Earth Overshoot Day
overshootday.org
overshootday.org
The Haber process and modern agriculture feed us all, and cheaply. We get five times more milk per cow and eight times more corn per acre than we did a century ago. We synthesize fertilizer out of thin air instead of scraping bird shit off of remote islands.
On top of that, human fertility rates have dropped far, far below replacement in substantial parts of the world, and when the developing world is developed, I suspect they also will see declining population. Each person needs slightly more than one child for us to have a stable population. So, a fertility rate of ~2.1 (2 children per woman). In the US it's 1.7, in Germany it's 1.54, in Japan it's 1.36, and in Korea it's 0.94. China: 1.7, Brazil: 1.72, India: 2.2 (just above replacement, and dropping)
We can outsmart, and have repeatedly outsmarted, all sorts of potential disasters.
We can't ignore our problems, but neither have we met with any sort of defeat.
Unfortunately, the main one we can't outsmart is volcanic winter, which has produced planet-wide famines on several occasions, and is all but certain to happen again.
Geologically speaking, the 20th century was pretty quiet. In the 21st century we've already had two tsunamis (including the 2nd or 3rd biggest earthquake), and the Tonga volcanic eruption, which was fortunately below sea level, but still likely the second loudest noise in human history after Krakatoa, and Eyjafjallajökull which had the potential for volcanic smog but fortunately didn't happen.
We're overdue a Cascadia mega-thrust earthquake which would have "interesting" repercussions for the tech industry, given how much of it is based on the US west coast.
I agree with your point though, we've largely progressed through normal seasonal issues with crops, and dramatically improved yields via science.
And yet, here we are still.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1315%E2%80%931...
What really causes starvation is a shortage of shipping. Shipping wheat from Thunder Bay to Egypt requires a lot more ships than shipping from Odessa to Egypt.
If both food production and oil production drop at the same time, then we're screwed.
(A volcanic winter would be quite bad for solar too. I don't know how fast we can scale fission in a disaster scenario, but I think it's our best hope. We should keep improving our fission tech too.)
So: kill the cows and the pigs, eat the meat and the feed.
I suspect you are right.
What is less clear is whether earth has the resources to sustain the standard of living rising in these developing nations.
There is currently 1.2 billion people living in developed countries and 5.4 billion in developing countries. Even if the developing populations stabilise, if their standard of living increases to match that of the 1.2 billion developed population, will our natural resources and environmental systems cope?
If not, we need to work on ways to maintain a developed world standard of living without using nearly as many natural resources.
We are sitting on a big ball of matter, so at long as we have the energy, we can make all the gadget we need. (You can even make food underground in multiple levels, if you have enough energy to burn on lighting.)
So the real problem is energy. Luckily, renewable are currently getting a lot cheaper. And we also still have nuclear, if we really want to go that route. Fission works, and fusion is in the works.
Hum... It's the only one we have to consume. But we still need the others, even if on fixed amounts.
The land on the moon is worth very little as there is almost no water on it. If we could extract rocket fuels from there we would already be sending people to mars. People don't seem to understand how valuable our planet is.
For water, the moon mostly lacks hydrogen. There's lots of oxygen in the rocks up there.
In general, I have sympathy for your position.
I think the person you replied to meant that being on earth, all you need is electricity. The rest falls into place.
Yes, the earth is extremely convenient.
In simple terms, having electricity is great. In contrast, oceans full of water at a balmy 20C have lots of heat energy, but you can't really use it, if there's no gradient.
See the second law of thermodynamics.
Or in other terms: you want electricity and a way to get rid of waste heat, like being able to radiate into outer space.
I mean there was already alarm bells from UNESCO today or yesterday that the food program is at risk due to rising food costs due to the conflict in Ukraine and sanctions on Russia, which in turn puts a lot of people that depend on that food program at risk.
And it's closer to home as well; the amount of people that start to rely on food banks has gone up sharply with the high inflation.
I mean it's dumb IMO; while all companies are eager to raise prices with inflation as soon as it happens, wages lag behind.
It could also translate into an increased rate of extraction/depletion of natural resources, as the economic incentive grows stronger.
It ultimately needs to reach an equilibrium where a developed nation lifestyle for the entire world population would only consume natural resources at the rate that they can be replenished.
