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"It is crazy how much well intentioned people do in the interests of sustainability, and how astoundingly futile or even counter productive it is. At the end of

by rsync 7y ago

"It is crazy how much well intentioned people do in the interests of sustainability, and how astoundingly futile or even counter productive it is. At the end of the day, people would rather feel nice about themselves than make actual change." We are currently in the "bargaining stage" of our grief[1] about how we've built our lifestyles on a failure to pay for environmental externalities. People living modern, first-world lifestyles are (myself included) horrified by the idea that we can probably only afford to live like the global middle class - which is tremendously deficient in services, infrastructure, material possessions and their built environment. And so, otherwise intelligent people propose very silly things like the idea that if you just sorted your garbage just right your role in this crisis (the crisis of modernity, in my opinion) has been absolved. For what it's worth, the final stage of grief is paraphrased as: "It's going to be okay."; "I can't fight it; I may as well prepare for it." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCbler-Ross_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCbler-Ross_model

martythemaniak 7y ago
To be honest, I find views like yours not only fatalist, but dangerous. Fatalist because you don't seem to believe that developed-world standards of living are globally possible and so all genuine efforts will just be written off as band-aids. Dangerous because if people start believing this en masse, that prosperity is a zero-sum-game, then war is the only reasonable alternative.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  > Dangerous because if people start believing this en masse, that prosperity is a zero-sum-game, then war is the only reasonable alternative. It’s always been when resources are constrained. For all forms of life. Single family detached homes with garages on quarter acre lots and annual beach/ski vacations are not going to happen for all 8B+ people. The ones that don’t have this are unlucky to have ancestors who lost wars. Although, I might agree that it’s best (at least for me) if people don’t realize this or think about it in these terms en masse.
  - notduncansmith 7y ago
    > Single family detached homes with garages on quarter acre lots and annual beach/ski vacations are not going to happen for all 8B+ people. The ones that don’t have this are unlucky to have ancestors who lost wars. True, but from a resource utilization perspective those things are pretty wasteful. We could definitely meet somewhere in the middle, our options are not “everyone lives like kings and some are destitute” or “all live like kings”. The idea that anyone needs those things (or even deserves them more than anyone else) is the real enemy here.
    - Aperocky 7y ago
      I’d much be here today than a king say 500 years ago. Not only do I have vastly longer life expectancy, the quality of life during which I’m alive is likely much better, both physically and spiritually, except the getting 100 servants part.
      - ErikAugust 7y ago
        You probably have 100 servants if you think about it. Between automation and all the specialized services you use.
        shadowprofile77 7y ago
        Just the average basic combination of smartphone in the pocket, microwave oven and small electric oven in the kitchen and electric heating in the home do the work of literally dozens of people 500 years ago. For a king to heat their castle at night (or anyone to heat their home) required hours of very hard work. Getting timely information of any kind would have required the same, and couriers, court philosophers and so forth, and to make a basic hot dinner was hours of work even for modest mealtimes.
  - strbean 7y ago
    > Single family detached homes with garages on quarter acre [...] are not going to happen for all 8B+ people. Why not? There are ~7.7 billion acres of arable land on the earth. 0.25 acres per person would leave ~5.7 billion acres of arable land for agriculture.
- omginternets 7y ago
  "I can't fight it" and "I may as well prepare for it" doesn't have to mean war. It might instead involve abandoning an economy built on infinite growth, even at the expense of some material wealth.
  - martythemaniak 7y ago
    Have you ever tried to convince real people of that? Parents? Ones in developing countries in particular? Fusion and space colonization seem pretty easy in comparison, at least to me.
    - ficklepickle 7y ago
      It's true. Humans seem unwilling to entertain any reduction in convenience. It's funny, because maintaining the status quo will result in a much larger inconvenience. We are too smart for our own good, but not smart enough by half.
  - philwelch 7y ago
    Economic growth doesn’t necessitate consuming more resources. In fact, it often necessitates consuming fewer resources. Netflix today has four times the annual revenue Blockbuster had at its peak. Which company consumed more natural resources? Which kind of car is more valuable, a Tesla Model S or a Ford Explorer? Which one consumes petroleum products? Economic value is a measure of the value delivered to some customer, as measured by that customer’s willingness to pay for it. If I want to watch a movie, I don’t care whether or not somebody has to manufacture a hard plastic cassette or disk, in fact I’d rather they didn’t and they’d rather save the expense if there’s any alternative. If I want to drive somewhere I don’t fundamentally give a damn if the car is powered by the gasoline in the tank or by a hydroelectric dam in the mountains so long as I can get where I want to go in style and comfort. Efficiently allocating scarce resources is the entire object of the game—and if you add up everyone’s score at the end of the year, you have a measure of economic growth.
