8 ms·

We need to discuss effective solutions like consuming less (e.g. stopping fast fashion habits, stopping the cars-becoming-bigger trends, not moving to 5G, etc).

• martimarkov 5y ago
  Why is 5G bad, I honestly don’t know?
  • etrautmann 5y ago
    In this context, perhaps higher power consumption (owen side) relative to 4G?
    • soco 5y ago
      Power consumption of 5G is about 20x lower than 3G and getting lower as we speak (there are many 5G technologies only gradually getting adopted). So probably he meant the planned obsolescence mentioned already above.
      • lwouis 5y ago
        Any time we increase efficiency, we also increase consumption. 5G increases efficiency, it's true. Now people consume more. It's enables new usages which people will jump on. This happens in History every time we improve efficiency. Cars now consume a fraction of what early cars did, yet we use these efficiency gains to stuff them with gadgets, and make them bigger, and overall they still consume more than they used now in absolute terms. In other words the engine inside your modern car is more fuel efficient than the first Ford, but we now make SUV that consume way more to produce and operate, can't be repaired/services easily, and people own multiple of them per household. This "rebound effect" can be seen everywhere
  • whoisthemachine 5y ago
    Usually requires a new phone, I think the poster meant planned obsolescence.
    • input_sh 5y ago
      It's not like 4G will shut down any time soon nor that we're at a stage where we have any use case for 5G speeds on a phone. I don't see how 5G fits into a planned obsolescence argument.
      • _nalply 5y ago
        Just wait a few years!
        • input_sh 5y ago
          In a few years the majority of us will swap our phones anyway, 5G or no 5G. Don't get me wrong, if the comment above said planned obsolescence instead of 5G, I'd be fully aboard. But 5G on its own makes no difference on climate change that I'm aware of.
  • BurningFrog 5y ago
    Whatever flaws it has are completely unrelated to climate. OP might just be venting.
  • lwouis 5y ago
    5G is a new park of machines for the network operators. It's also a new park of machines for the consumers. It's huge because we are so numerous. Imagine you renew a boat fleet. Imagine the impact on the nearby forest. Going from no boats to having a fleet may be worth the damage. Going from a very good fleet to a slightly more advanced fleet may not be worth it. Network infra and smartphones are the same. They require us to mine all their components and use energy to transform them. 4G seems to provide enough value to me. I don't like the tradeoff we get of "i can download 4K in the elevator now" (seems unnecessary to me) vs "we unleashed megatones of CO2, mined out large cobalt mines that will never form again in milleniaz to come, etc (seems critical to me)
• darawk 5y ago
  Consuming less is not a serious solution and never has been.
  • OccamsMirror 5y ago
    Not entirely true. Changing consumer habits is possible, but not without it being replaced by something that's more sustainable AND more convenient.
    • darawk 5y ago
      That's the point. It's about consuming different things, not consuming less. And consuming different things that are at least as good, or better than the things we're consuming now. Nobody has ever, or will ever, make any serious progress by shaming people into not doing the things they want to do.
  • TigeriusKirk 5y ago
    You're correct. Any plan that calls for less consumption is a non-starter. At this point it's incredibly harmful to hold on to an approach that's going nowhere and never will. We no longer have the luxury to indulge fantasies.
    • holomorphically 5y ago
      Consumption habits will need to change, people will need to start eating less meat. Factory farming of cattle and other animals is a large contributor of global emissions. So less consumption is definitely part of the answer.
    • jazzyjackson 5y ago
      exponential growth is a fantasy until fusion power and asteroid mining become real
      • mijamo 5y ago
        I never understood this line of thought. Economic growth is not a growth of raw material consumption. There has been some correlation but you could imagine a forever growing GDP with shrinking raw material usage without any major problem as long as there is technological or organisational progress.
• belorn 5y ago
  I agree that we need to use effective solutions, but the first and foremost of those solutions is a much more simpler one than reducing consumption. Every nation (with rare exceptions) is currently burning fossil fuel for the single purpose of reducing costs. Fossil fuels are a cost saving tactic, saving money while producing pollution. An expensive fossil free energy grid would cause disruptions to consumption but at the same time it would also allow things to mostly be business-as-usual. It just shifts the priority to care about the energy efficiency when cheap fossil fuels aren't there to be burned. In contrast, trying to reduce consumption while keeping fossil fuels in the energy grid is unlikely to work. Consumers who care might reduce their own consumption a bit, but industries and every else will continue to draw more and more power from fossil fuel power plants and pollution will continue to rise. Public opinion will just grow more divided between those that self-sacrifice and those that don't.
• amelius 5y ago
  > We need to discuss effective solutions like consuming less (e.g. stopping fast fashion habits, stopping the cars-becoming-bigger trends, not moving to 5G, etc). Yes, let's ban various forms of advertising, for starters. It's the main driver of our over-consumption.
  • holomorphically 5y ago
    It would be nice to restrict advertising but no politician would do that. All internet infrastructure is now based on ads and it's unlikely that will change any time soon.
