19 ms·

Modernity is incompatible with planetary limits: a PLAN for the future

151 points by e12e 4y ago

hoffcoder 4y ago
Population stabilisation: Most of the societies even in the developing world are now seeing stagnation in replacement levels of population growth. It will be challenging in the future to ensure economic growth rates of present times for that reason alone. When population stagnates, labour becomes expensive, consumption decreases and growth flattens. Even the last remaining regions of Africa are now seeing rapid urbanisation, and consequently will see this trend in the next 20 years. In a way, evolution itself is forcing humanity to cut down on its wasteful ways. The authors of this article should have touched upon the factor of population deflation in their article to make a more balanced case.
spullara 4y ago
It is only compatible because we are approaching peak population mid to late century and then we will slowly contract over time until extinction through lack of births... if trends continue.
- cjsaltlake 4y ago
  If trends continue, there will be 10 billion Amish in 100 years.
  - spullara 4y ago
    It is not entirely without merit to say that religious folks that encourage large families like the Amish, Catholics and Mormons will dominate in the distant future. Hell, I have 45 first cousins (on one side) and they on average have 3+ kids so it might just be my extended family :)
    - marshray 4y ago
      That experiment has been running for 50 generations already, by now it should have reached steady-state. Perhaps that's part of the reason that 84% of the world's population identifies with a religion.
    - rapind 4y ago
      I can't help but wonder if large families also beget religion just as religion begets large families. Now I personally think every religion I've encountered is ridiculous fiction (no offence, just my opinion), but I will admit that there can be some pretty significant advantages in a community. Raising a ton of kids is probably just easier in a close community of similar minded families (a.k.a. the local church/temple/mosque). It's almost like it's intentionally engineered to be this way.
      - thrown_22 4y ago
        Religion is subject to natural selection just like anything else. Religions which produce more offspring that stay in the religion will always win out over the ones that don't.
        bawolff 4y ago
        Until it becomes outweighed by splitting resources amongst too many children. Everything has pros and cons.
        thrown_22 4y ago
        So long as the children survive to give birth to more children it doesn't matter how poor they are. Evolution doesn't care for the comfort of anyone.
        bawolff 4y ago
        > So long as the children survive to give birth to more children Big if. In a true famine, the poor usually die first. > Evolution doesn't care for the comfort of anyone. Evolution cares about sexual desireability and fitness. Rich people usually have more. In nature we see these two strategies as well. Some species try and have as many babies as possible, where others have fewer but concentrate resources to make sure the few are more likely to survive. Neither strategy is optimal in all situations.
- Bakary 4y ago
  We aren't heading to extinction just on account of birthrates, it's the transition phase with a large number of elderly dependents and a small number of workers that is going to be the real problem.
  - spullara 4y ago
    Yeah, that will be a problem for sure. We will get a preview of it in Asia.
    - throwawaylinux 4y ago
      Despite all the fearmongering and wailing and gnashing of teeth, Japan is doing okay with a shrinking population.
      - spullara 4y ago
        They have a long fall ahead of them. https://www.ipss.go.jp/site-ad/index_english/esuikei/econ2.html#:~:text=Based%20on%20the%20results%20of,and%20Figure%201%2D1 https://www.ipss.go.jp/site-ad/index_english/esuikei/econ2.h...). Going from 128m in 2010 to 87m in 2060.
        throwawaylinux 4y ago
        And despite the wailing and gnashing of teeth, they'll probably continue do fine, as they have since their population leveled out 30 years ago. The doomsday predictions haven't just started now, and they weren't only about events in 2060. They started decades ago about population growth slowing, population leveling, population dropping. They've been pretty consistently wrong.
        thrown_22 4y ago
        >They've been pretty consistently wrong. They haven't been wrong, they turned out to be right for everyone. People who didn't live through the boom of the 1950s can't imagine what it's like to live in a world where things improve for everyone every year. Japan didn't start growing like it did before 1980 again, everyone else stopped too. China has been basically the only driver of world economic growth for the last 40 years. Which is kind of astonishing considering they are communists.
- adriand 4y ago
  Although I find the prospect disturbing, I think at some point (assuming we manage this dangerous transition) we will produce children in a technological way that is decoupled from human mothers. I could also see a social movement developing that campaigned for this on the grounds of equity for women. It could be presented as both essential for the species and empowering for all genders…and that might be true.
  - spullara 4y ago
    Not an entirely unbelievable end game. Will it be done by families or the government?
    - adriand 4y ago
      Good question. Probably both, depending on the country you live in.
ouid 4y ago
>infinite exponential growth which is impossible on a finite planet. its impossible in any space with non negative curvature. the kind of growth that is unsustainable in a finite region is any growth at all.
- alexnewman 4y ago
  constant growth != infinite growth constant growth just means converging growth if the population is shrinking all we need to do is increase gdp per capita.
  - ihaveajob 4y ago
    Zeno has entered the chat. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes#Achilles_and_the_tortoise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes#Achilles_an...
  - mr_toad 4y ago
    > constant growth != infinite growth constant growth just means converging growth if the population is shrinking all we need to do is increase gdp per capita. In theory. In practice GDP growth is strongly correlated with things like energy use and waste/pollution generation. There will come a point when either that correlation has to be broken or growth has to halt.
    - PeterisP 4y ago
      While GDP growth has historically been strongly correlated with energy use and pollution (including CO2/greenhouse gas emissions), due to the switch to service and digital economy, in rich countries GDP growth has become decoupled from energy use for a few decades already, already before year 2000. The correlation is already broken, and it seems quite plausible to continue GDP growth even with a decrease in energy use and waste/pollution generation.
      - Qem 4y ago
        > due to the switch to service and digital economy, in rich countries GDP growth has become decoupled from energy use for a few decades already. They just pushed pollution elsewhere, by outsourcing manufacturing.
StanislavPetrov 4y ago
>This age of modernity is characterized by consistent growth in energy use, economic activity, and resource consumption, and a generally increasing standard of living—albeit inequitably distributed. This paper states this as though it is desirable and inevitable. There's no reason human society needs to keep expanding like a cancer or a virus. Sustainability is both possible and desirable. This isn't to suggest we shouldn't explore and/or colonize other worlds, but it is to suggest that constant growth is not intrinsically beneficial. Many of the most serious problems we face as a society are a direct result of overpopulation and "growth".
- shmageggy 4y ago
  > This paper states this as though it is desirable and inevitable. No it doesn't? Two sentences later: > But modernity has been enabled by the rapid and accelerating expenditure of our one-time inheritance of fossil fuels, and by drawing down the resources and ecosystems of our finite Earth—none of which can be sustained as we transition from a resource-rich frontier to a human-dominated planet.
  - jxramos 4y ago
