The tragic thing is that there's this idea you have to live life as an austere pioneer hippie to address this. You really don't.
A world of mostly-vegetarian people living in modern, timber (for carbon sequestration) flats in mixed-use environments, using renewable electricity to power their heat pumps and AC, traveling primarily via bike, walking, and public transport, and owning less disposable crap would go a long, long way.
You could hire an EV for a weekend excursion or take a slow, internet-connected ship to travel for an overseas holiday.
I don't think living that way sounds especially terrible, to be honest.
Also, make 3 months' vacation the minimum. Turn off Slack at 5 PM. We have so much material crap it's hard to fathom, but many people are horribly starved of time. If I had more time I know I'd cook more and work in the garden more instead of ordering takeaway.
A huge amount of human endeavour is spent helping a relatively few rich people suck a bit more of the Earth before it implodes.
This is a lovely idea, but totally ignorant of global demography[1]. By 2100 there will be >3 billion people living in India and central Africa. Centra Africa in particular will show some of the greatest population growth. There will be another 300 million people living in the Congo, which is one fifth the size of the USA and a nightmarish war zone most of the time. There will be a stunning 600 million more people in Nigeria, which is even smaller. The irony is that these people will be mostly-vegetarian, use renewable energy and travel by bike, just not by their own choosing. Sheer numbers however will ensure global consumption continues to increase rapidly.
I don't know what the solution is, but the lifestyle choices of the Western world will become increasingly irrelevant.
You have totally misconstrued what I am saying. I am NOT blaming anyone. My point is that it is a fantasy to think that wealthy westerners can significantly reduce global consumption by choosing to live a certain way.
As a thought experiment, how much of a difference would it have made to the world today if the British empire decreed in 1700 that all its subjects adopt more eco friendly lifestyles?
No, you have indeed constructed a strawman argument based on prejudiced fears of third world 'population explosion' and poor data. Let me put aside the fact that third world peoples are not sitting around waiting for such explosions to occur and are proactive about and invested in our own resources and prospects. Let me put aside the comparison of the poorest, say, Indians (the strata where such an 'explosion' is likeliest to occur due to a host of social reasons) vs the richest, say, Americans. Even putting all that aside: the per capita consumption of an American is 10 times that of an Indian based on latest data [1].
And this does not at all take into account that so, so much of American consumer goods are manufactured abroad and does not factor into this calculation.
Really, please interrogate the kind of prejudice that leads to projections of the kind you have accepted, and the kind of prejudice that then uses it as a rationalization for not course-correcting own behavior.
You completely missed the parent point. American consumption might be 10 times the Indian per capita, but there are way more Indians than Americans, and soon there will be more Congolese and Nigerians and other Africans, and while American consumption is going down, African and Asian consumption is going up. If both USA and EU disappeared today, it would only reduce global emissions by 25%, and that fraction will go down as African and Asian emissions grow. If USA cut its emissions in half, it would reduce global emissions by something like 7%. So yes, we can try to reduce our consumption, but it won't really change a thing in grand scheme of things.
What you propose is in fact prejudicial by ascribing primary importance to American agency, and then furthermore by assuming other cultures have the same priorities. This is the same mistake as hoping China would turn into 1 billion big mac eating coke drinking bona fide neoliberals.
Also a demographic trend is not political statement or a value judgement, it is a curve fitting exercise. I never used the word explosion, that’s your word. I am not being alarmist. The long term trend is for population growth to slow if you look at the data.
"I'm not going to fix this crash, because next year, there might be a similar bug, and I'm not sure how to fix that yet."
I hope you don't code that way.
Not even that far. Primarily vegetarian diets and less driving would make mountains of difference for the world. As someone who is fairly new to adulthood I dont really see why we work so much - there just doesn't seem like there is much to "get". There should ve a greater focus on tending our environments around us, spending money on experiences and creating art (or even just having a hobby).
