This is a sentiment that rubs me the wrong way. I totally agree that we, at a global scale, need to drastically reduce our carbon footprint. And these reductions will have changes to our society. But many of the suggestions of those currently engaged in the cultural revolution are either focusing on small problems (like not buying food in plastic containers) or have complicated unintended consequences (like buying locally grown foods).

Shipping stuff on large boats is incredibly efficient per kg/km. It's not unlikely that I emit more Co2 driving my car to/from the grocery store than the emissions from shipping all the things I purchase to the store itself.

We should focus on things like stopping the burning of fossil fule for electricity generation and carbon natural land based transportation long before we almost religiously ban plastic straws.

I don't think the best way forward to actually solving this problem is engaging in some almost Protestant self hatred and punishment, trying to make the transition as impactful on our lives as possible.

Container ships are a problem because they usually run on ridiculously dirty fuel, which ends up polluting the ocean. But they're also extremely energy-efficient on a mass/distance basis. A saner world would have them use cleaner fuel[0].

Cars are a problem because at the scale they're used, they're both significant contributor to global warming and inefficient, energy-wise. Electrifying land transportation would fix the inefficiency and significantly reduce the carbon footprint. Powering the new electric fleet with green energy[1] would finally kill the emission issues.

Plastic straws, plastic packaging and other consumer disposables are a problem[2] because the plastic ends up in oceans, where it gets broken by UV into microplastics which then end up back in the food chain. Beyond that, it's mostly a sad thing to see. Energy and emissions-wise, plastic disposables are much smaller problem than other uses of fossil fuels, and sometimes they're likely better than the reusable alternatives proposed. But it's still so fucking sad to see so much garbage existing only as vehicle for marketing.

IMO people need to stop bundling these problems together. Even though they're all related, energy security != global warming != poisons in food chain != ethical considerations about animals. Those are all separate problems, with separate sets of solutions, and quite honestly, different prioritization.

--

[0] - My utopia would have nuclear-powered cargo ships as permanent global infrastructure, essentially treated as virtual conveyor belts.

[1] - Renewables or nuclear.

[2] - And we aren't even sure yet how big a problem this is. AFAIK this topic is covered mostly out of quite reasonable abundance of caution - we've noticed plastics showing up where they aren't supposed to. Even though there isn't any clear danger identified yet, history teaches us that human-released chemicals showing up in unexpected places generally don't lead to happy outcomes.

One reason that they burn dirty fuel is because we have that fuel, and the way our economy works, it's going to be burned somewhere. Making large ships with engines that can burn that fuel was intended to be a way of having the air pollution be produced away from inhabited land.

Having the ships work with cleaner fuel means the dirty fuel will be burned somewhere else, without further changes.

But I agree with your main point -- "sustainability" attracts so much momentum that people try to frame everything under that umbrella. E.g. suffering of animals raised for food production is a problem, but even less related to the things you mention. Still often seen as part of the same agenda as reducing our CO2 output.

Anyway, if there were sufficient political will to do things, taxes would solve this shit overnight.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_oil

>> "Small molecules like those in propane, naphtha, gasoline for cars, and jet fuel have relatively low boiling points, and they are removed at the start of the fractional distillation process. Heavier petroleum products like diesel fuel and lubricating oil are much less volatile and distill out more slowly, while bunker oil is literally the bottom of the barrel; in oil distilling, the only things denser than bunker fuel are carbon black feedstock and bituminous residue (asphalt), which is used for paving roads and sealing roofs. "

I'm asking because I only have a passing familiarity with how oil production works.

>> "It can't be cracked economically?"

This trash oil is produced anyway. There's no way to not make it and still make the less dirty kinds since it's what's left at the end of the process.

I see two possible solutions:

1: Invent commercial fusion reactors and burn it there. I don't know if this would produce less CO2.

2: Find something else to do with the trash oil that's less polluting. Markets are pretty good at finding uses for things, so there may just not be anything else.

Gasoline was a waste product until internal combustion engines came along. Trash oil probably occupied a similar status as waste until someone figured out it worked in ships. If trash oil were no longer economical to burn on ships, they would probably dump it in international waters instead unless some better use was incentivized.