    I still don't fathom this singular deposit of fossil fuels in the earth, are they truly some artifact of a huge die off of living creatures from centuries ago or is there some steady generation through time that replenishes and generates the crude oil beneath our feet? I'd like to learn more about where the fossil in fossil fuels comes from and just what sort of biomass quantity we're talking about and when on earth that quantity of biomass was originally generated and walked the earth.
    - jxramos 4y ago
      I got curious to see what an oil well cross section may look like to see a pool of oil, there's some fascinating stuff on Youtube in this domain https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzDrheWDhGw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzDrheWDhGw
    - fallingknife 4y ago
mberning 4y ago
I got to the plan section and was mighty disappointed. This is simply a treatise on how bad humans and civilization are in the eyes of the new age Gaia religion. All problems and very few “pro human” solutions.
- Animats 4y ago
  That's a problem with this article, and too many like it. OK, we're going to run out of various natural resources over the next 100-200 years, let alone the next 1000-2000. We will have a mostly sustainable society, like it or not. But it need not be a low-tech one. Energy probably won't be a problem. We have so many low-cost renewable sources now that the fossil fuel industry has trouble getting capital. The energy situation may look bad for another 10-20 years, but not for much longer than that. What looks like a problem? The US Geological Survey has studies for all the major useful minerals.[1][2] Some minerals are recycled easily because they're used in their elemental form. Copper and aluminum are good examples. Others get used up by being combined with other minerals in a way that's hard to undo. Manganese and vanadium are good examples, because they go into steelmaking. It's hard to un-make steel, although you can recycle it as steel. Something to expect is metal scrap sorting that does a quick spectrographic analysis on each item and routes it to the appropriate bin for re-melting. There's probably a startup opportunity there. Expect lithium battery recycling to be a major industry. Lithium batteries are a far higher grade source of lithium than ores or brines. Biologic systems are more recyclable. Biology is mostly C, H, O, and N, assembled in different ways. This doesn't necessarily mean "natural". We can expect to see a bigger role for semi-biological processes such as fermentation, synthetic enzymes, and such. The Impossible Burger uses a synthetic enzyme to produce the taste of blood people want in a burger. This sort of thing is probably enough to get through the next 100-200 years. The next 1000-2000 years will be tougher. But more technology will be available. [1] https://www.usgs.gov/programs/mineral-resources-program https://www.usgs.gov/programs/mineral-resources-program [2] https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2022/mcs2022.pdf https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2022/mcs2022.pdf
  - dane-pgp 4y ago
    > the taste of blood people want in a burger. To be clear, (most) burgers do not have noticeable blood in. The red juice that comes out of them that makes them "bleed" is in fact myoglobin, a protein found in animals’ muscle tissue. https://sage-answers.com/why-is-my-meat-bleeding/#Should_a_burger_bleed https://sage-answers.com/why-is-my-meat-bleeding/#Should_a_b...
jessenichols 4y ago
There are no resource limits, only limits to the creativity of people to create explanations that allow us to transform raw materials from one state to another. See The Beginning of Infinity by Deutsch and More From Less by McAfee.
- gnramires 4y ago
  This is false. There are resource limits, unfortunately (I guess?). Thermodynamics is a hard limit. There are many soft limits as well. Please look at this paper for an incredibly well researched physics-based review: (to appear in Nature Physics) https://tmurphy.physics.ucsd.edu/papers/limits-econ-final.pdf https://tmurphy.physics.ucsd.edu/papers/limits-econ-final.pd...
  - adastra22 4y ago
    Limits which are millions, billions, or trillions of times beyond current capacities. For the moment, thermodynamic limits don't apply.
    - tzs 4y ago
      Exponentials can get away from you a lot faster than you might expect. For instance if we sustained a 1% annual population growth for another 13000 years the total volume of all living people would be more than the total volume of all the space within 13000 light years of Earth. So unless we get faster than light travel or we greatly reduce the amount of space into which you can physically cram a living human we are under 13000 years away from a pretty hard upper limit. Make more realistic assumptions than speed of light expansion of humanity and that limit gets a lot shorter even with growth rates quite a bit lower than 1%.
      - dane-pgp 4y ago
        > if we sustained a 1% annual population growth for another 13000 years And if we sustained a 0.03% annual population reduction rate (like South Korea recently experienced) there would be less than 100 people on Earth after just 600 years. So I agree that exponentials can get away from you a lot faster than you might expect, but I also think that trying to predict cultural norms 13 millennia from now is likely to be counter-productive.
c54 4y ago
I do think some of the concerns here are right on the nose > What can be done to minimize the chances of colossal failure or sub-systemic breakdown, which in the worst case could threaten preservation of science and human knowledge? It seems like the two extremes are degrowth and malthus on the one hand, and haughty denialist expansionism on the other. One is borderline eugenicist and denies billions of people of our american/european standard of living. The other is naive and stupid and ignores the fact that we humans are capable of wielding planetwide power. The same strain of thinking that lets someone imagine himself as a tiny speck inconsequential to the cosmos, leads to denial that our species can affect the biosphere we live in. There’s a lack of context and of material security and of a culture of cultivating peace and mutual support. I think there’s a middle ground which acknowledges our need for stewardship, for human-in-the-loop systems level thinking about how we can garden our planet into a sustainable system that is not only able to support us but also helps us to thrive and to enjoy in the miracle of existence. We have to take stock of what we’re doing that isn’t working, and push for long term success in renewables, efficient human living, beauty in our proximate environments (not just faraway nature preserves). And we have to reckon with needing to mine huge amounts of materials in order to manufacture things like batteries and solar panels to make all this happen. Ultimately I think we’ll continue to make progress in exactly these goals and it’s important to not lose hope, and to try to positively affect those around you (especially young folks, children are the future).
- ericmcer 4y ago
  Do you think we will ever turn back to eugenics? It has deeply immoral roots and has led to some of the most messed up scenarios in our history, but it is also a crazy powerful tool we have been unable to leverage in a non-evil way. (This is kinda tangential but related) I have a weird theory about humanities purpose: Assuming someone/thing created life (if life wasn't created then it truly is random chaos and we have no purpose), but if life was intentionally made then we were created for a reason. Determining what that reason was will tell us what our purpose is. The only clue we have is evolution. If we can reverse engineer the mechanisms of evolution it should give us clues about why we are here. What is evolution driving us to become? If we can figure that out we might be able to deduce what our purpose is. I feel like one of life's huge leaps forward, on par with single->multicellular, is recognizing that these evolutionary mechanisms exist, furthering our understanding of and leveraging them. Anyway that is a long ramble to say it sucks that we as a species cannot really touch any kind of eugenics without genociding eachother.
Bloating 4y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0GFRcFm-aY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0GFRcFm-aY
gandalfgeek 4y ago
