Similar, fresh water is primarily a cost issue. Right now the only economical method to provide water at the lowest cost is to take naturally occurring fresh water. There are alternatives. It does not take a lot of solar, wind or nuclear power plants to supply a large city population with fresh water extracted from the ocean. The construction and operational costs would however be need to be taken from something else, reducing welfare and industrial output.
Why should we have to change what we eat? Surely taking that choice away takes away part of what we are, reduces our autonomy.
Why switch to seaweed when we can already produce what we already know we want?
Here in Sweden we eat fermented fish. Other countries eat ferment cabbage, beans, goat stomachs, or other fermented things which in my culture we would be weird to eat. I think fermented seaweed is also a thing somewhere.
There are things that could force a culture change, such as famine, war, social status signals, media, and religion to mention a few examples. Humans are social creatures, and culture is a social phenomenon, so the cause for a cultural change would likely be social in nature. I guess a societal collapse could also trigger a change in culture, or a cultural change could prevent a societal collapse. I guess it depend on how one want to perceive it, and what meaning people put into the word "societal collapse".
One-third of the world's exports of chilis, tomatoes, and cucumbers goes through the country. The Netherlands also exports one-fifteenth of the world's apples.
Aside from that, a significant portion of Dutch agricultural exports consists of fresh-cut plants, flowers, and flower bulbs, with the Netherlands exporting two-thirds of the world's total.
That's basically what you're alluding to with the seaweed and food thing.
Cultural and ideological hangups will go right out the window in a hurry when there's a real crisis and a culturally incompatible solution. People aren't gonna let things truly go to shit over something as trivial as what they eat or where their water comes from.
The primary danger in the first world as I see it is from the moneyed and empowered people F-ing it over for large enough other groups to cause probems. Doesn't take much of a stretch of the imagination to imagine how climate change might F-over downstate Illinois (because farms) but Chicago won't let them do anything about it because they hold all the cards and they make their money a different way. They'd probably figure it out eventually but with how unequal our society is I'm not gonna bet money on eventually happening before the shooting starts.
I actually can't envision what you mean by "Chicago won't let them do anything about it". Isn't Chicago the more liberal area that wants to fight climate change?
>Isn't Chicago the more liberal area that wants to fight climate change?
Right up until you have to take some other controversial step in order to do it.
I'm sure you can imagine how things would go if downstate farmers wanted to all apply some sort of fertilizer that would make their farming economically viable but the beta and the v1 versions of the chemical also killed some sort of visible wildlife.
It sounds like you're referring to herbicides and pesticides that kill bees and other pollinators. People have an obvious problem with pesticides that kill bees. It's not an acceptable level of collateral damage for dirt cheap corn and soybeans.
How about a desalination plant now? Even nuclear?
The water system has a storage capacity of 550 billion US gallons (2.1×109 m3) and provides over 1.2 billion US gallons (4,500,000 m3) per day of drinking water to more than eight million city residents, and another one million users in four upstate counties bordering on the system. Three separate sub-systems, each consisting of aqueducts and reservoirs, bring water from Upstate New York to New York City.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_water_supply_sys...
My idea is that a real need makes people reconsider their opinions which they held dear as long as they did not have a skin in the game.
It is an interesting question if a new world war is more likely than a major cultural change in our diet.
If traditional food sources go away and technology provides an alternative food source, that is what people will eat. Culture will follow technology, if that's what people have to do to survive.
EDIT:That mostly applies to the population in the developed world with access to capital, technology and industrial resources that we can use to adapt our food supply. Not everywhere in the world has those resources to fall back on though.
Societal collapse in for example India or Brazil would make things awkward real fast for a large chunk of the world
The military does not even play a role here. All the poorer countries need to do is a) not prevent their own young people from leaving, b) not prevent activity of smuggler gangs, c) complicate deportations by refusing to issue passports to their citizens who destroyed their papers underway. None of those actions need guns, much less superior guns.
[0] ... India and Brazil aren't really in the "top population growth" league. Look up population pyramids of Niger, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Yemen. Those graphs promise future mass migration streams. (https://www.populationpyramid.net)
[1] ... https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Your parent was suggesting that the developed world could not deal with a collapse of India or Brazil or several populous African countries.
