Would 1950s Living Standards Save Us?
warmedal.se
warmedal.se
>Quite a few of us, not most but at least a sizeable portion, are willing to make these concessions.
I think this author either has a seriously different idea of what "sizeable portion" means or is vastly overestimating how many people support this kind of policy to begin with and would continue supporting this policy once they actually saw what it affected their standard of living. It's all well and good until people find out that they can no longer have lots of nice things which they previously took for granted.
>It means more people growing food on smaller plots.
No, that takes MORE energy, not less. If your concern is about too much energy usage then decreasing the efficiency of energy use by reducing economies of scale is insane.
Me? My current living standard is essential to saving the planet so it would be a mistake for me to join you.
And, given how we saw quarantines and masking play out, I suspect sentirism is right.
When the alternative appears to be the collapse of civilization and the possible extinction of humanity, how can it NOT be an option?
Because there is no central government, no central decisor. It's a game theory context of actors spread all over.
Even if the situation does turn out to be hopeless, that point of view does not seem to offer anything useful. Better to try and fail, at least!
Also, "I don't know of a solution that works" != fatalism.
If the problem is important enough to solve, it's important enough to not waste time trying a solution that won't work.
Who is supposed to «try», and what?
The issue can only be resolved (in terms of political intervention) by a sound, sensible plan acceptable by enough parts.
You want to fix the problem, you have to facilitate that somebody formulates a proposal that enough governments will be available to subscribe to.
No, the fear of annihilation is factually not enough to convince a policymaker - first, guts to head, because of ethology, and second, because of game theory. "Ethology" being a well-dressed encapsulation for "that's how it is - see and evaluate", and "game theory" implying that for a player not to grab the loot a number of reassurances must be in place.
Is the issue here that the premise is false (that a 1950s standard of living will be necessary), or that the tools for getting there from here are insufficient to the task (liberal democratic polity).
In the more general case, if you've got a problem, a necessary destination, and standard set of tools used to solve problems, if the tools don't suit the destination is the problem the tools or the destination?
I ask as it seems that often the problem seems to be the tools, but discussion hinges on the destination. This strikes me as odd.
I'll note that the article isn't even premised on how we get to a 1950s standard of living, but if that's a viable goal or target. Departing immediately from that question to the viability of getting to it, before considering the target's sufficiency or suitability, seems ... premature.
Since we definitely want that to happen, we need other options than the options currently discussed.
If I look at this I always come back to the same point: humanity will need to take control of earth's climate. And while limiting CO2 (and, more importantly, methane) emissions will be a component of that, it's not going to be the only one or even the most important.
One thing I find really annoying and incredibly wasteful currently is the way electronics and appliances are so tightly integrated and proprietary. When a single component fails in your washing machine for example, it often means scraping the entire machine, because the entire electronics are integrated onto a single board, the sensors are all unmarked and wired into a harness, the motors are proprietary, even washing machine drum sizes, fridge shelf, door seal, egg-holder sizes, etc, are all proprietary.
I understand all this is so the manufacturer can either force obsolescence (and a new purchase), charge big bucks to a captive audience for proprietary spare parts, or just to save pennies in manufacture, which, especially in electronics, seems vital, currently. But the long-term cost, to the consumer, to society, and to the environment, far outweighs the pennies saved.
The EU effort to standardize phone chargers is an excellent example of what we should be doing to fight this trend. The day I can 'build' my own washing machine, fridge, cooker, etc from standard parts, the same way I can a PC now (and also repair, upgrade them) is when this is no longer a big problem.
The mac being the opposite strategy of tight integration.
It seems to be that tight integration lead to a better overall product but the prices are higher and the environmental impact worst indeed.
Not unless you also replace the motherboard. AMD and Intel CPUs have different sockets and incompatible firmware.
There was a time when I could have had an AMD GPU with a motherboard using an NVIDIA chipset with an Intel CPU.
Yes, this is because :
>the issue is how to store it
That little missing part part is massively expensive and completely unaddressed by the underlying technology. It's like saying riding using a sailboat is the most gasoline-efficient way to get from place to place, except the issue of how you get over land.
If you add together the cost of solar generation (the cheap and easy part) with storage (the expensive and hard part) you get the actual cost of the generation method, which is substantially higher.
