9 ms·

Scientists’ warning on affluence

91 points by colinprince 6y ago

zvrba 6y ago
The paper would perhaps have a greater impact if I didn't have to google for the meaning of the word in the title ("affluence").
- bamboozled 6y ago
  It’s a common English word.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  affluence (n) a state often correlated with both influence and effluents.
- kingkawn 6y ago
  With the internet you can look up information anytime, and it’s super easy!
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
erpellan 6y ago
We already have the technology to build net zero carbon buildings. But the building trade is both notoriously conservative and extremely effective at lobbying to protect their profits (at least in the UK). Superinsulated, almost airtight houses with ground and air source heat pumps and solar PV should be mandatory, as should banning of all in home boilers in new builds. That’s all easily achievable even without some of the recent novel inventions such as engineered wood: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476 We have to stop treating the atmosphere as a free line of credit with no limit that we can just dump all our externalities into, or we’ll find out very soon that there is no such thing as an externality at planetary scale. We’re all in the same hermetically sealed box, breathing each other’s farts. Sorry for the rant. It’s hard to stop once the despair creeps in.
- readarticle 6y ago
  Do mandated green initiatives in this vein have a history of eating into the profits of construction companies in the UK? At a naive, laymen’s first glance I’d imagine it creates opportunity for more!
  - pasabagi 6y ago
    The ideal situation for a construction company is where the house they sell has the best cost to manufacture / sale price ratio. People buy houses without living in them first, so the best strategy is to build a house that is very cheap, but is visually impressive. Consequently, developers tend to build houses that are barely functional as such, with all sorts of damp/heating/basic liveability problems, but which look impressive. Green initiatives are a sort of nightmare for developers, because the energy efficiency of a house is a cold, uninteresting metric that is not immediately present to the potential buyer. Consider windows, for example. In an unregulated market, the cheapest, most crappy windows are absolutely the optimal choice for a developer. The fact that they are going to be drafty, break within the first few months, and quickly become covered in mold is simply impossible for a buyer to know, before they've lived in the house for a year or so. Green windows, however, have to meet energy efficiency ratings - which means they must actually work. They have to keep cold out and heat in, or vice-versa. They can't be giant condensators. They probably don't look quite so pretty, and much worse, they are far more expensive. So the developer actually loses perceived property value, while paying more!
    - drunkpotato 6y ago
      This happened to a family member, looked great, expensive looking house and high price, but shoddy work, all sorts of basic problems with the house in the first year. I wonder if this couldn't be mitigated somewhat by a clause that makes the developer liable for all problems in the first year. (I know one potential loophole would be that the developer could use a proxy to "buy" from themselves and hold for a year, but it seems like that could be appropriately handled through existing or minimally altered fraud laws.) It's hard to see how we could get from our present situation to something like that, but it might improve craftsmanship, but would also make new houses even more expensive.
23throwaway23 6y ago
To highlight some important elements of their work: A group of researchers, led by a UNSW sustainability scientist, have reviewed existing academic discussions on the link between wealth, economy and associated impacts, reaching a clear conclusion: technology will only get us so far when working towards sustainability—we need far-reaching lifestyle changes and different economic paradigms. In their review, published today in Nature Communications and entitled Scientists' Warning on Affluence, the researchers have summarized the available evidence, identifying possible solution approaches. "Recent scientists' warnings have done a great job at describing the many perils our natural world is facing through crises in climate, biodiversity and food systems, to name but a few," says lead author Professor Tommy Wiedmann from UNSW Engineering. "However, none of these warnings has explicitly considered the role of growth-oriented economies and the pursuit of affluence. In our scientists' warning, we identify the underlying forces of overconsumption and spell out the measures that are needed to tackle the overwhelming 'power' of consumption and the economic growth paradigm—that's the gap we fill. "The key conclusion from our review is that we cannot rely on technology alone to solve existential environmental problems—like climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution—but that we also have to change our affluent lifestyles and reduce overconsumption, in combination with structural change."
- 23throwaway23 6y ago
  In fact, the researchers say the world's affluent citizens are responsible for most environmental impacts and are central to any future prospect of retreating to safer conditions. "Consumption of affluent households worldwide is by far the strongest determinant—and the strongest accelerator—of increased global environmental and social impacts," co-author Lorenz Keysser from ETH Zurich says. "Current discussions on how to address the ecological crises within science, policy making and social movements need to recognize the responsibility of the most affluent for these crises." ... "The structural imperative for growth in competitive market economies leads to decision makers being locked into bolstering economic growth, and inhibiting necessary societal changes," Prof Wiedmann says. "So, we have to get away from our obsession with economic growth—we really need to start managing our economies in a way that protects our climate and natural resources, even if this means less, no or even negative growth. These quotes taken from: https://phys.org/news/2020-06-overconsumption-growth-economy-key-drivers.html https://phys.org/news/2020-06-overconsumption-growth-economy...
novalis78 6y ago
Here is a lifestyle change for you: ‘A step farther out’ by Jerry Pournell. Anti-humanism on nature.com rubs me the wrong way.
asaegyn 6y ago
So there's a big question here (beyond the obvious, existential one) for the VC and startup community. What role do we play in all of this? Can we play a constructive role? What might that look like?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- brabel 6y ago
