I've been having a bit of an existential crisis about this recently. Is sustainability even possible anymore? We are obviously living beyond the capacity of the earth to cope right now. But is it even possible to sustain this many people (at current standards of living with foreseeable technology)?
I believe in global warming, but I also think a higher or lower temperature Earth with a greater level of CO2 just means that different organisms will thrive. We think that we have damaged the Earth, but the Earth is much, much older than us, and we've barely made a dent if you consider the full lifetime of everything that ever will be. Now- if we had started a global thermonuclear war and eradicated all life on Earth, I wouldn't be saying that, but all we have done is to change the temperature and the atmosphere a little, which has serious consequences for the way things currently are, but in the end it will just mean different organisms take over and what grows where will change.
If anything, the thing we need to be concerned about is being ready for changes, which will happen. We might need to grow different sorts of foods, focus on better insulation for our homes or move underground or underwater. We may need new laws to avoid wasting resources. But, there is no reason to be depressed about it. Those things will happen with time.
Yes, these things will be rendered insignificant in the fullness of time, but as a human's with limited lives, it's still important to maintain empathy towards the human suffering of the here-and-now, and the very near future. It will be painful, it will be stressful, and we need to brace ourselves for the reality that many of our fellow humans will die from famine, regional war, and refugee crises whilst we struggle to adapt to and mitigate the worst of it.
Well at least we are unlikely to starve: satellite imaging shows very significant greening of the planet in many areas previously barren. How so? As the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs puts it,
“The benefits of carbon dioxide supplementation on plant growth and production within the greenhouse environment have been well understood for many years. For the majority of greenhouse crops, net photosynthesis increases as CO2 levels increase from 340–1,000 ppm (parts per million). Most crops show that for any given level of photosynthetically active radiation (PAR), increasing the CO2 level to 1,000 ppm will increase the photosynthesis by about 50% over ambient CO2 levels. For some crops the economics may not warrant supplementing to 1,000 ppm CO2 at low light levels. For others such as tulips, and Easter lilies, no response has been observed."
But this means more carbs in plant and less proteins, the diluted nutrients is said to be cause of bees dieng off, as they eat pollen for their protein needs and pollen has less protein, because plants dillute it with all that extra carbohydrate productions caused by more co2 in atmosphere
That's my way of thinking about it too. At any rate getting nearly 200 independent nation states to agree on anything when they all individually benefit by flouting the rules - that's madness. We'll burn oil and coal and gas until it doesn't make economic sense. I very much doubt politics will change the outcome. Technology will hopefully save us from ourselves on that front.
A bigger problem is positive feedback loops. Melting ice means more dark water to absorb sunlight, and more melting. Melting permafrost releases CO2 and Methane and causes more warming. And somewhere around ~5 degrees warming the frozen methane on the ocean floor will bubble up and cause the mother of all feedback cycles. We'd be in for about 10 degrees warming and a mass extinction that would wipe out 90% or more of all species on Earth. From what I've seen of global warming predictions we won't get there - but I'm mentioning this because at some point warming temperatures doesn't just mean major changes and flooding our cities - at some point it means a terrible calamity like the Earth has only occasionally seen.
But will we be able to eat the different organisms that will thrive in this environment? What happens when today's staple crops no longer produce the yields we need to sustain our civilization?
During the little ice age, people ate things that grew in colder climates, like potatoes. We will find a way to survive, and we have more technology now to help than we did then.
I don't think so, if only because seaweed isn't very calorie dense - 4 calories per 2 tablespoon according to Wikipedia (well, the google card that gets all its info from Wikipedia at least).
I think it's much more plausible that we'll go the route Asimov predicted in "Caves of Steel" - genetically modified and processed yeasts, which are much more calorie dense than seaweed, and much better suited to the sort of industrial process that feeding 10+ billion people requires.
I specifically cite jellyfish, because they're one of the few creatures that will thrive in the increasingly acidic oceans. As so many other species — including those we currently enjoy eating to the brink of extinction — die off, jellyfish will abound.
