These "scientisticians are going to fix it (while we gorge)" headlines are bad because they contribute to the public opinion that business-as-usual is ok and will lead to a good outcome. It will not, and we are headed for a dreadful climate so far. This is often called green-washing
An expensive fossil free energy grid would cause disruptions to consumption but at the same time it would also allow things to mostly be business-as-usual. It just shifts the priority to care about the energy efficiency when cheap fossil fuels aren't there to be burned.
In contrast, trying to reduce consumption while keeping fossil fuels in the energy grid is unlikely to work. Consumers who care might reduce their own consumption a bit, but industries and every else will continue to draw more and more power from fossil fuel power plants and pollution will continue to rise. Public opinion will just grow more divided between those that self-sacrifice and those that don't.
But in the cases you name, and in many others, the messed up part is that we're creating so much stuff/waste that _isn't_ consumable, and so we needlessly use new resources.
Fast fashion is destructive because both the retailers and the end consumers end up throwing out so much stuff that piles up in landfills and isn't recyclable. If yesterday's garment was cheap (in a resource sense) to recycle into fiber to make a new garment, it would be a lot less harmful.
The cars-becoming-bigger pattern, in part an arms race between car manufacturers to improve safety ratings (in a collision, passengers in the heavier car experience smaller forces; who cares about pedestrians), with the net effect that after several years everyone has more massive cars but their safety edge has been totally eroded away. We no longer get a benefit, but we're all stuck pushing around extra metal for every mile driven.
The move to 5G didn't _have_ to be harmful, but we produce waste streams in all the devices that are now discarded which are _not_ consumed. Most of the components in the phones we toss every 2 years are still fine, but we make it so hard to put them all to good use.
The _unconsumed_ garments that go to a landfill, the _unconsumed_ discarded phones, touch screens, batteries, the ... non-benefit of moving around excess car (including those 4 empty seats when a person drives alone) are just as much the problem.
(Interest on excess reserves is making the discussion a bit more complicated, alas.)
business as usual leads to a pretty bleak future and if we refuse to confront this how will we even begin to adapt to a planet rapidly growing more difficult to inhabit
We have never had to care so far because we were not numerous. Now human activity is similar to geological forces like rain/volcanoes/etc and i think we should plan how we can exist on a stable cycle.
Mindless growth leads to us breaking our environment through our scale. Scale is exponential so after thousands of years we have a small window of 100 years where we grew so high in impact that we may break it all. It's a first for us, and i hope we can see further than the mold in the petri dish and make a concerted plan on how to live in a stable cycle without growing.
I'm advocating for planning a sustainable future. It's the first time in History we have to deal with this. People assume the future is like the past, and other incorrect things. They also live in cities, removed from physical realities. They only understand the collapse of species through some stats in a newspaper they forget the next day, and the energy/resources supply chains are unknown to them until there is a blackout and they lose internet for a few hours.
The future seems bleak in many ways for physical reasons. I don't think pretending we are not reaching planetary limits will help. I think it will make the fall harder. I would rather we concert and plan together what level of quality of life we want, and how we can stabilize our population, so we can cycle generations of human in a sustainable way.
This happens in History every time we improve efficiency. Cars now consume a fraction of what early cars did, yet we use these efficiency gains to stuff them with gadgets, and make them bigger, and overall they still consume more than they used now in absolute terms.
In other words the engine inside your modern car is more fuel efficient than the first Ford, but we now make SUV that consume way more to produce and operate, can't be repaired/services easily, and people own multiple of them per household.
This "rebound effect" can be seen everywhere
I don't see how 5G fits into a planned obsolescence argument.
Don't get me wrong, if the comment above said planned obsolescence instead of 5G, I'd be fully aboard. But 5G on its own makes no difference on climate change that I'm aware of.
OP might just be venting.
It's huge because we are so numerous.
Imagine you renew a boat fleet. Imagine the impact on the nearby forest. Going from no boats to having a fleet may be worth the damage. Going from a very good fleet to a slightly more advanced fleet may not be worth it.