Next to everyone doing things - we could also add some regulation for extremely polluting industries/companies.
Like I remember that one European Cruise company's ships produced the same amount of CO2-equivalent than all European Cars combined last year (or was it the year before that?).
All friggin EU cars? This is what I would call a lever.
And for what? For the sake of one company making money by providing a kind of recreation that could at least be discussed as it provides recreation - but recreation could be provided in a more environmental friendly way as well.
Just regulating this one industry would go a long way. And there are probably some other low hanging fruits still undiscussed.
Sadly the whole discussion seems to revolve around what the individual should/could do. Often it seems to me especially to mask the fact that regulating some industries would be a faster and imho more efficient way.
> Like I remember that one European Cruise company's ships produced the same amount of CO2-equivalent than all European Cars combined last year
Seems like BS. Such propositions are sometimes claimed, but they are for SO2/NOx/particulates emissions, not for CO2. Then they got misinterpreted as CO2 emissions.
Regulation is crucial. I worry my original comment was "you should do this". Really it's "we need to build society such that doing this is the easiest option"
When polled, people in Copenhagen don't say they ride a bike to save the planet, it's just the easiest way to get around. The city is also absolutely heavenly to walk in.
Yes, but like parent said, we're starved of time. I would love to bike or take public transport to work but that's over an hour of commute vs 20-25 minutes by car and I don't live in the middle of nowhere but in a medium sized European city.
The problem is the employers who move to the sticks, far away from the cties, where office space is cheapest and assume their workers can afford cars and should commute. Not only that but they actively fight against remote work saying it destroys team effort.
One huge step in the right direction would be governments incentivizing employers to accept remote work for office workers who's jobs are 100% digital. This way we won't all be clogging the streets at rush hour making commutes easier on those who have to drive.
Heck, one friend of mine broke his leg skiing and his company, instead of allowing him to work remote, prefered to pay his taxi fares to and from work for 2 months saying WE DON'T DO REMOTE!. And the company is a top EV supplier that loves to boast how green they're making the world. You can't make this stuff up.
I've got the opposite problem - office in the city centre, home out in the country where I can afford to live.
So, 30 minutes from my house to the city outskirts, 30 more from there to the office, whether it's by car, bus, or a combination. Then, the same in reverse in the evening. These times can be higher and are often unpredictable.
Working from home would be easy and save me a lot of time, but it's very much frowned upon, as you say.
In london commuter trains are over crowded and they spend millions (billions?) every year on upgrading and it costs me about £900 a month to use these trains.
If governments incentivised companies to encourage remote work, this money would be unnecessary as many people wouldn't commute any more - saving money for everyone, saving the environment and allowing people to have a home life and see their kids/partner etc.
Remote working is a massive win-win for everyone, I wish the government realised this.
How is your monthly cost that high? Based on some quick googling, the daily cap for zone 1-6 travel tops out under 20 pounds which would come to 600 pounds for 30 days assuming you travel every day. The 7 day caps top out around 60 pounds which would be 240 pounds for 4 weeks of commuting. You could probably get a small, fuel-efficient car and the total costs of ownership would save you money over what you claim to pay currently.
That would have worked in the days of a job for life but now, once you have a family, you can't keep moving every 2-3 years where your next job will be.
> Primarily vegetarian diets and less driving would make mountains of difference for the world.
No, it wouldn't.
Look at pandas, they are bears (omnivores, like us), living on a primarily vegetarian diet.
They sleep 16 hours a day and when they are awake they eat, because a vegetarian diet is not really energy efficient.
If we are talking about a true vegetarian diet, environmental friendly.
if we are talking about "I can be mostly vegetarian because I buy integrators from the drugstore" that's the same of eating fried chicken intensively farmed 4 times a day, in large quantities, for the environment.
What most western cultures should aim for is eating raw food, completely avoid processed food and, most of all, EAT LESS.
