic stuff from an economic theory, which is tragically hilarious given the fundamental arrogance of Republican policy towards progressive reforms such as carbon taxation always invokes laissez faire principles. The fact that basically applicable economic theory is politically untenable means that the people in economics as discipline have utterly failed humanity, sitting on their hands as this happened for some, or actively contributing to its exacerbation from the free market/laissez faire/libertarian wing of the University of Chicago.
- acd 7y ago
  You design and build products which are 100% recyclable. Own less stuff, give away things you do not need. Price waste and good sustainable eco systems
yqx 7y ago
I think this is absolutely right. I've heard people on this website wondering why climate change and plastic soup are seen as the same problem. This is it. We live in an economy based on burning through huge amounts of resources and generating tons of waste. Climate change, plastic soup, and I dare say almost any other environmental problem are all consequences of this mentality. The economic cost of waste is way too low. This is really the fundamental problem.
AdmiralGinge 7y ago
What would economics aimed at a sustainable planet look like? I guess this is quite an interesting question, are there any elegant solutions to penalising climate change in the same way a land-value tax penalises passively holding on to land? We definitely need to wean ourselves off unbridled consumption at any rate, even if it wasn't an ecological nightmare it's terrible for people's mental health. Existing to consume like chickens in a human battery farm is no way for a sentient species to live. Any country attempting to combat climate change using economic means would absolutely have to use "green tariffs" I think, otherwise businesses would simply export their emissions to the developing world on an even greater scale than they do today.
lotsofpulp 7y ago
> We need to stop consuming like there is no tomorrow. This is driven by advertisement convincing consumers they should buy products they may not need. I think it’s at least partly driven by people’s desire to status signal, if not their desire to consume anyway to occupy their time.
- tjr225 7y ago
  I also think about travel/tourism and social media in this way.
72deluxe 7y ago
How many of us have phones and laptops with batteries built into them? Sadly there are no reasonable alternatives. We're funnelled into this mindset/system.
clSTophEjUdRanu 7y ago
Fusion energy and CO2 removal are my bet. The limitless consumerism isn't as bad if all the products were created with power from green alternatives.
chpill 7y ago
> The best thing I can think of then is to lower the temperature of the earth because then the oceans will act as a Co2 buffer sink. If we had some other levers to cool down the earth, the CO2 in the atmosphere would not be such a big problem.
nathias 7y ago
this is not a desirable option, the result would be a civilization collapse (which will also be the result if we fail to find a sustainable solution)
ed_balls 7y ago
> lasts a life time. This won't change much. Nobody will work on Pentium II, drive a gas guzzler or get a low resolution MRI. It's hard to regulate such stuff. You can only improve it a bit e.g. mandatory 3-year warranty with an option to extend it to 6 years. While buying the consumer would see the price for each warranty length.
- pkolaczk 7y ago
  Many computer programs or websites were more responsive in the times of Pentium II than they are now. It looks like we negated a lot of hardware advancement by inefficient software or by putting advertising in almost every possible place.
- tjr225 7y ago
  Nobody needs to work on a Pentium II- though I think we could probably find a lot of applications for really old CPUs. The main issue is how much power they consume. My 2013 MacBook Pro retina started having weird, annoying keyboard issues. I could spend 600$ to get it repaired or 1000$ to get a newer, refurbished macbook. However I'm finding a hand me down 2009 MacBook is working just fine after putting an ssd in it.
  - paulcarroty 7y ago
    Not a mac user, but fixing keyboard issues for $600 sounds crazy.
- KozmoNau7 7y ago
  Pentium II no, however my desktop machine and main PC is 2011-era (aside from an upgraded GPU) and it still keeps up just fine. It won't play the very latest AAA titles, but just about anything else is fine. It gets ~50fps at 1080p ultra details in GTA V, which is not shabby at all. For office and graphical work, it's obviously beyond merely capable. 200+ tabs in Firefox, no problem.
spodek 7y ago
Glad to see reducing consumption at the top. People's scarcity mindset makes them think burning less fossil fuels and consuming less stuff will lower their quality of life. On the contrary, most Americans could reduce their consumption by 80% off pure life improvements. People convolve reducing consumption with returning to the stone age, which is a false dichotomy. It's more like exiting a mindset that stuff means happy to where it means people trying to create craving. I speak from experience of reducing my consumption by about 90%, leading many others to start reducing through my leadership executive training and podcast. Before they act, they're full of facts and figures arguing why not to act. After they act, they wish they had earlier. The key is to activate their intrinsic motivation, not to tell them what to do. Then what they do feels meaningful. People don't want to do small things, they want to do meaningful things.
- jncraton 7y ago
  I'm glad to see this as well. I've been working on a site as part of a class project to help surface used items that have a long useful lifetime. My hope is that this will help in a small way to reduce the cycle of consumerism. Here's a link to the site: https://createdtolast.com/laptops https://createdtolast.com/laptops
- natdempk 7y ago