- Thriptic 7y ago
  It's also somewhat misguided in my opinion. For some reason a large portion of the population have decided that it is categorically impossible to do anything about global warming from a technical or policy perspective. They have thrown up their hands and have decreed that we must all live awful lifestyles and shouldn't even try to innovate our way out of the problem. We are spending a tiny fraction of available resources fighting this problem, and it is not inconceivable that we could develop solutions which would change the state of the world dramatically if we actually threw money and talent at the problems.
  - henrikschroder 7y ago
    My biggest source of hope for the climate crisis is that we got into our current state by expending enormous amounts of human labour. Those mines didn't dig themselves, those factories didn't build themselves, those highway networks didn't fill with cars by themselves. It took effort to fuck things up, which means that with effort, we can un-fuck things as well.
    - int_19h 7y ago
      The problem is that we've spun up a bunch of positive feedback loops in the process, and so un-fucking things is a lot costlier.
      - henrikschroder 7y ago
        In some cases, yes, in some cases, no. Reforestation for example appears to be very cheap, fast, and simple.
        int_19h 7y ago
        Is it cheaper in terms of man-hours spent on each kilo of carbon sequestered, compared to man-hours spent on emitting it?
  - tonyedgecombe 7y ago
    and another group of people think some magic technology or wishful political thinking that doesn't exist right now can solve all our problems in the future.
- qmmmur 7y ago
  If you think that all 8 billion people can live with the environmental impact of a select portion of the human race who have already done irrevocable damage to the planet you are living in a fantasy. I hope that's not a guiding goal for you in life.
- mikekchar 7y ago
  Japanese people, in general, are enamoured with the Edo period: from about 1600 until the latter half of the 1800's. Japan was a very poor country and it's refusal to do much international trade (or even talk to the outside world, really) didn't help matters. However this period is often considered to be the most enlightened for Japanese culture. Poverty was rampant and people lived in a feudal society, but people were by and large comfortable. The minimalistic Japanese esthetic that exists even now is a carry over from that period. People's dwellings were very small, but in comparison to European standards things were incredibly clean. There are numerous writings from Europeans who almost universally remark on both the level of poverty and on the surprising level of happiness. There is an interesting book (the name of which escapes me at the moment) where the author tries to enumerate some of the things that the Edo period Japanese got right and that could be used as a model going forward. One of the things that I think we, as a more affluent generation/society, often get wrong is that we equate prosperity with comfort. Indeed, we also equate comfort with being better. A friend of mine was eating grapes that he brought with his lunch. "You know how sometimes you eat a grape and it's got this amazing flavour and sweetness, but sometimes you eat a grape and it is virtually tasteless? I mean, even with the same variety of grape. Why is that?" I had to explain to him that eating grapes in February is not necessarily going to lead to tasty grapes because they aren't really in season anywhere. Why are we flying unripe grapes from half way around the world? And why are we ever trying to buy and sell grapes that are over irrigated and over produced so that they no longer have any flavour? Well, the answer is that people want to buy inexpensive grapes in Canada in February. But, is this actually a good idea? As a society, perhaps we would actually be better off if you could only buy grapes in Canada in September or October. Maybe you would have culturally relevant food as well, instead of fulfilling every whim of every person in society. And maybe we don't need cars everywhere. I mean, how many families have 2 cars? How many have kids and therefore have 3 or 4 cars? Are we actually better off this way? And do you actually need air conditioning in most parts of North America? And do we need to keep our houses at 22 C, and have remote car starters so that our cars idle and are sitting at 22 C for when we dash into them and we have giant underground tunnels all heated to 22 C and we don't have to walk outside when we are shopping, and all the parking garages are heated so that we don't even have to run to our car and don't even get me started about taking a bus, or walking out of doors: It's winter out there! Which is not to say that I am idolising the noble savage and thinking that we're all going to turn into Tarzan and swing from tree house to tree house on vines in a wonderful magical world where we don't need anything. It's just that I don't think the pursuit of riches is necessarily going to enrich our lives and culture. I've been rich and I've been poor and I've got to say that the rich are often the ones missing out.
