I've seen this during the last few drought years in CA with a lot of my presumably educated, FAANG-employed friends scolding people over a glass of water at a restaurant or skipping showers for days out the week. I've been stumped at how highly rational individuals could fall for this cult-like aberration - with 80% of water dumped into the farm fields, if all of the 40 million CA consumers were completely eliminated and replaced by robots, that still wouldn't move the drought needle very much. Yet, highly educated techies would throw nasty fits over a glass of tap water to "save the planet"...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2015/04/03/a...

Wait, what’s the reasoning for scolding over a glass of water?

This, mostly - and yes, friendship bonds would be broken if you actually asked for a glass of water in some people's presense: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/02/05/271997854/ca...

All the while: "even inside the restaurant, some 84 percent of the water use happens in the kitchen and the bathroom"

It was like a cult. and this cult-like pattern gets applied to other things now, too.

The cult started with the Limits to Growth report (1972) which has been wrong on all counts yet it has been the basis for the ideology of all modern green parties.

I think “people being miserable” is because of the short-distance social isolation, not the long-distance one.

I don’t think the world would be any less happy if personal air travel returned to 1970s level, cars were half the weight and drove a bit slower, etc. Certainly not if we compensated lower consumption with a four-day working week.

And yes, that wouldn’t solve everything, but it is unlikely there will be a silver bullet. If solar/fusion/whatever turns out to be one, we can always scale up again, if we want to. Meanwhile, do whatever we can to give us more time to work on solar/fusion/whatever.

The impression I have is that people are miserable because (a) higher unemployment and fear of unemployment, and (b) limited social opportunities because anywhere with people in it has been closed — not specifically because of the lack of flights or commuting.

(Also, most factories are still running; for example in the USA, 16% down between Feb and April and 5.6% down between Feb and Oct [0], which is still almost all being open even in the worst periods).

Much as I like international travel (and despite my mother moving to an Alzheimer’s care home in a country I don’t live in), not flying this year is really low on the list of things that have been troubling me.

I believe human nature will probably cause geo-engineering to backfire; I anticipate a politician will claim that it is pointless and the running costs are too expensive, cancel funding, and proclaim loudly that the lack of immediate severe negative consequence “proves this was the right decision” in much the same way that current politicians who do not wish to spend money on improving the climate make similar claims about winter.

I’m in favour of renewables + storage + global power grid.

[0] https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g17/current/