Can the US become sustainable?

Great Debates
1

(Prelude)

I spent two weeks in Florida in 2008 and came away with some opinions regarding sustainability and enviromental awareness that made me rather pessimistic.

The US infrastructure seems incredibly car-focused. During my stay I saw only two busses, and a total of four people riding bikes. Other than me and my friends, practically nobody walked the streets. The cities seem built with only car-travel in mind. Areas are heavily segregated, meaning you have to travel by car from your residence to shop, work or recreate. Public transportation seemed underdeveloped or non-existent and people usually responded with polite befuddlement or outright fear/suspicion when we said we were walking somewhere.

Everything (hyperbole) came in small, plastic non-recyclable packages. At breakfast in the hotel, three people eating would produce a shopping bag full of waste which was non-recyclable. It just seemed incredibly wasteful. There was a huge milk container with a tap, for cereal, and right next to it a big basket of small plastic packaged with milk for coffy drinkers. People would stand next to a huge tank of milk and still pick up a handful of plastic containers for their coffy, rather than just pour some.

The culture itself seemed to focus almost exclusively on materialistic consumption as a way of self expression. Buying stuff, talking about buying stuff, planning to buy stuff and dreaming about buying stuff seemed to be a big part of peoples lives. Basically, it felt like I hadn’t travelled a few thousand miles west, but rather a few decades back in time to the 80’s.

(Actual question)

Assuming that material resources are not infinite (which makes sense), and some are closer to running out or peaking than others, can the US be made sustainable?

2

Can you define “sustainable” and demonstrate how the US is currently not “sustainable”? Also, where do you live?

3

Norrköping according to his profile.

4

The US is more spread out with fewer people per square mile than many regions of Europe. Public transportation tends to be non-viable. You’d have to have tens of thousands of buses (or vans) to service reasonable quantities of the suburbs, and tens of thousands of drivers to go with it.

Why is trash bad?

What else is there in life but stuff? Sitting in a vacuum isn’t very fulfilling spiritually or otherwise.

Material resources can be made to be equivalently infinite. Besides harvesting space, our economy is going to continue moving online. Your office might be in Second Life, your meetings with your subsidiaries on the opposite side of the planet might be done in Second Life, you might take your date out on the town in Second Life. Everyone can have a mansion with a beautiful view in Second Life.

Virtual items are already worth money and their value as worthwhile items is going to increase. And they are, for all intents and purposes, infinite.

5

:dubious: Where were you at in Florida? I’ve been there several times, and walking around (unless you are in the Everglades is pretty normal. To be sure, if you were in the middle of a swamp then I could see people either being befuddled or have fear/suspicion of your desire to go walking about. Other than that I have to call bullshit on this.

Certainly, depending on what runs out and what the alternatives are. If you are talking about oil (and from the ‘peak’ part I assume you are, though other materials also go through peak production), then I’d say the answer is ‘yes’…we can sustain our current lifestyle wrt personal transport almost indefinitely, IMHO. If you are talking about power generation and our huge use of it, again, I’d have to say the answer is ‘yes’…we can sustain our current levels of power usage (and probably even higher) almost indefinitely (coal deposits alone in the US won’t run out for hundreds of more years at current usage levels).

Granted, there are a lot of nuances to this discussion, and there will be some changes to our lifestyle and economy depending on how things pan out. That said, to me this is another version of ‘is our current civilization, dependent as it is on whale oil, sustainable in the long run, or will we have to go back to living in caves??’.

-XT

6

My immediate to this was ‘are you joking?’, but after some consideration it’s a bit more nuanced than that.

  • Trash inherantly signifies an unnecessary waste of manufacturing resources (relevant to sustainability)
  • It requires additional resources to collect and transport to areas for dumping. In Europe this is actually the major problem, because we’re running out of space for landfill, but in US it’s just a cost of movement to some deserted area…
  • In practice trash is never perfectly disposed of, hence our cities are filled with it and there is an island of crap floating in the Pacific. I guess this is mainly irrelevant to sustainability, though there are some relevant consequences.
    I don’t see how you could possible argue that trash is anything other than bad frankly

Spoken like a true capitalist consumer :slight_smile: Some things I enjoy that don’t involve consumption for the sake of consumption:

  • Hiking
  • Gardening / growing food
  • Cooking
  • Learning fings about stuff an dat
  • Intelligent discussion about the topics of the day
    If you honestly believe your statement then you are worthy of pity

:rolleyes:

7

Sure, but at the same time, people don’t want to have to carry around a bag to put stuff in every time they go out. They don’t want to have to carry around a thermos, cutlery, or whatever else. If there’s no significant downside to giving people a bit of convenience, then you may as well free up their hands.

The taxpayer considers it worth his convenience to pay for someone to collect trash.

An island of crap floating in the Pacific only matters to 0.01% of fish and plankton on the planet. I’m not a fish. Fish exist to please me as the only life form on the planet that can be shown to even care about the majesty of the Earth. To the fish, a piece of plastic is just an odd, translucent floating rock. It doesn’t care about rocks one way or the other.