  The current Silicon Valley model of pursuing hyper-growth and aiming at making a few people (founders and investors) very rich is part of the problem, not the solution. However, a more balanced startup culture that focuses on people well-being and environment sustainability as their ultimate goals could be part of the solution if they manage to find a working model within the current capitalist framework. The problem is that such framework is intensively individualistic and, without Government intervention, creates the worst possible outcome from a sustainability point-of-view because it assumes eternal growth and results in the concentration of resources into only a few hands. I would love to see a startup that focuses on making its customer's lives more fulfilling while at the same time less "affluent", which is possible to because after you have all your basic needs covered (food, shelter, medical care), no amount of money can make you happier... but small things, like a stimulating social life, or a sense of pride on what your work produces, definitely can. The founders of course, would need to be living proof that their startup delivers on that promise, so they wouldn't make a penny more than necessary to live a fulfilling life where most fulfillment came from bringing happiness to others. That's where I think this idea breaks down! I am sure there would be founders doing this if they thought they could make a billion $$$ first :D but if they could do that, the whole motivation for the project would've been undermined already.
k33n 6y ago
The radical environmentalists (really, they’re just marxists) finally starting to admit what they want to take from us.
Barrin92 6y ago
I think the article is right. Vaclav Smil has pointed out that today the share of fossil fuels, at about 90% of global energy consumed[1] is actually higher than in 2000, and falling at a snails pace. There is a worrying trend emerging, fuelled by the tech industry of performative environmentalism that seeks to promise absolution like the church did by buying Tesla's and biodegradable cups while the real-world impact is marginal while leaving the fundamental flaws of the system untouched. We won't consume ourselves out of the doghouse. Russ Ackoff in a great talk about systems thinking[2] once pointed out a few salient things 1. Counter to intuition one does not improve a system by merely removing deficiencies. Doing away with what you don't want doesn't get you what you want. 2. Incrementalism doesn't solve fundamentally new problems, rearranging deck chairs on the titanic is pointless, and people confuse efficiency with effectiveness. Doing the wrong thing right is worse than doing the right thing wrong. 3. One must recognise that like an architect, a designer does not design rooms independently of the house. One starts with the house, and only changes parts as to improve the overall functioning of the system, never the parts alone. This is what needs to be applied to modern environmentalism. Woke green consumerism and tech worship is useless. The entire global system needs to be redesigned, instead of trying to fix individual parts. We need to think in holistic terms rather than trying to remove individual problems. [1]https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/03/meet-vaclav-smil-man-who-has-quietly-shaped-how-world-thinks-about-energy https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/03/meet-vaclav-smil-man... [2]https://youtu.be/OqEeIG8aPPk https://youtu.be/OqEeIG8aPPk
- CuriousSkeptic 6y ago
  Is was just wondering the other day: do we have something like the IPCC currently charged with doing exactly that?
- fulafel 6y ago
  Buying a Tesla is certainly not marginal - it's lifetime carbon footprint incl manufacturing is still huge, it's wastefully big, and the owners previous car will in 90% of cases just continue life with the next owner, ending up with one more car in the world. The alternative co2 reducing uses of 1 Tesla worth of money would be very significant in the $2 earnings/day part of the world, so the opportunity cost is enormous.
ThePhysicist 6y ago
I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between affluence and environmental impact recently. It seems that in general, the richer you become, the more garbage and pollution you tend to produce. I am far from being rich myself but compared to people from less affluent countries I have a lot of free income, and while I try to reduce my environmental impact I have to say it’s worrying how much trash I have produced and how many resources I have used over the years: Electronics, furniture, clothes, travel, food, .... If I was more affluent this would only become worse I suppose. I think the problem is that a rational person (in our current definition) is incentivized to spend most of the available income/wealth during his/her lifetime, so as peoples income grows they find new ways to spend it: Get a new car every two years, buy a weekend house, go on expensive travels, buy lots of expensive clothes or furniture, always have the newest tech gadgets, etc.. All this incurs more pollution and resource usage. I don’t see how we can break this cycle without fundamentally changing our economic system, as right now almost everything is optimized to continuously increase output and create more consumption.
- logicchains 6y ago
  >I think the problem is that a rational person (in our current definition) is incentivized to spend most of the available income/wealth during his/her lifetime This is not necessarily a problem; there's no objective way to weigh up the satisfaction of somebody alive now against the satisfaction of some hypothetical person alive in future. And attempting to do so introduces some interesting questions, e.g. if we seek to maximise the satisfaction of future people, as individuals should we try to have as many children as possible? Because more people means more overall satisfaction.
- tokamak-teapot 6y ago
  Also as humans get richer, they almost never consider themselves ‘rich’. If you’re born into affluence, it’s almost impossible to comprehend this. I’ve watched people living in a rich western democracy, who are rich by the standards of their host country, travel to India and see the grinding poverty of so many people’s lives. Their assessment was not that they themselves are rich, but that those people are poor. It’s also incredibly difficult for those living higher up on Maslow’s hierarchy to see that it’s their entire level of society that is - in aggregate - a force for negative environmental impact. Individuals won’t admit to this, and will instead say it’s fine because they sort their recycling and only have one car and... but the macro scale is ignored because the self-defense mechanism won’t allow it to be fully understood or admitted to. Those who manage to admit and realise this is a problem may try to help - or at least not contribute - by doing their best, but usually this means keeping as clean as they can personally, while still taking advantage of most of the trappings of their bubble. Il not saying they’re bad people or they shouldn’t make an effort, but ten people picking up litter versus ten million dropping it is never going to work out.