My response to you is "what right do we have to usher in these changes?"
You might argue the "might makes right" perspective that anything within our capability is acceptable and appropriate but I don't agree with that sentiment. I feel that we, as sentient/semi-sapient beings, must be as custodians for this world and all the life within it.
We are actually the least among all, until we begin to serve the rest of this planet that has seen us to this point.
He's not saying this is all fine and dandy, hes saying its not an apocalypse, just a global catastrophe from which both the earth and humanity will recover.
Humanity will become extinct long before the biosphere.
You need to think more inhuman [1]
"It is based on a recognition of the astonishing beauty of things and their living wholeness, and on a rational acceptance of the fact that mankind is neither central nor important in the universe; our vices and blazing crimes are as insignificant as our happiness. […] Turn outward from each other, so far as need and kindness permit, to the vast life and inexhaustible beauty beyond humanity. This is not a slight matter, but an essential condition of freedom, and of moral and vital sanity.’
I believe that this assumption was addressed accordingly by Thucydides in his account of the Peloponnesian war around 400 BC.
If you believe that might makes right the time where you will find yourself in a situation of disadvantage will come and then the precedent you have set might come back and haunt you in ways you never had thought possible.
ps. ofc here we're talking about nature and believing that we're might against nature as a species is blasphemy. The earth (the planet) will survive, our species will not :-)
You are correct. As long as this does not mean we will hit severe resource scarcity that starts one or several wars that turns so bad that nukes starts flying.
This is very human-centric point of view. How many species will be lost forever as a direct cause of this event ? Sure, it happens all the time, but typically over a much longer period meaning other species can evolve to fill the gaps. There is no time for evolution to work over the 200 years this last change happened.
Another thing to consider is that the less diversity exists the harder it is for life to continue.
> This is very human-centric point of view. How many species will be lost forever as a direct cause of this event ?
Actually, it's your view that's human-centric. Species? Diversity? These are human concepts and mores.
> There is no time for evolution to work over the 200 years this last change happened.
Evolution doesn't "work". It's merely the process of natural and sexual selection. The flora and fauna are constantly being sculpted by the environment, even a rapidly changing one. And there is no evidence to suggest similarly rapid shifts haven't occurred in the past. In fact, there is evidence that they did and life went on.
I find it odd to see people criticizing each other because their comments are too human-centric. I happen to be human, and I believe the same is true of most of the commenters here. I don't really care very much about what happens to the Earth as a whole, but the survival and prosperity of humanity matters a great deal to me.
> the survival and prosperity of humanity matters a great deal to me
Just curious about what drives that particular viewpoint. Why do you care about the survival of the species? When you die, the world ends. It doesn't really matter what happens after that, does it? You could be dead two milliseconds and then a big rock hits the Earth and everything is gone. Still it doesn't impact you, because you are dead. And I am asking for the sake of discussion, purely.
I'm going to be around for a while, probably, and living in a better world makes for a better life. After I'm gone, I still want a better life for my child.
Sure. All live will grow until it consumes all available resources. There is no such thing as voluntary growth control in "natural systems". Agent Smith was wrong when he claimed all other life seems to find a "balance". Balance emerges from mortal competition between species.
I care about the Earth as far as it affects humanity. If white rhinos go extinct, that's sad, and the loss of biodiversity is harmful, but it's a fairly small thing. If, say, wheat were to go extinct, that would be a huge disaster.
The fact that our recent prosperity has come at the expense of the Earth is only bad in so far as that harm to the Earth is harmful to humans too. The two are linked, but not identical. The only way to eliminate human-induced harm to the Earth would be to eliminate humans, so the goal needs to be mitigation of harm and where possible moving harm to the Earth into areas that affect humans less.
No, its a systems viewpoint. And it can only be held by an organism that can appreciate the system. All other organisms breed util the systems natural capacity is exhausted and continually competes against one another.
