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> Nothing about the greenest and most sustainable solution: reducing consumption. Most Americans could drop their consumption by 75% purely improving their lives, before difficult decisions, many of which would also improve their lives.

As an Indian, when I see resource consumption per capita for US, it boggles my mind. But I don't believe every single American can make a significant change without institutional and government support.

Environmental impact is a function of what your society has optimized for. You can't really depend on public transport if the entire society around you is optimized and designed for cars. You'd have a tough time being a vegetarian if meat is a primary component of every meal. You can't forego flights if the rail infrastructure doesn't work well.

A similar thing happens in India. India optimizes for cheap stuff so a lot of stuff available for purchase near me is practically use & throw. I've had keyboards, monitors, powerbanks, cables die on me in 6-12 months. I'm having a hard time buying good quality stuff as India grows. That also has a significant environmental impact.

At the risk of sounding like fatalist, I won't discourage individual action. Every single step is welcome but as humans we need to significantly step up our political initiatives if we are to make a significant dent in climate change.

>At the risk of sounding like fatalist...

No, you sound like a realist. My wife has been an ardent environmentalist her whole adult life, but she has echoed this sentiment to me, to the extent she would rather people not even recycle. It is, she says, the security theater of environmentalism. Political action is needed.

In fact, I believe the populist movements around the world will soon meet with climate change environmentalism, and we will see a great voluntary contraction, supported by governments, that will indeed make a big dent on the problem. Until then, not using plastic straws and veganism is just theater.

The one thing theater can do is raise the consciousness of those around the one performing and socially normalize previously “weird” behaviors, both of which are useful groundwork for effective political action.

Maybe, but I don't think we really know what a "good" global economic contraction will look like, or what behaviors will come with it. Although, it seems pretty obvious that gas-powered vehicles will become a rarity, and (I hope!) working from home becomes the norm, not the exception. (That last one seems like such an obvious change we could encourage NOW.)

We should stop recycling our politicians, and throw away the old ones in a landfill.

Our consumption isn’t about things like turning off lights in your house. In the developed countries every human consumes about 10kW. You can actually graph energy consumption per capita and a quality of life index and they will correlate basically one to one. The bulk of that energy goes to power agricultural machinery that produces the food we eat and the transportation of that food from the mid west states to the coasts. There is little you can do to reduce that consumption because geography doesn’t allow for it. Local farms aren’t much better. They often times use old pickup trucks which are way less efficient than trains to deliver food. Even if you don’t use any power at all in your life, no heat, no lights, no transportation, you still would be in the 7-9kW range as long as you eat food.

> Local farms aren’t much better. They often times use old pickup trucks which are way less efficient than trains to deliver food.

This doesn't really make sense to me. Trains don't deliver from foreign farms to my door. You have to drive the food from those farms to the train, and drive the food from the train to its final destination. I don't see how that can possibly be less resource-intensive than getting food from local farms. And that's not even mentioning the difference between monoculture industrial agriculture and small-scale organic farming.

In any case, if you're worried about your resource consumption, you can always make more of your diet plant-based, drive your car less, and avoid flying when possible. In every carbon impact calculator I've used [1], these things make a significant impact. And I agree with the above poster that these decisions can, far from being sacrifices, greatly improve your life.

[1] https://footprint.wwf.org.uk/#/

Large farms move their crops in larger, more efficient vehicles. The efficiency offsets, to some degree, the distance.

You also are conflating organic and polyculture farming. Most organic farming is monoculture and much of it is industrial.

> Large farms move their crops in larger, more efficient vehicles. The efficiency offsets, to some degree, the distance.

Yes I understand this. My point was that it's not as simple as comparing trains to old pickup trucks, which seemed like a strawman. But I've been doing some research and was surprised to learn that food-miles are a relatively small portion of the emissions associated with food, so point taken.

> You also are conflating organic and polyculture farming. Most organic farming is monoculture and much of it is industrial.

I didn't mean to conflate them, I meant that monoculture + industrial is more resource-intensive than organic + small-scale. But I guess I was using "organic" as a catch-all for sustainable farming practices, e.g. polyculture, rather than literally "USDA organic".

Debate about "local produce" aside (which I probably should have let go), my more important point is that it's definitely possible to reduce your carbon footprint meaningfully.

Even if you don't eat, the energy uses to keep the society you benfit from going is high

Actually we've made huge progress in stemming growth. Fertility rates in most of the world have been falling, and in most developed nations are now below replacement levels. The big exception is Africa:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...

There's some lag built in, so even with a fertility rate below replacement, population can still grow for a while, but the root cause of population growth is already solved in much of the world.

The problem isn't the people that don't exist yet. It's the 7.8 billion that are already here; and the notion that the best way forward for Humanity is getting as many of them plugged into a system that - in reality - requires vast amounts of dirt cheap, easily transportable and scalable energy solutions.

Norman Borlaug's nobel prize speech was in 1970. Demographics have not gone in the direction he expected. Dependancy crises are now looming from falling birthrates in most developed countries, and China. China removed the one child policy in 2016 but their birthrate continues to decline and age despite the party's new efforts to encourage fertility. Have a look at Hans Rosling's work.

Why is birthrate decline a bad thing? The global population can't just keep growing... it has to slow down and stop at some point. Honestly we would all be better off if we had stopped growing at 2-5 billion, rather than continuing to grow unchecked to 8+.

It isn't. High dependancy ratios, however, are. i.e. a top-heavy population structure in which everyone is old and they rely on few people of productive working age.

> We haven't made much progress stemming growth.

The simplest and most effective way to limit population growth is 1) women's education, and 2) increase standard of living. With some or even one of those things, population rate naturally falls (even to below replacement rate, which is not good as Japan and increasingly Europe are learning).

