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This is very noble. But many people grew up in (relative) poverty - like me. I was studying hard, working hard, making compromise in order to move up. Now I am

• xbmcuser 5y ago
  This is why I feel the world is fucked and global warming can't be stopped. I am not blaming you or accusing you just saying the current resource use is when 80% of the worlds population is not consuming much. The world is already over populated as we simply don't have the resources to give a decent life to current worlds population let alone a rising population.
  • iso1631 5y ago
    I've got mine. It's a common sentiment.
  • 88840-8855 5y ago
    Thanks for commenting. HN loves to downvote this opinion: the world IS overpopulated. Imagine there were 8 billion tigers or bears living on this planet - how sustainable would this be? And bears and tigers dont fly, dont drive cars and dont wear clothes. I remember learning in school that there were 6 billion people in the world. Recently I realised that we are over 8 billion already. And all of us want to have a good life and those who grew up poor want to consume. 100% understanable.
    • Chris2048 5y ago
      Bears and tigers are apex predators that have a high calorie intake. The world can be as populated as society can sustainably support - problem is the path to "development" implies a massive ramp up in energy consumption. I suspect the main barriers are political. There is a lot of suffering in the world that has little to do with lack of resources, yet persists for political reasons.
    • ben_w 5y ago
      Tigers and bears don’t farm, either. Tech makes a big difference: If humans didn’t farm our population would be ~100 million; If we tile the world in greenhouses, and if we’re careful with our resources, we could have ~10 trillion.
      • pmlnr 5y ago
        > we could have ~10 trillion. Where? Physically, where? Compressed into tiny apartments all over the planet, like sardine cans?
        • ddnb 5y ago
          Fun fact: the whole human population can fit in the state of Texas if it had the same density as NYC. That answers the where. Compressed into tiny apartments? Yes, but maybe we should double everybody apartments and house them in 2 times Texas?
        • ben_w 5y ago
          That’s about the population density of Paris or Athens. I’d only be happy with that population level if we had a lot of Arcology-style mega-buildings to give each of us enough space and parkland, but that’s rather my point: tech enables the otherwise impossible.
      • kwere 5y ago
        no, 20/30 billions with decent lifestyle and maybe 50 billions in a distopia
• imtringued 5y ago
  There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. Just make sure everything you do is sustainable and nothing you do prevents future generations from doing it. This means avoiding activities that will generate CO2 and avoiding CO2 must become voluntary and automatic. There is no way you can get the entire population to collectively reduce CO2 emissions if they feel like they will lose out. Most people are "lazy" (in the sense that they cannot care about millions of different problems) which means high moral standards for CO2 emission reductions will turn them off.
• Chris2048 5y ago
  > There are billions like me on this planet who did not grow up in a nice middle class family in a 1st world I doubt that they all grew up in an equivalent level of poverty. When climate change takes major effect, it won't be western countries that first bear the brunt of it - it will be the poorest.
• tln750 5y ago
  Indeed. The quality of life that developed countries in the west currently enjoy is still the yardstick for poorer regions, as they improve their infrastructure and public amenities. To judge other people as materialistic while living in the lap of abundance and riches is hypocritical. Countries like China and India are still in the industrialization phase as they pull millions out of poverty. India is far behind though, as the quality of life for an average person on the ground is still depressingly terrible. Sometimes I stumble upon random channels like this: https://www.youtube.com/c/WalkEast/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/WalkEast/videos - and the QoL in China is in the stratosphere compared with India.
  • 88840-8855 5y ago
    I lived and worked in China and have visited a very rich friend in India for a few weeks prior the pandemic. I always thought you can compare China and India. After that trip I must say: My assumption was just so wrong. China is cleaner, way more modern, more reliable and way more industrialised than India. I made the mistake to go out in Old Delhi after 9 PM and I was fearing for my life. People just lie down on the road and slept away, dogs followed me, people followed me. People were making open fires on the road, others were defacating. The air was terribly poluted, it is not recommended to use tap water for brushing teeth. And yet, I liked the people there very much. It was great to be able to communicate in English, to speak to the normal taxi and uber drivers and to learn about their life. Again, the biggest takeaway for me was: China and India are separated by 30-40 years of Chinese high-speed development, I would assume.
    • rocknor 5y ago
      20 years is more like it. Both countries were at a similar place until the late 90s / early 2000s. https://qz.com/india/404758/once-near-equals-china-and-india-have-radically-diverged-in-the-past-two-decades/ https://qz.com/india/404758/once-near-equals-china-and-india...