What would happen if 20% of India decided that their society has collapsed and they should migrate at any cost to some developed country?
Perhaps seaweed could be used to produce something equivalent to tortillas or bread?
That's not fixing, that's a band aid, and an ugly one at that.
"Let's just eat worms, algae, problem fixed".
It's easy. It will happen. The only question is if it will take ten years or twenty.
Ten years ago? I'll still say it now and in 50 years.
In Toronto there is a decades-long established vegan restaurant called Buddha's Vegetarian Restaurant. They make a lot of mock meat products that are as realistic as the Impossible Burger, by layering and preparing things in such a way that they end up resembling meat fiber. You can easily fool yourself into thinking you are eating pulled pork there, for example.
So realistic vegetarian/vegan meat products have actually been around quite a while. Just not in the mainstream.
Where I'm at, I do the mediterranean diet, like most people (with a little more meat and BS snacks thrown in following the cultural example of the US, but still, nothing like the S.A.D.).
I'll also mention that most staple plants, legumes, etc. on that diet is cheaper in the US than here, where wages are double and more in the US. So price is not an excuse for Americans not to eat similarly.
People who want to eat "less processed food" can start eating less processed food. Highly processed, lab grown "meat" is hardly the way to eat "less processed food".
But I do agree with you on this "ah well, we'll just..." sunshiny outlook we keep hearing.
This year they've really been pushing edible "tree shrimp" cicadas. This is the first time I've heard that they were edible, and suddenly I'm hearing about it several times a week.
You can of course make the point fossilised oil is worse for global warming etc but from the point of view of the economy and population growth fossilised oil was much better than whale.
This would also apply to topsoil erosion. However this isn't the case with carbon emissions for example, unless we had some financial feedback loop (e.g. some carbon tax).
You say that as though it's a theorem. It's not. It's perhaps reasonable when discussing small perturbations of resources, but it's not a magical phenomena that will "just work" in a free market (assuming one even exists) at any scale.
The globe itself is finite and we have only finite time to make corrections to diminishing resources like oil. No one knows how long it will take to adapt, or what the human cost will be on the way to arriving at that adaptation. To make matters far worse, we have global warming to contend with and that's still subject to political whims and not even a concern yet for the "free market".
If you must take "the free market" as axiomatic truth, then consider also that the free market may "decide" that human extinction is the "optimal" outcome regardless of what monopolists and oligarchs say.
You place a lot of faith in it but "the free market" is not a construct that functions according to immutable natural laws. It's a man-made and very much corruptible system.
Nature does not comply with property rights, legal mechanisms, nor quarterly results. People have to force ecological concerns into their markets. That's a tall order and it won't just happen without a serious taste of what is to come, sadly.
Only once the resource has been consumed. And with topsoil I'm not sure you want to see what happens when food prices rise dramatically.
(My main concern with the book is the lack of references; for each chapter he provides " further reading", but I'd have preferred to see a source for each claim.)
It also helped the whales, but that was purely incidental. Without fossil energy, the whales would be gone.
Today, there is unfortunately too much oil and coal to force the search for alternatives. And the "whales" are the the climate and, again, that problem doesn't have the feedback loop because the atmosphere, like the high seas, does the tragedy-of-the-commons thing.
We can measure global warming, it is happening, and we know what drives it right now. We should at least try to model what kind of change would fix it. Including new technologies.
Today the problem is less the lack of ressources, but that we destroy the eco-system with our current technology. We can not just use another technologie to exploit a different kind of ressource. Instead we need a technology that has less consequences or even one that undoes the damage we already made.
Fossile oil reserves where not developed around 1800. They developed over millions of years. And actually they were already used in the middle east, china and myanmar way before europeans&americans started to use them to replace the shrinking and therefore more expensive supply of whale oil.
IMO the usage of petroleum was fueled(no pun intended) by the market and the rising price of whale blubber. It could have been used way earlier but was not lucrative.
Sadly the technologies that destroy our environment are still more lucrative then existing solutions that could solve our problem. That is especially if you look at the investments that are still made in this sector. We have the technologies to solve our problems, they are called renewable energies.
The problem is that we need a technology that takes over the market share that is currently taken by technologies that damage the environment. But that is very hard, as it would need to be more lucrative.