buboard 6y ago
This is not a good article and it has a very patronizing/inflammatory title. There is only 1 figure and that one is , if anything , hopeful. It shows that GDP growth has bent the curve of CO2 since the 2010s. They seem to be arguing about what was happening in the 20th century without taking into account current trends? This is supposed to be a review, but it doesn't really review much, they make various statements with references, but they often do not state the facts which they are referring to. There are also grammatical errors An example: > The positional consumption behaviour of the super-affluent thus drives consumption norms across the population, for instance through their excessive air travel, as documented by Gössling73. That Gosling73 study is a 2017 study of 10 celebrities including Meg whitman, emma watson, felix von derleden and Karl lagerfeld (are these people considered influential?) Celebrities and the "affluent" are different things. Plus i believe most air travel in the past 10 years was "influenced" by middle-to-low income influencers on youtube/instagram/etc. Importantly, that paper presents conjectures but no data that people are actually following the flight patterns of celebrities. > Whilst a number of countries in the global North have recently managed to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions while still growing their economies30, it is highly unlikely that such decoupling will occur more widely in the near future, rapidly enough at global scale and for other environmental impacts Why not? Every technology that the west built was quickly adopted by the rest of the world. What kind of inane/ahistorical statement is that ?
- ovi256 6y ago
  >Why not? Every technology that the west built was quickly adopted by the rest of the world. What kind of inane/ahistorical statement is that ? Those countries pay high costs for their energy because their alternative energy sources are in no way cost competitive yet. They can afford those high costs. Less rich countries will never adopt fancy, expensive technologies if they're not cost effective. India and most of Asia are building coal plants as we speak, because they're cost effective (to them). They've also, at most COP meetings, pushed back any initiative to tax carbon emissions, as they see that (probably justly) only as a brake on their development. Their social stability would fall apart quickly if they can't deliver the economic development. For these reasons, the majority of future carbon emissions are projected to occur in Asia and Africa. There's very little Western countries can do, except some novel form of imposing their will on other countries, which would quickly and justly be denounced as neo-colonialist.
jojo2000 6y ago
Model around consumption should get deeply revised if we want to leave the world in a good state for our children. Refurbish rather than build new buildings Build sturdy hardware with replaceable parts Build from natural materials as much as possible, and invent a new concrete Stop polluting by sprinkling deadly stuff to grow crops and make things Develop recycling aggressively (98%) Stop using oil derivates everywhere Stop using nuclear fission as a power source ... Problem is that it is antipodal with current economical growth models
- rplst8 6y ago
  You had me until "stop using nuclear fission..."
  - jojo2000 6y ago
    If everyone agreed on everything, the world would be less fun ! My main problem with nuclear fission is that we generate a lot of waste that is almost impossible to dispose of and very dangerous. We don't even know, in case of a civilization breakdown, how people would manage the situation if knowledge was lost. [0] edit : ray of hope here [1b] Currently there has been many accidents with nuclear power, and we don't know how to manage those. Fukushima is still releasing lots of radioactivity in the sea. Yet radio activity about this is close to zero. [1] And new ways to tap into fission power (pressurized reactors) are dangerous and hard to build. Yet, I shall agree with you, that there is no definite solution to the energy problem, consuming less would be a good start. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(film) [1] http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/13228942 http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/13228942 [1b] https://futurism.com/the-byte/nobel-prize-lasers-destroy-nuclear-waste https://futurism.com/the-byte/nobel-prize-lasers-destroy-nuc...
logicchains 6y ago
It's sad to see something like this in Nature. Science can tell us what actions will lead to what outcomes, but it can't tell us what outcomes we should aim for. Different people have different preferences, and there's certainly no objective measure of the value of preserving the environment vs people's quality of life. Trying to push a certain set of values like this risks giving science a bad name in the public eye, and making the public less willing to accept actual scientific facts. Because many people lack the ability to distinguish between facts and opinions in scientific publishing, so they just end up distrusting all science.
- guerrilla 6y ago
  > Science can tell us what actions will lead to what outcomes That's what this paper does. It seems like you may have missed the part that this situation is not sustainable, as well as the prior science that establishes that quality of life depends on the environment, which is why many people care about phenomena like polution and climate change. > Recent scientists’ warnings confirm alarming trends of environmental degradation from human activity, leading to profound changes in essential life-sustaining functions of planet Earth It's going to be hard to argue that the life-sustaining capacity of Earth is not a universal subjective value of all life but the paper isn't arguing the opposite anyway. This paper simply identifies causes contributing to the unsustainablity of the current system and makes some proposals to mitigate or eliminate it. It's analyzing and providing options. Make sure you understand what unsustainability means as far as consequences. Moreover, that's hardly a subjective value judgement. It's simply a measurable property of systems.
  - logicchains 6y ago