Assuming you genuinely are trying to make a good faith argument (which I strongly feel you're not):
Pandas eat bamboo. Bamboo has practically no nutritional value so, no, Pandas are not very energetic.
None of the vegetarians I know need 16 hours of sleep per day, and I suspect that's because
- They are not bears, and so do not have the metabolism of bears.
- They don't subsist entirely off bamboo, or one foodstuff in general.
Besides, the a primarily vegetarian diet doesn't necessarily mean no meat, it just means realising that meat production is so absurdly energy, land, and water intensive that eating it on a daily basis is simply unsustainable.
The amount of energy that goes into cooking hour meat is negligible compared to the amount of energy needed to produce it in the first place.
> Besides, the a primarily vegetarian diet doesn't necessarily mean no meat
Just eat less.
If you eat less, you automatically balance your diet.
You could live of three pieces of beef junkie a day for a long time, that's not so bad for environment as well.
They made you believe that "meat production is so absurdly energy, land, and water intensive" but that's because our information system is mainly based on the US lifestyle, the land of freedom (to destroy other people lives).
I grew up in places like this, where meat production is almost a natural process.
Look at Indians instead. We eat a primarily vegetarian diet. I assure you we sleep nowhere close to 16 hours a day. We also work in the sweltering heat etc, which our diet seems more than capable of taking on.
Yeah, eating raw food is great, and eating less is also great. "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants" and all that, but Indian cuisine stands as an example that eating vegetarian food need not be a bland affair.
i would against eating all food raw. The following is a comment i made in another thread:
Raw fruit is fine, veggies not really. Many contain substances that should deter animals from eating them. The digestibility of veggies usually increases when they are cooked.
> Primarily vegetarian diets and less driving would make mountains of difference for the world.
Changing diets yes. Changing driving habits, not really. Personal use of passenger vehicles accounts for a tiny fraction of transportation related CO2 emissions. The overwhelming majority comes from cargo ships and associated logistics.
A typical cargo ship will burn about 30 liters of bunker fuel (far more polluting than diesel) to travel 1 meter. 15 typical cargo ships emit as much CO2 as all cars on the planet combined. There are about 15,000 such ships operating today, with a further 30,000 slightly smaller ones. A single cruise ship company like Carnival Cruise emits more CO2 than all of Europe's car's combined.
Even if the entire world converted to zero-emission EVs overnight, it wouldn't make a meaningful dent in these numbers.
The inconvenient truth is that in order to make a serious dent on transportation related CO2 emissions, the entire developed world would have to give up its lavish lifestyle of internationally shipped products and foods. Sadly a harder sell then 'drive an EV to save the planet lol', so our governments continue to focus on inconsequential but easily attainable measures. And that is nothing to say of the fact that cutting down international shipping is at odds with free market capitalism that's driving our civilisation.
Fun fact: bulk carrier shipping is so cheap that in Australia, locally caught fish are shipped to China for processing and freezing and then shipped back here for retail. The pollution associated with this alone is more than the sum pollution of all Australian cars.
Ships individually use vast amounts of fuel, but are small in overall number (there are about 60-80,000 registered cargo vessels), and achieve efficiencies up up to ton-miles per gallon of fuel, as compared with 500 ton-miles/gallon for rail, 100 for trucks, and less than 10 for cars. Moving cargo by water is the most efficient option that exists by a long shot.
Where cargo ships have bad emissions is in particulates and sulfur, based on what fuels are burnt and how. CO2 emissions, however, are quite low relative to any other transport mode.
For those for whom the suspence has been simply unbearable: Marine cargo shipping achieves cargo fuel efficiency rates of as much as 1,000 ton-miles/gallon.
For passenger cars, the low mileage expressed in ton miles is largely due to the very low cargo utilisation. I'm using a single passenger of 150# here. You can increase net efficiency somewhat, but even, say, four 250# passengers and some luggage makes for only a modest improvement, as the starting point is single-digit tmpg.
