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The author presents the following options: 1. participate in the industrial economy = lose 2. living more simply = lose 3. stop the industrial economy = win

The author presents the following options: 1. participate in the industrial economy = lose 2. living more simply = lose 3. stop the industrial economy = win How about a fourth option, which includes: massive geo and atmospheric engineering, nuclear/fusion research/dissemination, desalination and water pipelines, and large-scale laboratory meat production from real animal tissue. My understanding is that the damage we've done will take thousands of years to reverse if done naturally. If that's true, the only viable solution, and one that may even let us maintain our standard of living, is the massive all-in application of science and engineering we used to decades ago dream about and assume would naturally come. Are we that spooked as a species that we forgot to think big, or is it simply delusional to think we can engineer the planet?

kijin 12y ago
The article exemplifies a pretty common attitude among certain types of environmentalists, which is that there's something intrinsically and irredeemably evil about the modern industrial society as a whole. Not surprisingly, it does not occur to them that we might be able to harness and redirect the formidable forces of the industrial economy to do good instead of evil under certain circumstances. Even though this would be easier and more effective than getting rid of it altogether. This is not a failure to think big. It's just what happens when you think big and only big. Nothing less than the entirety of the industrial economy can be the subject of their moral judgments, because they don't want to spend any time trying to find out which parts are okay and which parts are truly evil.
- schiffern 12y ago
  >which parts are okay and which parts are truly evil I don't know if I agree with your premise here. Why do destructive (or even self-destructive) systems have to have "evil parts"? These are systems problems, not the type of problem you can solve by taking out one kind of people and putting in another (or technology, or political party, or company, or…).
  - kijin 12y ago
    I was using the word "parts" very loosely. In large systems, a problem might not be the fault of any specific part(s), but the result of complex interaction among parts. If so, that interaction as a whole, rather than its individual components, would be the "part" that is evil or buggy or (insert appropriately negative expression here). Systems based on faulty architectures tend to be the most difficult to fix, since changing the basic architecture will affect nearly everything else. But even in such cases, it's not helpful to claim that the system as a whole is evil. If the architecture is bad, the architecture is bad. Anything more or less than that is hyperbole.
    - schiffern 12y ago
      >the result of complex interaction among parts Agree 100%. The architecture is bad, and that causes suffering.
overgard 12y ago
The problem with engineering the planet is that you would presumably have to have every country on-board for it to be effective (or at least the big ones). Which would imply that either the engineered solution is so obvious to everyone involved that any opposition would be considered a fringe minority, or you have some sort of united world government that has the power to enforce that kind of change. Neither of those seems super likely though, at least in the near future.
- rhino369 12y ago
  I think the exact opposite is true. In order to make real climate change progress we'll have to have a all the major nations on board for real cuts to C02 usage. That includes telling China, India, and Brazil that they must use a fraction of the C0/2 per capita that western nations use. On the other hand, a single rouge nation could engage in geoengineering. Some even claim a rouge billionaire could do it.
- fulafel 12y ago
  We've already done this with free trade agreements, human rights, etc. A strong consensus is enough, rest can be done with such and carrot diplomatically (aid, sanctions).
saalweachter 12y ago
Is anyone currently doing, hmm, civilization engineering? There's a very short question with a very long answer, design a perfect civilization. Heck, simplify it further, design a perfect industrial economy. What would our resource acquisition, energy generation and transmission, manufacturing and shipping, transportation and housing, agriculture have to look like to arbitrarily high standard of living with arbitrarily low environmental impacts?
- schiffern 12y ago
  So basically, you want a systems approach for designing sustainable… everything. These guys seem to be on to something: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture
  - saalweachter 12y ago
    Yeah, permaculture is interesting, but heavily biased towards agriculture. I'm also not sure if it takes a civilization-level view. Are current permaculture techniques a viable method for replacing industrial agriculture? Can they produce enough calories per acre to feed the projected world population on the projected amount of arable land? Can it function with the available manpower in our hypothetical civilization? Modern agriculture directly employees something like 1-3% of the population; do you need 10-20% engaged in permaculture growing food, or 80-150%?
    - schiffern 12y ago
      >Are current permaculture techniques a viable method for replacing industrial agriculture? Note that industrial agriculture isn't a viable replacement for itself (that's what being unsustainable means). So if you're expecting any drop-in replacement for industrial agriculture to be sustainable, you'll be disappointed. Permaculture is a process for designing systems. You can use it to design food systems, financial systems, energy systems, etc. And like most processes, you can fuck it up and do a bad job. :) >Can they produce enough calories per acre to feed the projected world population on the projected amount of arable land? An underlying assumption here is that food has to be produced on "arable" (read: cleared) land. This is tremendously inefficient, since most sunlight strikes bare soil and therefore isn't photosynthesized. Forests yield an order of magnitude more biomass per hectare without any human inputs, so it's definitely possible. The trick is to design the forest so it yields useful outputs while minimizing inputs.[1] This is all pretty abstract, so here's a simple example. Human labor is an input, and one technique to minimize it is zone analysis[2]. During zone analysis you minimize labor and energy by consciously placing the most frequently visited elements closest, followed by the next, and so on. This sounds obvious, but it avoids many common mistakes. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixx1c3RSw_8#t=28m25s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixx1c3RSw_8#t=28m25s [2] http://deepgreenpermaculture.com/permaculture/permaculture-design-principles/4-zones-and-sectors-efficient-energy-planning/ http://deepgreenpermaculture.com/permaculture/permaculture-d...
