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> They present how the world is improving in an irrefutable way but media and politicians would only focus on the negative. It's worth noting this 'world' that

by s_dev 3y ago

> They present how the world is improving in an irrefutable way but media and politicians would only focus on the negative. It's worth noting this 'world' that is constantly improving exists only for people. I routinely counter this with the analogy: that's like a dentist saying your teeth are better than they've ever been -- not only that; they're getting better but at the same time your gums are screwed. Are those teeth dependant on those gums you might ask. Yeah. Every serious envoirnmental science paper seems to conclude the same thing: biodiversity is collapsing. On the whole, the world we live in is worse than the past. Examples during the earths history that aren't really from external forces e.g. when the moon crashed in to earth, after asteroids, early earth volcanoes etc. are different and not under our control.

dsign 3y ago
As far as I can see, you are totally correct. As it is the post you are replying to. Which begs the question: how can the state of all of humanity improve without damaging even more the environment? Will we ever confront that question honestly?
- titzer 3y ago
  The answer is that birth rate needs to decline and the human population needs to level off and then also decline to sustainable levels. We're in overshoot right now and no amount of economic development (read: growth) is going to fix that. We need degrowth, and the only way that is achievable without harming standard of living is to have fewer humans. The only way to have fewer humans without murdering or starving a bunch is for population to level and drop off naturally. It's hard to even have this conversation without being branded an eco-fascist, but there it is. We are just too many.
  - throwawayqqq11 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - bombcar 3y ago
      That consumption would drop precipitously if we stopped upgrading/replacing working things. Wouldn't help support a growth economy as much, however.
  - JeremyNT 3y ago
    > The answer is that birth rate needs to decline and the human population needs to level off and then also decline to sustainable levels. I agree that's an answer, but is it the answer? It seems like reproduction rates in wealthy countries trend closer towards replacement levels, so perhaps you "just" need to get everybody's standard of living up to western levels to take population growth out of the equation. Then you're left with supporting roughly our current population level which seems... entirely feasible? Between existing but underutilized techniques like fission, renewables, smarter land use and management for agriculture (read: focus on producing more efficient crops and less on the intensive stuff like cows), retrofitting buildings with better insulation, and building out more efficient transit, it seems like we could get pretty close with current levels of technology. Nevermind the developments we continue to make. Fusion power would immediately solve a lot of problems.
    - titzer 3y ago
      > Then you're left with supporting roughly our current population level which seems... entirely feasible? That doesn't match data I've seen. For example, even the Wikipedia article on carrying capacity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity), second paragraph, states there are a number of lines of scientific evidence that we are already over capacity of Earth today. One project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Overshoot_Day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Overshoot_Day) does pretty intense data analysis to quantify how far we are over that capacity. The summary is, yes, we are definitely in overshoot, and all economic development to raise standard of living is making it worse. But it's even worse than that. We aren't just exceeding the carrying capacity, it is diminishing as we reduce biodiversity and biomass through land use (read: obliterating wildlife and forests), overfishing, and over-industrialization of agriculture, which kills healthy soils. > Between existing but underutilized techniques like fission, renewables, smarter land use and management for agriculture It's not just about producing more energy. We are consuming everything too much, from biomass to raw materials, even fresh water. > Fusion power would immediately solve a lot of problems. It might reduce CO2 consumption but ironically it will increase per capita energy consumption, which encourages even more environmental destruction by making everything cheaper to build and buy. So more land use and more consumption.
  - ytx 3y ago
    Unfortunately the assumption of real growth is very baked into things like social security, medicare, etc. There's no way to de-grow without an increased burden for those working to take care of a larger non-working aging cohort. A deeper problem is that the benefits / "slack room" provided by real growth are constantly eradicated because people's wants (and needs) keep growing along commensurately. Some changing expectations are fairly uncontroversial, e.g. better medical technology and doctor training costs more. Others are arguably less good, e.g. private jets (or taken to the extreme, passenger planes in general!)
    - tim333 3y ago
      There are different kinds of growth. The one needed for the above is growth in GDP which doesn't necessarily need growth in number of people, amount of energy used etc.
      - ytx 3y ago
        Right, we could definitely have real productivity growth without population growth - that's increased efficiency (I doubt this is possible without increasing energy expenditure though). I think the problem is still the one I pointed out, whereby if increased efficiency halved the number of man-hours required to make an iPhone 15, instead of "being happy with the current iPhone 15 for half the cost", AAPL/the market/people's demands would result in the same number of man-hours being utilized to produce the next fancier iPhone 20 (or VR headset). So I think a significant cultural shift would be required for increased productivity to translate into less work, rather than "more/better stuff" for the same (or an increased) amount of work.
        fennecfoxy 3y ago
        I think it's certainly true with a fixed population size that technology helps us gain efficiency. I guess we just need to change what we want out of mechanisation: historically it's been; more, cheaper, convenience, etc We need to change to: sustainable, fair, necessary The fact is, I can buy cheap plastic crap from somewhere to entertain myself for a day and get it shipped same/next day - but I don't _need_ to, nobody does. Like sugar is addicting, so is a lot of stuff in our modern lives. New phone every 6-12 months? There are people that do this and it's possible because everything has been set up to support it because we're _so_ concerned about our addiction to this sort of thing but not how it impacts the environment or social equity and so many other things. Our species needs to change priorities so badly, but we're too weighed down by the cruel calculus that evolution gave us.
  - melagonster 3y ago
