Scientists’ warning on affluence
nature.com
nature.com
Superinsulated, almost airtight houses with ground and air source heat pumps and solar PV should be mandatory, as should banning of all in home boilers in new builds.
That’s all easily achievable even without some of the recent novel inventions such as engineered wood: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476
We have to stop treating the atmosphere as a free line of credit with no limit that we can just dump all our externalities into, or we’ll find out very soon that there is no such thing as an externality at planetary scale. We’re all in the same hermetically sealed box, breathing each other’s farts.
Sorry for the rant. It’s hard to stop once the despair creeps in.
At a naive, laymen’s first glance I’d imagine it creates opportunity for more!
Consequently, developers tend to build houses that are barely functional as such, with all sorts of damp/heating/basic liveability problems, but which look impressive.
Green initiatives are a sort of nightmare for developers, because the energy efficiency of a house is a cold, uninteresting metric that is not immediately present to the potential buyer.
Consider windows, for example. In an unregulated market, the cheapest, most crappy windows are absolutely the optimal choice for a developer. The fact that they are going to be drafty, break within the first few months, and quickly become covered in mold is simply impossible for a buyer to know, before they've lived in the house for a year or so.
Green windows, however, have to meet energy efficiency ratings - which means they must actually work. They have to keep cold out and heat in, or vice-versa. They can't be giant condensators. They probably don't look quite so pretty, and much worse, they are far more expensive. So the developer actually loses perceived property value, while paying more!
I wonder if this couldn't be mitigated somewhat by a clause that makes the developer liable for all problems in the first year. (I know one potential loophole would be that the developer could use a proxy to "buy" from themselves and hold for a year, but it seems like that could be appropriately handled through existing or minimally altered fraud laws.) It's hard to see how we could get from our present situation to something like that, but it might improve craftsmanship, but would also make new houses even more expensive.
Developers are just like any other complex corporation. Quality is just one thing that has to be balanced. And it is a market with massive pent up demand and buyers everywhere. And customers who have very little choice after they have signed on the dotted line.
I now live in the Netherlands, and in the 80s, developers also started to pull this shit. Soon the lawsuits came, and very quickly they learned not to do this.
Most Dutch people have both comprehensive house insurance _and_ legal insurance!
The ideal situation in my experience is to find a home maybe 10 years old. Problems don't necessarily become evident the first year.
Then again homes of any age have issues creep in, so maybe there's always risks.
Remember,the beneficiaries of the old system will be lobbying to prevent progress.
For a trivial example, direct manufacturer car sales are effectively banned in many US states. Dealerships are an entrenched and hated third party.
They exist out of "concerns" about rural car maintenance. If there had been a law that mandated X percentage of the population must have a way to repair their car within Y miles, that would have been less distortionary.
The average American drives something like 13k miles per year, and modern cars tend to not need an oil change for 10k miles or even longer. Tires last for years. Other maintenance is less frequent.
Meanwhile in the 60s you'd change your oil every 3k miles. I'm sure in the 20s or 30s you'd have all kinds of maintenance to do
This concern about maintenance is obviously not as critical as it was in the 20s and 30s when these laws were created.
100 years of technical progress with little to no legal progress.
As a bonus point: taxes can be redistributed equally to citizens so it's revenue neutral.
I can use a Stirling engine driven by the solar gain to run a heat pump to push the temperature gradient, but I still need a large-ass amount of insulation to beat the radiating heat creeping into the cold volume.
Lots of HVAC discussions revolve around keeping people comfortable and happy, but I'm trying to figure out how to keep a cold space at that set point regardless of what goes on outside it. And if your definition of "crazy amounts" includes cost, then aerogel-core vacuum insulated panels are right out (though in terms of volume occupied, they're nifty, but only a 50 year lifecycle unfortunately).
Further, heat transfer is only half the story. A delta of 100f vs 72f is the same as 44f vs 72f which is not that cold. What makes AC consume so much energy is dehumidifying the air, and that varies wildly. That and everything heating the space like people and electronics is helpful in the cold and counterproductive in the heat.
Clearly there is always some value in more insulation, it’s simply less important than generally assumed.