The US and probably other countries pay farmers to destroy some crops to keep it profitable enough to make farming a viable industry. Farmers would sell all their crops without government intervention, driving profits below a sustainable level. They wouldn't just trash it otherwise.

Cargo ship owners are probably the only people who want the leftover oil. The shipping industry burns the oil industry's trash to make their ships go. Make using it uneconomical, and it gets dumped. That's what happens with byproducts no one wants to buy.

It might be a good idea to get people into contact with the smaller problems you mentioned because they are less political and less scary, still somewhat connected and people feel they can make a change. That's more than you get when people shy away instead.

Also, one point of activism is to get people into contact with an issue or a viewpoint so they can get used to the idea slowly, and when the time for changes comes it is familiar and unsurprising. So it's not about changing things right now but to pave the way for change in the future. (Maybe this is obvious, but for me it was a slightly different take of it.)

Not obvious at all. In fact, it's the first time I've encountered this idea. Thanks a lot for writing this. It makes me view some of the activist actions in a different light.

All of this depends on number of people constantly growing, and more of them buying more stuff and doing more stuff.

Even if we move to 100% electric cars powered by renewables tomorrow, that’s 43% of CO2 output. After decades, we are not even at the point where we can do that much, by the way. Grid-scale battery storage is an essential part of the equation, and we are not there yet.

We are still at the beginning stages of even thinking about the other 57%. Electrifying the national freight rail grid would be massively expensive. (Keeping overheard catenary well maintained is so expensive that Maryland’s commuter rail is moving to diesel locomotives for Baltimore to DC service, even though the corridor was electrified more than a century ago.) There are no commercially available electric trucks yet.

That stuff can’t wait for later. To limit temperature increases to 2C, we need to immediately cut global CO2 by three times as much as the US’s total CO2 output. Meanwhile, in the last couple of decades, China has added more than a US worth of CO2 output. If India develops similarly, we’ll add another US and a half. Europe and the US going to zero output won’t cancel out those increases. Even the communist party’s goal in China only calls for 20% electric cars by 2025.

The reliable models we have show that if we don’t cut emissions dramatically and immediately, we will need to go to negative emissions in the short term. That’s another generational problem. Carbon recapture is in its infancy. Look how long it took to perfect solar.

I'm not sure about how that chart is constructed, but for me it's obvious that we need to lower the carbon intensity of electricity production right now. That would "eliminate" 32% of the chart, and I guess also have a dent in the other pies.

I don't see how stopping consuming or fundamentally changing society is a better or even faster way to achieving our goals.

I think it's absurd to talk about trying to radically change society before you stop burning fossil fules for electricity.

Cutting emissions dramatically and immediately is by deploying nuclear, and by electrifying your rail lines.

Even limited 'growth' has not actually happened. It's a fiction. The physical reality is that complex sustainable evolved systems have been broken down to feed simpler crude unsustainable techological ones. There's no 'growth' to be seen - just an increase in planetary entropy. This is somewhat masked on a short-term & local scale because of the remarkable resilience of the evolved systems. But as those systems collapse, which now seems inevitable, the fictional nature of 'economic growth' will become very evident indeed.

Apparently, the main measure of economic growth is the gross domestic product - "the monetary value of all the finished goods and services produced", which is based on spending and consumption. Planetary entropy, as you say.

As someone else commented in this thread, what we need is a significant global shift in mentality and culture, our value systems and vision of what it means to be a grown-up civilization, not as an ever-hungry consumer, but an intelligent layer of nature.

Agreed, though whether we have time for this to happen seems doubtful. It would require a dramatic slowdown of faux-growth to enable natural systems to recover, while we spend the time needed (probably centuries) to develop tech with sustainability approaching that of evolved systems. There's no a priori technical reason why this should not be possible, but political realities make it hard to imagine. Maybe another 'intelligent' species can make this happen in a few millennia.

Life on earth is only possible because we're receiving a constant flow of energy from the sun.

Surely, we should not expect exponential growth, but it doesn't mean we could not have unlimited growth.

How so? It's not an argument per se - it's just a description of the physical reality that what economists falsely describe as 'growth' is actually a transfer of matter and energy from complex evolved sustainable systems (ie. what some people call 'nature', which I find to be misleading) to simple cultural-technological unsustainable systems. This transfer process damages the former to build the latter, increasing entropy (because our early-stage human tech is less ordered than evolved systems are). It is not 'growth' in any meaningful sense of the term at all, whether limited or unlimited.