• pmlnr 5y ago
  > Now it is my time to consume: drive a nice car, buy things I always wanted, travel a lot. Not having it in the past is not an excuse to waste in the present. I understand your point though, but let's see examples. For how long you're intending to keep that nice car? Modern cars easily last well over a decade, so if you do get a nice car, and keep it for long, that is a good route to take. Or another one: instead of buying plastic garden furniture and replacing it every X year because you're bored with it, buy locally made, wooden ones. Higher initial investment indeed, but those last for decades with minimal maintenance of re-painting every few years. The current idea of consumption is near equivalent to wasting, but it shouldn't have to be like that. When purchasing, plan ahead, and take arcane factors into the process: what is it packaged in? how far it was shipped from? for how long I'm intending to use it? And so on. Try not to waste, that's all. So much of the "piled up cargo" is cheap, bad quality, throwaways stuff, that nobody really needs or should need when better options are available. EDIT: fyi, I'm from eastern europe, so I had plenty of time in my childhood to learn how to be patient to have something. When you to save money in small bits for a "grand" purchase, like a bicycle, a guitar, a PC, etc, one leanrs how not to spend it on things they don't actually need.
• blueblisters 5y ago
  Why is this downvoted? This is exactly how a lot of people in the developing world feel - and also why people insist that comparing per capita measures for emissions make more sense than comparing total emissions between countries. It's unrealistic and hypocritical to suggest that everyone should pitch in equally to reduce consumption while the developed world probably consumes 10x of the developing world.
• neither_color 5y ago
  You are not wrong. Rich countries are telling poor countries to not do what they did to get rich. "Do as we say, not as we did while we keep reaping the benefits for generations." Global minimum taxes and global carbon credit schemes are a rug-pull on developing economies. Can't have new tax havens that compete with Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Monaco and Delaware. Can't have newly rich Asian countries do their own outsourcing now. Can't have Africans using their own cheap abundant natural resources for themselves.
• tedk-42 5y ago
  Upvoted for speaking the truth. As much as I care for the environment, I still drive around in my car to sightsee with my partner (burning fuel for no reason). We order take away and it gets put into plastic containers which go into the trash. We do our best not to pollute, be wasteful and recycle what we can, but modern life will always have waste and excess. It's like the company that wanted to build a modular phone that all tech people got behind, yet now we're buying more and more highly embedded computing devices which are harder to reuse/replace/recycle. We need more leaders, particularly tech/science background people in governing roles with power to change our course.
  • lm28469 5y ago
    > We need more leaders, particularly tech/science background people in governing roles with power to change our course. It's fancier/easier to sell fast electric cars and promise people we'll go to Mars than proposing to fix our problems here and now apparently
• lm28469 5y ago
  > Now it is my time to consume What a sad state of affairs. New generations completely internalised the fact that living = consuming goods and traveling (or more accurately consuming travel destinations). > The new generation that grew up in a very stable, rich world and had everything suddenly realises that they do not need consumption and hence talks noble things. This should be a warning rather than a motivation. We fucked up and realised consumerism is hell, now you're thinking "I want to be part of it too". I get the sentiment but I don't get the logic. I grew up in relatively modest family and we couldn't afford much besides our basic needs, now that I earn three times what I need I still live frugally. I'm focusing on working less and enjoying life rather than earning more money to buy more BS, all it does is create artificial needs that are, by design, _never_ fulfilled I was reading "A brave new world" again recently and the "conditioning" part of the education made me think of the modern view on the economy, from our earliest age we're bombarded by ads and talks about how we must live for the economy, work for the economy, consume for the economy, production must go up, new products must be created continuously, &c. It's like we built a monster and it took control of us. Don't fool yourself, "you" don't want to consume, we've all been conditioned to think consuming is our main goal. The trick was really well played, once consuming is your main goal you don't care about much besides a salary allowing you to consume more and keeps the wheel spinning. I think a lot of people will have very hard realisations once they get old enough to start thinking about death and reflecting on the best years of their lives, all this time, energy, money spent on long gone gadgets of instant gratifications which faded away decades ago. A few quotes from a book written in 67 by Guy Debord, during the infancy of mass marketing and mass consumption, he must have had a good crystal ball back then: > The proliferation of faddish gadgets reflects the fact that as the mass of commodities becomes increasingly absurd, absurdity itself becomes a commodity. > Reified people proudly display the proofs of their intimacy with the commodity. Like the old religious fetishism, with its convulsionary raptures and miraculous cures, the fetishism of commodities generates its own moments of fervent arousal. All this is useful for only one purpose: producing habitual submission. > To this end the reserve army of the unemployed is enlisted into the tertiary or "service" sector, reinforcing the troops responsible for distributing and glorifying the latest commodities at a time when increasingly extensive campaigns are necessary to convince people to buy increas­ ingly unnecessary commodities. > The economy's triumph as an independent power at the same time spells its own doom, because the forces it has unleashed have eliminated the economic necessity that was the unchanging basis of earlier societies. Replacing that necessity with a necessity for boundless economic development can only mean replacing the satisfaction of primary human needs (now scarcely met) with an incessant fabrication of pseudo-needs, all of which ultimately come down to the single pseudo-need of maintaining the reign of the autonomous economy. > the more he contemplates, the less he lives; the more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The spectacle's estrangement from the acting sub­ject is expressed by the fact that the individual's gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him. The spectator does not feel at home anywhere, because the spectacle is everywhere.
• kwere 5y ago
  pay the adjusted price to consume in modern time: ecological, ethical,reusable,etc... even if it makes things more expensive. also keep in mind that the US lifestile is the result of singularities, heavy subsudies and a big empire structure