    this will happen. when people are getting rich, they prefer to have less kids. UN predicted the largest number of population is 12 billion in future thirty years, then population start to diminish.
    - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
      > when people are getting rich, they prefer to have less kids. People are also having less kids because they are too poor. It's hard to pair off in an economy where 4 typical incomes are needed to make basic bills. I know young people who aren't dating because there's presently no point. They aren't in the minority who earn enough to pay for half a household - nevertheless afford children.
      - williamcotton 3y ago
        Uh, poor people have way more kids: https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
        defrost 3y ago
        Which in itself is a good argument to raise the standard of living from the bottom upwards .. below some ceiling of per capita consumption that exceeds current planet capacity to endure.
        melagonster 3y ago
        when society rich enough, the only way can let people want more kids is offer economic help. so this is not a pure linear relationship.
        WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
        > Uh, poor people have way more kids: Not in a wealthy country like the US they aren't. https://www.statista.com/statistics/562541/birth-rate-by-poverty-status-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/562541/birth-rate-by-pov... Poor people get the burdens of a rich economy (ex: increasingly complex living) but have far fewer resources to offset them.
  - andrewmutz 3y ago
    > We need degrowth, and the only way that is achievable without harming standard of living is to have fewer humans Why are you confident that having fewer humans would help with the standard of living? Doesn't most of the scarcity of what we consume come from the labor necessary to produce it, rather than the cost of physical stuff? With food for example, for every dollar you spend on food only about 15 cents is actually buying food items from the farmer and the rest of it goes it to the work of processing, packaging, transporting, selling, servicing, etc (https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-dollar-series/documentation/ https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-dollar-series/do...) With fewer people, those things become even more scarce.
    - titzer 3y ago
      Housing, infrastructure, and energy would all be in huge surplus.
    - darth_avocado 3y ago
      > only about 15 cents is actually buying food items from the farmer and the rest of it goes it to the work of processing, packaging, transporting, selling, servicing, etc Part of the reason we need to do all of that is because we have too many people to feed. If the population is 1/10 of the number of people we have today in the US, suddenly we only need 1/10 of the cows, which domestically we can raise sustainably. No longer to we need to grow alfalfa in Arizona, ship it to Australia or Brazil where they raise the cows and then ship the meat back to the US. We’ll need 1/10 of the avocados that can be sustainably grown in California instead of importing it from Mexico.
      - PeterisP 3y ago
        This is generally true for primary production like agriculture, however, agriculture is something less than 5% of our effort, and for the majority of our economy we have the opposite effect where economies of scale enable much greater efficiency - i.e. more or better goods/services for the same amount of labor - than it could be possible with a much smaller population.
  - swed420 3y ago
    Why not focus on reengineering our political and economic systems and their inefficient built in contradictions, like optimizing for consumption? Things used to be built to last. Planned obsolescence coupled with a human drive to consume needlessly are completely unnecessary to happiness, but decades of propaganda have convinced us otherwise. People don't need to keep driving to their fake jobs, etc.
    - concordDance 3y ago
      It's not really extra physical goods that are the issue (e.g. that arm chair made from farmed wood going to landfill), it's the pollution required to create them or the improper disposal of them. Some cast iron statues made using solar power as an energy source aren't a relevant climate issue. As such, the proper response is a CO2 tax and proper landfill practices.
  - 0x732202 3y ago
    ... or we could just build more nuclear plants and harness practically free energy, without getting weird about who's having babies
    - Miraltar 3y ago
      It's not just about energy, how do you store electricity ? How do you extract the materials ?
    - mharig 3y ago
      Nuclear energy is way more expensive than solar or wind.
  - williamcotton 3y ago
    The birth rate is coming down rather rapidly to the point where this will be a large problem for you when you’re in your golden years. Won’t that be ironic!
  - sleazy_b 3y ago
    Do you have children? How do you propose to convince or force others not to have children without devolving into something that could reasonably be called “eco-fascism”?
    - defrost 3y ago
      Pretty easy really - promote social programs that lift the standard of living and promote easy access to quality education. You can look at, say, Hans Rosling presentations over the past decades and see just how highly correlated education and women's rights are with reducing population expansion rates. Free quality public TV | streaming doesn't hurt either.
      - sleazy_b 3y ago
        How is that easy to accomplish nationally let alone globally? What if there’s places that buck the trend, or don’t want to incentivize low birth rates in this way?
        defrost 3y ago
        It's easier than devolving into literal facism which was the first bar you set. It's easy enough that the bulk of G20 countries got there sans the USofA which still struggles with public healthcare. Of course doing something isn't as easy as sitting around doing nothing save moving a bar along and just asking. Projection wise, for now, globally we're headed to peak and decline in population so much of this jawing is moot.
        sleazy_b 3y ago
        They got there by getting us to the point we’re at now, by burning fossil fuels and offloading many of their social ills to other regions. By all means, let’s improve education and get more money in people’s pockets. But degrowth is much more likely to be accomplished through fascism than by raising the standard of living globally in a way that preserves regional independence.
  - account42 3y ago
    I hope you will lead by example and not have any children?
    - fsflover 3y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque
    - wruza 3y ago
      If the world won't have any children, it will be degrowth to zero in a lifetime. One child for everyone is enough to halven the population, according to my napkin math. Even two children is okay if you're ready to pay extra. You just have to not turn your family into a spawning pool and kids will be okay. The problem is there, regardless of anyone who keeps their head in the sand. Humanity will meet the limit, and people will be unable to afford children. There's no if, there's when. The only question is whether future-we will be able to have 2, 1 or 0 kids on average, and how much fucked the planet will be at the point of realization. If your vote goes for "0 and very fucked", make sure to teach your kids to not whine about it later and to keep the pride.
