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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 ha

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.
      - generic92034 4mo ago
        And if you believe in the fair distribution of the benefits of automation and AI in the population. IMHO, this belief is the more unrealistic one, at least in the short term.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 4mo ago
    >Below replacement would be terrifying if there were one thousand humans, The funny part is that it should terrify you whether there are 10 humans or 10 billion. At the current rates, it's over in about 12-13 generations regardless of the number you start with. That's how it works... no matter how big the starting number, it's how many generations you have left. Think of it this way? You know the dumb story they taught us in school, about the guy whose payment from the king for doing something clever was to have one grain of rice on the first chess square, and 2 on the second, 4 on the third, and so on... and how it bankrupted the king long before the 64th square? That's the same math with fertility rate of 1.0! (The Chinese have a fertility rate of 1.0, famously.) Each generation will be half the size of the previous. But how long before that is effectively zero? Will it be 1 million years, 250,000 years? No, about 300ish. 300 years. But long before you reach that point, your civilization has fallen apart. Those last 4 or 5 generations live life without electricity, anything but muscle power, or metallurgy. And China's fertility rate isn't even the lowest! South Korea's rate just dropped to around 0.5! That's where each generation is one quarter the size of the previous. The best part of all is that these rates haven't even bottomed out. We will almost certainly see rates right around 0 long before the century ends. >but there are almost ten billion simultaneous humans, we're fine. At least math illiteracy ought to console you guys towards the end.
    - yoyohello13 4mo ago
      This whole comment rests on a very big assumption that these rates will never recover. Just because you can fit a trend line doesn’t mean the projections will pan out. It could just as easily be the case that once population starts meaningfully decreasing, the opportunity cost of children will also decrease and fertility rates will recover. This happens all the time in nature. Our population absolutely exploded over the last 100 years. This can easily just be a reversion to the mean. There really is no reason to be worrying about human extinction right now. In fact, the ‘extinction’ rhetoric is harmful and dangerous since so many ‘solutions’ to fertility rates are less education and less freedom. I have no trouble believing a handmaids tail like faction emerging because they believe they are saving the species.
      - 4mo ago
- jandrese 4mo ago
  You see a whole lot of panic from industrialists over the birth rate drop in the industrialized world. They claim it is an extinction level event for humanity. This is not quite correct. It is an extinction level event for economic models that assume unbounded growth of the consumer base.
  - gorjusborg 4mo ago
    This is an important distinction: what is good for ecology is not necessarily good for economy. If we need unbounded growth to jeep our economic system to function, its the economic system that is wrong, not nature.
    - CuriouslyC 4mo ago
      Hence why the die hard capitalist shills are so set on going to space.
      - deleted 4mo ago
        [deleted]
      - jay_kyburz 4mo ago
        We should help by shooting them into space.
        mfru 4mo ago
        you can save even more co2 and costs by leaving the "into space" part out
    - kruffalon 4mo ago
      Capitalist economy. Economies can exist in many different ways. At its core it is just a way to describe how we move resources between ourselves and that can be done in many, many ways.
      - nradov 4mo ago
Avicebron 4mo ago
> 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. For this to be the most effective it really needs to be deployed somewhere like India. How are they coming along with that?
- coryrc 4mo ago
  They have tons of people using small vehicles, bicycles and public transport. Unfortunately they aren't following China in mass rollout of solar photovoltaic; 90% of their energy consumption is fossil fuels: https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/india https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/india USA is at 80%, which isn't much better, but at least trending down: https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/united-states https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/united-states China is also at 80%, but trending down far steeper: https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china
- triceratops 4mo ago
  > For this to be the most effective it really needs to be deployed somewhere like India Why? Most people there already live like that, minus insulation and reliable electricity.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 4mo ago
    Because they are likely not living like that by choice. So, when they have the resources to consume more (which will certainly happen), energy-efficient choices need to be available.
    - triceratops 4mo ago
      Energy-efficient choices will make the same impact no matter where they're deployed. Arguably they'll have more impact in Western countries since they already emit more carbon. "India (or China) has to do <something>" is bullshit. Everyone has to do go lower carbon right now. Richer countries can afford more expensive technologies today so they should go first. By doing so they'll drive down the cost for everyone else.
dmitrygr 4mo ago
Western nations reducing will DO nothing - it is too small a fraction of greenhouse emissions. The large fraction is coming form india and china. And they do not have electric everything. they don't even have running water in most places.
- rwyinuse 4mo ago
