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According to a meta study on personal greenhouse impact the biggest "less" thing a person can do is to not have too many children. To their data a single child represent yearly the cost in CO2e as is saved by 20 people not driving, 40 less air trips, or about 100 people eating a purely vegetarian diet for the same time period. (http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541)

If we want less we need to understand the order of magnitude that the different forms of less have.

Thanks for those numbers. I'm a card-carrying /r/childfree member.

How do you propose enforcing that? Telling society 'use less' doesn't work, just like saying 'smoking kills, stop it' doesn't work: you have to either enforce some policy like tax hikes or graphic images on packs, or introduce a new technology like vaping or nicotine patches.

There's a huge boom of solar at the moment not because people give a shit about the environment, but because the technology has made it a viable alternative, and tax incentives have reduced the barrier to entry.

I'm saying we're already so far fucked up the ass that there is no hope. Nature will herself tell us it doesn't work, just like it tells people that smoking causes cancer. I wish I could be the Bill Gates brand of optimist but I'm not. The world is getting worse not better.

There is a "wonderful" movement called the Dark Mountain movement. It is a collection of formerly uber-passionate environmental activists who've essentially thrown in the towel and decided Humanity ist kaput. Their leader now gives lessons on how to use scythes instead of lawn mowers to cut grass. Others have found similarly low tech pastimes to keep themselves occupied.

The Dark Mountain folks seem to revel in it all a bit much don't you think? They're a kind of refreshingly dark counterpoint to the 'everything will be saved by an organic urine-fermented artisanal hemp startup' Guardianista crew. But they seem equally silly (not to mention wanky).

I'm not disagreeing with you, just pointing out that all "movements" are theater in a way. They have a position to state, and they get it out there by saying the words and doing the things. If it looks a bit artificial, well, it is. But it's nonetheless well meant. I'm sure some of them eat cheeseburgers sometimes, and that doesn't detract from the message.

> Less SUVs, less air travel, less fast fashion, less computer monitors, less phones replaced less quickly, less heating and cooling of our homes and more getting acclimated to the climate, less fucking juiceros and interent connected butt-plugs, less non-seasonal vegetables and meat, less eating of beef and pork and chicken and more plants. Reduce.

I note that such a reduction is achieved either by having less per person, or by having fewer people.

> Musk and Tesla aren't our saviours. 'Less' is.

Agree on the first, but the second is hardly likely. We would have to devise some miraculous means of global collective decision-making, with an eye to long-term consequences. Not even the most Panglossian UN weeny could imagine we're within decades of this (millennia is more likely).

The moment evolution tossed up a creature with the cognitive flexibility to invade all niches, and evade population-scale threats to fitness, universal overrun was a biological inevitability. Next time perhaps.

I would not be at all surprised if the second will come within most of our lifetimes. Probably under something akin to a wartime economy.

It will come when climate change is obvious even to the most arrogant denier troll. It won't be pretty, for anyone. We'll get to watch governments trying to force things whilst our major infrastructures are still built for economics of short term growth and ignoring externalities.

I can't see a route from here to there. If such a thing were to come about, it would obviously have to happen via some form of (hopefully transitional) authoritarianism, since a century (give or take) of assiduous cultivation of a culture of greed has left our citizenries largely too enfeebled to willingly and/or competently participate in such a change.

Going from a couple of hundred very disparate nation States to a global benevolent & rational authoritarian regime isn't something I can imagine happening in the next 50 years or so without nukes getting involved. Admittedly predicting the future outside of immediate trends is a mug's game.