The atmospheric CO₂ rates come from burning too much fossil fuel. Not from people wanting things. If you consume and produce things in a way that doesn't release net CO₂, that is perfectly fine from a climate perspective, even if the products are meaningless artefacts of a materialistic life that will never make you happy.
I understand the impulse toward a simpler, less materialistic life. If you like that, argue for it on its own merits.
> The best thing I can think of then is to lower the temperature of the earth
That... is not an action you can take. We don't have that lever. It's a goal of the whole climate change issue. So this is saying that to lower temperatures, we need to lower temperatures.
There needs to be a discussion about economic incentives. It's not people wanting things that is the problem. It's that it's easier and more profitable to produce short-lived crappy things that can be sold for cheap, because the environmental impact of the waste it generates (both CO2 and the actual crappy product itself) is not sufficiently factored into the price.
I would not be surprised if, in our current economic system, simply having more green energy available (or products produced without emitting CO2) is not going to solve anything. With almost 8 billion people on earth, we'll find ways to increase consumption and burn it.
So far global output of wealth and well-being is directly tied to emissions and consumption of fossil fuels. We have a 110-year long precedent for that. You could even argue it started with the Industrial Revolution, so the period is longer.
France is probably the only example of a country that came close enough to decoupling economic prosperity from CO2 production through Nuclear energy, but even they produce 5GT of CO2 per person.
It also isn't particularly evident that Nuclear is reproducible worldwide - it is very expensive, and Uranium is also a finite resource if you were to multiply its use by a factor of 10x/20x, etc. Remember, France is less than 1% of the world's population.
So decoupling prosperity from emissions is pretty much the panacea everyone wants. But it's unrealistic to hope for it and expect it to come in on our timeline. Kind of like fusion.
5 GT (5 000 000 T) is unfathomably large. They produce about 5T = 5000 kg CO₂ / person / year, which is 5 · 12 / (12+2·16) = 1.4 ton of carbon / coal or 1.7 m³ = 1700 l of diesel.
Going by Wikipedia 2017 list[1], they are about 5% above average per-capita CO₂ emissions.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
I'd say that's a pretty good track record for creating prosperity.
And yes, thank you for the correction, GT was the wrong unit.
Please don't forget to qualify you mean economic prosperity. It's a wholly different matter than happiness, health etc. The correlation is positive (I guess) but far from 100%.
French track record is not bad, but I would still hesitate to call it good. Going by [1], they haven't notably decreased their emissions since 2011, they are worse than Sweden and Switzerland, and if poorer countries follow, it's still the kind of emissions that take us into wild climate territory with mass migrations, unrest and I would hope not war.
Good for some inspiration, better than my country, but far from enough.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
As far as I understand we have a red button that will induce a nuclear winter
It still needs work, and I'm hoping to find a way to approximate the CO2 impact of their purchases.
Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/curb-your-consumer...
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/curb-your-con...
More info: https://www.curbyourconsumerism.app/#faq
(I'm not your target audience because I struggle to buy stuff even when its cheap and I'm flush with money hah)
Eventually everyone will have huge bank accounts, but live simple lives?
(Although more likely the economic contraction from wasting less stuff will cause incomes to go down!)
People's scarcity mindset makes them think burning less fossil fuels and consuming less stuff will lower their quality of life. On the contrary, most Americans could reduce their consumption by 80% off pure life improvements.
People convolve reducing consumption with returning to the stone age, which is a false dichotomy. It's more like exiting a mindset that stuff means happy to where it means people trying to create craving.
I speak from experience of reducing my consumption by about 90%, leading many others to start reducing through my leadership executive training and podcast. Before they act, they're full of facts and figures arguing why not to act. After they act, they wish they had earlier. The key is to activate their intrinsic motivation, not to tell them what to do. Then what they do feels meaningful.
People don't want to do small things, they want to do meaningful things.
Here's a link to the site:
Stopping buying stuff is hard for most people, and I think the key is to stop _wanting_ stuff. Sadly I think consumption-driven society is incredibly deeply ingrained. I mean, most people seem to devote large proportions of their life pursuing unnecessary luxury goods. This is the mindset that needs to change - and particularly be reversed as we bring up the next generation. A fundamental shift is needed in what people are 'pursuing'.