  Your view is outdated. China is building renewable power generation at an extremely high rate, and also exporting cheap solar panels worldwide. China has a higher share of electric vehicles in cities than most of Europe and America does. It appears their emissions are now starting to go down as a result, although the economy keeps growing. India still has a long way to go, but China is doing the right things. Same can't be said about USA under current administration.
  - budsniffer952 4mo ago
    >Same can't be said about USA under current administration. The reason half the population won't take climate alarmists seriously are statements like this. Saying the West, generally, or the US, specifically "aren't doing anything" is ridiculous. https://ourworldindata.org/profile/co2/united-states https://ourworldindata.org/profile/co2/united-states
    - brewdad 4mo ago
      That chart conveniently ends at the end of the Biden Administration.
      - budsniffer952 4mo ago
        Yes. It "conveniently" stops after showing 50 years of declining per captita carbon footprint. The last 4 years are what matter. Classic hacker News take. This is why you will continue to lose.
  - contingencies 4mo ago
    China's solar industry has some growth pangs right now but will recover: https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/chinas-solar-giants-quietly-shed-third-their-workforces-last-year-2025-08-01/ https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/chinas-solar-... (Aug 2025) + https://archive.is/6hCFU https://archive.is/6hCFU + (May) https://www.carbonbrief.org/chart-why-chinas-solar-boom-is-slowing-down/ https://www.carbonbrief.org/chart-why-chinas-solar-boom-is-s... (June) Most individual and collective consumption driving polluting production is overwhelmingly traditional western/first-world economies, though China is catching up.
mc32 4mo ago
All of the Western nations are at 2 kids or fewer but also so are China and India. Most of the 2+ children come from the ME and subsaharan Africa and areas in Oceania/SEAsia, Maybe some parts of South America. One could slow consumption by not importing people from low carbon footprint into high carbon footprint countries -though many countries, except Japan, aren't comfortable adjusting to lower populations.
dgroshev 4mo ago
You're missing the vast interconnected network of stuff that's required to sustain that home. From your home battery to cancer treatments that you might need to sewer that runs to your home, all of this needs to be made and sometimes replaced. Most of those things are still unavailable to most humans; in many places we still haven't built roads, much less sewers and water distribution systems. Household electricity self-sufficiency obscures the vast requirements to support it and extend this self-sufficiency to billions of other people.
- yoyohello13 4mo ago
  You’re right about that. I do think that access to more and cheaper energy has the downstream effect of making all those other things cheaper too and more available too. Energy is the foundation of it all.
graeme 4mo ago
>The crazy thing is that we have basically everything we need right now. Have you travelled? This doesn't describe most of the world. Most of the world would need to increase carbon emissions to live the way you're describing. You aren't describing a zero carbon lifestyle, you're describing a lower carbon lifestyle. And we still use carbon in building the things in your scenario: the building, the car, etc. Lower carbon lifestyles can slow the speed of the increase in global warming, but as long as we're emitting any carbon we're increasing global energy forcing. By all means choose lower carbon lifestyles, but fundamentally we need nuclear or renewables + battery or all of the above such that we don't face a tradeoff between energy use and getting stuff people want. Energy is extremely useful.
- Loquebantur 4mo ago
  The idea of average individuals being the relevant actors in global carbon emissions is pure misdirection. They're not, it's systemic with industry being the main culprit and the rich being the ones who benefit from that socialization of pollution costs. The AMOC shutdown isn't merely "possible" and due "this century" either. 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.
  - vladms 4mo ago
    > They're not, it's systemic with industry being the main culprit and the rich being the ones who benefit from that socialization of pollution costs. You two might agree if we consider that when you say "rich" you might describe the average individual on this website (if we consider all people alive). I do believe that 90% of the people would not want to actually destroy the planet the way it seems to be happening, but I also believe that 90% of the people can't refrain themselves from bad health habits either. So, to fix the root cause I would discuss more about people's bad emotional/impulse control, otherwise we will just change one issue (climate) to any of the others (violence, unhappiness, etc.)
to11mtm 4mo ago
> 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. 'political' is true but it covers so many different problems. For example, while there is a grocery store very accessible to me, you have to plot the route carefully due to the road design. Then there's the problem of the condo I currently live in not having the infrastructure for charging. (My compromise in that case is a hybrid. Kinda want a plug-in hybrid for my next car, they've gotten to where it very well could handle 80% of my driving.) > 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? I've never gotten this lifestyle either... I'm not afraid to do a long road trip once a year or so, but yes in most cases too many costs have been externalized for too long.
- CalRobert 4mo ago
  Yeah, it's absurd that you can be 500 feet from a grocery story and still have to drive because otherwise you're risking death to get there. As far as charging - I favour car-share, personally (I use mywheels.nl). Usually if you don't need a car every day (so you don't commute somewhere inaccessible via transit or bike) it makes more sense economically. Even where I live, in a place some people describe as a bicycle Eden, there's plenty of complaining about not having "enough" car parking.
oldandboring 4mo ago
Let me guess: you live in a European city.

