It's good to be able to visit friends in the next town over in a few minutes, in any weather, rather than having to walk and then transfer in some distant location.
It's good to be able to have our choice of food, rather than having to accept what's left of what the comisar of production allocated to are area.
The nice thing about technology is it will allow us to improve the future, rather than having to don the hair shirts of the past.
We should strongly consider things like redefining energy security rather rather than wallowing in our base loss aversion. We'll need to develop alternative ways to deliver all of these improvements that don't assign an unpayable environmental debt to our future generations.
I mean, fifteen years ago, electric cars weren't a thing. If we had abandoned cars in favor of bicycles then, Tesla wouldn't have gotten off the ground. And I think I'd rather ride around in a Tesla than on a Schwinn.
Basically, I think we have to find climate solutions that allow us to maintain our standard of living. And I think by accepting that's what we need to do, we can and will find those choices, and not divert attention to unpalatable options.
I'm an optimist, but the post-enlightenment world routinely justifies such optimism.
The problem with your line of reasoning is that you seem to pre-suppose that the market has to solve every problem, even the ones that the market created.
This is a statement made by a rich and enormously privileged person. You can't deny that most of the world's population lives in poverty without these choices. Your goal is not to push a post-enlightenment techno-optimism despite the couching of things in that framework. Your goal is to avoid losing what you have today.
And that's just not realistic. We will all need to redefine what is "normal." Our lifestyles not only can't pass environmental debts forward, they can no longer be defined by the extreme luxury of the top 7 richest nations at the expense of the majority of the world. Both our lives are sustained by what amounts to indentured servitude. As traditional power systems are disrupted by the inability to maintain deep supply chains, people aren't going to bow to your desire for comfort at their expense. Why should they?
We absolutely have to keep moving forward with technology that is more efficient and makes energy essentially free in the long term (and minimally rationed in the short term). But we can't do it at the expense of the future while chanting "standard of living" at obvious outcomes we don't like.
Outside of India and China, the developing world doesn't possess the military/technical capabilities to prevent the richest from securing the natural resources to maintain their gilded standard of living. Developing countries will either rapidly industrialize and militarize, becoming yet another part of the problem, or they are likely to be marginalized into migration, collapse, and death.
>>>Your goal is to avoid losing what you have today.
Which in practical terms applies to every human being, ever, who didn't become an ascetic monk.
Without re-examining our priorities quickly and changing our economies, this fate awaits everyone.
> Which in practical terms applies to every human being, ever, who didn't become an ascetic monk.
No, not everyone is a Reactionary.
I don't get this way of thinking. This isn't the first time people thought that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism
They were wrong then, they will be wrong now. Why do I think that ? Because we are already far over the carrying capacity of the planet without fossil fuels. Either technology will save us or your doom scenario WILL happen. In other words, you could be wrong or right. If you're wrong, then of course we should only take limited steps to change. If you're right and we cannot adapt, then we're fucked unless we kill something like 90% of the human race (exact number doesn't really matter, even if it's 50%). Any event that kills 90% of the human race is going to be as bad as just waiting for the "migration, collapse and death", whether we engineer it or not.
So you're wrong. Not just because there's a range of technologies that could save our ass, but also because "changing our priorities" is no different from "migration, collapse, and death" at this point.
BUT on the plus side: stabilization is happening, without us having to do anything:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth#Human_popula...
World population is on the path to peaking at around 8.5 billion humans and then dropping to steady state at around 7.5 billion. That's our current guess. Barring a great war or something like that, that's what will happen.
Animals come with a built-in "carrying capacity guesser", and populations end up very close to the exact STABLE carrying capacity of whatever environment they find themselves in. And while it's possible to disrupt this (famously the case of rabbits and cats in artificial environments without good enough places to hide for the rabbits, but abundant food availability), shouldn't our default assumption be that there clearly is a mechanism controlling human population size, and that it's not in fact screwing up ? That that 8.5/7.5 billion number is in fact a pretty good guess ?
As the history of Yellowstone park illustrates, humans have done far more damage attempting to control population sizes of animals than we have just letting them be.
