We need to discuss effective solutions like consuming less (e.g. stopping fast fashion habits, stopping the cars-becoming-bigger trends, not moving to 5G, etc).

These "scientisticians are going to fix it (while we gorge)" headlines are bad because they contribute to the public opinion that business-as-usual is ok and will lead to a good outcome. It will not, and we are headed for a dreadful climate so far. This is often called green-washing

I agree that we need to use effective solutions, but the first and foremost of those solutions is a much more simpler one than reducing consumption. Every nation (with rare exceptions) is currently burning fossil fuel for the single purpose of reducing costs. Fossil fuels are a cost saving tactic, saving money while producing pollution.

An expensive fossil free energy grid would cause disruptions to consumption but at the same time it would also allow things to mostly be business-as-usual. It just shifts the priority to care about the energy efficiency when cheap fossil fuels aren't there to be burned.

In contrast, trying to reduce consumption while keeping fossil fuels in the energy grid is unlikely to work. Consumers who care might reduce their own consumption a bit, but industries and every else will continue to draw more and more power from fossil fuel power plants and pollution will continue to rise. Public opinion will just grow more divided between those that self-sacrifice and those that don't.

I think we need to decrease our footprints radically, but I think the "consume less" framing scares people (though honestly, we should be scared ...)

But in the cases you name, and in many others, the messed up part is that we're creating so much stuff/waste that _isn't_ consumable, and so we needlessly use new resources.

Fast fashion is destructive because both the retailers and the end consumers end up throwing out so much stuff that piles up in landfills and isn't recyclable. If yesterday's garment was cheap (in a resource sense) to recycle into fiber to make a new garment, it would be a lot less harmful.

The cars-becoming-bigger pattern, in part an arms race between car manufacturers to improve safety ratings (in a collision, passengers in the heavier car experience smaller forces; who cares about pedestrians), with the net effect that after several years everyone has more massive cars but their safety edge has been totally eroded away. We no longer get a benefit, but we're all stuck pushing around extra metal for every mile driven.

The move to 5G didn't _have_ to be harmful, but we produce waste streams in all the devices that are now discarded which are _not_ consumed. Most of the components in the phones we toss every 2 years are still fine, but we make it so hard to put them all to good use.

The _unconsumed_ garments that go to a landfill, the _unconsumed_ discarded phones, touch screens, batteries, the ... non-benefit of moving around excess car (including those 4 empty seats when a person drives alone) are just as much the problem.

Economic growth is possible without higher emissions. https://twitter.com/MaxCRoser/status/1430509654698831878

Because wealth inequality. Rich people getting richer, putting their money in the bank. GDP grows, but median citizen is losing wealth.

Do you know that banks, by and large, don't just stuff your money in a piggy bank?

(Interest on excess reserves is making the discussion a bit more complicated, alas.)

Sounds like your perspective is that human consumption is fundamentally the problem. Doesn’t this perspective lead to a pretty bleak future?

My proposition is that we have to deal with our scale if we don't want to be the bacterias that took over the petri dish and died because they made their environment toxic for themselves.

We have never had to care so far because we were not numerous. Now human activity is similar to geological forces like rain/volcanoes/etc and i think we should plan how we can exist on a stable cycle.

Mindless growth leads to us breaking our environment through our scale. Scale is exponential so after thousands of years we have a small window of 100 years where we grew so high in impact that we may break it all. It's a first for us, and i hope we can see further than the mold in the petri dish and make a concerted plan on how to live in a stable cycle without growing.

I'm advocating for planning a sustainable future. It's the first time in History we have to deal with this. People assume the future is like the past, and other incorrect things. They also live in cities, removed from physical realities. They only understand the collapse of species through some stats in a newspaper they forget the next day, and the energy/resources supply chains are unknown to them until there is a blackout and they lose internet for a few hours.

The future seems bleak in many ways for physical reasons. I don't think pretending we are not reaching planetary limits will help. I think it will make the fall harder. I would rather we concert and plan together what level of quality of life we want, and how we can stabilize our population, so we can cycle generations of human in a sustainable way.

