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Asking people to have less, experience less, and do less isn’t an argument that can ever win. The winning argument is to show how you can consume more energy f

Asking people to have less, experience less, and do less isn’t an argument that can ever win. The winning argument is to show how you can consume more energy for less money by using sustainable technology. Cramped trains will rarely win politically but electric cars that go fast and look cool do win. In essence I believe the only politically viable way to reduce carbon is to engineer and tech our way to systems that reliably do more for less and increase the amount of energy people can consume.

hughw 3y ago
You're probably right but I fear the end of that road is a completely "re-terraformed" Earth we create to adapt to support our industrial society.
- generalizations 3y ago
  So we take the notion of national parks to the extreme, and carve out parts of the planet dedicated to preservation, and dedicate other parts to supporting humans and their needs, and we learn the science we need to artificially protect against ecological collapse. Maybe the solution to our expanding technology is technological.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    So because the fix is mildly inconvenient, better to just do nothing, keep making the problem worse, keep letting people die, and just hope that magic fixes everything? Tech can't undo the physics of the greenhouse effect. You want a cooler earth, you have to reduce the radiation we receive or increase the radiation that leaves through the atmosphere. For hundreds of years we have been participating in a geoengineering experiment.
    - generalizations 3y ago
      > mildly inconvenient Wildly disruptive.
      - wizofaus 3y ago
        If your income directly depends on BAU, sure. But while there are those that would lose out initially to a rapid transition away from burning fossil fuels, including some that live at best a modest existence, I'm confident it'd be vastly cheaper to pay them to retrain etc. than to pay the costs of allowing the global temperature to keep climbing. Unfortunately there are also those whose personal fortunes are directly dependent on our addiction to fossil fuels, and they're not willing to risk jeopardising their wealth and status, so it's pretty much guaranteed we'll keep on burning them for a long while yet. At this stage the best we can hope for is that thousands of climate scientists have somehow got it wrong and we'll be fine in planet that's 3 or 4 degrees warmer.
      - uoaei 3y ago
        There are billions of people living in just such a "disrupted" state today. Says more about your attachment to convenience than about what humans can handle.
flagrant_taco 3y ago
What you're describing is the path to inevitable collapse. If people will never be able to give up convenience or growth then we really are doomed, tech advantages only slow down that runaway train. I don't actually think it's a fundamental blocker though. People sacraficed quite a bit at home during WWII to support the war effort, we could make similar sacrifices now if we saw our impact on the planet as a similarly existential threat. To me it seems like the failure is in trying to analyze the problem so specifically that we can define the "right" path then logic people onto it. That will never work, mainly because the problem is so complex that there won't be a complete understanding to share. There will always be assumptions used in modeling and holes in the data allowing for alternative explanations that are then argued over even further. We all know that using oil at this scale isn't a great idea. And we all know that we could actually use less oil without giving up much at all. If we spent less time arguing over how we got here we could find reasonable next steps that are hard to argue with when it isn't all backed by "science" and "fact" that can be debated endlessly.
- Fricken 3y ago
  Young men have a genetic proclivity for getting their asses handed to them in war. It's surprisingly easy to order men to their deaths when they're convinced it's to protect their tribe from some other tribal threat. We've been doing it for longer than we've been human. Nothing in our evolutionary history has prepared us for climate change. We have more trivial things to worry about.
  - Aerbil313 3y ago
    That's the thing. No one can actually comprehend such things like geopolicits, global/national economy, climate change etc. The world is too big for our brains to understand.
    - Fricken 3y ago
      Reason is slave to the passions. If it doesn't resonate at an emotional level we don't care. It doesn't matter if we understand. We also have to give a fuck, and clearly we don't.
ericmay 3y ago
> Asking people to have less, experience less, and do less isn’t an argument that can ever win. Yes and no. I agree that if your approach is to ask people to do this, you aren't going to win the argument. But instead you can reframe the argument. Does that $70,000 truck that you have to make payments on while you do back-breaking or soul-crushing work to afford it really make you happy? Do you really get use out of that or are people scamming you with clever marketing? Do you really enjoy glamping or do you just like the idea and you sit around on your phone posting pictures about how much you like it while not really doing much. Are you honest with yourself? Etc. > Cramped trains will rarely win politically but electric cars that go fast and look cool do win. We don't even have trains, let alone cramped trains. This one is funny though because everyone "loves how walkable XYZ area is" but then they get their mind completely wiped once they leave not realizing they can live like that too if they demanded it or if we had a good market mechanic in place that allows for choice. For some bewildering reason we don't build more of the most loved homes and neighborhoods and transit experience like we do for every single other product.
- spenczar5 3y ago
  > are people scamming you with clever marketing? … Are you honest with yourself? This is still an adversarial tone which is more likely to create resistance. It comes across as insulting their intelligence. Convincing people to change is really hard!
  - nemo44x 3y ago