I'm looking for designs that incorporate passive elements that last ideally 100+ years that are reusable in modular sections, amortizing cost-effectiveness over generations. For that criteria, below-frost-line earth-covered, foamed glass building envelopes meets my requirements, and I'm happy to set aside 6-12 feet of foamed glass insulation after digging down enough to get below the frost line to achieve the thermal control I'm seeking.
I'm looking for dehumidification to consistently 5-8%, with temperature in deep freeze range (-30 to -50°C).
I've so far been stumped finding someone who has already, or figuring out myself how to passively (or with about the energy consumption of a Pi Zero per day) capture and use elsewhere the heat hitting panels to manage their thermal cycling. Nor have I been able to find a self-cleaning (superhydrophobic and/or appropriate wettability) coating that can be lifecycle rated to the timeframe I'm seeking. I think if we can control those, then solar panel lifetimes can be extended to 100 years at 20% degradation ("80% 'efficiency'").
Unfortunately, I've been stymied trying to find the lifespan of gallium-arsenide solar panels. Probably because their three-order of magnitude cost differential limiting them mostly to outer space applications where the weight-to-efficiency savings are the primary design motivator, and no one particularly cares about lifespan as long as it outlasts the design life of the satellite, which is way less than the 100+ years I'm seeking.
Solar panels already have a pretty decent LifeCycle Assessment compared to coal and natural gas, though their de-manufacturing/re-manufacturing tech is still at a nascent stage. I simply have a different goal than most people with my requirements for long duration lifespans.
Wouldn’t it be more productive to centralize an efficient form of power generation, and let the consumers choose how much they can afford to pay for through their electricity meters?
The paper is say that those who have more money pollute more and consume more resources. Your solution seems to be to let people with more money consume more resources, rather than building more efficient buildings that reduces everyone’s resource consumption.
IIRC there is a limiting factor with (ground-based) heat-pumps, though... the in-earth elements can't be placed too close to each other before they lose efficiency badly through competition for the same heat energy stocks. (Somebody who knows more about this should correct me.)
The same could be said of 99% of building code requirements...and it adds up.
Shock! It turns out that doing it right at scale just isn't much harder, and pays society back in spades over the life of the building.
The article you're commenting under talks about why this leads to poor outcomes.
People have been doing it and usually getting it right for millenia. 38% of the UK's housing stock dates from before 1946; much more than was built in the last forty years.
And one of the few really consistent objections to older buildings is 'the architects assumed nobody would still be living in it fifty years later'...
one key seems to be to avoid concrete.
broad.com, a company in china, has developed a lightweight, energyefficient, durable, and reusable way to build using steel.
i am pretty sure there are others out there with other good alternatives
Example. Concrete foundations don't have to be slabs that are torn up when a new house is built on the lot with a different footprint. They're just cheaper that way. You can instead use a modular foundation if you are willing to pay for it and give up flexibility in foundation footprints. Design the modules using 800 MPa ultra-high strength pozzolanic concrete, pre-stressed basalt fiber reinforcement, and carbon fiber reinforcing filaments, with basalt ducts for carbon fiber post-tensioning cables to connect the modules together, all covered on the envelope with foamed glass insulation to protect from UV.
A foundation system like this would have a lifecycle rated in multiple hundreds of years. Might have to replace the carbon fiber post-tensioning cables sooner than 100 years, but we're still figuring out the lifecycle of those; they're rated about the same as steel as far as we know from current lifecycle testing, possibly longer because they aren't subject to the corrosion concerns of steel, but no one knows for sure yet.
You'd be able to repurpose these modules indefinitely. If foundations like these were commonplace in average residential and commercial buildings, breaking out the jackhammers to toss out a foundation would only be reserved for one-off projects where the compressive load far exceeds what these could take. Used for just your average residential projects, and they'd be fine from SFH up to mid-rise multifamily projects; I'd have to retain and pay structural and civil engineers to figure out what these could ultimately take.
Such a foundation though, is fantastically expensive compared to how we currently build foundations. If you put a gun to my head to force a guess, I'd pluck an order of magnitude out of thin air. I wouldn't be surprised if it is acutally more. I can't even find someone who makes basalt post-tensioning ducts that are textured on the surface to simultaneously serve as reinforcing rods.
I'd like to eventually see if carbon nanotube-based cables can be used for filaments and post-tensioning, possibly pre-tensioning, as carbon fiber manufacturing emits lots of CO2 while there are some interesting processes shown in the lab for making carbon nanotubes that consume CO2.
