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I’ve come to terms with the fact that there is no stopping human consumption. It is simply not possible to get enough people to reduce to make an impact. The fa

I’ve come to terms with the fact that there is no stopping human consumption. It is simply not possible to get enough people to reduce to make an impact. The failure of the environment movements over the last 60 years are proof. The only way is ‘up and out’ developing clean, cheap methods of energy generation and lobbying to get that infrastructure built out as quickly as possible. At this point, investing more in Fossil fuels is a joke and anyone claiming “coal” or whatever is the future is simply a conman or a clown.

snovv_crash 4mo ago
Agreed. You aren't going to convince people in India that their children should stay poor when there is an option to uplift them. That's an extra billion people of energy and material needs, all by itself.
- islandfox100 4mo ago
  ''Now, the total population of well-off countries in the world is about 1 billion, while China has more than 1.3 billion people. If we are all to become modernized, the well-off population must more than double. If we are to consume as much energy in production and daily lives as the present well-off people do, all the existing resources in the world would be far from enough for us! The old path seems to be a dead end. Where is the new road? It lies in scientific and technological innovation, and in the accelerated transition from factor-driven and investment-driven growth to innovation-driven growth.'' -Xi Jinping, Governance of China
- coryrc 4mo ago
  The question is whether you use solar PV or build more coal plants to supply them. The latter makes people sicker, but more dependent on the government, so you can guess which one gets the tax breaks and which one gets tariffs and international politics to make it more expensive to acquire.
  - budsniffer952 4mo ago
    Coal technology is cheap and wide spread. PV technology is not, yet.
    - dalyons 4mo ago
      Huh? Solar is widely acknowledged to be significantly cheaper than building new coal. And it is everywhere, you can just buy containers of it and have it delivered anywhere in the world.
      - budsniffer952 4mo ago
        Yes. You can just buy containers of PV equipment from China and have it delivered anywhere in the world. Until they decide not to sell it to you, or they decide to stop subsidizing it. Or we go to war with them. Then you're gonna wish you had built those coal plants. Have you paid attention to anything since 2020? Are you paying attention to anything now? Suggesting PV is "cheaper" because of the per-watt cost to install it misses so much reality it's hard to take seriously. We live in the now, not some idealized future state. We need energy NOW. Do you think solar cells are immune to supply and demand? And that the economics will not be affected by a global shift?
        coryrc 4mo ago
        PV panels can't be switched off remotely because China doesn't like you. Once within your country's borders, they are yours.
        snovv_crash 4mo ago
        PV can't be switched off once sold, coal can stop being delivered. Coal is the one that brings centralisation and dependency on external parties, unless you happen to live somewhere with large coal deposits, and even in that case you get all the health problems of putting radioactive soot into the air.
mistrial9 4mo ago
> The failure of the environment movements over the last 60 years are proof superficial and incorrect
- supertroop 4mo ago
  Explain your reasoning or stop wasting bits.
  - flyinglizard 4mo ago
    Environmental movements had a huge impact on public awareness and climate change mitigation. It sure didn’t come from the government themselves. We take many everyday steps to reduce our environmental impact, from energy to transportation to building to recycling. It’s all happening to one degree or another pretty much everywhere.
  - dnautics 4mo ago
    it's hard to argue that the environmental movement has had "no effect" considering how much carbon the US and Europe have reduced in the last 15 years. SOx and NOx, have basically gone to zero, and water is cleaner, etc. Sure, some of that is "dollars and cents" and not the movement directly, but most of that (technological improvement) had nonzero influence on the technologists who built the impromevents.
  - dahinds 4mo ago
    For the past ~60 years... with maybe just a bit of slack on the start of that, it would include tremendously impactful things like: - the clean air act and clean water act - endangered species act and restrictions on international trade for protected animals and plants - creation of the EPA, and reductions and regulation of pesticides and herbicides - the emergence of the organic food industry - the Montreal protocol and global reduction in CFC production - contribution to the development of clean energy technology -- you could argue that now the boom in clean energy is just economics in action but that comes after decades of basic science and technical innovation motivated by environmental concerns.
  - calgoo 4mo ago
CalRobert 4mo ago
The crazy thing is that we have basically everything we need right now. You can live in a well-insulated fully electric home powered by renewable energy and have most things you need within a walk, bike, or public transport ride away, _OR_ use an electric car for the things that aren't. If you combine that with a mostly-plant based diet (or at _least_ swapping chicken for most of your beef and lamb) and have 2 kids or fewer you're... basically there. The main reason most people can't do this is because of political choices, not technological limitations. Granted this doesn't include luxuries like jetting halfway around the world for a 1 week holiday or living in a 4000 square foot house in the desert and driving a studio apartment an hour to work every day, but really, is that a better life?
- hypfer 4mo ago
  > have 2 kids or fewer This is at odds with lots of other relevant topics that go beyond just "consumption". 2 or fewer is below the replacement rate of 2.1 This _has_ already happened, but there are a lot of voices voicing a lot of reasons why they believe that that might actually be not the best situation.
  - tialaramex 4mo ago
    Below replacement would be terrifying if there were one thousand humans, it would be worrying if there were a million, and at least worthy of consideration if there were a hundred million, but there are almost ten billion simultaneous humans, we're fine.