My hometown just invested in doing this, they're building a decentralized power grid where people can generate or consume solar energy.
I'm convinced at this point that wind and solar are actually completely ready for mainstream adoption but we're so used to saying "in a few decades" that we don't realize it's ready now.
Rivers and canals were the highways of the pre-industrial world. Even the early-industrial, as digging and locks-management equipment were mechanised.
There's still a tremendous tonnage of cargo which moves by river, though most of it is less time-sensitive than that moved by rail, truck, or air. Modern rail is roughly as efficient as inland water transport. Both are reasonably viable for electrification --- barge "mules" could be and are in places electrified locomotives operating on land with tow cables.
The impact that the Erie Canal had in opening up the central United States cannot be overstated. It followed on a tradition of canal building dating back well over 2,500 years --- see China's Grand Canal.
Would I rather have paid $100 instead of $120? Sure, but I don’t know how much better it could have gone overall.
Fast living is pretty straight forward. Jet setting is fast living, going out to eat is fast living, owning multiple vehicles or homes, replacing perfectly good things with the latest model and most forms of conspicuous consumption are fast living.
> Today it's quite hard to even find clothes that can be fixed. Polyester and stretch materials aren't really meant to be patched.
This is just flat out not true, sorry, but if you are saying that your heart isn’t in it. Clothes were never really “made” to be mended, at least not in recent times, people did it because they had more important thing to spend money on.
I mend my clothes frequently. Often with stretch fabrics you can just stitch a hole shut, no patch needed. Can they not find blue jeans? those mend well. I won’t speak to the winter coat because wearing one daily is outside my wheelhouse. I pay a lot of attention to the specific fabrics that I buy and avoid any garment that doesn’t seem to be made from something durable, I’m hard on clothes and the only thing I find myself replacing frequently is teeshirts because they tend to attract holes around my hips and its _really_ noticeable when you mend them.
Sure, mended clothes don't look like new, but I personally don’t care much at all(I think so much of society's fixation on clothing is insane/immoral(discriminatory), don’t get me started on suits).
The thing is, mending clothes takes time, and the result isn’t usually as nice as just replacing it, which is much easier to do. Ultimately this line of thinking about climate change is untenable. Society isn’t going back.
I try to mend pants but I have evidently strange shaped legs because I wear the crotch out consistently. Some pants have fabric that doesn't stand up well to attempts to patch it. And I know from girlfriends who buy more clothing that some of the cheaper clothes just break down faster. They aren't built to be durable. Some higher end baselayers for winter are also not very durable, the priorities seem to be performance and weight, not durability or the ability to be repaired.
There is absolutely no way that standard of living would be acceptable, and nor should it be.
That said it does seem to be the way things are going with hyperinflation and shortages, and the spectre of "climate lockdowns" haunting Europe.
America was in the unique position of ending the world with no mainland damage.
One way to be sure one is not contributing to environmental degradation would be to live in an artificial biosphere, but those have not worked for long periods of time. The lack of such a closed-loop system in Earth limits our potential for long-term habitation in space.
Wrong Sw* country. Switzerland.
Other parts not so much. I'd guess very few people in the US had air conditioning in the 1950s. It might be OK to go without AC in northern countries and states but most of the world is going to want AC as soon as they can afford it.
Other high-energy lifestyle are easy air travel and wide selection of food year-round. I don't think people are going to willingly return to 1950s levels of air travel affordability or food availability.
On the contrary, I would say it's most reasonable. Where I am writing from, I could bet that already the brighter half of the population, not just a minority, would call eating strawberries in winter an aberration - let us say, luxury, not a natural right. Similarly (about travel), there where there are secondary costs such as externalities, one expects them to be embedded in the price. If, in air travel, you see tickets sold at the price of a meal, it means that the offer of the service is very liberal, instead of competitive.
But since these drafty ideas should reveal complexities immediately thereafter - vital importance of export, dynamics of inflation, of markets etc. -, what should emerge is that a simplistic consideration of the matter is not productive. Even when "people" would gladly call for more reasonable systems: such solutions are not trivially defined.
Polls have consistently failed to find this "sizeable portion" in the wild, and that is before we get into the difference between stated vs. revealed preferences.
There's also a long history of people using environmental concerns related to overpopulation as cover for racism or other bigotry, so bringing up world population without qualification can feel, unfairly or not, like a racist dog whistle people are reluctant to engage with.