  > On the contrary, most Americans could reduce their consumption by 80% off pure life improvements. This sounds great, how do I do it?
  - spodek 7y ago
    My first TEDx talk describes my process and how to do it http://joshuaspodek.com/my-tedx-talk-is-online-find-your-delicious http://joshuaspodek.com/my-tedx-talk-is-online-find-your-del.... My podcast shares me walking through many people to start their challenge http://joshuaspodek.com/podcast http://joshuaspodek.com/podcast. Do they give you enough to start with?
    - natdempk 7y ago
BurningFrog 7y ago
I'm sorry, but this is nonsense. The atmospheric CO₂ rates come from burning too much fossil fuel. Not from people wanting things. If you consume and produce things in a way that doesn't release net CO₂, that is perfectly fine from a climate perspective, even if the products are meaningless artefacts of a materialistic life that will never make you happy. I understand the impulse toward a simpler, less materialistic life. If you like that, argue for it on its own merits. > The best thing I can think of then is to lower the temperature of the earth That... is not an action you can take. We don't have that lever. It's a goal of the whole climate change issue. So this is saying that to lower temperatures, we need to lower temperatures.
- m12k 7y ago
  > We don't have that lever. As far as I understand we have a red button that will induce a nuclear winter
  - AstralStorm 7y ago
    Unfortunately the effects of which would be different from just cooling the climate in an unpredictable and likely extremely bad ways, so it's not an option.
- yqx 7y ago
  Mass consumption and CO2 emissions aren't independent problems. It already is an insurmountable challenge to meet current energy demands with green energy. Producing things costs energy, energy costs CO2. Producing things in a carbon-neutral way still requires energy and that energy could have more usefully been spent to replace carbon non-neutral energy. There needs to be a discussion about economic incentives. It's not people wanting things that is the problem. It's that it's easier and more profitable to produce short-lived crappy things that can be sold for cheap, because the environmental impact of the waste it generates (both CO2 and the actual crappy product itself) is not sufficiently factored into the price. I would not be surprised if, in our current economic system, simply having more green energy available (or products produced without emitting CO2) is not going to solve anything. With almost 8 billion people on earth, we'll find ways to increase consumption and burn it.
mc32 7y ago
Just today on NPR I heard about upscale retailers and brands getting into the second hand (thrift) market (albeit still expensive). The idea is “conscientious” people will buy second hand items so that fewer resources are used, net. But it’s wholly beside the point. They could make durable stylish (maybe not fashionable) clothing that cradle to grave would be less impactful to the enviro than this recycling PR nonsense.
agumonkey 7y ago
and we need to stop moving way too much car use oh and absurd heating too, I saw black water buckets in the caribeans. Every high sun rate place should use that and never have an electric heated tank ever again
jsomau 7y ago
I've been building a browser extension called Curb Your Consumerism that detects when you're on a checkout page for a website and redirects you to a screen that shows you how long you had to work to earn the purchase you're about to make. The idea is to get people to more consciously consume and reduce their consumption. It still needs work, and I'm hoping to find a way to approximate the CO2 impact of their purchases. Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/curb-your-consumerism/khdjgifdbcmpgadopnlhiffkbjljonhk https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/curb-your-consumer... Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/curb-your-consumerism/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/curb-your-con... More info: https://www.curbyourconsumerism.app/#faq https://www.curbyourconsumerism.app/#faq
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  Let's say this works, and people spend less. That means they get more and more savings. Eventually everyone will have huge bank accounts, but live simple lives?
  - pjc50 7y ago
    Given that it's already declared to be "necessary" for people to have huge retirement saving to not live in penury .. yes? Also people could work less or retire earlier? (Although more likely the economic contraction from wasting less stuff will cause incomes to go down!)
  - jsomau 7y ago
    That's a possibility or perhaps they will work less and enjoy their family, relationships, exercise, nature and art more. Maybe they'll decide to pay off their loans or save for retirement or their kids education or donate to a charity. Even if they end up buying something at least they stopped to think about it and committed to it knowing what it took to earn, rather than just hitting the checkout button with a reflex action. Maybe during that time they'll choose to look in to the company they're buying from and look for more sustainable alternatives.
Nasrudith 7y ago
While endurance helps it isn't so straightforward as /just/ increasing endurance. Efficency gains can more than pay for the cost of additional manufacturing for one. It is something which calls for doing math on a case by case basis essentially. Going from Incandescents to LEDs and similiar caused the energy usage to go down in spite of increased always on electronic device usage. Replacing a hummer with a Prius or Yaris wins out quickly.
cjlars 7y ago
The whole "reduce, reuse, recycle" approach isn't tenable. Even a very environmentally conscious US lifestyle still produces a very substantial appoint of carbon emissions. For more, see how Hans Rosling covered the idea in his 2011 "Magic Washing Machine" presentation. https://youtu.be/BZoKfap4g4w https://youtu.be/BZoKfap4g4w