    > Convincing people to change is really hard! It’s hard when you’re trying to trick them. But show someone a genuinely better product and you don’t need to convince them of anything.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
  >> Does that $70,000 truck that you have to make payments on while you do back-breaking or soul-crushing work to afford it really make you happy? Cars, apart from their direct purpose, also serve as status symbol. This might justify the investment.
londons_explore 3y ago
> Asking people to have less, experience less, and do less isn’t an argument that can ever win. Asking people to eat less might never win... But when there is a famine, people have no choice but to eat less. It's not that there is no food available in a famine - it's just that prices go sky high. Tomorrow the government could shut down the oil wells and say "nobody may emit any CO2 unless they pay $1000/ton of CO2 emitted.". The population may revolt, like they do during famines. But with those oil wells blocked up, they probably wouldn't get what they were looking for.
- spenczar5 3y ago
  - which government? - did I emit a ton of CO2 when I cut down a tree? - what happens to the cost of medical plastics, etc? Did you just kill millions in poor countries because the cost of care went up so much? This stuff is hard. Pretending it is simple stops us from working on the hard parts.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    >what happens to the cost of medical plastics, Plastic production is an insanely small part of oil and gas usage, 4%. Anyone bringing up plastic as a reason to not stop using oil isn't being intellectually honest. We could literally decimate the oil industry and still produce way more oil than the plastic industry needs. It's just not a concern.
    - spenczar5 3y ago
      The proposal was to crank up the price of oil directly. You couldnt price-curve your way past a $1,000 per CO2 ton tax. While plastic does not drive oil production, it is definitely the case that oil prices determine plastic production costs. Recycling can absorb much of that, but medical plastics cannot be made through recycling today.
      - londons_explore 3y ago
        $1000/ton is $1/kg. Most medical plastic items are tens of grams - so 1 cent. Considering the price of medical devices in the US, there is certainly room for a few extra cents.
sho_hn 3y ago
> Asking people to have less, experience less, and do less isn’t an argument that can ever win. I think that's setting the bar very low, and I don't think it's necessarily true. Most of us learn how to manage a finite resource (our own income) and how to maximize results within those constraints. This is not some sort of alien situation that humans can't identify with. We face questions like "Do we really need this?" and "Can we afford it right now?" all the time. We need to get better at organizing ourselves in large groups/structures to do this at the global level, and make people feel equity in the decision-making and that they can afford this equity, and I'm quite optimistic we can in principle get there. Whether we can do it fast enough is the worrying bit.
pfdietz 3y ago
> Asking people to have less, experience less, and do less isn’t an argument that can ever win. What needs to be done is cost the damage from unrestricted emissions. You can't just look at the benefits. Consider the original Clean Air Act. Economists estimate the value of reducing harmful pollution due to that act exceeded the cost of implementing the reductions by a factor of 40. FORTY! It's like picking up free money. And the same is going to be true of CO2 emissions reduction. Now, it's not true for those personally benefiting, like oil companies. Well, screw them.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
This whole "experience" thing is overrated. Tens of millions of people go to see Mona Lisa, what do they get out of it? Absolutely nothing IMO. Their travel created an awful amount of CO2. Had they sat at home and read about Renaissance art and history, they and the world would be much better off.
- aydyn 3y ago
  The vast majority of people disagree with your subjective opinion. Most people dont want to sit in front of their computer their entire lives.
  - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
    They can go and take a stroll in a park. There is more beauty in that than jostling in a crowd of tourists in front of the Mona Lisa.
    - NoGravitas 3y ago
      Or play softball. Or listen to some live local music.
    - aydyn 3y ago
      Again, the vast majority of people disagree with you. Stop pushing your values onto others.
      - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
        I don't care what majority of people agree with. If majority of people don't change their ways, we all gonna die.
neaden 3y ago
This sounds like the argument someone in massive credit card debt would give when told to cut their spending. Sure I hope there are ways to solve climate change without lowering standard of living, but if there aren't we still have to do it or our standard of living is going to get lowered from the consequences of our civilizations actions.
- hcurtiss 3y ago
  I think the point is that we are not that civilized. If the stakes are as high as many claim, we would be waging war to stop climate emissions. Of course, we won't do that. And if we did, many more would wage war to continue emitting (and emit in the process). This is a one-way train unless and until there's a lower-cost, low emissions solution. Humans are humans, and politics are politics. The stakes are too high to "altruism" our way out.
KronisLV 3y ago
> Cramped trains will rarely win politically but electric cars that go fast and look cool do win. That's unfortunate, since trains would surely be the more efficient form of transportation, at least when dealing with regular commute, like going to work and back. Over here, a train ticket costs a few Euros, you don't have to worry about driving or traffic jams, gas/charging, or parking. Of course, if you need to go to a specific rural area or transport some heavy items, then the equation changes, but that's not the majority of the cases. I'm actually rather sad that they closed down a train route to a city next to my countryside residence, since buses aren't as comfortable in most cases. Either way, public transportation feels like an obvious necessity to me, though many might disagree.