    >It seems like you may have missed the part that this situation is not sustainable, as well as the prior science that establishes that quality of life depends on the environment, which is why many people care about phenomena like polution and climate change. It seems you missed the fact that many people don't care about sustainability, and are unwilling to accept even a small reduction in quality of life in the name of the environment. Clearly their values differ from the values of the paper's authors regarding what is "necessary societal change". >It's going to be hard to argue that the life-sustaining capacity of Earth is not a universal subjective value of all life but the paper isn't arguing the opposite anyway. If we look at sustainability from the perspective of "preserving human existence as long as possible", then the only long-term solution is expanding to other planets/solar systems. The more limits there are on economic growth, the longer this will take. Similarly, life-extension technology will allow people to extend their lives longer; the slower the economy grows, the longer it will take to develop this. The paper didn't even consider this, or any other downsides of limiting economic growth. >Make sure you understand what unsustainability means as far as consequences. Moreover, that's hardly a subjective value judgement. It's simply a measurable property of systems. The language and tone used in the paper is not in the format "if we want to increase sustainability, this is what we should do", it's in the format "this is what we should do". For example: "economic systems that exploit nature and humans" - that's clearly a value judgement, not science.
lazyjones 6y ago
Sorry, but this is a purely political piece of garbage. It's full of claims unsupported by their data. For example, all their data shows population growth is a central issue but they focus on "affluence" and then they cherry-pick the (already affluent, saturated in consumption) first world to attack and suggest improvements for when the elephant in the room is the third world with its not exactly "affluent" but at least no longer starving population that is beginning to do what they suggest we stop doing. Then the typical radical left / eco-socialist "solutions" appear out of nowhere. It's disappointing that such political pieces are now in mainstream science publications (presumably because it's en vogue to kneel to the radical left...).
- mynameishere 6y ago
  The same group of people were obsessed with population growth decades ago, when the wrong kind of people were the ones having babies. That problem is solved, and so they have moved on to the next one, which is the pastoralization of the West. It's crazy, but the left has won every single battle it has fought. So, get ready...
tim333 6y ago
>It is clear that prevailing capitalist, growth-driven economic systems have not only increased affluence since World War II, but have led to enormous increases in inequality, financial instability... Globally it's not at all clear there have been increases in inequality. When I was a kid in the 60s '3rd world nations' were impoverished going on starving, now they are mostly prosperous, have 4G, plenty of food etc. China especially was getting by on maybe $300/yr GDP and now has western style prosperity. The US may be more unequal but there is 90%+ of the world that is not the US. It may seem nitpicking but it's basically an essay on economics and it makes me disregard the rest a bit when they get basic facts wrong. Also in terms of stability things have been fairly stable given the pandemic, fingers crossed. Re affluence and the environment probably what we need is pricing for externalities in things like fossil fuels - people can be rich in non damaging ways - make artworks and sell them to each other for $1m+, build eco buildings, gardens etc - it doesn't have to be SUVs.
- 0d9eooo 6y ago
  It's important to keep that in mind re: improvements in inequality, but at the same time, for example, there is a refugee crisis that's been steadily increasing over time worldwide in recent times. GDP per capita is not the only metric of inequality, nor is China the only exception to the US. I basically agree with everything you're saying, I just think something is going on that's not nearly captured by a lot of traditional metrics.
- ttonkytonk 6y ago
  From the Wikipedia article on Economic inequality: "In 1820, the ratio between the income of the top and bottom 20 percent of the world's population was three to one. By 1991, it was eighty-six to one." The article does say that global inequality may have decreased in the last few decades. However, considering that the richest 85 people have a combined wealth equal to the bottom half of the world's population (according to the same article), the claim that the capitalist, growth-driven economies have led to enormous inequalities is a basic fact.
andrewtbham 6y ago
"Any transition towards sustainability can only be effective if far-reaching lifestyle changes complement technological advancements." How can they possibly know this for sure? My intuition is that sustainable energy, over the long term, will lead to more consumption and improved lifestyles.
dade_ 6y ago
Other than the minor detail that only the affluent think about these problems, have the resources to solve them, and the spare time to do anything about them.
- 0d9eooo 6y ago
  I've increasingly become convinced the environmental problem is really a socioeconomic problem. This is in some ways the point of the paper, but in other ways the paper misses the point completely, by focusing on affluent lifestyles rather than how to meet human needs in a sustainable way.
bJGVygG7MQVF8c 6y ago
No mention of reducing population growth. There never seem to be anymore. The trajectory we're on is either toward ecological catastrophe or, if we manage to avoid that, a bimodal distribution of quality of life between an affluent few and the immiserated (if distracted) masses.
- Apocryphon 6y ago
  We're set to hit below replacement birthrates for most of the world, and those parts of the world, being the most developed, are the places that consume the most fossil fuels, among other resources.
lcall 6y ago
I don't think we are competent to solve this when we can't generally trust each other to keep our word, and especially when we have rejected the specific advice of the planet's Creator. I realize many will think that is silly, but I have put reasons I think this, and why I believe this, in depth, at my simple site (no JS etc): http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854581820.html http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854581820.html -- for what it's worth. And why we can really be OK. Edit: I think expecting honesty, penalizing the lack of it, (and probably the Golden Rule) are prerequisites to solving many things. Etc.