    - hypfer 4mo ago
      On a humanity-level: yes. On an individual state-level: no.
      - giantg2 4mo ago
        "On an individual state-level: no." This might actually be a yes if you believe in the potential impact of automation and AI.
rwyinuse 4mo ago
Yep, all the talk about individual "carbon footprint" is just a distraction designed by the fossil fuel lobby. Universally in the world people who live most environmentally friendly lives are those that are too poor to consume much, not those who are the most aware, or claim to care the most about climate change. The only way forward is developing as much solar, wind and nuclear as possible, driving down energy prices. Obviously stuff like carbon tax can help accelerate the process, but mostly it's happening because renewables have become the cheapest way of generating energy in most parts of the world.
RajT88 4mo ago
> anyone claiming “coal” or whatever is the future is simply a conman or a clown. I've seen people on social media seriously claiming that coal plants are cleaner than wind energy or solar energy. It's aggravating. Never mind that it's easy to show that for the same amount of energy output, you get a similar amount of tons of coal ash yearly to the amount of materials it went into building a wind or solar plant... I go back and forth if they are bots, or somehow people who are just really susceptible to this kind of garbage shill clickbait.
- Loquebantur 4mo ago
  The "shill" phenomenon goes much further than ignorant laypeople. The AMOC shutdown isn't merely "possible" and due "this century". The math of the dynamics of complex systems shows the current behavior to be signs of a phase transition in the process of happening. The speed of that shutdown isn't "decades" either, it's more likely just years. The voices of "experts" telling you it was all some incomprehensible conundrum should deeply worry you. They're either not being honest or they're no experts.
- sph 4mo ago
  People are stupid. I almost had a fight with a friend I have seen in a long time, a usually smart person, that wanted to convince me that solar power is more polluting than non-renewable alternatives. He’a not a shill, he is a farmer and like many just believes the propaganda and the skepticism. One of the biggest flaws of human rationality is wanting to believe that ‘the man’ is lying to you and the stupid conspiracy meme on Facebook has a valid point. We all have seen the American public completely implode with the COVID and mask and antivax idiocy.
dnautics 4mo ago
> It is simply not possible to get enough people to reduce to make an impact What are you talking about? The united states is currently ~-30% off peak carbon emissions.
- don_esteban 4mo ago
  How much of that reduction has been achieved by outsourcing the production to China/other places? Are there good links to articles/papers where proper accounting has been done?
lumost 4mo ago
I really think the environmental movements were a red herring. It was always impossible to make a meaningful dent in your personal emissions while still existing in your location. There was never any reduction proposal which could mitigate this. Government mandates for e.g. large nuclear construction, geo-engineering, BEV adoption, or other similar proposals would have had an impact. These all exposed the real tradeoffs which would need to be accepted of cost, hardship, or whatever the opposition to nuclear was. The environmental movements of the last 60 years focused on impossible goals which were easy to rally behind.
- JeremyNT 4mo ago
  > The environmental movements of the last 60 years focused on impossible goals which were easy to rally behind. Is this true? Americans elect leaders who won't even acknowledge the issue is real. We have at times managed to gather some momentum towards using government to address the issues through incentives and regulation - even as recent as the Biden administration - then reactionaries gain power and dismantle the efforts. The "environmental movement" was not focused on the personal responsibility angle, it's just that the American political system rejected proposals to do any meaningful government interventions because long term thinking is never rewarded.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
asveikau 4mo ago
Outside the US, countries are doing a better job of electrifying. The US has deliberately retrograde policies right now.
tootie 4mo ago
We are essentially there now. We have begun the mass deployment of renewable energy and it's only accelerating. The problem is that energy consumption is also growing so it's a moving target. We are within reach of hitting peak emissions, but the fact is that most emissions will still hang in the atmo for decades. So even when we hit the point of decreasing emissions, that's still only proximate to decreasing the amount of GHG in the atmo which is proximate the heating effects on the earth. So even at our current breakneck pace of remediation, the end effects are still locked in and getting worse for at least several decades if not centuries.
cameldrv 4mo ago
The environmental movements of the past 60 years have been extremely successful, certainly in the U.S. The ozone hole problem has been essentially solved, acid rain has been essentially solved, mass scale water pollution like rivers catching on fire has been essentially solved, massive smog has been essentially solved.
- dualvariable 4mo ago
  And the people involved in climate policy have solutions to climate change which don't involve enormously large restrictions on consumption, but just require more energy efficiency (which is savings) and investment into carbon-neutral energy. And they've had those solutions for at least the past 20 years. This isn't an insolvable problem, but the carbon-based energy sector will be big losers, and they're fighting tooth and nail against it. An awful lot of our politics and geopolitics right now is symptomatic of the carbon energy sector fighting against the reality that it needs to die for the good of the human race, but it is also extraordinarily powerful.
  - mastermage 4mo ago
    this exactly this. They are trying to keep their money sources alive even if it costs the entire world. Which is Supervillain amount of selfish.
- graemep 4mo ago