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.
    - generic92034 4mo ago
      And if you believe in the fair distribution of the benefits of automation and AI in the population. IMHO, this belief is the more unrealistic one, at least in the short term.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 4mo ago
  >Below replacement would be terrifying if there were one thousand humans, The funny part is that it should terrify you whether there are 10 humans or 10 billion. At the current rates, it's over in about 12-13 generations regardless of the number you start with. That's how it works... no matter how big the starting number, it's how many generations you have left. Think of it this way? You know the dumb story they taught us in school, about the guy whose payment from the king for doing something clever was to have one grain of rice on the first chess square, and 2 on the second, 4 on the third, and so on... and how it bankrupted the king long before the 64th square? That's the same math with fertility rate of 1.0! (The Chinese have a fertility rate of 1.0, famously.) Each generation will be half the size of the previous. But how long before that is effectively zero? Will it be 1 million years, 250,000 years? No, about 300ish. 300 years. But long before you reach that point, your civilization has fallen apart. Those last 4 or 5 generations live life without electricity, anything but muscle power, or metallurgy. And China's fertility rate isn't even the lowest! South Korea's rate just dropped to around 0.5! That's where each generation is one quarter the size of the previous. The best part of all is that these rates haven't even bottomed out. We will almost certainly see rates right around 0 long before the century ends. >but there are almost ten billion simultaneous humans, we're fine. At least math illiteracy ought to console you guys towards the end.
  - yoyohello13 4mo ago
    This whole comment rests on a very big assumption that these rates will never recover. Just because you can fit a trend line doesn’t mean the projections will pan out. It could just as easily be the case that once population starts meaningfully decreasing, the opportunity cost of children will also decrease and fertility rates will recover. This happens all the time in nature. Our population absolutely exploded over the last 100 years. This can easily just be a reversion to the mean. There really is no reason to be worrying about human extinction right now. In fact, the ‘extinction’ rhetoric is harmful and dangerous since so many ‘solutions’ to fertility rates are less education and less freedom. I have no trouble believing a handmaids tail like faction emerging because they believe they are saving the species.
    - 4mo ago
jandrese 4mo ago
You see a whole lot of panic from industrialists over the birth rate drop in the industrialized world. They claim it is an extinction level event for humanity. This is not quite correct. It is an extinction level event for economic models that assume unbounded growth of the consumer base.
- gorjusborg 4mo ago
  This is an important distinction: what is good for ecology is not necessarily good for economy. If we need unbounded growth to jeep our economic system to function, its the economic system that is wrong, not nature.
  - CuriouslyC 4mo ago
    Hence why the die hard capitalist shills are so set on going to space.
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
    - jay_kyburz 4mo ago
      We should help by shooting them into space.
      - mfru 4mo ago
        you can save even more co2 and costs by leaving the "into space" part out
  - kruffalon 4mo ago
    Capitalist economy. Economies can exist in many different ways. At its core it is just a way to describe how we move resources between ourselves and that can be done in many, many ways.
    - nradov 4mo ago

Avicebron 4mo ago

> 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. For this to be the most effective it really needs to be deployed somewhere like India. How are they coming along with that?

coryrc 4mo ago
They have tons of people using small vehicles, bicycles and public transport. Unfortunately they aren't following China in mass rollout of solar photovoltaic; 90% of their energy consumption is fossil fuels: https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/india https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/india USA is at 80%, which isn't much better, but at least trending down: https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/united-states https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/united-states China is also at 80%, but trending down far steeper: https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china
triceratops 4mo ago
> For this to be the most effective it really needs to be deployed somewhere like India Why? Most people there already live like that, minus insulation and reliable electricity.
- HeyLaughingBoy 4mo ago
  Because they are likely not living like that by choice. So, when they have the resources to consume more (which will certainly happen), energy-efficient choices need to be available.
  - triceratops 4mo ago
    Energy-efficient choices will make the same impact no matter where they're deployed. Arguably they'll have more impact in Western countries since they already emit more carbon. "India (or China) has to do <something>" is bullshit. Everyone has to do go lower carbon right now. Richer countries can afford more expensive technologies today so they should go first. By doing so they'll drive down the cost for everyone else.

dmitrygr 4mo ago

Western nations reducing will DO nothing - it is too small a fraction of greenhouse emissions. The large fraction is coming form india and china. And they do not have electric everything. they don't even have running water in most places.