- rsync 7y ago
  "... you don't seem to believe that developed-world standards of living are globally possible ..." I do believe that first-world, middle-class living standards, circa 2020, are globally possible ... just not in 2020. By the time that those standards are globally possible without unpaid debits in the form of environmental externalities, there will be a new "first world" standard that we will then decide whether or not to borrow from the future to pay for ...
- shadowprofile77 7y ago
  Much of this kind of attitude (where it can't substantiate claims concretely) is a type of fashionable nihilism masquerading as environmental concern. It serves as a kind of jaded virtue signalling too. This isn't to say that we shouldn't be worried about various aspects of the environment and human habits, or that we shouldn't individually and collectively push for better use of resources, but to simply claim we're lost as a species and discount all notions of us being capable of continuing to improve human well-being with better technology is both cheap and ignorant of centuries of real progress that have no reason for not being able to continue or improve in real ways..
- fulafel 7y ago
  People just need to understand that we can have good life with less consumption. For us rich people it can be hard to see how you can still have good healthcare, education, worklife balance then but it's worth the effort to think it through and learn about examples in other countries.
- lm28469 7y ago
  > Fatalist because you don't seem to believe that developed-world standards of living are globally possible and so all genuine efforts will just be written off as band-aids. If everyone lived like the average american we'd be in deeeep trouble. We went way too far past equilibrium and the only reason we're still able to make somehow it work is because the majority of the world hasn't make it as far as us.
- bobbydroptables 7y ago
  >Fatalist because you don't seem to believe that developed-world standards of living are globally possible I don't know about the rest of your comment but there's no question that current first world standards are not possible for all people. It's a very simple math problem. If everyone ate beef and drove cars and consumed carbon and participated in wanton habits at the current levels of the first world then the planet would be utterly and irreversibly ruined. It's not even close. I understand acknowledging our unsustainable habits makes us uncomfortable. But for better or worse that doesn't change the truth.
  - philipkglass 7y ago
    Japan consumes less than half the energy per capita that the US does. The UK is even lower. Portugal's energy per capita is less than 1/3 of the US figure [1]. Japan and South Korea consume less than half the meat per capita as the US [2]. These are all highly developed countries. When we consider sustainability and the limits of global development, "American" too often stands in for "developed," and "upper-income-bracket Texan" too often stands in for "American." Even among Americans, there are large differences between states in CO2 emissions per capita: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ... New York has only 1/3 the per-capita emissions as Texas. If the rest of the globe wants to be like Americans, it still makes a big difference whether they want to live like in Houston or like in New York City. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_consumption_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_co... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_meat_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_meat_cons...
ced 7y ago
"It's going to be okay" for us.
- ironmagma 7y ago
  Actually, not even. We’ll all die, it’s not going to be okay. But we must tell ourselves it’s going to be so, because that is the best use of our time while we have it.
mjevans 7y ago
We can do better. The collective we can do better than that. There are a number of currently less than popular steps that are obvious short / middle term answers. * Nuclear power (cleaner, cheaper energy) * Waste Reducing Nuclear designs ('breeder' reactors) * Population design (reducing humans on Earth) * Fund better land / farming use. * Tax misuse. Longer term I feel that as a species we need to take bigger steps. * Colonies in space (orbit, moon, other planets) * Establishing at least robots in the 'belt * Building world ships to distribute backups * Solar collector rings for more power The problem with solar rings is that while they're great at focusing the sun for industrial uses like power plants or maybe solar forge operations, they're also great at delivering lots of energy to places that don't desire it. Like the evil villain in a cartoon, movie, or distopian dictatorship. I think they should be staffed the same way that other dangerous engineering operations should be staffed. Engineers and security forces working as part of the largest collective governing units (at the present time, that would probably be the UN or one of the permanent members on some UN security councils).
- naasking 7y ago
