TBF there are far, far too many technological solutions that are “science will save us” but haven’t been fully fleshed out, studied, or require some modest form of unobtainium to work in mass deployment. Also, a huge chunk of those solutions would have to have been implemented 20 years ago, yet haven’t even made it off the proverbial drawing board yet.
IMO solutions need to be implemented now, like wind, solar, especially nuclear power, EV, etc. Yeah, nuclear is temporary, and yes, nothing stays in place longer than a temporary solution, but it’s a known and can be built now rather than yet another 5-15 years of waiting for untried tech solutions. Unfortunately the comic isn’t entirely wrong, we are going to need to lose some things if we want to save ourselves.
Yeah, nuclear is temporary, and yes, nothing stays in place longer than a temporary solution, but it’s a known and can be built now rather than yet another 5-15 years of waiting for untried tech solutions.
I guess you could say nuclear power can be built "now". From a certain point of view.
The last nuclear reactor to go online in the United States took 14 years to build - from breaking ground in 2009 to going online in 2023 - at a cost of thirty billion dollars.
And that wasn't even a new nuclear power site, it was a additional reactor added on as an existing site, so planning and permitting and so on were significantly faster then a new nuclear power plant would be.
So yes, we could start the process of building a new nuclear reactor in the United States and commit 30 billion in taxpayer money to it. And after 20 to 30 years that reactor might come online.
Or we could commit 30 billion dollars to subsidizing wind and solar power, and get that power generation online in the next few years, at a significantly lower cost per kilowatt.
This doesn’t have to be the binary choice you’re making it. Both can be done. Furthermore I also disagree with the premise that imperfect solutions should be immediately discounted. There is no perfect solution.
Both can be done, of course, and we live in a world with limited resources. There's no reason to commit resources to nuclear when those resources can, demonstratively and statistically, be used far more efficiently to implement other options.
It's like saying, yes, I can buy a used car for $5k cash now, or, on the other hand, I could pay $50k to get on the waiting list for a Tesla Cybertruck to be delivered in like five years.
And when I point out that the Cybertruck is less reliable, more expensive, and will leave me without a car for 5 years while I'm waiting, you say "well, why don't you buy the used car and put yourself on the Cybertruck waiting list?"
And I haven't even touched on the moral and environmental issues with nuclear power. I shouldn't have to. New nuclear is clearly the least efficient form of non-emitting power generation in the world. That should be the end of the discussion.
They say this and then reject every technological solution that exists. Like wind or solar energy. Trains. Ebikes. The goalposts always get moved to some not yet existant technology so nothing needs to change.
But my mind went to meat consumption, which is higher in the developed world, is considered indicative of a high standard of living, and, in my opinion, is best addressed not by lab-grown meat (or other technological solutions), but by reduced consumption (the reduced living standard).
I would argue that reduced meat can be either the result of a lower living standard or a higher one. This is the issue a lot of people on each side refuse to see, a higher standard of life can be more efficient with systems either technological or social which make it possible.
Really we need a blend of each, yes the techphobes are right we don't want to live in battery farms where only efficiency matters but also we don't want to live in the drudgery of a Neolithic existence. We need to identify and adopt systems that allow a good quality of life and enables diversity of thought and lifestyle, tech can make this possible but is unlikely to do it alone.
Yes it's difficult but we need social growth, that means people tying new things and demonstrating them to the world. We should be using our absurd luxury and wealth here in the developed nations to help develop solutions everyone can use to live a good life, instead of flexing fast cars and designer clothes we should be spreading knowledge of healthy food, useful educational and organizational tools, community project structures which enable people to work on shared goals and mutually beneficial platforms...
We have a very privileged platform in the world, we should use it to show that even the richest most well educated, traveled and socialised people prefer a low or no meat diet.