Just having the technology does not help, if people still use the damaging technologys. Cause they alone are enough to reach certain tipping points. And after those, no technology can save us even if it would undo damage that we caused earlier.
Now industry leaders are talking about "peak oil demand", the idea that demand for petrochemicals will crash over the next decade or so.
Most of the problems today are caused by our greed. I’m no MIT scholar nor as educated as most of you here, but from a anecdotal ground level I have seen it really seems some people at various positions from a office manager all the way to the highest political offices are driven by greed. Their greed usually results in negative outcomes for a lot of people.
I’m not sure how we can solve that.
It feels like when I want more stuff per unit time/effort, I’m just “trying to support my family and build a better life for my children”. But when other people do the same, it’s “greedy”. Is there any definition of “greedy” we could use for the purposes of this discussion that would apply yo all humans equally?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma
Its somebody who instills distrust in society by taking advantage of it.
The problem is the term greed is often used in a pejorative way as a proxy for success. If you work hard and achieve a lot and that comes with financial rewards, you are greedy by definition. Add in some snark about how the work hard part doesn't count somehow, and that's the modern critique of capitalism.
Oh, and rent seeking and corruption are because capitalism too and not at all human flaws seen to an even greater degree in every other economic system ever devised.
A billionaire could conceivably work much harder than the median person. However, they don't work 8000 times harder ($1 billion divided by the median net worth in America of $122k).
part from my first job working for the government here in the UK all my other jobs have been for companies founded and run by private individuals. They've helped me put food on my table and clothes on my children.
On the other hand I do agree that when it comes to inheritance, rent seeking, financial manipulation, etc there's a lot to do to close loopholes and create a more equitable system. There is a good argument to be made that the main reasons inequality has risen are not good ones. I do not see those as fundamentally flaws in capitalism, they're certainly flaws but you get abuses in any economic system. They're not fundamental. The Netherlands is definitely a capitalist society, but they also have a wealth tax for example. There are good arguments for land value taxes, which some countries use to good effect. There are plenty of tools available to us.
Opposition to addressing inequality in the US tends to take the form of arguing that the rich worked harder, earned their wealth, are more valuable, etc.; therefore, it is immoral to redistribute that wealth. The argument that I am attempting to make is that the differences in wealth are so dramatic that it isn't realistic that they earned it in the sense that free market advocates are implying.
That being said, I think it's also unlikely that they brought a skill to the table that's 8000 times more valuable. My understanding is that people who become billionaires do so by leveraging capital.
As a third world native I find corruption works better than everyone mindlessly following law under one self-righteous government becomes illegal under the next one, thereby making citizens life hell.
For example, if we make a back of the envelope estimate that an elite person has skills that are 10 times those of an average person (10 times smarter, stronger, more charismatic, better educated, etc.) and works 3 times longer then they could conceivably be 30 times more productive. If, to be conservative, we doubled that, then we could define greed as attempting to amass more than 60 times more wealth than the average person.
And you can be much more than 10x more productive than your average person without being 10x smarter. You can just have skills or have an idea that allows you to scale your contributions much more than an average person.
For instance, if we can teach cars to drive themselves, we have the capacity to save hundreds of millions, if not billions, of man hours a day.
The people who made significant contributions to that effort will have contributed thousands of times more to society than an average person.
If a surgeon saves 50 lives a year, I'd say that's a lot more than 10x what I'm doing.
I guess the way forward is to build a sustainable future for everyone and their families. And to get everyone to agree it's the best way to go about things.
I am very confused about this statement, can you please explain what is the "natural state of things" ?
Most people will chose child/spouse/relative without thinking twice and doing so is quite natural. Not everyone agree on that though, and would argue that the potential benefit the stranger could be to society should be taken into the equation.
Luckily, reality isn't that black and white in most cases, but most people will prioritize their in-group. That's just the way people work.
People will often prefer their own in-group to themselves.
Thus, it depends on how one defines the in-group, and one's own interests.
Looking at Coldtea's earlier comment:
>It's either pushed to us by greed, or given to us as a substitute for things we'd rather have (no friends, but here are games you can buy), (no work-life balance, but here's Netflix you can watch when you're home exhaused from work), (no community, but here's social media, go argue with strangers), etc.
showing how the 'in-group' has shrunk. Used to be a larger tribe, now you could be lucky to consider it an atomic family.
