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It's odd how everytime somebody mentions slashing oil production by 50 or 75%, people are immediately up in arms. Same for red meat or cheap air travel. Wester

by jokoon 3y ago

It's odd how everytime somebody mentions slashing oil production by 50 or 75%, people are immediately up in arms. Same for red meat or cheap air travel. Western rich countries have too many really spoiled consumers. It's weird to say, but we should crash the economy if it can slow down climate change. I mean there are plenty people in other parts of the world who don't have such a high standard of living, and it's not that big of a problem. And yes, I don't believe it's only rich people, it's also middle class people who generate a lot of emissions, and I'm a leftist.

jmondi 3y ago
And what about all the countries that won’t do anything regardless? So we should just tank our own economy while being unable to do anything about our neighbors? It won’t take tanking the economy, it would take world war 3.
- micromacrofoot 3y ago
  “I won’t stop because they won’t stop” is going to destroy the planet
  - jmondi 3y ago
    It is a collective effort. If you don’t realize that, you will not get anywhere in your goals of reducing climate change.
    - verisimi 3y ago
      Isn't it funny that the only option is going to be greater government, that forces its citizens to act against their own interests? The real winner in this situation is government! (Exclamation mark, but I'm not actually surprised.) You have to wonder whether this is a self-serving agenda for those who run it.
      - verisimi 3y ago
        and who are the World Meteorological Organization? > The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for promoting international cooperation on atmospheric science, climatology, hydrology and geophysics. from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Meteorological_Organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Meteorological_Organizat... Ok - so its the UN. The UN is an UNelected body that presents itself as the face of world government. > The United Nations (UN) is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and serve as a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations The unprecedented disaster is the increase in global governance!
    - micromacrofoot 3y ago
      collective efforts don’t always start simultaneously!
- stavros 3y ago
  > So we should just tank our own economy while being unable to do anything about our neighbors? Yes.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - jmondi 3y ago
    You seem smart.
    - stavros 3y ago
      I'm glad you agree, it did seem the dumber choice to continue driving at full speed into a brick wall just because the driver next to me won't brake first.
      - batch12 3y ago
        I think the right metaphor to demonstrate the argument being made is you are coupled to the other car and it doesn't matter if you turn off your engine, you're both hitting the wall anyway if the other car doesn't decide to stop too.
        amrocha 3y ago
        So you better turn off the engine and then hope the other drivers turns theirs off too. In what world is doing nothing the right choice?
        batch12 3y ago
        I don't know if hope is enough. I don't think people are willing to be miserable for hope- especially when there is no reasonable expectation that others would stop.
        amrocha 3y ago
- mdale 3y ago
  Why does a green transformation have to "tank" the economy? Can't we have green economic revival ? Would it not create more jobs to transition faster ?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - jmondi 3y ago
    It doesn’t. Both sides need to work together towards a common goal. If only one side is doing it, nothing will change.
  - vel0city 3y ago
    More jobs = more consumption = more resources. Their idea is for people to consume far less, therefore own less. If people own and consume less there's less incomes. Don't own a house, only rent a small apartment in a dense urban setting. Don't own the means to your own transportation, only get by with walking and transit. Price meats so high most people can't afford them regularly.
    - kmeisthax 3y ago
      Two out of the three things you mention are so 'undesirable' that the few dense walkable urban areas in the US are more expensive than living in the suburbs. There's a reason why left-wingers use the word "gentrification" a whole lot. In many cases suburban home and car ownership is actually cheaper than the traditional urban lifestyle, for various reasons including but not limited to: 1. Supply being limited because America outlawed dense urban construction decades ago. Dense cities cannot legally expand to meet demand and building up gets more expensive and unrealistic after a certain number of floors. 2. People in suburbs being further away from lucrative jobs - i.e. proximity to one's work is priced into the cost of the home. 3. Various government subsidies and tax credits that distort the market to produce more resource-intensive suburban housing.
      - vel0city 3y ago
        "America" didn't outlaw the expansion, the cities did it to themselves. The cities are in charge of their zoning and planning, not the federal government. They could allow for more density, but the voters choose no. Just look at all the nimbys fighting apartment complexes; are they all goons from faceless corporations and the federal government or are they just the local people currently living there expressing their choice? It's not like the government subsidies and tax credits exist even though nobody wants them. They exist because, once again, that's what voters have suggested they want when they go to the polls. I do agree, cities should be able to expand their density. I think in an ideal world people should be able to choose to live in generally affordable forms of whatever housing they want. And that's the thing, I'd like to be able to choose the housing style I think is good for my family. Many here would argue I shouldn't be able to make that choice, or that some choices (like single family homes) should be made so expensive most people can't afford it.
- dazc 3y ago
  It's all making sense now, only WW3 can save us.
  - jmondi 3y ago
    It’s all making sense now, we kill half the population today by stopping all oil consumption so then maybe in the future they won’t die.
cscurmudgeon 3y ago
1. How do you know these people are from the West? 2. Crashing the economy may make things worse as people may move to cheaper more polluting options. 3. Also any crashing has to be global if implemented. If the West implements this, will China implement it too? Otherwise, it is useless. 4. We have to get out of the outdated/silly notion that the economy is inversely proportional to a clean planet. E.g., cleaner cars cost more than older polluting cars. So if more cleaner cars are bought, that implies economic growth as well as less pollution. Same for building mass transit. There will be a ton of upfront pollution.
huntertwo 3y ago
You realize that would cause countless death _today_ if you don’t replace the oil with something else? People will starve, become homeless, and maybe anarchy will reign. Not just in the developed world but globally.
- edhelas 3y ago
  Sounds like what will actually happen _tomorrow_ if we don't act radically _now_.
  - RandomLensman 3y ago
    Nothing of that sort will happen "tomorrow", and even if true it would not justify genocidal policies today.
    - ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
      The true genocidal policy is to continue dumping CO2 into the atmosphere in increasing amounts. Personally, I feel it is more honest for us to deal with the outcomes of what "we" are doing now, rather than just leaving it for our children to deal with.
      - RandomLensman 3y ago
        The future is fundamentally uncertain. Climate change will be addressed but not by corporate welfare programs like net zero nor by impoverishing rich populations. The idea that the simplistic socio-economic models/pathways are in any way right or predictive was just a fantasy.
        netsharc 3y ago
        > The future is fundamentally uncertain. Climate change will be addressed but not by corporate welfare programs like net zero nor by impoverishing rich populations. This is very wishful thinking. It's like a doc telling you your body is collapsing due to lung cancer, you need to stop smoking, and you answering "the future is fundemantally uncertain, I'm sure something will come along and figure out this cancer for me, got a light?"
ZeroFries 3y ago
Have you done the cost:benefit analysis? Curious what makes you so confident that "crashing the economy" (you're aware of all the excess death and despair this would cause?) is the best move here.
- dtech 3y ago
  I mean it's pretty obvious that our current situation is already causing death and despair (droughts, wildfires, hurricanes) and this will only increase on our current trajectory.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - replygirl 3y ago
    right, now imagine the hysteria that would come from doing that actively and intentionally to everyone on an accelerated schedule. thwarting cancer by downing a bottle of cyanide
    - gbanfalvi 3y ago
      I'd say it's more like thwarting cancer with chemotherapy: an unpleasant experience necessary for survival.
      - replygirl 3y ago
        the analogy doesn't hold for me. my mom just finished chemo the other week, and it definitely wasn't close in effect to what she'd've dealt with otherwise. she went on living her life as usual, minus some household chores
  - gls2ro 3y ago
    I am not sure crashing the economy is a viable solution. I say this because what I learned so far is that is people will start being cold and hungry then they will focus on immediate needs and that will make sure that no money will be spent on solving climate change. This is a natural instinct: you cannot think about the future if your current situation is suffering.
Sanctity6820 3y ago
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peoplefromibiza 3y ago
