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> the ONLY reason you can say this crap is simply because people competed ... and be pretentious and ungrateful about what society have achieved so far.

Even though you're grossly exaggerating what I've said in the comment, I'm still going to answer with a rhetorical question:

What good is all that shit if the price for that is the suffering and death of our children and eventual end of our species ?

This is what the article is really about. ...

My perspective comes from the summers spent with my grandparents - in the village where life was as it has been for thousands of years. They produced no garbage, they breathed clean air and drank clean water. Did they suffer ? Yes of course, from time to time, that's how it's always been.

Frankly, with all our advanced technology, knowledge, medicine, I think we are a lot more unhappier as a whole - you said it yourself, "my blood boils" - and for what ?

Anyway, I think you're angry at the wrong person, because I think we can have both magic and sustainability - if we just change our philosophy. We can look at the last 100 years or so as a 'growth spurt' for humanity - we had to break eggs to make an omelet; now it's time to get back into shape.

Use the best of magic and our ability to create new one and integrate it into a sustainable system, which treats nature as an organism and not as 'resources' and we might be able to survive it.

I think you're looking at the world's history with rose-colored glasses. World poverty is at the lowest levels today than it has been in recorded history: https://ourworldindata.org/slides/world-poverty/#/declining-...

I think you'd be hard pressed to find a time in history when life was better than it is today. And if you did find one, it would be so long ago than population levels were a fragment of what they are now.

We can't go back. Get that idea out of your head. The question is how can we steer the ship.

> I think you'd be hard pressed to find a time in history when life was better than it is today.

That's nice and dandy but what good is it if we can only sustain that maybe another 50 years if we're lucky?

I guess if we had foresight we could have prevented the industrial revolution which would had (likely) prevented climate change.

Of course, the industrial revolution was a force of economic pressure, not a decision the world came together and decided on in unity.

So to prevent the industrial revolution would have required a suppression of freedom and property rights unlike has ever existed in history. On a world scale.

It really is too late, I think. There's too much momentum, and too little control. It's like that situation just before the Titanic hit the iceberg.

> The question is how can we steer the ship.

You mean how we can fix the leaks.

Fix the leaks or find another ship (planet).

Now who's got the rose-coloured glasses on?

Thinking that organising a worldwide migration to another planet is going to be a practical option is as absurd as thinking that moving back to a pre-industrial society is.

To be honest, I'm not convinced anyone will try until a mass extinction is underway anyway, in which case you're only migrating your quota of humans for the rocket's load before the volcanic ash density hits 11 (or whatever).

"May you live in interesting times."

> My perspective comes from the summers spent with my grandparents

Seriously, get a grip and stop being self-absorbed. Read history before you long for something you've never actually truly experienced!

The assertion is that, as cool as iPhones and flying are, this lifestyle may or may not be sustainable, e.g. regarding the CO2 levels.

Leaving aside your silly anger about "hippie bullshit" (really?) and regardless of our history of "competing, losing, getting ahead", what would you propose? Are we just going to brace for pain, and then compete over diminishing ressources?

Consider: all of environment protection legislation that we take for granted now was once "hippie bullshit".

It goes beyond bracing for pain. We'd better be bracing for extinction. And our iPhones and supermarkets won't save us, only our ingenuity will and we now have an administration not much interested in that. This does not bode well for us.

Oh please. The "extinction" meme is all around the thread! I challenge you to elaborate the exact mechanism of humanity's extinction. Why on earth should humanity go extinct because of climate change?

>Consider: all of environment protection legislation that we take for granted now was once "hippie bullshit".

No, all the environmental damage we now defend and wish we could take for granted was once, and remains, valid science. Bio-time, bio-space, and the folding and unfolding of DNA across the ages are in fact hippie bullshit.

I get what you're trying to say but you're probably not old enough to remember (or weren't born yet), however environmental protection legislation was considered "hippie bullshit" well into the late 20th century.