    - titzer 3y ago
      Not that it's any of your goddamn business, but yes, I have decided to not have kids, for multiple reasons.
  - matthewfelgate 3y ago
    You have degrowth. Because degrowth is frankly, a disgusting ideology.
  - tomp 3y ago
    You're so wrong that you could hardly be any more wrong. Economic growth is possible without consuming more resources. That's literally what technology is - producing more output with less input. Rich countries have grown over the past 20 years without increasing CO2 emissions. Most developing countries have also grown faster than their CO2 emissions. https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-relationship-between-growth-in-gdp-and-co2-has-loosened-it-needs-to-be-cut-completely https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-relationship-between-gr... Degrowth is murder, anyone promoting it is evil.
    - MrVandemar 3y ago
      > Degrowth is murder, anyone promoting it is evil. That's some emotive rhetoric there. I'm thinking that you're pretty passionate about the subject, and therefore not remotely objective.
      - tomp 3y ago
        I have used objective reasoning to conclude that degrowth is murder. Now I'm passionately opposing it. Same with Nazism, Communism, Decolonization, Hamas, etc.
        Miraltar 3y ago
        How do you define murder ?
        tomp 3y ago
        children dying because you don't produce enough food to feed them. people dying because your economy cannot support high technology required to make advanced drugs. old people freezing to death because you don't produce enough energy to heat their homes this isn't a hypothetical. Look at any communist regime!
        wruza 3y ago
        Yeah, right, but gppp’s degrowth means “not producing more humans than needed followed by food reduction”, not “starving the excess to death”. You’re seeing what isn’t there (and are all over the place in general, which makes it hard to reason).
  - grokgrok 3y ago
    How do you know that 'we are too many' is the truth? How do you tell others what to do (or not to do) and bind others to such an obligation without that which you repudiate? How do we 'naturally' overcome the individual's natural instinct to reproduce? What do you think is happening in the current middle east conflict? We are seeing this logic play out in horror and tragedy. You elevate standard-of-living to the sacrosanct. The addict's standard of living was never so high as during the rush. Some will always pine for the good old days when their backs didn't ache and their burden of knowledge weighed less great. Parts of society are addicted to convenience and ease, but the standard of living is not singular, this preference is not total. Technocratic institutions require democratic feedback. Premising our solution with 'the maintenance of standards' ignores the truth that change is hard and many will bear the weight of the necessary adaptations. If the distribution of weights seem fair, we will bear it. Seemliness is a difficult problem in a chaotic world full of untrustworthy actors speaking at a distance, words of disguised self interest. We cannot transfer the burden of responsible living to 'other people' while not committing to appropriate action ourselves. Irresponsible reproduction does risk diseases of society and the individual, and none of this argument should construe a preference for unrestrained growth.
- mym1990 3y ago
  Not until our infatuation with constant growth is confronted. Currently all major economies focus on growth(GPD), and any sign of slowdown is essentially a doomsday scenario. We have gotten massive efficiency gains in almost all labor intensive work, and while this means more goods and services can be pumped out to increase global wealth, it also means a rapid degradation of the environment.
  - matthewfelgate 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - ttz 3y ago
    As someone who wholeheartedly agrees with this statement, I do wonder why this mentality is so prevalent. Is it just a consequence of natural selection? Those who want to grow and compete will inevitably dominate those who do not, and so propagate more?
    - mym1990 3y ago
      Yeah this question is a good one to chew on. I think ultimately humans are pretty good followers, and in my relatively short life time, I have not seen much in the way of good leadership at the global level. So we just end up following incompetent power hungry people around into their own interests(which is usually money and power).
  - Shocka1 3y ago
    All true. As a sidenote, in the Midwest rural area I grew up in there has been an extreme amount of growth in the past few years, with just about every big tech name buying land in the area and building data centers and plants, getting decades and hundreds of millions in tax breaks in the process. Once beautiful farmland and forests have been decimated in the process. Local county politicians haven't really taken the lead, leaving townships to fend for themselves, in which it seems no-one has an idea what they are doing and constantly on their heels. There are many concerns over the environment and where the water is coming from. Stuff like this is going down with township trustees: https://www.newarkadvocate.com/story/news/local/granville/2023/11/03/granville-township-residents-petitioning-trustee-vanness-to-resign-after-land-sale-new-albany/71384922007/ https://www.newarkadvocate.com/story/news/local/granville/20... There is a lot of whining and complaining from residents, but they all gladly accept the check when the players knock on their door with that Silicon Valley money. I think the obsession with growth is ingrained in American life at this point and inevitable. I don't blame the companies for finding cheap land, water, and tax breaks. And I don't blame landowners for taking money. At this point if someone is unwilling to accept growth, they will get left behind or boxed in. However, it doesn't make the decimation of forests and farmland any less sad, and this is the part that really bothers me about the whole thing. I'm sure it's probably been shared here many times, but this is one of my favorite quotes from Tolstoy about the ideal life, which it seems is becoming a little harder to obtain the more this growth philosophy plays out. “A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbour — such is my idea of happiness.”
- adventured 3y ago