By his logic the simpler option is just to make living more difficult and to ultimately find ways to kill dumb consumers faster? We could just start heavily incentivizing vaping, smoking and alcohol consumption? Pushing contraceptives is also a big one, you might even start chipping at the goals of the elites if you slowed population growth AND reduced consumerism...

whether or not it's consumption in particular it's undeniably human activity that's the problem

business as usual leads to a pretty bleak future and if we refuse to confront this how will we even begin to adapt to a planet rapidly growing more difficult to inhabit

Why is 5G bad, I honestly don’t know?

Usually requires a new phone, I think the poster meant planned obsolescence.

It's not like 4G will shut down any time soon nor that we're at a stage where we have any use case for 5G speeds on a phone.

I don't see how 5G fits into a planned obsolescence argument.

Just wait a few years!

In a few years the majority of us will swap our phones anyway, 5G or no 5G.

Don't get me wrong, if the comment above said planned obsolescence instead of 5G, I'd be fully aboard. But 5G on its own makes no difference on climate change that I'm aware of.

5G is a new park of machines for the network operators. It's also a new park of machines for the consumers.

It's huge because we are so numerous.

Imagine you renew a boat fleet. Imagine the impact on the nearby forest. Going from no boats to having a fleet may be worth the damage. Going from a very good fleet to a slightly more advanced fleet may not be worth it.

Network infra and smartphones are the same. They require us to mine all their components and use energy to transform them.

4G seems to provide enough value to me. I don't like the tradeoff we get of "i can download 4K in the elevator now" (seems unnecessary to me) vs "we unleashed megatones of CO2, mined out large cobalt mines that will never form again in milleniaz to come, etc (seems critical to me)

In this context, perhaps higher power consumption (owen side) relative to 4G?

Power consumption of 5G is about 20x lower than 3G and getting lower as we speak (there are many 5G technologies only gradually getting adopted). So probably he meant the planned obsolescence mentioned already above.

Any time we increase efficiency, we also increase consumption. 5G increases efficiency, it's true. Now people consume more. It's enables new usages which people will jump on.

This happens in History every time we improve efficiency. Cars now consume a fraction of what early cars did, yet we use these efficiency gains to stuff them with gadgets, and make them bigger, and overall they still consume more than they used now in absolute terms.

In other words the engine inside your modern car is more fuel efficient than the first Ford, but we now make SUV that consume way more to produce and operate, can't be repaired/services easily, and people own multiple of them per household.

This "rebound effect" can be seen everywhere

Whatever flaws it has are completely unrelated to climate.

OP might just be venting.

> (e.g. stopping fast fashion habits, stopping the cars-becoming-bigger trends, not moving to 5G, etc).

Do you have any idea how much of a problem so called fast fashion habits actually are? Same for the others?

Scale matters.

We moved from having a few new clothes a year to having new clothes as often as we want. We have also exponentially grown our population.

An Earth with let's say 2 billion people at 2 set of clothes a year has considerably less environment impact that an Earth with 8 billion people averaging let's say 10 set of clothes a year.

The scale of deforestation to produce coton, and the boom of the plastic fiber industry are sizable phenomenons with huge visible consequences. Whole industries exist now in Bangladesh and Vietnam for instance that didn't exist 20 years ago. Factories, supply chains, large yearly resources consumption, etc.

These changes are visible anywhere from the shops of wealthy nation cities, to Google Earth timeline where you see entire forests disappear every year now (rate is exponentially accelerating)

You use a lot of adjectives, but not a lot of numbers.

How much of a problem is this actually? Eg what proportion of our overall emissions (or environment impact etc) are from the manufacture and supply of clothing? And how much extra is from 'fast fashion' vs a return to old fashioned clothing habits?

I just did a very quick search, and found eg https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector Their numbers suggest that cotton and clothing barely show up.