> and it's not that big of a problem. it actually is and it's really big. Not to say that we shouldn't reduce our consumerism, but not by lowering our living standards. It would immediately harm if not kill the weakest/poorer segments of every Country's population.
- ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
  I'm fairly sure that living standards will be lowered by floods, fires and other climate catastrophes. Not doing enough to stop CO2 production will result in a lot of lowered living standards, including making some areas of the world uninhabitable without air conditioning etc.
  - peoplefromibiza 3y ago
    > I'm fairly sure that living standards will be lowered by floods No, it won't as badly. Doomerism is not a valid rational point of view. Most of all, floods would happen anyway, so you'll have floods + lower standards of living, including much worse emergency services. we are not at the brink of extinction and people lived and prospered in almost unhabitable lands long before we had the technology to regulate the temperature. like for example Northern United Kingdom. But are also living today in the middle of deserts, with no AC. Of course we should cut on emissions werever it is possible, worst offenders being fossil fuels. Edit: on a side note the reason why your proposal will never work is because cutting on emissions is actually easy. For example let's stop keeping pets at home. Pets that usually eat a lot of red meat. It is feasible, won't lower living standards and won't cost much to society. Now convince people that their cat eats more meat in a year than a Chinese average person and that's not sustainable.
    - ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
      > we are not at the brink of extinction and people lived and prospered in almost unhabitable lands long before we had the technology to regulate the temperature. It's relatively simple (though not necessarily easy) to live in a cold area if you have access to furs and fuel. Trying to survive in an area where the wet bulb temperature is over 35 degrees will require reliable air conditioning and working outside will become virtually impossible for humans. > Edit: on a side note the reason why your proposal will never work is because cutting o. emissions s it's actually easy. For example let's stop keeping let's at home. Pets that usually eat a lot of red meat. It is feasible, won't lower living standards and won't cost much to society. Now convince people that their cat eats more meat in a year than a Chinese average person and that's not sustainable. That reads as gibberish.
mrcwinn 3y ago
Look around. Everyone on earth wants to maintain a standard of living. Governments are toppled over this. And yet it is the largest economy that is objectively slowing its share of contributed emissions. And it’s the largest exhibit that is helping to drive the innovation needed to solve this problem, alongside incredible people from all parts of the globe. I wish we weren’t dealing with this. I wish there had been a better, more cost effective way to grow. Maybe if you or I hadn’t been born, our emissions might lower enough to make the difference. But I’d suggest now isn’t the time to count scores. We need to stay focused and continue the work. Despite our flaws we are all worth saving.
- black_13 3y ago
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- zetsurin 3y ago
  I'm not disagreeing with your conclusions... >And yet it is the largest economy that is objectively slowing its share of contributed emissions. These largest economy's also contributed the most over their history, which seems reasonable grounds for contributing more and helping other economies come up to that standard of living w/o making the same contributions
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    As a US citizen, I’d be happy for us to stand up (ie fully fund) a “solarcorps,” where we send folks to help build out renewable infra in developing countries subsidized or free. Your country provides the local labor who will be paid fair wages, we’ll provide hardware and know how. Conversely, if that help is not accepted and they keep building coal plants (or similar “business as usual”), punitive economic policies are enacted. The carrot is welcome, but sometimes the stick is needed. People are tricky, but physical systems don’t give AF. Simultaneously, the developed world should partner with China to stoke uptake of EVs globally, and rapidly destroy the market for fossil powered mobility (although there is strong evidence we're rapidly approaching a tipping point wrt EV sales [1]). TLDR War time effort without the war. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-28/electric-cars-pass-a-crucial-tipping-point-in-23-countries https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-28/electric-... | https://archive.ph/jakiU https://archive.ph/jakiU
quonn 3y ago
„It's weird to say, but we should crash the economy if it can slow down climate change.“ You can do this exactly once. Afterwards the cause will be severely discredited and no candidate doing even moderate climate change policies will be able to be elected. In short this is stupid.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
lr4444lr 3y ago
> there are plenty people in other parts of the world who don't have such a high standard of living, and it's not that big of a problem. Go live like that for 6 months and get back to us: food insecurity, inadequate healthcare, and few civil services or safety net. Those other countries are not net zero pollution either. You wanna crash the economy? How then will we develop the innovations to fix this problem? Can't believe this comment is top rated.
- moritzwarhier 3y ago
  I upvoted you, but IMO: - private cars and their usage are too cheap - air travel is too cheap - producing garbage is to cheap - politics is top centered around providing infinte fuel for "growth" instead of distributing resources rationally Yes, this is a political opinion. The stunt many people do is pretending that climate denialism and politics centered on fueling growth are not a political opinion but "rational" and sustainable.
  - lr4444lr 3y ago
    Agreed, both on the whole and in the details. But if I'm forced into the "either/or" mindset of the OP of a hypothetical choice to shrink GDP by 1% by stopping all vacation car travel or deficit spend 1% GDP as a "Manhattan Project" to get lab grown beef commercially viable, I'm voting for the latter.
    - moritzwarhier 3y ago
      The latter sounds like fantasy though, and it's not the lab-grown meat per se I'm talking about. Also I wasn't talking about car usage exclusively during vacations, I was explicitly talking about private car usage. People literally get governmental subsidies for building homes in the suburbs, then commute by car and pollute the planet in order to avoid car traffic. Anyone who fails to see the absurdity of this has drank too much Kool-aid for my taste.
  - concordDance 3y ago
    If your issue is global warming you should be campaigning for electric cars rather than against private cars. But I suspect you actually dislike cars in and of themselves, even if they could be grown on trees and powered by banana skins.
jader201 3y ago
> we should crash the economy if it can slow down climate change This really shouldn’t be the top comment on this thread without some sort of reference to cost/benefit analysis to back it up. Otherwise this appears to be an overly extreme solution to give climate deniers fuel to not listen to more reasonable solutions.
- briansm 3y ago
  It's not like anyone on this message board has a little 'crash the economy' button on their keyboard.
  - jader201 3y ago
    I’m mostly arguing that this feels like an extremist view, and in the realm of “let’s look for real solutions to the problem”, this doesn’t feel like it should be the most upvoted one in this thread.
talldatethrow 3y ago
.."and I'm a leftist." No kidding.
moomoo11 3y ago
This line of thinking is why I never vote for leftists.
HAL3000 3y ago
> It's odd how everytime somebody mentions slashing oil production by 50 or 75%, people are immediately up in arms. Maybe because they understand the immediate consequences of such an action and you don't. That's why 0 leaders around the world are proposing that kind of solutions because everyone that knows how world works, how supply chains work and what kind of environment is needed for people to elect leaders like Hitler. You want WWIII? The best way to do it is crashing the world economy. > I mean there are plenty people in other parts of the world who don't have such a high standard of living, and it's not that big of a problem. Good luck with that, people didn't work so hard in the west to now switching to 3rd world country standards. Climate change is a common knowledge, there are green parties in almost every country, if people really wanted to change their way of living they would vote for them but they don't. Clearly they are waiting for a technical miracle to happen or just don't care. So what does it mean? It means that winter is coming and you should prepare for it. None of the newest models show that we can avoid first level of catastrophe even if we stop all the emissions. Millions or tens of millions of people will die, hundreds of millions will try to migrate. At this stage it's not a question of if but when. Life is not a Hollywood movie.
dv_dt 3y ago
Slashing oil production only works if we make serious investments in other energy infrastructure. It’s only tangentially about “standard of living” - it’s about how you even supply food and other basics of living if you cut off current energy systems. And while we have made renewable energy investments to some degree - it’s at a dilettante level for show instead of being serious about it. Renewable infrastructure investments should be made highly favored financial investments to accelerate its manufacture and installation. Even with large government financing it would save money and lives. And energy production is only a part of it, investments also need to be favored for restructuring our economy to alter high energy habits like individual commutes in cars vs bikes buses and trains.
zackmorris 3y ago