This certainly isn't impossible! You could construct scenarios where exactly that happens. But in real life, developed nations have an absolute advantage in producing just about everything. Some things are cheaper in developing nations, but only because of the opportunity costs (as in, steel would be cheaper in America, but the difference is even bigger in planes or whatever so that's what gets made there). If tomorrow the entire world was developed there would obviously be huge issues, but a continuous change would work out just fine.
Now that's not to say that there wouldn't be a higher fraction of people working in jobs which today in developed nations are seen as lesser. Some tasks are simply most efficient with a human at the helm. But if you wander around the rust belt, you'll find plenty of people that wish it made economic sense to employ them in manufacturing or mining. The shift wouldn't be a bad one.
> It could also translate into an increased rate of extraction/depletion of natural resources, as the economic incentive grows stronger.
That is absolutely true, but people overestimate the effect of resource use compared to pollution and the like. We will probably never run out of oil, metal, or any other nonrenewable resource. There's plenty there, and productivity growth will likely ensure that it is cost effective to extract pretty much indefinitely. Land is another story, as we're using a greater fraction of it than most other resources, but it's not by enough to make a huge difference.
The issue is pollution and other public bads. We can feed the world on very little land, but all the nitrogen runoff could cause other issues. We could go centuries without ever hitting peak oil, but dumping that much carbon into the atmosphere is problematic for obvious reasons. But that's no reason to fear production specifically! With greater productivity, we'd find it far easier to roll out nuclear worldwide. And while wasteful food production wouldn't go away without government regulation (or worldwide shifts in consumer preferences I won't hold my breath for), we can make those regulations and it's a small price to pay to increase the global standard of living.
Defeat against whom? Is human race at war with someone?
Earth overshoot day isn't about survival of human race, it's about human being in balance with Earth. Countless species are extinct because of us. Is this victory?
All the other animals want our food. Many of them want our flesh. Plant viruses destroy our crops. Locusts will starve human children to death. We are absolutely at war.
A trillion parasites want our blood: hookworms, ticks, mosquitoes, you name it.
We destroyed smallpox for ourselves, but we also eradicated rinderpest to the benefit of a great many large animals (deer, giraffes, goats, cows, etc). We never started a Save the Hookworm campaign for good reason. We will wipe those fuckers out eventually.
We don't even have to worry about our children being eaten by wolves in most forests now... because we killed most of the wolves. A fairy tale ending.
So yeah, we're at war and always will be. Let's kill HIV next.
Ecosystems are not "at war" with us. Parts of it are beneficial to us, parts of it are not. We cannot simply exterminate the parts we don't like because they are all intertwined. Of course, it doesn't mean that we should breed hookworms within us and spread HIV for the sake of it, but treating it as a war is a bit ignorant of how ecosystems work.
The ecosystem could support only a few of us, only so many food-plants could grow in such and such an area.
Then, we learned to grow crops.
Then, we learned to control and even eradicate pests to our crops.
We bred the plants and animals to suit our needs and wants, to make not just more food but tastier food.
We can, we have, and we will continue to transcend "the ecosystem" when it suits us. We will bend it not just to our needs, but to our desires. We will have dominion over it, and we will have delicious sweet corn on the cob instead of bitter grass seed, and we won't share it with the locusts and crop viruses.
> We were naked, starving hunter-gatherers once. Hyenas preyed on us. We struggled to find wild plants and animals to eat to survive.
Until we killed all mammoths and almost all of megafauna.
> The ecosystem could support only a few of us, only so many food-plants could grow in such and such an area. > Then, we learned to grow crops.
And burned out large swaths of land for grazing land, maybe created the deserts of today with fire, deforestation & overgrazing.
What happens when we cut down the last tree standing and plant the last piece of land with corn? We already have more land for meat/dairy production, than we have forests? [0]
> Then, we learned to control and even eradicate pests to our crops.