  > * Population design (reducing humans on Earth) Entirely unnecessary. Native population growth rate is negative in every affluent country in the world, and they maintain their populations only via immigration. Focus on improving the quality of life in third world nations (via investment, education, etc.) and growth rate will naturally fall, like it has everywhere else.
  - mjevans 7y ago
    This is true, however it's also about fairness. It's fair for a pair of adults that love each other to replace their generation (at least until we're much closer to effective immortality). It's much less fair for some portions of the population to have VAST NUMBERS of offspring. Though 100% social security and retirement security as a right has been theorized (at least in science fiction if not reality) to greatly discourage using kids as a retirement insurance policy. I'm right up there with you on increasing global prosperity and raising the bottom though. That'll fix so many ills that achieving it would be a true benefit to everything. - Additionally - cheaper energy (my first two unpopular points) should be one of the theoretical routes to getting to this kind of outcome. Having enough energy means that all sorts of other things become economically viable.
dredmorbius 7y ago
First: strong agreement. Second: I'm starting to think that grief is less about loss than it is about model change. The more deeply embedded, and identity-providing that model is, the deeper the grief. This seems to follow a continuum, with benign instances ranging from humour (often based on violated expectations when in an open mental state) and surprise, to anger (feeling agency against change), fear (lack of agency, but an option to withdraw), panic (disordered action), and ultimately depression or freezing (no sensible action). Individually, adapting to major shocks means rescaling expectations and rewriting our own world models and life plans. Collectively, it's all of that plus the challenge of coming up on a social basis a new set of tribal myths to replace the old standard. (This is mostly my own construct, though it borrows heavily from a few sources, notably Kubler-Ross, as well as others. I'd be very surprised if there were no similar extant concept in circulation.) Alvin Toffler expresses a quite similar notion toward the end of Chapter 8 of Future Shock, "Information: The Kinetic Image": Change, roraring through society, widens the gap between what we believe and what really is, between the existing images and the reality they are supposed to freflect. When this gap is only moderate, we can cope more or less rationally with change, we can react sanely to new conditions, we have a grip on reality. When this gap grows too wide, however, we find ourselves increaingly unable to cope, we respond inappropriately, we become ineffectual, witdraw or simply panic. At the final extreme, when the gap grows too wide, we suffer psychosis --- or even death. The passage continues for another five paragraphs, recommended. One of the sources is Harold D. Lasswell's work on education, learning, and relearning, particularly concerning the limits on this. I've long been a fan of applying K-R to existential threats and Big Problems: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/237qw6/is_tactical_stupidity_strategic_ignorance_a_form/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/237qw6/is_tact...
nothrabannosir 7y ago
This doesn't hold up in the face of technical advances. As others have mentioned, cheap energy (e.g. fusion) provide very real solutions to many of the problems we face, and will make it realistic to continue to improve lifestyles across the globe. Of course our politics might get in the way and we could still be doomed, agreed, but that's a very different conversation. The idea that a western lifestyle for everyone is "impossible", and that "we can probably only afford to live like the global middle class" etc, needs more than just a nice ring to it. I hate to be that guy, but: "citation needed." Otherwise I do agree on recycling being mostly a boondoggle. But, again: politics. There are ways.
- manicdee 7y ago
  The denial stage of grief is where we hope for miracles (nuclear fusion) so that we don’t have to face reality (the lack of sufficient resources to sustain our energy- and resource-intensive lifestyle). We have been using plastics for less time than fusion has been “just around the corner.” Going back to a plastics-free lifestyle will be easier than magicking up fusion power.
  - nothrabannosir 7y ago
    Yes, I guess this is getting confusing but the fusion bit is a counter argument to "we are definitely doomed." If we harness fusion, we're clearly not doomed, ergo that statement is false. It doesn't mean we necessarily need fusion for salvation. The point is: the claim is just that, a claim. A big, sweeping, depressing claim, without any actual evidence to back it up, and which doesn't hold up against a bit of critical analysis. To be clear: I'm not saying we need fusion to keep our environment inhabitable for humans. Personally, I'm bullish on more effective use of the resources we already have, first and foremost through pigovian taxes. I'm pessimistic about the politics required to achieve that. But I disagree that we're doomed. That's patently false.
    - njarboe 7y ago
      Nuclear fission power can be almost as clean today as nuclear fusion will be. Fusion power plants will still be radioactive. Not using fission is a political and social issue, not a technical one. I'm not sure people would accept nuclear fusion either if we had it. Maybe if we can invent a different name?