api 12y ago
That's a religious heresy to this movement. What you wrote is tantamount to suggesting a Christian worship Satan.
jmclean 12y ago
One problem here is that any outcome (warming or no, human-engineered or no) will impact every nation differently. Under current warming projections, some nations will see massive increases in arable land, whereas others will be completely underwater. Even within nations, some cities and regions will see detrimental effects, whereas others could even see benefits (though this is taboo to talk about, which foreshadows one variation of the problem). It seems naively optimistic to think we will be able to geoengineer altruistically or with the general good in mind. Even the concept of an 'average good' for the earth is a little morally problematic if some nations benefit and others are hurt. When a nation acquires the ability to affect climate at a large scale, it seems likely that it will be used for political ends as much as for net positive outcomes.
- waps 12y ago
  And what makes you think that random outcomes ("natural" outcomes if you will) are any better ? I mean, didn't we stop believing in a benevolent God at some point ? Because when I look at the green movement, my mind very quickly feels the need to point out that for the green movement to do any good at all with their pushing of nature, nature would have to be good. Nature is not good, nor is it evil, but let me point out that with very, very few exceptions murderers are not evil either (the large majority are furthering their own ends, not killing for fun or morals).
  - learc83 12y ago
    > I mean, didn't we stop believing in a benevolent God at some point ? Who is we? The majority of the world believes in a "Supreme Being". In the US, about 75% believe in God, and in the EU 51% believe in God.
    - eli_gottlieb 12y ago
      >Who is we? The sensible people, who can clearly see that there's less a God than there is an Auditor of Reality, an anal, obsessive-compulsive cosmic bureaucrat who doesn't give half a damn what happens to people as long as every atom reports its spin and the paperwork is filed on every chemical reaction.
schiffern 12y ago
>massive geo and atmospheric engineering, nuclear/fusion research/dissemination, desalination and water pipelines, and large-scale laboratory meat production from real animal tissue These "solutions" are merely a continuation of business-as-usual. Each will inevitably cause problems larger than it solves, because until it does we'll just view that as "headroom" to grow more. Desalination is particularly nasty, destroying huge amounts of land (at the opportunity cost of the ecosystem services the site could perform were it regenerated) in order to concentrate power and wealth. This is bad for socio-economic sustainability as well. Proper rainwater harvesting and storage—or as I call it, "lazy desalination"—is quite sustainable both ecologically and socially, but that's the un-sexy problem: decentralized solutions don't make rich people richer. Try tackling that with your start-up. ;) Continuous growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
- waps 12y ago
  And no growth (or linear growth) is the ideology of the extinct.
  - schiffern 12y ago
    I'm sorry, I don't follow. What do you mean by "growth" in this context? What is growing? I don't think I need to enumerate the counterexamples here, as any long-lived extant species would suffice.
    - waps 12y ago
      1) read this http://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/how-populations-grow-the-exponential-and-logistic-13240157 http://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/how-populat... 2) realize why populations "stabilize" ... (which for all species but humans and domesticated species means that the rate of die-off is equal to the rate of exponential growth. It does NOT mean that the individual members of the species aren't growing exponentially). There are many examples of species that stopped growing exponentially, or lost the ability to do so. They're all extinct.
hyperbovine 12y ago
We cannot even reliably forecast the weather one week in the future, and you are advocating climate engineering on a global scale? Forgive me for being skeptical. I'm not aware of any so-called geo-engineering effort that has been successful other than those whose aim was strictly to undo whatever it is we did to fuck things up in the first place. There is no fourth option. It's simply delusional.
- thaumaturgy 12y ago
  It's worth repeating that weather and climate are two very different beasts.
- brandonmenc 12y ago
  > We cannot even reliably forecast the weather one week in the future, and you are advocating climate engineering on a global scale? Weather is not climate. I don't think we should act immediately. Atmospheric and oceanic engineering could take decades - maybe even a hundred years - to research, test, and convince the world of. I'm talking about multi-generation engineering projects.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
coldtea 12y ago
>How about a fourth option, which includes: massive geo and atmospheric engineering, nuclear/fusion research/dissemination, desalination and water pipelines, and large-scale laboratory meat production from real animal tissue. Without stoping the industrial economy (actually just slowing it down) this is a non starter. This only covers the food production/water, and perhaps energy needs. What about pollution from production? What about plastics, etc? Even with all that, the US/Western consumption levels don't scale to 7 billion people. (Plus, what about people not actually really needing 90% of all the crap that's produced in the first place? The main reason behind all that stuff's production is not human need, either to create or to consume those products, but as a way to make money. That's why they have to be marketed that hard, or why other items have to be brittle to "expire" artificially and drive a new purchase cycle). >and one that may even let us maintain our standard of living I'd think the whole idea for me is to NOT maintain our catastrophic standard of living (I'm a European, the US one is even worse by most metrics), but to go into a sustainable (and humane) standard of living, and expand that to the third world.

