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Overshooting Earth’s Boundaries: An Interview with Bill Rees
- 3seashells 3y agoThe problem was the promise after the cold War, that everyone could life like a king, that the madness would scale.
- gizajob 3y ago[flagged]
- throwbadubadu 3y agoSomehow I feel that infinite other alternatives besides these two extremes exist, but just me, heh?
- kelseyfrog 3y agoNo, the nihilism of neoliberalism means that we have to be content with this. We've been freed to give up on the project of competing systems forever.
- SequoiaHope 3y agoFalse choice. There are many ways to run an economy aside from neoliberalism or soviet state-communism.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- goatlover 3y agoWhy not? Problem is we’re incredibly wasteful, inefficient and the benefits are unequally distributed. There’s nothing physically limiting us from doing so with better tech and much better policies and governance.
- 3seashells 3y agoYes, there is. The human brain is a rather primitive hunter gather apparatus, that resorts to brutal aggression & societal decomplexification the moment the endless surplus ends. Hoping that better tech saves one from this, is like believing that going all in with higher risk, will save one from bankruptcy due to gambling.
- esafak 3y agoClimate optimists seem oblivious to the concept of planetary boundaries. Is it a concept generally supported by scientists, and would we still overshoot them if we hit net zero emissions?
- haltist 3y agoThe biomass of earth is finite so the neoliberal economic directive of constant exponential growth is both a physical and logical impossibility. Either the economic model changes and we start consuming within bounds that helps the earth system recover or we are headed for an inevitable crash. There is no 3rd option.
- throwbadubadu 3y agoThis is as obvious as it is ignored, but why?
- baggy_trough 3y agoBecause the limit is very far away, so the existence of an absolute limit to growth is simply a pedantic technicality.
- haltist 3y agoChildren are now born with plastic in their veins. We are already at the limits of growth and potentially beyond it so either some technological miracle enables further growth or we start facing the negative consequences of cancerous growth of the human population.
- esafak 3y agoIs that so? Please provide evidence. Here's mine: https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/research-news/2023-09-13-all-planetary-boundaries-mapped-out-for-the-first-time-six-of-nine-crossed.html https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/research-news/2... https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458
- neovialogistics 3y agoTake a pinch of the spores of some rapidly-growing fungus and drop them into a gallon jug, one whose walls are coated with nutrient so the fungus can grow as fast as it likes. Suppose you do this one morning, and that exactly 4 days later you find that the fungus has filled the jar and is just beginning to overflow it. How full was the jug the morning of the 3rd day? It was half full.
- esafak 3y agoThe human population is projected to peak this century, and we have the technology to mold our environment, so there's that... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_grow...
- neovialogistics 3y agoWe can also calculate at what point we will fill the metaphorical jar and start to cannibalize. We will start using up more resources than the planet produces annually in about 1970: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/0a834e8c-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/0a834e8c-en https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/0a834e8c-en/index.html?i...