I'm quite certain you've misread me because you seem to be suggesting I'm not advocating action and a possible stable outcome. I am. What I'm saying is that making no changes in the face of new data will simply continue to ignore the reality we're increasingly convinced of: that climate change is going to collapse every aspect of modern society unless we react swiftly and broadly to counteract it and its effects.
Suggesting this is Malthusian in nature is wrong.
> So you're wrong. Not just because there's a range of technologies that could save our ass, but also because "changing our priorities" is no different from "migration, collapse, and death" at this point.
If we refuse to apply said technologies, then we're in trouble. We might refuse if, for example, men are afraid recycling makes them look effeminate or because solar power is unpopular with people convinced oil industry=freedom.
> Animals come with a built-in "carrying capacity guesser", and populations end up very close to the exact STABLE carrying capacity of whatever environment they find themselves in.
... What? No, they don't. Any species that doesn't reach equilibrium dies.
> shouldn't our default assumption be that there clearly is a mechanism controlling human population size, and that it's not in fact screwing up ?
What a weird argument. So first you suggested we can and should use technology to preserve societal growth, and then you seem to suggest that being cognizant of these motivations and selecting among various strategies is wrong because we should trust in some kind of implicit governing principle or intelligence?
Which is it?
> As the history of Yellowstone park illustrates, humans have done far more damage attempting to control population sizes of animals than we have just letting them be.
Here again you're contradicting the sentiments you displayed in paragraph 1 and 2. Should we try and use technology to solve the problems before us proactively or accept any such intervention is doomed due to ignorance?
Are you sure you're the not the adherent to Malthusianism?
And point out you and I live on lives sustained by indentured servitude.
Those folks subsist in extreme poverty, doing difficult physical work. They're miners and farmers and duck haulers and other such tasks that make up the bulk of the actual work but a minority of the actual profitshare.
You don't fix those problems in the long term by buying different things. You solve them by paying people sums commensurate with the value they produce and by focusing on making the base standard of living more fair for more of the planet rather than making it realistic for Jeff Bezos to build a private moonbase.
Such a reprioritization will surely see changes in what is available for the top 30% of the world, to the betterment of the bottom 70%. It is recency and identity biases that make it difficult for us to understand how much that matters.
But how would you propose to solve this? Say China implements a minimum wage that meets your standard of a fair wage. What happens to the people of Vietnam who would gladly take those jobs at half the pay? Will you tell them they can't have jobs they consider far better than what they have now, because you don't think they pay enough? Like it or not, we're not in some broken system, we're in the best system we've ever had with no clear competitor. And things are going up for everyone, the world has never been so well off, a truly incredible feet considering the incredible population.
Although if I were king for a day, I'd use the wealth of the industrialized countries to build out nuclear plants everywhere. Because at least with cheap unlimited power people would never have to worry about food, sleeping in the dirt, or clean water. Bonus points for ending the need for slash and burn, or more fossil fuels.
Just an aside, ask yourself if cheap energy is actually the problem to solve here.
There's a great range of opinion on this. The extent of the expense and the meaning of 'future'. And what needs to be done first and foremost. And who gets to decide. And how our own children will be impacted by our choices of adversity.
The only real 'sure thing' is the arrival of another dinosaur killer.
We don't need to cut our consumption until we actually run out of energy, i.e. have harnessed the whole sun with a Dyson sphere and used up every other source. After that, there are other stars to harness.
The hard truth that makes this stuff even harder to convince is that, deep down, we know society will still function for those of us at the very top. Things will get permanently worse but _somehow_ systems will get set up so that those at the top of society will basically live comfortably forever.
The worst case climate scenarios are not actually "game over" for a lot of people. It will cause immense, quasi-permanent damage to a lot of people. But those people don't hold the levers of power.
Even this seems optimistic to me. It might coast along on inertia for a few decades but once food production and distribution ceases, "rich" gets redefined pretty quickly.
These are not even close to the worst-case climate scenarios. We don't have enough scientific evidence to ascertain whether the real worst-case scenarios are likely, so reputable scientists avoid talking about them, but we can't rule them out either.