You know exactly what I mean by "work". The current 6'th mass extinction (Holocene) is currently ongoing. The species responsible for this has no natural enemies against which we compete and will therefore continue unabated until all resources have been consumed and the system collapses. Just like it always has.
> The species responsible for this has no natural enemies against which we compete and will therefore continue unabated until all resources have been consumed and the system collapses.
This isn't remotely true. There are tons of bacteria and viruses which are parasitic towards us. We compete against them.
Nevermind the fact that the greatest competition always comes from your own species. The greatest check on human expansion and prosperity is humanity. We kill, maim, and restrict each other on grand scales.
There is also no historical evidence that a single species has ever been responsible for a mass extinction, so I find it odd that you're assuming we'll be the first when there is a historical record that spans billions of years. That's just arrogance.
> But is it even possible to sustain this many people (at
> current standards of living with foreseeable technology)?
Absolutely, there is a tremendous amount of waste which is not recaptured due to economic rather than technological reasons. Further there are technologies (like nuclear power and breeder reactors) which can provide energy forever (for all practical purposes). And ultimately the survival of humans can be reduced to simply to energy, energy to grow food, energy to process wastes, and energy to communicate and interact. Modern nuclear submarines stay submerged under the ocean for 6 months, only coming up for consumables such as food. A companion "farm" sub (not that such a thing currently exists, but is certainly possible given the extent of aquaculture today) could provide the necessary consumable. Letting the submarine pair exist under the ocean until its nuclear fuel ran out. Add a third submarine that has a breeder reactor and a fuel reprocessing pipeline and you've got a permanent colony.
It still requires Newport News to build more subs but you get the picture. With enough energy you can support the entire predicted population of the planet.
But emotionally, there are bigger problems. Nation states and large population groups are at risk of starvation and deprivation as a direct result of climate change. And those at risk populations are not getting any support from the people who are putatively putting them at risk. So emotionally, an existential crisis is probably justified.
The way I see it, sooner or later it will come down to atmospheric engineering (i.e. managing reflective airborne molecules, like an artificial volcanic winter). The question will be wether we have this technology sorted out until the situation becomes desperate and whether the world will be politically stable enough for an entity to take responsibility over this - it's going to be like a sword of damocles over everyone's heads and once we've started with this we can't go back (because everyone will keep burning fossil fuel until it has run out).
"But is it even possible to sustain this many people (at current standards of living with foreseeable technology)?"
In short no.
The reason being the current system requires endless growth (measured currently in GDP) in order sustain this many people with current standards of living. Of course current standards of living are not enough, especially for people in poverty around with world. If growth doesn't continue the entire economic system grinds to a halt. However, endless growth confined to a closed system (Earth) is not sustainable not only for the climate but also for resources like water, food, etc.
Geoengineering is just another foolish attempt of humans to try to bend the planet to our wishes. This line of thinking, that we are somehow better than the earth, somehow removed from all earth systems as a species, is what got us in this mess in the first place. Yes, I realize the irony of saying this on a forum with readers, like myself, who solve technical problems for a living.
Parts of the environmental movement are now starting to focus on economic system change for this very reason.
> The reason being the current system requires endless growth (measured currently in GDP) in order sustain this many people with current standards of living.
I don't think we are anywhere near the growth limit on the planet. (Economic) Growth is mostly limited by energy use, and current tech can handle growth for about a century. Add technological evolution, and we're easily in the 500 years range of energy use increase.
By then, all bets are off. Heck, for the 100 year span all bets are off.
It's not true that the economic system requires endless growth. The EU and Japan haven't grown much in recent times and life goes on. The electorate quite like growth though and will tend to vote for governments that provide it.
Nature looks very harmonious to us, but we only see the sustainable species (alive now, and very few are fossilised and found). Many many species must have evolved that created conditions unfavourable to themselves - we only see the ones that didn't. (Organisms have an effect on their environment, favourable, unfavourable or neutral). Consider a plant that encourages swampy conditions. If it thrives in those conditions, great. If it doesn't, it will evolve itself away.