Concrete and foundation companies wouldn't like it if their customer base shrunk to only bespoke foundation gigs for megascale projects and new customers needing new modular foundation modules. If common foundations were like this, we'd be used to thinking of foundations as some object we simply pass along for multiple generations, and re-purpose as modules across that entire timespan. The amount of concrete manufactured per year after the initial production of modules is satisfied would be alarming to many in the concrete and related industries (don't forget n-th order effects onto real estate and finance among others, for example). I don't even know if we have enough volcanic basalt to satisfy global demand.
Do it right in the first place and it will be livable forever.
People are physical beings with well-known needs - warmth, protection from the elements, water and plumbing, privacy, comfort, sunlight, air, lack of health risks (fire, unsafe water, outgassing materials, damp, mold, etc).
A good solution to this problem will be a good solution a century from now, with minor modifications.
People should be less into ripping things up just because they get bored with them. Even if we reuse materials, the environmental cost of a new building is huge.
For another example, I subscribe to Ethical Consumer magazine [1], who rate products and companies on everything from carbon impact to animal use/abuse to tax avoidance. Invariably, the most ethical products are the most expensive. It simply costs more when you don't externalize negative effects. So the products are there, but they're only purchased by the small cross section of folks who can afford to and choose to essentially double their cost of living. What we need is (at the very least) societal, structural incentives towards more ethical capitalism.
HFCS is more expensive to make than sugar, but it is cheaper in the US (and through exports this bleeds to other places) due to corn subsidies.
Similarly, there are a lot of meat subsidies and oil subsidies - to the point that market pricing only matter within small sectors, but not replacement sectors that aren’t the same commodity.
I suppose purchasing a colorful carton adorned by lots of writing in the "Vegan Isle" of a grocery store could be an easier way because the aforementioned steps may be far too time consuming for most people who want everything pre-prepared for them by a favorite brand and stored in plastic/cardboard/glass individual packaging.
Meat is a different story, because coordinating the grazing routines, herding (some canine breeds are helpful for this), winter hay feeding stockpile, veterinary treatments, calf birthing, nutrition feed deficiency compensation, slaughter (bolt-gun to forehead is most humane), blood drain (good composting material), and butchering into desired cuts would be consuming much more time than available in a highly specialized life.
Anyway, nearly zero-energy buildings are now mandated for all new buildings in the EU, so hardly a fad.
But we digress, I am firmly convinced that such narrow focus on energy efficiency of buildings to the detriment of other things is exactly the "affluent" technological solution the paper is critical about.
The COP for heat pumps range from 3.2 to 4.5 for air source heat pumps to 4.2 to 5.2 for ground source heat pumps.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump
Whereas a resistive heat coil has a COP 1.
Heat pump water heaters for either space heating or hot water production are most certainly a product you can buy today.
Eg, Rheem sell these two models in Australia https://www.rheem.com.au/products/residential/heat-pumps
We are evolved to react incredibly well at about a 100ms threshold. Through agriculture, humans have taught themselves to plan in terms of a whole year. Beyond that people can't really understand.
If you offered most people this deal, "I'll give you $10 billion today but in exchange the whole world is destroyed 150 years from now," I think 90% of humans would take it.
"I'll be dead anyway."
There is a worrying trend emerging, fuelled by the tech industry of performative environmentalism that seeks to promise absolution like the church did by buying Tesla's and biodegradable cups while the real-world impact is marginal while leaving the fundamental flaws of the system untouched. We won't consume ourselves out of the doghouse.
Russ Ackoff in a great talk about systems thinking[2] once pointed out a few salient things
1. Counter to intuition one does not improve a system by merely removing deficiencies. Doing away with what you don't want doesn't get you what you want.
2. Incrementalism doesn't solve fundamentally new problems, rearranging deck chairs on the titanic is pointless, and people confuse efficiency with effectiveness. Doing the wrong thing right is worse than doing the right thing wrong.
3. One must recognise that like an architect, a designer does not design rooms independently of the house. One starts with the house, and only changes parts as to improve the overall functioning of the system, never the parts alone.
This is what needs to be applied to modern environmentalism. Woke green consumerism and tech worship is useless. The entire global system needs to be redesigned, instead of trying to fix individual parts. We need to think in holistic terms rather than trying to remove individual problems.