kijin 12y ago

The article exemplifies a pretty common attitude among certain types of environmentalists, which is that there's something intrinsically and irredeemably evil about the modern industrial society as a whole. Not surprisingly, it does not occur to them that we might be able to harness and redirect the formidable forces of the industrial economy to do good instead of evil under certain circumstances. Even though this would be easier and more effective than getting rid of it altogether. This is not a failure to think big. It's just what happens when you think big and only big. Nothing less than the entirety of the industrial economy can be the subject of their moral judgments, because they don't want to spend any time trying to find out which parts are okay and which parts are truly evil.

schiffern 12y ago
>which parts are okay and which parts are truly evil I don't know if I agree with your premise here. Why do destructive (or even self-destructive) systems have to have "evil parts"? These are systems problems, not the type of problem you can solve by taking out one kind of people and putting in another (or technology, or political party, or company, or…).
- kijin 12y ago
  I was using the word "parts" very loosely. In large systems, a problem might not be the fault of any specific part(s), but the result of complex interaction among parts. If so, that interaction as a whole, rather than its individual components, would be the "part" that is evil or buggy or (insert appropriately negative expression here). Systems based on faulty architectures tend to be the most difficult to fix, since changing the basic architecture will affect nearly everything else. But even in such cases, it's not helpful to claim that the system as a whole is evil. If the architecture is bad, the architecture is bad. Anything more or less than that is hyperbole.
  - schiffern 12y ago
    >the result of complex interaction among parts Agree 100%. The architecture is bad, and that causes suffering.

