What's with this obsession to 'get back to where we were before'?

Where we were before was broken, and the pandemic helped reveal that. Poor work/life balance, income inequality, industries built on JIT processes which fail spectacularly when the unexpected happens (see lumber, shipping containers, semiconductors, etc), an unfortunate wake-up call that even with entire industries shut down and almost no flights and cars on the road we only reduced emissions by 13% so we're going to need to make incredible sacrifices and green-tech investments if we even want to hope at our promised 50% reduction by 2030.

We shouldn't hope to get to where we were before. We should try to be better, and perhaps learn to live with less, because on a global scale we're not going to have a choice before too long whether we do it consciously or have it forced on us.

Green Tech isn't the savior we need. Flat out there needs to be a consumption revolution worldwide. Even if say we were all driving electric cars, on top of the energy required for normal everyday life now, you're also adding powering those cars. The necessary "reliable" green energy generation for that to happen is nothing short of trillions of dollars (when I say reliable, I mean exactly as you use it today). Yes I'm pulling that number out of my butt, although I'm in major power company in the country. Over 85% of our power generation is from non-renewables like natural gas and coal. Why? Well for one thing Natural resource departments don't like us damming up rivers as well as Joe "Second Home" Schmoe. On top of that, wind is unreliable or if it's too windy we can't use them so the turbine doesn't obliterate from too much torque. Sun? Where is the sun in winter?

I get so upset about people who think green energy is the answer when they don't realize it's not feasible if you want your current lifestyle. People altogether need to stop driving so much, spending so much, and living more modestly. I guarantee you without even switching to green energy we'd see a higher drop in non-renewable usage.

> People altogether need to stop driving so much, spending so much, and living more modestly.

Yeah I believe I said that when I said we need to make large sacrifices, I just didn't specify what those sacrifices were exactly.

I don't think green tech is the end-all be-all. I honestly think we're kind of fucked either way (if anything I was holding back, I've been reading some pretty bleak shit about how impossible this task will be and how bad things can get, but this is Hacker News and most people here don't seem to be receptive to that). Clean tech is just part of reducing the degree of how fucked we are, at least slightly.

And I also think nuclear energy needs to be part of that solution to bring down emissions as well, at least for now. I haven't been against nuclear power for a long time, and was disappointed how people shunned it again after Fukushima.

One reason we don't do nuclear is not enough people are skilled in it, we don't want to invest in building them after just having decommissioned two, and they are the ultimate NIMBY powerplant. Tell people there's a coal plant and they may get upset. Tell them there's a nuclear power plant after just having seen the HBO series Chernobyl and guess how fast they'll be knocking down the city governments door to not allow it. You're spot on really. People just don't trust it and there's nothing we can do about it.

I think what gets people so stuck on this problem is that nothing solves it. Everything is only x% of the problem, everyone is only a tiny contributor. We need to solve everything and all the percents add up to solving it.

Green energy is not the end of the solution but it is part of it. It's also quite a big part of it.

It is not unless we can reliably store energy, which we still can't. If there was some way we could store megawatts of power on reserve, it would offset the unreliability. But when you have 7 billion + people in the world, you can't stop what's already in motion.

> What's with this obsession to 'get back to where we were before'?

> Where we were before was broken,

Not for the people with dominant power over society, including over the media organizations that write the narratives fed to the masses.

And that's the answer to your question.

Good point, fair enough. We should push back against that narrative, then, I guess is my point.

Honestly, I can only imagine this is informed by a relatively privileged place in society.

First of all, your focus on this boogeyman of work/life balance assumes that all but a small percent of the global population even has enough autonomy in their employment to enjoy any balance whatsoever. Most everyone in the world is at sustenance levels of labor, "work/life balance" is the work of being alive. Secondly, JIT everything worked for the past 100 years, failed during an unprecedented in history event (we've had pandemics, but we've never "shut down" society) and will probably recover to do well until the next once-in-a-century event. Solving the global emissions crises isn't going to occur via the wealthiest working remotely or "learning to live with less". Population growth is far and away the biggest contributor to global climate change. Not your commute to the office, but growing enough food, building enough homes and providing for nearly 10 billion people and counting. Again, most of these people don't have anywhere near the luxury of bemoaning a poor work/life balance.

