> If there hypothetically was a magical source of near infinite renewable energy that could be harnessed without negative side effects, would you be ok with 2600+ sqft homes and air conditioning?
Yes. In a world with zero negative externalities for massive resource consumption, then by all means, give everyone a mansion and a yacht.
> What number of humans can the Earth ideally sustain in your estimation? If it's substantially less than the current population, then the cure is worse than the disease.
In our current industrialized, consumerist, global economy? Far less than 8 billion. You're painting me as a rabid anti-human eco-fascist though, so let me assure you I'm none of those things. I want humanity to succeed and I want all people to be happy and successful. But the current rate of resource extraction and ecological disturbance that we're directly responsible for will drive our species into a brick wall very soon. Along with millions of other species. We will come to a point where we simply cannot extract the energy we need to feed everyone, and where the biosphere has been so damaged that the necessary agriculture yields just won't be there. And also the other things, like the tropics becoming uninhabitable, ocean acidification killing marine life that the food chain depends on, etc.
I'm not anti-human, I'm very much a humanist, and pro-nature. Humans are part of nature. Unfortunately, we seem incapable of limiting our consumption to sustainable levels when given the opportunity to overshoot. Or at least our current civilization does (past ones have done better, but they also didn't have to try to resist the temptation of internal combustion engines like we do now). I've lost hope for any political solutions given how lackluster all efforts have been thus far, so we don't really need to sit here and debate solutions, because no one's at the wheel and the brick wall is getting very close. Enjoy the surplus of energy while we can still extract it.
TL;DR the famous book "Limits to Growth" was very prescient and it mostly hit the mark.
Before climate change was a thing, Malthus was making the same claims about society hitting a brick wall in the late 18th century. You then had scientists in the 19th century predicting the downfall of society because we would run out of places to store horse manure as more people could afford a horse. In the 20th century intellectuals predicted that the world would run out of food. When that didn’t work, scientists predicted the world would end in nuclear war, with rediculous props like the clock counting down to midnight. That didn’t happen, and there had to be a new boogeyman.
Even if we could push a button and solve climate change, I’m sure there would always be a reason why we need to stop having babies, turn back time, and live a subsistence lifestyle (Which is also incredibly racist, since it’s usually directed at people in developing economies, as their standard of living increases). And this is why I don’t believe most of the arguments against big houses, cars, air conditioning, are honest or being made in good faith.
> That didn’t happen, and there had to be a new boogeyman.
The world didn't end in nuclear fire, for much the same reasons it didn't end in a civilisation-breaking IT meltdown at the start of the new millennium - because everyone put in a shit-ton of work to make sure it didn't happen in the first place. Calling those dangers a "boogeyman" is showing ignorance of titanic efforts that went into mitigating them.
The other issues that you described as "failed boogeymen" - it's great that we've been able to outrun them, but how long have we left to run, exactly? We don't have a silver-bullet solution for climate change, whether flawed or perfect. Nobody seems to be keen on doing the hard work, so I'm not bullish on making it to 2050 without damaging the ecosystems across the planet.
> this is why I don’t believe most of the arguments against big houses, cars, air conditioning, are honest or being made in good faith.
FWIW, I'm a white Western guy and I 100% believe that we should try to do without some luxuries, me included. Part of the problem of getting rid of such luxuries is that they may not be luxuries at all to some - urban planning can be often very car-centric (which makes not owning a car either impractical, or a huge waste of time), AC can be required because other ways of cooling down buildings haven't been put in place, etc. Holistic change AND a reduction in resource use across the board is what we need.
I'm acutely aware that middle to upper class, mostly white, Americans are the worst offenders of overconsumption and that people who make overpopulation claims about the third world are being racist. Britain, and then America, led the charge of industrial imperialism that doomed us to this current timeline. And we colonized and brutalized people of color the world over to get there. I understand that, and I understand the hypocrisy of living a middle class American lifestyle while I type this. Though at least I live in a small-ish duplex without AC :)
I'm also aware that people have been predicting the apocalypse for as long as there have been people. But this is not as simple as manure storage, and it's a bit disingenuous to draw that comparison. You simply cannot have 8 billion people living in huge houses with air conditioning. It will not work. If our definition of racial equality and harmony is to let everyone fuck up the environment equally, rather than restricting everyone's (including rich white people) ability to overconsume, then we are all equally toast.
> And this is why I don’t believe most of the arguments against big houses, cars, air conditioning, are honest or being made in good faith.
Reminder: all the information and points I'm citing come from the world's leading climate and environmental scientists. If you think the IPCC is just being racist when they lay out the data about how bad climate change will be and say we need to reduce our emissions (i.e. consumption), then I don't know what to tell you.
> If our definition of racial equality and harmony is to let everyone fuck up the environment equally, rather than restricting everyone's (including rich white people) ability to overconsume, then we are all equally toast.
I wish some people would have this sentence printed and framed on a wall. Yes, equality-wise it's unfair that only we have energy-consuming QoL improvements. Environmentally speaking, it would be a massive disaster if everyone did it while we still rely on fossil fuels for our energy supply.
You're probably referring to another book as this one's main author is a she.
The book makes a point of how you can't predict the future. Instead it enumerates a bunch of shapes the future could take given various sets of assumptions. Some of the shapes look decent but require a lot of things to go right in the meantime.
Yes. In a world with zero negative externalities for massive resource consumption, then by all means, give everyone a mansion and a yacht.
> What number of humans can the Earth ideally sustain in your estimation? If it's substantially less than the current population, then the cure is worse than the disease.
In our current industrialized, consumerist, global economy? Far less than 8 billion. You're painting me as a rabid anti-human eco-fascist though, so let me assure you I'm none of those things. I want humanity to succeed and I want all people to be happy and successful. But the current rate of resource extraction and ecological disturbance that we're directly responsible for will drive our species into a brick wall very soon. Along with millions of other species. We will come to a point where we simply cannot extract the energy we need to feed everyone, and where the biosphere has been so damaged that the necessary agriculture yields just won't be there. And also the other things, like the tropics becoming uninhabitable, ocean acidification killing marine life that the food chain depends on, etc.
I'm not anti-human, I'm very much a humanist, and pro-nature. Humans are part of nature. Unfortunately, we seem incapable of limiting our consumption to sustainable levels when given the opportunity to overshoot. Or at least our current civilization does (past ones have done better, but they also didn't have to try to resist the temptation of internal combustion engines like we do now). I've lost hope for any political solutions given how lackluster all efforts have been thus far, so we don't really need to sit here and debate solutions, because no one's at the wheel and the brick wall is getting very close. Enjoy the surplus of energy while we can still extract it.
TL;DR the famous book "Limits to Growth" was very prescient and it mostly hit the mark.