What happens when we kill the last 20% remaining bugs remaining in the world? How many more percent can we exterminate with our "control" of its population before some critical processes start failing? [1]
> we will continue to transcend "the ecosystem" when it suits us. We will bend it not just to our needs, but to our desires. We will have dominion over it, and we will have delicious sweet corn on the cob instead of bitter grass seed, and we won't share it with the locusts and crop viruses
What happens when we fish out beyond the critical mass of fish out of oceans, that only thing living there will be jellyfish (90% of sharks already gone because of by-kill and overfishing) [2]
How many wild animals can we replace with farm animals until we throw the nature out of balance too much (98% of biomass to 4% in biomass in last 100 years)? [3]
How many forests can we cut down until it rains only in coastal areas, thus turning the continents into deserts? [4]
Welcome to the anthropocene [5], current geological epoch dating from the commencement of significant human impact on Earth's geology and ecosystems, including, but not limited to, anthropogenic climate change.
We already have our dominion over nature. But we don't handle that responsibility well.
And as you're the one talking about dominion, I have to point you to the [6]. Enjoy (engorge of) our superiority.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2020/01/Global-land-use-g... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaspiracy [3] https://xkcd.com/1338/ [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKL40aBg-7E [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene [6] https://www.dominionmovement.com/watch
We won't pave all the forests. We won't kill all the bugs. We won't net all the fish. Partially because of hysterical people such as yourself, which is sometimes useful, and partially because of cold-thinking people such as myself, which is also sometimes useful.
For example, more than a few countries protect more than a quarter of their land. You've heard of national parks, I'm sure. Where I live, 32% of the country is protected, and of course, not all unprotected land has been paved.
The fisheries, too, are protected to varying extents, and so we farm fish in sea-pens and ponds inland. There's work still to do to rebuild the fisheries to their former glory, but it's not being ignored and pillaged as you imply. The fisheries are doing well and improving here and elsewhere, and fish is relatively affordable for hungry human beings.
What we did 100 years ago, we have learned from, and stopped, we won't clearcut the rest of the old-growth, in fact we have replanted, not just pine, but also hardwoods, even some very slow growing ones, and we hope that in a millenium (it takes a while to grow), we will have more of our old forests back.
Not much furniture is made of hardwoods now, and not many farmers in the developed world slash and burn. We already have made great strides toward making our dominion stable; perhaps even a net benefit. Pine farms sequester a lot of carbon. Keep in mind that there is no such thing as the "undeveloped" world, only the "developing" world, so they'll get there eventually too. We can and should have it all.
I take it that you personally do not live in the wild forests alone and naked? You also partake of this glorious civilization we have built? Why? Because it's better. They cut down trees to build your house, and I think you'll agree that it was a good idea so that you don't have to live in the rain. We don't have to pave it all, but we do have to pave some of it.
I will not divest myself of sympathy for the hungry men, women, and children of the world because a sanctimonious actor who can spend $1000 on every meal insists that his ideology is superior to mine. Sanctimony is never convincing.
Nevertheless, all the meat here is grass-fed, and all the cows look happy. I see them when I'm driving around. They hang out in lush meadows and on hillsides. In fact, where I work, there are quite a few grassy hills that do nothing, so they graze cows on them part of the year. It's nice to see them trampling around and playing while I write machine control code. Those cows are going to die one day anyway, we may as well humanely make meat of them and stay strong and healthy so we can build a more beautiful, prosperous, peaceful world.
In closing, I will say that I know the above is a little optimistic, but a little optimism is called for to move us forward. We need not depress all of the kids who will build our glorious future with a gnashing of teeth about the wrongs of the past, with claims of defeat, but to motivate them with possibility. We can do better, sure, and we are trying. I believe we will succeed. We will have our beautiful, prosperous, peaceful world. We already have it on a good portion of this earth. I'm going to go outside and enjoy some of it now.
Optimism is a must, I agree. But it should not stop us from searching for ways forward, it should not make us complacent, it should not limit the actions we could take.
You want to believe. I get it. I was there myself. But then you'll open your eyes, see that all that progress is just words and smoke and you'll stand on the corner with the sign: "the end is nigh".
<https://www.chrismadden.co.uk/cartoon-gallery/the-end-is-nig...>
Some links for complementing your viewpoint.