by acd 7y ago

philbarr 7y ago

How would this "circular sustainable economy" work? People tend to think of there being only two versions of the economy available - the government tells us what stuff to make, or free markets determine what we make. We would need a way of incentivising re-use, and of incentivising companies to make things re-usable. Currently the only way to make more money is to make and sell more stuff.

lm28469 7y ago
> We would need a way of incentivising re-use, and of incentivising companies to make things re-usable. That's what happened pre 50s. My mother still uses the sewing machine my grandma was using and it was made in my country, not in buttfuck nowhere SE asia. As it turns out making long lasting products isn't the most profitable thing so we shifted to producing to the least reliable standards people would still accept
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  People shifted to buying the cheapest products available.
  - OJFord 7y ago
    No, far cheaper products became available.
    - lotsofpulp 7y ago
      Obviously, if people are buying them. The point is if consumers prefer cheaper, lower quality products, then how is a business offering more expensive, higher quality products supposed to survive?
      - OJFord 7y ago
        My point is that the cost of the cheapest got lower, due to industrialisation & globalisation, rather than a shift in habits as people started to think 'actually sod this expensive stuff that lasts a life time, gimme cheap & disposable'.
        lotsofpulp 7y ago
        Oh, I see what you mean. But I think people do choose to cheap and disposable for things they think they won't need. The rule of thumb for household tools is you go to harbor freight and buy the cheapest thing, and only go higher end if and when it breaks or can't do the job. Similar with electronics that keep changing or furniture if you keep moving. I myself don't see any value to furniture of better quality than IKEA, since my kids won't want it, and I don't gain any utility of getting something of higher quality. There's also probably some confluence with people's buying power stagnating forcing them to buy cheaper goods.
vnorilo 7y ago
We'd need to increase the price of materials compared to labor. Correct taxation of negative externalities would work towards this. I (like everyone else in my neighborhood) have super cheap, barely servicable tools in my shed that I have used once or twice. There's no way that's a reasonable allocation of resources in comparison to neighbor sharing, renting high quality tools or hiring a pro who owns such, but price and convenience heavily push me towards owning disposable crap, and I have to consciously fight it.
dd36 7y ago
One way I recall from college is “producer responsibility”. If you produce it, you’re on the hook for its safe disposal. You can bake disposal deposits or some other such mechanism into the price. Such a mechanism would help deter cheap plastic junk (Chucky Cheese prizes).
- smt88 7y ago
  > If you produce it, you’re on the hook for its safe disposal I'd prefer laws that producers are on the hook for enabling safe disposal. This would cover the plastic junk issue, because most of those things cannot be recycled. Some can be "downcycled" (recycled into something less valuable), but that's still not great. The problem with your proposal is that lots of products (like batteries) can be safely disposed, but a consumer could do something malicious, like throwing them into a river. A manufacturer should be responsible for producing products that are easy to use safely, not for the actual safe use. We see the same thing in other industries: auto makers have to include seatbelts, but they can't be sued if someone chooses not to use one.
incangold 7y ago
The U.K. will soon charge manufacturers for the recycling of their packaging: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46261129 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46261129
- distances 7y ago
  That's from 2018, did it go into effect?
Super_Jambo 7y ago