You aren't that far off. Young people today can see the writing on the wall: for the first time in history, we have scientific evidence that continuing with capitalism will bring the end of the world. We'll have to choose between continuing with colonial subjugation of the working class by the owner class for another eon or revolution by spiritual enlightenment to take us to an egalitarian future like Star Trek. Now I'm not anti-capitalist, because capitalism is social darwinism and is a description of how resources get distributed under contention due to scarcity. It doesn't need defending. It also can't be stopped. So it doesn't care if you believe in it or not. But the rampant corruption and crony/late-stage capitalism we live under today has metastasized. And most people don't know it. I'm sure that 50% of the people reading this are just fine with the status quo. They have high incomes and can take care of their families and that's great. What they probably aren't thinking about on a conscious level is that the median income for individuals globally is right at $10,000 annually. An American making $36,000 is already standing on 3 other people's backs. HN viewers making $100,000-$250,000 are standing on about 10-25 people. A billionaire making $100 million stands on 10,000 people. Our uber-rich stand on 1 million people or more. So what we think of as buying a $30,000 automobile and spending that again on fuel and maintenance steals 6 years of someone's life, not to mention the life lost by the owner working to make payments. A $300,000 home ($600,000 with mortgage interest) steals 60 years of life. A house is someone else's lifetime. You can see where I'm going with this. It's not so much that we can't imagine a life without fossil fuels. That's actually pretty easy: solar panels on our roofs and electric cars, home hydroponic robotic gardens, recycling of all things (even landfills), off-grid living. Solarpunk. It's that we can't imagine ourselves at the bottom of the capitalist pyramid, toiling our lives away so that someone somewhere can be wealthy at our expense, forever separated from financial stability and self-actualization like the 7 billion people propping up the billion people in "developed" countries. So we project our generational trauma onto the people we depend on most. That's what the Russia-Ukraine war is about. That's why the Middle East can't seem to get left alone. That's why the Global South struggles to eat. That's why we're seeing continuous decline in all things from economics to health to the environment. That's why we won't solve global climate change. And that's why the most likely future currently is a dystopian one. We can't change the world, but we can change ourselves. As we each pull ourselves up by our bootstraps since the wealthy do nothing about any of this, we begin to manifest a viable future. Personally I have stopped fantasizing about disruption and winning the internet lottery. Now I meditate on how to bring $10,000 of resources to every single person in the world through automation to free humanity from forced labor and enter the New Age.
booleandilemma 3y ago
It's weird to say, but we should crash the economy if it can slow down climate change. If global warming is in fact a conspiracy made up by foreign actors to destabilize the west, man, have they got you.
ITB 3y ago
You’re not being practical, hence you’re not adding any value to the conversation. How exactly would you slow the world down?
crazygringo 3y ago
"Crashing the economy" is literally the worst thing you could do to fix climate change. Even in a stagnant economy, people are still commuting to and from work in their gas-guzzling cars, and heating their homes in the winter. CO2 emissions aren't going to change a ton. But what a stagnant economy does is prevent any kind of investment in renewable energy and electrification, because there's no excess money to use for investment. A stagnant economy is not installing solar panels, replacing ICE cars with electric and installing new charging stations nationwide, or replacing boilers with heat pumps. And if we want to hasten the changes to renewable energy and electrification, that's what government policy is for -- via subsidies for desired technologies, heavier taxation for undesired ones, and regulation. "Crashing the economy" to slow down climate change is like cutting university faculty by half in order to combat grade inflation. It doesn't make any sense.
- mempko 3y ago
  You don't need private investment to do electrification and renewable energy. That can be done by the government. Which doesn't have funding problems, ever.
  - crazygringo 3y ago
    The government isn't inventing electric cars or improving heat pumps or improving batteries or making solar panels more efficient to produce. You absolutely still need private investment in a growing economy to produce and invent these technologies. What the government incentives then can do is speed up their rates of adoption and installation. But you need both sides -- public and private.
    - amrocha 3y ago
      The government is literally doing that by funding research. The government can fund literally anything it wants to. Private investment is literally never necessary.
      - crazygringo 3y ago
3seashells 3y ago
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pentae 3y ago
I'm going to guess you've never spent much time outside the bubble of the first world. After living extensively overseas in Latin America & South-east Asia and seeing how its part of everyday life for most people in the rest of the world to openly burn trash, plastics, car tyres.. litter everywhere, cutting the cat converters off their trucks, dumping construction waste straight into rivers.. it's been eye opening. Nobody in Asia is dropping plastic bags or single use plastic straws unless its a cafe for hippy white tourists. Meanwhile, educated people in western countries are incredibly eco-conscious, have excellent modern waste management, have amazing huge national parks and conservation areas, clean waterways or have nets to prevent plastics entering the oceans.. are 'banning' gasoline cars by 2030.. and the air quality! Amazing. The truth is 85% of the worlds population just doesn't care enough at all about the environment and no amount of western policy making will fix the problem. And only an ignorant college educated person from the first would assume that their 'solutions' will be exported globally. sorry to break it to you but the rest of the world doesn’t have any interest in that. The middle/upper class whites you seem to deride so much are actually participating in one of the most eco friendly societies on earth
- freen 3y ago
  Personal responsibility for environmental issues is a fiction peddled by the biggest polluters. The moment you think an individual is going to make any sort of a difference through minor changes in behavior, you have already lost the plot.
- thomasahle 3y ago
  "But it's you reduce the economy, think of what it will do to the poor!" it's incredible how ritch people will happily push the poor in front of them when it's beneficial. The fact is "emmisions per capita" is heavily correlated with "gdp per capita": https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-emissions-vs-gdp https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-emissions-vs-gdp The "educated people in western countries [who] are incredibly eco-conscious" emit way more co2 than "85% of the worlds population".
  - rayiner 3y ago
29athrowaway 3y ago
What politician would you vote for? Politician A) The one that promises you more economic comfort in the short term Politician B) The one that promises you sustainability (i.e.: not necessarily growth) Most people will vote for Politician A. Because most families in this culture want prosperity so they have more income to have a "better lifestyle" (consume more). The problem is that a better lifestyle means a higher environmental footprint. That brings us to the realization that at some point in time we became an ecocidal invasive species, and having good historians and a good public relations team won't change that in the actually true and objective historic record: the geological and fossil record, which will be the only one that will remain after we starve ourselves to death. In that record we will see how after the arrival of the behaviorally modern human, especially after the industrial revolution, all species above certain weight started dying. We look down at tribal peoples with dumb narratives such as "they are not making an efficient use of the land". Well, 200 years after the industrial revolution we are learning that the industrial mindset is collective suicide, and perhaps there was something that the tribal peoples were doing correctly, measured in terms of KPIs such as carbon emissions, topsoil, biodiversity, etc. And the solution is a) reducing our environmental footprint (which is impossible with a growth-oriented industrial mindset) or b) resist growth or c) reduce our population. b) and c) will never be supported by the population. We will have to rewrite history and rethink the way we educate people, accepting that the industrial revolution was progress in terms of consumption but it was a massive setback in terms of sustainability. i.e.: it is a progress trap, or in simpler terms, it doesn't fucking work. We are just immature people playing with a credit card and thinking we can afford everything. But everything you spend you'll have to pay later, with interest, and that time is arriving at an increasingly faster rate. We are living lavish lifestyles at the expense of the future generations. Political leadership doesn't have an answer, neither do corporations. The media serves those groups, so the solution won't come from them either. I predict that once strong AI is here, elites will not have a reason to collaborate and share resources with the masses, and will have no incentive to share political representation. Plus, the agriculture supply chain is highly centralized and corporations can cause a famine any time they want.
isthispermanent 3y ago