  > The ozone hole problem has been essentially solved, acid rain has been essentially solved, mass scale water pollution like rivers catching on fire All far less expensive to fix. Never actually heard of rivers catching fire? Has acid rain been solved globally? The ozone hole problem we got lucky on. It required global action but a lot of things lined up. Things like the British prime minster at the time being a former research chemist and therefore understanding the issue, and being successful at influencing both the US President at the time and European countries.
  - rsynnott 4mo ago
    > Never actually heard of rivers catching fire? This is the most famous example, though there have been a few of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuyahoga_River https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuyahoga_River > Has acid rain been solved globally? Not entirely, but largely.
zerobees 4mo ago
I'm not as negative about this, but with the benefit of hindsight, it's easy why the current initiatives didn't go anywhere. It's not that people are not willing to make sacrifices. We repeatedly did this in times of famine or war. Europe during WWII is a perfect example. Another good example of a major cultural shift in response to a new threat was the AIDS epidemic. The entire sexual revolution went out the window and we're now in a world where young people have a lot less sex than ever before. We like to talk about gender and sexuality, but we do a lot less with it, so to speak. Anti-consumption / degrowth arguments face an uphill battle because they basically say "you should live a harder life". There should be less stuff, the stuff should be more expensive, there should be less of you. So you need a good answer why this is the right choice. Doing it "for the planet" doesn't sound too convincing because we're also a part of the planet and most people feel entitled to it. It's hard to get others to make real lifestyle sacrifices because you showed them some photos of koalas or coral reefs. Because koalas don't cut it, we started giving increasingly apocalyptic, doomsday-type answers, all the way to renaming "climate change" to "climate crisis" or "climate disaster / catastrophe". That was probably a mistake. It created a sense of inevitability (so might as well have fun while you can) and undermined the credibility of the proposed solutions. Is it really going to save us all if I'm sorting my recyclables into five different bins? So in a sense, I think this is a PR disaster more than anything else.
- nikanj 4mo ago
  WWII was much easier to sell to the people, because the nazis were invading _now_. It seems impossible to sell reduced standard of living today to respond to a problem tomorrow
  - xnyan 4mo ago
    Nazis were invading other places now. The US cut off Japan's oil supply, triggering an existential crisis for Japan that led to a military attack. If United States had joined the Axis powers, leadership very plausibly could have continued the practice of isolationism (which was the popular opinion before Pearl Harbor). It might have been a shortsighted move, but Nazis invading Europe did not sell the US population on entering the war.
stinkbeetle 4mo ago
> I’ve come to terms with the fact that there is no stopping human consumption. I really felt _sure_ that billionaires and monarchs and rest of the ruling class flying their private jets to meet their private mega yachts before attending very important meetings in luxury chalets where they lecture the filthy commoners about how horrible and greedy they are for not wanting to eat cockroaches and pay them more taxes for the greater good was going to do it. Are you sure that a few more decades of that won't finally convince people how awful they are? > It is simply not possible to get enough people to reduce to make an impact. The failure of the environment movements over the last 60 years are proof. The only way is ‘up and out’ developing clean, cheap methods of energy generation and lobbying to get that infrastructure built out as quickly as possible. At this point, investing more in Fossil fuels is a joke and anyone claiming “coal” or whatever is the future If only the "environment" movements had failed. They were instrumental in destroying nuclear power, with support of fossil fuel interests. The coal industry has had no better friend than the anti-nuclear "green" movement in the past 50 years. > is simply a conman or a clown. There's lots of conmen and clowns around. The trick is not sniffing out the ones twirling their mustaches and adjusting their monocles while demolishing orphanages, it's the ones who tell you things that make you feel good that are the dangerous ones. That's where the "con" in conmen comes from.
nradov 4mo ago
Ironically the "environmental" movement has in some ways actually set us back by opposing clean, safe nuclear power.
- junto 4mo ago
  > Ironically the "environmental" movement has in some ways actually set us back by opposing clean, safe nuclear power. Problem is it’s not exactly clean because you’ve got nuclear waste to dispose of and nobody wants it in their backyard. It’s mostly safe, but when it does go wrong it contaminates large swathes of land for thousands of years. Its biggest problem is that it’s expensive[1]. Not only that - it’s getting more expensive. Not only that - it will never achieve economies of scale. [1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3A3-Learning-curves-for-electricity-prices.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3A3-Learning-curves-...
FooBarWidget 4mo ago
On top of that, I see more and more people actively resisting what they call "the degrowth mind virus". For example levelsio on Twitter. He regularly complains about EU environmental regulations and the lack of AC, or inability to set it to lower than 22 C. He sets it to 18 C (which is too cold for me to sleep, but his cup of tea I guess). And regularly posts about how hot temperatures make people dumber and drive down productivity. What I don't see is these anti-degrowth people discussing substance with pro-degrowth people. No discussions about the merits of the idea that planet's carrying capacity has been reached or exceeded. Both camps seem to treat their thesis as a given, a religion even.
- graemep 4mo ago
  I often have discussions of substance about religion! I love them. I think one of the problems is that,as with many political things, people assume bad faith on the other side in this argument so there is no point having a discussion about the substance.