[1]https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/03/meet-vaclav-smil-man...
The alternative co2 reducing uses of 1 Tesla worth of money would be very significant in the $2 earnings/day part of the world, so the opportunity cost is enormous.
Fossil fuels were a major concern then as well, mostly because of automobile exhaust. During the current pandemic, people have posted before/after photos of their cities. But places like Los Angeles had smog so thick that the skyline was hidden[2]. Since then, better engine controls and catalytic converters have reduced emissions to amazingly low levels. If you're behind an older car that has a carburetor some time, you'll definitely notice the smell of raw gasoline. Imagine millions of cars emitting that!
There's no question that the more people, the more resources get consumed. However what is an important question is: Is world population growth exceeding our ability to engineer lower per-person resource usage? Right now, that curve has positive slope, and we need to get it to a slight negative slope, without losing the advantages of a technological civilization.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Day [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth [2] https://timeline.com/la-smog-pollution-4ca4bc0cc95d
That's a trick question. The answer is that human population increases by about 1.1% a year; and independently, individual human consumption increases exponentially as well.
The exact rate depends on the specific resource or commodity being consumed of course.
Now, you're right that technology allows individual things to be manufactured more effectively, with less waste. What you miss is that this causes people to buy a lot more things, so it more than cancels out.
I spent some time looking at this, and I found a few resources that had decreased consumption. Freon is the most obvious one, but it's important to notice that it was replaced by another safer but rather similar gas - raw material consumption did not decrease.
Even things like biofuels - wood, dung, or other biological products that are burned for heat. They used to be nearly all the world's energy production - now they're a tiny part but on their own, their growth is now and has always been exponential. It's just that fossil fuels grew much faster - we never cut down on anything.
We need to use less of absolutely everything.
For us not to such the world dry, we individually and as a species need to decrease our consumption by as much an order of magnitude. If we are not to decimate our biosphere, we need both far more efficient manufacturing, but also a lot less manufacturing.
Trying to push a certain set of values like this risks giving science a bad name in the public eye, and making the public less willing to accept actual scientific facts. Because many people lack the ability to distinguish between facts and opinions in scientific publishing, so they just end up distrusting all science.
That's what this paper does.
It seems like you may have missed the part that this situation is not sustainable, as well as the prior science that establishes that quality of life depends on the environment, which is why many people care about phenomena like polution and climate change.
> Recent scientists’ warnings confirm alarming trends of environmental degradation from human activity, leading to profound changes in essential life-sustaining functions of planet Earth
It's going to be hard to argue that the life-sustaining capacity of Earth is not a universal subjective value of all life but the paper isn't arguing the opposite anyway.
This paper simply identifies causes contributing to the unsustainablity of the current system and makes some proposals to mitigate or eliminate it. It's analyzing and providing options.
Make sure you understand what unsustainability means as far as consequences. Moreover, that's hardly a subjective value judgement. It's simply a measurable property of systems.
It seems you missed the fact that many people don't care about sustainability, and are unwilling to accept even a small reduction in quality of life in the name of the environment. Clearly their values differ from the values of the paper's authors regarding what is "necessary societal change".
>It's going to be hard to argue that the life-sustaining capacity of Earth is not a universal subjective value of all life but the paper isn't arguing the opposite anyway.
If we look at sustainability from the perspective of "preserving human existence as long as possible", then the only long-term solution is expanding to other planets/solar systems. The more limits there are on economic growth, the longer this will take. Similarly, life-extension technology will allow people to extend their lives longer; the slower the economy grows, the longer it will take to develop this. The paper didn't even consider this, or any other downsides of limiting economic growth.
>Make sure you understand what unsustainability means as far as consequences. Moreover, that's hardly a subjective value judgement. It's simply a measurable property of systems.
The language and tone used in the paper is not in the format "if we want to increase sustainability, this is what we should do", it's in the format "this is what we should do". For example: "economic systems that exploit nature and humans" - that's clearly a value judgement, not science.
That's not really true, there are other solutions. Bombing us back to stone age, or keeping everyone poor and occasionally decimating the population through resulting pandemics and wars, are both working solutions that align well with the ideology behind the article.
Now if we want civilized solutions that actually improve life for everyone, becoming an interplanetary species is mandatory.