There's speculation that Earth's oxygen atmosphere destroyed the life that created it. Though most changes and extinctions are local.
Intelligence is such a dramatic, effectful evolution, it may take several iterations before
a sustainable version arises (if possible). Perhaps this has happened on Earth already.
In the Drake equation, L is very low (how long technological civilizations usually last).
If myself (or someone else) were to develop a zero-emission approach to electricity generation (non-nuclear) that could handle "base load" and did not involve filling up the landscape with solar panels (or their moral equivalent), and did not produce waste, would that even help any more?
We globally consume about 20,000 terawatt-hours of electricity right now annually, and in the US, electricity generation is 30% of total CO2 emissions. Presumably, if there was additional power for electric vehicles, we could also reduce overall emissions even further by moving away from gasoline.
But at this point, even NO emissions seems pointless to work towards—we're already screwed. It seems like instead of pursuing lower emissions, we need to work towards reducing the CO2 that's already in the atmosphere.
Large-scale engineering, the kind we'd need to do large-scale cleaning of the atmosphere, or large-scale high-efficiency hydroponic farming, or building huge earthworks to protect cities from rising sea levels, or anything else we might need to do to deal with global warming, is driven by large-scale energy production. Without energy, we can't do the things we need to do to survive without a lot of pain, suffering, and death. With plentiful energy, we can do the things we know we need to do, and new technological advancements become possible.
I wouldn't rule out nuclear energy. There are risks, but it can produce a lot of energy in a small space, and the waste is much lower volume and easier to contain than chemical energy production. In my opinion, we should've built up our nuclear energy production over the past 30 years so that coal and oil could've been phased out by now, while we developed viable solar energy tech to replace the nuclear tech.
I'd say the less emissions we have to less severe the consequences will be and the the easier it will be to work around the problems in the future. Every tiny reduction buys us more time.
I would suggest you stop worrying and get on with your biological imperative to reproduce your dna, only in slightly variated pattern to ensure parasites and viruses are kept guessing.
Also know that people have been grappling with this question for centuries and every doomsday prediction has turned out to be wrong. So there is cause for optimism.
Obviously there's no simple naive answer to your question, but essentially to a first approximation the answer is yes, it's possible. The changes we need to implement are pretty dramatic and some particular things don't look very viable (say, regular people making frequent international flights), but aside from those it's entirely doable and reasonably affordable. It's purely a matter of willpower.
{not a quote from link but the conversation reminded me of this}
I would not rule out the chance to preserve a nucleus of human specimens. It would be quite easy... at the bottom of ah...some of our deeper mineshafts. Radioactivity would never penetrate a mine some thousands of feet deep, and in a matter of weeks, sufficient improvements in drilling space could easily be provided... It would not be difficult, Nuclear reactors could, heh... provide power almost indefinitely. Greenhouses could maintain plant life. Animals could be bred and slaughtered. A quick survey would have to be made of all the available mine sites in the country, but I would guess that dwelling space for several hundred thousands of our people could easily be provided. [Selecting who would go down] could easily be accomplished with a computer set and programmed to accept factors from youth, health, sexual fertility, intelligence, and a cross-section of necessary skills. Of course, it would be absolutely vital that our top government and military men be included to foster and impart the required principles of leadership and tradition.
Q: Wouldn't this nucleus of survivors be so grief-stricken and anguished that they'd, well, envy the dead and not want to go on living?
When they go down into the mine, everyone would still be alive. There would be no shocking memories, and the prevailing emotion will be one of nostalgia for those left behind, combined with a spirit of bold curiosity for the adventure ahead! Ahhh!
Yes, sustainability is possible. No, we are not living beyond the capacity of the earth. Yes, it's possible to sustain this many people, and some billions more.
Because the very concept of "resources" is not fixed. In the Paleolythic, all of Eurasia and Africa only had resources to sustain a few hundred of thousands of humans. Petrol wasn't a resource, coal wasn't a resource, even land wasn't a resource.