[0] https://robinlinacre.com/energy-usage [1] https://observablehq.com/@robinl/energy-usage-and-goods-impo...
I do try to argue that we should reduce our consumption and buy much fewer, but much higher quality items, which we repair and maintain for a long time, instead of throwing them out and buying a completely new thing.
But I am constantly met with arguments that "no consumption means no growth, and no growth means no life and no progress" and similar arguments. These people have really entrenched themselves in consuming more and more all the time.
You mean to say you used to "consume" 10x what you do now? I'm skeptical that's even possible for someone living in the first world. Just food, clothing, and housing is too much consumption to make that figure reasonable.
My TEDx talks cover some of the major changes http://joshuaspodek.com/my-tedx-talk-is-online-find-your-del.... The important part was shedding the myths erroneously justifying flying or packaged food. Then practicing and finding the joy, community, and connection that life is about when you avoid polluting behavior.
This sounds great, how do I do it?
My podcast shares me walking through many people to start their challenge http://joshuaspodek.com/podcast.
Do they give you enough to start with?
A couple podcast guests are prominent in zero waste and minimalism, so you might enjoy their episodes and books: Bea Johnson http://joshuaspodek.com/guests/bea-johnson and Joshua Becker http://joshuaspodek.com/guests/joshua-becker.
The biggest resource in my experience is to start however you can. People get hung up on toothbrushes while still ordering take-out while their fridges are full, which uses far more plastic than a toothbrush.
The more you do it, the easier it gets and the more horrible the old ways become.
People tend to think of there being only two versions of the economy available - the government tells us what stuff to make, or free markets determine what we make.
We would need a way of incentivising re-use, and of incentivising companies to make things re-usable. Currently the only way to make more money is to make and sell more stuff.
Correct taxation of negative externalities would work towards this.
I (like everyone else in my neighborhood) have super cheap, barely servicable tools in my shed that I have used once or twice. There's no way that's a reasonable allocation of resources in comparison to neighbor sharing, renting high quality tools or hiring a pro who owns such, but price and convenience heavily push me towards owning disposable crap, and I have to consciously fight it.
It's really telling that the only market the wealthy class needs to care about has incredibly tight regulation on how you describe the 'product' (Accounting standards, auditing, what the CEO tweets...).
Meanwhile the markets every day consumers & workers lives are ruled by are wall to wall lies and deception.
Our current low-regulation markets are basically designed to innovate in manipulating voters, consumers and workers. Where our most profitable industries main focus is buying off their regulators, competitors and focusing on creating moats and monopolies.
In my view a good first step would be to bring in tight regulation on political spending & lobbying. Followed by regulating advertising with a view to nationalized product discovery. Basically if even Amazon can't stop fake reviews we should make it a publicly funded good. Let every company freely list their products and (as with listed companies accounting regulation) any product produced by a big company should have stats which are directly comparable to their competitors products & legally binding. We could also require companies to list the CAD files for replacement parts they no longer make.
Could you elaborate on this bit please? Do we regulate away all but one way to differentiate a product? How do we decide which one?
That's what happened pre 50s. My mother still uses the sewing machine my grandma was using and it was made in my country, not in buttfuck nowhere SE asia.
As it turns out making long lasting products isn't the most profitable thing so we shifted to producing to the least reliable standards people would still accept
I myself don't see any value to furniture of better quality than IKEA, since my kids won't want it, and I don't gain any utility of getting something of higher quality.
There's also probably some confluence with people's buying power stagnating forcing them to buy cheaper goods.
Then people are wrong. Almost no economy is purely one of the other - even the most "free market" economies have lots of government regulation, government spending makes up huge parts of their economy, etc.
> We would need a way of incentivising re-use, and of incentivising companies to make things re-usable. Currently the only way to make more money is to make and sell more stuff.
Totally doable in a completely free market way. You tax externalities.