This kind of Malthusian thinking has a horrible track record. Imagine if we drastically altered the course of technological progress every time a cabal of "experts" declares that we're going to destroy the planet. I'm not arguing that we should be reckless with the environment, but there are massive existential risks to humanity with this kind of self-limiting belief system. It's not obvious that one side of the argument is right. If we even slowed down to linear growth from our current exponential path, life on Earth would probably suck within a generation.
- fny 4y ago
  This whole paper is lazy, panic-ridden grift. Why lazy? Because it's core thesis is that fossil fuels are a natural constraint... The word "nuclear" does not appear a single time in the entire paper! We have more than enough carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen on this earth to do incredible things given an energy source. It's time to stop dooming and start exploring. Also, fuck Mars. Why not try to make the desert liveable?
  - NortySpock 4y ago
    The clouds of Venus, 50km above the surface, also seem like a neat place to colonize. (relatively speaking)
    - dotandimet 4y ago
      The Gobi desert and the bottom of the ocean are far more hospitable for human colonization than anywhere off-planet (not to mention far, far cheaper and more energy-efficient)
  - t0bia_s 4y ago
    I agree. We spending ridcolous amount of money and fuel to colonizing Mars/space but at same time we are not able to feed millions starving children on our planet. Instead of panicking we should change our politics, that seems to me, is pathological in many ways. Our planet have enough space and energy sources. For example in Russia there is a lot of inhabited places with great weather conditions to live, but it is politics who makes those places terrible to live in. Nuclear energy is incredible source of energy and waste could be shoot out into space? Alarmism that predict inevitable collapse of our planet and blaming individuals as a source of those problems is hypocrisy. Individual will never damage environment as corporates driven by lobby and politics.
weatherlite 4y ago
I really recommend Tom Murphy's (one of the paper's authors) blog about energy and our possible future https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/
steve76 4y ago
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jeffreyrogers 4y ago
Similar things were predicted in the 70s but new sources of energy and improvements in productivity invalidated those predictions. Obviously at some point limits will kick in (unless we can expand to other planets) but what to do about that is more of a political question than a scientific one. I personally think it is more appealing to attempt expanding the limits, as we've done in the past, than to pre-emptively adopt austerity measures to live within estimated limits.
- llsf 4y ago
  Would law of physics kick in ? If it takes thousands of years to produce oil/gas/coal, and months to extract and consume it... then what political solution do have ? My concern is that we might hit an energy crisis (Russia/Ukraine is just the tip of the iceberg). We need oil/gas/coal for everything around us (clothes, transportation, heat, cement, iron, energy). For energy we could use nuclear for baseline, and some renewable. For iron, we could use hydrogen instead of coal (see above for energy) For cement, we could electricity (see above for energy) For heat we could use electricity (and better insulation) (see above for energy) For transportation we could use electricity for ground transportation (trains, trucks, cars, light mobility) and keep the planes on oil, hydrogen, etc. For clothes... well we could use the rest of oil left. Our needs in energy are growing, and the reserve or oil/gas/coal is finite and even if there are still a lot available, it might be a long tail and so too expensive to extract. We might need to plan for a shortage (or too expensive) oil/gas/coal. Renewable is nice, but the amount of energy needed to replace oil/gas/coal is just massive, we cannot produce and install renewable fast enough. We need hundreds more nuclear reactors, just for US alone. This is likely a national security question. In that sense it is a political question based on physic emergency.
  - verinus 4y ago
    and as far as I read nuclear fuel isn't endless either...
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
mcwone 4y ago
The graph says it all and by the way similar graphs exist for lithium and all the rare earth elements to construct so called renewables.
- ben_w 4y ago
  We don't need rare earths to make renewables, we choose them because they are cheaper; and calling renewables "so called" in this context is a bit weird even though yes the sun will eventually die.
  - kragen 4y ago
    We mostly don't use rare earths to make renewable energy at all. Solar panels and lithium batteries don't have any rare earths in them. Most wind turbines do: https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/JRC122671/jrc122671_the_role_of_rare_earth_elements_in_wind_energy_and_electric_mobility_2.pdf https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/J... but Amory Lovins argues that the advantage of doing so is small or even nonexistent: https://rmi.org/rmi-reality-check-greener-friendlier-alternatives-exist-for-rare-minerals-in-batteries/ https://rmi.org/rmi-reality-check-greener-friendlier-alterna...
    - Brometheus 4y ago
      The turbines of ENERCON don't need "rare-earths", because of their ring generator https://www.enercon.de/technologie/komponenten/ https://www.enercon.de/technologie/komponenten/
      - kragen 4y ago
        Of course you don't need rare earths to build electrical wind turbines; the Europa paper I linked above explains that even today 25% of wind turbines are rare-earth-free, and people have been building large-scale electrical generators for 156 years even though rare earth magnets were only invented about 50 years ago.
ajl666 4y ago
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meany 4y ago
I think the authors do a disservice to their cause with the inclusion of judgmental, emotional rhetoric such as sentences like: “ From this perspective, it seems likely that future generations will label the past two centuries as the Fossil Fuel Age rather than the Industrial Revolution—emphasizing the critical importance of a now-depleted resource over a self-flattering celebration of human innovation” It suggests they’re not looking at all options to solve our problems, and that there is a moral imperative to support a de-growth ideology.
- throw827474737 4y ago
  Care to elaborate the options?
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  More importantly, it shows that they've been taken in by the Billions spent on propaganda to convince people that fossil fuels are necessary for modern society, and not an inefficient and polluting tech that we should be glad to move beyond with better alternatives.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  That sentence is factualy accurate. If you are not comfortable with that, it suggest you are engaging in double think. Basically doing the same thing Russia does when it calls a war 'special operation'. Basic premice is solid, after all we don't look kindly at the medieval peasants that pointlessly died of the plague because they didn't know to wash their hands. Or chopped down all forests in UK to build wooden ships to fight China and force them to accept Opium trade
  - FeepingCreature 4y ago
    Yeah but we don't call it the Deforestation Age or the Plague Age, and most people don't center those concerns when talking about the past. Re plague, the one thing that could be argued actually comes to mind when considering the middle ages, those waves of disease killed ~ half the population. To compete, climate change would have to kill several billion people. I think it's fair to call that alarmist.
seydor 4y ago
Without competition you don't have a market. You don't even have political discourse. You have centralized, planned economy and society, clearly defined 'optima', in which the academics have all the power. I think this should be added to the discussion section as there is an obvious conflict of interest here. Maybe we shoulkd have a world without power instead ...
- brutusborn 4y ago
  I think this is covered in the supplement, 4. Economics, f) Free market... I would agree that competition in some form is essential, but we must also be mindful of issues with competition such as market failures.
  - seydor 4y ago