> If we look at sustainability from the perspective of "preserving human existence as long as possible", then the only long-term solution is expanding to other planets/solar systems.
Or not have a system of infinite growth at all.
> The language and tone used in the paper is not in the format "if we want to increase sustainability, this is what we should do"
It's literally what the paper says.
> "economic systems that exploit nature and humans"
This is also objectively measurable. They're talking about externalities. Is economics also a bunch of value judgements now too?
"Life" isn't a sentient being with values, people are. Humanity makes decisions based on some aggregate of the preferences of living humans. If most humans want to enjoy a good life now at the expense of the future environment, there's no objective standard to say they're wrong. It's a classic argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regress_argument , as noted by Sextus Empiricus, the founder of empiricism. There's no way to empirically justify a moral judgement.
>Or not have a system of infinite growth at all.
This betrays a misunderstanding of what growth means in an economic context. If your barber learns how to cut your hair twice as fast, that's economic growth. If the paperboy adopts a more efficient paper route to deliver papers faster, that's economic growth. If enough paperboys adopt more efficient routes, that shows up in GDP growth.
>This is also objectively measurable. They're talking about externalities. Is economics also a bunch of value judgements now too?
Yes of course it is. It's based on utilitarianism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism), basically the philosophy that there is some quantitative form of value that we should aim to maximise. That's why there are different schools of economics: they disagree on the foundations.
Nope, you're just ignoring the limits of optimization.
"This science disagrees with my political beliefs so it must be wrong." -you
> there's certainly no objective measure of the value of preserving the environment vs people's quality of life.
If we fail to preserve the environment, there will be no quality of life, there will be no life.
We are literally talking about a universal mass extinction as we simply outconsume the planet's ability to support us.
> they just end up distrusting all science.
No, YOU distrust all science and you project this on others.
I mean, you don't question your airplanes, cars, or internet, do you? You only question the parts of science that disagree with your personal political beliefs.
The consequences of a population overshoot http://www.approachingthelimits.com/CC_Overshoot.html are unbelievably terrible. The consequences of uncontrolled climate change are also unbelievably terrible.
These negatives are so bad that a rational, prudent person would expend almost anything to prevent them.
When your eminent scientists uniformly warn you that a mass extinction is underway, you should listen.
---
I love old SF novels, and every permutation of catastrophe was worked out, except this idea - that the scientists of the world warn that catastrophe is coming and people say, "Fake news!"
Humans are addicts, and the addiction is consumer goods. This addiction will decimate the planet, and you might well live to see it happen.
I'm really disappointed to see anti-intellectual nonsense like this on HN. Science can be positive and normative, when it needs to be.
Maybe people do have different preferences, but there are objective, universal goals that benefit 99.9% of people and improve their quality of life. We are content with a minority in a democracy not getting their way when their candidates lose, but suddenly, in science, if 0.1%'s preferences aren't exactly in line with the rest, it's a grave offense?
Fresh water, heat, electricity, all available as many hours a day as possible aren't objective goals? Is there a person on this planet that would refuse a washing machine or a refrigerator?
Please.
> Trying to push a certain set of values like this risks giving science a bad name in the public eye, and making the public less willing to accept actual scientific facts.
The only thing trying to give science a bad name here is your comment, through inventing unreasonable and ever-moving goalposts, hiding behind individual preferences of people.
Also, if someone were to distrust science because of a factual article -- well, I don't think science could really do much for them, and at this point in history they're probably best ignored.
I think the problem is that a rational person (in our current definition) is incentivized to spend most of the available income/wealth during his/her lifetime, so as peoples income grows they find new ways to spend it: Get a new car every two years, buy a weekend house, go on expensive travels, buy lots of expensive clothes or furniture, always have the newest tech gadgets, etc.. All this incurs more pollution and resource usage. I don’t see how we can break this cycle without fundamentally changing our economic system, as right now almost everything is optimized to continuously increase output and create more consumption.
This is not necessarily a problem; there's no objective way to weigh up the satisfaction of somebody alive now against the satisfaction of some hypothetical person alive in future. And attempting to do so introduces some interesting questions, e.g. if we seek to maximise the satisfaction of future people, as individuals should we try to have as many children as possible? Because more people means more overall satisfaction.