It is so telling that the answer you see to solve the woes of modern society -- which as you are commenting on HN, you and me and the rest of us are beneficiaries of -- is to work less and remotely. What sacrifice you make for the good of the world!

I am sorry I just am beyond over the sanctimony and self-importance of everyone. Now that _you_ have _yours_ and can relax in relative comfort, lets call it a day and cut off the engine that rose you and yours out of poverty for those poor schmucks still dreaming of the comfort of a 40-hour work week.

I mean, this is Hacker News, most people here are in a privileged place compared to the rest of the world. That's kind of the audience.

I'm fully aware not everyone is in this position to request or push for work/life balance. I've worked a decent amount of shitty jobs in my day, in fast food, retail, shipping/receiving, warehouse work. I've gone through periods where I was so physically exhausted after work I didn't do much more than go home and pass out and wake up and go back to work again. It sucks. And I don't know what they can do exactly, I'm too far removed from that now.

I believe I did say that shutting down and working remotely brought our emissions down only 13%, not "solving the global emissions crisis". I said it was a painful wake-up call that even with all that happened last year, it wasn't anywhere near enough. So we need to try to do as much of that as possible and a lot, lot more if we are to get anywhere close.

I don't know what that might be. I was listening to Bill Gates' 'How to Avoid a Climate Catastrophe' and he thinks there's several technologies that can possibly get our emissions to zero in the next decade or two. But after listening to that book I'm more dubious than he is. It sounded like even with his optimism he just inadvertently kept making a case for how fucking hard it is, how every piece of the solution has downsides and problems to overcome to work at scale, and how there's no way we're going to change enough hearts and minds or provide enough incentives to do enough to get us to 50% reduction in the next decade, or all the way down to zero by 2050.

I don't think just staying home means we solved it, not by a long shot. We (and I mean corporations in this too, they're the bigger culprits than individuals) need to be doing all the things and a whole lot more, if possible, and even then I don't see it being enough totally avert catastrophe. I'm just hoping instead of like, 4-8 degrees warming (and likely human extinction or near extinction), maybe we'll somehow bring it down to only 2-3 degrees of warming. And that will still lead to terrible things.

And it'll be hard to give up creature comforts. I'm failing pretty hard at this more than I'd like to myself right now. I'm trying to get better, though, but even if I do, it's going to make such a tiny, unnoticeable difference by itself.

We can expect things to get fucking bad regardless, I think, I'm just hoping we can make things slightly less bad instead of everyone just shrugging our shoulders and accelerating and steering directly into the iceberg.

My main thesis is that this is almost purely a population problem. The developed world can give up all their creature comforts and it would still not nearly be enough to even put a dent in anything.

We are already dealing with famine and disease in many places of the world. Independent of whether or not this is climate caused, we can't solve it without expending large resources and using the industrial might that we've built.

The conundrum is that the place with massive population growth aren't really the places with the resources to implement green energy solutions. Coal is easier, coal is cheaper. Yes, the developed world's love of meat is a major source of deforestation, but so is the need to grow the food to feed 10 billion people.

Retarding population growth is _the_ single biggest thing we can do as a species to reduce climate damage. This is one of the reasons I am not planning to have kids, when I die the relative population to my existence drops by one. Even if my kid rode their bike their whole life, lived in a climate friendly passive heating/cooling house and ate locally sourced food, their existence would produce more climate gasses than my ICE could ever dream of producing.

> Retarding population growth is _the_ single biggest thing we can do as a species to reduce climate damage

Retarding economic growth is, a better candidate, if you limit it to “retarding growth”; you’d need substantial and rapid population reduction (not just “retarding growth”) to offset the expected effects of near term economic development outside of the West.

Obviously, the biggest thing we could do to end anthropogenic clomate change is species-scale mass suicide. No anthropos, no anthropogenic climate change.