Society would grind to an abrupt halt if you cut oil production by even 20%. Of course, if you did that red meat and cheap air fare would go away on their own. That this is the most upvoted comment shows just how far most people wander from reality.
salmonfamine 3y ago
You're right that emissions-per-capita in Western countries are unsustainable, and that consumer demand is out of step with the true cost of fuel, meat, etc. But how exactly would any country succeed in deliberately destroying their own economy? They would face revolts, civil unrest, and the economic vacuum left behind would simply open the door for any country that doesn't play along to gain a monopoly on forbidden economic growth, and potentially establish their own global hegemony. No economic system has ever had "fair" or equal distributions of wealth, and no system will ever have a fair distribution of carbon emissions either.
wernercd 3y ago
"if it can" you have proof that it can and will? this is the same "it's worth anything" arguments where "maybe" is treated as "it will happen" while ignoring the negative aspects (IE: human suffering, facts that poor people are worse for the economy, green tech is made from worse than carbon and is creating megatons of unrecyclable stuff like windmill blades and solar panels, etc. Nothing like putting the lives of people on the chopping block for an "if" in response to a religious belief that "carbon is evil".
acdha 3y ago
> It's weird to say, but we should crash the economy if it can slow down climate change. I mean there are plenty people in other parts of the world who don't have such a high standard of living, and it's not that big of a problem. The thing is, we have no reason to believe halting climate will do anything other than boost the economy. The reason for inaction despite the fact that it’ll make tons of new jobs, and remove major consumer costs and widespread reductions to health & quality of life caused by cars, is that certain specific sectors of the economy will shrink. The fossil fuel industry has spent half a century funding science deniers and consolidating their political power to prevent action on climate change or their pollution. They’re not acting on behalf of the entire economy, just their shareholders. A simple example: beef is a solid order of magnitude worse than other common protein sources (with the possible exception of lamb in some countries). We could see huge reductions in our food-related emissions simply by eating pork or chicken instead, and almost nobody would say that’s an intolerable lifestyle hit but the beef industry isn’t going to let that happen easily because it’s bad for their revenue even if it’d mean most people save money.
- iamegypt 3y ago
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  - acdha 3y ago
    > It's absolutely not given that removing beef from our diet would make things much better. It is - the food input & land requirements are less efficient - and it’s absurd to say that eating pork or chicken instead is so miserable that people won’t abide it.
    - burnernumber9 3y ago
      > It is - the food input & land requirements are less efficient you are assuming that everything else will stay the same, which is a very common bias. > say that eating pork or chicken instead is so miserable that people won’t abide it. there are literally billions of people that do not eat various specific foods and beverages in conformity with various religious, cultural, legal or other societal prohibitions. Try to convince your neighbor to eat dog instead of beef.
rayiner 3y ago
> I mean there are plenty people in other parts of the world who don't have such a high standard of living, and it's not that big of a problem. As someone from Bangladesh—average CO2 emissions under 1 ton per person—I can confirm that it sucks and conservation is a stupid way of mitigating climate change. The anti-development people are just evil. When my dad was a kid in Bangladesh, 1 out of 5 kids died before age 5. Capitalism and development brought us up to similar levels to where the US was in the 1970s in just one generation.
tarsinge 3y ago
Slashing oil production by 50% in western economies is not a reduction in lifestyle it’s a full collapse with a huge number of collateral death. But still you have a partial point: health/life expectancy and happiness have already started to decorrelate with the economy in the US, and US people consume more resources than other western economies with obviously better material outcome but no better quality of life outcome. This point to solutions were conversely it should then be possible to maintain standard of living with a decrease in the energy consumption. Red meat and leisure only air travel are indeed good candidates because you can live a very happy, healthy and fulfilled life without them. Same with cars weighting 1000 pounds less, putting a sweater in winter at home, having denser city centers with public transportation, etc… This is not about left or right, this is about having an open look at some ideologies with data. It’s always hard to accept when people make economical theories a part of their identity and values, this a religious crisis for them not a simple discussion.
postmodest 3y ago
At this point we are in some sort of 'space station ecosystem collapse' situation and we need to start acting like it and completely change how capitalism works. So... we're fucked.
jtc331 3y ago
> It's weird to say, but we should crash the economy if it can slow down climate change. To save humanity we should destroy humanity. No thanks.
the_optimist 3y ago
Is there perhaps nothing at all we should refrain from i the name climate change? Reset humanity to zero.
beefield 3y ago
> It's weird to say, but we should crash the economy if it can slow down climate change. It can't. I did the numbers some time ago [1], and they are bad. If you take electricity as a proxy, western countries consume something like 5 times as much as the global average per capita. So if we are willing to let the poorest to get to the global average while not cutting global consumption at all, the west should reduce their consumption by something like 80%. That's not crashing the economy. Thats... destroying the society most likely. There are two solutions: 1. We force the global poor to stay poor. 2. We figure out how to make lots more stuff sustainably than we currently do. Feel free to make your choise. Reducing consumption in the west is not going to make a dent anywhere and should be not on your list of worries if you choose 2. Edit, add [1]: I don't habe the numbers now but you can replicate it pretty easly by taking population and electricity consumption data by country from wikipedia.
akira2501 3y ago
> Western rich countries have too many really spoiled consumers. That's because I live in a market economy and I have no desire to live in your planned economy without any democratic process in place to represent me. > but we should crash the economy if it can slow down climate change. "We should make decisions that will kill people and shorten their life expectancy, because I believe there aren't any other compromises that can be made to impact pollution." Yea.. it's is weird to say, it's also demented and inhumane. > And yes, I don't believe it's only rich people, it's also middle class people who generate a lot of emissions, and I'm a leftist. And the rest of the world that hasn't developed yet? We still just don't spare any thoughts for them at all.
Gareth321 3y ago
Poor people don’t have the luxury of caring about the environment. Making people poorer is guaranteed to make things worse. I don’t think we need to make everyone’s lives worse. It’s not politically viable. We don’t need to give up computers and well insulated homes and medicine. Technology will help us reduce pollution and emissions. It’s just going to take time.
ctoth 3y ago
Let's walk through this hypothetical scenario with a modicum of realism First and foremost, there's no way to transition our complex society through such an energy bottleneck of this nature without massive unrest. You will literally be killing people and causing mass starvation, so the very first thing that happens is everyone who loses someone or otherwise is hurt by the new regime instantly rebels and you have the largest energy war in history. Seven billion people? That's just an abstract number to you, I suppose, and of course you will be one of the people who figures things out, why you're a "leftist!" as you told us so being on the right side of history will save you :) but in Reallandistan, the amount of human suffering you just released, the amount of ancient ills which we have finally, as a species , put to bed which you casually reawakened instantly flare up. But what are several billion dead people? We're saving the planet here! Do you honestly, really, in the deep quiet parts of your mind, think that it would be better to kill billions than to solve environmental and other problems, as we have been, better and better with technology? I fundamentally disagree with this inhumane approach and want nothing to do with those who might advocate it.
concordDance 3y ago
China releases more CO2 than the US, EU, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand combined. The West has become really good at reducing emissions and environmental impact. Yes, a fair portion of that reduction is consuming CO2 intensive products made in China rather than locally, but even taking that into account the developed world is probably still less CO2 producing than the developing world.
stainablesteel 3y ago
[flagged]
timwaagh 3y ago
This sort of fanaticism is why there is no progress on this issue. Let's start by banning low hanging fruit like cryptocurrencies, private jets and superyachts. If it's insufficient we might have to do more, like build sufficient high speed rail and force the third world to contain their population boom, because if that isn't contained nothing will work. Only then would it be reasonable to go after ordinary people.
andrewjl 3y ago
> It's weird to say, but we should crash the economy if it can slow down climate change. That's a direct path to armed conflict. Those aren't great in the reduce CO2 emissions and cut down on resource consumption departments.

