Assuming scientists will come up with a new technology is a bad survival strategy. At this rate, we expect our children to find a way around climate change, ocean acidification and soil erosion. Mankind is one fat dude who'd rather dream about diet pills than stop eating.
Fossil fuel companies: bankrupt
Cheap Chinese goods: gone
Meat in every meal: nope
Cheap processed foods: gone
It would be a huge lifestyle change for everyone on the planet. Difficult, but certainly viable.
Edit: I'm not saying fossil fuel dependency is a good thing, but it's a fact of life, and any realistic proposal for moving away from fossil fuels needs to start with accurately understanding just how important they are.
Also, maybe the fact that we have to distribute food across the country is part of the problem. If food prices in areas that can't grow food nearby go up 100x then people will move.
It's pretty obvious that eventually we'll have to deal with these problems, but I don't see how society will start the process voluntarily. It's too disruptive and there is no financial incentive to do so. (And even if one country decides to, then they lose out relative to every country that decides not to, so it really has to be an everyone or no one thing).
You would distribute less and source more locally. No more bananas or mangoes. That was the idea behind the "reduce our standard of living" phrase.
It's way harder to de-industrialize than to industrialize. A lot of our cities are only viable because of the dividend from fossil fuels.
Is that correct?
Agreed. I had a lawyer-gf at one point in my past, and she executed some variant of this on me every time a vacuous proposal left my mouth. Any proposal at all, really.
But, I did not understand the intent behind what you were writing. Can you restate this for those of us slower members of your audience?
This is all just silly. Credit to 'workthrowaway27 for responding in reasoned fashion, but that hasn't dissuaded any of the silly folk in their silliness. They suggest catastrophic changes to the lives of everyone on earth, and the reasons they offer are transparently based on personal psychological idiosyncrasies rather than on a practical understanding of reality. All of this tyrannical bullshit won't happen, not only because it shouldn't happen, but also because it can't possibly happen. One does admit it to be a lovely dream, because one understands that lots of people dream of denying the agency of other humans. This is an impulse to indulge in daydreams, not in the political sphere.
Thank you.
It's easy to believe they are utterly indispensable. They are just so convenient, and we love to convince ourselves convenience is really necessity. But would the world truly collapse into the dark ages if fossil fuels petered out in the next decade, and we no longer had that option?
How are you going to transport food? You ignore that food was shipped around a long time before fossil fuels. More of a pain, of course, but we did it all the same.
Yes, society can function without fossil fuels, but probably not with the same number of people, and certainly not with the same standard of living.
If we wait until there is no topsoil left, even more billions will die, and it won't be in a controlled and purposeful way like it would be if we do it now. Hell, maybe even no one has to die from starvation. Maybe just limiting births would do the trick. Or any other number of ideas that don't involve mass murder or mass starvation or going back to 200 year old farming methods.
So it's idealist to want a sustainable society that doesn't destroy the planet a short couple hundred years after discovering fossil fuels and industrial food production? How is that idealist? Idealism is thinking that the current situation is somehow salvageable without extreme overhauls.
And plus, no one is saying to go back to oxen and carts. That is fairly ridiculous so my response was equally ridiculous.
People were advocating for much the same thing in the '70s when Erlich's The Population Bomb came out, and thank God we ignored them. And yet a single hectare of land produces multiples of what it produced then, allowing enough food for everyone (though it doesn't always get to the people who need it, admittedly).
If I had to bet I'd say in 100 years we'll be producing even more food per person, so I consider any plan that would have people starving forced to limit reproduction to be off the table.