    That says nothing about power or about academia itself. The whole supplement is a "list of superficial assertions we hold to be true even though we have no idea if they are", that are typical political anti-capitalist rhetoric
    - brutusborn 4y ago
      They are "working hypothesis" to be studied, and thus implicitly they are being considered skeptically. I agree they should consider power, I would imagine that would come under cultural aspects. As to Academia, they explicitly criticize Academic silos; the whole network is a way to address problems with reductionism. I'm not sure what makes you think they are anti-capitalist. I suspect you didn't read the whole thing because they say "To be clear, the authors are not making blanket statements about the pros and cons of markets, capitalism, socialism, or communism. (These are tasks for the scholarly network whose creation we urge.)" Edit: on a side note, I'm genuinely interested in how you would envision a 'world without power'?
      - seydor 4y ago
        > I'm not sure what makes you think they are anti-capitalist. Their list contains these: - Our current economic model emphasizes means (income, spending) over ends (wellbeing) - The free market may not be the best way of meeting basic human needs, such as water, food, and air quality (empirically false) - Relentless focus on short-term performance and growth, together with a discount rate that devalues the future, blinds decision-makers to long-term challenges (content-free rambling) - Humanity will need to reevaluate its place in the natural world, shifting from consumerism to conservation, and accepting planetary boundaries - It is essential that humanity reframe its decisionmaking processes to value ecosystem health, resilience, sustainability, human rights, and true quality of life above traditional economic indicator > envision a 'world without power'? Not possible , but a world with less concentration of power is possible
personomas 4y ago
This. This is really the real direction we need. Changing to renewable energy is only one small part of the whole problem. The real problem is that there are too many people on the planet.
- simonhorlick 4y ago
  The richest 10% of the global population are responsible for an estimated 47% of emissions. The problem has never been that there are too many people. The problem is that there is a small number of people that are destroying the planet for the rest of us.
  - bruce343434 4y ago
    Could this be a case of Zipf’s law? I.e. there will always emerge a top 10%? In which case the true solution is to decrease human population across the globe.
  - yakutori 4y ago
    > The problem is that there is a small number of people that are destroying the planet for the rest of us. I wonder if taking part in this forum is almost a sure indication of membership in the 10%, so perhaps it's us destroying the planet for the rest of them?
- erklik 4y ago
  This is such a lie. There are not "too" many people. Let's look at four nations China, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. These make up about 40% of the population of the world [1]. If you look at their per capita emissions, China is highest (7.6), India is 1.8, Pakistan is 0.9, and Bangladesh is 0.6. However, look at the highest numbers on that list and you'll see nations like Qatar at 32.5, Kuwait at 22.0. Yes, Granted, they don't have huge populations so overall, they're not pumping out that much. However, Australia, America, Canada also are emitting >14 tons per capita. The vast majority of these people do not need to be emitting that much but they do so to fuel luxury, and their "standard of living" while telling the people of countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, China that they need to do better. It's pretty hypocritical. The top 15% of the world needs to emiting much less. Not the bottom 40%. Pakistan is an even more interesting example because currently a third of the nation is underwater (literally an inland sea has formed [3]) because of floods that were defintely far more exacerbated this year due to climate change. They're the ones suffering from it (along with good old goverments being incompetent and not planning enough) while they've not benefitted from the emissions in the slightest. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen... 2. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Pakistan_floods#/media/File:2022_Pakistan_Floods_-_August_27,_2021_vs._August_27,_2022_in_Sindh.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Pakistan_floods#/media/Fi...
hcks 4y ago
To my knowledge, it literally never happened that humanity ran out of a ressource and it turned out not to be replaceable.
- fallingknife 4y ago
  As they say, past performance is not a guarantee of future results
  - hcks 4y ago
    Obviously, but I'll need a bit more than a 50 years old computer simulation of a few coupled PDEs before I give back my job and go live the peasant life.
    - lm28469 4y ago
      > give back my job and go live the peasant life There are a whole lot of scenarios between amazon same day toilet paper delivery, lidar enabled autonomous vacuum cleaner, 3 tonnes tesla doing 0-60, bluetooth enabled fridges and the peasant life
      - hcks 4y ago
        Sorry for not being clear, but the current level of argumentation of degrowthers is insufficient for giving up the tiniest amount of technology-enabled comfort. So thanks but I'll have my lidar enabled autonomous toilet paper, it doesn't go against my religion.
brutusborn 4y ago
I came to the comments expecting them to be hopeful and supportive but most seem to be critical and barely engaging with the paper at all. These people are trying to produce a network to study the world in a different way to make life better through avoiding existential risks. How do people see this in a bad light? The paper uses some language that may seem pessimistic, but to me seems on the whole fairly realistic and balanced.
mountaintimefrm 4y ago
I would love to hear what the authors of this paper think about permaculture; not the woo-woo hippie stereotype of permaculture that is so prevalent ("herb spirals", cob ovens, etc), but rather the specific principles and methods outlined in Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (Mollison, 1988). After reading their article , especially the points on creating actionable solutions, I would think they would readily embrace the framework created by permaculture.
- weatherlite 4y ago
  I don't know about Tom Murphy's (from the paper) opinion but I do see permaculture being taken seriously by people in the field - Post Carbon Institute for example (https://www.postcarbon.org/ https://www.postcarbon.org/).
  - mountaintimefrm 4y ago
    Thanks for posting that link. I took a look at their website and it's reassuring they way they succinctly pitch permaculture: "One collection of ideas and skills that’s already handily packaged and awaiting adoption is permaculture—a set of design tools for living created by ecologists back in the 1970s who understood that industrial civilization would eventually reach its limits." The phrase "already handily packaged and awaiting adoption" is a simple message that could get the point across to policy makers and the public (even though it ignores that there have already been successful permaculture-based ecosystem restoration projects for decades now).
mchusma 4y ago
The paper has several key flaws: - it does not address recent dematerialization and improved efficiency per human in the first world. - it does not address "off planet" in any way. We can build the surface area of over a billion earths just by disassembling mercury and using it to build rotating space habitats. - it doesn't address the fact that human energy consumption is a tiny fraction of what is available in our own solar system. Less than 2 billionths of sunlight hits earth at all, and efficiency keeps going up. much less than 0.1% of the earth has solar panels, so with solar alone we can increase energy production more than a trillion times more than today. - it doesn't address the potential other energy sources like fusion, which have capacities far beyond fossil fuels. All of this has the net effect of the paper sounding smart but its only applicable in a scenario where technological progress stops and we never truly leave the planet. I actually think it's good for people to think of plan B options, but plan A should be to build tech, get off planet, and have a trillion+ hunans living in luxury.