by rsync 7y ago

martythemaniak 7y ago

To be honest, I find views like yours not only fatalist, but dangerous. Fatalist because you don't seem to believe that developed-world standards of living are globally possible and so all genuine efforts will just be written off as band-aids. Dangerous because if people start believing this en masse, that prosperity is a zero-sum-game, then war is the only reasonable alternative.

lotsofpulp 7y ago
> Dangerous because if people start believing this en masse, that prosperity is a zero-sum-game, then war is the only reasonable alternative. It’s always been when resources are constrained. For all forms of life. Single family detached homes with garages on quarter acre lots and annual beach/ski vacations are not going to happen for all 8B+ people. The ones that don’t have this are unlucky to have ancestors who lost wars. Although, I might agree that it’s best (at least for me) if people don’t realize this or think about it in these terms en masse.
- notduncansmith 7y ago
  > Single family detached homes with garages on quarter acre lots and annual beach/ski vacations are not going to happen for all 8B+ people. The ones that don’t have this are unlucky to have ancestors who lost wars. True, but from a resource utilization perspective those things are pretty wasteful. We could definitely meet somewhere in the middle, our options are not “everyone lives like kings and some are destitute” or “all live like kings”. The idea that anyone needs those things (or even deserves them more than anyone else) is the real enemy here.
  - Aperocky 7y ago
    I’d much be here today than a king say 500 years ago. Not only do I have vastly longer life expectancy, the quality of life during which I’m alive is likely much better, both physically and spiritually, except the getting 100 servants part.
    - ErikAugust 7y ago
      You probably have 100 servants if you think about it. Between automation and all the specialized services you use.
      - shadowprofile77 7y ago
        Just the average basic combination of smartphone in the pocket, microwave oven and small electric oven in the kitchen and electric heating in the home do the work of literally dozens of people 500 years ago. For a king to heat their castle at night (or anyone to heat their home) required hours of very hard work. Getting timely information of any kind would have required the same, and couriers, court philosophers and so forth, and to make a basic hot dinner was hours of work even for modest mealtimes.
- strbean 7y ago
  > Single family detached homes with garages on quarter acre [...] are not going to happen for all 8B+ people. Why not? There are ~7.7 billion acres of arable land on the earth. 0.25 acres per person would leave ~5.7 billion acres of arable land for agriculture.
omginternets 7y ago
"I can't fight it" and "I may as well prepare for it" doesn't have to mean war. It might instead involve abandoning an economy built on infinite growth, even at the expense of some material wealth.
- martythemaniak 7y ago
  Have you ever tried to convince real people of that? Parents? Ones in developing countries in particular? Fusion and space colonization seem pretty easy in comparison, at least to me.
  - ficklepickle 7y ago
    It's true. Humans seem unwilling to entertain any reduction in convenience. It's funny, because maintaining the status quo will result in a much larger inconvenience. We are too smart for our own good, but not smart enough by half.
- philwelch 7y ago
  Economic growth doesn’t necessitate consuming more resources. In fact, it often necessitates consuming fewer resources. Netflix today has four times the annual revenue Blockbuster had at its peak. Which company consumed more natural resources? Which kind of car is more valuable, a Tesla Model S or a Ford Explorer? Which one consumes petroleum products? Economic value is a measure of the value delivered to some customer, as measured by that customer’s willingness to pay for it. If I want to watch a movie, I don’t care whether or not somebody has to manufacture a hard plastic cassette or disk, in fact I’d rather they didn’t and they’d rather save the expense if there’s any alternative. If I want to drive somewhere I don’t fundamentally give a damn if the car is powered by the gasoline in the tank or by a hydroelectric dam in the mountains so long as I can get where I want to go in style and comfort. Efficiently allocating scarce resources is the entire object of the game—and if you add up everyone’s score at the end of the year, you have a measure of economic growth.