Nixon created the EPA. I don't think he was generally for hippie bullshit. If one is to believe John Ehrlichman[1], Nixon put marijuana on Schedule I to try and destroy the hippies.

[1]http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richa...

> Consider: all of environment protection legislation that we take for granted now was once "hippie bullshit".

In part; I think environmental policies and technologies are very strongly influenced by economics and capitalism. I mean they managed to monetize CO2 emissions via emission rights. It's making money out of vapor. There's probably a few people getting very rich off of the emission rights market.

The other one is alternative energy sources. Solar panels are a good example; they're expensive, have a limited lifespan (10-15 years), and yet provide a huge amount of goodwill and feel-good. There's a lot of people getting very rich off of a product that, in the end, is not actually sustainable and does little to nothing to alleviate the emissions problem - not when the production of a solar panel costs more energy than it'll generate during its lifetime.

I'd argue the only environmental protection stuff that is still primarily motivated by hippie bullshit is things like the ban on whaling and the conservation of nature areas. Neither of which has much of an impact on the environment, unless it's on a huge scale (like idk, spanning all of the Amazon plus all of the deforested areas of the past fifty years).

> not when the production of a solar panel costs more energy than it'll generate during its lifetime.

That is no longer true [1].

[1] http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/april/pv-net-energy-04021...

It's making money out of vapor.

No, it's making money out of the process of assigning a limited resource to the most economically efficient use.

...not when the production of a solar panel costs more energy than it'll generate during its lifetime.

This is just rubbish. The embodied energy payback period of solar PV was already under 4 years a decade ago.

Your statement that the green movement would be embraced by everyone if they understood tradeoffs and economics doesn't take into account the opposition from entrenched interests and capital.

Your argument makes it sound like most people actually have an option to participate in progress or not (they don't realistically) or that the people making the decisions on tradeoffs are doing so in a rational way that benefits everyone. (They aren't.)

If you view progress as some kind of struggle of the species, like a force of nature, then yes it is indeed grand. If you view progress in the light of power struggle between factions in the species, then most progress actually benefits very few people.

I mean, despite the fact that people have known that plumbing is awesome for several thousand years most people still defecate in a hole in the ground.

I get it. That "captain-planet-mother-gaia" bullshit gets on my nerves too. But so does "economics is a science like physics". While the former is obnoxious, the latter is dangerous.

> Your statement that the green movement would be embraced by everyone if they understood tradeoffs and economics doesn't take into account the opposition from entrenched interests and capital.

It would be if the gains were on the level that would justify the adoption of whatever was/is proposed. Give me any tech, green or not, with 10x improvement on what currently exist and I can bet you anything that no amount of capital or vested interest will be able to oppose it - there are exceptions ofc but I would argue that those are far from the norm (if they weren't no progress would ever take place which we know is not true).

>If you view progress as some kind of struggle of the species, like a force of nature, then yes it is indeed grand.

I believe indeed in this former view you describe here. We could argue which of the two views you present is more true than the other, but I think there is plenty that speaks for both. I choose to believe in this version as long as there is evidence to support it.

> But so does "economics is a science like physics". While the former is obnoxious, the latter is dangerous.

I could not agree more. In fact, I think you are the kind of guy who I could sit with and talk to for hours and we'd get somewhere. I don't believe economics is like physics. In fact, I believe economics, like politics, are more like religion. Case and point being the clusterfuck that is the rule of Keynesian economics for the past 80 years or so.

When I say economics I refer to the rational human ability to understand trade-offs. Not all agents are equally capable of it and not all care as much. But, with that said, it does not take a genius to understand what I wrote above (which you originally replied to).

I firmly believe that most of these hippie green suckers wouldn't want to live in the world they themselves describe as ideal. I think they vastly underestimate the prices of things and how much of their living standard is dependent on energy as a whole. It is short-sightedness that pisses me off. You see people complain about living cost being too high in one thread and later on see the same person talk about how we should be greener regardless of cost. This cognitive dissonance buggs me to no end...