Switch the limited liability companies from their current blacklist based regulation to whitelisting allowed behaviour. Focus this entirely on creating highly competitive markets & fostering innovation in technology, logistics and production. Markets should be full of small companies making a specific product or service as efficiently as possible. Comparison of different products should be simple, pricing should be transparent. Basically the market for products and services should resemble as closely as possible the stock market. It's really telling that the only market the wealthy class needs to care about has incredibly tight regulation on how you describe the 'product' (Accounting standards, auditing, what the CEO tweets...). Meanwhile the markets every day consumers & workers lives are ruled by are wall to wall lies and deception. Our current low-regulation markets are basically designed to innovate in manipulating voters, consumers and workers. Where our most profitable industries main focus is buying off their regulators, competitors and focusing on creating moats and monopolies. In my view a good first step would be to bring in tight regulation on political spending & lobbying. Followed by regulating advertising with a view to nationalized product discovery. Basically if even Amazon can't stop fake reviews we should make it a publicly funded good. Let every company freely list their products and (as with listed companies accounting regulation) any product produced by a big company should have stats which are directly comparable to their competitors products & legally binding. We could also require companies to list the CAD files for replacement parts they no longer make.
- emiliobumachar 7y ago
  > Comparison of different products should be simple Could you elaborate on this bit please? Do we regulate away all but one way to differentiate a product? How do we decide which one?
edanm 7y ago
> People tend to think of there being only two versions of the economy available - the government tells us what stuff to make, or free markets determine what we make. Then people are wrong. Almost no economy is purely one of the other - even the most "free market" economies have lots of government regulation, government spending makes up huge parts of their economy, etc. > We would need a way of incentivising re-use, and of incentivising companies to make things re-usable. Currently the only way to make more money is to make and sell more stuff. Totally doable in a completely free market way. You tax externalities. This is basic stuff - economists generally agree that if you set up a carbon tax, people will use less carbon.
- philbarr 7y ago
  The OP implied there was a third way. I didn't mean only one way or another.
- AtlasBarfed 7y ago
  Taxing externalities reduces to a blame avoidance game in the political arena. If you think America has "free markets" you haven't been watching the steady march of monopolies and cartels in virtually all sectors. Corporations own the political process in America to avoid these well past the point of usefulness to reducing emissions/concentrations. The toothless and ineffective Paris accords show this is roughly the same for even "progressive" economies like Europe. The privileged will risk complete destruction over the surrender of advantage. That cute quote is frightening accurate when applied to modern partisan republican politics, think tanks, and especially the billionaire donor class, and has been for 40-50 years now with respect to environmental policy. The only hope right now is the near-miraculous development of solar/wind/EV tech that can challenge and hopefully fundamentally undercut the viability of fossil fuels. The article's suggestion for mass investment in sequestration technologies is warranted. But if externality taxing was actually something politically doable as opposed to some policy dream by an economist, then we would have had a carbon tax on gasoline two decades ago, which any look at the cost of sequestration of carbon generally leads to a 3-10$/gallon tax. And we are probably a decade from it now. I do agree that it is basic stuff from an economic theory, which is tragically hilarious given the fundamental arrogance of Republican policy towards progressive reforms such as carbon taxation always invokes laissez faire principles. The fact that basically applicable economic theory is politically untenable means that the people in economics as discipline have utterly failed humanity, sitting on their hands as this happened for some, or actively contributing to its exacerbation from the free market/laissez faire/libertarian wing of the University of Chicago.
acd 7y ago
You design and build products which are 100% recyclable. Own less stuff, give away things you do not need. Price waste and good sustainable eco systems

yqx 7y ago

I think this is absolutely right. I've heard people on this website wondering why climate change and plastic soup are seen as the same problem. This is it. We live in an economy based on burning through huge amounts of resources and generating tons of waste. Climate change, plastic soup, and I dare say almost any other environmental problem are all consequences of this mentality. The economic cost of waste is way too low. This is really the fundamental problem.