When we learnt to grow crops and tame animals the resources grew to let the same land sustain some millions of people.
And in the past 50 years, Borlaug's Green Revolution [1] turned all of 70's predictions of doom like The Population Bomb false. We have now more food than ever, and more resources than ever. And that's if we call "resources" just the things that we can use now.
In 50 years, people will be worrying about running out of X, where X will be a thing that we now don't think about as a resource.
No, sustainability is an empty concept in a future where the status quo is past the point of no return (which we're already in). We will need to move a hell of a lot faster than the Paris Agreement to prevent huge die-offs of people and loss of biodiversity.
We're going to need a Manhattan Project for carbon sequestration.
Agricultural production areas and crops will probably have to shift to follow climate and rainfall. I don't want to go all doom and gloom but there is going to be a substantial economic (and perhaps human) cost for future generations.
The people behind climate change denial are basically exercising generational warfare. They are attacking the future of young people and their offspring to maximise the profits of predominantly elderly investors.
This. I had an argument with a friend because I said having more than 3 kids is selfish, and conversely, having fewer kids (or adopting) is selfless and should be praised. They retorted saying it should be part of an individual's freedom to have as many as they wish. I think after a few more generations we may be looking at a world wide child policy (similar to China).
Oh come off it hardly anyone has kids anymore. US population growth is very slow and due purely to immigration. Populations in many countries are in free fall. China's one child policy has created a demographic disaster with insufficient girls born.
The sooner the better. According to the most realistic climate models, the point of no return for ~2 degree global average warming is already over. We don't have a good idea at what point truly catastrophic damage is going to occur (by which I mainly mean something like a Siberian clathrate gun that could hypothetically drastically warm the climate within a human lifetime). Continuing the current path of CO2 increase, every 10 years increases the risk for a runaway warming process. What's worse is that our models aren't good enough to say with certainty how high this risk is (or that it doesn't exist). So really, the time we live in now is what counts and every little bit we do, helps.
If you want some scary reading material, start here:
Holy shit! The methane clathrate gun is scary stuff..so basically there's a temperature that we dont exactly know that could eradicate our species in some kind if irreversible chain reaction. And almost no one talks about it.. Ive never heard of MCG before, thanks for your post.
Exactly. The most infuriating thing about it is that people keep debating about how serious we should take this. Even that wiki article seems to be poisoned by deniers. I quote from a previous comment of mine:
> "Research carried out in 2008 in the Siberian Arctic has shown millions of tons of methane being released, apparently through perforations in the seabed permafrost,[20] with concentrations in some regions reaching up to 100 times normal levels.[22][23] The excess methane has been detected in localized hotspots in the outfall of the Lena River and the border between the Laptev Sea and the East Siberian Sea. Some melting may be the result of geological heating, but more thawing is believed to be due to the greatly increased volumes of meltwater being discharged from the Siberian rivers flowing north.[24] Current methane release has previously been estimated at 0.5 Mt per year.[25] Shakhova et al. (2008) estimate that not less than 1,400 Gt of carbon is presently locked up as methane and methane hydrates under the Arctic submarine permafrost, and 5–10% of that area is subject to puncturing by open taliks. They conclude that "release of up to 50 Gt of predicted amount of hydrate storage [is] highly possible for abrupt release at any time". That would increase the methane content of the planet's atmosphere by a factor of twelve,[26][27] equivalent in greenhouse effect to a doubling in the current level of CO2."
Yet in the same section, you know what the introduction text reads currently?
> "Most deposits of methane clathrate are in sediments too deep to respond rapidly, and modelling by Archer (2007) suggests the methane forcing should remain a minor component of the overall greenhouse effect.[17] Clathrate deposits destabilize from the deepest part of their stability zone, which is typically hundreds of metres below the seabed. A sustained increase in sea temperature will warm its way through the sediment eventually, and cause the shallowest, most marginal clathrate to start to break down; but it will typically take on the order of a thousand years or more for the temperature signal to get through.[17]"
So let me get this straight: Because someone found a model from 2007 that makes things look mostly fine, we ignore empirical data from 2008 that shows that a Clathrate Gun of 50 Gt could go off at any time? Please someone tell me how I'm wrong just so I don't have to go crazy here.