Why won't it? The main issue is where we get our energy from. There are working methods that are CO2 neutral. I'm firmly in the "only science will save us" camp.

> It's like when you move form a basic 40sq meter flat to a fancy 250sq meter house, going back is very hard.

I believe this is view harmful to the cause because it will only result in pushback, and rightfully so. Only excess wealth creates the spare capacity to care for the environment.

The problem is that just saying that, allows policy makers and public to sit back and wait for the problem to be saved - without funding the science to do, or take other necessary policy steps.

In a sense you can argue that science has saved us - we have solar and wind, nuclear and excellent battery tech.

So why aren't we "saved"?

I wanted to put this in contrast to the "stop growth and consume less" mindset, which I believe will be massively insufficient in solving climate change. When we switch to alternative means of energy, at least in the beginning they will be more expensive than fossil, and you need to be able to afford this. Asia must be able to afford this! And they will not give up cars and go back to riding bicycles, this is a pipe dream.

Those mitigations won't necessarily include carbon reduction - they'll be increased levee construction, abandonment of low-lying cities and building codes adjusted so that '1 in a century' storms are encountered every couple of years.

What we are trying to do at this point, ius avoid such grim consequences, now and the market can't help us unless we promote panic, which isn't a great strategy.

No, that's just the most currently newsworthy of literally hundreds of causes of the global ecological collapse. Ecologists have been mapping many of these causes for decades. The overarching cause of all the component causelets (eg. emissions, habitat destruction, soil & water degradation, etc) has been the expansion of a crude global civilisation based on selective ignorance of science. We pretend to respect science when it produces stuff we like ("technology"), but ignore the inconvenient understandings revealed by science as it relates to the complex living systems that sustain us.

https://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_populati...

“Growth” as the politicians and the lobbyists push it is simply not sustainable.

But both “the left” and “the right” have their agendas not to let you discuss or act on that.

"Bacteria grow by doubling. One bacterium divides to become two, the two divide to become 4, the 4 become 8, 16 and so on. Suppose we had bacteria that doubled in number this way every minute. Suppose we put one of these bacteria into an empty bottle at 11:00 in the morning, and then observe that the bottle is full at 12:00 noon. There's our case of just ordinary steady growth: it has a doubling time of one minute, it’s in the finite environment of one bottle.

I want to ask you three questions. Number one: at what time was the bottle half full? Well, would you believe 11:59, one minute before 12:00? Because they double in number every minute.

And the second question: if you were an average bacterium in that bottle, at what time would you first realise you were running of space? Well, let’s just look at the last minutes in the bottle. At 12:00 noon, it’s full; one minute before, it’s half full; 2 minutes before, it’s a quarter full; then an 1?8th; then a 1?16th. Let me ask you, at 5 minutes before 12:00, when the bottle is only 3% full and is 97% open space just yearning for development, how many of you would realise there’s a problem?"

Note that the before that point in the talk he explains that for any "steady growth" you can find the period in which what you observe doubles, i.e. any "steady growth" has its "doubling time."

The problem is that many people (who express that conviction) treat "Science" just like the God in the famous anecdote: http://epistle.us/inspiration/godwillsaveme.html

It is important to understand the limits of science. It won't save you universally from everything, no matter what you do. Your own action (or inaction, in case of waste) determines what can be done.

[0] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...

If you mean "science" as in existing science and technology, then, sure, technological approaches are part of the solution.

Often, though, in these discussions, "science" is used to mean some sort of magical advancement that is just around the corner that will solve all our problems. That would be nice, but probably isn't the case. We'll probably see incremental advances in things like solar panels but we're up against some hard limits of physics. Reducing consumption and making efficiency savings are significantly easier.

> Only excess wealth creates the spare capacity to care for the environment.

I think this is view is harmful. First, it looks very clear that mitigating climate change is cheaper than dealing the consequences, so this "excess wealth" is mythical.

Second, we shouldn't be treating our environment as a luxury. We need to make sure the planet is liveable first, then see what other toys we can afford.