AdmiralGinge 7y ago

What would economics aimed at a sustainable planet look like? I guess this is quite an interesting question, are there any elegant solutions to penalising climate change in the same way a land-value tax penalises passively holding on to land? We definitely need to wean ourselves off unbridled consumption at any rate, even if it wasn't an ecological nightmare it's terrible for people's mental health. Existing to consume like chickens in a human battery farm is no way for a sentient species to live. Any country attempting to combat climate change using economic means would absolutely have to use "green tariffs" I think, otherwise businesses would simply export their emissions to the developing world on an even greater scale than they do today.

lotsofpulp 7y ago

> We need to stop consuming like there is no tomorrow. This is driven by advertisement convincing consumers they should buy products they may not need. I think it’s at least partly driven by people’s desire to status signal, if not their desire to consume anyway to occupy their time.

tjr225 7y ago
I also think about travel/tourism and social media in this way.

72deluxe 7y ago

How many of us have phones and laptops with batteries built into them? Sadly there are no reasonable alternatives. We're funnelled into this mindset/system.

clSTophEjUdRanu 7y ago

Fusion energy and CO2 removal are my bet. The limitless consumerism isn't as bad if all the products were created with power from green alternatives.

chpill 7y ago

> The best thing I can think of then is to lower the temperature of the earth because then the oceans will act as a Co2 buffer sink. If we had some other levers to cool down the earth, the CO2 in the atmosphere would not be such a big problem.

nathias 7y ago

this is not a desirable option, the result would be a civilization collapse (which will also be the result if we fail to find a sustainable solution)

ed_balls 7y ago

> lasts a life time. This won't change much. Nobody will work on Pentium II, drive a gas guzzler or get a low resolution MRI. It's hard to regulate such stuff. You can only improve it a bit e.g. mandatory 3-year warranty with an option to extend it to 6 years. While buying the consumer would see the price for each warranty length.

pkolaczk 7y ago
Many computer programs or websites were more responsive in the times of Pentium II than they are now. It looks like we negated a lot of hardware advancement by inefficient software or by putting advertising in almost every possible place.
tjr225 7y ago
Nobody needs to work on a Pentium II- though I think we could probably find a lot of applications for really old CPUs. The main issue is how much power they consume. My 2013 MacBook Pro retina started having weird, annoying keyboard issues. I could spend 600$ to get it repaired or 1000$ to get a newer, refurbished macbook. However I'm finding a hand me down 2009 MacBook is working just fine after putting an ssd in it.
- paulcarroty 7y ago
  Not a mac user, but fixing keyboard issues for $600 sounds crazy.
KozmoNau7 7y ago
Pentium II no, however my desktop machine and main PC is 2011-era (aside from an upgraded GPU) and it still keeps up just fine. It won't play the very latest AAA titles, but just about anything else is fine. It gets ~50fps at 1080p ultra details in GTA V, which is not shabby at all. For office and graphical work, it's obviously beyond merely capable. 200+ tabs in Firefox, no problem.

spodek 7y ago

Glad to see reducing consumption at the top. People's scarcity mindset makes them think burning less fossil fuels and consuming less stuff will lower their quality of life. On the contrary, most Americans could reduce their consumption by 80% off pure life improvements. People convolve reducing consumption with returning to the stone age, which is a false dichotomy. It's more like exiting a mindset that stuff means happy to where it means people trying to create craving. I speak from experience of reducing my consumption by about 90%, leading many others to start reducing through my leadership executive training and podcast. Before they act, they're full of facts and figures arguing why not to act. After they act, they wish they had earlier. The key is to activate their intrinsic motivation, not to tell them what to do. Then what they do feels meaningful. People don't want to do small things, they want to do meaningful things.

jncraton 7y ago
I'm glad to see this as well. I've been working on a site as part of a class project to help surface used items that have a long useful lifetime. My hope is that this will help in a small way to reduce the cycle of consumerism. Here's a link to the site: https://createdtolast.com/laptops https://createdtolast.com/laptops
natdempk 7y ago
> On the contrary, most Americans could reduce their consumption by 80% off pure life improvements. This sounds great, how do I do it?
- spodek 7y ago
  My first TEDx talk describes my process and how to do it http://joshuaspodek.com/my-tedx-talk-is-online-find-your-delicious http://joshuaspodek.com/my-tedx-talk-is-online-find-your-del.... My podcast shares me walking through many people to start their challenge http://joshuaspodek.com/podcast http://joshuaspodek.com/podcast. Do they give you enough to start with?
  - natdempk 7y ago