I don't think it's that clear cut. Other than the personal freedom aspect, which I agree with, you can also argue that more people == more scientists/engineers/minds working on advancing our technological capabilities. This is arguably the number one thing that will lead to a solution.
Your whole reason for being, the thing that gets you out of bed and searching for food, is your in-built desire to recreate and nurture life. Intentionally rejecting that is a massive commitment to make, given the very long term consequences of it.
In short, go have some kids, bring them up well and enjoy the benefits. Our biology is tribe-based and ingrained, so it's smart to work with that and be part of a tribe.
We all die alone, but those that die surrounded by love feel less lonely in all the decades up to that final point. That's your Dna rewarding you for a job well done.
That seems a bit of a stretch... There's no inbuilt point to life, but people try desperately to find one because evolution gave us some kind of drive for meaning, whatever that is. Don't mistake reproduction for some kind of divine purpose, it just is.
Don't mistake anything for purpose. Purpose is a concept central to goal directed planning, but it is a construct of the mind. Since humans give purpose to things, humans cannot be assigned a purpose except as a way to use them for some other means.
You are right though -- finding cuties gets me out of bed, but believe me I'm using birth control.
This advice isn't for everyone, but personally my study of philosophy has led to adopting nihilism which has, surprisingly, reduced my anxiety about concerns like OP's.
It is this almost backward reasoning that since life is meaningless, it really isn't this gigantic tragedy even if the earth is destroyed by a giant planetary collision and the human race is destroyed. In the grand scheme of things, I don't matter, the human race doesn't matter, and neither does the earth.
I will still do what I can to improve my life and others' lives, but accepting this nihilism has allowed me to free myself from the paralyzing anxiety and inaction caused by overvaluing human life. This, in turn, enables me further to make healthy contribution and add what little meaning I actually can to our existence here.
Quite probably not, though the fundamental problem's been apparent since the late 18th century. No, not a typo.
Fossil fuels, population, pollution, mineral resources, topsoil, water. There are numerous problems.
You might want to look up the WorldWatch Institute who have done a lot of basic work here. Pick up a standard ecology text (say, Odum), and you'll find this discussed.
Figuring out how to run fast and hot for a long time is difficult.
I'm going to suggest 2 things which have historically been unpopular in my postings :-)
1. We don't need to sustain this many people
2. We don't need to sustain this standard of living
The first one is pretty straight forward, although it's going to take another 100 years to sort out (barring a major disaster). Shifting child bearing years from the early 20's to the early 30's and changing cultural habits so that each family has only 1 or 2 children will do this for us. However to fix this problem, people need to be willing to share the wealth of the world a little bit more equitably. Improving the situation of women around the world has to be a very high priority as well. But if you look at what's happened in the last 50 years or so, it's pretty impressive. I actually have a lot of confidence that we will reach a slightly declining population within the next century. Either way, I just don't see a problem. Fixing this issue will make the world better, not worse. Obviously there are difficult economic challenges to consider, but again I think if we solve them it will only make life better for everyone.
Standard of living is similar. I think we're probably going to have to cut back a certain amount. But I don't think this is bad in any way. We're used to doing things like driving anywhere we want to go in a personal car. But if you go to Europe these days you will find that many cities and towns have opted to do away with cars in their town centres. This reduces some convenience, but massively improves the centre of the town. It means you have to park on the outskirts and either walk or take public transit into the centre.
Likewise we can get rid of a lot of things we don't need. I would literally ban clothes driers if I were king of the world. What a useless waste of energy. You are very slightly inconvenienced by having to hang your clothes outside. Of course you can't do that immediately because many apartment buildings have no access to the outside. Again, over 100 years we can dramatically improve this situation.