Already, even China's birth rate has fallen to levels that will soon be of concern to the country (obviously, a small working population can't support a massive elderly population). And once India's birth rate makes the same transition, the global birth rate will start to level out. Already, projects are that it will level out around 2100.

Population growth is not the problem. Consumption levels and lack of environmentally-friendly sources of energy are the problem. We can solve one of those now, with nuclear power.

>Nothing about the greenest and most sustainable solution: reducing consumption.

Well that's because it's not a realistic solution. Any solution that goes against the human nature is doomed to fail. Our species historically had issues with implementing solutions that require short-term detriment no matter how large the long term benefits were. Montreal protocol is often cited as one of these collective actions that succeeded, however what is NOT often cited is that the cost of implementing it was tiny compared to respective countries GDP. I.e. millions, not billions of USD.

This is a non-solution. Its basically saying, why don't we just go back to living like before we had technology. That is not gone happen because people want do those things and consume those things. And people already have made those decisions.

The people who were predicting doom because of population were utterly and completely wrong and have been for 50+ years now. Just as terrible a prediction as those who predicted 'Peak Coal' in 1870. Guys like Borlaug are good at what they do but their understanding of the economy is incredibly limited.

The idea that population was the big issue is just fundamentally flawed assumption. The idea that population growth needs to end in order not to have a huge catastrophe is also incredibly flawed.

And add to all that, we can have both population and consumption growth at the same time, and we had that for a long time now and we can continue to do it for a long time. The energy inherent in the LITERAL DIRT on the ground alone could power advanced human civilization for 1000s of years and that is before we even start considering space based resources.

Simply put, with the 3x3x3 Cube of Dirt from where you are now, you have enough Thorium to literally power your whole life, including flying around with airplanes, driving and so on.

In fact we can do that AND at the same time reduce the amount of space people actually life on. Forest and other nature preserves are growing in the Western world. Increasingly people will live in population centers and more and more of the land around will have little actual use other then looking at it.

From wikipedia[1], annual CO2 emissions per capita in the US are 16.1 tons, while for many European countries it's around 6 tons. I understand that there are emissions that aren't included there (like things manufactured elsewhere and imported), but I don't think those are significantly different between the EU and the US?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

Not sure where I claimed there was no difference.

Yes and by far the biggest difference is with countries that use nuclear like France, Switzerland, Sweden.

Many of those gains, can absolutely not be achieved by US population 'purely improving their lives, before difficult decisions'. That is simply not the case.

It would require a total change in energy and transportation policy. Massively increasing the price of gas and flying. Changes in the way they live. And so on.

A comparative person living in New York City, Berlin, London is already not that different.

I agree that improving our energy generation is important.

But we must also get over the idea that we need mass immigration into the West.

The most environmentally friendly thing to do is accept a slow decline in absolute population numbers.

This will mean roads are not as busy, hospitals not full to bursting and the chance to improve the kids to teacher ratio.

I just want those people that want children to have them, and those that don't now. We don't need a global or national policy on how much population we want.

In fact, we are currently subsiding families. I tend to oppose that, but not because of fear of overpopulation.

Most roads are already not used often, its really just a few roads that are to full. And in those cases its really a density problem that we are not gone solve by having slightly less children.

For the rest I don't think population is the issue. The issue is with how those markets are organized. More people means you can have more teachers, not just more children. Currently the ratio is going down already, so I this is happening automatically anyway.

> Most Americans could drop their consumption by 75%

What would be the impact on overall income and employment rates?

> improving their lives

How could it be done with less income and less employment?

I'm asking honestly because I see this as a huge social-economic challenge.

Imho both would improve because of the change and innovation required. New technologies, new service industries (“decluttering consultant”, maybe).

Plus of course what good does income do if the world around you is shit?

Air quality, water quality, etc, should be baked into our economic models.

Income and employment age currently incomplete measures of health, happiness, and well-being — of which they are supposed to be indicators for.

Reducing consumption at this point is not a good option, rather wee need to find ways how to produce more energy in a clean manner, as that's how most of our current problems can be solved.

Carbon capture, polluted water/air filtering, land recultivation, waste recycling, desalination, electricity powered transport, carbon neutral fuel production and even spaceflight - all these can fix our environmental problems if we have enough clean & cheap power.

Just reducing consumption means we reduce our options while still using our current old, expensive and dirty power sources.

And as for global footprint being bigger than the one of Earth at some time in the future - well, Earth and it's resources are just a very tiny part of our Solar System, not to mention it's wider neighborhood.

Only limiting ourselves to the resources our our single planet is a very bad thing to do as that will indeed lead to strife, but using the wider resources of the Solar System should enable us to avoid this pressure for quite a while to come.

The population growth is now sublinear, and expected to stop around 2070.

Came to the US from Europe in 2014, been living in a small 2-room NYC apartment ever since. I realize that not everyone enjoys living in a urban shoebox, but damn everytime i go outside NYC i realize just how much STUFF and SPACE the average American househol has. The huge property, the huge house, all the small and big appliances, gadgets, tools and obviously the riding lawn mower.

Things like the tiny house movement and the sharing economy still have a long way to go.

Not having children would beat your greenest most sustainable solution.

Be the first of your ancestors to be an evolutionary dead-end! Tough sell...

That could be an argument for carbon pricing. If you price in the externalities people might reconsider if they need to use quite so much.

> We haven't made much progress stemming growth.

Birth rates in the United States are already below replacement rate. Population growth is a result of immigration. Americans lowering their birth rates further won't do much.

I agree that we can consume less, it is just a hard policy to push. How will the market be affected? Any politician enacting this change will be hit with the 'destroying the economy'. Is there room for capitalism in that economy? It feels like the idealism wars have doomed us.