91 points by colinprince 6y ago

The paper would perhaps have a greater impact if I didn't have to google for the meaning of the word in the title ("affluence").

bamboozled 6y ago
It’s a common English word.
082349872349872 6y ago
affluence (n) a state often correlated with both influence and effluents.
kingkawn 6y ago
With the internet you can look up information anytime, and it’s super easy!
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

erpellan 6y ago

We already have the technology to build net zero carbon buildings. But the building trade is both notoriously conservative and extremely effective at lobbying to protect their profits (at least in the UK). Superinsulated, almost airtight houses with ground and air source heat pumps and solar PV should be mandatory, as should banning of all in home boilers in new builds. That’s all easily achievable even without some of the recent novel inventions such as engineered wood: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476 We have to stop treating the atmosphere as a free line of credit with no limit that we can just dump all our externalities into, or we’ll find out very soon that there is no such thing as an externality at planetary scale. We’re all in the same hermetically sealed box, breathing each other’s farts. Sorry for the rant. It’s hard to stop once the despair creeps in.

readarticle 6y ago
Do mandated green initiatives in this vein have a history of eating into the profits of construction companies in the UK? At a naive, laymen’s first glance I’d imagine it creates opportunity for more!
- pasabagi 6y ago
  The ideal situation for a construction company is where the house they sell has the best cost to manufacture / sale price ratio. People buy houses without living in them first, so the best strategy is to build a house that is very cheap, but is visually impressive. Consequently, developers tend to build houses that are barely functional as such, with all sorts of damp/heating/basic liveability problems, but which look impressive. Green initiatives are a sort of nightmare for developers, because the energy efficiency of a house is a cold, uninteresting metric that is not immediately present to the potential buyer. Consider windows, for example. In an unregulated market, the cheapest, most crappy windows are absolutely the optimal choice for a developer. The fact that they are going to be drafty, break within the first few months, and quickly become covered in mold is simply impossible for a buyer to know, before they've lived in the house for a year or so. Green windows, however, have to meet energy efficiency ratings - which means they must actually work. They have to keep cold out and heat in, or vice-versa. They can't be giant condensators. They probably don't look quite so pretty, and much worse, they are far more expensive. So the developer actually loses perceived property value, while paying more!
  - drunkpotato 6y ago
    This happened to a family member, looked great, expensive looking house and high price, but shoddy work, all sorts of basic problems with the house in the first year. I wonder if this couldn't be mitigated somewhat by a clause that makes the developer liable for all problems in the first year. (I know one potential loophole would be that the developer could use a proxy to "buy" from themselves and hold for a year, but it seems like that could be appropriately handled through existing or minimally altered fraud laws.) It's hard to see how we could get from our present situation to something like that, but it might improve craftsmanship, but would also make new houses even more expensive.

23throwaway23 6y ago

To highlight some important elements of their work: A group of researchers, led by a UNSW sustainability scientist, have reviewed existing academic discussions on the link between wealth, economy and associated impacts, reaching a clear conclusion: technology will only get us so far when working towards sustainability—we need far-reaching lifestyle changes and different economic paradigms. In their review, published today in Nature Communications and entitled Scientists' Warning on Affluence, the researchers have summarized the available evidence, identifying possible solution approaches. "Recent scientists' warnings have done a great job at describing the many perils our natural world is facing through crises in climate, biodiversity and food systems, to name but a few," says lead author Professor Tommy Wiedmann from UNSW Engineering. "However, none of these warnings has explicitly considered the role of growth-oriented economies and the pursuit of affluence. In our scientists' warning, we identify the underlying forces of overconsumption and spell out the measures that are needed to tackle the overwhelming 'power' of consumption and the economic growth paradigm—that's the gap we fill. "The key conclusion from our review is that we cannot rely on technology alone to solve existential environmental problems—like climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution—but that we also have to change our affluent lifestyles and reduce overconsumption, in combination with structural change."

23throwaway23 6y ago
In fact, the researchers say the world's affluent citizens are responsible for most environmental impacts and are central to any future prospect of retreating to safer conditions. "Consumption of affluent households worldwide is by far the strongest determinant—and the strongest accelerator—of increased global environmental and social impacts," co-author Lorenz Keysser from ETH Zurich says. "Current discussions on how to address the ecological crises within science, policy making and social movements need to recognize the responsibility of the most affluent for these crises." ... "The structural imperative for growth in competitive market economies leads to decision makers being locked into bolstering economic growth, and inhibiting necessary societal changes," Prof Wiedmann says. "So, we have to get away from our obsession with economic growth—we really need to start managing our economies in a way that protects our climate and natural resources, even if this means less, no or even negative growth. These quotes taken from: https://phys.org/news/2020-06-overconsumption-growth-economy-key-drivers.html https://phys.org/news/2020-06-overconsumption-growth-economy...

novalis78 6y ago

Here is a lifestyle change for you: ‘A step farther out’ by Jerry Pournell. Anti-humanism on nature.com rubs me the wrong way.