snovv_crash 4mo ago

Agreed. You aren't going to convince people in India that their children should stay poor when there is an option to uplift them. That's an extra billion people of energy and material needs, all by itself.

islandfox100 4mo ago
''Now, the total population of well-off countries in the world is about 1 billion, while China has more than 1.3 billion people. If we are all to become modernized, the well-off population must more than double. If we are to consume as much energy in production and daily lives as the present well-off people do, all the existing resources in the world would be far from enough for us! The old path seems to be a dead end. Where is the new road? It lies in scientific and technological innovation, and in the accelerated transition from factor-driven and investment-driven growth to innovation-driven growth.'' -Xi Jinping, Governance of China
coryrc 4mo ago
The question is whether you use solar PV or build more coal plants to supply them. The latter makes people sicker, but more dependent on the government, so you can guess which one gets the tax breaks and which one gets tariffs and international politics to make it more expensive to acquire.
- budsniffer952 4mo ago
  Coal technology is cheap and wide spread. PV technology is not, yet.
  - dalyons 4mo ago
    Huh? Solar is widely acknowledged to be significantly cheaper than building new coal. And it is everywhere, you can just buy containers of it and have it delivered anywhere in the world.
    - budsniffer952 4mo ago
      Yes. You can just buy containers of PV equipment from China and have it delivered anywhere in the world. Until they decide not to sell it to you, or they decide to stop subsidizing it. Or we go to war with them. Then you're gonna wish you had built those coal plants. Have you paid attention to anything since 2020? Are you paying attention to anything now? Suggesting PV is "cheaper" because of the per-watt cost to install it misses so much reality it's hard to take seriously. We live in the now, not some idealized future state. We need energy NOW. Do you think solar cells are immune to supply and demand? And that the economics will not be affected by a global shift?
      - coryrc 4mo ago
        PV panels can't be switched off remotely because China doesn't like you. Once within your country's borders, they are yours.
      - snovv_crash 4mo ago
        PV can't be switched off once sold, coal can stop being delivered. Coal is the one that brings centralisation and dependency on external parties, unless you happen to live somewhere with large coal deposits, and even in that case you get all the health problems of putting radioactive soot into the air.

