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Then what do you do with the salt when you have exponentially desalinated amounts of water? Managing it is already a problem with our limited amounts of desalin

Then what do you do with the salt when you have exponentially desalinated amounts of water? Managing it is already a problem with our limited amounts of desalination. Growth has consequences. People who optimize for economic gain are paid in part to conceal negative consequences to keep their short term gains from being inhibited. If you can attain exponential growth without consequence, you’ve found a way to simply create matter or violate some law of physics, and honestly, that’s a bigger scientific achievement than economic.

endymi0n 5y ago
It's not that there won't be consequences. I'm just firmly believing in a possibility of managing those and be better off afterwards. Supposing free energy and a common goal of not letting salinity increase, why not invest a bit more energy of extracting 100% of the water and just piling it up on a mountain? Salt is benign. We've pulled it from the ground below. We can put it back. Sea level's currently rising anyway, so we're synergetic. We'll find a way if there is growth to sustaing it. On the contrary, degrowth will just lead to shrinkage and the zero-sum mindset behind will soon create fights for all the resources perceived as limited, distracting from the climate crisis. IMHO that's the only sure way to lose the fight against climate change.
- trainsplanes 5y ago
  Free energy isn’t a thing. There’s a cost to building it. Mining absolutely wrecks environments. And just dumping billions of tons of salt on a mountainside is no different from what humanity has been doing for centuries now. Destroying an environment that currently has no economic benefits and leaving the next generation to deal with the disaster that it becomes. We’ve done it with deforestation, fossil fuels, excessive and mismanaged farming (see: dust bowl), growth hormones and excessive antibiotics in livestock, excessive ground water usage, excessive fertilizers and their runoff, etc. All those were great in small amounts, then people realized they could pretend there were no consequences to milk even more gains now. Now we have rising sea levels and countless other environmental problems, all because people previously avoided accepting consequences later on.

endymi0n 5y ago

It's not that there won't be consequences. I'm just firmly believing in a possibility of managing those and be better off afterwards. Supposing free energy and a common goal of not letting salinity increase, why not invest a bit more energy of extracting 100% of the water and just piling it up on a mountain? Salt is benign. We've pulled it from the ground below. We can put it back. Sea level's currently rising anyway, so we're synergetic. We'll find a way if there is growth to sustaing it. On the contrary, degrowth will just lead to shrinkage and the zero-sum mindset behind will soon create fights for all the resources perceived as limited, distracting from the climate crisis. IMHO that's the only sure way to lose the fight against climate change.

trainsplanes 5y ago
Free energy isn’t a thing. There’s a cost to building it. Mining absolutely wrecks environments. And just dumping billions of tons of salt on a mountainside is no different from what humanity has been doing for centuries now. Destroying an environment that currently has no economic benefits and leaving the next generation to deal with the disaster that it becomes. We’ve done it with deforestation, fossil fuels, excessive and mismanaged farming (see: dust bowl), growth hormones and excessive antibiotics in livestock, excessive ground water usage, excessive fertilizers and their runoff, etc. All those were great in small amounts, then people realized they could pretend there were no consequences to milk even more gains now. Now we have rising sea levels and countless other environmental problems, all because people previously avoided accepting consequences later on.