Protected areas:
<https://www.ecowatch.com/earth-environmental-protection-area...> How Much of Earth Is Currently Protected? - 17% land, 6% sea, "many protected and conserved areas are not demonstrating effectiveness"
Fish farming:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_farming#Issues> Fish farming - issues <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaspiracy> Seaspiracy
Hardwood:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation#Present-day> - (... in 2019 ...) a third of that loss, 3.8 million hectares, occurred within humid tropical primary forests, areas of mature rainforest that are especially important for biodiversity and carbon storage. That's the equivalent of losing an area of primary forest the size of a football pitch every six seconds
There is no alternative. Defeat and death are not an alternative to working harder. It is infinitely better to fail while having tried to overcome than it is to concede defeat, give up, and lay down. The former is noble, and the latter cannot, and should not, be countenanced.
Join the fight. I am right now today building machines that grow more food on the same land. It's my day job. We don't have to work on adtech and digital casinos. We can win, we can have fun doing it, and we can be prosperous and happy.
You seem like you don't accept that nature is already critically depleted, that biodiversity is severely threatened (or you simply don't see its value), and that we're doing (as a species) too little too late too reluctantly to change the current "business as usual" approach to solving this problem.
I accept that I can't change your viewpoint here & now.
P.S. being alarmed is not hysteria, an opposite to optimism, or even defeatism.
Some definitely are, they are also an important source of biomass for extreme northern latitudes.
Anopheles is fucking useless.
So do all the other people. It is a very dangerous ideology that is willing to justify any action on the notion of increased survival.
The parent comment's claim that "life is a war against entropy" is completely in line with this model.
There is this nonsense idea that the earth would be fine if humans didn’t come along. It wouldn’t. This planet is in its death throes. Life has delicately established itself in a habitable zone that is coming to an end. The carbon cycle has a good 800M years left before photosynthesis starts grinding to a halt. That might seem like a long time, but life’s been here for a good 4B years - we are 75% through life on earth. It’s taken evolution 4B years to print its first ticket off this rock: humans. That it’ll print another in 800M years is a poor bet.
The idea of saving life on this planet by curbing human progress is a fools errand. You save life on this planet by bringing it with you when you leave this rock.
What?
Most of that is fairly bleak.
I have never meant anyone who's concerned about Earth's ability to perpetuate its ecosystems in 800 million years. People are concerned about its ability to (comfortably) support human life 20, 200, or (maybe) 2000 years from now.
It seems as if you're trying to imply that industrial humanity hasn't had a uniquely destructive impact on the natural environment over the past two centuries.
Everyone is obsessed with these short time scales. But I’ve yet to see someone propose a viable alternative to human civilization on a 800M year timescale.
Yes, I do believe humans are bringing about the end of the Holocene. But I’m fairly forgiving of the human race on multiple grounds:
1 - life on earth needs a ticket out or it dies in 800M years no matter what. That ticket requires escaping orbit and establishing itself on another rock. I have no reason to believe that any species that evolves to successfully do that would fair better than humanity. It doesn’t matter how far in the future this event is, it’s a critical path for at least one species to follow if life on earth is to end in any way other than complete extinction. If it has to happen - it has to happen. And so far, I haven’t seen many great arguments for viable alternative timelines of human (or non-human) progress that avoid complete extinction in 800M years.
2 - No other species on earth, that I know of, self identifies that it is past the ecosystem’s carrying capacity and attempts to self correct. For example, white tail deer in the Midwest will gladly keep having babies and eat all their food supply. The plants all die. Then the deer all starve. Then the wolves and coyotes all starve. And then the cycle repeats. The deer don’t call international food symposiums to talk about the sustainability of harvesting their food stock. This is a uniquely human trait. Humans are held to a different standard because we know better - which in and of itself is amazing and gives me significant hope.
TL;DR: there isn’t another species that I’d bet on to do a better job at saving all life on earth than what humans are already doing. Yes we have work to do, of course we have work to do, because we are literally life on earth’s only (risk adjusted) chance. If you’re not trying to sustainably save life on earth, what are you advocating for?
I don't feel completely safe in ruling out cephalopods in that regard. That said, life on dry land would seem to be a precursor to scientific advancement such as chemistry.
