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Society decided we wanted good things and we took action to get those things. I am against poverty and not having things such as electricity and clean tap wate

Society decided we wanted good things and we took action to get those things. I am against poverty and not having things such as electricity and clean tap water, abundant food, education, hospital care, sewage treatment and proper waste disposal. I like these things, they are good. You would be surprised at how sustainable things are by sheer hard work and will. In other words, we get what we cause. The alternative to these things is worse. To be sustainable (no or renewable electricity, sparse population, no cars, no factories, no meat, land used for growing food) you need to remove the things society wants by sheer will. And I don't think you'll sell anybody on that. In other words, telling people that they need to give up good things is not enough.

mrtesthah 4y ago
That’s a false dichotomy; we can have all these things without burning down rainforests at a furious pace and filling the oceans with plastic, etc. These things are done out of laziness and carelessness.
- samsquire 4y ago
  I don't think it's false but it might be a dichotomy. The good things we enjoy are destructive and have externalities. To offer a solution, if the people who do bad things such as not dispose waste properly or want to cut down rainforests for profit, we need to solve the incentives behind those decisions. Such as universal basic income. Or lowering crime. Unfortunately poverty is the baseline. In other words you need to expend resources to get resources. I said in my comment things are sustainable by sheer will. To implement sustainability we need to invest profound amounts of resources and do extreme amounts of work by sheer will to solve the problem. We also need the right people working on these problems. The smartest people from my simple perspective are working on the wrong problems. What we have is an improper allocation of limited resources.
ljw1001 4y ago
No solution is worse than a flawed solution. There are many ways to make progress that aren’t being tried, like using tax code to dissuade Americans from buying SUVs, but those are the only American made cars people buy so there is no action.

mrtesthah 4y ago

That’s a false dichotomy; we can have all these things without burning down rainforests at a furious pace and filling the oceans with plastic, etc. These things are done out of laziness and carelessness.

samsquire 4y ago
I don't think it's false but it might be a dichotomy. The good things we enjoy are destructive and have externalities. To offer a solution, if the people who do bad things such as not dispose waste properly or want to cut down rainforests for profit, we need to solve the incentives behind those decisions. Such as universal basic income. Or lowering crime. Unfortunately poverty is the baseline. In other words you need to expend resources to get resources. I said in my comment things are sustainable by sheer will. To implement sustainability we need to invest profound amounts of resources and do extreme amounts of work by sheer will to solve the problem. We also need the right people working on these problems. The smartest people from my simple perspective are working on the wrong problems. What we have is an improper allocation of limited resources.

ljw1001 4y ago

No solution is worse than a flawed solution. There are many ways to make progress that aren’t being tried, like using tax code to dissuade Americans from buying SUVs, but those are the only American made cars people buy so there is no action.