See, now I don’t think that’s a very compelling reason at all to “put the brakes on our idiotic, short-sighted consumption habits”. Seriously, what’s the rest of the world going to do about our overconsumption of resources? Conquer and enslave America? Hardly.
Now, I could see a reasonable argument being made that we’re spending so much cash on crap that we’re unable to afford it, draining savings, accumulating debt, imperilling retirement, and hastening the complete economic collapse of society, with accompanying dogs and cats living in sin. That would strike me as a somewhat supportable and potentially compelling argument in favor of trying to rein in idiotic gratuitous spending. That we’re out of raw materials, not so much - we can first loot other countries, and when they run dry (or arm up and refuse) then the recycling and alternative resources will become more attractive and fill in for the shortage of virgin first-choice raw materials, no problem.
Of course, by whatever route we arrive at the conclusion that it would be nice if idiots wouldn’t buy so much crap, that still leaves us with the problem of how to get them to stop doing it. I maintain that no viable solution has been presented. What do you think?
Who are you talking to? Each consumer individually? Or gigantic megacompany producers who are contractually committed to kill babies for profit? Or the government who doesn’t have anything to do with the issue at all unless they force people to do things?
If you’re talking to the consumer, good for you. You’ll convince some people. You won’t convince me. You won’t convince enough people to save the planet. You’ll fail and we’ll all die. Or in my opinion you’ll fail and we won’t all die, but whichever.
If you’re appealing to the corporation’s desire to do the right thing, then, well…
If you’re appealing to the government, what do you expect them to do?
Well, OK, here’s another big hint. We all get to have different values and, if we like, debate them. That’s why we are in a forum called “Great Debates”.
What’s wrong with using a car to express one’s personality is that a billion or so people live in crushing poverty, and we are wearing out our planet, and an SUV spends a great deal of energy. It’s like eating a feast in sight of starving people. Actually, now that gasohol is getting bigger and bigger, it’s actually burning a feast in sight of starving people.
I think anybody debating a point about values more or less has to be starting from a position of believing their values are better. Who promotes views they disapprove of, anonymously, for fun?
But I’m not so sure I’m really doing so much better. I wish I was. Nevertheless, if somebody wants opinions regarding to what extent we should limit what we make based on what people need, it certainly makes sense to offer one.
No, just imitate us. We can’t hog all the resources if everyone else is acting equally hoggish; we can’t live the American lifestyle in it’s presently wasteful incarnation if every one else is also trying to do so. There just aren’t enough resources.
There aren’t enough resources in the world for that; alternative or otherwise. Not when more and more other nations are acting the same way. Not when we’ve burned through so much of our resource capital, and are likely to burn through most of what’s left before we try to change. We’ve already been looting other countries for decades.
I think there are plenty of resources. Guess the discussion’s over and we don’t need to do anything?
What laws, forcing who? Who, and what, is taxed? What is regulated?
Seriously, you can’t handwave this, because I think there isn’t a way to tax or regulate this to a solution. I mean, what are you proposing here? Tax the populace so hard that they can only afford the bread and water necessities? Tax or regulate the corporations so hard that any that produce anything but bread and water necessities shut down? Pardon me if I think that we’re well into the realm of science fiction when we posit either a government that can muster the political will to shut down the sale of unnecessary items, or a populace so docile that they’ll accept such constrictive behavior from their government.
Not if we actually care about things like reducing third world poverty. The western lifestyle is only possible because we use up the vast majority of the world’s resources. Whether this is immoral or not is subjective, but its as plain as day that if the rest of the world is going to ever get a quality of life similar to our own, we need to be vastly more efficient in the way we consume resources, or lower our levels of consumption.
Tax the destructive and unsustainable industries. Give tax breaks to industries that are sustainable.
I completely agree that the political will isn’t there at the moment, but that’s not to say it never will be.
Our moral obligation to end third world poverty extends no further than getting them the needs, not the wants. And if we cared, from a resource perspective we could do that and still hoard the vast majority of resources for ourselves - food’s not that expensive. The problem is distribution, not supply.