hughw 3y ago

You're probably right but I fear the end of that road is a completely "re-terraformed" Earth we create to adapt to support our industrial society.

generalizations 3y ago
So we take the notion of national parks to the extreme, and carve out parts of the planet dedicated to preservation, and dedicate other parts to supporting humans and their needs, and we learn the science we need to artificially protect against ecological collapse. Maybe the solution to our expanding technology is technological.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  So because the fix is mildly inconvenient, better to just do nothing, keep making the problem worse, keep letting people die, and just hope that magic fixes everything? Tech can't undo the physics of the greenhouse effect. You want a cooler earth, you have to reduce the radiation we receive or increase the radiation that leaves through the atmosphere. For hundreds of years we have been participating in a geoengineering experiment.
  - generalizations 3y ago
    > mildly inconvenient Wildly disruptive.
    - wizofaus 3y ago
      If your income directly depends on BAU, sure. But while there are those that would lose out initially to a rapid transition away from burning fossil fuels, including some that live at best a modest existence, I'm confident it'd be vastly cheaper to pay them to retrain etc. than to pay the costs of allowing the global temperature to keep climbing. Unfortunately there are also those whose personal fortunes are directly dependent on our addiction to fossil fuels, and they're not willing to risk jeopardising their wealth and status, so it's pretty much guaranteed we'll keep on burning them for a long while yet. At this stage the best we can hope for is that thousands of climate scientists have somehow got it wrong and we'll be fine in planet that's 3 or 4 degrees warmer.
    - uoaei 3y ago
      There are billions of people living in just such a "disrupted" state today. Says more about your attachment to convenience than about what humans can handle.

flagrant_taco 3y ago

What you're describing is the path to inevitable collapse. If people will never be able to give up convenience or growth then we really are doomed, tech advantages only slow down that runaway train. I don't actually think it's a fundamental blocker though. People sacraficed quite a bit at home during WWII to support the war effort, we could make similar sacrifices now if we saw our impact on the planet as a similarly existential threat. To me it seems like the failure is in trying to analyze the problem so specifically that we can define the "right" path then logic people onto it. That will never work, mainly because the problem is so complex that there won't be a complete understanding to share. There will always be assumptions used in modeling and holes in the data allowing for alternative explanations that are then argued over even further. We all know that using oil at this scale isn't a great idea. And we all know that we could actually use less oil without giving up much at all. If we spent less time arguing over how we got here we could find reasonable next steps that are hard to argue with when it isn't all backed by "science" and "fact" that can be debated endlessly.

Fricken 3y ago
Young men have a genetic proclivity for getting their asses handed to them in war. It's surprisingly easy to order men to their deaths when they're convinced it's to protect their tribe from some other tribal threat. We've been doing it for longer than we've been human. Nothing in our evolutionary history has prepared us for climate change. We have more trivial things to worry about.
- Aerbil313 3y ago
  That's the thing. No one can actually comprehend such things like geopolicits, global/national economy, climate change etc. The world is too big for our brains to understand.
  - Fricken 3y ago
    Reason is slave to the passions. If it doesn't resonate at an emotional level we don't care. It doesn't matter if we understand. We also have to give a fuck, and clearly we don't.

ericmay 3y ago

> Asking people to have less, experience less, and do less isn’t an argument that can ever win. Yes and no. I agree that if your approach is to ask people to do this, you aren't going to win the argument. But instead you can reframe the argument. Does that $70,000 truck that you have to make payments on while you do back-breaking or soul-crushing work to afford it really make you happy? Do you really get use out of that or are people scamming you with clever marketing? Do you really enjoy glamping or do you just like the idea and you sit around on your phone posting pictures about how much you like it while not really doing much. Are you honest with yourself? Etc. > Cramped trains will rarely win politically but electric cars that go fast and look cool do win. We don't even have trains, let alone cramped trains. This one is funny though because everyone "loves how walkable XYZ area is" but then they get their mind completely wiped once they leave not realizing they can live like that too if they demanded it or if we had a good market mechanic in place that allows for choice. For some bewildering reason we don't build more of the most loved homes and neighborhoods and transit experience like we do for every single other product.

spenczar5 3y ago
> are people scamming you with clever marketing? … Are you honest with yourself? This is still an adversarial tone which is more likely to create resistance. It comes across as insulting their intelligence. Convincing people to change is really hard!
- nemo44x 3y ago
  > Convincing people to change is really hard! It’s hard when you’re trying to trick them. But show someone a genuinely better product and you don’t need to convince them of anything.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
>> Does that $70,000 truck that you have to make payments on while you do back-breaking or soul-crushing work to afford it really make you happy? Cars, apart from their direct purpose, also serve as status symbol. This might justify the investment.