Well you are absolutely right, what i mean is, we are to many peoples, seen from the point of a planet and not country's, just look at something big like oceans/fish, how many more people can we feed with that source without "drying" it out? Fish-farming? Where comes the food for the fish then from? I don't even touch the land farming, wheat etc.
But we'll have to treat the entire planet as a tool for our use and that's sad, putting it mildly. The ocean used to be brimming with life and now we treat it like a food factory and a road for our ships and talk about dead zones and garbage islands. There's no humane way back but we can mourn what we've lost.
The developed world going back to 1950 would probably cause the biggest famine in human history.
Let them eat cake.
Up to 10x as much house volume per person (family of 4 in 1000 sqft, vs. now frequently 2 in 5000 sqft), probably averages around 2-4x when you consider the housing stock and who lives in it.
Need to air condition all that in the summer, whereas back then you would have just opened the windows, slept in the basement, whatever it takes to suffer through it.
Need to heat all that in the winter. But that's probably negative. A high efficiency furnace and modern sealing/insulation probably means less heating load per person now, than then. Example: Apartment buildings so enthusiastically heated that people had to leave windows open in the winter. Completely uninsulated detached houses etc.
Much more transportation. Less walking and public transit, more automobiles per capita, need to drive children everywhere whereas just "be home by dinnertime", much international travel for work and recreation. One assumes the actual cars, big and wasteful as they are, are no worse consumption-wise than the cars back then.
Much more energy to manufacture and power all the gadgets that people simply didn't have back then. And all the disposable clothes. On the other hand, the 20" black-and-white TV that's burbling in the background 12 hours of the day probably used more electricity back then than all the simultaneously operating big flat screens in a modern household.
More energy to run a globalized economy, with stuff that you use _and eat_ often shipped halfway around the planet.
What does it come down to? Avoid travel. Live outdoors more, preferably in athletically meaningful ways (walk, bike). Tolerate a warmer house in the summer. Eat a simpler, local diet. Use quality goods and use them longer.
Doesn't sound so terrible, but it also consumes a lot less resources, therefore less profits for bigcos, therefore a nonstarter.
You have missed specifying the preliminary operations required to enable that.
"Problem: overpopulation. Proposal: colonizing Mars". Putting the latter on the table was not the real difficulty.
The difficulty is in drawing a feasible plan for an implementation, to promote a proposal into a solution.
Last piece of news I got from the papers only minutes ago was Cuba and Urals having met to proclaim their will for a multipolar world - is not the present time clear enough?
Was my previous post not clear? Proposals have to be credible! Anybody can come up with a proposal which is not a solution. It is what so-called "populism" does for a living, to spread "enthusiastic, (pseudo)heartly" ideas. There is no value in "they shall eat cake": you have to point to where the flour and eggs are!
You're a bit telegraphic in what you write. You might want to offer a bit more to your audience. Your viewpoint deserves it.
The psychology of declaring the "enemy is here" and at the same time enacting exactly the kinds of intrusive surveillance that would be "enemy" ... is .. morbidly compelling to see it unfold.
Some people saw "lockdowns" in prison and decided to use the same word for actions at public school when a safety threat occurs. School lockdowns preceded covid-19 lockdowns, which have changed political history. Now in the arid Western USA, Australia and a few other places, climate related "lockdown" or enforced evacuation, are part of public policy. How is a "lockdown" enforced? with GPS, with trivial financial records checked, and identity linked to facial recognition at the gas station or convenience store. This is not "eco-fascists" doing any of this.. its a literal reversal of logic to claim "eco facists" are the threat here; moronic, paranoid, accusatory politics. This forum is a place where thinking, informed people can see and discuss this sort of development, with the tech link as a basis.
One party rule. Anyone that disagrees with the party is silenced.
Mauricio Schoijet's "Limits to Growth and the Rise of Catastrophism" (1999) details this.
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.2307/3985399
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3985399
(I believe PDF is available, otherwise try LibGen / Sci-Hub.)
You'll find the right decrying eco-fascism, and institutions of the left, such as the SPLC (with which I generally find common cause) labeling advocates of growth limits as ethno-nationalists. Somewhat inaccurately in at least one case ("Tragedy of the Commons").