Sometimes it was just mankind surviving as a species though. Humans as a whole are probably hard to kill. But that says nothing about one of the defining traits of mankind: Their ability to form advanced cultures and civilizations. The survival rate of these cultures is abysmal and there is no reason to be believe, the current culture with its incredible high standard of living for as many people as ever before, will not fail. I blame Hollywood and their stories about the eternally advancing human race for this fallacy.
Sure humans will likely survive a great many catastrophes but they might find themselves again in an agrarian society and in far fewer numbers.
> We can't ignore our problems, but neither have we met with any sort of defeat.
Yet.
When does it become advisable to start ignoring the people saying "don't worry, it's not too late, we'll figure it out"? While this may still be true, it's a great way to rationalize putting off the massive social, psychological, legal and technical changes we desperately need.
(with tongue very slightly in cheek)
If we continue down this path, were going to run against a wall
We are so smart it took us two hundred years to realise we are creating a disaster ourselves, and we still can't figure out how to stop it. Because we are so smart we keep outsmarting ourselves. Or our greed does, I'm not sure.
While this is my general take on these kinds of things as well, it's good to keep in mind that it takes just one outlier disaster to never be able to outsmart anything ever again, and perhaps it's just dumb luck that we're in a timeline where that didn't happen so far.
Apparently the volcanic winter of 536 lowered global temperatures by around 2.5C, which puts global warming in a worrying light, though.
It's not obvious to me so I'll ask: why does the volcanic winter of 536 lowering global temps by 2.5C put global warming in a worrying light?
The problem is that the developed world needs too many resources per capita. The developing world will have similar issues when it reaches a standard of living where they start declining. Also this decline is too slow and too far out to matter. We need to effectively at least halve global resource usage in the next 1 or 2 decades. Waiting until the developing world stops growing in 30 years is not a solution.
This [1] article explains some of my frustrations, but doesn't address everything mentioned on the Overshoot website.
[1]: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/people-are-realizing-that-...
I think what the site is saying is we depend on ecological systems and natural resources to sustain our current standard of living, but we are consuming them at a faster rate than they can replenish. We need to use the available resources more efficiently - doesn't necessarily translate to less or even slower growth though.
This is proposing that people are lacking faith. You believe something must work because an economic theory proposed that it does. In reality these theories often fail to predict anything substantial.
Our economic system is very primitive and requires steady growth. But in reality the productivity of a finite area of land cannot grow any further even with technological advancement and long before you hit the limits of thermodynamics. The only thing that can grow in an unlimited fashion are excuses by economists to be honest.
Sorry, perhaps I just don't have the growth mindset.
Not proposing that the end is nigh, but bullshit has to be called what it is in the interest of progress.
If you haven't, I would suggest "The Limits to Growth." I'm not arguing for "de-growth," but I think your fundamental assumption that we can innovate or Silicon Valley our way out of climate change without inadvertently sacrificing economic prosperity is too late and highly naive. https://www.amazon.com/Limits-Growth-Donella-H-Meadows/dp/19...
Ehrlich might have been way too early but still have something interesting to say.
Not quite convinced about that. That, or the solutions you read aren't up to par with what science has to say about it. For starters not all presented solutions are even about degrowth?
Just one example, take land use: the last talk I heard about that be a professor from a local university, people aren't exactly advocating 'less growth, less land use' but more like 'we expect synthetic meat to be x% of food intake so there's y% less land needed for animals and if all of that would be taken up by the produce needed for the synthetic meat that is actually i% more protein produced/acre' and 'x% of nice fertile land is going to degrade within the next decades because of erosion so if we implement some relatively simple measures that can be countered' and 'instead of dividing land into massive fields for production and some small dots of nature in between, as far as preservation goes it is often actually better to not do that but create one area for nature as large as those dots and optionally but even more optimal create lines of nature to connect those bigger patches'.
Sounds economically viable to me, or at least certainly not 'extremely illiterate', and also not impossible.
economics is a psuedoscience like all social sciences and astrology. They've predicted absolutely nothing of value. It's just people studying these things prior to them becoming scientific, like people did with alchemy and whatnot before chemistry.
I think I agree with the author about degrowth as a goal being a political nonstarter. But I'm pretty skeptical about the notion that future growth can consist of ever increasing amounts of "dematerialized" goods and services without ceasing to be real, meaningful growth (however it might be defined).