Other things are the way we heat/cool/light buildings. Why should it be 21 degrees C every single day inside regardless of the weather outside? What the heck is wrong with having seasons? What's wrong with having a night time? Some people would obviously rather have it the way it is now, but given that I personally live with an apartment that goes above 30C in the summer and below 5C in the winter, I can attest that it doesn't dramatically affect my standard of living. In many ways I prefer it. I was in Tokyo a few weeks ago. There are many more people on the streets in Ueno at 2am than at lunch time. Yes, it's fun, but is this really essential to our culture? Do we really suffer as a society by having to sleep during the night?
Most of our energy usage is in manufacturing and transporting things. We may have to do with less. But imagine if goods were 2 or 3 times the price they are now. Suddenly there is a reason to make higher quality goods with craftsmanship. If energy is priced higher than labour, suddenly there is a reason to train people to do a craft/skill. Suddenly there is a reason to buy a frying pan and not throw the damn thing out until well after you are dead. Seriously, do we need to buy crappy furniture, cooking utensils, clothes, etc, etc and replace them every 2 or 3 years??? Is this really a higher standard of living?
I remember reading a small book on the ecology of older cultures. You would buy 1 or 2 nice sets of clothes. When they got worn, you would wear them for every day use. When they got too worn for that, you would cut them up and make cleaning rags out of them. When they got too worn/dirty for that, you burned them for heat. Is this really worse that having a closet full of clothes from 30 years ago, waiting for a revival of that style? Good grief, clothes end up in land fill and we manufacture brand new rags for cleaning which also end up in land fill. It's almost criminal.
Enough rant :-) Like I said, from my previous rants on the subject, I realise it is not such a popular viewpoint, but I invite you to consider that dealing with constraints does not necessarily make your life worse. We're spoiled to a certain degree and having to do without has the potential to let us grow as a culture.
I'm going to posit that many of your proposed changes to standard of living aren't even downgrades. For the most part, cities eliminate cars in town centers to raise the standard of living, not out of fear of pending ecological disaster.
As far as consumerism, I think a lot of it is driven partly by corporations desperately trying to avoid us ending up in a post-scarcity society; inducing artificial scarcity by emphasizing fashion and planned obsolescence is a great way to capture what otherwise would have been excess wealth.
On top of that, certain resources are either naturally or artificially constrained, which lets the owners of those resources collect rent, again capturing what otherwise would have been excess wealth.
On a side note, I don't have air conditioning, and my house gets much warmer than 30C in the summer. Anywhere above about 32C is just plain too hot for me to do anything other than lay underneath a fan and drink water, so if I need to get work done I go to a coffee shop. At 15C I put on a sweater and am fine down to about 5C (assuming I'm sheltered from the wind). My wife, however is shivering under six layers of blankets and 3 layers of clothes at 5C, but is perfectly chipper up to about 35C. It's lucky we don't have thermostats because we already argue about when the windows should be open!
[edit]
About the clothes dryer... I live in a semi-arid area now, so I understand how clothes lines could work. I grew up in an area where much of the year at least one of the following would apply:
1) Raining
2) over 90% humidity
3) below freezing
clothes lines in those conditions were more than a minor inconvenience.
Refreshing viewpoint. I agree with both suggestions.
I hope as you do that humans start limiting their population. It seems to me that we can either breed un-controllable and have the maximum number of humans living awful lives fighting for scarce resources; or we can control our population and have less humans living happy sustainable lives.
Thanks to technological advances, those living today have been blessed with plentiful resources, which has meant most of us have had happy lives. Read Jared Diamond's "Collapse" for what happens when resources run out - in almost all cases, humans start literally eating each other within a generation.
And you are right on the standard of living too. We can (and most of humanity does) have very happy and fulfilled lives with a fraction of the resources most western people consume. Go and knit a sweater/carve a spoon/write a poem, instead of watching the Kardashians (or Cardasians!).
Second - how do you propose this without being "King of the world" ?