asaegyn 6y ago

So there's a big question here (beyond the obvious, existential one) for the VC and startup community. What role do we play in all of this? Can we play a constructive role? What might that look like?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
brabel 6y ago
The current Silicon Valley model of pursuing hyper-growth and aiming at making a few people (founders and investors) very rich is part of the problem, not the solution. However, a more balanced startup culture that focuses on people well-being and environment sustainability as their ultimate goals could be part of the solution if they manage to find a working model within the current capitalist framework. The problem is that such framework is intensively individualistic and, without Government intervention, creates the worst possible outcome from a sustainability point-of-view because it assumes eternal growth and results in the concentration of resources into only a few hands. I would love to see a startup that focuses on making its customer's lives more fulfilling while at the same time less "affluent", which is possible to because after you have all your basic needs covered (food, shelter, medical care), no amount of money can make you happier... but small things, like a stimulating social life, or a sense of pride on what your work produces, definitely can. The founders of course, would need to be living proof that their startup delivers on that promise, so they wouldn't make a penny more than necessary to live a fulfilling life where most fulfillment came from bringing happiness to others. That's where I think this idea breaks down! I am sure there would be founders doing this if they thought they could make a billion $$$ first :D but if they could do that, the whole motivation for the project would've been undermined already.

k33n 6y ago

The radical environmentalists (really, they’re just marxists) finally starting to admit what they want to take from us.

Barrin92 6y ago

I think the article is right. Vaclav Smil has pointed out that today the share of fossil fuels, at about 90% of global energy consumed[1] is actually higher than in 2000, and falling at a snails pace. There is a worrying trend emerging, fuelled by the tech industry of performative environmentalism that seeks to promise absolution like the church did by buying Tesla's and biodegradable cups while the real-world impact is marginal while leaving the fundamental flaws of the system untouched. We won't consume ourselves out of the doghouse. Russ Ackoff in a great talk about systems thinking[2] once pointed out a few salient things 1. Counter to intuition one does not improve a system by merely removing deficiencies. Doing away with what you don't want doesn't get you what you want. 2. Incrementalism doesn't solve fundamentally new problems, rearranging deck chairs on the titanic is pointless, and people confuse efficiency with effectiveness. Doing the wrong thing right is worse than doing the right thing wrong. 3. One must recognise that like an architect, a designer does not design rooms independently of the house. One starts with the house, and only changes parts as to improve the overall functioning of the system, never the parts alone. This is what needs to be applied to modern environmentalism. Woke green consumerism and tech worship is useless. The entire global system needs to be redesigned, instead of trying to fix individual parts. We need to think in holistic terms rather than trying to remove individual problems. [1]https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/03/meet-vaclav-smil-man-who-has-quietly-shaped-how-world-thinks-about-energy https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/03/meet-vaclav-smil-man... [2]https://youtu.be/OqEeIG8aPPk https://youtu.be/OqEeIG8aPPk

CuriousSkeptic 6y ago
Is was just wondering the other day: do we have something like the IPCC currently charged with doing exactly that?
fulafel 6y ago
Buying a Tesla is certainly not marginal - it's lifetime carbon footprint incl manufacturing is still huge, it's wastefully big, and the owners previous car will in 90% of cases just continue life with the next owner, ending up with one more car in the world. The alternative co2 reducing uses of 1 Tesla worth of money would be very significant in the $2 earnings/day part of the world, so the opportunity cost is enormous.

ThePhysicist 6y ago

I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between affluence and environmental impact recently. It seems that in general, the richer you become, the more garbage and pollution you tend to produce. I am far from being rich myself but compared to people from less affluent countries I have a lot of free income, and while I try to reduce my environmental impact I have to say it’s worrying how much trash I have produced and how many resources I have used over the years: Electronics, furniture, clothes, travel, food, .... If I was more affluent this would only become worse I suppose. I think the problem is that a rational person (in our current definition) is incentivized to spend most of the available income/wealth during his/her lifetime, so as peoples income grows they find new ways to spend it: Get a new car every two years, buy a weekend house, go on expensive travels, buy lots of expensive clothes or furniture, always have the newest tech gadgets, etc.. All this incurs more pollution and resource usage. I don’t see how we can break this cycle without fundamentally changing our economic system, as right now almost everything is optimized to continuously increase output and create more consumption.

logicchains 6y ago
>I think the problem is that a rational person (in our current definition) is incentivized to spend most of the available income/wealth during his/her lifetime This is not necessarily a problem; there's no objective way to weigh up the satisfaction of somebody alive now against the satisfaction of some hypothetical person alive in future. And attempting to do so introduces some interesting questions, e.g. if we seek to maximise the satisfaction of future people, as individuals should we try to have as many children as possible? Because more people means more overall satisfaction.
tokamak-teapot 6y ago
Also as humans get richer, they almost never consider themselves ‘rich’. If you’re born into affluence, it’s almost impossible to comprehend this. I’ve watched people living in a rich western democracy, who are rich by the standards of their host country, travel to India and see the grinding poverty of so many people’s lives. Their assessment was not that they themselves are rich, but that those people are poor. It’s also incredibly difficult for those living higher up on Maslow’s hierarchy to see that it’s their entire level of society that is - in aggregate - a force for negative environmental impact. Individuals won’t admit to this, and will instead say it’s fine because they sort their recycling and only have one car and... but the macro scale is ignored because the self-defense mechanism won’t allow it to be fully understood or admitted to. Those who manage to admit and realise this is a problem may try to help - or at least not contribute - by doing their best, but usually this means keeping as clean as they can personally, while still taking advantage of most of the trappings of their bubble. Il not saying they’re bad people or they shouldn’t make an effort, but ten people picking up litter versus ten million dropping it is never going to work out.