I also think the political and physical challenges inherent in technological or "pro-growth" (I need a better word) solutions for getting out of overshoot are widely underappreciated. This [1] article runs some numbers to show that, for our global civilization to satisfy its current level of energy consumption without emitting significant amounts of greenhouse gases in 2050, we will have to bring online clean energy generation capacity equivalent to one nuclear power station every day between now and then. Given that, I'd be extremely surprised to see us get there by 2150, or maybe at all.
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerpielke/2019/09/30/net-zero...
This fixation on growing every single year hurts prospects to grow more over longer periods of time. It also causes needless environmental destruction. We would rather deplete the soil for a quick buck than maintain it and make it better every year at the cost of lower initial yields.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Convention_for_Clim...
Also economy is just numbers going up and down, it's not real. You just need to change some variables of what makes economic growth if you want your numbers keep going up in gdp. Earth overshoot is not as flexible, we don't make the rules.
The idea was to make the idea of going to war unthinkable because we relied on each other, and it's quite easily to calculate the deficit in deaths in Europe after that.
There are statistics saying it was extremely effective; Even when you account for Russian conflict against the Chechen's and the Serbian/Albanian conflict in Kosovo..
https://www.statista.com/chart/15458/the-estimated-number-of...
Unless you're referring to the obvious horrific cost to human lives, war isn't "expensive" in any real sense in terms of national finance. War is profitable: any money "spent" goes somewhere. Many wars have lifted countries from recession.
The only slight argument one could make for the expense of war is military consumption of fossil fuels (but we're already talking about control of that resource, so that's self-fulfilling).
I think the fact that wars can be economically beneficial is a blazing indictment of our economic competency.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
In other words, war can compensate for a "demand shortage," notwithstanding that in a sensibly run economy, such a thing should never be expected to exist.
(Yet, sometimes like around 2008 countries still fail.)
If the rich folks keep it, then it doesn't contribute to anything (eg not to inflation), and you can just print more.
In fact, the latter is much better: you can have your central bank gradually buy up the rest of the world without any inflation nor devaluation of your currency.
If the rich people "X" it and it gets in the hands of other people without burning those people's economic output on RPIs, then X is called "donating", not "spending". And in that case, we might as well cut out the middleman, cough UBI cough.
Bastiat's parable alone is not particularly convincing in itself as it chooses to deal exclusively with currency (something that's provably debunkable by looking at economic systems even slightly more complex than the oversimplified whims of one shopkeeper), and not with the allocation of resources to society in general, which is much more negatively impacted by war / broken windows.
It's the broken-window effect, if your political system is captured by a glassmakers' lobby.
> it's still better for your economy
No. It's not. It's always worse in every way other than pure monetary terms.
I mean sure, but that's contingent, not required. For instance, imagine two nations going to war with combat robots that can be perfectly recycled. The only effect is direct consumption of labor. However, due to the militarized society, the labor would be worthless otherwise.
I agree that some measures of economy (GDP? unemployment?) would get better in this scenario, but the whole effort wouldn't serve any other purpose than to increase those values, making it a little pointless.
I guess if this is what you're trying to say, then it is indeed an indictment of how we do economy.
Could you just give people the money without burning their labor in spectacular explosions? Yes. But we don't. :shrugs:
There exist (with quite a lot of empirical validation) some situations where moving the money around improves the society, even if the reason the money is moving is a slight loss.
It's not as simple as "spending money on wasteful things doesn't benefit anyone", but it is always the case that if you would gain even from breaking windows, you would gain even more from spending on something useful.
However, war is expensive in strictly economic term due to the physical destruction of resources.
A bombed factory cannot produce cars. If the skilled engineers needed to rebuild or operate the factor are not available (dead, otherwise occupied, etc), this will also result in economic loss.
The investment to convert a factory from car-making to military-vehicle making only generates long-term value if the military continues to order from that factory. Otherwise, that investment does not generate a return, likewise it takes additional investment to convert it back to car manufacture.
Ukraine is not selling much wheat this year, due to the war. Since this wheat is perishable, its economic value is lost.
It does. It also destroys cartels, rentiers, economic caste systems, captured government regulators and regressive tax regimes.