Being able to see the trade-offs beyond what is in front of you is what, in my book, classifies as economics. Perhaps I should have been clearer in my definition. But I hope that this clarifies to you where I stand on the matter!

I agree with you about people not wanting to live in the world that they are signing other people up for.

Despite the fact that I'm about as liberal as a person can get, my problem with the fossil fuel argument is that places like New York state ban fracking but buy natural gas from Texas and Louisiana. So it's OK for us to screw up our environment, but it's not OK in their back yard. Louisiana is so captured by the energy companies that its one of, if not the most, polluted states in the country. New Yorkers get to make money off of energy, use the energy, and complain about how its produced? Fuck that in the ear.

The thing that bothers me the most, though, is the way that we (meaning the democratically elected government) can't use the levers of power to force the massive economic engines that are the energy companies to finance the shift to other technologies. Like a sovereign wealth fund, or something like that. The way it works now, the people fund research and give tax breaks to companies in lots of sectors that are then allowed to privatize the profits that get generated from that investment. Why can't we get part of the profits? Instead of fighting over taxes, it should be viewed as actual ownership and return on investment.

I know that the idea would make a lot of libertarians throw up in their mouth, but I don't think that you can really ever keep government out of markets. It makes the markets. If it operated from an ownership perspective then it can use that ownership to make the public's concerns a real fiduciary issue. It's already picking and choosing winners and losers. It always has. The question, at least as it seems to me, is on whose behalf is the government going to intervene? It's going to intervene. Should that be only to benefit the wealthiest, or is there a way that we can force the markets to honor democratic will without completely screwing it up. I don't know, but I can say this. I don't believe in business anymore as a means to solve any problem. Over the course of my life I have only seen business prove time and time again that short sighted, short term, growth is more important than any other factor.

Even with the way that government has colluded with business to help create the situation we are in, at least government has even notionally democratic institutions while business are inherently un-democratic. I'm not a shareholder of Exon by birth, although I am an American.

I don't know. I'm not optimistic. I do agree with you though about the faux hippie thing. That kind of woo woo BS ends the conversation just as fast as saying "Jesus will fix it".

Not to take anything away from the impressive technological advancement we have made, but that is certainly not the reason that we can now talk about spirituality. Spirituality and related philosophy has been existing long before any of this existed. Ironically, lot of people once they have spiritual realization, move to lifestyle which you would consider "poor living standards".

Sure you could talk then, but with the brightest in the world from your bathroom in slippers? No, technology has made it available. Do you know why the printing pressvwas a big deal? Not being able to talk about spirituality with an audience.

>Man this pseudo spiritual hippie bullshit annoys me to no end.

This guy gets it; he's laffin.

"We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath - a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.

We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit.

We will sing of the vibrant nightly fervour of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.

Look at us! We are still untired! Our hearts know no weariness because they are fed with fire, hatred, and speed!... Does that amaze you? It should, because you can never remember having lived! Erect on the summit of the world, once again we hurl our defiance at the stars!"

(Which is where we should head, by the way, before our lease here expires.)

> we are making one of the BEST trade-offs humanity has ever seen

Either you believe that we are not heading to a near extinction-level event, that we will prevent it before it happens, or that such an event is a fair price to pay for enjoying a century of computers and iphones.

The first option seems blind, the second baseless optimism, and the 3rd... I don't really know what to say. Is there a 4th?

Do you believe that we are heading to near extinction-level event? As far as I have seen, even the most extreme predictions of climate change consequences don't come close to that.

I have seen predictions expecting mass forced migrations, decrease in sustainable population, etc; but unless you're literally expecting the vast majority of the worldwide population to die, it's not an extinction-level event, it's not near extinction-level event, it's an entirely different ballpark.

It might be a horrible catastrophe, it might change civilization as we know it, that's for sure, but there's really no valid reason to mention the term of extinction in this context. There are some risks/potential events that have a (low) chance of threatening extinction, but the expected climate change is not one of them.

"Horrible catastrophe" works, but it doesn't stop there. How are humans and our political and military structures going to react?