Community-building might be a possible solution, but how do you pull people away from their screens and get them out on the streets to make new connections and then turn that into a positive force that actually makes a different?
- stupidity
-fear
-greed
The problem is figuring out which instances of these are induced by society and civilization and which are inherent to human behavior in general. While we can try to address the former, the latter probably can't be fixed without significantly changing our definition/perception of what humans are.
I think recent history has shown that simply killing the Bourgeoisie tends to just eventually create another in the form of whoever had the power to do the other killings, and not always to better ends for the people. That form of communism has been shown to not really work. Democratic socialism though seems to work out pretty well for people.
That's difficult, as technology is here mostly because of greed.
Much of technology we don't really need, and even more so for most technology we consume (of course, you can't convince tech workers for that, as their salary, and hobbies, are based on the stuff).
It's either pushed to us by greed, or given to us as a substitute for things we'd rather have (no friends, but here are games you can buy), (no work-life balance, but here's Netflix you can watch when you're home exhaused from work), (no community, but here's social media, go argue with strangers), etc.
I am not sure if by technology you mean products or ideas. In case of the latter, that does not sound right. Smart driven persons do not have to be greedy in order to devote their live to something.
Smart people who have the ability and resources to change things don't really share the same problems as the target audience of mass market tech (I mean, hackernews is full of product reports illustrating this) - greed motivates them to solve problems of their "outgroup", filling the needs of all the people they don't really care about much.
There was a lot more to it than that, and largely speculative, but it was interesting. What if the reason we don't see alien civilizations all over our sky is that sociopathy in social animals is actually really rare or is always otherwise controlled for?
also, scientists, doctors, researchers, even maybe the military?, progress has been defined by a lot of different motivators than just greed i would think… (was einstein full of greed when he made his breakthroughs?)
Even if there were an event that wiped out 75% of people, it kicks the can down the road at most 30 years due to a baby boom.
Refusing to solve the real problem is what got us in to this mess.
It’s also utterly like us as a species to think that killing 3 out of 4 people is an easier fix than just living within our means.
Individuals aren't really responsible for the mass amounts of pollutants put into the atmosphere the same way corporations are. In order for the human population to "live within it's means" at an impactful scale it would require a change of capitalist philosophy that quite obviously isn't going to change anytime soon.
Kicking the can down the road 30 years is by far the best option we have available to us at this point (not that it will happen in my lifetime).
Capitalism won’t go without a fight.
Yes.
Absolutely the scale of the problem is unprecedented though, but that message hasn’t changed in 50 years.
We live in a world of finite resources. If we, as a species, overpopulate to the point where these finite resources run dry, what are the best options?
Climate change is a problem that makes us need a rapid solution right now even if its costly and painful, general depletion of resources really isn't; if it wasn't for climate change then we could just let the replacement of oil to renewables happen "naturally" as oil prices slowly increase as the supply decreases, the usual market incentives would be enough to manage the resource allocation.
Finiteness of resources is not as big of an issue as it looked in 1970s (when the original Limits to Growth study was made) - with a stable or shrinking population (current situation in developed world, soon-to-arrive globally) each person's share of physical resources is the same all the while as each person's need for physical resources (except energy) is not growing now (unlike 1970s), with advances in tech meeting the same needs now requires less resources so we can continue to grow our economy within the limits of the same finite resources.
We live in a society where everything is disposable, and that has a huge energy cost that we don't factor in because energy is so cheap right now. When energy is more expensive, repairing, conserving, and reusing a thing will be a better choice instead of throwing it out and buying a new one.
The reason they are considered "magic bullets" is because they involve game-changing shifts in technology that couldn't easily be conceived beforehand. Just look at the traveling salesman problem for a sample as to how a handful of input options could output a massive amount of output combinations. Every so often, one of those output combinations turns into a game-changer...then we have people spewing a new version of the rhetoric stated here.
I'd put my money on the game-changer.
IMHO, unfathomably short sighted is expecting the rate of technological progress over the last hundred years to be matched by the next 100 years. We went from the Wright Brothers in 1903, to Neil Armstrong walking on the moon in 1969, but by 2035 we'll still be using rockets similar to those we used in 1969.