by jokoon 3y ago

jmondi 3y ago

And what about all the countries that won’t do anything regardless? So we should just tank our own economy while being unable to do anything about our neighbors? It won’t take tanking the economy, it would take world war 3.

micromacrofoot 3y ago
“I won’t stop because they won’t stop” is going to destroy the planet
- jmondi 3y ago
  It is a collective effort. If you don’t realize that, you will not get anywhere in your goals of reducing climate change.
  - verisimi 3y ago
    Isn't it funny that the only option is going to be greater government, that forces its citizens to act against their own interests? The real winner in this situation is government! (Exclamation mark, but I'm not actually surprised.) You have to wonder whether this is a self-serving agenda for those who run it.
    - verisimi 3y ago
      and who are the World Meteorological Organization? > The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for promoting international cooperation on atmospheric science, climatology, hydrology and geophysics. from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Meteorological_Organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Meteorological_Organizat... Ok - so its the UN. The UN is an UNelected body that presents itself as the face of world government. > The United Nations (UN) is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and serve as a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations The unprecedented disaster is the increase in global governance!
  - micromacrofoot 3y ago
    collective efforts don’t always start simultaneously!
stavros 3y ago
> So we should just tank our own economy while being unable to do anything about our neighbors? Yes.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- jmondi 3y ago
  You seem smart.
  - stavros 3y ago
    I'm glad you agree, it did seem the dumber choice to continue driving at full speed into a brick wall just because the driver next to me won't brake first.
    - batch12 3y ago
      I think the right metaphor to demonstrate the argument being made is you are coupled to the other car and it doesn't matter if you turn off your engine, you're both hitting the wall anyway if the other car doesn't decide to stop too.
      - amrocha 3y ago
        So you better turn off the engine and then hope the other drivers turns theirs off too. In what world is doing nothing the right choice?
        batch12 3y ago
        I don't know if hope is enough. I don't think people are willing to be miserable for hope- especially when there is no reasonable expectation that others would stop.
        amrocha 3y ago
mdale 3y ago
Why does a green transformation have to "tank" the economy? Can't we have green economic revival ? Would it not create more jobs to transition faster ?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- jmondi 3y ago
  It doesn’t. Both sides need to work together towards a common goal. If only one side is doing it, nothing will change.
- vel0city 3y ago
  More jobs = more consumption = more resources. Their idea is for people to consume far less, therefore own less. If people own and consume less there's less incomes. Don't own a house, only rent a small apartment in a dense urban setting. Don't own the means to your own transportation, only get by with walking and transit. Price meats so high most people can't afford them regularly.
  - kmeisthax 3y ago
    Two out of the three things you mention are so 'undesirable' that the few dense walkable urban areas in the US are more expensive than living in the suburbs. There's a reason why left-wingers use the word "gentrification" a whole lot. In many cases suburban home and car ownership is actually cheaper than the traditional urban lifestyle, for various reasons including but not limited to: 1. Supply being limited because America outlawed dense urban construction decades ago. Dense cities cannot legally expand to meet demand and building up gets more expensive and unrealistic after a certain number of floors. 2. People in suburbs being further away from lucrative jobs - i.e. proximity to one's work is priced into the cost of the home. 3. Various government subsidies and tax credits that distort the market to produce more resource-intensive suburban housing.
    - vel0city 3y ago
      "America" didn't outlaw the expansion, the cities did it to themselves. The cities are in charge of their zoning and planning, not the federal government. They could allow for more density, but the voters choose no. Just look at all the nimbys fighting apartment complexes; are they all goons from faceless corporations and the federal government or are they just the local people currently living there expressing their choice? It's not like the government subsidies and tax credits exist even though nobody wants them. They exist because, once again, that's what voters have suggested they want when they go to the polls. I do agree, cities should be able to expand their density. I think in an ideal world people should be able to choose to live in generally affordable forms of whatever housing they want. And that's the thing, I'd like to be able to choose the housing style I think is good for my family. Many here would argue I shouldn't be able to make that choice, or that some choices (like single family homes) should be made so expensive most people can't afford it.
dazc 3y ago
It's all making sense now, only WW3 can save us.
- jmondi 3y ago
  It’s all making sense now, we kill half the population today by stopping all oil consumption so then maybe in the future they won’t die.

cscurmudgeon 3y ago

1. How do you know these people are from the West? 2. Crashing the economy may make things worse as people may move to cheaper more polluting options. 3. Also any crashing has to be global if implemented. If the West implements this, will China implement it too? Otherwise, it is useless. 4. We have to get out of the outdated/silly notion that the economy is inversely proportional to a clean planet. E.g., cleaner cars cost more than older polluting cars. So if more cleaner cars are bought, that implies economic growth as well as less pollution. Same for building mass transit. There will be a ton of upfront pollution.

huntertwo 3y ago

You realize that would cause countless death _today_ if you don’t replace the oil with something else? People will starve, become homeless, and maybe anarchy will reign. Not just in the developed world but globally.

edhelas 3y ago
Sounds like what will actually happen _tomorrow_ if we don't act radically _now_.
- RandomLensman 3y ago
  Nothing of that sort will happen "tomorrow", and even if true it would not justify genocidal policies today.
  - ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
    The true genocidal policy is to continue dumping CO2 into the atmosphere in increasing amounts. Personally, I feel it is more honest for us to deal with the outcomes of what "we" are doing now, rather than just leaving it for our children to deal with.
    - RandomLensman 3y ago
      The future is fundamentally uncertain. Climate change will be addressed but not by corporate welfare programs like net zero nor by impoverishing rich populations. The idea that the simplistic socio-economic models/pathways are in any way right or predictive was just a fantasy.
      - netsharc 3y ago
        > The future is fundamentally uncertain. Climate change will be addressed but not by corporate welfare programs like net zero nor by impoverishing rich populations. This is very wishful thinking. It's like a doc telling you your body is collapsing due to lung cancer, you need to stop smoking, and you answering "the future is fundemantally uncertain, I'm sure something will come along and figure out this cancer for me, got a light?"

ZeroFries 3y ago

Have you done the cost:benefit analysis? Curious what makes you so confident that "crashing the economy" (you're aware of all the excess death and despair this would cause?) is the best move here.

dtech 3y ago
I mean it's pretty obvious that our current situation is already causing death and despair (droughts, wildfires, hurricanes) and this will only increase on our current trajectory.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- replygirl 3y ago
  right, now imagine the hysteria that would come from doing that actively and intentionally to everyone on an accelerated schedule. thwarting cancer by downing a bottle of cyanide
  - gbanfalvi 3y ago
    I'd say it's more like thwarting cancer with chemotherapy: an unpleasant experience necessary for survival.
    - replygirl 3y ago
      the analogy doesn't hold for me. my mom just finished chemo the other week, and it definitely wasn't close in effect to what she'd've dealt with otherwise. she went on living her life as usual, minus some household chores
- gls2ro 3y ago
  I am not sure crashing the economy is a viable solution. I say this because what I learned so far is that is people will start being cold and hungry then they will focus on immediate needs and that will make sure that no money will be spent on solving climate change. This is a natural instinct: you cannot think about the future if your current situation is suffering.

Sanctity6820 3y ago

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peoplefromibiza 3y ago

> and it's not that big of a problem. it actually is and it's really big. Not to say that we shouldn't reduce our consumerism, but not by lowering our living standards. It would immediately harm if not kill the weakest/poorer segments of every Country's population.

ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
I'm fairly sure that living standards will be lowered by floods, fires and other climate catastrophes. Not doing enough to stop CO2 production will result in a lot of lowered living standards, including making some areas of the world uninhabitable without air conditioning etc.
- peoplefromibiza 3y ago
  > I'm fairly sure that living standards will be lowered by floods No, it won't as badly. Doomerism is not a valid rational point of view. Most of all, floods would happen anyway, so you'll have floods + lower standards of living, including much worse emergency services. we are not at the brink of extinction and people lived and prospered in almost unhabitable lands long before we had the technology to regulate the temperature. like for example Northern United Kingdom. But are also living today in the middle of deserts, with no AC. Of course we should cut on emissions werever it is possible, worst offenders being fossil fuels. Edit: on a side note the reason why your proposal will never work is because cutting on emissions is actually easy. For example let's stop keeping pets at home. Pets that usually eat a lot of red meat. It is feasible, won't lower living standards and won't cost much to society. Now convince people that their cat eats more meat in a year than a Chinese average person and that's not sustainable.
  - ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
    > we are not at the brink of extinction and people lived and prospered in almost unhabitable lands long before we had the technology to regulate the temperature. It's relatively simple (though not necessarily easy) to live in a cold area if you have access to furs and fuel. Trying to survive in an area where the wet bulb temperature is over 35 degrees will require reliable air conditioning and working outside will become virtually impossible for humans. > Edit: on a side note the reason why your proposal will never work is because cutting o. emissions s it's actually easy. For example let's stop keeping let's at home. Pets that usually eat a lot of red meat. It is feasible, won't lower living standards and won't cost much to society. Now convince people that their cat eats more meat in a year than a Chinese average person and that's not sustainable. That reads as gibberish.

mrcwinn 3y ago

Look around. Everyone on earth wants to maintain a standard of living. Governments are toppled over this. And yet it is the largest economy that is objectively slowing its share of contributed emissions. And it’s the largest exhibit that is helping to drive the innovation needed to solve this problem, alongside incredible people from all parts of the globe. I wish we weren’t dealing with this. I wish there had been a better, more cost effective way to grow. Maybe if you or I hadn’t been born, our emissions might lower enough to make the difference. But I’d suggest now isn’t the time to count scores. We need to stay focused and continue the work. Despite our flaws we are all worth saving.

black_13 3y ago
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zetsurin 3y ago
I'm not disagreeing with your conclusions... >And yet it is the largest economy that is objectively slowing its share of contributed emissions. These largest economy's also contributed the most over their history, which seems reasonable grounds for contributing more and helping other economies come up to that standard of living w/o making the same contributions
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  As a US citizen, I’d be happy for us to stand up (ie fully fund) a “solarcorps,” where we send folks to help build out renewable infra in developing countries subsidized or free. Your country provides the local labor who will be paid fair wages, we’ll provide hardware and know how. Conversely, if that help is not accepted and they keep building coal plants (or similar “business as usual”), punitive economic policies are enacted. The carrot is welcome, but sometimes the stick is needed. People are tricky, but physical systems don’t give AF. Simultaneously, the developed world should partner with China to stoke uptake of EVs globally, and rapidly destroy the market for fossil powered mobility (although there is strong evidence we're rapidly approaching a tipping point wrt EV sales [1]). TLDR War time effort without the war. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-28/electric-cars-pass-a-crucial-tipping-point-in-23-countries https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-28/electric-... | https://archive.ph/jakiU https://archive.ph/jakiU

quonn 3y ago

„It's weird to say, but we should crash the economy if it can slow down climate change.“ You can do this exactly once. Afterwards the cause will be severely discredited and no candidate doing even moderate climate change policies will be able to be elected. In short this is stupid.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

lr4444lr 3y ago

> there are plenty people in other parts of the world who don't have such a high standard of living, and it's not that big of a problem. Go live like that for 6 months and get back to us: food insecurity, inadequate healthcare, and few civil services or safety net. Those other countries are not net zero pollution either. You wanna crash the economy? How then will we develop the innovations to fix this problem? Can't believe this comment is top rated.

moritzwarhier 3y ago
I upvoted you, but IMO: - private cars and their usage are too cheap - air travel is too cheap - producing garbage is to cheap - politics is top centered around providing infinte fuel for "growth" instead of distributing resources rationally Yes, this is a political opinion. The stunt many people do is pretending that climate denialism and politics centered on fueling growth are not a political opinion but "rational" and sustainable.
- lr4444lr 3y ago
  Agreed, both on the whole and in the details. But if I'm forced into the "either/or" mindset of the OP of a hypothetical choice to shrink GDP by 1% by stopping all vacation car travel or deficit spend 1% GDP as a "Manhattan Project" to get lab grown beef commercially viable, I'm voting for the latter.
  - moritzwarhier 3y ago
    The latter sounds like fantasy though, and it's not the lab-grown meat per se I'm talking about. Also I wasn't talking about car usage exclusively during vacations, I was explicitly talking about private car usage. People literally get governmental subsidies for building homes in the suburbs, then commute by car and pollute the planet in order to avoid car traffic. Anyone who fails to see the absurdity of this has drank too much Kool-aid for my taste.
- concordDance 3y ago
  If your issue is global warming you should be campaigning for electric cars rather than against private cars. But I suspect you actually dislike cars in and of themselves, even if they could be grown on trees and powered by banana skins.

jader201 3y ago

> we should crash the economy if it can slow down climate change This really shouldn’t be the top comment on this thread without some sort of reference to cost/benefit analysis to back it up. Otherwise this appears to be an overly extreme solution to give climate deniers fuel to not listen to more reasonable solutions.

briansm 3y ago
It's not like anyone on this message board has a little 'crash the economy' button on their keyboard.
- jader201 3y ago
  I’m mostly arguing that this feels like an extremist view, and in the realm of “let’s look for real solutions to the problem”, this doesn’t feel like it should be the most upvoted one in this thread.

talldatethrow 3y ago

.."and I'm a leftist." No kidding.

moomoo11 3y ago

This line of thinking is why I never vote for leftists.

HAL3000 3y ago

> It's odd how everytime somebody mentions slashing oil production by 50 or 75%, people are immediately up in arms. Maybe because they understand the immediate consequences of such an action and you don't. That's why 0 leaders around the world are proposing that kind of solutions because everyone that knows how world works, how supply chains work and what kind of environment is needed for people to elect leaders like Hitler. You want WWIII? The best way to do it is crashing the world economy. > I mean there are plenty people in other parts of the world who don't have such a high standard of living, and it's not that big of a problem. Good luck with that, people didn't work so hard in the west to now switching to 3rd world country standards. Climate change is a common knowledge, there are green parties in almost every country, if people really wanted to change their way of living they would vote for them but they don't. Clearly they are waiting for a technical miracle to happen or just don't care. So what does it mean? It means that winter is coming and you should prepare for it. None of the newest models show that we can avoid first level of catastrophe even if we stop all the emissions. Millions or tens of millions of people will die, hundreds of millions will try to migrate. At this stage it's not a question of if but when. Life is not a Hollywood movie.

dv_dt 3y ago

Slashing oil production only works if we make serious investments in other energy infrastructure. It’s only tangentially about “standard of living” - it’s about how you even supply food and other basics of living if you cut off current energy systems. And while we have made renewable energy investments to some degree - it’s at a dilettante level for show instead of being serious about it. Renewable infrastructure investments should be made highly favored financial investments to accelerate its manufacture and installation. Even with large government financing it would save money and lives. And energy production is only a part of it, investments also need to be favored for restructuring our economy to alter high energy habits like individual commutes in cars vs bikes buses and trains.