151 points by e12e 4y ago

Population stabilisation: Most of the societies even in the developing world are now seeing stagnation in replacement levels of population growth. It will be challenging in the future to ensure economic growth rates of present times for that reason alone. When population stagnates, labour becomes expensive, consumption decreases and growth flattens. Even the last remaining regions of Africa are now seeing rapid urbanisation, and consequently will see this trend in the next 20 years. In a way, evolution itself is forcing humanity to cut down on its wasteful ways. The authors of this article should have touched upon the factor of population deflation in their article to make a more balanced case.

spullara 4y ago

It is only compatible because we are approaching peak population mid to late century and then we will slowly contract over time until extinction through lack of births... if trends continue.

cjsaltlake 4y ago
If trends continue, there will be 10 billion Amish in 100 years.
- spullara 4y ago
  It is not entirely without merit to say that religious folks that encourage large families like the Amish, Catholics and Mormons will dominate in the distant future. Hell, I have 45 first cousins (on one side) and they on average have 3+ kids so it might just be my extended family :)
  - marshray 4y ago
    That experiment has been running for 50 generations already, by now it should have reached steady-state. Perhaps that's part of the reason that 84% of the world's population identifies with a religion.
  - rapind 4y ago
    I can't help but wonder if large families also beget religion just as religion begets large families. Now I personally think every religion I've encountered is ridiculous fiction (no offence, just my opinion), but I will admit that there can be some pretty significant advantages in a community. Raising a ton of kids is probably just easier in a close community of similar minded families (a.k.a. the local church/temple/mosque). It's almost like it's intentionally engineered to be this way.
    - thrown_22 4y ago
      Religion is subject to natural selection just like anything else. Religions which produce more offspring that stay in the religion will always win out over the ones that don't.
      - bawolff 4y ago
        Until it becomes outweighed by splitting resources amongst too many children. Everything has pros and cons.
        thrown_22 4y ago
        So long as the children survive to give birth to more children it doesn't matter how poor they are. Evolution doesn't care for the comfort of anyone.
        bawolff 4y ago
        > So long as the children survive to give birth to more children Big if. In a true famine, the poor usually die first. > Evolution doesn't care for the comfort of anyone. Evolution cares about sexual desireability and fitness. Rich people usually have more. In nature we see these two strategies as well. Some species try and have as many babies as possible, where others have fewer but concentrate resources to make sure the few are more likely to survive. Neither strategy is optimal in all situations.
Bakary 4y ago
We aren't heading to extinction just on account of birthrates, it's the transition phase with a large number of elderly dependents and a small number of workers that is going to be the real problem.
- spullara 4y ago
  Yeah, that will be a problem for sure. We will get a preview of it in Asia.
  - throwawaylinux 4y ago
    Despite all the fearmongering and wailing and gnashing of teeth, Japan is doing okay with a shrinking population.
    - spullara 4y ago
      They have a long fall ahead of them. https://www.ipss.go.jp/site-ad/index_english/esuikei/econ2.html#:~:text=Based%20on%20the%20results%20of,and%20Figure%201%2D1 https://www.ipss.go.jp/site-ad/index_english/esuikei/econ2.h...). Going from 128m in 2010 to 87m in 2060.
      - throwawaylinux 4y ago
        And despite the wailing and gnashing of teeth, they'll probably continue do fine, as they have since their population leveled out 30 years ago. The doomsday predictions haven't just started now, and they weren't only about events in 2060. They started decades ago about population growth slowing, population leveling, population dropping. They've been pretty consistently wrong.
        thrown_22 4y ago
        >They've been pretty consistently wrong. They haven't been wrong, they turned out to be right for everyone. People who didn't live through the boom of the 1950s can't imagine what it's like to live in a world where things improve for everyone every year. Japan didn't start growing like it did before 1980 again, everyone else stopped too. China has been basically the only driver of world economic growth for the last 40 years. Which is kind of astonishing considering they are communists.
adriand 4y ago
Although I find the prospect disturbing, I think at some point (assuming we manage this dangerous transition) we will produce children in a technological way that is decoupled from human mothers. I could also see a social movement developing that campaigned for this on the grounds of equity for women. It could be presented as both essential for the species and empowering for all genders…and that might be true.
- spullara 4y ago
  Not an entirely unbelievable end game. Will it be done by families or the government?
  - adriand 4y ago
    Good question. Probably both, depending on the country you live in.

ouid 4y ago

>infinite exponential growth which is impossible on a finite planet. its impossible in any space with non negative curvature. the kind of growth that is unsustainable in a finite region is any growth at all.

alexnewman 4y ago
constant growth != infinite growth constant growth just means converging growth if the population is shrinking all we need to do is increase gdp per capita.
- ihaveajob 4y ago
  Zeno has entered the chat. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes#Achilles_and_the_tortoise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes#Achilles_an...
- mr_toad 4y ago
  > constant growth != infinite growth constant growth just means converging growth if the population is shrinking all we need to do is increase gdp per capita. In theory. In practice GDP growth is strongly correlated with things like energy use and waste/pollution generation. There will come a point when either that correlation has to be broken or growth has to halt.
  - PeterisP 4y ago
    While GDP growth has historically been strongly correlated with energy use and pollution (including CO2/greenhouse gas emissions), due to the switch to service and digital economy, in rich countries GDP growth has become decoupled from energy use for a few decades already, already before year 2000. The correlation is already broken, and it seems quite plausible to continue GDP growth even with a decrease in energy use and waste/pollution generation.
    - Qem 4y ago
      > due to the switch to service and digital economy, in rich countries GDP growth has become decoupled from energy use for a few decades already. They just pushed pollution elsewhere, by outsourcing manufacturing.

StanislavPetrov 4y ago

>This age of modernity is characterized by consistent growth in energy use, economic activity, and resource consumption, and a generally increasing standard of living—albeit inequitably distributed. This paper states this as though it is desirable and inevitable. There's no reason human society needs to keep expanding like a cancer or a virus. Sustainability is both possible and desirable. This isn't to suggest we shouldn't explore and/or colonize other worlds, but it is to suggest that constant growth is not intrinsically beneficial. Many of the most serious problems we face as a society are a direct result of overpopulation and "growth".

shmageggy 4y ago
> This paper states this as though it is desirable and inevitable. No it doesn't? Two sentences later: > But modernity has been enabled by the rapid and accelerating expenditure of our one-time inheritance of fossil fuels, and by drawing down the resources and ecosystems of our finite Earth—none of which can be sustained as we transition from a resource-rich frontier to a human-dominated planet.
- jxramos 4y ago
  I still don't fathom this singular deposit of fossil fuels in the earth, are they truly some artifact of a huge die off of living creatures from centuries ago or is there some steady generation through time that replenishes and generates the crude oil beneath our feet? I'd like to learn more about where the fossil in fossil fuels comes from and just what sort of biomass quantity we're talking about and when on earth that quantity of biomass was originally generated and walked the earth.
  - jxramos 4y ago
    I got curious to see what an oil well cross section may look like to see a pool of oil, there's some fascinating stuff on Youtube in this domain https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzDrheWDhGw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzDrheWDhGw
  - fallingknife 4y ago

mberning 4y ago

I got to the plan section and was mighty disappointed. This is simply a treatise on how bad humans and civilization are in the eyes of the new age Gaia religion. All problems and very few “pro human” solutions.