The idea that eliminating meat reduces your standard of living is a preconceived bias. It is not an accident you believe that. You are being manipulated. If you investigate you will find that people who do it report improvements in their standard of living, not reduction. Meat is simply a way of refining cheap, sustainable, healthy plants into scarce, expensive, toxic and addictive processed food, by abusing the bodies and minds of sentient creatures. It is literally killing you and everyone you know. The more meat you eat, the younger you die and the more diseases you experience. Nearly all the top ten killers of humans on Earth today, and especially in the Western world, is caused by an animal-based diet: heart disease, stroke, diabetes, Alzheimer's, cancer, and more. Heart disease, diabetes, AND RECENTLY ALZHEIMER'S have all been reversed in massive clinical trials, by doing little more than eliminating toxic animal products from the diet.
The classic fallacy that industries have sold us over the past decades that technology would solve all our problems. So funny. They are doing the same again with AI
The thing is they have solved an endless litany of problems and improved life for everyone on a radical scale thousands of times, but then people get born into the world snd never see those problems - have you ever even had to worry about milk souring let alone storing produce to last the winter? Have you ever even been attacked by a predator? That was a way of life for our ancestors before technology, the concept of clean drinking water didn't even come close to meaning the same thing but their version of it was a daily struggle which often went unmet regardless.
Go back in time before the industrial revolution and ask.a serf what their problems are, I bet.you nor I have ever faced a single one of them. It'd be fun to listen to the conversation you explaining that politicians are corrupt and avocados are expensive, he doesn't know what they are but he says he's thy literal property of a baron that doesn't even pretend to care what he thinks and mice got into his grainstore so some of his kids will starve this winter.
Tech had made your life significantly better and the coming wave of ai tools is going to make it much better again and allow things you never even imagined possible like localized food networks and community based industry, you'll use it all snd move on to complaining asteroid mining is over hyped or whatever comes next
That’s what quantum computers are for. We can use parallel universes to eliminate lag in our bitcoin calculations. It’s like we’re stealing their money.
We live much more efficiently than we ever have, there aren't enough trees and wild game for us to live like the Neolithic - the non tech solution is mass genocide or total ecological destruction of the planet. Not really solutions.
They are very much the solutions our „advanced civilization” is heading (and accelerating) towards.
Remember, the ones on top needed us healthy to report to work on monday. Because they wanted a bigger yacht. Once there is no work, or monday we’re all just wasting oxygen and they won’t shudder sending us to wars or letting us all die off.
If everyone lived like developed countries we would need even less resources because the birth rate is so low we wouldn't suffer over population. Also look at how less developed countries dispose of garbage.
Not denying how some developed countries send their trash to developing countries for disposal on the beaches. Fuck them. CEO's and politicians responsible need the rope.
do you really think the population would be allowed to reduce? GDP growth would never be allowed to slow down (or heaven forbid GDP shrink) and right now countries with low birth rates use immigration to fill that gap.
look at Canada: small birth rate, but aiming for 100 million population by 2100.
Multiple wealthy countries have put incentives in place to encourage increased birth rates, all have failed. Other than forcibly inseminating women there's not much they could do.
why do I need to talk to the voters to see the policies that they support by voting Republican?
it seems like you're a Libertarian, voting Republican might make sense to you I guess, because Libertarians with critical thinking skills are Left-Anarchists
It doesn't matter what is "allowed," people in highly developed countries, especially ones with low immigration, are experiencing freefalling birth rates that are already well below the replacement rate, and governments are BEGGING women to have more babies. See South Korea, China, and Japan
Next you're all gonna say I should use dentures to chew my own food rather than have my underage slave girls chew it and spit in my mouth. You people disgust me.
Wait... It's developed countries using up all our resources? Isn't that, like, the opposite of the truth?
And technical solutions are a panacea? Is what tech bros have shown us?
This seems like a very odd meme
Afaik, Americans use about 20% of the world’s resources with about 4% of the population. China and India both do use a lot of resources, but they’re also a third of the world’s population
Yes, but when taking regional inequality in account, the picture becomes clearer. There are regions in both China and India where the per capital consumption is nearly as bad as in the US.
Certainly, but those are the wealthy regions, which don’t really fit into the “developing” stage anymore imo. They’re more developed than the (mainland) UK was when the terminology became common.