It is debatable how close we have been, during various past crisis, to an actual large-scale nuclear conflict. I don't think we can deny our raw capability to cause a near-extinction-level with our existing technology (nuclear, biological or otherwise). Our political and military ecosystems, flawed as they may be, have kept that capability in check.

But would such a "horrible catastrophe" stress that ecosystem way past the point where it will remain confidently under control? Absolutely yes, I believe that beyond any reasonable doubt.

With our global structure out of control, is there is a significant probability for that destructive capability to be put into action? Absolutely yes, I believe that probability to be significant, beyond any reasonable doubt. I don't see how it can't be otherwise.

Do I get this correctly?

* climate change may lead to a "horrible catastrophe" of unknown substance with probability A

* this "horrible catastrophe" may lead to a nuclear war with probability B

* the nuclear war may lead to humanity's extinction with probability C

* you are claiming that A * B * C is very close to 1

If that's right, I call bullshit. There is a ton of potential triggers for nuclear war besides climate change, we didn't have one yet and I can't see why climate change should be the biggest concern in this regard. Moreover, nuclear war is hardly an existential threat to humanity and may even cool the planet a bit.

It's worth noting that only USA-Russia full "mutually assured destruction" nuclear exchange has the potential to come anywhere close to an existential threat. A limited nuclear exchange using up the arsenals of all other states does not; a nuclear escalation that results in USA or Russia nuking a non-nuclear state does not, etc. As long as USA and Russia (who between them hold almost all global nuclear weapons) keep their MAD reserves not triggered, it would simply be localized mass destruction on a scale comparable to the city/country destroying mass bombings of WW2.

It would be horrible, it would be comparable to the largest mass killings of 20th century, but it wouldn't be anything that different from what we have survived in the past and it wouldn't be a "near extinction event". "Just" a horrible catastrophe.

Yes, and what I'm saying is that MAD is far from an unthinkable outcome of the stress and conflicts arising from the worldwide "horrible catastrophe" caused by rapid climate change.

Maybe not, but since when did climate change become the only environmental concern? It's as if we can just curb our appetite for fossil fuel in time, we'll be okay. But there are other pressures on the biosphere that clean energy isn't going to alleviate.

I think "near-extinction" might be hard to credit - humans have survived tough times before - but I also don't think a mere "horrible catastrophe" sounds like a reasonable price to pay for the recent century and a half of rapid progress either.

That's what I mean when I say they lack reason. The entire green movement's argument is an emotional one not a logical one.

>The first option seems blind

yea, just toss an opinion aside as blind because you don't like it. That will get people listening to your point of view!

The benefits of technological and social progress we have managed don't depend on us continuing to pollute and overpopulate the planet. We could have, as a planet, decided not to grow our population back in ~1960 and decided to transition away from fossil fuels back in ~1980 and still managed to have the same, probably more freedom and safety than we have now.

We get it you are mad.

But you anger makes no sense: your world view is winning. Opinions like the one you replied to are definitely in the minority.

People value their iPhones and disney cruises way more than the natural environment.

>People value their iPhones and disney cruises way more than the natural environment

This is a emotional statement rather than a practical one. I think you'd probably get people to give those up if it would have a measurable, provable impact that wasn't 200 or 300 years in a possible future. The real bulk of emissions are caused by the everyday use of things that make modern life and the current population levels possible. Giving up an iPhone is one thing giving up electricity, transport, sanitation, modern farming, refrigeration, climate control, and sending countless billions into abject poverty while causing a few billion more to starve is a politically untenable position.

I believe few people actually truly hold these beliefs as suicides among environmentalists don't seem to be abnormally common and yet it is probably the most carbon friendly course of action possible. The idea seems to be that someone else should do without and that someone else is typically the working poor and middle class families at home and the majority of the world that lives in poverty abroad.

There is an incredible amount of waste involved in the "everyday things" you listed. Surely it would make a difference if that were cut down. Is it out of the question that a fairly comfortable life can be had by all without destroying the natural environment?