  > how can the state of all of humanity improve without damaging even more the environment? It can't. There are three to four billion young, new consumers coming on in the third world over the next 30-50 years, and they want what the first world has. And there's no fair argument to telling them they can't have it or strive for it. That means enormous additional coal power plant production and emissions output. Just ask India and China, they can't build coal power fast enough. Next comes Africa's energy build-out, and it will only partially be green, the rest will be coal. Take Africa's next billion new consumers and give that block the coal output of China, that's the end of the world as we know it (if the climate change forecasts are correct). There's no stopping it now. Just enjoy your life, the future is set. Unless someone has an epic cheap energy breakthrough ready to go right now (so that we can have it deployed fully within 30-50 years). Just what China and India are adding alone is enough to end the world. You could immediately cut US emissions in half and it wouldn't matter at all to the expansion going on in Asia. And again that's before we even get to what's about to happen in Africa. No matter how many times you bring this up to the green crowd, they just ignore it aggressively, pretending that doing little token virtue signaling things in one market (we cut emissions 5% in NY state, it's amazing!) is going to actually contribute meaningfully to stopping the avalanche. Anything that doesn't involve massively slashing the coal output of China and India (and preventing its rise elsewhere), is meaningless.
  - concordDance 3y ago
    > that's the end of the world as we know it Notably, this does NOT mean a mass die off and the end of human civilization or even the end of lots of nicely habitable bits of Earth.
    - Ekaros 3y ago
      My take is that environment will become lot more variable and we will just have to deal with it. Living in some areas will be worse than now and in others better. And we might need to move some things a bit, which is likely expensive but not life ending.
      - 3y ago
- austhrow743 3y ago
  By moving manufacturing off world.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
skybrian 3y ago
I think it’s important to remember that the future isn’t known to us. People will fixate on one scenario or another, forgetting that there are others. Our ability to forecast is limited. Studying the recent past or the deep past gives us some perspective on how things have changed before. Making analogies might help us think of more scenarios, but it’s not so good for ruling things out.
paulddraper 3y ago
> On the whole, the world we live in is worse than the past. Some things are worse, some things are better. For example, in the U.S., clean air and water have improved dramatically over the past 50 years. Worldwide, deforestation is on the decline for the past 20 years.
- BHSPitMonkey 3y ago
  > For example, in the U.S., clean air and water have improved dramatically over the past 50 years. In large part through exporting our staggering manufacturing demands to poorer parts of the globe such that the localized effects of pollution happen there instead.
williamcotton 3y ago
Biodiversity will come roaring back once humanity is gone. To the rest of life on our planet there is no difference to the damage done by a meteor or by humans. It’s not like an endangered owl is sitting around thinking about what counts as an external, life-threatening force!
- ununoctium87 3y ago
  Yay?
  - williamcotton 3y ago
    If you really care about the planet then you don’t really need to worry!
- Miraltar 3y ago
  The condition of the planet affects our living, you can't really juste shurg it off
huijzer 3y ago
> biodiversity is collapsing This is not the conclusion of the book Not the End of the World by Hannah Richie. As with many things, things are not so simple/binary.
- ruszki 3y ago
  The consensus is clearly 100 to 1000 of the background extinction rate, and that biomass is decreasing in wide range of categories (like mammals, insects, fishes, plants, etc). How they refuted that? Are there more and more diverse bacterias, and the rate of how diverse they become increased 100 fold?
akkad33 3y ago
Maybe biodiversity is shrinking, but the book has examples of environmental conservation efforts that have improved biodiversity in the case of tigers in India, to give one example. I strongly believe that when humans are doing better, the life around them will too. We are now more humane than ever. S Korea is banning dog meat, we have banned ivory production, rhinos are being protected in Africa.
- 0xfffafaCrash 3y ago
  It’s interesting how quickly an argument for “factfulness” morphs into cherry-picking data points as soon as the facts are unfavorable. Turns out that facts aren’t bestsellers or at least not memorable ones that everyone wants to read and share. Optimistic narratives are — they fit a human need in a time when on many fronts that matter realism and cynicism are predominantly one and the same.
- lukan 3y ago
  "S Korea is banning dog meat" Why is that a good thing, when the normal meat factories are bad as always? Because dogs have more rights to be treated nice, because they are considered cute, unlike pigs who are way more intelligent?
- MrVandemar 3y ago
  I live in the South West of Western Australia, in a bio-diversity hotspot. I look South, and I see bush-land, a relatively small postage stamp sized block. I've counted about 23 separate species of orchids, and a huge variety of plants, and birds. One of the species of orchids is basically a sex-lure for wasps, and is absolutely fascinating. I look North, East and West and I see farm-land as far as the eye can see (aside from another very small "reserve" to the NE). It's just paddocks for animals, and the diversity is "cattle" and "Sheep", and the various grasses which they eat. Very f absolutely fascinating.ew birds (not many trees), much less variety and diversity. And no orchids. That's where food comes from, and it starts with a bulldozer, it relies on fossil-fuels (including the fertiliser) to keep producing. And we're still growing. Banning ivory and protecting Rhino's is basically palliative care at this point.
- rdm_blackhole 3y ago
refurb 3y ago
Theoretical question - if no humans existed, what is the “value” of nature?
- fennecfoxy 3y ago
  If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear it. Nature has value because we exist. It wasn't as important to us for a while (and still isn't) but hopefully in the future it will become more and more important to people. Nature also has value in that it is almost irreplaceable. If humans are around long enough that we see our entire planet destroyed, we live in space; in order to replace/get a new "nature" it would take billions of years of waiting and exactly the right conditions, which may not even be reproduceable. And even then you get a different nature; if we want the same ecosystem we have now, then it is truly priceless, truly irreplaceable.
  - refurb 3y ago
    > Nature has value because we exist. Agreed. Nature without humans has no value. Nature has value because humans value it. And at the same time humans are a part of nature. When the first humans built a hut out of wood and leaves that isn't different than a beaver building a dam. The idea that the only "true nature" is that which has not seen human activities makes no sense. Same with the logic that "we can only heal nature by removing humans".
robinoh 3y ago
> You can find all our data, visualizations, and writing related to biodiversity on this page. It aims to provide context on how biodiversity has changed in the past; the state of wildlife today; and how we can use this knowledge to build a future path where humans and other species can thrive on our shared planet. https://ourworldindata.org/biodiversity https://ourworldindata.org/biodiversity
Borrible 3y ago
The winner takes it all, until nothings left for him.