>Personal use of passenger vehicles accounts for a tiny fraction of transportation related CO2 emissions. The overwhelming majority comes from cargo ships and associated logistics.
while this might represent a small fraction of the global total emissions, the CO2 (and other harmful particles) produced by cars is much more detrimental to human health since it will be concentrated in the cities and near humans live.
The cargo emissions should be less harmful as there are not many people living in the oceans and algae effect should also be considered as it produces most of the oxygen we breath.
This is correct. If we ignore catastrophic climate change, the next worst thing is being directly exposed to personal transportation pollutants - amongst which CO2 is pretty benign but there is far worse stuff.
Living next to major roads or highways significantly reduces life expectancy.
Particulates and SO4 are short-term acute pollutants. They are problems, but the problem is localised (shipping routes, ports), and settles out fairly quickly.
The scope is significant -- you can see shipping lanes simply by the SOx emissions, as the Nullschool Weather Visualiser shows, here, traffic between Indonesia and the Gulf of Aden is clearly visible:
But: CO2 remains resident in the atmosphere for centuries or millennia, affecting long-term climate. It's a vastly larger problem.
Moreover, particulates and SOx can be mitigated with improved fuel quality and stack scrubbers, at relatively low (though nonzero) costs. CO2 emissions are intrinsic to hydrocarbon combustion. We either have to stop burning anything with carbon in it, or switch to biomass (present-cycle carbon) rather than fossil-fuel based sources. Which is its own problem, though potentially tractable for shipping using various biomass wastestream sources.
But at this point we need to prioritize, and climate change is arguably becoming more important than direct exposure to personal transportation pollutants.
Do you have a source for your claim? Here[1] is a link I found breaking down the fuel consumption by sector. Seems Motor Oil vastly outscores Residue Fuel Oil, which I believe is what tankers use. I may be wrong, though, and would be interested in being corrected.
My actual job is in the shipping route optimisation space. Sub-percentile improvements in fuel consumption for a single route result in hundreds of millions of dollars of fuel savings. Of a fuel that's both cheaper and far more polluting than diesel. It's pretty obvious that shipping fuel consumption and associated emissions eclipse personal transportation.
Your sources are in error. Particularly the first, which I believe is confusing particulate and/or sulfer emissions with CO2 emissions. It cites several further news articles, not a primary source.
The inews source compounds this error, and is cited by the Medium blog.
The newatlas source confirms this: "The low grade bunker fuel used by the worlds 90,000 cargo ships contains up to 2,000 times the amount of sulfur compared to diesel fuel used in automobiles." The measurement is sulfur emissions and NOT CO2.
FT likewise discusses sulfur and not CO2: "Sulphur dioxide emissions from cars was 3.2m kt versus 62m kt from cruise ships, with Carnival accounting for half that, the study found."
The AFR link discusses seafood and not shipping emissions.
True, shipping is absolutely filthy. This was a big part of why I mentioned "less disposable crap".
Though how much is ghg and how much a matter of particulates? Seems most analysis shows the drive to the grocery store emits more carbon than shipping the fish.
Also fish is generally a disaster, but that's a separate topic. (Eating carnivores full of plastic dumping concentrated waste and disease in to the ocean is suboptimal)
>The tragic thing is that there's this idea you have to live life as an austere pioneer hippie to address this. You really don't. A world of mostly-vegetarian people living in modern, timber (for carbon sequestration) flats in mixed-use environments, using renewable electricity to power their heat pumps and AC, traveling primarily via bike, walking, and public transport, and owning less disposable crap would go a long, long way.
That means a reduction of production and consumer spending by 50% or more, and the end of the "no limits progress" which is beyond the pale for modern business interests, and the 10% well off part of the population that does their biding (executives, intellectuals, politicians, media people, and so on).
It's better in today's prevalent culture that the world end in flames (perhaps while waiting for some magic technology to fix it all) than go back on consumption...