> The problem with the green movement as a whole is that they do not understand economics or trade-offs.

Yes, they do. It's just that destroying the planet and letting the future generations suffer for a more comfortable and convenient life right now is not a trade that they are willing to make.

> letting the future generations suffer...

source?

Soil depletion: http://news.berkeley.edu/2015/05/07/soil-depletion-human-sec...

Groundwater depletion: https://water.usgs.gov/edu/gwdepletion.html

Antibiotic resistance: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23231044-000-antibiot...

Shall I go on?

Yes, please! Because the only response I can think of to the list you've posted is "so what?"

Humanity faced a lot of problems in the past. Let me remind you just a few:

* multiple plagues decimating European population

* wheat rust (and unpredictable famines ensuing)

* guano depletion

However, we engineered our way out of them. I can't see why the problems you've listed are any different.

Yes, we engineered our way out of them providing better conditions for future generations. We are not engineering our way out of the problems I listed, but rather making them worse and worse and creating worse conditions for future generations.

Plagues could still happen again. We know more about how they occur and how to contain them, but we don't have any magic bullet against all future plagues that will occur.

Rust is still a problem. I'm not sure why you think it isn't. We have more resistant lines and fungicides but the rust is adapting rapidly.

The difference is, apart from maybe the guano depletion, none of the problems you list of the past were due to human actively making things worse. All of the problems I listed are due to action right now that will cause major problems in the future.

You might enjoy this book. It's quite good.

https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Case-Fossil-Fuels/dp/1591847443

Trade-off: Humanity as a species ends.

Which gadget do you feel is worth that?

Humanity as a species won't end due to climate change. That's a ridiculous assertion. Full scale nuclear war probably couldn't wipe us out completely. Global warming can't either. Billions might die, but humanity will survive almost certainly.

Maybe, maybe not. If you want to split hairs then, how many billion people do you think it's acceptable to kill or cause to suffer so we can have iPhones?

People are very bad at estimating the probability of catastrophic events. We base our estimates on things that have happened in the past, but that doesn't help predict things that have never happened before. Hundreds of millions of years of pent up carbon have never been released into the atmosphere over the course of a couple centuries before. It is hubris to the point of suicidal to think anyone can predict the effect it will have on a complex, nonlinear system like the global climate.

Sure, maybe it will be fine. But the burden of proof should be on the people claiming that it's going to be fine, not on those recommending caution before screwing with something we don't understand.

That's a false dichotomy. There is no reason to believe that we can't have modern technology without catastrophic climate change. If for example we switched completely to nuclear energy and electric cars we would greatly reduce our carbon footprint to the point where the rest might be offset by planting trees and turning them into charcoal.

IF we did those things, sure. However there is significant pressure from various interests to stop us from doing those things on the basis that climate change won't really be a problem or that we'll fix it somehow if it is.

The assertion that climate change will result in human extinction is of course not literally true. But given our current path it is not a ridiculous hyperbole. The consequences we are talking about is the inability to grow food in much of the southwest United States, Mediterranean regions and large areas of mainland China. Not to mention the collapse of a healthy ocean ecosystem, storm variability, etc... This really is an event that will alter the way of life of everyone on Earth and kill a whole bunch in the process. It is not at all ridiculous to treat this as the existential crisis it is.

I agree that global warming is one of the biggest threats we face in the immediate future. I just dislike pointless hyperbole. The likely consequences are scary enough without having to exaggerate them. If we want honest discussions we need truth, not hyperbole.

If there is no air to breathe?

Nuclear power plant + hydrolysis: Oxygen for a couple of millennia.

We'll make some.

The gamble we're making is that we're smart enough to survive in the most dire conditions.

That's a stupid gamble, but we might win. Plus we're on a roll so far.

Survivor bias.

Affordable enough space travel that we can survive.

Earth is just a bootstrap.

Humanity as a species is going to end no matter what we do. Or do you have a solution for the heat death of the universe?

Let's solve our problems in the order they're likely to happen ;)

Ok, so why not to end it right now, it does not matter, right?