You are effectively saying we should get over capitalism.

I agree, but I gotta ask why are you sugar coating it?

Consuming less is not a serious solution and never has been.

I’m not sure why you think this? We have finite resources, a heavily populated planet and a few nations consuming the vast majority of the resources. Do you honestly think that’s maintainable in perpetuity?

I’d suggest your viewpoint is highly likely to be one of privilege, not from one of poverty.

Perhaps a charitable interpretation of the parent post would be "Voluntarily consuming less is not a serious solution and never has been."

A poverty viewpoint is indeed relevant - there are so many objectively poor people who will consume more to fill their currently unmet needs as soon as they can afford to (so the only way to prevent this consumption increase is to ensure that they stay in poverty); and it should be expected that people will reduce consumption en masse only when they can't afford the current consumption (no matter if caused by prices skyrocketing, or an impactful carbon/fuel tax, or simply declining income), and they will be very unhappy about it as they will treat this reduction as a shift from privilege to poverty.

And a realistic threat of being prevented to escape from poverty or being forced to shift from privilege to poverty IMHO would be considered by people as an existential threat comparable to global warming (I mean, for many people the main threat of global warming is the expected decrease in their living standards caused by it) and a much stronger motivation to act because, unlike climate change, that threat would be (a) closer in time, (b) more certain, and (c) with a clear way to fight against it - voting out a politician or rioting in the streets won't fix climate change (you'd need global coordination for that), but it definitely could suffice to kill any local carbon tax or government imposed reduction of consumption.

TL;DR the way humans behave, it should be expected that they will fight against a decrease in consumption much harder than they would fight against climate change.

For one its not just about stopping the unfavorable trend, but also reversing it, not to mention remediation all the pollution in the environment.

All this is going to be insane energy and also resource intensive and totally impossible just by saving some resource here and there. A massive expansion of clean energy sources is whats needed, anything else just wont work.

Demanding a global decrease in consumption is just about the most privileged viewpoint possible.

Oh - just to be clear - I'm absolutely not of that viewpoint at all.

If they were serious about saving the environment and not just doing whatever weird thing it is to demand that people buy fewer phones, they'd be pushing for more clean energy. As countries become richer they pollute less and have the resources to protect themselves from climate change. What is needed is a wealthier world, not a poorer one.

I have to agree. It's more about changing habits, efficiency savings, and replacements.

Let's take a simple examples: meat. There's quite a saving to be had by everyone eating less meat, but that doesn't mean we eat less food in general... It's just replaced with something else less harmful to the environment.

Another example would be plastic, I've starting seeing more use of those bamboo trays for food containers. Plastic knives and forks are being replaced with wooden ones. Etc

You're looking at bacterias on a petri dish. They are exponentially taking over the dish and soon will collapse under their own activity.

That's us. An advantage we have over the bacterias is that we can discuss together how we will face the limits of our box.

Saying "not slowing down and consuming everything in the dish is not serious" confuses me. It's the only serious thing here. Everything else is noise before we collapse.

Exponential scale is scary. Bacterias doubling every cycle means 1 cycle before the bottle is full, it's half full. You're looking around and there is still plenty of room. Next cycle it's 100% and you're gasping for air.

Humans don't double every cycle but you only need 7% growth to double in 10 years.

So when you hear that we use X% more steel or coal every year, keep in mind it's a doubling cycle every few years.

Reducing consumption (per capita and/or population size) is the only serious discussion to not hit the walls and gasp for air

Not entirely true. Changing consumer habits is possible, but not without it being replaced by something that's more sustainable AND more convenient.

That's the point. It's about consuming different things, not consuming less. And consuming different things that are at least as good, or better than the things we're consuming now. Nobody has ever, or will ever, make any serious progress by shaming people into not doing the things they want to do.

You're correct. Any plan that calls for less consumption is a non-starter. At this point it's incredibly harmful to hold on to an approach that's going nowhere and never will. We no longer have the luxury to indulge fantasies.