OTOH, most people who want to address that problem don’t actually think that doing the most we can on that unconditionally overrides all other concerns.

That is sort-of the subtext of my thinking on this whole thing. Want to limit famine? You will warm the globe. Want to cool the planet? Production and industrialization needs to halt which will increase famine.

It is all a balancing act and I am not convinced any balance we find won't result in massive suffering and loss of life somewhere.

Different times. There was a time you needed hands on deck; you needed many many people doing hard, mechanic work.

This is a time where you need minds on deck. The "knowledge worker" as some places call it. You stretch them too thin and you get less for you money and time.

Is a 4 day week better? I don't know. But I know it's not the same context as it was too years ago.

The objective of work is not "to work", its to be productive. If a 4 day week is more productive than a 5 day, why wouldn't you support it as a business owner?

> The objective of work is not "to work", its to be productive.

Exactly. Which is why of all governments the Japanese one is pushing the 4 day week is really surprising. Here the mentality is really to work for the show, even if resulting in no increase of production whatsoever.

Not a business owner, but I have a household.

There's always more stuff to be done and it needs to be done faster to keep up.

However I can't just expect everyone to keep "working harder" without sacrificing the household itself.

Just letting things lapse, optimizing for speed through technology, and lowering expectations (un)surprisingly end up with a healthy household.

Business can be run the same way.

In the short-term, overwork provides a productivity boost. But in the long-term, makes people less productive, people waste their time more... and the worst part: they neglect activities outside work. Like being with their families, or starting a family, or looking for a partner.

Only an owner would feel that way. Without significant equity, what's the point?

The worker gets nothing except less life and more stress. The owner sucks up all the benefit.

I find the whole balance rather interesting.

The worker thinks 'without my work, the owner would have nothing!'

The owner thinks 'without my business, the worker would have nothing.'

The truth is, both are right, to different degrees depending on the circumstances. A good owner should make workers feel they have a stake, whether by salary or ownership. A good worker should make the owner believe they are making a good decision by paying them.

I have no answer to the debate in the title, I just find this little sub-argument fascinating.

Perhaps society would be better off if more of us were owners?

You need a healthy mix of workers and owners. Those owners need incentives, and workers need protection.

Money is a powerful drug and society needs to tame the habit. Otherwise, you will end up with conditions equal to slavery for the workers and royalty for the capital owners.

All this will lead to is revolutions and bloodshed.

Its ok to sacrifice rapid growth, in cycles, to steady but slower growth that has none.

It would definitely be better off if more people felt they were participating in economic growth. Over the last few decades most growth has gone to a small number of people and the rest didn't really benefit. This leads to a very cynical and resigned attitude.

Not really possible. If everyone is an owner, no one is an owner. You can try completely abolishing the worker/owner dichotomy though, which is very difficult but probably possible.

That's what the creator economy is!

Distributism?

Small businesses?

> It was the 5-6 day week that built modern Japan

Are you sure that is because of employees slogging in factories?

Productive people outside of work will develop and nurture their passions. That is a net positive effect on the economy. This leads to new innovations, companies and benefit to the economy.

"But now, more than ever, is when we need to be working harder to get back to where we were before."

the question is whether working more really leads to working harder and more output. From what I see most people just go through the motion after a certain amount of work per week. They look busy and feel busy but I am not sure the output is there. I personally I am most productive if I work around 32 hours per week with some spurts of much more work in between.

So how do you explain the last thirty years in Japan? Was there a decrease in work ethic?

Furthermore, people are so worked to the bone that they forgot about having kids and raising families.

human labour is becoming less and less relevant in production of goods & services, society must find a balance between an everdominant capital and diminuishing labour value (as a whole), keeping busy all hours in bullshit jobs is not the same as 50 years ago (from a global perspective)

Only given highly parallelizable tasks wherein input linearly maps to output, e.g. picking corn, laying train tracks, chopping trees, etc.

Technology increases leverage allowing exponential outputs given the right inputs.

Overworking employees ceases to be a viable strategy for high tech industries.