Your view of the first 300,000 years of human history is very typical of modern humans but it’s also very skewed. It doesn’t even truly characterize the era which is viewed as the archetype of the premodern, the Middle and Dark Ages of western Europe.
Please read The Dawn of Everything and get back to me about this.
The quiz didn’t answer any questions like that. It’s a very good one to ask though. Here’s my first google hit, from the NRDC, a longtime advocate for sustainable environmental practices.
(bolding mine)
This is the crux of the matter for me. Not the profitability exactly, but the near-term aspect. We humans are wired for near-term gratification, and our most successful socioeconomic systems are based on delivering it. Companies and politicians who promise short-term benefits generally beat companies and politicians who urge a long-term view.
I’m overweight and pre-diabetic, and am well aware of the consequences that may hit me in a few years if I don’t change my ways. Yet I can’t resist those Double-Stuf Oreos.
If I may tweak that slightly …
You totally can. Given sufficient motivation. So far you don’t have that motivation. So you won’t. Yet.
To be clear, I’m not trying to pick on you specifically or personally, nor to judge your eating habits. You just did an excellent job of making a pithy succinct statement for me to work from.
We all as individuals and as a collective human society are heading for climate disaster. But we lack the motivation to change. Yet. And a bit like people with developing diabetes, some hefty fraction of us won’t develop the motivation until after they’ve amputated our metaphorical feet.
And maybe not even then: “Eh, what’s the use dieting now, my feet are already gone? Gimme them Oreos!”
I’ve read Graeber and Wengrow, and it is very clear that they are cherry picking their ‘evidence’ (which like most pre-Roman and pre-Han historiography is circumstantial at best) regarding sociology. Regardless of the alleged egalitarianism of specific pre-industrial cultures, in transition to urbanism all of them suffered plagues of disease, famine, warfare with competing empires unlike tribal conflicts that were both intentionally and resource-limited in extent. It is true that industrialization led to the ability to conduct war to an extent not previously possible due to mechanization of destruction and the ability to sustain year-round siege warfare, but pre-modern urbanization was a kind of horror that is only seen in post-colonial collapse today, and in general early efforts to build cities were a way of concentrating political and military power, not some kind of cosmopolitanism of beliefs and ideals.
While hunter-gatherer societies may have been more egalitarian than Thomas Hobbes’ characterization of “nasty, brutal, and short”, they also offered essentially no opportunity to opt to ideals or lifestyles outside of tribal norms. They may have been more accepting of deviations in sexuality and gender norms by dint of necessity, but tribal cultures are also notoriously xenophobic. It is no surprise that modern neofascism leans heavily on pre-Christian paganism and the provincialism of those cultures vice expansive religions like Catholicism that requires expansiveness and acceptance of cultural variation to expand its influence.
Regardless, the exploitation of ‘fossil fuel’ energy sources has allowed for science to go from a domain of individual wealthy patrons supporting eccentric astrologers and vivisectionists to a domain of objective inquiry about the fundamental rules and laws of reality from genetics and microbiology to astrophysics and quantum mechanics. This simply could not have happened without access to some easily exploited and concentrated source of energy, and natural agriculture and human/animal labor alone could not provide that. Even it the inevitable conclusion of that is a large scale collapse of the global ecology and potential end of industrial society, it has provided knowledge that no other conceivable path (at least, for our particular evolution) could have offered. Quite frankly, we need to look for ways to preserve this knowledge rather than just throw up our hands and say that this learning was for naught and of no evidential value, because the alternative of hunter-gatherer and primitive urban cultures rising and falling in perpetuity is not any kind of noble virtue in and of itseslf.
You may not be able to resist it (and modern cognitive science supports the idea that you literally cannot exert willpower to resist temptation indefinitely) but you can avoid it simply by not exposing yourself to those temptation, i.e. by only shopping at the perimeter of the a grocery and not in the aisles containing these sirens. Living a healthy lifestyle is as much about building habits and avoiding the opportunity to undermine them than just being somehow willful about resisting products deliberately engineering to break your prerogatives. Which goes back to your ability to avert climate change; we live in a world in which it is virtually impossible to function without using petroleum and gas regardless of your ideals and intent, and we need to make the structural changes to our industrial society where that choice isn’t one of gross austerity versus nominal comfort, because that is always going to be a losing battle.
Stranger
No, not of itself, but it also doesn’t destroy the fabric of the planet for all life to come. Which at this point IS a noble virtue, one we cannot, apparently attain to.
So there! 