This is one reason the US, Japan and Germany recovered so strongly after WW2.
Yes, capitalists are insane.
Sure, if you simplify things enough you could argue that all wars are about resource interdependence because attacking someone for cutting you off from resources or for withholding your resources is also "about resource interdependence" and even civil wars are ultimately about unequal access to resources. But at that point you could say a peasant revolt is about "resource interdependence" because the lords own the land and the peasants provide them the food.
I don't think "resource interdependence" is the right framing. Colonialism was essentially "resource interdependence" but that is clearly a different dynamic than e.g. the European Economic Area (or EFTA).
Realistically, it's probably more about a mix of defensive pacts (essentially military MAD), economic interdependence (essentially economic MAD) and a somewhat level power dynamic (limiting the potential for exploitation).
> Most wars involve resource control. That doesn't mean most wars are about capturing resources.
What's the difference beyond technicalities? Resource control -vs- resource capture, both are issues of resource interdependence. External resource control isn't a priority in a system of resource independence.
If you cut off my access to drinking water by blocking the river that runs through both of our countries you could call my dependence on your exported bottled water "interdependence" if we already have a trade relationship, but if I declare war on you over that it's not "because of interdependence" but "because you were trying to take advantage of me". Interdependence might actually make me less likely to declare war because I have to contrast how much you "stealing my water" hurts me with how much being able to trade with you benefits me and how waging war will affect those things.
I guess we will have to unwind back to definitions because afaict, Colonialism was about domination of a people to extract their resources, by using the people as a disposable resource. I don't think the people being dominated depend(ed) on the colonisers.
Such a weird exchange. You used better terminology to explain what I meant ("resource interdependence") but still seem to have a different idea of what my point was.
Seeing what the likes of Gerhard Schröder is doing and given other economic incentives that favoured Germany I don't think that was the main idea behind it.
Hardly. It just hadn't on gone long enough and far enough. I'd say that the entire cause of the war is just that- that the interests of the two sets of elites didn't line up yet. They eventually would have because ownership would have become much more distributed as always happens as a result of neoliberalism.
That's at best a nice side-effect, if it actually works.
Nah, the main reason is that specialisation and trade is just so much more efficient. You get more from less.
She did a very nice job changing my mind about nuclear power: [1]
[0]: https://backreaction.blogspot.com/p/about.html
[1]: https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2022/04/is-nuclear-power-g...
While we currently use about ~50% of habitable land for food production, if we all adopted the diet in Bangladesh we would only need about 14%. If we all had the diet as in New Zealand we would need 190%. The dutch fall at 100% in the data that they published: https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets
Not exactly the 3.6 worlds listed in the link above, but diet is only one small part...
My transportation is at 0.2.
Same thing with me living alone in an apartment caused my shelter score to grow to 0.7 from 0.4 if I was to claim that two people shared this apartment. Which kind of makes sense, many people living alone generally means more buildings have to be built and more energy be used to heat/cool and light them, and land have to be used to build them on.
We are sitting on a huge ball of matter, and even consumption typically does not destroy any matter nor loses any to the void of space.
(The sun is a great source of energy. We also have nuclear fission and fusion, otherwise.)
Yeah if you scale back to the universe nothing ever changes and nothing matters at all.
If you start looking at air/soil/water pollution (which is only a fraction of our problems) it's clear that our ways of life are far from ideal. But sure, the atoms are still all there, I don't think that's the part that matters tho
Humans have eliminated anything even close to being their predator at any significant scale, except our own behaviour. As a result, we run the risk of exhausting our own food (read: resource) supply.
I'm assuming you include 'disease' as a predator (i.e. viral/bacterial/microscopic actors).
Oh, well, no risk of that predator disappearing anytime soon, then...
I've heard this metric before and I find it believable but I'm curious of how it is calculated and what assumptions it's based on.
So a bit under 5.1 earthes.
Although interestingly because the USA are a large, sparse, and resource-rich country, it doesn’t live that much beyond its own means ecologically: 2.4 USA would be enough to fulfill its needs, whereas (per the above) the netherlands being a dense and resource-poor country it would need a bit more than 7 of itself.