And there’s nothing in the world to stop the taxpayer from calling up their congressman and asking to have trash cleaned up from the surface of the ocean. We could easily have ships going out to clean away trash from the sea once a year or whenever if anyone actually cared. Yet we don’t. Your insistence that it’s a blight on the planet isn’t demonstrated by the amount of fervor to correct it that I sense in you or pretty much anyone.

So, what relevant consequences are there?

People didn’t have the free time to hike or garden for enjoyment before “things”. Cooking was generally done with minimal spice or seasoning and preservation was an issue. Most people were uneducated nor did they have any need of it. Intelligent discussion was altogether nill until businesses started cranking out paper (let alone the internet).

99% of your daily life is dependent on the freedom that material objects gave you. You may not ever see the farm machinery that cranks out enough food for thousands of people, but it’s of massive relevance to your life. Without it, you’d almost certainly be one of the 99% of everyone who did back-breaking work from sunrise to sunset trying to gather enough food to last you through winter. Complaining about the 0.1% of material things in modern life that we could live without or find a more efficient alternative for as some sort of proof about the evil or non-necessity of material things is amazingly foolish.

8

I’m guessing you were in Tampa? :stuck_out_tongue:

Nitpick: The little packets are half-and-half (half cream, half milk), not milk. Coffee shops will typically offer half-and-half (and milk) in pitchers, but places that are not devoted just to coffee often tend to offer the packets. I guess their thinking is that the packets last longer; a pitcher of half-and-half might go bad.

9

Trash has been with us for as long as there have been, well, humans wandering about. They’ve found huge midden heaps in Europe dating back to the stone age. I guess the point here is that trash ‘inherantly (sic) signifies an unnecessary waste of manufacturing resources’ is true in the same way that human waste signifies an ‘unnecessary waste of organic resources’. This isn’t to say that all waste is necessary or good, only that it’s always been with us, and is just so much more proportionally larger than in, say, the stone age, because there are quite a few more humans now, and our technology has grown a bit since then.

That’s all true, but again it’s always been the case. I think it’s part of human society, just one of the associated costs, like other waste disposal in order to mitigate disease.

I think that they are all pretty much irrelevant to sustainability, especially when you consider the potential for mining our modern day midden heaps. Recycling and new ways of disposal should at least mitigate some of the worse problems. In the end though, it’s a problem that has been with humans for as long as there have been humans, and I don’t think it impacts whether or not the US is sustainable or not.

I’d say ‘spoken like a true human’, since as with the trash thing, wanting ‘stuff’ is something that has always been with us. The only difference really is that in the stone age an entire hunter gatherer group my be focused on working to accumulate resources in order to trade it all for a finely crafted green granite axe head, or to produce a ceremonial shirt bedecked with colorful feathers, shells and pigments, and today we have access to more stuff because we have access to more resources and more technology.

You go out hiking in the nude, with no equipment or resources? You just walk out of your cave to where ever you are hiking at and start hiking?

Using your bare hands you just go out into a near by field and start planting things? (this leaves aside that the land use involves consumption itself)

You cook using a polished rock and sunlight, or do you have access to a thermal vent to cook your food over (again, this leaves aside the consumption related to GETTING that food, unless you are using magic to produce it)

You learn everything using an oral tradition passed down from your ancestors? (which leaves aside how those bards were maintained and sustained from time immemorial)
Anyway, this little excersize is simply to demonstrate that everything that you do, unless you live in a cave and don’t need to eat has aspects of consumption and waste. Even something as prosaic as hiking could involve something as simple as shoes and trail mix (or it could involve driving to a scenic spot, camping gear and all manner of other gear)

If you don’t then all I can say is you either don’t understand, or you aren’t a human and are trying to infiltrate our planet for your own nefarious reasons. :stuck_out_tongue:

-XT

10

That is correct. Other than certain major cities like New York, San Francisco or Boston, most urban areas are designed on automobile scales, not people scales. If you Google map nearly any American city, you will find they are designed (terrain permitting) on large grids of major surface arteries about 1 mile by 1 mile square on each side. Inside each square you’ll find feeder roads leading to residential housing developments, malls, big box stores, office parks and what have you. They are not designed to be walked. Communities are often fenced in or surrounded by 6 lane highways. Stores and offices sit as islands in giant parking lots that can be a mile wide.

The city of Las Vegas outside The Strip is a perfect example. I walked from The Palms casino to the main strip which is little over a mile. I basically felt like an ant walking across the kitchen floor. The buildings, even ones that were not casinos were large and monolithic and there is little in between to occupy ones interest. Distances were a lot further than expected and it seemed to take forever to walk between any two points. Plus I had to navigate my way through a lot of large and potentially dangerous infrastructure (highways, railroad right of ways and so on) that were clearly not designed with my comfort in mind.

In contrast, my entire city of Hoboken, NJ is also about a mile square. It consists of about 50,000 people living on a street grid about 200’ x 600’ on a side. The buildings are mostly appartments or multi-unit brownstones. There is public transportation both within town, Manhattan. neighboring Jersey City, Weehawken and Union City as well as an NJ Transit commuter rail station. I don’t even own a car.