I think it is a dire logical error to equate capitalism, which arises naturally out of fair and mutually consensual dealing between humans, and the neverending consumer consumption drive epitomized by the global west.
They are not the same thing, and the former does not necessitate the latter. Same goes for all the other ills of our society that people misguidedly invoke under the “capitalism” umbrella, like intellectual property, patents, and regulatory capture.
Military-industrial complex-flavored capitalism is the problem. It sounds like that is part of the problem described in the article, too.
>I think it is a dire logical error to equate capitalism, which arises naturally out of fair and mutually consensual dealing between humans, and the neverending consumer consumption drive epitomized by the global west.
I don't think "really existing capitalism" "arises naturally out of fair and mutually consensual dealing between humans".
We should not confuse trade (which always existed) with capitalism, which is a relatively recent development (circa 14-16 century and spread from then), tied to banking, stock market, industrialization, the "protestant work ethic" and so on.
For millennia civilizations had trade but no capitalism.
Plus histories of early capitalism mention how rural populations had to be pushed, by government decrees, unfavorable ad-hoc laws, manufactured famines, and so on to go and become workers.
And of course, modern capitalism, with rampant commercialization of all fields of life, advertising, the stock market, etc is another thing entirely.
They are exactly the same thing. Capitalism requires endless growth, which requires endless production and consumption. Those in turn require imperialism, to have a supply of desperate workers and consumers. Imperialism is not always overtly military, but it is always a threat of violence in order to assert power.
Read Lenin's "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism", he makes it very easy to understand.
This is incorrect. Just the particular way some countries have their capitalist systems and priorities set up requires endless growth.
But even then, if you'd just allow for bankruptcy to weed out the worst performers, forfeiting outstanding debt, you can do without it. Another way is compensating for it with inflation. But instead debt tends to be funneled upwards until governments are left holding the bag with no other option but to grow their way out of it for fear of causing inflation.
Well, you kind of have to - otherwise people starve.
There's lot of excesses and pointless elements to economies worldwide, but ultimately, at minimum they have to grow to compensate for population growth, or people will starve. And they really have to grow more than that, because a lot of people live in bad conditions and they justifiably want to earn their way out of it.
Growth is currently needed in the world we live in; trying to eliminate it wholesale is self-destructing. But growth doesn't have to be as environmentally taxing as it is today, and we should strive to fix that.
>There's lot of excesses and pointless elements to economies worldwide, but ultimately, at minimum they have to grow to compensate for population growth, or people will starve.
Several issues with this.
There's no requirement that we need to have "population growth" above replacement rate. In fact we should probably have below for a while - and in many western countries we do. In which case "we need growth because we need to cater for the population growth" is a moot point.
Second, "a lot of people living in bad conditions" does not necessarily means growth is required to get them out. Especially since we have unprecedented inequality and hoarding of resources by tiny elites. More equality / better distribution (and no grabbing from ex-colonial powers of developing world resource) would go a long way.
RE second point, you can shift wealth from the richest to the poorest, but if you equalize everything and now everyone is miserable, you'll still need growth to correct this further.
>You could hire an EV for a weekend excursion or take a slow, internet-connected ship to travel for an overseas holiday.
I think part of the reason air travel is so popular is that people are trying to make the best of what little vacation time they have. Slow travel would be so much nicer if one could afford an extra week dedicated to the journey.
I feel this is a factor, but contributes very little. Having a choice between 1 week travel + 2 weeks at the destination, vs. 1 day travel + 2 weeks and 6 days at the destination, I'd chose the latter.
Unless travel is a special experience in itself, people will consider it just means to an end, and pick the most convenient one affordable.
For things like a transcontinental flight, etc. this is very true. But for things like, say, my recent trip from Portland OR to Sacramento, having vacation measured in weeks and not days makes it feasible to do things like take a train (highly recommended - a sleeper car is a MUCH nicer experience with an infant than an airplane)
> You could hire an EV for a weekend excursion or take a slow, internet-connected ship to travel for an overseas holiday.