Tech will certainly play a role, but I'm convinced that without a cultural, political and economical change we're doomed. Saying "tech will save us" make people believe that they have no part to play, no responsibility.

We know what to do, the fact is that we're not acting fast enough.

"At the heart of capitalism is a vast and scarcely examined assumption: you are entitled to as great a share of the world’s resources as your money can buy. You can purchase as much land, as much atmospheric space, as many minerals, as much meat and fish as you can afford, regardless of who might be deprived. If you can pay for them, you can own entire mountain ranges and fertile plains. You can burn as much fuel as you like. Every pound or dollar secures a certain right over the world’s natural wealth."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/15/capita...

the pie will keep getting bigger. more resources. more energy. more people. more goods. more kinds of goods. more movement of goods.

thats a direct consequence of your point in that we structurally assume an infinite number of fish, amount of land...and more importantly that the oceans and sky are so vast and unknowable that we throw as much into them as we want without anything ever coming back.

maybe we're living out the last aftershock of the end of the age of exploration. and we're so completely unprepared to manage any kind of economic contraction the only response is fear. growth is the seductive poison thats killing us.

> Why won't it?

Because science doesn't run the world, politicians do.

The problem is sustainable growth. The path we're on isn't sustainable, unless we hit some scientific and political miracles in the next years. Sustainable growth is unfortunately slower than unsustainable one, so it loses out in competitive environment. Still, I don't think we should focus on attacking growth in general - just the type we have now. Done right, economic growth may yet save us.

Also we already consume more than we should, if we go back that would impact the GDP.

Fusion reactor 8 light minutes away does not burn out for a good long while, long enough that we can consider it indefinite for the current climate debate.

So we have an energy source that we can use to rearrange the stuff that IS finite, ie the big rock with water on it.

What we don't want is for the rock to end up in a state where we can't live on it comfortably.

Now, as for growth, we could reach a state where people have roughly the replacement number of kids. In fact, it looks like that will happen. Then we just have to make sure the average amount of consumption doesn't take us over some limit.

Note that GDP is also a pretty imperfect measure. It was conceived in an era where having more stuff generally meant a better life, because some of that stuff was useful things like medicine, insulation, and so on. Nowadays a lot of things go into GDP that is perhaps not measuring what you really want.

It's not "indefinitely". It's just "long enough that we can bootstrap a space economy and expand into the Solar System", or alternatively "long enough so that we can fix the environmental damage, get rid of poverty and most diseases, and slowly S-curve the economy into some acceptable state". Or some combination of that.

Moreover, not all growth is tied to physical space and resource use. We're also not using the space and resources we have efficiently. There's plenty of room on Earth for us to grow, but it might start looking more like improving things than expanding them.

> if we go back that would impact the GDP.

Switching to a sustainable level of growth will require that - slowing down the growth itself, and even a temporary shrinking of the economy.

In reality it seems most of the things we find valuable do involve energy consumption. We are so far from completely decoupling it that you might as well consider money and energy to be the same thing. The more you spend and the richer you are the more damage you are causing the environment.

It seems politicians (of the environmental kind) who tell you we can grow and save the planet are almost certainly lying.

Put another way: if we could suddenly switch transportation to electric and replace all our power generation with renewables with some surplus power on top, why would anyone want to limit energy consumption? That would be equivalent to saying, let's reverse civilization, bring back more poverty and suffering, because it was all cool and games 300 years ago.

> We are so far from completely decoupling it that you might as well consider money and energy to be the same thing.

With market setting prices according to supply and demand and business model shenanigans, and with lots of externalities everywhere unaccounted for, I'd say prices on everything are pretty well decoupled from energy use. It would be a better world if they weren't.

Not only in the sense of 'pollution' as such, but just completely changing ecosystems.

We could have a perpetual motion machine with zero emissions, and we'd still have to handle 7 billion people chucking straws in the ocean or whatever.

If we actually had an unlimited energy source we'd probably turn half of the planet into skyscrapers with farms in them or something.

That's the thing with energy, and why I'm arguing that aiming for reduction in energy production would be self-destructive for our civilization: with enough surplus energy, you can do near anything. We could remove from the air and the seas all the pollution we emitted so far. We could keep turning air into combustible hydrocarbons all day long and enjoy high-density hydrocarbon fuels that are carbon neutral. There's lots of things that could help which we aren't currently doing, because they don't make economical sense. With more cheap energy, they would.