This is basic stuff - economists generally agree that if you set up a carbon tax, people will use less carbon.
If you think America has "free markets" you haven't been watching the steady march of monopolies and cartels in virtually all sectors.
Corporations own the political process in America to avoid these well past the point of usefulness to reducing emissions/concentrations.
The toothless and ineffective Paris accords show this is roughly the same for even "progressive" economies like Europe.
The privileged will risk complete destruction over the surrender of advantage. That cute quote is frightening accurate when applied to modern partisan republican politics, think tanks, and especially the billionaire donor class, and has been for 40-50 years now with respect to environmental policy.
The only hope right now is the near-miraculous development of solar/wind/EV tech that can challenge and hopefully fundamentally undercut the viability of fossil fuels.
The article's suggestion for mass investment in sequestration technologies is warranted.
But if externality taxing was actually something politically doable as opposed to some policy dream by an economist, then we would have had a carbon tax on gasoline two decades ago, which any look at the cost of sequestration of carbon generally leads to a 3-10$/gallon tax.
And we are probably a decade from it now.
I do agree that it is basic stuff from an economic theory, which is tragically hilarious given the fundamental arrogance of Republican policy towards progressive reforms such as carbon taxation always invokes laissez faire principles.
The fact that basically applicable economic theory is politically untenable means that the people in economics as discipline have utterly failed humanity, sitting on their hands as this happened for some, or actively contributing to its exacerbation from the free market/laissez faire/libertarian wing of the University of Chicago.
I'd prefer laws that producers are on the hook for enabling safe disposal.
This would cover the plastic junk issue, because most of those things cannot be recycled. Some can be "downcycled" (recycled into something less valuable), but that's still not great.
The problem with your proposal is that lots of products (like batteries) can be safely disposed, but a consumer could do something malicious, like throwing them into a river. A manufacturer should be responsible for producing products that are easy to use safely, not for the actual safe use.
We see the same thing in other industries: auto makers have to include seatbelts, but they can't be sued if someone chooses not to use one.
This won't change much. Nobody will work on Pentium II, drive a gas guzzler or get a low resolution MRI. It's hard to regulate such stuff. You can only improve it a bit e.g. mandatory 3-year warranty with an option to extend it to 6 years. While buying the consumer would see the price for each warranty length.
For office and graphical work, it's obviously beyond merely capable. 200+ tabs in Firefox, no problem.
My 2013 MacBook Pro retina started having weird, annoying keyboard issues. I could spend 600$ to get it repaired or 1000$ to get a newer, refurbished macbook. However I'm finding a hand me down 2009 MacBook is working just fine after putting an ssd in it.
The idea is “conscientious” people will buy second hand items so that fewer resources are used, net.
But it’s wholly beside the point. They could make durable stylish (maybe not fashionable) clothing that cradle to grave would be less impactful to the enviro than this recycling PR nonsense.
Any country attempting to combat climate change using economic means would absolutely have to use "green tariffs" I think, otherwise businesses would simply export their emissions to the developing world on an even greater scale than they do today.
I think it’s at least partly driven by people’s desire to status signal, if not their desire to consume anyway to occupy their time.
Going from Incandescents to LEDs and similiar caused the energy usage to go down in spite of increased always on electronic device usage. Replacing a hummer with a Prius or Yaris wins out quickly.
For more, see how Hans Rosling covered the idea in his 2011 "Magic Washing Machine" presentation.
If we had some other levers to cool down the earth, the CO2 in the atmosphere would not be such a big problem.
way too much car use
oh and absurd heating too, I saw black water buckets in the caribeans. Every high sun rate place should use that and never have an electric heated tank ever again
Sadly there are no reasonable alternatives. We're funnelled into this mindset/system.
The limitless consumerism isn't as bad if all the products were created with power from green alternatives.
Remove co2 out of the sky is also a good thing. The best thing I can think of then is to lower the temperature of the earth because then the oceans will act as a Co2 buffer sink. Think like carbon beverage, when you cool cans during production for putting carbon in them you cool them. If you heat a can they release stored co2. The same process with the oceans but at a much bigger scale.