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It is fair to point out that people in the third world that already live on "less cars, smaller homes, less concrete, less meat, less gadgets and more trees" ch
by hollerith 3y ago
It is fair to point out that people in the third world that already live on "less cars, smaller homes, less concrete, less meat, less gadgets and more trees" choose to ramp up their consumption of those things as soon as they can afford to. The Chinese for example probably have more cars per capita than the US did when its GDP per capita was what China's is now -- and mopeds and motorcycles (and bicycles if my hours spent watching Youtube videos of urban outdoor environments in China are any indication) are banned in the Tier 1 cities: to travel on the roads, you have to have a car or ride a bus -- and the privately-owned cars vastly outnumber the buses just like in any US city.
And the Chinese eat many times more meat than they used to.
It is fair to point those things out because it is evidence that living on "less cars, smaller homes, less concrete, less meat, less gadgets and more trees" really sucks and that it is possible for us to overdo our response to climate change and ocean acidification.
- sgu999 3y ago"less" doesn't mean "none", it's not hard to find plenty of evidence of better living standards without car dependency or smaller average houses compared to the US for instance. Active mobility is good for your health, so is a moderated consumption of meat. Lots of benefits to organizing society better while respecting the finiteness of all our resources. It's always the same rhetoric with your kind, you pretend to fight for the poor, when all you really want is freedom to keep on grabbing as much as possible for yourselves.
- Teever 3y agoFairness doesn't matter. What does matter is that we make our best effort to mitigate the impending disaster to the human race and the ecosystem.
- llm_trw 3y agoA modest proposal. Instead trying to keep the third world poor why don't we just nuke them? This has the triple benefit of: 1). Reducing the total population. 2). Reducing CO2 production of the survivors. 3). Starting a nuclear winter. It's just unethical to do anything else when faced with the impending disaster to the human race and the ecosystem.
- sgu999 3y agoYou'd be better off nuking the rich, they are the ones who are actually producing the bulk of the CO2. The debate on degrowth isn't whether a Somalian family should have access to a decent home, healthcare, clothing, enough food etc. The answer is a very obvious yes. The debate is whether a middle class American family really should own 2 trucks, live in a 200sqm house and eat that much meat. But you always make it about the poor.