Animats 4y ago
That's a problem with this article, and too many like it. OK, we're going to run out of various natural resources over the next 100-200 years, let alone the next 1000-2000. We will have a mostly sustainable society, like it or not. But it need not be a low-tech one. Energy probably won't be a problem. We have so many low-cost renewable sources now that the fossil fuel industry has trouble getting capital. The energy situation may look bad for another 10-20 years, but not for much longer than that. What looks like a problem? The US Geological Survey has studies for all the major useful minerals.[1][2] Some minerals are recycled easily because they're used in their elemental form. Copper and aluminum are good examples. Others get used up by being combined with other minerals in a way that's hard to undo. Manganese and vanadium are good examples, because they go into steelmaking. It's hard to un-make steel, although you can recycle it as steel. Something to expect is metal scrap sorting that does a quick spectrographic analysis on each item and routes it to the appropriate bin for re-melting. There's probably a startup opportunity there. Expect lithium battery recycling to be a major industry. Lithium batteries are a far higher grade source of lithium than ores or brines. Biologic systems are more recyclable. Biology is mostly C, H, O, and N, assembled in different ways. This doesn't necessarily mean "natural". We can expect to see a bigger role for semi-biological processes such as fermentation, synthetic enzymes, and such. The Impossible Burger uses a synthetic enzyme to produce the taste of blood people want in a burger. This sort of thing is probably enough to get through the next 100-200 years. The next 1000-2000 years will be tougher. But more technology will be available. [1] https://www.usgs.gov/programs/mineral-resources-program https://www.usgs.gov/programs/mineral-resources-program [2] https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2022/mcs2022.pdf https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2022/mcs2022.pdf
- dane-pgp 4y ago
  > the taste of blood people want in a burger. To be clear, (most) burgers do not have noticeable blood in. The red juice that comes out of them that makes them "bleed" is in fact myoglobin, a protein found in animals’ muscle tissue. https://sage-answers.com/why-is-my-meat-bleeding/#Should_a_burger_bleed https://sage-answers.com/why-is-my-meat-bleeding/#Should_a_b...

jessenichols 4y ago

There are no resource limits, only limits to the creativity of people to create explanations that allow us to transform raw materials from one state to another. See The Beginning of Infinity by Deutsch and More From Less by McAfee.

gnramires 4y ago
This is false. There are resource limits, unfortunately (I guess?). Thermodynamics is a hard limit. There are many soft limits as well. Please look at this paper for an incredibly well researched physics-based review: (to appear in Nature Physics) https://tmurphy.physics.ucsd.edu/papers/limits-econ-final.pdf https://tmurphy.physics.ucsd.edu/papers/limits-econ-final.pd...
- adastra22 4y ago
  Limits which are millions, billions, or trillions of times beyond current capacities. For the moment, thermodynamic limits don't apply.
  - tzs 4y ago
    Exponentials can get away from you a lot faster than you might expect. For instance if we sustained a 1% annual population growth for another 13000 years the total volume of all living people would be more than the total volume of all the space within 13000 light years of Earth. So unless we get faster than light travel or we greatly reduce the amount of space into which you can physically cram a living human we are under 13000 years away from a pretty hard upper limit. Make more realistic assumptions than speed of light expansion of humanity and that limit gets a lot shorter even with growth rates quite a bit lower than 1%.
    - dane-pgp 4y ago
      > if we sustained a 1% annual population growth for another 13000 years And if we sustained a 0.03% annual population reduction rate (like South Korea recently experienced) there would be less than 100 people on Earth after just 600 years. So I agree that exponentials can get away from you a lot faster than you might expect, but I also think that trying to predict cultural norms 13 millennia from now is likely to be counter-productive.

c54 4y ago

I do think some of the concerns here are right on the nose > What can be done to minimize the chances of colossal failure or sub-systemic breakdown, which in the worst case could threaten preservation of science and human knowledge? It seems like the two extremes are degrowth and malthus on the one hand, and haughty denialist expansionism on the other. One is borderline eugenicist and denies billions of people of our american/european standard of living. The other is naive and stupid and ignores the fact that we humans are capable of wielding planetwide power. The same strain of thinking that lets someone imagine himself as a tiny speck inconsequential to the cosmos, leads to denial that our species can affect the biosphere we live in. There’s a lack of context and of material security and of a culture of cultivating peace and mutual support. I think there’s a middle ground which acknowledges our need for stewardship, for human-in-the-loop systems level thinking about how we can garden our planet into a sustainable system that is not only able to support us but also helps us to thrive and to enjoy in the miracle of existence. We have to take stock of what we’re doing that isn’t working, and push for long term success in renewables, efficient human living, beauty in our proximate environments (not just faraway nature preserves). And we have to reckon with needing to mine huge amounts of materials in order to manufacture things like batteries and solar panels to make all this happen. Ultimately I think we’ll continue to make progress in exactly these goals and it’s important to not lose hope, and to try to positively affect those around you (especially young folks, children are the future).

ericmcer 4y ago
Do you think we will ever turn back to eugenics? It has deeply immoral roots and has led to some of the most messed up scenarios in our history, but it is also a crazy powerful tool we have been unable to leverage in a non-evil way. (This is kinda tangential but related) I have a weird theory about humanities purpose: Assuming someone/thing created life (if life wasn't created then it truly is random chaos and we have no purpose), but if life was intentionally made then we were created for a reason. Determining what that reason was will tell us what our purpose is. The only clue we have is evolution. If we can reverse engineer the mechanisms of evolution it should give us clues about why we are here. What is evolution driving us to become? If we can figure that out we might be able to deduce what our purpose is. I feel like one of life's huge leaps forward, on par with single->multicellular, is recognizing that these evolutionary mechanisms exist, furthering our understanding of and leveraging them. Anyway that is a long ramble to say it sucks that we as a species cannot really touch any kind of eugenics without genociding eachother.