Africa has a population growth rate of 2.53%, they will double from 1.2B to 2.4B in <30 years. The world population growth of 1.13% still will DOUBLE in less than 70 years.
Just the fact that the world's economies are based on debt requires that there is an exponential increase in growth to support the interest.
I've thought about this issue a lot and without some kind of dramatic (i.e. catastrophic) change, I don't see the status quo working, nor the 'carbon taxes' which seem to be a lot more of the same.
If you consider declining energy ratios like ERoEI (energy returned on energy invested) or energy produced per global capita, we should be hitting these limits repeatedly over the next 50 years.
In order to stop growth, you would need to halt population as well as have a debt jubilee, I don't see either of those happening. You'd also have to tell most of the people in developing nations that they will never have the riches that the west currently enjoys.
I'm not sure how you achieve those goals without war.
Just a quick reply since it is impossible to solve all the world's problems in an HN comment ;-)
1) You need to invest in poorer countries and lobby their governments to improve the condition women (possibly doing both at the same time by essentially bribing governments). This should naturally reduce population. You simply need to push the natural child bearing age out to 30. If you allow women the economic ability to resist getting married until they are in their late 20's this will solve the problem. Like I said, it can't be done quickly. It might take 100 years, so let's make the next doubling of population the last.
2) There is some misinformation about economics out there (from personal experience of being misinformed). I recommend reading some text books on the subject. The main thing to keep in mind is that interest paid is entered into the money supply. Interest is necessary to maintain inflation. Debt as money creation removes barriers to growth. I seriously have no room to explain further than that.
I'll leave you with one more thing. From about 1600 (slightly after I think, but I can't recall when) until the mid 1800's it was illegal for most people to cut down trees in Japan (because by the year 1600 almost the entire country was in danger of deforestation). No wood, no coal, no oil, no electricity, and virtually no animal fats (legally "vegetarian"/pescatarian society) for 250 years. The next 100 years will be dramatically easier than that was and Japanese people still praise Edo society as being one of the most cultured in history.
My point is not that our current rate of consumption is sustainable (it's obviously not). My point is that the alternatives are not necessarily worse.
I agree with most of what you have said. In fact, in my talks in various places, I propose similar changes. I give concrete examples that make sense to them locally. Less number of children, no air conditioning, and less number of clothes are included my set of examples. A few of the others that I talk about are excessive home furniture and furnishings, frequent and expensive vacations, and exorbitantly-priced housing.
Reception varies widely. Overall, I have seen that rural and semi-urban population is more receptive than the urban. Most urban population has a consumerism-driven notion of "standard of life" that can not coexist with any practice of economy that disagrees with it.
yea but not everybody has a triple digit iq and is a self sustainable engineer and doctor. consumption economy works bc it makes people buy stuff constantly and replenish all the time which in turn makes them work all day therefore driving innovation (as a whole) forward.
Out of curiosity, how does them working all day and buying things drive meaningful innovation? Less resource usage per person might instead free up people to do innovative work because fewer people need to do the other work.
Bored, educated people with some free time seem to innovate the most; as opposed to who is paid to do it.
It might change the direction of innovation, but I'm not certain if that is good or bad. I'd love to cut down on the innovation done in advertising or algorithmic stock trading.
well could argue that the work of others may give some with certain talents more time to create meaningful innovation e.g. funding research, but i guess its true that many things lack any large purpose. if people were more productive as individuals maybe that would be different, i dont know.
Yeah sure. The only thing we're really unsustainable on is burning fossil fuels. Solar is growing exponentially and at the current rate would be able to replace most fossil fuel use in a few decades.
Birth control doesn't help when people want to have lots of children. Having lots of children is an essential survival strategy in a poor country. If you want them to have fewer children, make them wealthier.
I'm not convinced by that argument (though I've heard it before).
This strikes me as assuming the births are planned, whereas I don't see how they possibly could be.
Enriching these countries is certainly part of the solution, but controlling population is part of the solution towards enriching them in the first place.