mistrial9 4mo ago

> The failure of the environment movements over the last 60 years are proof superficial and incorrect

supertroop 4mo ago
Explain your reasoning or stop wasting bits.
- flyinglizard 4mo ago
  Environmental movements had a huge impact on public awareness and climate change mitigation. It sure didn’t come from the government themselves. We take many everyday steps to reduce our environmental impact, from energy to transportation to building to recycling. It’s all happening to one degree or another pretty much everywhere.
- dnautics 4mo ago
  it's hard to argue that the environmental movement has had "no effect" considering how much carbon the US and Europe have reduced in the last 15 years. SOx and NOx, have basically gone to zero, and water is cleaner, etc. Sure, some of that is "dollars and cents" and not the movement directly, but most of that (technological improvement) had nonzero influence on the technologists who built the impromevents.
- dahinds 4mo ago
  For the past ~60 years... with maybe just a bit of slack on the start of that, it would include tremendously impactful things like: - the clean air act and clean water act - endangered species act and restrictions on international trade for protected animals and plants - creation of the EPA, and reductions and regulation of pesticides and herbicides - the emergence of the organic food industry - the Montreal protocol and global reduction in CFC production - contribution to the development of clean energy technology -- you could argue that now the boom in clean energy is just economics in action but that comes after decades of basic science and technical innovation motivated by environmental concerns.
- calgoo 4mo ago

CalRobert 4mo ago

The crazy thing is that we have basically everything we need right now. You can live in a well-insulated fully electric home powered by renewable energy and have most things you need within a walk, bike, or public transport ride away, _OR_ use an electric car for the things that aren't. If you combine that with a mostly-plant based diet (or at _least_ swapping chicken for most of your beef and lamb) and have 2 kids or fewer you're... basically there. The main reason most people can't do this is because of political choices, not technological limitations. Granted this doesn't include luxuries like jetting halfway around the world for a 1 week holiday or living in a 4000 square foot house in the desert and driving a studio apartment an hour to work every day, but really, is that a better life?

hypfer 4mo ago
> have 2 kids or fewer This is at odds with lots of other relevant topics that go beyond just "consumption". 2 or fewer is below the replacement rate of 2.1 This _has_ already happened, but there are a lot of voices voicing a lot of reasons why they believe that that might actually be not the best situation.
- tialaramex 4mo ago
  Below replacement would be terrifying if there were one thousand humans, it would be worrying if there were a million, and at least worthy of consideration if there were a hundred million, but there are almost ten billion simultaneous humans, we're fine.
  - hypfer 4mo ago
    On a humanity-level: yes. On an individual state-level: no.
    - giantg2 4mo ago
      "On an individual state-level: no." This might actually be a yes if you believe in the potential impact of automation and AI.

rwyinuse 4mo ago

Yep, all the talk about individual "carbon footprint" is just a distraction designed by the fossil fuel lobby. Universally in the world people who live most environmentally friendly lives are those that are too poor to consume much, not those who are the most aware, or claim to care the most about climate change. The only way forward is developing as much solar, wind and nuclear as possible, driving down energy prices. Obviously stuff like carbon tax can help accelerate the process, but mostly it's happening because renewables have become the cheapest way of generating energy in most parts of the world.

RajT88 4mo ago

> anyone claiming “coal” or whatever is the future is simply a conman or a clown. I've seen people on social media seriously claiming that coal plants are cleaner than wind energy or solar energy. It's aggravating. Never mind that it's easy to show that for the same amount of energy output, you get a similar amount of tons of coal ash yearly to the amount of materials it went into building a wind or solar plant... I go back and forth if they are bots, or somehow people who are just really susceptible to this kind of garbage shill clickbait.