Bloating 4y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0GFRcFm-aY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0GFRcFm-aY

gandalfgeek 4y ago

This kind of Malthusian thinking has a horrible track record. Imagine if we drastically altered the course of technological progress every time a cabal of "experts" declares that we're going to destroy the planet. I'm not arguing that we should be reckless with the environment, but there are massive existential risks to humanity with this kind of self-limiting belief system. It's not obvious that one side of the argument is right. If we even slowed down to linear growth from our current exponential path, life on Earth would probably suck within a generation.

fny 4y ago
This whole paper is lazy, panic-ridden grift. Why lazy? Because it's core thesis is that fossil fuels are a natural constraint... The word "nuclear" does not appear a single time in the entire paper! We have more than enough carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen on this earth to do incredible things given an energy source. It's time to stop dooming and start exploring. Also, fuck Mars. Why not try to make the desert liveable?
- NortySpock 4y ago
  The clouds of Venus, 50km above the surface, also seem like a neat place to colonize. (relatively speaking)
  - dotandimet 4y ago
    The Gobi desert and the bottom of the ocean are far more hospitable for human colonization than anywhere off-planet (not to mention far, far cheaper and more energy-efficient)
- t0bia_s 4y ago
  I agree. We spending ridcolous amount of money and fuel to colonizing Mars/space but at same time we are not able to feed millions starving children on our planet. Instead of panicking we should change our politics, that seems to me, is pathological in many ways. Our planet have enough space and energy sources. For example in Russia there is a lot of inhabited places with great weather conditions to live, but it is politics who makes those places terrible to live in. Nuclear energy is incredible source of energy and waste could be shoot out into space? Alarmism that predict inevitable collapse of our planet and blaming individuals as a source of those problems is hypocrisy. Individual will never damage environment as corporates driven by lobby and politics.

weatherlite 4y ago

I really recommend Tom Murphy's (one of the paper's authors) blog about energy and our possible future https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/

steve76 4y ago

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jeffreyrogers 4y ago

Similar things were predicted in the 70s but new sources of energy and improvements in productivity invalidated those predictions. Obviously at some point limits will kick in (unless we can expand to other planets) but what to do about that is more of a political question than a scientific one. I personally think it is more appealing to attempt expanding the limits, as we've done in the past, than to pre-emptively adopt austerity measures to live within estimated limits.

llsf 4y ago
Would law of physics kick in ? If it takes thousands of years to produce oil/gas/coal, and months to extract and consume it... then what political solution do have ? My concern is that we might hit an energy crisis (Russia/Ukraine is just the tip of the iceberg). We need oil/gas/coal for everything around us (clothes, transportation, heat, cement, iron, energy). For energy we could use nuclear for baseline, and some renewable. For iron, we could use hydrogen instead of coal (see above for energy) For cement, we could electricity (see above for energy) For heat we could use electricity (and better insulation) (see above for energy) For transportation we could use electricity for ground transportation (trains, trucks, cars, light mobility) and keep the planes on oil, hydrogen, etc. For clothes... well we could use the rest of oil left. Our needs in energy are growing, and the reserve or oil/gas/coal is finite and even if there are still a lot available, it might be a long tail and so too expensive to extract. We might need to plan for a shortage (or too expensive) oil/gas/coal. Renewable is nice, but the amount of energy needed to replace oil/gas/coal is just massive, we cannot produce and install renewable fast enough. We need hundreds more nuclear reactors, just for US alone. This is likely a national security question. In that sense it is a political question based on physic emergency.
- verinus 4y ago
  and as far as I read nuclear fuel isn't endless either...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

mcwone 4y ago

The graph says it all and by the way similar graphs exist for lithium and all the rare earth elements to construct so called renewables.

ben_w 4y ago
We don't need rare earths to make renewables, we choose them because they are cheaper; and calling renewables "so called" in this context is a bit weird even though yes the sun will eventually die.
- kragen 4y ago
  We mostly don't use rare earths to make renewable energy at all. Solar panels and lithium batteries don't have any rare earths in them. Most wind turbines do: https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/JRC122671/jrc122671_the_role_of_rare_earth_elements_in_wind_energy_and_electric_mobility_2.pdf https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/J... but Amory Lovins argues that the advantage of doing so is small or even nonexistent: https://rmi.org/rmi-reality-check-greener-friendlier-alternatives-exist-for-rare-minerals-in-batteries/ https://rmi.org/rmi-reality-check-greener-friendlier-alterna...
  - Brometheus 4y ago
    The turbines of ENERCON don't need "rare-earths", because of their ring generator https://www.enercon.de/technologie/komponenten/ https://www.enercon.de/technologie/komponenten/
    - kragen 4y ago
      Of course you don't need rare earths to build electrical wind turbines; the Europa paper I linked above explains that even today 25% of wind turbines are rare-earth-free, and people have been building large-scale electrical generators for 156 years even though rare earth magnets were only invented about 50 years ago.

ajl666 4y ago

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meany 4y ago

I think the authors do a disservice to their cause with the inclusion of judgmental, emotional rhetoric such as sentences like: “ From this perspective, it seems likely that future generations will label the past two centuries as the Fossil Fuel Age rather than the Industrial Revolution—emphasizing the critical importance of a now-depleted resource over a self-flattering celebration of human innovation” It suggests they’re not looking at all options to solve our problems, and that there is a moral imperative to support a de-growth ideology.

throw827474737 4y ago
Care to elaborate the options?
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
More importantly, it shows that they've been taken in by the Billions spent on propaganda to convince people that fossil fuels are necessary for modern society, and not an inefficient and polluting tech that we should be glad to move beyond with better alternatives.
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
That sentence is factualy accurate. If you are not comfortable with that, it suggest you are engaging in double think. Basically doing the same thing Russia does when it calls a war 'special operation'. Basic premice is solid, after all we don't look kindly at the medieval peasants that pointlessly died of the plague because they didn't know to wash their hands. Or chopped down all forests in UK to build wooden ships to fight China and force them to accept Opium trade
- FeepingCreature 4y ago
  Yeah but we don't call it the Deforestation Age or the Plague Age, and most people don't center those concerns when talking about the past. Re plague, the one thing that could be argued actually comes to mind when considering the middle ages, those waves of disease killed ~ half the population. To compete, climate change would have to kill several billion people. I think it's fair to call that alarmist.

seydor 4y ago

Without competition you don't have a market. You don't even have political discourse. You have centralized, planned economy and society, clearly defined 'optima', in which the academics have all the power. I think this should be added to the discussion section as there is an obvious conflict of interest here. Maybe we shoulkd have a world without power instead ...