Does that matter? It’s not an attack on Americans: Europeans, Japanese people and South Koreans also use more than their fair share, along with many other countries, roughly correlated with wealth.
AFAIK, anarcho-primitivism advocates for stopping anything they deem to be "civilizational technology". Live like the amish in the best case, do away with agriculture in the worst case.
Degrowth is a movement away from a growth-at-all-costs economy and towards one where production that benefits the majority of people.
I thought it was targeted at ecofascists who want the global south to stay poor because having clean water and malaria treatments is bad for the environment somehow.
Like there's a lot of people saying that China's ongoing industrialisation and raising the standard of living is bad. But China is actually implementing renewables much faster than the West did, so China's industrialization is not the same story. Now yes, there are problems with what China is doing. For example, as they transition away from coal they are selling their leftover coal to poorer and less advanced countries, and that's fucked. But this isn't a technological inevitability of industrialization, it's simply a policy failure. China is doing better than the West did, and China has the technological potential to be doing even better if their politicians so chose. So the fundamental assumptions of ecofascism are not true. China should be industrializing in a greener way, rather than remaining a production center for cheap plastic garbage the West uses, which is what ecofascists prefer.
I think green shirt's statement is a dogwhistle. I don't think someone advocating degrowth would have used the same words. As a supporter of degrowth myself, I don't think degrowth means the same thing as "reducing living standards". For example I don't own a car, and I'm happier riding a bike every day. Less growth increased my standard of living. I'm also vegan, and I rarely miss meat. I prefer the lack of guilt over the taste of meat. So I don't think my standard of living is any lower for having abandoned my reliance on animal subjugation and excessive land and water use. I don't think degrowth has to mean giving up the internet, or clean drinking water, or medicine, or many of the actual benefits of living in a developed nation.
I don't think it's a strawman of degrowthers. I think green shirt is supposed to be an ecofascist. He's talking like an ecofascist, and being made fun of with the arguments that work on ecofascists.
Hey, why is making everyone use public transit instead of wastefully having everyone have their own private vehicle treated as "lowering living standards," huh?
Especially in a world where there's so many fucking cars that you can get stuck in traffic for hours and hours. We've rounded the bend where actually having serious public transit, that was moving on every public street every ten minutes, you'd suddenly have a lot more freedom of movement than you currently do with hours and hours of traffic. Public transit literally could be faster than a car in many big cities but people are too hung up on having to be around other people.
But nooooo, somehow freeing people from the logistically stupid nightmare of every human having a car and focusing on transit, we have to call that a "reduction in living standards." Get the fuck out of here.
As someone without a car but with a child let me tell you, cars significantly reduce our living standard.
Most places we go I need to constantly tell my toddler not to walk too much to the left or right or run or slow down, I have to control her like a slave, or suppress her emerging wish for independence by holding her by the hand all the time, or even worse, put her in a stroller. Hell there are so many cars parked here (even on corners) that I often cannot leave the sidewalk safely with a stroller or cross the street safely (so that I would see a coming car or a coming car would see me).
I'd happily be less of a "germophobe" and have my kid run around with dirty hands, pick up dirt, etc. But car dirt is definitely not the "healthy dirt" so no, no dirt for you. Don't touch, don't play.
I want my child to grow up in a city that embraces her existence. I want her to feel like a welcomed member of society. But instead I have to keep telling her so many negative things, this is dangerous, don't go there, don't do this. She still loves being downtown and prefers this often to the playground or nature (which we try to encourage). She loves the tram and trains. But there are so many restrictions of free movement it breaks my heart.
And I am in a privileged position living in a German city. I can't even begin to imagine how devastating it would be in an even more car centric society.
Hey, why is making everyone use public transit instead of wastefully having everyone have their own private vehicle treated as "lowering living standards," huh?
My last job was 1 hour away by bus and 15 minutes by car.
In my book, losing 1.5 hours per day, five days a week, is a drop in living standards.