Loquebantur 4mo ago
The "shill" phenomenon goes much further than ignorant laypeople. The AMOC shutdown isn't merely "possible" and due "this century". The math of the dynamics of complex systems shows the current behavior to be signs of a phase transition in the process of happening. The speed of that shutdown isn't "decades" either, it's more likely just years. The voices of "experts" telling you it was all some incomprehensible conundrum should deeply worry you. They're either not being honest or they're no experts.
sph 4mo ago
People are stupid. I almost had a fight with a friend I have seen in a long time, a usually smart person, that wanted to convince me that solar power is more polluting than non-renewable alternatives. He’a not a shill, he is a farmer and like many just believes the propaganda and the skepticism. One of the biggest flaws of human rationality is wanting to believe that ‘the man’ is lying to you and the stupid conspiracy meme on Facebook has a valid point. We all have seen the American public completely implode with the COVID and mask and antivax idiocy.

dnautics 4mo ago

> It is simply not possible to get enough people to reduce to make an impact What are you talking about? The united states is currently ~-30% off peak carbon emissions.

don_esteban 4mo ago
How much of that reduction has been achieved by outsourcing the production to China/other places? Are there good links to articles/papers where proper accounting has been done?

lumost 4mo ago

I really think the environmental movements were a red herring. It was always impossible to make a meaningful dent in your personal emissions while still existing in your location. There was never any reduction proposal which could mitigate this. Government mandates for e.g. large nuclear construction, geo-engineering, BEV adoption, or other similar proposals would have had an impact. These all exposed the real tradeoffs which would need to be accepted of cost, hardship, or whatever the opposition to nuclear was. The environmental movements of the last 60 years focused on impossible goals which were easy to rally behind.

JeremyNT 4mo ago
> The environmental movements of the last 60 years focused on impossible goals which were easy to rally behind. Is this true? Americans elect leaders who won't even acknowledge the issue is real. We have at times managed to gather some momentum towards using government to address the issues through incentives and regulation - even as recent as the Biden administration - then reactionaries gain power and dismantle the efforts. The "environmental movement" was not focused on the personal responsibility angle, it's just that the American political system rejected proposals to do any meaningful government interventions because long term thinking is never rewarded.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

asveikau 4mo ago

Outside the US, countries are doing a better job of electrifying. The US has deliberately retrograde policies right now.

tootie 4mo ago

We are essentially there now. We have begun the mass deployment of renewable energy and it's only accelerating. The problem is that energy consumption is also growing so it's a moving target. We are within reach of hitting peak emissions, but the fact is that most emissions will still hang in the atmo for decades. So even when we hit the point of decreasing emissions, that's still only proximate to decreasing the amount of GHG in the atmo which is proximate the heating effects on the earth. So even at our current breakneck pace of remediation, the end effects are still locked in and getting worse for at least several decades if not centuries.

cameldrv 4mo ago

The environmental movements of the past 60 years have been extremely successful, certainly in the U.S. The ozone hole problem has been essentially solved, acid rain has been essentially solved, mass scale water pollution like rivers catching on fire has been essentially solved, massive smog has been essentially solved.

dualvariable 4mo ago
And the people involved in climate policy have solutions to climate change which don't involve enormously large restrictions on consumption, but just require more energy efficiency (which is savings) and investment into carbon-neutral energy. And they've had those solutions for at least the past 20 years. This isn't an insolvable problem, but the carbon-based energy sector will be big losers, and they're fighting tooth and nail against it. An awful lot of our politics and geopolitics right now is symptomatic of the carbon energy sector fighting against the reality that it needs to die for the good of the human race, but it is also extraordinarily powerful.
- mastermage 4mo ago
  this exactly this. They are trying to keep their money sources alive even if it costs the entire world. Which is Supervillain amount of selfish.
graemep 4mo ago
> The ozone hole problem has been essentially solved, acid rain has been essentially solved, mass scale water pollution like rivers catching on fire All far less expensive to fix. Never actually heard of rivers catching fire? Has acid rain been solved globally? The ozone hole problem we got lucky on. It required global action but a lot of things lined up. Things like the British prime minster at the time being a former research chemist and therefore understanding the issue, and being successful at influencing both the US President at the time and European countries.
- rsynnott 4mo ago
  > Never actually heard of rivers catching fire? This is the most famous example, though there have been a few of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuyahoga_River https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuyahoga_River > Has acid rain been solved globally? Not entirely, but largely.