I’ve watched people living in a rich western democracy, who are rich by the standards of their host country, travel to India and see the grinding poverty of so many people’s lives. Their assessment was not that they themselves are rich, but that those people are poor.
It’s also incredibly difficult for those living higher up on Maslow’s hierarchy to see that it’s their entire level of society that is - in aggregate - a force for negative environmental impact. Individuals won’t admit to this, and will instead say it’s fine because they sort their recycling and only have one car and... but the macro scale is ignored because the self-defense mechanism won’t allow it to be fully understood or admitted to.
Those who manage to admit and realise this is a problem may try to help - or at least not contribute - by doing their best, but usually this means keeping as clean as they can personally, while still taking advantage of most of the trappings of their bubble. Il not saying they’re bad people or they shouldn’t make an effort, but ten people picking up litter versus ten million dropping it is never going to work out.
Or maybe they just don't care? It's not exactly a stretch to imagine people value their wellbeing in the present over some impact to the environment. Most people don't even care about other people enough to give to charity, let alone care about the environment.
Until there is understanding and some route to channeling the will of the larger populations of affluent societies, however, I think we are stuck in a downward spiral.
The only realistic scenario I can conceive of is that eventually enough damage will reflect back on the affluent to effect a change in mindset. I regretfully believe that the poor all over the world will suffer a great deal before this begins to occur.
Refurbish rather than build new buildings
Build sturdy hardware with replaceable parts
Build from natural materials as much as possible, and invent a new concrete
Stop polluting by sprinkling deadly stuff to grow crops and make things
Develop recycling aggressively (98%)
Stop using oil derivates everywhere
Stop using nuclear fission as a power source
...
Problem is that it is antipodal with current economical growth models
edit : ray of hope here [1b]
Currently there has been many accidents with nuclear power, and we don't know how to manage those. Fukushima is still releasing lots of radioactivity in the sea. Yet radio activity about this is close to zero. [1]
And new ways to tap into fission power (pressurized reactors) are dangerous and hard to build.
Yet, I shall agree with you, that there is no definite solution to the energy problem, consuming less would be a good start.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(film)
[1] http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/13228942
[1b] https://futurism.com/the-byte/nobel-prize-lasers-destroy-nuc...
How can they possibly know this for sure? My intuition is that sustainable energy, over the long term, will lead to more consumption and improved lifestyles.
This is supposed to be a review, but it doesn't really review much, they make various statements with references, but they often do not state the facts which they are referring to. There are also grammatical errors
An example: > The positional consumption behaviour of the super-affluent thus drives consumption norms across the population, for instance through their excessive air travel, as documented by Gössling73.
That Gosling73 study is a 2017 study of 10 celebrities including Meg whitman, emma watson, felix von derleden and Karl lagerfeld (are these people considered influential?) Celebrities and the "affluent" are different things. Plus i believe most air travel in the past 10 years was "influenced" by middle-to-low income influencers on youtube/instagram/etc. Importantly, that paper presents conjectures but no data that people are actually following the flight patterns of celebrities.
> Whilst a number of countries in the global North have recently managed to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions while still growing their economies30, it is highly unlikely that such decoupling will occur more widely in the near future, rapidly enough at global scale and for other environmental impacts
Why not? Every technology that the west built was quickly adopted by the rest of the world. What kind of inane/ahistorical statement is that ?
Those countries pay high costs for their energy because their alternative energy sources are in no way cost competitive yet. They can afford those high costs. Less rich countries will never adopt fancy, expensive technologies if they're not cost effective.
India and most of Asia are building coal plants as we speak, because they're cost effective (to them). They've also, at most COP meetings, pushed back any initiative to tax carbon emissions, as they see that (probably justly) only as a brake on their development. Their social stability would fall apart quickly if they can't deliver the economic development.
For these reasons, the majority of future carbon emissions are projected to occur in Asia and Africa. There's very little Western countries can do, except some novel form of imposing their will on other countries, which would quickly and justly be denounced as neo-colonialist.
A group of researchers, led by a UNSW sustainability scientist, have reviewed existing academic discussions on the link between wealth, economy and associated impacts, reaching a clear conclusion: technology will only get us so far when working towards sustainability—we need far-reaching lifestyle changes and different economic paradigms.
In their review, published today in Nature Communications and entitled Scientists' Warning on Affluence, the researchers have summarized the available evidence, identifying possible solution approaches.