Thriptic 7y ago
It's also somewhat misguided in my opinion. For some reason a large portion of the population have decided that it is categorically impossible to do anything about global warming from a technical or policy perspective. They have thrown up their hands and have decreed that we must all live awful lifestyles and shouldn't even try to innovate our way out of the problem. We are spending a tiny fraction of available resources fighting this problem, and it is not inconceivable that we could develop solutions which would change the state of the world dramatically if we actually threw money and talent at the problems.
- henrikschroder 7y ago
  My biggest source of hope for the climate crisis is that we got into our current state by expending enormous amounts of human labour. Those mines didn't dig themselves, those factories didn't build themselves, those highway networks didn't fill with cars by themselves. It took effort to fuck things up, which means that with effort, we can un-fuck things as well.
  - int_19h 7y ago
    The problem is that we've spun up a bunch of positive feedback loops in the process, and so un-fucking things is a lot costlier.
    - henrikschroder 7y ago
      In some cases, yes, in some cases, no. Reforestation for example appears to be very cheap, fast, and simple.
      - int_19h 7y ago
        Is it cheaper in terms of man-hours spent on each kilo of carbon sequestered, compared to man-hours spent on emitting it?
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  and another group of people think some magic technology or wishful political thinking that doesn't exist right now can solve all our problems in the future.
qmmmur 7y ago
If you think that all 8 billion people can live with the environmental impact of a select portion of the human race who have already done irrevocable damage to the planet you are living in a fantasy. I hope that's not a guiding goal for you in life.
mikekchar 7y ago
Japanese people, in general, are enamoured with the Edo period: from about 1600 until the latter half of the 1800's. Japan was a very poor country and it's refusal to do much international trade (or even talk to the outside world, really) didn't help matters. However this period is often considered to be the most enlightened for Japanese culture. Poverty was rampant and people lived in a feudal society, but people were by and large comfortable. The minimalistic Japanese esthetic that exists even now is a carry over from that period. People's dwellings were very small, but in comparison to European standards things were incredibly clean. There are numerous writings from Europeans who almost universally remark on both the level of poverty and on the surprising level of happiness. There is an interesting book (the name of which escapes me at the moment) where the author tries to enumerate some of the things that the Edo period Japanese got right and that could be used as a model going forward. One of the things that I think we, as a more affluent generation/society, often get wrong is that we equate prosperity with comfort. Indeed, we also equate comfort with being better. A friend of mine was eating grapes that he brought with his lunch. "You know how sometimes you eat a grape and it's got this amazing flavour and sweetness, but sometimes you eat a grape and it is virtually tasteless? I mean, even with the same variety of grape. Why is that?" I had to explain to him that eating grapes in February is not necessarily going to lead to tasty grapes because they aren't really in season anywhere. Why are we flying unripe grapes from half way around the world? And why are we ever trying to buy and sell grapes that are over irrigated and over produced so that they no longer have any flavour? Well, the answer is that people want to buy inexpensive grapes in Canada in February. But, is this actually a good idea? As a society, perhaps we would actually be better off if you could only buy grapes in Canada in September or October. Maybe you would have culturally relevant food as well, instead of fulfilling every whim of every person in society. And maybe we don't need cars everywhere. I mean, how many families have 2 cars? How many have kids and therefore have 3 or 4 cars? Are we actually better off this way? And do you actually need air conditioning in most parts of North America? And do we need