rwyinuse 4mo ago
Your view is outdated. China is building renewable power generation at an extremely high rate, and also exporting cheap solar panels worldwide. China has a higher share of electric vehicles in cities than most of Europe and America does. It appears their emissions are now starting to go down as a result, although the economy keeps growing. India still has a long way to go, but China is doing the right things. Same can't be said about USA under current administration.
- budsniffer952 4mo ago
  >Same can't be said about USA under current administration. The reason half the population won't take climate alarmists seriously are statements like this. Saying the West, generally, or the US, specifically "aren't doing anything" is ridiculous. https://ourworldindata.org/profile/co2/united-states https://ourworldindata.org/profile/co2/united-states
  - brewdad 4mo ago
    That chart conveniently ends at the end of the Biden Administration.
    - budsniffer952 4mo ago
      Yes. It "conveniently" stops after showing 50 years of declining per captita carbon footprint. The last 4 years are what matter. Classic hacker News take. This is why you will continue to lose.
- contingencies 4mo ago
  China's solar industry has some growth pangs right now but will recover: https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/chinas-solar-giants-quietly-shed-third-their-workforces-last-year-2025-08-01/ https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/chinas-solar-... (Aug 2025) + https://archive.is/6hCFU https://archive.is/6hCFU + (May) https://www.carbonbrief.org/chart-why-chinas-solar-boom-is-slowing-down/ https://www.carbonbrief.org/chart-why-chinas-solar-boom-is-s... (June) Most individual and collective consumption driving polluting production is overwhelmingly traditional western/first-world economies, though China is catching up.

mc32 4mo ago

All of the Western nations are at 2 kids or fewer but also so are China and India. Most of the 2+ children come from the ME and subsaharan Africa and areas in Oceania/SEAsia, Maybe some parts of South America. One could slow consumption by not importing people from low carbon footprint into high carbon footprint countries -though many countries, except Japan, aren't comfortable adjusting to lower populations.

dgroshev 4mo ago

You're missing the vast interconnected network of stuff that's required to sustain that home. From your home battery to cancer treatments that you might need to sewer that runs to your home, all of this needs to be made and sometimes replaced. Most of those things are still unavailable to most humans; in many places we still haven't built roads, much less sewers and water distribution systems. Household electricity self-sufficiency obscures the vast requirements to support it and extend this self-sufficiency to billions of other people.

yoyohello13 4mo ago
You’re right about that. I do think that access to more and cheaper energy has the downstream effect of making all those other things cheaper too and more available too. Energy is the foundation of it all.

graeme 4mo ago

>The crazy thing is that we have basically everything we need right now. Have you travelled? This doesn't describe most of the world. Most of the world would need to increase carbon emissions to live the way you're describing. You aren't describing a zero carbon lifestyle, you're describing a lower carbon lifestyle. And we still use carbon in building the things in your scenario: the building, the car, etc. Lower carbon lifestyles can slow the speed of the increase in global warming, but as long as we're emitting any carbon we're increasing global energy forcing. By all means choose lower carbon lifestyles, but fundamentally we need nuclear or renewables + battery or all of the above such that we don't face a tradeoff between energy use and getting stuff people want. Energy is extremely useful.

Loquebantur 4mo ago
The idea of average individuals being the relevant actors in global carbon emissions is pure misdirection. They're not, it's systemic with industry being the main culprit and the rich being the ones who benefit from that socialization of pollution costs. The AMOC shutdown isn't merely "possible" and due "this century" either. 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.
- vladms 4mo ago
  > They're not, it's systemic with industry being the main culprit and the rich being the ones who benefit from that socialization of pollution costs. You two might agree if we consider that when you say "rich" you might describe the average individual on this website (if we consider all people alive). I do believe that 90% of the people would not want to actually destroy the planet the way it seems to be happening, but I also believe that 90% of the people can't refrain themselves from bad health habits either. So, to fix the root cause I would discuss more about people's bad emotional/impulse control, otherwise we will just change one issue (climate) to any of the others (violence, unhappiness, etc.)

to11mtm 4mo ago

> 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. 'political' is true but it covers so many different problems. For example, while there is a grocery store very accessible to me, you have to plot the route carefully due to the road design. Then there's the problem of the condo I currently live in not having the infrastructure for charging. (My compromise in that case is a hybrid. Kinda want a plug-in hybrid for my next car, they've gotten to where it very well could handle 80% of my driving.) > 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? I've never gotten this lifestyle either... I'm not afraid to do a long road trip once a year or so, but yes in most cases too many costs have been externalized for too long.

CalRobert 4mo ago
Yeah, it's absurd that you can be 500 feet from a grocery story and still have to drive because otherwise you're risking death to get there. As far as charging - I favour car-share, personally (I use mywheels.nl). Usually if you don't need a car every day (so you don't commute somewhere inaccessible via transit or bike) it makes more sense economically. Even where I live, in a place some people describe as a bicycle Eden, there's plenty of complaining about not having "enough" car parking.

oldandboring 4mo ago

Let me guess: you live in a European city.