"Recent scientists' warnings have done a great job at describing the many perils our natural world is facing through crises in climate, biodiversity and food systems, to name but a few," says lead author Professor Tommy Wiedmann from UNSW Engineering.
"However, none of these warnings has explicitly considered the role of growth-oriented economies and the pursuit of affluence. In our scientists' warning, we identify the underlying forces of overconsumption and spell out the measures that are needed to tackle the overwhelming 'power' of consumption and the economic growth paradigm—that's the gap we fill.
"The key conclusion from our review is that we cannot rely on technology alone to solve existential environmental problems—like climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution—but that we also have to change our affluent lifestyles and reduce overconsumption, in combination with structural change."
"Consumption of affluent households worldwide is by far the strongest determinant—and the strongest accelerator—of increased global environmental and social impacts," co-author Lorenz Keysser from ETH Zurich says.
"Current discussions on how to address the ecological crises within science, policy making and social movements need to recognize the responsibility of the most affluent for these crises." ... "The structural imperative for growth in competitive market economies leads to decision makers being locked into bolstering economic growth, and inhibiting necessary societal changes," Prof Wiedmann says.
"So, we have to get away from our obsession with economic growth—we really need to start managing our economies in a way that protects our climate and natural resources, even if this means less, no or even negative growth.
These quotes taken from: https://phys.org/news/2020-06-overconsumption-growth-economy...
You know it in your heart.
It's very unclear how an ethical person is supposed to be behave. If we believe that this huge machine is destroying the planet, surely we should stop participating in it - and yet if we do that, we become unable to support ourselves.
I compensate by trying to consume as little in my personal life, and trying to get jobs that aren't unethical.
Edit: I think expecting honesty, penalizing the lack of it, (and probably the Golden Rule) are prerequisites to solving many things. Etc.
The trajectory we're on is either toward ecological catastrophe or, if we manage to avoid that, a bimodal distribution of quality of life between an affluent few and the immiserated (if distracted) masses.
Globally it's not at all clear there have been increases in inequality. When I was a kid in the 60s '3rd world nations' were impoverished going on starving, now they are mostly prosperous, have 4G, plenty of food etc. China especially was getting by on maybe $300/yr GDP and now has western style prosperity. The US may be more unequal but there is 90%+ of the world that is not the US.
It may seem nitpicking but it's basically an essay on economics and it makes me disregard the rest a bit when they get basic facts wrong. Also in terms of stability things have been fairly stable given the pandemic, fingers crossed.
Re affluence and the environment probably what we need is pricing for externalities in things like fossil fuels - people can be rich in non damaging ways - make artworks and sell them to each other for $1m+, build eco buildings, gardens etc - it doesn't have to be SUVs.
I basically agree with everything you're saying, I just think something is going on that's not nearly captured by a lot of traditional metrics.
"In 1820, the ratio between the income of the top and bottom 20 percent of the world's population was three to one. By 1991, it was eighty-six to one."
The article does say that global inequality may have decreased in the last few decades. However, considering that the richest 85 people have a combined wealth equal to the bottom half of the world's population (according to the same article), the claim that the capitalist, growth-driven economies have led to enormous inequalities is a basic fact.
It's full of claims unsupported by their data. For example, all their data shows population growth is a central issue but they focus on "affluence" and then they cherry-pick the (already affluent, saturated in consumption) first world to attack and suggest improvements for when the elephant in the room is the third world with its not exactly "affluent" but at least no longer starving population that is beginning to do what they suggest we stop doing. Then the typical radical left / eco-socialist "solutions" appear out of nowhere. It's disappointing that such political pieces are now in mainstream science publications (presumably because it's en vogue to kneel to the radical left...).
I would love to see a startup that focuses on making its customer's lives more fulfilling while at the same time less "affluent", which is possible to because after you have all your basic needs covered (food, shelter, medical care), no amount of money can make you happier... but small things, like a stimulating social life, or a sense of pride on what your work produces, definitely can. The founders of course, would need to be living proof that their startup delivers on that promise, so they wouldn't make a penny more than necessary to live a fulfilling life where most fulfillment came from bringing happiness to others. That's where I think this idea breaks down! I am sure there would be founders doing this if they thought they could make a billion $$$ first :D but if they could do that, the whole motivation for the project would've been undermined already.