BurningFrog 7y ago

I'm sorry, but this is nonsense. The atmospheric CO₂ rates come from burning too much fossil fuel. Not from people wanting things. If you consume and produce things in a way that doesn't release net CO₂, that is perfectly fine from a climate perspective, even if the products are meaningless artefacts of a materialistic life that will never make you happy. I understand the impulse toward a simpler, less materialistic life. If you like that, argue for it on its own merits. > The best thing I can think of then is to lower the temperature of the earth That... is not an action you can take. We don't have that lever. It's a goal of the whole climate change issue. So this is saying that to lower temperatures, we need to lower temperatures.

m12k 7y ago
> We don't have that lever. As far as I understand we have a red button that will induce a nuclear winter
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  Unfortunately the effects of which would be different from just cooling the climate in an unpredictable and likely extremely bad ways, so it's not an option.
yqx 7y ago
Mass consumption and CO2 emissions aren't independent problems. It already is an insurmountable challenge to meet current energy demands with green energy. Producing things costs energy, energy costs CO2. Producing things in a carbon-neutral way still requires energy and that energy could have more usefully been spent to replace carbon non-neutral energy. There needs to be a discussion about economic incentives. It's not people wanting things that is the problem. It's that it's easier and more profitable to produce short-lived crappy things that can be sold for cheap, because the environmental impact of the waste it generates (both CO2 and the actual crappy product itself) is not sufficiently factored into the price. I would not be surprised if, in our current economic system, simply having more green energy available (or products produced without emitting CO2) is not going to solve anything. With almost 8 billion people on earth, we'll find ways to increase consumption and burn it.

mc32 7y ago

Just today on NPR I heard about upscale retailers and brands getting into the second hand (thrift) market (albeit still expensive). The idea is “conscientious” people will buy second hand items so that fewer resources are used, net. But it’s wholly beside the point. They could make durable stylish (maybe not fashionable) clothing that cradle to grave would be less impactful to the enviro than this recycling PR nonsense.

agumonkey 7y ago

and we need to stop moving way too much car use oh and absurd heating too, I saw black water buckets in the caribeans. Every high sun rate place should use that and never have an electric heated tank ever again

jsomau 7y ago

I've been building a browser extension called Curb Your Consumerism that detects when you're on a checkout page for a website and redirects you to a screen that shows you how long you had to work to earn the purchase you're about to make. The idea is to get people to more consciously consume and reduce their consumption. It still needs work, and I'm hoping to find a way to approximate the CO2 impact of their purchases. Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/curb-your-consumerism/khdjgifdbcmpgadopnlhiffkbjljonhk https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/curb-your-consumer... Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/curb-your-consumerism/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/curb-your-con... More info: https://www.curbyourconsumerism.app/#faq https://www.curbyourconsumerism.app/#faq

deleted 7y ago
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BurningFrog 7y ago
Let's say this works, and people spend less. That means they get more and more savings. Eventually everyone will have huge bank accounts, but live simple lives?
- pjc50 7y ago
  Given that it's already declared to be "necessary" for people to have huge retirement saving to not live in penury .. yes? Also people could work less or retire earlier? (Although more likely the economic contraction from wasting less stuff will cause incomes to go down!)
- jsomau 7y ago
  That's a possibility or perhaps they will work less and enjoy their family, relationships, exercise, nature and art more. Maybe they'll decide to pay off their loans or save for retirement or their kids education or donate to a charity. Even if they end up buying something at least they stopped to think about it and committed to it knowing what it took to earn, rather than just hitting the checkout button with a reflex action. Maybe during that time they'll choose to look in to the company they're buying from and look for more sustainable alternatives.

Nasrudith 7y ago

While endurance helps it isn't so straightforward as /just/ increasing endurance. Efficency gains can more than pay for the cost of additional manufacturing for one. It is something which calls for doing math on a case by case basis essentially. Going from Incandescents to LEDs and similiar caused the energy usage to go down in spite of increased always on electronic device usage. Replacing a hummer with a Prius or Yaris wins out quickly.

cjlars 7y ago

The whole "reduce, reuse, recycle" approach isn't tenable. Even a very environmentally conscious US lifestyle still produces a very substantial appoint of carbon emissions. For more, see how Hans Rosling covered the idea in his 2011 "Magic Washing Machine" presentation. https://youtu.be/BZoKfap4g4w https://youtu.be/BZoKfap4g4w