And further, it brings up interesting moral questions touching on eco-justified anti-natalism. Would it be morally justified to have a hundred kids?
EDIT: I largely take back the first paragraph, but I'll leave it for posterity. Helping girls to create a career for themselves probably has a larger impact on population growth. The anti-natalism thing is still interesting though.
Reading general comments on the web about the likes of the UK only have a tiny part to play and it being 'almost pointless' to combat climate change and conservation (vs larger population countries) seem to forget we've been industrialised and polluting for a quarter of a millenia. On the same token, the technology acquired over that time can solve the problem.
Overshoot day is a good reminder that we're still living above our means.
We instead need to get sustainable holistically and need technological advancements and policy changes. It doesn't matter much if we are 6 or 8 billion (currently) or 11 billion (UN forecast for 2100) people on the planet if the smaller number already overshoots resources x-times.
But it does matter, because the world won't end on 2100, the world healing from current damage will take several centuries at minimum, the less damage that is done to the ecosphere during this period of heavy growth will help the recovery and healing process on the upcoming centuries
If you achieve these metrics while aiming to set up a renewables vertical, then you can overshoot and more easily at least metrics wise control co2 production
[divider line_type=”No Line” custom_height=”40″][nectar_btn size=”jumbo” button_style=”regular” button_color_2=”Accent-Color” icon_family=”none” url=”https://www.overshootday.org/newsroom/webinar-dutch-overshoo... text=”DUTCH OVERSHOOT DAY WEBINAR” css_animation=”bounce” margin_left=”40″]
What’s the deal?
The truth is that, once resources become scarce, various optimization mechanisms kick in. For example, Israel produces a lot of food in the desert thanks to various water usage optimization techniques.
Human civilization uses a tiny percentage of the total energy delivered to Earth. This again is tiny percentage of power generated by Sun. There are abundant resources all around us that we simply need to learn how to effectively utilise. This is not sci-fi stuff, these are "merely" engineering problems.
The challenge is to get to that "post-scarcity" (or whatever you call it) future sustainably, without killing ourselves or making Earth a toxic hellhole. This requires cooperation, but you won't get that by going around and claiming falsehoods or persuading people with fallacies.
It's just an easy to understand illustration of how our current civilization is largely resting on unsustainable foundations. Finding solutions to the engineering and societal challenges that you mention seems to be the goal of the project.
Why so?
Life needs energy, we can harness energy better to produce engineered food and desalt water.
I can definitely get behind some of the solutions they propose! But it is important to give a truthful rationale for these. Otherwise this is a slippery slope, like lying to your children about medicine because they will get better if they take it.
I stand by my assertion that the methodology they picked ("pick a subset of civilization, make a prediction as if everything was it") is fallacious. Imagine a sustainable, closed-loop civilization, satisfying all the goals you can dream of. It is inevitable that not every part of the system will be balanced when looked at in isolation. If you are allowed to cherry-pick a subset of that civilization and scale it arbitrarily, you are guaranteed to arrive at the same unreasonable conclusion as they give us.
To make it less abstract, let us consider nature itself. There are siberian tigers which eat 9 kg of food a day. This is a lot! If every animal were to eat that much, all animals would quickly starve. Clearly, nature is not sustainable!
(And there will be plenty of incentives to come up with cheaper steaks or steak alternatives.)
I think the "we simply" is the least simple part of it all. We act as if everything is just a matter of time and engineering, but nothing assures that, and even if it does we're still running against time. This isn't a CIV game, we don't know if these hypothetical saving techs will ever exists.
It's pretty much all sci fi for now, and without intent it will still be sci fi. There is no law of the universe that guarantees what we call "progress" actually makes us move towards a better future. You can call it "tech progress", "engineering progress", "discoveries", the wording doesn't matter. Lead paint was progress, freon was progress, gas powered vehicles was progress, &c. Anything that's new is called progress and only decades later we can really assess what was beneficial or not. (cue electric personal vehicles)
In French we have an idiom: "fuite en avant"; "Not facing one's problems, running away from one's problems without solving them, or continuing a problematic action without considering its future consequences" and I feel like it can be applied to tech very easily, especially when the main technocrats argument is "we'll do more of X, Y, Z and eventually we'll find a solution"