Network infra and smartphones are the same. They require us to mine all their components and use energy to transform them.
4G seems to provide enough value to me. I don't like the tradeoff we get of "i can download 4K in the elevator now" (seems unnecessary to me) vs "we unleashed megatones of CO2, mined out large cobalt mines that will never form again in milleniaz to come, etc (seems critical to me)
Do you have any idea how much of a problem so called fast fashion habits actually are? Same for the others?
Scale matters.
An Earth with let's say 2 billion people at 2 set of clothes a year has considerably less environment impact that an Earth with 8 billion people averaging let's say 10 set of clothes a year.
The scale of deforestation to produce coton, and the boom of the plastic fiber industry are sizable phenomenons with huge visible consequences. Whole industries exist now in Bangladesh and Vietnam for instance that didn't exist 20 years ago. Factories, supply chains, large yearly resources consumption, etc.
These changes are visible anywhere from the shops of wealthy nation cities, to Google Earth timeline where you see entire forests disappear every year now (rate is exponentially accelerating)
How much of a problem is this actually? Eg what proportion of our overall emissions (or environment impact etc) are from the manufacture and supply of clothing? And how much extra is from 'fast fashion' vs a return to old fashioned clothing habits?
I just did a very quick search, and found eg https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector Their numbers suggest that cotton and clothing barely show up.
I agree, but I gotta ask why are you sugar coating it?
I can imagine governements doing a more serious job and limiting more things for the common good (aka we don't kill ourselves by destroying our environment)
I’d suggest your viewpoint is highly likely to be one of privilege, not from one of poverty.
A poverty viewpoint is indeed relevant - there are so many objectively poor people who will consume more to fill their currently unmet needs as soon as they can afford to (so the only way to prevent this consumption increase is to ensure that they stay in poverty); and it should be expected that people will reduce consumption en masse only when they can't afford the current consumption (no matter if caused by prices skyrocketing, or an impactful carbon/fuel tax, or simply declining income), and they will be very unhappy about it as they will treat this reduction as a shift from privilege to poverty.
And a realistic threat of being prevented to escape from poverty or being forced to shift from privilege to poverty IMHO would be considered by people as an existential threat comparable to global warming (I mean, for many people the main threat of global warming is the expected decrease in their living standards caused by it) and a much stronger motivation to act because, unlike climate change, that threat would be (a) closer in time, (b) more certain, and (c) with a clear way to fight against it - voting out a politician or rioting in the streets won't fix climate change (you'd need global coordination for that), but it definitely could suffice to kill any local carbon tax or government imposed reduction of consumption.
TL;DR the way humans behave, it should be expected that they will fight against a decrease in consumption much harder than they would fight against climate change.
All this is going to be insane energy and also resource intensive and totally impossible just by saving some resource here and there. A massive expansion of clean energy sources is whats needed, anything else just wont work.
Let's take a simple examples: meat. There's quite a saving to be had by everyone eating less meat, but that doesn't mean we eat less food in general... It's just replaced with something else less harmful to the environment.
Another example would be plastic, I've starting seeing more use of those bamboo trays for food containers. Plastic knives and forks are being replaced with wooden ones. Etc
That's us. An advantage we have over the bacterias is that we can discuss together how we will face the limits of our box.
Saying "not slowing down and consuming everything in the dish is not serious" confuses me. It's the only serious thing here. Everything else is noise before we collapse.
Exponential scale is scary. Bacterias doubling every cycle means 1 cycle before the bottle is full, it's half full. You're looking around and there is still plenty of room. Next cycle it's 100% and you're gasping for air.
Humans don't double every cycle but you only need 7% growth to double in 10 years.
So when you hear that we use X% more steel or coal every year, keep in mind it's a doubling cycle every few years.
Reducing consumption (per capita and/or population size) is the only serious discussion to not hit the walls and gasp for air
Yes, let's ban various forms of advertising, for starters. It's the main driver of our over-consumption.