to keep our houses at 22 C, and have remote car starters so that our cars idle and are sitting at 22 C for when we dash into them and we have giant underground tunnels all heated to 22 C and we don't have to walk outside when we are shopping, and all the parking garages are heated so that we don't even have to run to our car and don't even get me started about taking a bus, or walking out of doors: It's winter out there! Which is not to say that I am idolising the noble savage and thinking that we're all going to turn into Tarzan and swing from tree house to tree house on vines in a wonderful magical world where we don't need anything. It's just that I don't think the pursuit of riches is necessarily going to enrich our lives and culture. I've been rich and I've been poor and I've got to say that the rich are often the ones missing out.
rsync 7y ago
"... you don't seem to believe that developed-world standards of living are globally possible ..." I do believe that first-world, middle-class living standards, circa 2020, are globally possible ... just not in 2020. By the time that those standards are globally possible without unpaid debits in the form of environmental externalities, there will be a new "first world" standard that we will then decide whether or not to borrow from the future to pay for ...
shadowprofile77 7y ago
Much of this kind of attitude (where it can't substantiate claims concretely) is a type of fashionable nihilism masquerading as environmental concern. It serves as a kind of jaded virtue signalling too. This isn't to say that we shouldn't be worried about various aspects of the environment and human habits, or that we shouldn't individually and collectively push for better use of resources, but to simply claim we're lost as a species and discount all notions of us being capable of continuing to improve human well-being with better technology is both cheap and ignorant of centuries of real progress that have no reason for not being able to continue or improve in real ways..
fulafel 7y ago
People just need to understand that we can have good life with less consumption. For us rich people it can be hard to see how you can still have good healthcare, education, worklife balance then but it's worth the effort to think it through and learn about examples in other countries.
lm28469 7y ago
> Fatalist because you don't seem to believe that developed-world standards of living are globally possible and so all genuine efforts will just be written off as band-aids. If everyone lived like the average american we'd be in deeeep trouble. We went way too far past equilibrium and the only reason we're still able to make somehow it work is because the majority of the world hasn't make it as far as us.
bobbydroptables 7y ago
>Fatalist because you don't seem to believe that developed-world standards of living are globally possible I don't know about the rest of your comment but there's no question that current first world standards are not possible for all people. It's a very simple math problem. If everyone ate beef and drove cars and consumed carbon and participated in wanton habits at the current levels of the first world then the planet would be utterly and irreversibly ruined. It's not even close. I understand acknowledging our unsustainable habits makes us uncomfortable. But for better or worse that doesn't change the truth.
- philipkglass 7y ago
  Japan consumes less than half the energy per capita that the US does. The UK is even lower. Portugal's energy per capita is less than 1/3 of the US figure [1]. Japan and South Korea consume less than half the meat per capita as the US [2]. These are all highly developed countries. When we consider sustainability and the limits of global development, "American" too often stands in for "developed," and "upper-income-bracket Texan" too often stands in for "American." Even among Americans, there are large differences between states in CO2 emissions per capita: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ... New York has only 1/3 the per-capita emissions as Texas. If the rest of the globe wants to be like Americans, it still makes a big difference whether they want to live like in Houston or like in New York City. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_consumption_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_co... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_meat_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_meat_cons...