by s_dev 3y ago

dsign 3y ago

As far as I can see, you are totally correct. As it is the post you are replying to. Which begs the question: how can the state of all of humanity improve without damaging even more the environment? Will we ever confront that question honestly?

titzer 3y ago
The answer is that birth rate needs to decline and the human population needs to level off and then also decline to sustainable levels. We're in overshoot right now and no amount of economic development (read: growth) is going to fix that. We need degrowth, and the only way that is achievable without harming standard of living is to have fewer humans. The only way to have fewer humans without murdering or starving a bunch is for population to level and drop off naturally. It's hard to even have this conversation without being branded an eco-fascist, but there it is. We are just too many.
- throwawayqqq11 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - bombcar 3y ago
    That consumption would drop precipitously if we stopped upgrading/replacing working things. Wouldn't help support a growth economy as much, however.
- JeremyNT 3y ago
  > The answer is that birth rate needs to decline and the human population needs to level off and then also decline to sustainable levels. I agree that's an answer, but is it the answer? It seems like reproduction rates in wealthy countries trend closer towards replacement levels, so perhaps you "just" need to get everybody's standard of living up to western levels to take population growth out of the equation. Then you're left with supporting roughly our current population level which seems... entirely feasible? Between existing but underutilized techniques like fission, renewables, smarter land use and management for agriculture (read: focus on producing more efficient crops and less on the intensive stuff like cows), retrofitting buildings with better insulation, and building out more efficient transit, it seems like we could get pretty close with current levels of technology. Nevermind the developments we continue to make. Fusion power would immediately solve a lot of problems.
  - titzer 3y ago
    > Then you're left with supporting roughly our current population level which seems... entirely feasible? That doesn't match data I've seen. For example, even the Wikipedia article on carrying capacity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity), second paragraph, states there are a number of lines of scientific evidence that we are already over capacity of Earth today. One project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Overshoot_Day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Overshoot_Day) does pretty intense data analysis to quantify how far we are over that capacity. The summary is, yes, we are definitely in overshoot, and all economic development to raise standard of living is making it worse. But it's even worse than that. We aren't just exceeding the carrying capacity, it is diminishing as we reduce biodiversity and biomass through land use (read: obliterating wildlife and forests), overfishing, and over-industrialization of agriculture, which kills healthy soils. > Between existing but underutilized techniques like fission, renewables, smarter land use and management for agriculture It's not just about producing more energy. We are consuming everything too much, from biomass to raw materials, even fresh water. > Fusion power would immediately solve a lot of problems. It might reduce CO2 consumption but ironically it will increase per capita energy consumption, which encourages even more environmental destruction by making everything cheaper to build and buy. So more land use and more consumption.
- ytx 3y ago
  Unfortunately the assumption of real growth is very baked into things like social security, medicare, etc. There's no way to de-grow without an increased burden for those working to take care of a larger non-working aging cohort. A deeper problem is that the benefits / "slack room" provided by real growth are constantly eradicated because people's wants (and needs) keep growing along commensurately. Some changing expectations are fairly uncontroversial, e.g. better medical technology and doctor training costs more. Others are arguably less good, e.g. private jets (or taken to the extreme, passenger planes in general!)
  - tim333 3y ago
    There are different kinds of growth. The one needed for the above is growth in GDP which doesn't necessarily need growth in number of people, amount of energy used etc.
    - ytx 3y ago
      Right, we could definitely have real productivity growth without population growth - that's increased efficiency (I doubt this is possible without increasing energy expenditure though). I think the problem is still the one I pointed out, whereby if increased efficiency halved the number of man-hours required to make an iPhone 15, instead of "being happy with the current iPhone 15 for half the cost", AAPL/the market/people's demands would result in the same number of man-hours being utilized to produce the next fancier iPhone 20 (or VR headset). So I think a significant cultural shift would be required for increased productivity to translate into less work, rather than "more/better stuff" for the same (or an increased) amount of work.
      - fennecfoxy 3y ago
        I think it's certainly true with a fixed population size that technology helps us gain efficiency. I guess we just need to change what we want out of mechanisation: historically it's been; more, cheaper, convenience, etc We need to change to: sustainable, fair, necessary The fact is, I can buy cheap plastic crap from somewhere to entertain myself for a day and get it shipped same/next day - but I don't _need_ to, nobody does. Like sugar is addicting, so is a lot of stuff in our modern lives. New phone every 6-12 months? There are people that do this and it's possible because everything has been set up to support it because we're _so_ concerned about our addiction to this sort of thing but not how it impacts the environment or social equity and so many other things. Our species needs to change priorities so badly, but we're too weighed down by the cruel calculus that evolution gave us.
- melagonster 3y ago
  this will happen. when people are getting rich, they prefer to have less kids. UN predicted the largest number of population is 12 billion in future thirty years, then population start to diminish.
  - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
    > when people are getting rich, they prefer to have less kids. People are also having less kids because they are too poor. It's hard to pair off in an economy where 4 typical incomes are needed to make basic bills. I know young people who aren't dating because there's presently no point. They aren't in the minority who earn enough to pay for half a household - nevertheless afford children.
    - williamcotton 3y ago
      Uh, poor people have way more kids: https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
      - defrost 3y ago
        Which in itself is a good argument to raise the standard of living from the bottom upwards .. below some ceiling of per capita consumption that exceeds current planet capacity to endure.
      - melagonster 3y ago
        when society rich enough, the only way can let people want more kids is offer economic help. so this is not a pure linear relationship.
      - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
        > Uh, poor people have way more kids: Not in a wealthy country like the US they aren't. https://www.statista.com/statistics/562541/birth-rate-by-poverty-status-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/562541/birth-rate-by-pov... Poor people get the burdens of a rich economy (ex: increasingly complex living) but have far fewer resources to offset them.
- andrewmutz 3y ago
  > We need degrowth, and the only way that is achievable without harming standard of living is to have fewer humans Why are you confident that having fewer humans would help with the standard of living? Doesn't most of the scarcity of what we consume come from the labor necessary to produce it, rather than the cost of physical stuff? With food for example, for every dollar you spend on food only about 15 cents is actually buying food items from the farmer and the rest of it goes it to the work of processing, packaging, transporting, selling, servicing, etc (https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-dollar-series/documentation/ https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-dollar-series/do...) With fewer people, those things become even more scarce.
  - titzer 3y ago
    Housing, infrastructure, and energy would all be in huge surplus.
  - darth_avocado 3y ago
    > only about 15 cents is actually buying food items from the farmer and the rest of it goes it to the work of processing, packaging, transporting, selling, servicing, etc Part of the reason we need to do all of that is because we have too many people to feed. If the population is 1/10 of the number of people we have today in the US, suddenly we only need 1/10 of the cows, which domestically we can raise sustainably. No longer to we need to grow alfalfa in Arizona, ship it to Australia or Brazil where they raise the cows and then ship the meat back to the US. We’ll need 1/10 of the avocados that can be sustainably grown in California instead of importing it from Mexico.
    - PeterisP 3y ago
      This is generally true for primary production like agriculture, however, agriculture is something less than 5% of our effort, and for the majority of our economy we have the opposite effect where economies of scale enable much greater efficiency - i.e. more or better goods/services for the same amount of labor - than it could be possible with a much smaller population.
- swed420 3y ago
  Why not focus on reengineering our political and economic systems and their inefficient built in contradictions, like optimizing for consumption? Things used to be built to last. Planned obsolescence coupled with a human drive to consume needlessly are completely unnecessary to happiness, but decades of propaganda have convinced us otherwise. People don't need to keep driving to their fake jobs, etc.
  - concordDance 3y ago
    It's not really extra physical goods that are the issue (e.g. that arm chair made from farmed wood going to landfill), it's the pollution required to create them or the improper disposal of them. Some cast iron statues made using solar power as an energy source aren't a relevant climate issue. As such, the proper response is a CO2 tax and proper landfill practices.
- 0x732202 3y ago
  ... or we could just build more nuclear plants and harness practically free energy, without getting weird about who's having babies
  - Miraltar 3y ago
    It's not just about energy, how do you store electricity ? How do you extract the materials ?
  - mharig 3y ago
    Nuclear energy is way more expensive than solar or wind.
- williamcotton 3y ago
  The birth rate is coming down rather rapidly to the point where this will be a large problem for you when you’re in your golden years. Won’t that be ironic!
- sleazy_b 3y ago
  Do you have children? How do you propose to convince or force others not to have children without devolving into something that could reasonably be called “eco-fascism”?
  - defrost 3y ago
    Pretty easy really - promote social programs that lift the standard of living and promote easy access to quality education. You can look at, say, Hans Rosling presentations over the past decades and see just how highly correlated education and women's rights are with reducing population expansion rates. Free quality public TV | streaming doesn't hurt either.
    - sleazy_b 3y ago
      How is that easy to accomplish nationally let alone globally? What if there’s places that buck the trend, or don’t want to incentivize low birth rates in this way?
      - defrost 3y ago
        It's easier than devolving into literal facism which was the first bar you set. It's easy enough that the bulk of G20 countries got there sans the USofA which still struggles with public healthcare. Of course doing something isn't as easy as sitting around doing nothing save moving a bar along and just asking. Projection wise, for now, globally we're headed to peak and decline in population so much of this jawing is moot.
        sleazy_b 3y ago
        They got there by getting us to the point we’re at now, by burning fossil fuels and offloading many of their social ills to other regions. By all means, let’s improve education and get more money in people’s pockets. But degrowth is much more likely to be accomplished through fascism than by raising the standard of living globally in a way that preserves regional independence.
- account42 3y ago
  I hope you will lead by example and not have any children?
  - fsflover 3y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque
  - wruza 3y ago
    If the world won't have any children, it will be degrowth to zero in a lifetime. One child for everyone is enough to halven the population, according to my napkin math. Even two children is okay if you're ready to pay extra. You just have to not turn your family into a spawning pool and kids will be okay. The problem is there, regardless of anyone who keeps their head in the sand. Humanity will meet the limit, and people will be unable to afford children. There's no if, there's when. The only question is whether future-we will be able to have 2, 1 or 0 kids on average, and how much fucked the planet will be at the point of realization. If your vote goes for "0 and very fucked", make sure to teach your kids to not whine about it later and to keep the pride.
  - titzer 3y ago
    Not that it's any of your goddamn business, but yes, I have decided to not have kids, for multiple reasons.
- matthewfelgate 3y ago
  You have degrowth. Because degrowth is frankly, a disgusting ideology.
- tomp 3y ago
  You're so wrong that you could hardly be any more wrong. Economic growth is possible without consuming more resources. That's literally what technology is - producing more output with less input. Rich countries have grown over the past 20 years without increasing CO2 emissions. Most developing countries have also grown faster than their CO2 emissions. https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-relationship-between-growth-in-gdp-and-co2-has-loosened-it-needs-to-be-cut-completely https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-relationship-between-gr... Degrowth is murder, anyone promoting it is evil.
  - MrVandemar 3y ago
    > Degrowth is murder, anyone promoting it is evil. That's some emotive rhetoric there. I'm thinking that you're pretty passionate about the subject, and therefore not remotely objective.
    - tomp 3y ago