brutusborn 4y ago
I think this is covered in the supplement, 4. Economics, f) Free market... I would agree that competition in some form is essential, but we must also be mindful of issues with competition such as market failures.
- seydor 4y ago
  That says nothing about power or about academia itself. The whole supplement is a "list of superficial assertions we hold to be true even though we have no idea if they are", that are typical political anti-capitalist rhetoric
  - brutusborn 4y ago
    They are "working hypothesis" to be studied, and thus implicitly they are being considered skeptically. I agree they should consider power, I would imagine that would come under cultural aspects. As to Academia, they explicitly criticize Academic silos; the whole network is a way to address problems with reductionism. I'm not sure what makes you think they are anti-capitalist. I suspect you didn't read the whole thing because they say "To be clear, the authors are not making blanket statements about the pros and cons of markets, capitalism, socialism, or communism. (These are tasks for the scholarly network whose creation we urge.)" Edit: on a side note, I'm genuinely interested in how you would envision a 'world without power'?
    - seydor 4y ago
      > I'm not sure what makes you think they are anti-capitalist. Their list contains these: - Our current economic model emphasizes means (income, spending) over ends (wellbeing) - The free market may not be the best way of meeting basic human needs, such as water, food, and air quality (empirically false) - Relentless focus on short-term performance and growth, together with a discount rate that devalues the future, blinds decision-makers to long-term challenges (content-free rambling) - Humanity will need to reevaluate its place in the natural world, shifting from consumerism to conservation, and accepting planetary boundaries - It is essential that humanity reframe its decisionmaking processes to value ecosystem health, resilience, sustainability, human rights, and true quality of life above traditional economic indicator > envision a 'world without power'? Not possible , but a world with less concentration of power is possible

personomas 4y ago

This. This is really the real direction we need. Changing to renewable energy is only one small part of the whole problem. The real problem is that there are too many people on the planet.

simonhorlick 4y ago
The richest 10% of the global population are responsible for an estimated 47% of emissions. The problem has never been that there are too many people. The problem is that there is a small number of people that are destroying the planet for the rest of us.
- bruce343434 4y ago
  Could this be a case of Zipf’s law? I.e. there will always emerge a top 10%? In which case the true solution is to decrease human population across the globe.
- yakutori 4y ago
  > The problem is that there is a small number of people that are destroying the planet for the rest of us. I wonder if taking part in this forum is almost a sure indication of membership in the 10%, so perhaps it's us destroying the planet for the rest of them?
erklik 4y ago
This is such a lie. There are not "too" many people. Let's look at four nations China, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. These make up about 40% of the population of the world [1]. If you look at their per capita emissions, China is highest (7.6), India is 1.8, Pakistan is 0.9, and Bangladesh is 0.6. However, look at the highest numbers on that list and you'll see nations like Qatar at 32.5, Kuwait at 22.0. Yes, Granted, they don't have huge populations so overall, they're not pumping out that much. However, Australia, America, Canada also are emitting >14 tons per capita. The vast majority of these people do not need to be emitting that much but they do so to fuel luxury, and their "standard of living" while telling the people of countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, China that they need to do better. It's pretty hypocritical. The top 15% of the world needs to emiting much less. Not the bottom 40%. Pakistan is an even more interesting example because currently a third of the nation is underwater (literally an inland sea has formed [3]) because of floods that were defintely far more exacerbated this year due to climate change. They're the ones suffering from it (along with good old goverments being incompetent and not planning enough) while they've not benefitted from the emissions in the slightest. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen... 2. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Pakistan_floods#/media/File:2022_Pakistan_Floods_-_August_27,_2021_vs._August_27,_2022_in_Sindh.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Pakistan_floods#/media/Fi...

hcks 4y ago

To my knowledge, it literally never happened that humanity ran out of a ressource and it turned out not to be replaceable.

fallingknife 4y ago
As they say, past performance is not a guarantee of future results
- hcks 4y ago
  Obviously, but I'll need a bit more than a 50 years old computer simulation of a few coupled PDEs before I give back my job and go live the peasant life.
  - lm28469 4y ago
    > give back my job and go live the peasant life There are a whole lot of scenarios between amazon same day toilet paper delivery, lidar enabled autonomous vacuum cleaner, 3 tonnes tesla doing 0-60, bluetooth enabled fridges and the peasant life
    - hcks 4y ago
      Sorry for not being clear, but the current level of argumentation of degrowthers is insufficient for giving up the tiniest amount of technology-enabled comfort. So thanks but I'll have my lidar enabled autonomous toilet paper, it doesn't go against my religion.

brutusborn 4y ago

I came to the comments expecting them to be hopeful and supportive but most seem to be critical and barely engaging with the paper at all. These people are trying to produce a network to study the world in a different way to make life better through avoiding existential risks. How do people see this in a bad light? The paper uses some language that may seem pessimistic, but to me seems on the whole fairly realistic and balanced.

mountaintimefrm 4y ago

I would love to hear what the authors of this paper think about permaculture; not the woo-woo hippie stereotype of permaculture that is so prevalent ("herb spirals", cob ovens, etc), but rather the specific principles and methods outlined in Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (Mollison, 1988). After reading their article , especially the points on creating actionable solutions, I would think they would readily embrace the framework created by permaculture.

weatherlite 4y ago
I don't know about Tom Murphy's (from the paper) opinion but I do see permaculture being taken seriously by people in the field - Post Carbon Institute for example (https://www.postcarbon.org/ https://www.postcarbon.org/).
- mountaintimefrm 4y ago
  Thanks for posting that link. I took a look at their website and it's reassuring they way they succinctly pitch permaculture: "One collection of ideas and skills that’s already handily packaged and awaiting adoption is permaculture—a set of design tools for living created by ecologists back in the 1970s who understood that industrial civilization would eventually reach its limits." The phrase "already handily packaged and awaiting adoption" is a simple message that could get the point across to policy makers and the public (even though it ignores that there have already been successful permaculture-based ecosystem restoration projects for decades now).

mchusma 4y ago

The paper has several key flaws: - it does not address recent dematerialization and improved efficiency per human in the first world. - it does not address "off planet" in any way. We can build the surface area of over a billion earths just by disassembling mercury and using it to build rotating space habitats. - it doesn't address the fact that human energy consumption is a tiny fraction of what is available in our own solar system. Less than 2 billionths of sunlight hits earth at all, and efficiency keeps going up. much less than 0.1% of the earth has solar panels, so with solar alone we can increase energy production more than a trillion times more than today. - it doesn't address the potential other energy sources like fusion, which have capacities far beyond fossil fuels. All of this has the net effect of the paper sounding smart but its only applicable in a scenario where technological progress stops and we never truly leave the planet. I actually think it's good for people to think of plan B options, but plan A should be to build tech, get off planet, and have a trillion+ hunans living in luxury.