zerobees 4mo ago

I'm not as negative about this, but with the benefit of hindsight, it's easy why the current initiatives didn't go anywhere. It's not that people are not willing to make sacrifices. We repeatedly did this in times of famine or war. Europe during WWII is a perfect example. Another good example of a major cultural shift in response to a new threat was the AIDS epidemic. The entire sexual revolution went out the window and we're now in a world where young people have a lot less sex than ever before. We like to talk about gender and sexuality, but we do a lot less with it, so to speak. Anti-consumption / degrowth arguments face an uphill battle because they basically say "you should live a harder life". There should be less stuff, the stuff should be more expensive, there should be less of you. So you need a good answer why this is the right choice. Doing it "for the planet" doesn't sound too convincing because we're also a part of the planet and most people feel entitled to it. It's hard to get others to make real lifestyle sacrifices because you showed them some photos of koalas or coral reefs. Because koalas don't cut it, we started giving increasingly apocalyptic, doomsday-type answers, all the way to renaming "climate change" to "climate crisis" or "climate disaster / catastrophe". That was probably a mistake. It created a sense of inevitability (so might as well have fun while you can) and undermined the credibility of the proposed solutions. Is it really going to save us all if I'm sorting my recyclables into five different bins? So in a sense, I think this is a PR disaster more than anything else.

nikanj 4mo ago
WWII was much easier to sell to the people, because the nazis were invading _now_. It seems impossible to sell reduced standard of living today to respond to a problem tomorrow
- xnyan 4mo ago
  Nazis were invading other places now. The US cut off Japan's oil supply, triggering an existential crisis for Japan that led to a military attack. If United States had joined the Axis powers, leadership very plausibly could have continued the practice of isolationism (which was the popular opinion before Pearl Harbor). It might have been a shortsighted move, but Nazis invading Europe did not sell the US population on entering the war.

stinkbeetle 4mo ago

> I’ve come to terms with the fact that there is no stopping human consumption. I really felt _sure_ that billionaires and monarchs and rest of the ruling class flying their private jets to meet their private mega yachts before attending very important meetings in luxury chalets where they lecture the filthy commoners about how horrible and greedy they are for not wanting to eat cockroaches and pay them more taxes for the greater good was going to do it. Are you sure that a few more decades of that won't finally convince people how awful they are? > It is simply not possible to get enough people to reduce to make an impact. The failure of the environment movements over the last 60 years are proof. The only way is ‘up and out’ developing clean, cheap methods of energy generation and lobbying to get that infrastructure built out as quickly as possible. At this point, investing more in Fossil fuels is a joke and anyone claiming “coal” or whatever is the future If only the "environment" movements had failed. They were instrumental in destroying nuclear power, with support of fossil fuel interests. The coal industry has had no better friend than the anti-nuclear "green" movement in the past 50 years. > is simply a conman or a clown. There's lots of conmen and clowns around. The trick is not sniffing out the ones twirling their mustaches and adjusting their monocles while demolishing orphanages, it's the ones who tell you things that make you feel good that are the dangerous ones. That's where the "con" in conmen comes from.

nradov 4mo ago

Ironically the "environmental" movement has in some ways actually set us back by opposing clean, safe nuclear power.

junto 4mo ago
> Ironically the "environmental" movement has in some ways actually set us back by opposing clean, safe nuclear power. Problem is it’s not exactly clean because you’ve got nuclear waste to dispose of and nobody wants it in their backyard. It’s mostly safe, but when it does go wrong it contaminates large swathes of land for thousands of years. Its biggest problem is that it’s expensive[1]. Not only that - it’s getting more expensive. Not only that - it will never achieve economies of scale. [1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3A3-Learning-curves-for-electricity-prices.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3A3-Learning-curves-...

FooBarWidget 4mo ago

On top of that, I see more and more people actively resisting what they call "the degrowth mind virus". For example levelsio on Twitter. He regularly complains about EU environmental regulations and the lack of AC, or inability to set it to lower than 22 C. He sets it to 18 C (which is too cold for me to sleep, but his cup of tea I guess). And regularly posts about how hot temperatures make people dumber and drive down productivity. What I don't see is these anti-degrowth people discussing substance with pro-degrowth people. No discussions about the merits of the idea that planet's carrying capacity has been reached or exceeded. Both camps seem to treat their thesis as a given, a religion even.

graemep 4mo ago
I often have discussions of substance about religion! I love them. I think one of the problems is that,as with many political things, people assume bad faith on the other side in this argument so there is no point having a discussion about the substance.