ced 7y ago

"It's going to be okay" for us.

ironmagma 7y ago
Actually, not even. We’ll all die, it’s not going to be okay. But we must tell ourselves it’s going to be so, because that is the best use of our time while we have it.

mjevans 7y ago

We can do better. The collective we can do better than that. There are a number of currently less than popular steps that are obvious short / middle term answers. * Nuclear power (cleaner, cheaper energy) * Waste Reducing Nuclear designs ('breeder' reactors) * Population design (reducing humans on Earth) * Fund better land / farming use. * Tax misuse. Longer term I feel that as a species we need to take bigger steps. * Colonies in space (orbit, moon, other planets) * Establishing at least robots in the 'belt * Building world ships to distribute backups * Solar collector rings for more power The problem with solar rings is that while they're great at focusing the sun for industrial uses like power plants or maybe solar forge operations, they're also great at delivering lots of energy to places that don't desire it. Like the evil villain in a cartoon, movie, or distopian dictatorship. I think they should be staffed the same way that other dangerous engineering operations should be staffed. Engineers and security forces working as part of the largest collective governing units (at the present time, that would probably be the UN or one of the permanent members on some UN security councils).

naasking 7y ago
> * Population design (reducing humans on Earth) Entirely unnecessary. Native population growth rate is negative in every affluent country in the world, and they maintain their populations only via immigration. Focus on improving the quality of life in third world nations (via investment, education, etc.) and growth rate will naturally fall, like it has everywhere else.
- mjevans 7y ago
  This is true, however it's also about fairness. It's fair for a pair of adults that love each other to replace their generation (at least until we're much closer to effective immortality). It's much less fair for some portions of the population to have VAST NUMBERS of offspring. Though 100% social security and retirement security as a right has been theorized (at least in science fiction if not reality) to greatly discourage using kids as a retirement insurance policy. I'm right up there with you on increasing global prosperity and raising the bottom though. That'll fix so many ills that achieving it would be a true benefit to everything. - Additionally - cheaper energy (my first two unpopular points) should be one of the theoretical routes to getting to this kind of outcome. Having enough energy means that all sorts of other things become economically viable.

dredmorbius 7y ago

First: strong agreement. Second: I'm starting to think that grief is less about loss than it is about model change. The more deeply embedded, and identity-providing that model is, the deeper the grief. This seems to follow a continuum, with benign instances ranging from humour (often based on violated expectations when in an open mental state) and surprise, to anger (feeling agency against change), fear (lack of agency, but an option to withdraw), panic (disordered action), and ultimately depression or freezing (no sensible action). Individually, adapting to major shocks means rescaling expectations and rewriting our own world models and life plans. Collectively, it's all of that plus the challenge of coming up on a social basis a new set of tribal myths to replace the old standard. (This is mostly my own construct, though it borrows heavily from a few sources, notably Kubler-Ross, as well as others. I'd be very surprised if there were no similar extant concept in circulation.) Alvin Toffler expresses a quite similar notion toward the end of Chapter 8 of Future Shock, "Information: The Kinetic Image": Change, roraring through society, widens the gap between what we believe and what really is, between the existing images and the reality they are supposed to freflect. When this gap is only moderate, we can cope more or less rationally with change, we can react sanely to new conditions, we have a grip on reality. When this gap grows too wide, however, we find ourselves increaingly unable to cope, we respond inappropriately, we become ineffectual, witdraw or simply panic. At the final extreme, when the gap grows too wide, we suffer psychosis --- or even death. The passage continues for another five paragraphs, recommended. One of the sources is Harold D. Lasswell's work on education, learning, and relearning, particularly concerning the limits on this. I've long been a fan of applying K-R to existential threats and Big Problems: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/237qw6/is_tactical_stupidity_strategic_ignorance_a_form/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/237qw6/is_tact...

nothrabannosir 7y ago

This doesn't hold up in the face of technical advances. As others have mentioned, cheap energy (e.g. fusion) provide very real solutions to many of the problems we face, and will make it realistic to continue to improve lifestyles across the globe. Of course our politics might get in the way and we could still be doomed, agreed, but that's a very different conversation. The idea that a western lifestyle for everyone is "impossible", and that "we can probably only afford to live like the global middle class" etc, needs more than just a nice ring to it. I hate to be that guy, but: "citation needed." Otherwise I do agree on recycling being mostly a boondoggle. But, again: politics. There are ways.

manicdee 7y ago
The denial stage of grief is where we hope for miracles (nuclear fusion) so that we don’t have to face reality (the lack of sufficient resources to sustain our energy- and resource-intensive lifestyle). We have been using plastics for less time than fusion has been “just around the corner.” Going back to a plastics-free lifestyle will be easier than magicking up fusion power.
- nothrabannosir 7y ago
  Yes, I guess this is getting confusing but the fusion bit is a counter argument to "we are definitely doomed." If we harness fusion, we're clearly not doomed, ergo that statement is false. It doesn't mean we necessarily need fusion for salvation. The point is: the claim is just that, a claim. A big, sweeping, depressing claim, without any actual evidence to back it up, and which doesn't hold up against a bit of critical analysis. To be clear: I'm not saying we need fusion to keep our environment inhabitable for humans. Personally, I'm bullish on more effective use of the resources we already have, first and foremost through pigovian taxes. I'm pessimistic about the politics required to achieve that. But I disagree that we're doomed. That's patently false.
  - njarboe 7y ago
    Nuclear fission power can be almost as clean today as nuclear fusion will be. Fusion power plants will still be radioactive. Not using fission is a political and social issue, not a technical one. I'm not sure people would accept nuclear fusion either if we had it. Maybe if we can invent a different name?