zackmorris 3y ago

You aren't that far off. Young people today can see the writing on the wall: for the first time in history, we have scientific evidence that continuing with capitalism will bring the end of the world. We'll have to choose between continuing with colonial subjugation of the working class by the owner class for another eon or revolution by spiritual enlightenment to take us to an egalitarian future like Star Trek. Now I'm not anti-capitalist, because capitalism is social darwinism and is a description of how resources get distributed under contention due to scarcity. It doesn't need defending. It also can't be stopped. So it doesn't care if you believe in it or not. But the rampant corruption and crony/late-stage capitalism we live under today has metastasized. And most people don't know it. I'm sure that 50% of the people reading this are just fine with the status quo. They have high incomes and can take care of their families and that's great. What they probably aren't thinking about on a conscious level is that the median income for individuals globally is right at $10,000 annually. An American making $36,000 is already standing on 3 other people's backs. HN viewers making $100,000-$250,000 are standing on about 10-25 people. A billionaire making $100 million stands on 10,000 people. Our uber-rich stand on 1 million people or more. So what we think of as buying a $30,000 automobile and spending that again on fuel and maintenance steals 6 years of someone's life, not to mention the life lost by the owner working to make payments. A $300,000 home ($600,000 with mortgage interest) steals 60 years of life. A house is someone else's lifetime. You can see where I'm going with this. It's not so much that we can't imagine a life without fossil fuels. That's actually pretty easy: solar panels on our roofs and electric cars, home hydroponic robotic gardens, recycling of all things (even landfills), off-grid living. Solarpunk. It's that we can't imagine ourselves at the bottom of the capitalist pyramid, toiling our lives away so that someone somewhere can be wealthy at our expense, forever separated from financial stability and self-actualization like the 7 billion people propping up the billion people in "developed" countries. So we project our generational trauma onto the people we depend on most. That's what the Russia-Ukraine war is about. That's why the Middle East can't seem to get left alone. That's why the Global South struggles to eat. That's why we're seeing continuous decline in all things from economics to health to the environment. That's why we won't solve global climate change. And that's why the most likely future currently is a dystopian one. We can't change the world, but we can change ourselves. As we each pull ourselves up by our bootstraps since the wealthy do nothing about any of this, we begin to manifest a viable future. Personally I have stopped fantasizing about disruption and winning the internet lottery. Now I meditate on how to bring $10,000 of resources to every single person in the world through automation to free humanity from forced labor and enter the New Age.

booleandilemma 3y ago

It's weird to say, but we should crash the economy if it can slow down climate change. If global warming is in fact a conspiracy made up by foreign actors to destabilize the west, man, have they got you.

ITB 3y ago

You’re not being practical, hence you’re not adding any value to the conversation. How exactly would you slow the world down?

crazygringo 3y ago

"Crashing the economy" is literally the worst thing you could do to fix climate change. Even in a stagnant economy, people are still commuting to and from work in their gas-guzzling cars, and heating their homes in the winter. CO2 emissions aren't going to change a ton. But what a stagnant economy does is prevent any kind of investment in renewable energy and electrification, because there's no excess money to use for investment. A stagnant economy is not installing solar panels, replacing ICE cars with electric and installing new charging stations nationwide, or replacing boilers with heat pumps. And if we want to hasten the changes to renewable energy and electrification, that's what government policy is for -- via subsidies for desired technologies, heavier taxation for undesired ones, and regulation. "Crashing the economy" to slow down climate change is like cutting university faculty by half in order to combat grade inflation. It doesn't make any sense.

mempko 3y ago
You don't need private investment to do electrification and renewable energy. That can be done by the government. Which doesn't have funding problems, ever.
- crazygringo 3y ago
  The government isn't inventing electric cars or improving heat pumps or improving batteries or making solar panels more efficient to produce. You absolutely still need private investment in a growing economy to produce and invent these technologies. What the government incentives then can do is speed up their rates of adoption and installation. But you need both sides -- public and private.
  - amrocha 3y ago
    The government is literally doing that by funding research. The government can fund literally anything it wants to. Private investment is literally never necessary.
    - crazygringo 3y ago

3seashells 3y ago

[flagged]

pentae 3y ago

I'm going to guess you've never spent much time outside the bubble of the first world. After living extensively overseas in Latin America & South-east Asia and seeing how its part of everyday life for most people in the rest of the world to openly burn trash, plastics, car tyres.. litter everywhere, cutting the cat converters off their trucks, dumping construction waste straight into rivers.. it's been eye opening. Nobody in Asia is dropping plastic bags or single use plastic straws unless its a cafe for hippy white tourists. Meanwhile, educated people in western countries are incredibly eco-conscious, have excellent modern waste management, have amazing huge national parks and conservation areas, clean waterways or have nets to prevent plastics entering the oceans.. are 'banning' gasoline cars by 2030.. and the air quality! Amazing. The truth is 85% of the worlds population just doesn't care enough at all about the environment and no amount of western policy making will fix the problem. And only an ignorant college educated person from the first would assume that their 'solutions' will be exported globally. sorry to break it to you but the rest of the world doesn’t have any interest in that. The middle/upper class whites you seem to deride so much are actually participating in one of the most eco friendly societies on earth

freen 3y ago
Personal responsibility for environmental issues is a fiction peddled by the biggest polluters. The moment you think an individual is going to make any sort of a difference through minor changes in behavior, you have already lost the plot.
thomasahle 3y ago
"But it's you reduce the economy, think of what it will do to the poor!" it's incredible how ritch people will happily push the poor in front of them when it's beneficial. The fact is "emmisions per capita" is heavily correlated with "gdp per capita": https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-emissions-vs-gdp https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-emissions-vs-gdp The "educated people in western countries [who] are incredibly eco-conscious" emit way more co2 than "85% of the worlds population".
- rayiner 3y ago

29athrowaway 3y ago

What politician would you vote for? Politician A) The one that promises you more economic comfort in the short term Politician B) The one that promises you sustainability (i.e.: not necessarily growth) Most people will vote for Politician A. Because most families in this culture want prosperity so they have more income to have a "better lifestyle" (consume more). The problem is that a better lifestyle means a higher environmental footprint. That brings us to the realization that at some point in time we became an ecocidal invasive species, and having good historians and a good public relations team won't change that in the actually true and objective historic record: the geological and fossil record, which will be the only one that will remain after we starve ourselves to death. In that record we will see how after the arrival of the behaviorally modern human, especially after the industrial revolution, all species above certain weight started dying. We look down at tribal peoples with dumb narratives such as "they are not making an efficient use of the land". Well, 200 years after the industrial revolution we are learning that the industrial mindset is collective suicide, and perhaps there was something that the tribal peoples were doing correctly, measured in terms of KPIs such as carbon emissions, topsoil, biodiversity, etc. And the solution is a) reducing our environmental footprint (which is impossible with a growth-oriented industrial mindset) or b) resist growth or c) reduce our population. b) and c) will never be supported by the population. We will have to rewrite history and rethink the way we educate people, accepting that the industrial revolution was progress in terms of consumption but it was a massive setback in terms of sustainability. i.e.: it is a progress trap, or in simpler terms, it doesn't fucking work. We are just immature people playing with a credit card and thinking we can afford everything. But everything you spend you'll have to pay later, with interest, and that time is arriving at an increasingly faster rate. We are living lavish lifestyles at the expense of the future generations. Political leadership doesn't have an answer, neither do corporations. The media serves those groups, so the solution won't come from them either. I predict that once strong AI is here, elites will not have a reason to collaborate and share resources with the masses, and will have no incentive to share political representation. Plus, the agriculture supply chain is highly centralized and corporations can cause a famine any time they want.

isthispermanent 3y ago

Society would grind to an abrupt halt if you cut oil production by even 20%. Of course, if you did that red meat and cheap air fare would go away on their own. That this is the most upvoted comment shows just how far most people wander from reality.