I'm more wary about the idea that we can solve all problems if we just have more energy.

What we're doing, and show no signs of slowing down on, is fundamentally restructuring how the planet works. We're building housing, industry, solar farms, roads, railroads, you name it - everywhere we can afford to, and having more energy makes that even easier.

You can suck CO2 out of the atmosphere; you can attempt to clean plastic from the oceans (I suspect that this would be difficult without side effects even with limitless energy; how do you avoid disturbing life on the seabed?).

But can you create natural wilderness? Can you provide habitats for wildlife? We don't even know what that means. Can we produce cities for humans rather than endless car-based hellscapes?

I vividly remember discussing this with my fellow students almost a decade ago now. The idea that we are going to turn the planet into a farm because we can.

I don't want to live on a farm. I want to live on a natural Earth that we live in symbiosis with, not an extremely efficient well-tuned machine.

That's good; but unfortunately, people do fixate on "growth" and "energy use" as sources of problems, when they're not. To better evaluate what we can and should do, we need to keep in mind where exactly the problems come from.

> I'm more wary about the idea that we can solve all problems if we just have more energy.

I'm not saying we will or would, but we definitely could solve most of them. Energy is a necessary but not sufficient component of almost everything we do, and "more energy" is a necessary component of some ways of fixing climate that we currently aren't deploying - like e.g. synthesizing hydrocarbons instead of digging them up from the ground.

> But can you create natural wilderness? Can you provide habitats for wildlife?

Yes, we can. The best way to do it is to transplant some existing wilderness. The habitat will build itself, that's exactly what life is good at.

> Can we produce cities for humans rather than endless car-based hellscapes?

In theory, we can. In practice, this is where technology ends, and economy and politics start.

> I don't want to live on a farm. I want to live on a natural Earth that we live in symbiosis with, not an extremely efficient well-tuned machine.

Same, but that's because Earth already is a pretty decent machine, full of self-regulating feedback loops. It works well without supervision, and it's kind of dumb of us to break the feedback loops only to then have to maintain them "by hand", because they're crucial to our survival. We should be able to let it mostly be, enjoy it, and focus on doing other cool stuff. I still believe nature is there for us to exploit, but we're doing it the dumb way instead of the smart way.

It's arguably not so much "science will save us" as "economics will save us". That's almost a religion in the US. Also, some distrust science on religious basis. And some even believe that it's all part of the coming apocalypse. Which is God's will.

but our environment is the universe, and the universe is infinite in resources...

Our immediate environment aside from Earth is the vastness of the solar system, in planets totally unsuitable to support us, and with extreme costs to even get us to the nearest one, and with vast expanses of space and radiation to go through to get to the next.

We got humans to the closest rock for a few years, on a huge cost and effort, and with big risks (and some casualties), based on the competition of 2 superpowers. Since then, not only we haven't established any "base", but we haven't even been there for 48+ years (almost half a century)...

And even if by a very slim chance (which people who view technological progress as some kind of boundless Paolo Coelio fairy tale take for granted) we manage to do something in those planets, the next step (some earth like habitable planet elsewhere) is extremely more challenging, and speed of light limits would apply (of course people who view technological progress as some kind of boundless Paolo Coelio fairy tale bypass them with exotic contraptions that have us riding wormholes and what have you...).

And that's if war and climate mayhem doesn't have us concentrate all our efforts here...

Some food for though: don't concentrate on the pedantic details, but the high level arguments:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/11/the_myth...

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high...

The thing is, you and I are no more qualified to speculate on the future than someone from 100 years ago would be qualified to speculate on the Internet. However I can say one thing: if we even make a fraction of the progress in the next 100 years compared to the progress in the last, I don’t think we have anything to worry about when it comes to energy or transportation.

I'd say we are.

We don't expect the speed of light to change for example. Whereas people in the 1800s didn't have any such hard limit (e.g. based on Newtonian theory).

We also have the benefit of hindsight, and can see the rate of technical development (and e.g. that the low hanging fruit were on the late 19th century, increasing on early 20th century, and dropping down after the later half of the 20th century.