The 20th C was a very unique time in history, I don't think humanity will experience something like that again for... many centuries.
The technological progress of the next hundred years will make the previous hundred look like we were all standing still. In the 20th century GPS was a bulky device, wireless comm was power hungry and slow, and any sort of real computing required an expensive lump at least the size of a small book -- two decades into the 21st century and I have a device in my pocket that is magic and for $10 I can put a SoC into an existing device (or something new) that has good GPS, fast cellular data, and sips power to give it “smarts” that would have been unprecedented in the late 20th.
The 20th century may have seen big changes in aerospace as we first learned how to master the field, but it was the dark ages when it comes to computing, materials sciences, biology, and solid-state physics -- every one of those fields will deliver results over the next 50 years that will make the 20th century look like the 18th century in terms of technological advancement.
Even in a Covid 19 aware world there's still a fair amount of denial about the complexity of the global economy. What happens if dissent - not co-operation - increases? It can certainly be argued that both invasions of Afghanistan were for resources. Suddened the gears will shift and world leaders are going to stick to peaceful cooperation?
Put another way, as stress in the systems begin to surface it seems unlikely humans will remain rational and broadly organized. The social fabric will likely breakdown before anything else. Trying to predict the future is difficult enough. Add to that, human emotional / psychological response to extremes - real as well as perceived - and all the models / scenarios mentioned in the article could end badly.
To put it brutally it's because on Hacker News and probably your social circle, there are too many people whose social status and income depends on being clever, or at least the perception of being clever. This leads us to seriously over-index on things that look like science or data analysis, without even being able to see alternatives that in my experience easily occur to the less (over?) educated.
Consider this article. It's actually a good case in point. The article can be summarized like this:
1. In the 1970s there were these modellers who predicted disaster. Lots of very influential and educated people took them uber-seriously and thought the Limits To Growth was proof positive that everything needed to change.
2. The model turned out to be useless and the disaster it predicted never happened, because the numbers it used for natural resource availability were garbage.
3. This major error did not reduce the modellers confidence in what they were doing (this seems to be a common theme with modellers). Instead they just doubled the number of natural resources and kept on going. That sounds rather arbitrary and not like a real fix to me, but alright. The new models indicated that nothing makes much of a difference for decades (until 2020), conveniently making the predictions unfalsifiable on any timeline that the original authors may have cared about.
4. Now a new researcher has published a new paper on these models, which also says nothing useful. We read that the models "aren't terribly enlightening" because we don't have any data past 2020 yet so which scenario we're supposedly in cannot be determined.
5. Despite all the above, the author concludes that "the most important takeaway from these models is that we need to take definitive action".
Wrong! A rational person can conclude nothing from the evidence in the article. Given that we can only judge the models by prior performance, we should anticipate that the models are probably wrong again. Moreover, the model scenarios don't have any probabilities attached to them and are described in sufficiently vague terms that nobody would ever be able to conclude which scenario we actually followed, again, making it an exercise in stargazing, not science.
Therefore, we cannot actually say we've "known for at least 50 years that our current pattern of consumption is not sustainable". We've known no such thing. The conclusions of the article and many of the commenters here seem like motivated reasoning as a consequence - or at least, it's certainly not Bayesian reasoning!
Invariably, the nature of a difficult situation is that they're difficult to get out of, so we tend to be very interested in avoiding difficult situations. This is why people are so interested in avoiding climate change, rather than waiting for more real-time data about how much climate change actually sucks so they can update their Bayesian priors and "avoid climate change when it happens again."
One now obscure reason for this is that back in the 1970s people didn't believe in global warming and the term "climate change" didn't exist as we know it today. Climatologists were worried about global cooling instead. At that point their records showed a generalized decline in temperature from the 1940s onwards and they believed it might continue indefinitely, leading to a new ice age. This was taken quite seriously, as newspaper records from the time show.
These days it can be hard to understand why they thought that, because if you get a modern graph of the long term temperature record it doesn't show this cooling effect. The reason is that climatologists have repeatedly issued new versions of the historical time series, each time reducing the extent to which this cooling period can be seen. The differences between versions are the extent to which models are allowed to modify the raw data. The climatologists do this because they are very certain in their theories, but a long period of cooling in the 20th century is not compatible with them, and thus they look for reasons why the data must be wrong. When they come up with such a reason it gets merged into the model and the next version "corrects" for it.