In the strictest sense, no. But one difference, which might matter to some people, is that "ending it now" seems to imply actively killing people. Most people, I believe, would see that as inherently different from simply dying due to whatever interaction(s) happen with the natural environment around us.

All of that said, I'm not arguing against pursuing actions to protect the environment. Just pointing out that "preventing the extermination of the human race" really isn't a terribly good justification for doing so when you look at the big picture.

If you accept that premise, the question then becomes: "what are the good arguments for pursuing actions to protect the environment / reverse climate change?" That is, what arguments will persuade people to care about protecting the environment for future generations that don't exist yet, in a time beyond their own limited lifespan?

only very few people contribute to human progress. most of the population are selfish consumers.

Except here what you label as "pseudo spiritual" is actually the more realistic, scientific and moral way of seeing things.

The iPhones and Supermarkets are of the dream reality.

A world without consequences, where the Foxconn Factory Workers (or the mines of Congo) do not exist.

You should go read some history on pre-industrial revolution living standards and come back and tell us you prefer that.

Foxconn factory workers have a lower suicide rate than the average Chinese.

Yea and the slaves in the kitchen were happier then the ones in the field. So what? To try and justify the horrible treatment of these people so that we can feel better about having an iphone that is a few hundred dollars cheaper is absurd.

I wonder why... (http://www.dailytech.com/Foxconn+Installs+AntiSuicide+Nets+a...)

They have a lower suicide rate than Silicon Valley ..

Can an average Foxconn worker afford an iPhone?

It depends. How expensive is tea in China at the moment?

What does that have to do with anything? I build search engines, but cannot afford to buy one. I don't count this as a great injustice.

Probably because you can use a search engine without owning one.

And yes, I would definetly say it's a problem if workers in a factory can not afford the goods the factory produces.

I would definetly say it's a problem if workers in a factory can not afford the goods the factory produces

Even if the factory is producing high end sports cars or precision engineered industrial machinery?

For that matter I doubt even the CEO of Boeing could afford most of the 'goods' made in his factories.

I get your point.

The CEO of Boeing can probably still afford to take a flight on a plane made by his company, and that probably is true of an average worker of a Boeing factory as well.

So let me rephrase: if people working in a factory can only afford the very basic necessities and the actual goods the factory produces get shipped to the other side of the globe (and waste gets left behind), something is not right.

But certainly in the case of the iPhone a lot of them do get bought locally. Perhaps not by Foxconn factory floor workers, but certainly by a lot of other people in China.

I mean I kind of get the point you are trying to make, but Foxconn and iPhones aren't really a good example of that.

The dream reality.

I'll bite. What's the dream reality?

Seems like there's a sub-thread going on in this discussion relating to zen/buddhism/enlightenment. Dream reality or "Maya" is the reality of concepts and ego. "Reality" is the real tangible experience of consciousness. Everything else is layered on top of that as projection or thought. However, I can tell you having had some experience in this area that using these doctrines to create a "good and evil" but just using more subtle language is also just another concept and layer (supermarkets are just as real and part of reality as anything else). The real goal is to see the perfection of things exactly as they are, and that also doesn't mean you don't have the potential to change it (because human growth and change is also part of it).

Right. OK.

So, while some aspects of what we know from neuroscience and modern medicine map pretty closely to some eastern practices, those practices are embedded in superstitious religions that are no different from their counterparts in other regions.

The real goal is to procreate. There is no soul or divinity or whatever. While we can say that yes to a degree the world as experienced by my brain is like the concept of Maya and the synthesis of my inputs into consciousness are my subjective reality, that's really it. You can't get from there to "the real goal is to see the perfection of things".

The practices of meditation, visualization, etc do have benefits but they don't have to be rooted in the mysticism that spawned them. In fact, that's one of the things I like about zen. it rejects those notions because of the way that people assign baggage to them and start to worship the baggage instead of doing "the thing".

Oh, idk. The modern equivalent of Plato's Cave?

You mean a metaphor?