Consumption habits will need to change, people will need to start eating less meat. Factory farming of cattle and other animals is a large contributor of global emissions. So less consumption is definitely part of the answer.

On the other hand, any plan that doesn't call for less consumption is simply going to be inadequate.

Societies of the past had to deal with this. We still deal with this in wealthy societies actually. When the US west coast is hot and dry, authorities ration water usage.

I can imagine governements doing a more serious job and limiting more things for the common good (aka we don't kill ourselves by destroying our environment)

exponential growth is a fantasy until fusion power and asteroid mining become real

I never understood this line of thought. Economic growth is not a growth of raw material consumption. There has been some correlation but you could imagine a forever growing GDP with shrinking raw material usage without any major problem as long as there is technological or organisational progress.

You can imagine it, but it doesn't track with reality. Economic growth has been synonymous with fast fashion, planned obsolescence, new cars every few years, a new phone every year, more and more meat in our diets, cheap plastic crap and so on - conspicuous consumption.

> We need to discuss effective solutions like consuming less (e.g. stopping fast fashion habits, stopping the cars-becoming-bigger trends, not moving to 5G, etc).

Yes, let's ban various forms of advertising, for starters. It's the main driver of our over-consumption.

It’s one thing to say every little bit helps, but when your talking about something that’s never going to offset even 1% of current CO2 output it’s reasonable to suggest focusing on more effective solutions.

Especially when actually mining transporting and distributing the material is going to release significant CO2.

We have almost 8 billion people on the planet, we absolutely need to "focus" on every possible solution that may work.

There are currently over 100 proposed solutions that do actually add up to more than enough sequestration but the conversation needs to change and the disparaging whataboutism needs to end.

If people get apathetic or nihilism sets in nobody will be able to make the changes required.

You can’t use every approach as iron seeding and this both do the same thing and the oceans are finite.

So this isn’t a 1% solution, it’s not even a 0.1% soliton it might be a 0.01% solution. “50,000 tonnes of tephra – a bulk carrier vessel’s worth – offshore could sequester 2750 tonnes of atmospheric carbon dioxide. This, they said, equates to a cost of around £43 per tonne of carbon dioxide sequestered” assuming absolutely zero CO2 was released in the process.

Bulk carriers are quite efficient and could move 50,000 tons ~= 0.4 tons of CO2 per mile in a straight line. Which sounds fine except you can’t simply dump all 50,000 tons 1 mile off shore and expect anything useful to happen. If you can dump on average 50 tons per mile you just released ~400 tons to sequester 2750. And that’s assuming it somehow gets loaded and unloaded without releasing any extra CO2.

You're ignoring that science improves and leads to further discovery.

It's perfectly fine if 0.00000001% of the population spends their lives on something that achieves nothing if a few of these lead to further developments.

0.00000001% of the global population is less than one person.

Which is kind of the issue, we need a significant fraction of the global workforce to solve climate change. Inefficiency is useless because we lack the economic capacity to solve climate change inefficiently.

Busywork is as useful as doing nothing.

What does whataboutism mean here?

A comprehensive carbon tax that's more expensive than CO2 sequestration will solve the problem by itself (or rather by market forces, everyone will either optimize away emissions or offset them with sequestration rather than pay the tax). For that we need a sequestration method that's cheap enough that a comprehensive CO2 tax at that price point is viable and won't be riddled with loopholes. $50/ton is still a bit high for that, but it's a lot closer than other methods we have so far.

If you haven't noticed, most Americans aren't fit...and this is IMO precisely the reason why. The world of instant gratification has ruined our abilities to see and think long term.

Most americans aren't fit because nutritious food is expensive and more time consuming than sugar food.

Time consuming, yes. More expensive, no. People with long term perspective are willing to take the time to provide healthful meals for themselves.

Obesity is strongly correlated with poverty. Don't go mistaking weight as a function of work ethic or long term perspective. Many people both do not have enough to eat and are obese.