Modern graphs show basically no cooling, leading to some people concluding that the belief in global cooling was some sort of fringe belief, or even an urban legend, because obviously, how could they have thought that when no such cooling is visible.
Given the long track record of educated people having near unshakeable confidence in models even in the face of failed predictions (of which World3 is a salient example), this progressive replacement of measured historical data with synthetic data is well worth pondering deeply.
The one that always gets me is how people expect us to even develop those new technologies. With what energy? The ones we're running out of? The ones that are already more and more expensive to find?
And the fact that we'll be doing that...during increasing droughts and extreme weather...water shortages...crop shortages or even widespread failures...the associated political instability...refugee crises far beyond what we've experienced in recent years...all while the population grows...
And that doesn't even mention the fact that, just as when a privileged group of people lose that privilege and call it persecution, those of us in the developed world will see any drop in the standard of living as more extreme than it necessarily actually is. I fully expect right wing terrorism to increase; even now they're running around screaming about "Jews replacing them" -- what happens when their lives get very clearly worse? Who do you think they'll blame and how will they respond?
I could go on.
That's just, like, 1% of the different angles and interplaying variables involved. It's enormously complex, but all paths lead to serious instability, perhaps societal collapse.
Solar panels, batteries, and wind mills are comparatively easy to produce at ridiculous volumes. They’re a cheaper, faster and cleaner solution.
Buildings are also “adapted for each location”, but there is still an entire corpus of standardized techniques to do that that massively reduces costs compared to literally solving the problem from scratch at each site.
And why is it the case that “we don’t have the skilled people to do that”? If people value it, they’ll pay for it- and people can learn new skills in response to market need / pay - there is no predetermined number of “ad-tech software engineers” for example, they were “created” by the people themselves responding to market forces (pay)
Maybe you could have a universally implantable design, and maybe you could train people with the relevant skillset. The point is: we haven’t, and we aren’t, so other ways of generating green power are easier and cheaper. Nuclear will play a role for sure (the climate crisis is such that we need to do all the things) but it won’t cover more than 10% of our energy needs. I would be glad to get a rosier outlook on nuclear though.
>Nuclear power is the largest source of electricity in France, with a generation of 379.5 TWh, or 70.6%
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France
>France is Europe’s biggest net electricity exporter in 2019, says report
>French electricity costs are just 59% of German electricity prices.
https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/electricity-export...
>Nuclear power in Germany accounted for 11.63% of electricity supply in 2017
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France
>German power export surplus shrank 46.2% in 2020
https://www.reuters.com/article/germany-electricity-statisti...
The dream was "power too cheap to meter". Didn't come true back then, and it turns out after you account for safety systems like a containment building and backup cooling, it's far more expensive than alternatives.
To make things worse, making nuclear remotely profitable relies on running it as close to 24/7 as possible. Given that renewables exist and produce cheaper power, nuclear only gets to offer anything when renewables aren't working, which makes it even more expensive.
Economically, it's extremely risky. Why risk billions on a plant that might profit 20 years down the line, when you could build solar or wind faster, and profit faster?
Politically, it's not great because construction times are very long, so any politician that starts building them probably won't be there to see the benefit, and may have their work stopped by a successor.
Practically, we can't build it fast enough. It's a big, complex, specialized tasks that few people do because there's not much market.
> The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.
Nuclear can be safe but look at the failures of the USSR on Chernobyl to see how it depends completely on a country's culture and willingness to pay for this safety. Or even Fukushima, in a country very risk-averse and rich, corners were still cut even with the responsible engineer calling out that the sea walls were too low.
Should we trust governments around the world that each single one of them will keep their nuclear power plants safe for the foreseeable future until we can move away from it (let's say 50-100 years)?
I'm on the camp that no, we can't.
Just look at China, with ~50 nuclear plants (just 5% of energy production), while they have thousands of coal plants. It's practically impossible that they can shift to a reusable carbon-neutral energy production methods.
Also, China can build a hundred coal plants in a year, but there's no way it can do that with nuclear.
The realistic picture is that growth cannot be sustained and there will be dire consequences due to other factors too.