londons_explore 3y ago

> Asking people to have less, experience less, and do less isn’t an argument that can ever win. Asking people to eat less might never win... But when there is a famine, people have no choice but to eat less. It's not that there is no food available in a famine - it's just that prices go sky high. Tomorrow the government could shut down the oil wells and say "nobody may emit any CO2 unless they pay $1000/ton of CO2 emitted.". The population may revolt, like they do during famines. But with those oil wells blocked up, they probably wouldn't get what they were looking for.

spenczar5 3y ago
- which government? - did I emit a ton of CO2 when I cut down a tree? - what happens to the cost of medical plastics, etc? Did you just kill millions in poor countries because the cost of care went up so much? This stuff is hard. Pretending it is simple stops us from working on the hard parts.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  >what happens to the cost of medical plastics, Plastic production is an insanely small part of oil and gas usage, 4%. Anyone bringing up plastic as a reason to not stop using oil isn't being intellectually honest. We could literally decimate the oil industry and still produce way more oil than the plastic industry needs. It's just not a concern.
  - spenczar5 3y ago
    The proposal was to crank up the price of oil directly. You couldnt price-curve your way past a $1,000 per CO2 ton tax. While plastic does not drive oil production, it is definitely the case that oil prices determine plastic production costs. Recycling can absorb much of that, but medical plastics cannot be made through recycling today.
    - londons_explore 3y ago
      $1000/ton is $1/kg. Most medical plastic items are tens of grams - so 1 cent. Considering the price of medical devices in the US, there is certainly room for a few extra cents.

sho_hn 3y ago

> Asking people to have less, experience less, and do less isn’t an argument that can ever win. I think that's setting the bar very low, and I don't think it's necessarily true. Most of us learn how to manage a finite resource (our own income) and how to maximize results within those constraints. This is not some sort of alien situation that humans can't identify with. We face questions like "Do we really need this?" and "Can we afford it right now?" all the time. We need to get better at organizing ourselves in large groups/structures to do this at the global level, and make people feel equity in the decision-making and that they can afford this equity, and I'm quite optimistic we can in principle get there. Whether we can do it fast enough is the worrying bit.

pfdietz 3y ago

> Asking people to have less, experience less, and do less isn’t an argument that can ever win. What needs to be done is cost the damage from unrestricted emissions. You can't just look at the benefits. Consider the original Clean Air Act. Economists estimate the value of reducing harmful pollution due to that act exceeded the cost of implementing the reductions by a factor of 40. FORTY! It's like picking up free money. And the same is going to be true of CO2 emissions reduction. Now, it's not true for those personally benefiting, like oil companies. Well, screw them.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago

This whole "experience" thing is overrated. Tens of millions of people go to see Mona Lisa, what do they get out of it? Absolutely nothing IMO. Their travel created an awful amount of CO2. Had they sat at home and read about Renaissance art and history, they and the world would be much better off.

aydyn 3y ago
The vast majority of people disagree with your subjective opinion. Most people dont want to sit in front of their computer their entire lives.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
  They can go and take a stroll in a park. There is more beauty in that than jostling in a crowd of tourists in front of the Mona Lisa.
  - NoGravitas 3y ago
    Or play softball. Or listen to some live local music.
  - aydyn 3y ago
    Again, the vast majority of people disagree with you. Stop pushing your values onto others.
    - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
      I don't care what majority of people agree with. If majority of people don't change their ways, we all gonna die.

neaden 3y ago

This sounds like the argument someone in massive credit card debt would give when told to cut their spending. Sure I hope there are ways to solve climate change without lowering standard of living, but if there aren't we still have to do it or our standard of living is going to get lowered from the consequences of our civilizations actions.

hcurtiss 3y ago
I think the point is that we are not that civilized. If the stakes are as high as many claim, we would be waging war to stop climate emissions. Of course, we won't do that. And if we did, many more would wage war to continue emitting (and emit in the process). This is a one-way train unless and until there's a lower-cost, low emissions solution. Humans are humans, and politics are politics. The stakes are too high to "altruism" our way out.

KronisLV 3y ago

> Cramped trains will rarely win politically but electric cars that go fast and look cool do win. That's unfortunate, since trains would surely be the more efficient form of transportation, at least when dealing with regular commute, like going to work and back. Over here, a train ticket costs a few Euros, you don't have to worry about driving or traffic jams, gas/charging, or parking. Of course, if you need to go to a specific rural area or transport some heavy items, then the equation changes, but that's not the majority of the cases. I'm actually rather sad that they closed down a train route to a city next to my countryside residence, since buses aren't as comfortable in most cases. Either way, public transportation feels like an obvious necessity to me, though many might disagree.