• vimy 5y ago
  Economic growth is possible without higher emissions. https://twitter.com/MaxCRoser/status/1430509654698831878 https://twitter.com/MaxCRoser/status/1430509654698831878
  • amelius 5y ago
    Because wealth inequality. Rich people getting richer, putting their money in the bank. GDP grows, but median citizen is losing wealth.
    • eru 5y ago
      Do you know that banks, by and large, don't just stuff your money in a piggy bank? (Interest on excess reserves is making the discussion a bit more complicated, alas.)
• project2501a 5y ago
  You are effectively saying we should get over capitalism. I agree, but I gotta ask why are you sugar coating it?
• dr_dshiv 5y ago
  Sounds like your perspective is that human consumption is fundamentally the problem. Doesn’t this perspective lead to a pretty bleak future?
  • walleeee 5y ago
    whether or not it's consumption in particular it's undeniably human activity that's the problem business as usual leads to a pretty bleak future and if we refuse to confront this how will we even begin to adapt to a planet rapidly growing more difficult to inhabit
  • 71a54xd 5y ago
    By his logic the simpler option is just to make living more difficult and to ultimately find ways to kill dumb consumers faster? We could just start heavily incentivizing vaping, smoking and alcohol consumption? Pushing contraceptives is also a big one, you might even start chipping at the goals of the elites if you slowed population growth AND reduced consumerism...
  • lwouis 5y ago
    My proposition is that we have to deal with our scale if we don't want to be the bacterias that took over the petri dish and died because they made their environment toxic for themselves. We have never had to care so far because we were not numerous. Now human activity is similar to geological forces like rain/volcanoes/etc and i think we should plan how we can exist on a stable cycle. Mindless growth leads to us breaking our environment through our scale. Scale is exponential so after thousands of years we have a small window of 100 years where we grew so high in impact that we may break it all. It's a first for us, and i hope we can see further than the mold in the petri dish and make a concerted plan on how to live in a stable cycle without growing. I'm advocating for planning a sustainable future. It's the first time in History we have to deal with this. People assume the future is like the past, and other incorrect things. They also live in cities, removed from physical realities. They only understand the collapse of species through some stats in a newspaper they forget the next day, and the energy/resources supply chains are unknown to them until there is a blackout and they lose internet for a few hours. The future seems bleak in many ways for physical reasons. I don't think pretending we are not reaching planetary limits will help. I think it will make the fall harder. I would rather we concert and plan together what level of quality of life we want, and how we can stabilize our population, so we can cycle generations of human in a sustainable way.
• abeppu 5y ago
  I think we need to decrease our footprints radically, but I think the "consume less" framing scares people (though honestly, we should be scared ...) But in the cases you name, and in many others, the messed up part is that we're creating so much stuff/waste that _isn't_ consumable, and so we needlessly use new resources. Fast fashion is destructive because both the retailers and the end consumers end up throwing out so much stuff that piles up in landfills and isn't recyclable. If yesterday's garment was cheap (in a resource sense) to recycle into fiber to make a new garment, it would be a lot less harmful. The cars-becoming-bigger pattern, in part an arms race between car manufacturers to improve safety ratings (in a collision, passengers in the heavier car experience smaller forces; who cares about pedestrians), with the net effect that after several years everyone has more massive cars but their safety edge has been totally eroded away. We no longer get a benefit, but we're all stuck pushing around extra metal for every mile driven. The move to 5G didn't _have_ to be harmful, but we produce waste streams in all the devices that are now discarded which are _not_ consumed. Most of the components in the phones we toss every 2 years are still fine, but we make it so hard to put them all to good use. The _unconsumed_ garments that go to a landfill, the _unconsumed_ discarded phones, touch screens, batteries, the ... non-benefit of moving around excess car (including those 4 empty seats when a person drives alone) are just as much the problem.
• eru 5y ago
  > (e.g. stopping fast fashion habits, stopping the cars-becoming-bigger trends, not moving to 5G, etc). Do you have any idea how much of a problem so called fast fashion habits actually are? Same for the others? Scale matters.
  • lwouis 5y ago
    We moved from having a few new clothes a year to having new clothes as often as we want. We have also exponentially grown our population. An Earth with let's say 2 billion people at 2 set of clothes a year has considerably less environment impact that an Earth with 8 billion people averaging let's say 10 set of clothes a year. The scale of deforestation to produce coton, and the boom of the plastic fiber industry are sizable phenomenons with huge visible consequences. Whole industries exist now in Bangladesh and Vietnam for instance that didn't exist 20 years ago. Factories, supply chains, large yearly resources consumption, etc. These changes are visible anywhere from the shops of wealthy nation cities, to Google Earth timeline where you see entire forests disappear every year now (rate is exponentially accelerating)
    • eru 5y ago
      You use a lot of adjectives, but not a lot of numbers. How much of a problem is this actually? Eg what proportion of our overall emissions (or environment impact etc) are from the manufacture and supply of clothing? And how much extra is from 'fast fashion' vs a return to old fashioned clothing habits? I just did a very quick search, and found eg https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector Their numbers suggest that cotton and clothing barely show up.