To belabor the analogy … we’ve been getting (and ignoring) ominous test results for decades. Now damage is starting to manifest, and it’s not even clear if changing our diet now will stave off life-threatening results. We may have to live with a drastically altered lifestyle, and it’s not going to be fun.
I make absolutely no sacrifices to my quality of life or living on account of wanting to combat climate change, because to do so would adversely affect me while making fuck-all difference to the planet. Me taking shorter showers will save precisely 0 polar bears, and switching off my central heating will inconvenience me while doing nothing to mitigate the desertification of sub-Saharan Africa.
Just 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions, study says
Focusing on how individuals can stop climate change is very convenient for corporations
Individuals Are Not to Blame for the Climate Crisis
etc., ad infinitum
Nonsense. Errant nonsense. IMO.
We can, and will, utterly screw this up and make life far more difficult for future humans. Future humanity will come to hate us down the centuries millenia if their society & tech remains advanced enough to have records of the rampant selfish stupidity that ruled human thought from 1800 CE to 2200 CE before the Fall of Civilization.
Nature and the rest of Life will chug along just fine. Yes, there will be mass extinctions of plants and animals. But no different than have happened countless times in the past and would happen in the future anyhow if we’d never climbed down out of the trees and were now merely slightly smarter forest chimps. New forms will arise to replace those who die while occupying the new niches that arise to replace those that AGW closed. It makes as much sense to lament this change to Nature as it does to argue that lions are false usurpers deserving of extermination whereas sabre-toothed cats are the rightful lords of the jungle for all eternity.
The Earth will do fine no matter what we do to it. Only the Sun or a nearby supernova can wreck this rock. Nature will do fine despite our massive perturbations of it. What will suck is human existence.
We have a lot to answer for. But wrecking Nature herself will never be one of the charges. We’re still not nearly big / strong enough to do that. And thanks to the decidedly future-limiting actions current humanity is taking, we may well never again acquire the collective power to even think about wrecking Nature.
Well, if that’s what you call “just fine”, then yes. “Nature” will survive us, and and hundreds of thousands of years from now, will no doubt flourish anew. I’m taking a little shorter view of it.
I suppose I’d say there’s quite an excluded middle between your hyperbolic “destroy the fabric of the planet for all life to come” and my hyperbolic “just fine”.
We are unleashing an ecological cataclysm that may not quite rival the Chicuxulub impact’s Cretaceous extinction or the Great Oxygen Catastrophe, but it’s in the running. That it’s happening due to critters supposedly equipped with brains versus the mute brute forces of astrophysics or unicellular evolution gives it a moral enormity unparalleled by anything that’s ever happened that we know of.
I believe I’m mostly making a distinction between wiping out many of the current players versus wiping out the field of play. Capital L Life will go on. There was / is nothing privileged about the biosphere of, say, 4000BC before humans had made the slightest persistent dent in it.
I’m certainly not proud of my part in all this. Nor am I proud of my countrymen in generals’ part.
I agree with this.
The level of carbon emissions that would lead to massive global warming only started in earnest in the 70s. Before that, and possibly into the 2000s, it was a fixable problem. We were able to successfully address ozone-destroying CFCs and acid rain, at least lower their impact, rather than increase it as with carbon, so there’s no reason we couldn’t also do it with carbon.
So while carbon is a knock–on effect of industrialization, I don’t think it was an inevitable knock-on effect. All the ways of getting alternative energy and the science of global warming were known by the 70s, so if we had started to impose a regime much like we did for other pollutants back then, we would have had a much better head start at tackling carbon via research and legislation.
Actually, the cat statement is a good example of why many ignore the “overwhelming evidence” – evidence that is often exaggerated, manufactured, or the result of flawed methodology. Do We Really Know That Cats Kill By The Billions? Not So Fast : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR
Blaming cats for bird declines lets people ignore major causes that would be inconvenient – like cars, suburbs, & consumerism. Which is parallel to blaming corporations or other people’s lifestyles so we personally don’t have to make big changes.
After reading the NPR article, I don’t see any reason to believe that the study was flawed, only that it, like any such aggregating study, has a wide range of possible values. Maybe it’s one billion, maybe it’s ten billion. No one actually knows. It’s not a dismissible number though. And cat lovers do dismiss it, which angers me.
The largest cause of the songbird population is almost certainly habitat destruction. Which is also something we could do something about if we wanted to.
Re: veganism—there’s an excluded middle in this argument. We could, collectively, make an enormous difference if we just all ate LESS meat, or different meat.