11

According to the DOE

12

OK, firstly, the milk in the big container was probably 1% milkfat or at best 2% milk fat. The little containers were ‘half and half’, which is a light cream and not milk for drinking. Most americans use cream in their coffee, not milk.

Secondly, most of the US is not actually mass transit friendly. For example, I live out in the country side. The nearest town is 5 miles away. If I were to try and get to my old job 50 miles away, I would have to walk 5 miles into town, and wait until a bus came for the town 18 miles away [I would have to call the transit service and request a bus come to my town to transfer me to the larger town] and then I would have to catch a bus into the city. This is about a 3 hour deal. Then I would have to transfer to another bus to get to about 4 blocks from where I used to work. Then I would have to work for 9 hours, and repeat the process in reverse to get home.

In the US, people very frequently work great distances from their homes as that is where the businesses are. A majority of us are locked into where we work by profession - we can not just work anywhere, the jobs have to actually BE here. Some of us are also locked into location because our spouses work somewhere, and if we lose our job, we remain where we are because our spouse still has their job. Many of us own our residences, and can not move to a different location because we are locked into a mortgage.

As to the packaging, much of the redundant plastic packaging is absolutely absurd, a ‘loss prevention’ measure. People shoplift the items, so in an effort to make things harder to steal the packaging gets larger, or more layers … or nonrecyclable materials.

And I do agree, we have a different city organization in the US - we had an issue in the 1950s where people moved away from urban areas, into suburban areas and so you have a city, surrounded by smaller towns, and then rural areas. Everything is linked by roads because the light rail systems were dismantled back in the 1960s. It was mainly a deal where the american wealth was typified by a single family dwelling, a car, a husband , wife, 2 children and some family pet. Look up Levitown, it is the first real suburb [not planned community, I lived in a planned community called Craddick in Portsmouth VA that predated Levitown.]

13

Don’t assume that trash is less environmentally friendly than recycling or using non-disposable containers. Non-disposable containers have to be washed with detergent and hot water, which uses energy. Modern packaging is amazingly efficient in terms of energy and material use. A lot of it is biodegradable and made from renewable resources, such as wood tailings from commercial tree farms and various eco-friendly synthetics.

The landfill problem has been greatly overblown by environmentalists, at least in the United States.

In addition, most of the products that are truly non-renewable have alternatives, albeit slightly more expensive. That’s why alternatives aren’t used now. But let’s say the price of plastic goes up 100% due to petroleum shortages. That would simply price plastic out of many markets, and plastic packaging would be replaced by cardboard or other renewables, and/or it would become worthwhile to recycle plastics and you’ll see an industry spring up to deal with it.

14

Actually, you could make plastics using non-petroleum based materials (I’ve seen plants that make a plastic like substance that can easily substitute for packaging using various by-products of corn). As you say, when costs start to rise then other, more expensive alternatives will become economically viable and so will be adopted…and life will go on. In the end, it’s energy that’s the key IMHO…not materials.

-XT

15

You seem to be making the argument that as long as we import stuff, we’re not “sustainable.” “Look at that big number of stuff we have to get from someone else!”

How is that different from us importing, say, copper, or exporting semiconductors to Turkey? Why aren’t you waving your arms over our unsustainability in copper, a finite resource? Is Turkey in trouble because their electronics industry is beholden to Americans who may not have their interests at heart?

You (and the OP) seem to be making a lot of assumptions based on intuitive folk economics. Oil Is Bad, your cultural biases tell you, so you cast upon the first argument that sounds decent - that It’s Bad to Rely on Others for Your Stuff. It would behoove you to think more clearly about what you are arguing before going into the doom’n’gloom, rather than kneejerking the first intuitive argument that happens to cast the right people as the Bad Guys.

16

As far as being car-focused I think that has a lot to do with how spread out we are. We Americans like our elbow room and wide open spaces and I think most countries people would spread out also if they had the space.
If we were as densely packed as say the UK I think all of the US population would fit into the Eastern time zone or even possibly the 13 original states. If this were true I think you’d find mass transit in much more extensive use.

17

This is absurd; Europe has lots of places to dump stuff. What Europe might not have is anyone willing to have it near them, but there’s an enormous amount of empty space even in a densely populated place like Europe.

18

But, you see, here’s the difference. We care about our so-called “empty spaces” as part of our identity. Beautiful Lapland, endless convoluted fjords, austere and comforting alpine mountains…
We don’t want to fill them with consumer-society shit like you do :rolleyes:.

19

Yes, the horror of small scenic hills being added to your countryside. :rolleyes:

Molesey Heath is in general a reclaimed landfill site, not a naturally occurring area of heathland, that has reverted to areas of rough grassland and scrub. It is a Local Nature Reserve.

20

Isn’t that pretty much the definition of sustainable? :confused:

FWIW, I ran the numbers for steel (the US is still a net importer), but it turns out that the US could just about about sustain output if it ran its plants at 100% output. That’s not the case with oil.

Let’s look at those numbers again.

If the US is become sustainable in oil, then a reduction in consumption equivalent to not running any private cars at all would be needed. This would make me unhappy as I work for an oil company.