buboard 6y ago

This is not a good article and it has a very patronizing/inflammatory title. There is only 1 figure and that one is , if anything , hopeful. It shows that GDP growth has bent the curve of CO2 since the 2010s. They seem to be arguing about what was happening in the 20th century without taking into account current trends? This is supposed to be a review, but it doesn't really review much, they make various statements with references, but they often do not state the facts which they are referring to. There are also grammatical errors An example: > The positional consumption behaviour of the super-affluent thus drives consumption norms across the population, for instance through their excessive air travel, as documented by Gössling73. That Gosling73 study is a 2017 study of 10 celebrities including Meg whitman, emma watson, felix von derleden and Karl lagerfeld (are these people considered influential?) Celebrities and the "affluent" are different things. Plus i believe most air travel in the past 10 years was "influenced" by middle-to-low income influencers on youtube/instagram/etc. Importantly, that paper presents conjectures but no data that people are actually following the flight patterns of celebrities. > Whilst a number of countries in the global North have recently managed to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions while still growing their economies30, it is highly unlikely that such decoupling will occur more widely in the near future, rapidly enough at global scale and for other environmental impacts Why not? Every technology that the west built was quickly adopted by the rest of the world. What kind of inane/ahistorical statement is that ?

ovi256 6y ago
>Why not? Every technology that the west built was quickly adopted by the rest of the world. What kind of inane/ahistorical statement is that ? Those countries pay high costs for their energy because their alternative energy sources are in no way cost competitive yet. They can afford those high costs. Less rich countries will never adopt fancy, expensive technologies if they're not cost effective. India and most of Asia are building coal plants as we speak, because they're cost effective (to them). They've also, at most COP meetings, pushed back any initiative to tax carbon emissions, as they see that (probably justly) only as a brake on their development. Their social stability would fall apart quickly if they can't deliver the economic development. For these reasons, the majority of future carbon emissions are projected to occur in Asia and Africa. There's very little Western countries can do, except some novel form of imposing their will on other countries, which would quickly and justly be denounced as neo-colonialist.

jojo2000 6y ago

Model around consumption should get deeply revised if we want to leave the world in a good state for our children. Refurbish rather than build new buildings Build sturdy hardware with replaceable parts Build from natural materials as much as possible, and invent a new concrete Stop polluting by sprinkling deadly stuff to grow crops and make things Develop recycling aggressively (98%) Stop using oil derivates everywhere Stop using nuclear fission as a power source ... Problem is that it is antipodal with current economical growth models

rplst8 6y ago
You had me until "stop using nuclear fission..."
- jojo2000 6y ago
  If everyone agreed on everything, the world would be less fun ! My main problem with nuclear fission is that we generate a lot of waste that is almost impossible to dispose of and very dangerous. We don't even know, in case of a civilization breakdown, how people would manage the situation if knowledge was lost. [0] edit : ray of hope here [1b] Currently there has been many accidents with nuclear power, and we don't know how to manage those. Fukushima is still releasing lots of radioactivity in the sea. Yet radio activity about this is close to zero. [1] And new ways to tap into fission power (pressurized reactors) are dangerous and hard to build. Yet, I shall agree with you, that there is no definite solution to the energy problem, consuming less would be a good start. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(film) [1] http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/13228942 http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/13228942 [1b] https://futurism.com/the-byte/nobel-prize-lasers-destroy-nuclear-waste https://futurism.com/the-byte/nobel-prize-lasers-destroy-nuc...

logicchains 6y ago

It's sad to see something like this in Nature. Science can tell us what actions will lead to what outcomes, but it can't tell us what outcomes we should aim for. Different people have different preferences, and there's certainly no objective measure of the value of preserving the environment vs people's quality of life. Trying to push a certain set of values like this risks giving science a bad name in the public eye, and making the public less willing to accept actual scientific facts. Because many people lack the ability to distinguish between facts and opinions in scientific publishing, so they just end up distrusting all science.