> The worst case climate scenarios are not actually "game over" for a lot of people. It will cause immense, quasi-permanent damage to a lot of people. But those people don't hold the levers of power.
This really depends on the amount of system damage done. Sure, at +1.5°C of global average temperature increase, you'll probably do fine.
But at +15°C? What will wealth buy you?
Doesn't that arguement suggest that despotism is self-justifying because it increases the quality of life for the despots?
The notion that a temporary setback due to our worldview basing itself on untenable principles is no different than societal collapse is, to me, terribly wrongheaded.
If anything, the knowledge and technology we have gained enables us to imagine building something truly better from scaffolding erected by our current, less-than-desirable societal structure and industrial dependence on expensive and toxic energy (made all the more absurd by the fact it is essentially free with modern technology if we are just willing to alter our usage patterns a bit). Maybe we can imagine a world with a place for everyone and an understanding that cooperation and coordination need not only be accomplished via super-massive hierarchies that unjustly benefit only the upper strata.
I said that I wanted each generation to live better than the last. From what did you draw the conclusion that this means stasis, or is contradictory to my ethos?
Over the past several thousand years, on average, each generation has lived better than the previous, and technological progress is the main reason for that.
Since you didn't really grok my basic thesis, I think the rest of your argument is against a strawman.
Bikes won't carry everything but they go a long way in solving day to day commuting problems.
The answer to that, of course, is e-bikes aren't cheating, but driving a car is.
As someone who cycles to work year-round, I'd love to see more bicycles and infrastructure, but I don't think bicycles are a panacea.
I don’t own a car all my commuting happens on a bike. I live in a city with not so good public transport so when needed I just rent a car for the weekend or so.
But I don't think bicycles and mass transit will take over ultimately. But self driving electric vehicles a bit larger than a bicycle could do it.
These will only need one seat and minimal storage. They'll go directly from home to work without stopping at every bus stop or train station along the way. And they'll be 1/4 the cost of today's car.
And, yes, they won't work for everybody and every situation, just like everything else.
https://www.bikeleague.org/content/national-household-travel...
The vast majority of people making those trips are able-bodied people in urbanized areas (80% of the US lived in an urbanized area as of 2010).
https://www.icip.iastate.edu/tables/population/urban-pct-sta...
So if you can get bike infrastructure to where people are living, you've attacked a big chunk of the auto problem.
Per your second point, yes, it can be feasible. The modern rural US is very sprawling in terms of the built environment but it wasn't always that way. Rural areas in the US used to revolve around small villages and points of density that service a wide area, complete with transit connections. Many German rural villages are extremely bikeable and have regular transit through their regions and to larger cities.
You still can accommodate people who need vehicles, just the demand on infrastructure (parking, number of lane miles, subsidies and costs) would be greatly reduced. As it is now, the children, the disabled, and frequently the poor can't drive themselves and rely on other people driving them. Cycling can be done by almost anyone, is much cheaper and therefore much more accessible than driving.
https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/population/2018-...
While not having to park, consuming electricity, and more efficient road usage will make cars much much better, this future car will still be significantly less efficient than modern trains in several key metrics. Examples include efficient land usage, efficient energy usage, maintenance requirements, raw resource requirements, max speed.
As the process of urbanization continues trains are the most logical next step in transportation for our cities. While side driving cars will play a role in less traveled routes, we’ll see heavy investment in trains as cities try to find ways to allow more and more people access to their most busy business districts.
It doesn't ; if anything our hardwiring is always for efficiency and less effort. It's just that there is no easy and low-effort way to avoid those things.
We should go after military and cooperate polluters first because of their larger impact, but that’s easier to do when you gain moral high ground.
But one way to drastically improve this situation is to improve public transit and alternative transit (e.g., welcome electric scooters if they can leave they're sustainably designed and sourced). Most people live in cities, so improving that story for cities is the most impactful way to reduce civil emissions.
As for corporations, I doubt any moral high ground will be impactful. It will almost certainly come to violence (or if we're lucky, implied violence via state action) over that in one form or another.