overgard 12y ago

The problem with engineering the planet is that you would presumably have to have every country on-board for it to be effective (or at least the big ones). Which would imply that either the engineered solution is so obvious to everyone involved that any opposition would be considered a fringe minority, or you have some sort of united world government that has the power to enforce that kind of change. Neither of those seems super likely though, at least in the near future.

rhino369 12y ago
I think the exact opposite is true. In order to make real climate change progress we'll have to have a all the major nations on board for real cuts to C02 usage. That includes telling China, India, and Brazil that they must use a fraction of the C0/2 per capita that western nations use. On the other hand, a single rouge nation could engage in geoengineering. Some even claim a rouge billionaire could do it.
fulafel 12y ago
We've already done this with free trade agreements, human rights, etc. A strong consensus is enough, rest can be done with such and carrot diplomatically (aid, sanctions).

saalweachter 12y ago

Is anyone currently doing, hmm, civilization engineering? There's a very short question with a very long answer, design a perfect civilization. Heck, simplify it further, design a perfect industrial economy. What would our resource acquisition, energy generation and transmission, manufacturing and shipping, transportation and housing, agriculture have to look like to arbitrarily high standard of living with arbitrarily low environmental impacts?

schiffern 12y ago
So basically, you want a systems approach for designing sustainable… everything. These guys seem to be on to something: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture
- saalweachter 12y ago
  Yeah, permaculture is interesting, but heavily biased towards agriculture. I'm also not sure if it takes a civilization-level view. Are current permaculture techniques a viable method for replacing industrial agriculture? Can they produce enough calories per acre to feed the projected world population on the projected amount of arable land? Can it function with the available manpower in our hypothetical civilization? Modern agriculture directly employees something like 1-3% of the population; do you need 10-20% engaged in permaculture growing food, or 80-150%?
  - schiffern 12y ago
    >Are current permaculture techniques a viable method for replacing industrial agriculture? Note that industrial agriculture isn't a viable replacement for itself (that's what being unsustainable means). So if you're expecting any drop-in replacement for industrial agriculture to be sustainable, you'll be disappointed. Permaculture is a process for designing systems. You can use it to design food systems, financial systems, energy systems, etc. And like most processes, you can fuck it up and do a bad job. :) >Can they produce enough calories per acre to feed the projected world population on the projected amount of arable land? An underlying assumption here is that food has to be produced on "arable" (read: cleared) land. This is tremendously inefficient, since most sunlight strikes bare soil and therefore isn't photosynthesized. Forests yield an order of magnitude more biomass per hectare without any human inputs, so it's definitely possible. The trick is to design the forest so it yields useful outputs while minimizing inputs.[1] This is all pretty abstract, so here's a simple example. Human labor is an input, and one technique to minimize it is zone analysis[2]. During zone analysis you minimize labor and energy by consciously placing the most frequently visited elements closest, followed by the next, and so on. This sounds obvious, but it avoids many common mistakes. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixx1c3RSw_8#t=28m25s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixx1c3RSw_8#t=28m25s [2] http://deepgreenpermaculture.com/permaculture/permaculture-design-principles/4-zones-and-sectors-efficient-energy-planning/ http://deepgreenpermaculture.com/permaculture/permaculture-d...

api 12y ago

That's a religious heresy to this movement. What you wrote is tantamount to suggesting a Christian worship Satan.

jmclean 12y ago

One problem here is that any outcome (warming or no, human-engineered or no) will impact every nation differently. Under current warming projections, some nations will see massive increases in arable land, whereas others will be completely underwater. Even within nations, some cities and regions will see detrimental effects, whereas others could even see benefits (though this is taboo to talk about, which foreshadows one variation of the problem). It seems naively optimistic to think we will be able to geoengineer altruistically or with the general good in mind. Even the concept of an 'average good' for the earth is a little morally problematic if some nations benefit and others are hurt. When a nation acquires the ability to affect climate at a large scale, it seems likely that it will be used for political ends as much as for net positive outcomes.