guerrilla 6y ago
> Science can tell us what actions will lead to what outcomes That's what this paper does. It seems like you may have missed the part that this situation is not sustainable, as well as the prior science that establishes that quality of life depends on the environment, which is why many people care about phenomena like polution and climate change. > Recent scientists’ warnings confirm alarming trends of environmental degradation from human activity, leading to profound changes in essential life-sustaining functions of planet Earth It's going to be hard to argue that the life-sustaining capacity of Earth is not a universal subjective value of all life but the paper isn't arguing the opposite anyway. This paper simply identifies causes contributing to the unsustainablity of the current system and makes some proposals to mitigate or eliminate it. It's analyzing and providing options. Make sure you understand what unsustainability means as far as consequences. Moreover, that's hardly a subjective value judgement. It's simply a measurable property of systems.
- logicchains 6y ago
  >It seems like you may have missed the part that this situation is not sustainable, as well as the prior science that establishes that quality of life depends on the environment, which is why many people care about phenomena like polution and climate change. It seems you missed the fact that many people don't care about sustainability, and are unwilling to accept even a small reduction in quality of life in the name of the environment. Clearly their values differ from the values of the paper's authors regarding what is "necessary societal change". >It's going to be hard to argue that the life-sustaining capacity of Earth is not a universal subjective value of all life but the paper isn't arguing the opposite anyway. If we look at sustainability from the perspective of "preserving human existence as long as possible", then the only long-term solution is expanding to other planets/solar systems. The more limits there are on economic growth, the longer this will take. Similarly, life-extension technology will allow people to extend their lives longer; the slower the economy grows, the longer it will take to develop this. The paper didn't even consider this, or any other downsides of limiting economic growth. >Make sure you understand what unsustainability means as far as consequences. Moreover, that's hardly a subjective value judgement. It's simply a measurable property of systems. The language and tone used in the paper is not in the format "if we want to increase sustainability, this is what we should do", it's in the format "this is what we should do". For example: "economic systems that exploit nature and humans" - that's clearly a value judgement, not science.

lazyjones 6y ago

Sorry, but this is a purely political piece of garbage. It's full of claims unsupported by their data. For example, all their data shows population growth is a central issue but they focus on "affluence" and then they cherry-pick the (already affluent, saturated in consumption) first world to attack and suggest improvements for when the elephant in the room is the third world with its not exactly "affluent" but at least no longer starving population that is beginning to do what they suggest we stop doing. Then the typical radical left / eco-socialist "solutions" appear out of nowhere. It's disappointing that such political pieces are now in mainstream science publications (presumably because it's en vogue to kneel to the radical left...).

mynameishere 6y ago
The same group of people were obsessed with population growth decades ago, when the wrong kind of people were the ones having babies. That problem is solved, and so they have moved on to the next one, which is the pastoralization of the West. It's crazy, but the left has won every single battle it has fought. So, get ready...

tim333 6y ago

>It is clear that prevailing capitalist, growth-driven economic systems have not only increased affluence since World War II, but have led to enormous increases in inequality, financial instability... Globally it's not at all clear there have been increases in inequality. When I was a kid in the 60s '3rd world nations' were impoverished going on starving, now they are mostly prosperous, have 4G, plenty of food etc. China especially was getting by on maybe $300/yr GDP and now has western style prosperity. The US may be more unequal but there is 90%+ of the world that is not the US. It may seem nitpicking but it's basically an essay on economics and it makes me disregard the rest a bit when they get basic facts wrong. Also in terms of stability things have been fairly stable given the pandemic, fingers crossed. Re affluence and the environment probably what we need is pricing for externalities in things like fossil fuels - people can be rich in non damaging ways - make artworks and sell them to each other for $1m+, build eco buildings, gardens etc - it doesn't have to be SUVs.

0d9eooo 6y ago
It's important to keep that in mind re: improvements in inequality, but at the same time, for example, there is a refugee crisis that's been steadily increasing over time worldwide in recent times. GDP per capita is not the only metric of inequality, nor is China the only exception to the US. I basically agree with everything you're saying, I just think something is going on that's not nearly captured by a lot of traditional metrics.
ttonkytonk 6y ago
From the Wikipedia article on Economic inequality: "In 1820, the ratio between the income of the top and bottom 20 percent of the world's population was three to one. By 1991, it was eighty-six to one." The article does say that global inequality may have decreased in the last few decades. However, considering that the richest 85 people have a combined wealth equal to the bottom half of the world's population (according to the same article), the claim that the capitalist, growth-driven economies have led to enormous inequalities is a basic fact.

andrewtbham 6y ago

"Any transition towards sustainability can only be effective if far-reaching lifestyle changes complement technological advancements." How can they possibly know this for sure? My intuition is that sustainable energy, over the long term, will lead to more consumption and improved lifestyles.

dade_ 6y ago

Other than the minor detail that only the affluent think about these problems, have the resources to solve them, and the spare time to do anything about them.

0d9eooo 6y ago
I've increasingly become convinced the environmental problem is really a socioeconomic problem. This is in some ways the point of the paper, but in other ways the paper misses the point completely, by focusing on affluent lifestyles rather than how to meet human needs in a sustainable way.

bJGVygG7MQVF8c 6y ago

No mention of reducing population growth. There never seem to be anymore. The trajectory we're on is either toward ecological catastrophe or, if we manage to avoid that, a bimodal distribution of quality of life between an affluent few and the immiserated (if distracted) masses.

Apocryphon 6y ago
We're set to hit below replacement birthrates for most of the world, and those parts of the world, being the most developed, are the places that consume the most fossil fuels, among other resources.

lcall 6y ago

I don't think we are competent to solve this when we can't generally trust each other to keep our word, and especially when we have rejected the specific advice of the planet's Creator. I realize many will think that is silly, but I have put reasons I think this, and why I believe this, in depth, at my simple site (no JS etc): http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854581820.html http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854581820.html -- for what it's worth. And why we can really be OK. Edit: I think expecting honesty, penalizing the lack of it, (and probably the Golden Rule) are prerequisites to solving many things. Etc.