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Comment by darawk | Hacker News Reader

Consuming less is not a serious solution and never has been.

I’m not sure why you think this? We have finite resources, a heavily populated planet and a few nations consuming the vast majority of the resources. Do you honestly think that’s maintainable in perpetuity?

I’d suggest your viewpoint is highly likely to be one of privilege, not from one of poverty.

Perhaps a charitable interpretation of the parent post would be "Voluntarily consuming less is not a serious solution and never has been."

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.

Demanding a global decrease in consumption is just about the most privileged viewpoint possible.

If they were serious about saving the environment and not just doing whatever weird thing it is to demand that people buy fewer phones, they'd be pushing for more clean energy. As countries become richer they pollute less and have the resources to protect themselves from climate change. What is needed is a wealthier world, not a poorer one.

Oh - just to be clear - I'm absolutely not of that viewpoint at all.

For one its not just about stopping the unfavorable trend, but also reversing it, not to mention remediation all the pollution in the environment.

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.

I have to agree. It's more about changing habits, efficiency savings, and replacements.

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

You're looking at bacterias on a petri dish. They are exponentially taking over the dish and soon will collapse under their own activity.

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

Not entirely true. Changing consumer habits is possible, but not without it being replaced by something that's more sustainable AND more convenient.

That's the point. It's about consuming different things, not consuming less. And consuming different things that are at least as good, or better than the things we're consuming now. Nobody has ever, or will ever, make any serious progress by shaming people into not doing the things they want to do.

You're correct. Any plan that calls for less consumption is a non-starter. At this point it's incredibly harmful to hold on to an approach that's going nowhere and never will. We no longer have the luxury to indulge fantasies.

Consumption habits will need to change, people will need to start eating less meat. Factory farming of cattle and other animals is a large contributor of global emissions. So less consumption is definitely part of the answer.

exponential growth is a fantasy until fusion power and asteroid mining become real

I never understood this line of thought. Economic growth is not a growth of raw material consumption. There has been some correlation but you could imagine a forever growing GDP with shrinking raw material usage without any major problem as long as there is technological or organisational progress.

You can imagine it, but it doesn't track with reality. Economic growth has been synonymous with fast fashion, planned obsolescence, new cars every few years, a new phone every year, more and more meat in our diets, cheap plastic crap and so on - conspicuous consumption.

On the other hand, any plan that doesn't call for less consumption is simply going to be inadequate.

Societies of the past had to deal with this. We still deal with this in wealthy societies actually. When the US west coast is hot and dry, authorities ration water usage.

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)

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