> Also, make 3 months' vacation the minimum. Turn off Slack at 5 PM. We have so much material crap it's hard to fathom, but many people are horribly starved of time. If I had more time I know I'd cook more and work in the garden more instead of ordering takeaway.
In the words of the Maria Antoinette "Let them eat cake"!
No doubt. But who claimed otherwise? The closest I could find is that CalRoberts said thay theyd'd spend more time gardening and cooking if they had the time, which is hard to refute unless you know them personally, is not an overgeneralisation -- and even if it was, growing a few tomatoes is a far fetch from subsistence farming.
Am I? Because that's what one winds up with if one dispenses with buying all that stuff people were induced to want by industry.
Besides, it's a mite presumptuous to claim that people are wasting their lives acquiring things they are induced to want, rather than actually wanting.
My original intent was to suggest that wealthy people consume more (after all, they have the wealth to do so) and ultimately a lot of our current economic system is designed to serve those needs. There's the classic example of "rich nerds in SF trying to solve problems for other rich nerds" but ultimately it's a matter of who controls most of the income that can be spent on non-necessities.
> ultimately a lot of our current economic system is designed to serve those needs.
I simply don't buy that. The market for VWs is far, far larger than the market for Ferraris/Bentleys. McDonald's made orders of magnitude more money than any luxury restaurant chain. The same for shoes, pots, pans, watches, computers, jewelry, soap, etc. The luxury yacht business is microscopic.
I'm at less than a third of the typical US footprint. I offset the rest.
That involves, in its totality, not jetting around, not driving an ICE, and not eating meat. My country uses primarily renewables.
A whole bunch of the rest of that is related to industrial processes and transport of food/materials that can be addressed. It would not impact me severely if my fruits came from different places or I had to eat different fruits.
I don't think my life is "worse" at all than the typical American lifestyle. People talk about quality of life, but what they actually mean is that they've chosen some arbitrary metric to maximise (e.g. overseas holidays particularly to very far flung places or whatever) and if they don't have that then QoL would be lower.
To me that sounds like a boring life, not a quality life.
Before someone trots out the 'but EVs are expensive'; 'but solar will take time' stuff; sure, it's not trivial for people to do this stuff in isolation, the point is that reducing carbon doesn't mean living in a cave. It means some small mindful adjustments, that's it.
When I look at what I'm using honestly it could be way lower making more substitutions; it'd just be the companies that provide services to me substituting instead of me, e.g. regulation.
My family and I have changed our ways. I used to live a typically American lifestyle - spending 4 hours every day in the car, mostly parked on a freeway, to get to work. Ordering takeout 5 times a week because I was too exhausted to cook for myself. Buying useless crap that filled my house, only to get a bigger house for more useless crap.
But, after the 9/11 attacks, I took a good hard look at myself. You could say, the blowback factor was real.
Now I live in a modest house just outside the city where I work, and I can cycle into the city in 40 minutes through a green landscape when the weather is good. My family and I are avid gardeners and grow our own veggies for 4/5th's of the year - sourcing it from local farmers for the rest of the time when our garden is sleeping for winter. We cook for ourselves like demons, and have massively improved health as a result. My children are taller and stronger than their peers, because they've been raised on home cooking and fresh vegetables where their peers were not.
I also ride electric, always and only - a small, weak, underpowered electric moped gets me through the city comfortably, and I recharge it every few days from house power, derived from renewables (solar and wind). Its pretty much ideal in terms of carbon footprint.
It took a big change however. I had to leave the USA and now live in middle Europe (Vienna, Austria) - a country that has long since decided to upgrade the standard of living of its people through smart economic policies designed to reduce dependence on petroleum. Its not perfect - there is still a lot of work to do in my community - but its certainly better than the, frankly disturbing, lifestyle I led in the USA.