      I have used objective reasoning to conclude that degrowth is murder. Now I'm passionately opposing it. Same with Nazism, Communism, Decolonization, Hamas, etc.
      - Miraltar 3y ago
        How do you define murder ?
        tomp 3y ago
        children dying because you don't produce enough food to feed them. people dying because your economy cannot support high technology required to make advanced drugs. old people freezing to death because you don't produce enough energy to heat their homes this isn't a hypothetical. Look at any communist regime!
        wruza 3y ago
        Yeah, right, but gppp’s degrowth means “not producing more humans than needed followed by food reduction”, not “starving the excess to death”. You’re seeing what isn’t there (and are all over the place in general, which makes it hard to reason).
- grokgrok 3y ago
  How do you know that 'we are too many' is the truth? How do you tell others what to do (or not to do) and bind others to such an obligation without that which you repudiate? How do we 'naturally' overcome the individual's natural instinct to reproduce? What do you think is happening in the current middle east conflict? We are seeing this logic play out in horror and tragedy. You elevate standard-of-living to the sacrosanct. The addict's standard of living was never so high as during the rush. Some will always pine for the good old days when their backs didn't ache and their burden of knowledge weighed less great. Parts of society are addicted to convenience and ease, but the standard of living is not singular, this preference is not total. Technocratic institutions require democratic feedback. Premising our solution with 'the maintenance of standards' ignores the truth that change is hard and many will bear the weight of the necessary adaptations. If the distribution of weights seem fair, we will bear it. Seemliness is a difficult problem in a chaotic world full of untrustworthy actors speaking at a distance, words of disguised self interest. We cannot transfer the burden of responsible living to 'other people' while not committing to appropriate action ourselves. Irresponsible reproduction does risk diseases of society and the individual, and none of this argument should construe a preference for unrestrained growth.
mym1990 3y ago
Not until our infatuation with constant growth is confronted. Currently all major economies focus on growth(GPD), and any sign of slowdown is essentially a doomsday scenario. We have gotten massive efficiency gains in almost all labor intensive work, and while this means more goods and services can be pumped out to increase global wealth, it also means a rapid degradation of the environment.
- matthewfelgate 3y ago
  [flagged]
- ttz 3y ago
  As someone who wholeheartedly agrees with this statement, I do wonder why this mentality is so prevalent. Is it just a consequence of natural selection? Those who want to grow and compete will inevitably dominate those who do not, and so propagate more?
  - mym1990 3y ago
    Yeah this question is a good one to chew on. I think ultimately humans are pretty good followers, and in my relatively short life time, I have not seen much in the way of good leadership at the global level. So we just end up following incompetent power hungry people around into their own interests(which is usually money and power).
- Shocka1 3y ago
  All true. As a sidenote, in the Midwest rural area I grew up in there has been an extreme amount of growth in the past few years, with just about every big tech name buying land in the area and building data centers and plants, getting decades and hundreds of millions in tax breaks in the process. Once beautiful farmland and forests have been decimated in the process. Local county politicians haven't really taken the lead, leaving townships to fend for themselves, in which it seems no-one has an idea what they are doing and constantly on their heels. There are many concerns over the environment and where the water is coming from. Stuff like this is going down with township trustees: https://www.newarkadvocate.com/story/news/local/granville/2023/11/03/granville-township-residents-petitioning-trustee-vanness-to-resign-after-land-sale-new-albany/71384922007/ https://www.newarkadvocate.com/story/news/local/granville/20... There is a lot of whining and complaining from residents, but they all gladly accept the check when the players knock on their door with that Silicon Valley money. I think the obsession with growth is ingrained in American life at this point and inevitable. I don't blame the companies for finding cheap land, water, and tax breaks. And I don't blame landowners for taking money. At this point if someone is unwilling to accept growth, they will get left behind or boxed in. However, it doesn't make the decimation of forests and farmland any less sad, and this is the part that really bothers me about the whole thing. I'm sure it's probably been shared here many times, but this is one of my favorite quotes from Tolstoy about the ideal life, which it seems is becoming a little harder to obtain the more this growth philosophy plays out. “A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbour — such is my idea of happiness.”
adventured 3y ago
> how can the state of all of humanity improve without damaging even more the environment? It can't. There are three to four billion young, new consumers coming on in the third world over the next 30-50 years, and they want what the first world has. And there's no fair argument to telling them they can't have it or strive for it. That means enormous additional coal power plant production and emissions output. Just ask India and China, they can't build coal power fast enough. Next comes Africa's energy build-out, and it will only partially be green, the rest will be coal. Take Africa's next billion new consumers and give that block the coal output of China, that's the end of the world as we know it (if the climate change forecasts are correct). There's no stopping it now. Just enjoy your life, the future is set. Unless someone has an epic cheap energy breakthrough ready to go right now (so that we can have it deployed fully within 30-50 years). Just what China and India are adding alone is enough to end the world. You could immediately cut US emissions in half and it wouldn't matter at all to the expansion going on in Asia. And again that's before we even get to what's about to happen in Africa. No matter how many times you bring this up to the green crowd, they just ignore it aggressively, pretending that doing little token virtue signaling things in one market (we cut emissions 5% in NY state, it's amazing!) is going to actually contribute meaningfully to stopping the avalanche. Anything that doesn't involve massively slashing the coal output of China and India (and preventing its rise elsewhere), is meaningless.
- concordDance 3y ago
  > that's the end of the world as we know it Notably, this does NOT mean a mass die off and the end of human civilization or even the end of lots of nicely habitable bits of Earth.
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    My take is that environment will become lot more variable and we will just have to deal with it. Living in some areas will be worse than now and in others better. And we might need to move some things a bit, which is likely expensive but not life ending.
    - 3y ago
austhrow743 3y ago
By moving manufacturing off world.