As for them getting a quality of life similar to our own dvd-player and SUV-laden one, that’s their problem. But let’s suppose they gave it a decent shot - we have this nifty resource-allocation method called “capitalism”. It will pretty much automatically redistribute our toys to the formerly third-world countries when they join us on the playing field. (Which is a fact which scares some people.) This fact means that I don’t need to be concerned in the slightest about taking additional steps to make this happen. When the resources become scarce, the prices will rise, and the average american will stop affording them. And there you have it - people will only have what they need.
And then, better and better, industries will naturally seek ways to keep selling crap with the resources available. Efficiency will automatically become a market priority, just because they can make more money if you can make more crap to sell to more people. So there you go - it’s self-correcting.
There won’t be the will until it’s too late to matter, you know that.
And when that happens, the unsustainable industries will die on their own, being unsustainable and all.
They are already on the playing field. They are hamstrung by a lack of manufacturing industries, and until they develop these, capitalism will hurt them more than help them. Its hard to get out of poverty if all you can do is grow bananas and coffee beans for export.
You might well be right, although I hope not.
The idea is to stop them before it gets to this point.
Part of the problem is what the unsustainable industries take with them when they go - how much of the world’s irreplaceable resources have been used up at that point?
Leaving that aside, and for the sake of argument assuming you are correct, what’s your solution to this? What do you propose as a more optimal system and which will provide people with all their needs?
What you describe is pretty much the definition of not being on the playing field, in the context laid out in the post you were quoting. They aren’t playing with the big boys in any real sense because they can’t, which is why capitalism is leaving them high and dry rather than shifting all the wealth and prosperity from our pockets to theirs.
And I think I made it pretty clear that as far as I’m concerned, getting out of poverty is their problem. To the limited extent I feel any moral obligation to support them I’m only concerned about whether they’re starving, freezing, or ill. And I suspect that banana money is sufficient to avoid these things to a basic degree, if it’s distributed properly. (Which it probably isn’t.)
Why? Is the argument that they’ll use up every scrap of usable material on the planet in the next few years and then we’ll all die in the cold, with nary a blanket left to wrap around us? Because I seriously don’t think this will happen. I think that as a material gets rare it becomes more expensive, deterring use and incentivising the use of more-available alternatives, resulting in an automatic shift away from sparse materials as necessary.
Is the concern that the market shift will happen “too late” - such that rather than a gradual transition from SUVs to solar-powered bicycles, we’ll overnight go from all having full gas tanks to running completely dry, finding ourselves up a creek without a solar-powered paddle? In my opinion this is a more valid concern, but only somewhat - it’s only a problem for transitions that require significant infrastructure changes and where the shortage of resources catches us by surprise. And I think this is not the case with peak oil - I think we’ll have plenty of time to start easing in alternate technologies as oil prices climb. Some people might find themselves priced out of the market for a while, but in my opinion most will be able to carry on one way or the other.
Is the concern that no alternatives will be found? That when the last elephant is poached, there will be no more ivory, and that that’ll be the end of piano manufacture for lack of something to make the keys out of? Personally I don’t find this plausible. A lack of resources isn’t going to end society; we’ll power our cars with steam made by burning human feces if we have to, but powered they’ll be, or replaced by something else that also works, nonetheless.
When I see something like this my brain translates this as “I have no argument to present; I concede.”
If you don’t mean to concede, you might try to find a different approach that I won’t interpret as a concession.
I took a bath and thought about this a bit more, and I have come up with two ideas - the first one is on the individual level - to continue on with and increase reduce, re-use, and recycle. Less consumption and less waste is a good thing at this point in human history.
My second idea is that world resources and world pollution can’t be left in the hands of each country’s governments to oversee, in large part because their most over-riding concern is getting elected then getting re-elected. I’m not sure how to work this one without creating a world government that is just more of the same on a grander scale.
If you want to see changes in the individual behavior of any significant percentage of the population you’re going to have to incentivize it, at least by creating manufactured demand for the behavior through advertising.
And you wanna (forcibly) take the world resources and world pollution out of governments’ hands, without having land in some other governments’ hands? I hope you’re a theist, because you are literally calling for the intervention of an uncorruptible overarching power.