salmonfamine 3y ago

You're right that emissions-per-capita in Western countries are unsustainable, and that consumer demand is out of step with the true cost of fuel, meat, etc. But how exactly would any country succeed in deliberately destroying their own economy? They would face revolts, civil unrest, and the economic vacuum left behind would simply open the door for any country that doesn't play along to gain a monopoly on forbidden economic growth, and potentially establish their own global hegemony. No economic system has ever had "fair" or equal distributions of wealth, and no system will ever have a fair distribution of carbon emissions either.

wernercd 3y ago

"if it can" you have proof that it can and will? this is the same "it's worth anything" arguments where "maybe" is treated as "it will happen" while ignoring the negative aspects (IE: human suffering, facts that poor people are worse for the economy, green tech is made from worse than carbon and is creating megatons of unrecyclable stuff like windmill blades and solar panels, etc. Nothing like putting the lives of people on the chopping block for an "if" in response to a religious belief that "carbon is evil".

acdha 3y ago

> It's weird to say, but we should crash the economy if it can slow down climate change. I mean there are plenty people in other parts of the world who don't have such a high standard of living, and it's not that big of a problem. The thing is, we have no reason to believe halting climate will do anything other than boost the economy. The reason for inaction despite the fact that it’ll make tons of new jobs, and remove major consumer costs and widespread reductions to health & quality of life caused by cars, is that certain specific sectors of the economy will shrink. The fossil fuel industry has spent half a century funding science deniers and consolidating their political power to prevent action on climate change or their pollution. They’re not acting on behalf of the entire economy, just their shareholders. A simple example: beef is a solid order of magnitude worse than other common protein sources (with the possible exception of lamb in some countries). We could see huge reductions in our food-related emissions simply by eating pork or chicken instead, and almost nobody would say that’s an intolerable lifestyle hit but the beef industry isn’t going to let that happen easily because it’s bad for their revenue even if it’d mean most people save money.

iamegypt 3y ago
[flagged]
- acdha 3y ago
  > It's absolutely not given that removing beef from our diet would make things much better. It is - the food input & land requirements are less efficient - and it’s absurd to say that eating pork or chicken instead is so miserable that people won’t abide it.
  - burnernumber9 3y ago
    > It is - the food input & land requirements are less efficient you are assuming that everything else will stay the same, which is a very common bias. > say that eating pork or chicken instead is so miserable that people won’t abide it. there are literally billions of people that do not eat various specific foods and beverages in conformity with various religious, cultural, legal or other societal prohibitions. Try to convince your neighbor to eat dog instead of beef.

rayiner 3y ago

> I mean there are plenty people in other parts of the world who don't have such a high standard of living, and it's not that big of a problem. As someone from Bangladesh—average CO2 emissions under 1 ton per person—I can confirm that it sucks and conservation is a stupid way of mitigating climate change. The anti-development people are just evil. When my dad was a kid in Bangladesh, 1 out of 5 kids died before age 5. Capitalism and development brought us up to similar levels to where the US was in the 1970s in just one generation.

tarsinge 3y ago

Slashing oil production by 50% in western economies is not a reduction in lifestyle it’s a full collapse with a huge number of collateral death. But still you have a partial point: health/life expectancy and happiness have already started to decorrelate with the economy in the US, and US people consume more resources than other western economies with obviously better material outcome but no better quality of life outcome. This point to solutions were conversely it should then be possible to maintain standard of living with a decrease in the energy consumption. Red meat and leisure only air travel are indeed good candidates because you can live a very happy, healthy and fulfilled life without them. Same with cars weighting 1000 pounds less, putting a sweater in winter at home, having denser city centers with public transportation, etc… This is not about left or right, this is about having an open look at some ideologies with data. It’s always hard to accept when people make economical theories a part of their identity and values, this a religious crisis for them not a simple discussion.

postmodest 3y ago

At this point we are in some sort of 'space station ecosystem collapse' situation and we need to start acting like it and completely change how capitalism works. So... we're fucked.

jtc331 3y ago

> It's weird to say, but we should crash the economy if it can slow down climate change. To save humanity we should destroy humanity. No thanks.

the_optimist 3y ago

Is there perhaps nothing at all we should refrain from i the name climate change? Reset humanity to zero.

beefield 3y ago

> It's weird to say, but we should crash the economy if it can slow down climate change. It can't. I did the numbers some time ago [1], and they are bad. If you take electricity as a proxy, western countries consume something like 5 times as much as the global average per capita. So if we are willing to let the poorest to get to the global average while not cutting global consumption at all, the west should reduce their consumption by something like 80%. That's not crashing the economy. Thats... destroying the society most likely. There are two solutions: 1. We force the global poor to stay poor. 2. We figure out how to make lots more stuff sustainably than we currently do. Feel free to make your choise. Reducing consumption in the west is not going to make a dent anywhere and should be not on your list of worries if you choose 2. Edit, add [1]: I don't habe the numbers now but you can replicate it pretty easly by taking population and electricity consumption data by country from wikipedia.

akira2501 3y ago

> Western rich countries have too many really spoiled consumers. That's because I live in a market economy and I have no desire to live in your planned economy without any democratic process in place to represent me. > but we should crash the economy if it can slow down climate change. "We should make decisions that will kill people and shorten their life expectancy, because I believe there aren't any other compromises that can be made to impact pollution." Yea.. it's is weird to say, it's also demented and inhumane. > And yes, I don't believe it's only rich people, it's also middle class people who generate a lot of emissions, and I'm a leftist. And the rest of the world that hasn't developed yet? We still just don't spare any thoughts for them at all.

Gareth321 3y ago

Poor people don’t have the luxury of caring about the environment. Making people poorer is guaranteed to make things worse. I don’t think we need to make everyone’s lives worse. It’s not politically viable. We don’t need to give up computers and well insulated homes and medicine. Technology will help us reduce pollution and emissions. It’s just going to take time.

ctoth 3y ago

Let's walk through this hypothetical scenario with a modicum of realism First and foremost, there's no way to transition our complex society through such an energy bottleneck of this nature without massive unrest. You will literally be killing people and causing mass starvation, so the very first thing that happens is everyone who loses someone or otherwise is hurt by the new regime instantly rebels and you have the largest energy war in history. Seven billion people? That's just an abstract number to you, I suppose, and of course you will be one of the people who figures things out, why you're a "leftist!" as you told us so being on the right side of history will save you :) but in Reallandistan, the amount of human suffering you just released, the amount of ancient ills which we have finally, as a species , put to bed which you casually reawakened instantly flare up. But what are several billion dead people? We're saving the planet here! Do you honestly, really, in the deep quiet parts of your mind, think that it would be better to kill billions than to solve environmental and other problems, as we have been, better and better with technology? I fundamentally disagree with this inhumane approach and want nothing to do with those who might advocate it.

concordDance 3y ago

China releases more CO2 than the US, EU, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand combined. The West has become really good at reducing emissions and environmental impact. Yes, a fair portion of that reduction is consuming CO2 intensive products made in China rather than locally, but even taking that into account the developed world is probably still less CO2 producing than the developing world.

stainablesteel 3y ago

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timwaagh 3y ago

This sort of fanaticism is why there is no progress on this issue. Let's start by banning low hanging fruit like cryptocurrencies, private jets and superyachts. If it's insufficient we might have to do more, like build sufficient high speed rail and force the third world to contain their population boom, because if that isn't contained nothing will work. Only then would it be reasonable to go after ordinary people.

andrewjl 3y ago

> It's weird to say, but we should crash the economy if it can slow down climate change. That's a direct path to armed conflict. Those aren't great in the reduce CO2 emissions and cut down on resource consumption departments.