deleted 3y ago

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skybrian 3y ago

I think it’s important to remember that the future isn’t known to us. People will fixate on one scenario or another, forgetting that there are others. Our ability to forecast is limited. Studying the recent past or the deep past gives us some perspective on how things have changed before. Making analogies might help us think of more scenarios, but it’s not so good for ruling things out.

paulddraper 3y ago

> On the whole, the world we live in is worse than the past. Some things are worse, some things are better. For example, in the U.S., clean air and water have improved dramatically over the past 50 years. Worldwide, deforestation is on the decline for the past 20 years.

BHSPitMonkey 3y ago
> For example, in the U.S., clean air and water have improved dramatically over the past 50 years. In large part through exporting our staggering manufacturing demands to poorer parts of the globe such that the localized effects of pollution happen there instead.

williamcotton 3y ago

Biodiversity will come roaring back once humanity is gone. To the rest of life on our planet there is no difference to the damage done by a meteor or by humans. It’s not like an endangered owl is sitting around thinking about what counts as an external, life-threatening force!

ununoctium87 3y ago
Yay?
- williamcotton 3y ago
  If you really care about the planet then you don’t really need to worry!
Miraltar 3y ago
The condition of the planet affects our living, you can't really juste shurg it off

huijzer 3y ago

> biodiversity is collapsing This is not the conclusion of the book Not the End of the World by Hannah Richie. As with many things, things are not so simple/binary.

ruszki 3y ago
The consensus is clearly 100 to 1000 of the background extinction rate, and that biomass is decreasing in wide range of categories (like mammals, insects, fishes, plants, etc). How they refuted that? Are there more and more diverse bacterias, and the rate of how diverse they become increased 100 fold?

akkad33 3y ago

Maybe biodiversity is shrinking, but the book has examples of environmental conservation efforts that have improved biodiversity in the case of tigers in India, to give one example. I strongly believe that when humans are doing better, the life around them will too. We are now more humane than ever. S Korea is banning dog meat, we have banned ivory production, rhinos are being protected in Africa.

0xfffafaCrash 3y ago
It’s interesting how quickly an argument for “factfulness” morphs into cherry-picking data points as soon as the facts are unfavorable. Turns out that facts aren’t bestsellers or at least not memorable ones that everyone wants to read and share. Optimistic narratives are — they fit a human need in a time when on many fronts that matter realism and cynicism are predominantly one and the same.
lukan 3y ago
"S Korea is banning dog meat" Why is that a good thing, when the normal meat factories are bad as always? Because dogs have more rights to be treated nice, because they are considered cute, unlike pigs who are way more intelligent?
MrVandemar 3y ago
I live in the South West of Western Australia, in a bio-diversity hotspot. I look South, and I see bush-land, a relatively small postage stamp sized block. I've counted about 23 separate species of orchids, and a huge variety of plants, and birds. One of the species of orchids is basically a sex-lure for wasps, and is absolutely fascinating. I look North, East and West and I see farm-land as far as the eye can see (aside from another very small "reserve" to the NE). It's just paddocks for animals, and the diversity is "cattle" and "Sheep", and the various grasses which they eat. Very f absolutely fascinating.ew birds (not many trees), much less variety and diversity. And no orchids. That's where food comes from, and it starts with a bulldozer, it relies on fossil-fuels (including the fertiliser) to keep producing. And we're still growing. Banning ivory and protecting Rhino's is basically palliative care at this point.
rdm_blackhole 3y ago

refurb 3y ago

Theoretical question - if no humans existed, what is the “value” of nature?

fennecfoxy 3y ago
If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear it. Nature has value because we exist. It wasn't as important to us for a while (and still isn't) but hopefully in the future it will become more and more important to people. Nature also has value in that it is almost irreplaceable. If humans are around long enough that we see our entire planet destroyed, we live in space; in order to replace/get a new "nature" it would take billions of years of waiting and exactly the right conditions, which may not even be reproduceable. And even then you get a different nature; if we want the same ecosystem we have now, then it is truly priceless, truly irreplaceable.
- refurb 3y ago
  > Nature has value because we exist. Agreed. Nature without humans has no value. Nature has value because humans value it. And at the same time humans are a part of nature. When the first humans built a hut out of wood and leaves that isn't different than a beaver building a dam. The idea that the only "true nature" is that which has not seen human activities makes no sense. Same with the logic that "we can only heal nature by removing humans".

robinoh 3y ago

> You can find all our data, visualizations, and writing related to biodiversity on this page. It aims to provide context on how biodiversity has changed in the past; the state of wildlife today; and how we can use this knowledge to build a future path where humans and other species can thrive on our shared planet. https://ourworldindata.org/biodiversity https://ourworldindata.org/biodiversity

Borrible 3y ago

The winner takes it all, until nothings left for him.