>However I can say one thing: if we even make a fraction of the progress in the next 100 years compared to the progress in the last, I don’t think we have anything to worry about when it comes to energy or transportation.

Compared to the progress in the last 100 years, or the last 50 years? Because already the progress in the last 50 years is laughable compared to the progress up until 1970 or so.

E.g. we had electricity, nuclear energy, combustion engine, radio, tv, film, digital imaging, lasers, microwaves, satellites, internet, computers, airplanes, transistors, rockets, radars, and tons of other fundamentals already available by 1960s -- not so much huge progress later on aside from evolutionary stuff.

(Well, we did have the slinky)

shouldn't the internet be considered the greatest achievement yet?

When was the last time a new technology reached commercial success?

Besides we're not talking about mere products here, but core technologies, e.g. inventions. The steam engine, the combustion engine, electricity, the telephone, laser, microwave, satellites, and so on, weren't mere "applications of other technologies" and even less so a mere incremental bump in the way modern internet vs 60s/70s internet is.

Do we even have the raw resources on earth / the tech to move everyone to a new planet and terraform it before we're all toast ?

Even if we do what's your moral standpoint on the fact that humanity destroyed 3+ billion years of evolution on earth in a few hundred years ?

Who in their right mind think that terraforming a planet is easier than just stopping destroying our home planet ?

Even if we do move to a new planet, in what kind of conditions will we live, I doubt we'd have even 10% f the comfort we have today. So why not scale down here, on earth, in the first place ?

a moon base would cost upwards of 20 billion USD.

the increase in the US military budget for FY2018 is 58 billion USD, bringing it to a total of 639 billion USD. that's just for FY2018. there is currently no world war.

> Do we even have the raw resources on earth / the tech to move everyone to a new planet and terraform it before we're all toast ?

no one mentioned anything about terraforming or moving people in this thread. i made a comment regarding finite resources, which aren't finite if you just look at the sky instead of the ground.

It doesn;t have much to do with the original topic, but I think you're way underestimating it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ouiTMXuDAQ

didn't the earth go thru numerous planet-wide extinction events? and those were much much faster than a few hundred years.

But sure in the big scheme of things it's not changing much, it's more of a personal / moral position.

A good analogy is the Eiffel tower, you can remove a bolt, 10 bolts, 100 bolts, it'll still hold fine, remove one too many and it'll collapse. The metal will still be there (earth) but it won't be the Eiffel tower anymore (Life).

> The current rate of extinction of species is estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than natural background rates.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

In which case it will be little consolation that amoebas or even cockroaches and squirrels might survive...

Per capita energy usage is about 6 MWh / year and our population has been doubling every 53 years. Assuming that continues, in 10000 years we'll be using 4e69 Wh / year. If we figure out 100% conversion of mass to energy, that's 1e56 kg of fuel, which is a lot more than all the matter in the visible universe.

You can play with these numbers a little, but even reducing the energy usage per person by a million only gives us another 1000 years. Soon we'll be growing so fast that every year we'll use all the resources within one light-year.

[1] https://youtu.be/FACK2knC08E

Get a human permanently and self-sufficiently out of LEO and i'll agree a limited part of the solar system is our environment.

For the foreseeable future our environment is earth and not a lot else.

Not to mention they're still vaporware... Brochures are easy.

In 30 years Miami might be under the waters, and we'd still be extremely lucky if we have a 200 sq ft base on the moon.

(On which a man haven't even set foot for the last 48 years).

We have a very real thing happening right now on earth with extreme consequences: major species extinction, air pollution, water pollution, soon to be ecological refugees, &c. But the answer is mining asteroid and having a moon base.

Why would we care about asteroid gold and the few (<100) people that might go to the moon and live an extremely strenuous life. It's not like we'll all go to the moon, crack open a cold one and watch the moon superbowl.

If you change your sense of scale from a few years to a few hundred, yeah, I think it’s likely humanity will be watching the moon superbowl, in fact it’s probably the most dull and conservative view of the future someone could have.

scientific progress.

Even the moon which is the closest stable near earth resource is at least a couple of decades away from any practical use.

Chances are that the climate of earth will become more unstable before any kind of space based economy can really be taken seriously.