(climate change, migration, wet bulb temperatures, crop failures, people being too good at capitalism, etc.)
Compared to all the construction China has done in the past 50 years, it doesn't seem that difficult a target.
> Also, China can build a hundred coal plants in a year, but there's no way it can do that with nuclear.
That isn't a law of nature. They can build hundreds of plants of any type in a year.
Who says we haven't thought of it? There are plenty of candidates technologies, like moving food production into cities via vertical farms so top soil erosion is irrelevant. Lab grown is on the short-term horizon as well (5-10 years).
Water shortages are a non-issue, as we have an abundance of water. Certainly desalinated water is more expensive than water from fresh lakes and rivers, but it's becoming more cost effective, and if water increases in price, they'll meet somewhere and level off.
Climate change might be a challenge, but people will simply move away from the areas where it's no longer cost effective to live, at the very least because it's no longer cost effective to run businesses there due to insurance premiums.
The "Comprehensive Tech" model isn't too far fetched. It requires some disruptive changes, but not too drastic. Errors bars are wide due to climate change though, since it's effects are still unpredictable.
Water shortage is totally an issue in the American West. When you build a development you need to prove that there is enough water for your development for the next 100 years before the city will authorize you for tap. This is becoming a real challenge for developers in Phoenix and other areas.
Climate change is already effecting where people live, and it will likely get worse. Likely, the places that are unaffected by climate change are going to be so expensive that most of the people fleeing the effects of climate change will not be able to relocate there.
The Comprehensive Tech model is far fetched because it requires planning, cooperation, commitment, and sacrificing short term gains for long term stability--basically all of the things humans are terrible at.
It's simply one among many possible resolutions to soil erosion. There need not be a single solution. Soil erosion won't kill all traditional farming practices, and vertical farms can simply make up part of the difference (and progressively more if soil erosion isn't tackled directly).
> Likely, the places that are unaffected by climate change are going to be so expensive that most of the people fleeing the effects of climate change will not be able to relocate there.
We may or may not have refugee crises driven by climate change. There is simply no way to estimate these likelihoods.
> The Comprehensive Tech model is far fetched because it requires planning, cooperation, commitment, and sacrificing short term gains for long term stability--basically all of the things humans are terrible at.
You just described that regulations require demonstration of any new development's water access for 100 years, which is exactly the kind of planning, cooperation, and commitment you said we need. Clearly we are capable of it when necessary.
Regulations have certainly gotten a bad rap over the past few decades with the push for deregulation, but the worse the situation gets due to lax regulations, the more this will change.
Your conclusion is based on the naive assumption that circumstances don't change people's behaviour and so the past couple of decades will predict the next century, but history doesn't support this argument. Cultural views on nearly every issue have changed dramatically in each generation.
I think vertical farming is a great idea, and I think crop rotation and planting native species are great ideas. I just think all the sustainable long term solutions are a hard sell in the short term, and people tend to think and invest on the short term. Theoretically, a government could used sticks and carrots to get these things done, but I don't see the American government pulling that off effectively.
> You just described that regulations require demonstration of any new development's water access for 100 years, which is exactly the kind of planning, cooperation, and commitment you said we need. Clearly we are capable of it when necessary.
You got me. I think that resolution is an exception, not the rule. In any case, water shortages are a real thing.
> Cultural views on nearly every issue have changed dramatically in each generation.
I don't see that from my perspective. I see a lot of the same taboos and biases perpetuated from generation to generation, across all cultures. Young people lean progressive, and then they lean conservative twenty years later.
I don't think circumstances effect people's behavior until it they affects them personally, but then it's too late.
Obviously this isn't true for everyone. Some people will not change their behavior under any circumstances, e.g., Representative Steve Scalise fighting gun control after getting shot in a mass shooting.
There will be huge migration waves, that is expected.
Surely there are in fact, many technologies that we have thought of, that could help in a number of ways, if only we could realize them as practical and/or get them adopted in terms of politics and the economy.
The biggest issue is that we don’t monetize the externalities in the current state.
Stop eating meat, extended warranties in home products and designing goods in a way they can be easily repaired, led bulbs, better insulation for buildings, solar water heaters, heat pumps, bicycles...
We could easily consume a fifth of the resources we use now and be as happy if twenty selected things were banned in the world. But we live in a capitalist world, there's only hope in people taking the initiative.