The point is, the resources are there. People can actually massively reduce their carbon footprint if needed. You may have to move - far and wide - to escape the city trap. If you are spending more than an hour every day in your car, just to support your lifestyle, this is a clue that you MUST change. Every hour spent in traffic is a crime against the planet.
Would love to compare notes! Left the US in 2013, and living on a bit of land in Ireland at the moment. Remote work helps a lot.
The city trap is a big problem for a few reasons, and I LOVE cities. Sadly we have artificially constrained them (especially in the US, where it's illegal to build a real city and not just a zombie stretch of suburbia). In short, if you're in debt for the necessities of life (i.e. you have a mortgage) you are not free to choose your actions, and instead must choose them in a way that helps in servicing your debt.
Debt is indeed a big part of the trap. The only way to avoid it is to work ones ass off. Such is the nature of the world.
Cities have their pros and cons. A lot of cities, especially in my neighbourhood, have their amazing cons, and I don't mean conveniences. Living as though ones external geometry was governed by the size of a horses ass, for example, can be a real drag. (Vienna is a horse town.)
> (Vienna, Austria) - a country that has long since decided to upgrade the standard of living of its people through smart economic policies designed to reduce dependence on petroleum.
As someone from a bordering country, that is a surprising statement. Could you expand on that point a bit?
Austria's Green Electricity Act 2012 has been regarded as pretty much successful.
It helps that Austria has a tradition of strong ecological standing - it has very much protected its natural resources and its forests have been maintained (by their private owners) for centuries now, as a form of renewable energy.
Austria is pretty well regarded as a hydroelectric producer, and from where I stand here now, I see fields of wind power production far off in the distance. My immediate energy supply is 100% renewable - house solar, charged from the aforementioned grid when necessary - but installed on the basis of a government subsidy.
Not a day goes by when I don't see new electric vehicles on the road. Not just Tesla's, but also mopeds. In fact, this year the European electric moped revolution seems to have kicked off ..
The problem with your reasoning is this is being done by corrupt governments and cattle and lumber industries in a country making consumer goods for themselves. I can do all those things here and it won't do anything to fix the problem there, the problems are local and will continue to be local as long as the people of Brazil tolerate it. How many people have donated to funds to preserve the Amazon, and what exactly has that gotten us? We sit here in a our affluent country and tell those in another country that they shouldn't exploit their natural resources to have what we have? This is backwards and naive thinking. Until the people locally value what they have more than they do economic prosperity, even if only temporary, it will continue no matter what life style Americans or Europeans choose to adopt.
> A world of mostly-vegetarian people living in modern, timber (for carbon sequestration) flats in mixed-use environments, using renewable electricity to power their heat pumps and AC, traveling primarily via bike, walking, and public transport, and owning less disposable crap would go a long, long way
Can you quantify that into something more precise than a fuzzy feeling?
It is clear that the proposal would lead to a lot less energy usage and less pollution and thus to a cleaner environment, places where most energy generates little pollution would see the fewer benefits, which would help to ameliorate the effects of climate change.
Like degrees of avoided warming. Because the proposal above is not sufficient to avoid climate change in any significant respect, especially a counting for increased living standards in India and China.
A world of mostly-vegetarian people living in modern, timber (for carbon sequestration) flats in mixed-use environments, using renewable electricity to power their heat pumps and AC, traveling primarily via bike, walking, and public transport, and owning less disposable crap would go a long, long way.
You could hire an EV for a weekend excursion or take a slow, internet-connected ship to travel for an overseas holiday.
I don't think living that way sounds especially terrible, to be honest.
Also, make 3 months' vacation the minimum. Turn off Slack at 5 PM. We have so much material crap it's hard to fathom, but many people are horribly starved of time. If I had more time I know I'd cook more and work in the garden more instead of ordering takeaway.
A huge amount of human endeavour is spent helping a relatively few rich people suck a bit more of the Earth before it implodes.