waps 12y ago
And what makes you think that random outcomes ("natural" outcomes if you will) are any better ? I mean, didn't we stop believing in a benevolent God at some point ? Because when I look at the green movement, my mind very quickly feels the need to point out that for the green movement to do any good at all with their pushing of nature, nature would have to be good. Nature is not good, nor is it evil, but let me point out that with very, very few exceptions murderers are not evil either (the large majority are furthering their own ends, not killing for fun or morals).
- learc83 12y ago
  > I mean, didn't we stop believing in a benevolent God at some point ? Who is we? The majority of the world believes in a "Supreme Being". In the US, about 75% believe in God, and in the EU 51% believe in God.
  - eli_gottlieb 12y ago
    >Who is we? The sensible people, who can clearly see that there's less a God than there is an Auditor of Reality, an anal, obsessive-compulsive cosmic bureaucrat who doesn't give half a damn what happens to people as long as every atom reports its spin and the paperwork is filed on every chemical reaction.

schiffern 12y ago

>massive geo and atmospheric engineering, nuclear/fusion research/dissemination, desalination and water pipelines, and large-scale laboratory meat production from real animal tissue These "solutions" are merely a continuation of business-as-usual. Each will inevitably cause problems larger than it solves, because until it does we'll just view that as "headroom" to grow more. Desalination is particularly nasty, destroying huge amounts of land (at the opportunity cost of the ecosystem services the site could perform were it regenerated) in order to concentrate power and wealth. This is bad for socio-economic sustainability as well. Proper rainwater harvesting and storage—or as I call it, "lazy desalination"—is quite sustainable both ecologically and socially, but that's the un-sexy problem: decentralized solutions don't make rich people richer. Try tackling that with your start-up. ;) Continuous growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

waps 12y ago
And no growth (or linear growth) is the ideology of the extinct.
- schiffern 12y ago
  I'm sorry, I don't follow. What do you mean by "growth" in this context? What is growing? I don't think I need to enumerate the counterexamples here, as any long-lived extant species would suffice.
  - waps 12y ago
    1) read this http://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/how-populations-grow-the-exponential-and-logistic-13240157 http://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/how-populat... 2) realize why populations "stabilize" ... (which for all species but humans and domesticated species means that the rate of die-off is equal to the rate of exponential growth. It does NOT mean that the individual members of the species aren't growing exponentially). There are many examples of species that stopped growing exponentially, or lost the ability to do so. They're all extinct.

hyperbovine 12y ago

We cannot even reliably forecast the weather one week in the future, and you are advocating climate engineering on a global scale? Forgive me for being skeptical. I'm not aware of any so-called geo-engineering effort that has been successful other than those whose aim was strictly to undo whatever it is we did to fuck things up in the first place. There is no fourth option. It's simply delusional.

thaumaturgy 12y ago
It's worth repeating that weather and climate are two very different beasts.
brandonmenc 12y ago
> We cannot even reliably forecast the weather one week in the future, and you are advocating climate engineering on a global scale? Weather is not climate. I don't think we should act immediately. Atmospheric and oceanic engineering could take decades - maybe even a hundred years - to research, test, and convince the world of. I'm talking about multi-generation engineering projects.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

coldtea 12y ago

>How about a fourth option, which includes: massive geo and atmospheric engineering, nuclear/fusion research/dissemination, desalination and water pipelines, and large-scale laboratory meat production from real animal tissue. Without stoping the industrial economy (actually just slowing it down) this is a non starter. This only covers the food production/water, and perhaps energy needs. What about pollution from production? What about plastics, etc? Even with all that, the US/Western consumption levels don't scale to 7 billion people. (Plus, what about people not actually really needing 90% of all the crap that's produced in the first place? The main reason behind all that stuff's production is not human need, either to create or to consume those products, but as a way to make money. That's why they have to be marketed that hard, or why other items have to be brittle to "expire" artificially and drive a new purchase cycle). >and one that may even let us maintain our standard of living I'd think the whole idea for me is to NOT maintain our catastrophic standard of living (I'm a European, the US one is even worse by most metrics), but to go into a sustainable (and humane) standard of living, and expand that to the third world.