Why do all climate policies currently being adopted allow increased carbon emissions and assume we will have carbon capture technologies to negate them right in the nick of time? This is the kind of irresponsible behaviour that we usually see only in addicts or psychopaths. How are we allowing this?
Alternatively, a push for antifragility acknowledges human's scale of environmental control and the tendency for unexpected things to happen simply because they are possible.
Ergodicity expresses the idea that a point of a moving system, either a dynamical system or a stochastic process, will eventually visit all parts of the space that the system moves in, in a uniform and random sense. [0]
Antifragility is a property of systems in which they increase in capability to thrive as a result of stressors, shocks, volatility, noise, mistakes, faults, attacks, or failures. [1]
The most antifragile system we know is the earth's biosphere and its component ecosystems. By reorganising it for our industrial processes, we have made it pretty fragile and we will be experiencing the results of that (in the form of more droughts, storms, temperature swings etc.) increasingly if we keep it up.
Adopting the stable world scenario would be accepting that we need to limit our use of the world's resources and give back a lot of land and ocean use to the natural ecosystems that gave us those resources in the first place -- rewilding large portions of the earth. This is about the only reasonable suggesting for antifragility I could conceive of, making it basically the same thing as the SW option.
I think clean energy will not by itself solve much. We need to reduce and reorganize at the same time as bringing on clean energy production, but that won't happen. Look at China, who is the world leader in clean energy production. I worry if fusion ever happens, people will just be like "great, electrical energy is free now", which won't be good.
I agree we need leaders thinking more than a few years ahead.
They can do that. It's the electoral system which doesn't give an incentive to do so.
COVID-19 is a perfect example of the folly in believing "technology will always save us". In the U.S., the general sentiment was that technology in the form of vaccines and entrepreneurship will rise to the occasion, so let's just ride it out until then. Well after more than a year of shit show after shit show and 600,000+ deaths in the U.S. alone along with countless reverberations in society (businesses failing, long term health effects of COVID-19, basically a year wasted of schooling across all ages, unemployment, shortages, etc.), people are still like "we got the vaccine, we did it everyone!" I still hear people saying they got COVID-19 like it was an inevitability and no big deal and also now that the vaccine is here no worries. I honestly doubt that climate change, agricultural exhaustion, ecosystem destruction, over population, etc. are anywhere near the public's or even government's serious thoughts. If they are, they're likely to be wholly short term.
We can't even solve simple problems like destroying the dams and decreasing salmon farms in the Pacific northwest that are decimating wild salmon populations which has side effects like starving the resident orcas.
I have zero hope humanity will solve these upcoming problems in any way shape or form. We'll end up just dealing with them and reacting to them once they're here, like we do with everything else (at best).
From a purely collectivist point of view, unchecked Covid only kills around 1% of the population and the vast majority are retired people, so it's not something society needed saving from as it has pretty much zero effect on humanity's long-term economic/technological progress.
But COVID to human civilisation is like a badly stubbed toe to a human. Painful. To be avoided. Maybe quite a bit of damage. Not really a threat if responded to in a rational way & with some whimpering.
[1] https://academic.oup.com/eurheartj/article/42/19/1866/614099...
[2] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.11.21258690v...
Suppose I thought you should get some injections, and you researched it and concluded they almost certainly wouldn't benefit you, and might harm you. Would you be OK with being characterized as a weird uncle who refused to get a treatment?
Not in any magical way just simply in the fact that we are the first who through our combination of wealth and knowledge-creation and with the help of technology and science have the potential of solving the problems we encounter.
It's not a guarantee but it's very different than previous civilizations (just as the challenges are).
In general humans and our ansestors have gradually been turning an environment that was sheer hell in its inception, into a much more habitable environment.
They all had the wealth, the power, the tech. They didn't have the tolerance for short term pain for greater future gains anymore. So they stood there watching how they went down, slowly but surely . And talking a lot.
I would not be surprised if future historians mark the 1990’s as the peak of the US empire
Again there is no certainty in life, but to say that this civilization is not very different than others before it is in my view ahistorial.
All countries have this now. How's this relevant to the point that less complacent countries will eclipse more complacent ones?
I'd put money on BAU2 over CT any day of the week.