Per capita meat consumption by type - Our World in Data notes that Americans eat 151 kg of meat per year (though the largest category is poultry, which I’d think would be more sustainable than beef).
For India, it’s 12 kg / person / year; for the world as a whole it’s 63 kg / p / y.
It seems to me that in terms of practical climate solution, convincing all American to reduce their meat consumption by two-thirds is much easier, and more sustainable, than convincing even 5% of Americans to go vegan. Less meat = cheaper! healthier! more environmentally friendly! Look, here’s a tasty vegetarian recipe! And you don’t have to give up anything!
That’s one change I’ve made. I’m not willing to give up meat, but I’m certainly willing to consume less.
The other point raised (way) above that I wanted to mention was plastics recycling as virtue signalling. I recycle plastics, but it’s not virtue signalling, because who knows that I do it beside me and the bin collector? I do it out of hope that it will be recycled, and out of the guilt that prevents me from just binning it when it might be recyclable. How do I know what’s going on once it leaves my property? I try to avoid plastic packaging but it’s impossible: buying cheese, if I hope to avoid a plastic-wrapped block and go to the deli, they placed the sliced cheese on a plastic sheet for some reason and then into a plastic bag.
One key area to combat is germophobia: people are convinced that plastic makes things sanitary because it means you don’t have to touch things people have touched. I strongly suspect frequent and robust handwashing but letting people touch your food is a wash in terms of sanitation (given the number of times people use their santiary plastic gloves to handle money or touch their hair or what have you) but better for the environment.
I don’t ever remember it being called a fixable problem. Even in the early 2000 there was considerable debate into the extent of climate change and the consequences. I distinctly remember scientific debates where it was said that climate change will benefit some parts of the globe and hurt some others.
This was never the understanding within the scientific community. Whether it was CFCs or NOx or SOx, they were all small emissions in ppm or point sources but CO2 emissions were large and removal; cleanup and storage was always understood to be hard.
This is true but Solar Energy or Wind Energy technology was not economically competitive with Fossil fuels in the 70s. Now they are and the way Solar is going, levelized costs may turn out to be lower than oil soon.
A sane post.
I have a goal to eat no red meat, fish a couple times a week, chicken maybe once a week, and the other meals vegetarian or vegan. This isn’t a hardship for me, mainly because I eat out maybe three or four times a year, and I do not buy prepared meals at all.
It is very recent change in lifestyle, for almost everyone to eat almost every meal in some way commercially prepared – fast food, take out, restaurant meals, etc, every day and often more than once a day. When I was younger that was something only very urban people did. I never heard women, at least, saying that they literally did not know how to cook food. Now it seems unexceptional. This change makes it much harder for people to eat lower on the food chain (as well as personally healthier).
I’m hypoglycemic. I have to be very careful about eating sugar, and Oreos are pretty much off my list too.
I found it easier than you did, I think mainly because the effects on me happens closer to the event-- high sugar consumption spikes my blood sugar, and it’s then followed by a precipitous drop that makes me dizzy, light-headed, shaky, and generally feel crappy, and if I don’t eat something quick, I’ll probably pass out. It can happen in 30 minutes, not 20 years.
But I will say, it was a lot harder at first, when there was no artificial sweetener on the market that I didn’t find disgusting. Then Splenda came out. It’s so much easier now.
Maybe if we can get alternate sources in place so the transition to the is easy, it’ll be easier to get people to make it. That’s going to involve a lot of getting out and voting for people who want to make that happen.
Yeah, that’s kind of what our household is going for. For traditional meat based recipes, like turkey shepherd’s pie, I just double the recipe without doubling the meat, add extra vegetables and you basically get a bunch of veggies with some decent protein. Most of our meals are vegan, but tonight I made white chicken chili, and it was just too much damned meat. You lose a taste for it after a while because your entire gut microbiome changes. But am I ever going to turn down a plump, juicy restaurant steak? No. I just have it every three months as opposed to every day.
The real challenge I have is that vegan foods are just fine for maintaining a normal person’s health, but the second you get to where you want to build muscle or do some serious athletic work, the harder it is to subsist solely on plant foods. For someone like me, who is overweight but also very short (meaning my recommended calorie intake isn’t much more than 2000 calories a day even with extensive exercise) it is extremely difficult to get the requisite amount of “muscle building” protein without eating too much. I have tried. Og knows I have tried. But I eventually had to start working in more seafood (which is expensive AF) and a little more meat just because when I eat no meat whatsoever things really seem to fall apart. And I’m still dependent on cheese for snacks. I’ve yet to find an elegant solution.