I’m simply pointing out that even before we start to reduce, we’d already be down around 10K.
This is a huge problem. I’ll bring in an additional caveat, which very much complicates things. Money does not equal resources. The wealthiest among us (the multimillionaires and billionaires) don’t over consume in the same way an upper middle class suburbanite making 6 figures does. Their wealth isn’t largely bound up in a 4 bedroom house in the suburbs, the latest iPhone, fresh food from Whole Foods, etc. Their money is mostly digital, with only a small percentage tied up. in things like super yachts or private jets.
Taking away their money and spreading it out among the poor means that money previously represented as shares of stock, a hedge fund portfolio, and other such forms of savings that largely exist as bits on a computer somewhere rather than things of tangible value, will now be converted to real world goods (food, houses / apartments, clean water, medicine, etc). That means an increase in production of those things. Where is that increased production going to come from? Who is going to do this producing it if they don’t receive a reward for doing so? If those people do receive a reward, doesn’t that mean we’re right back to an unequal distribution of wealth?
ETA: In other words, my perspective is that there is a disconnect in our current system between those doing the producing and those reaping the rewards. Fixing that means those doing the producing will now be reaping the rewards as opposed to those who own the means of production but aren’t doing labor. It does nothing to fix the problem that not everyone does an equal amount of equally productive labor.
And yet your response to my previous post singled out that one facet of life and instead of “then sure” you stated it would severely reduce quality of life.
As a liberal Norwegian living in North Carolina who’s struggling with just such decisions regarding his grandma I have in no way implied emotional reactions are unjustified. Those emotional reactions and what we know of their impact on voting and politicians/CEOs willingness to act “early” are what will destroy the ecosphere as we know it today though, and I’m perfectly comfortable blaming everyone for that. Including me.
And my emotional reaction to this thread is making me a poor participant, so I’m going to attempt to step away.
Exactly. It’s not just the owner of the factory who is having their wealth taken away. It means that we’re taking wealth away from the person working an assembly line at the GM plant, not just those who own a large number of GM shares. It means we’re taking away wealth from the person flipping burgers at a McDonalds in the US, since they’re also in the top 1% globally. It means the vast majority of Americans will be losing a lot of their wealth, not just guys like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. They aren’t going to want to make that sacrifice unless they get something in return (myself included). Those receiving that wealth aren’t really going to be in a position to make good on that, even with an increased amount of wealth.
I understand. And I’m sorry if it sounds like I’m teeing off on you. I’m angry and I’ve lost hope in humanity. We, humanity, failed. We are simply too stupid and selfish as a people. We would rather allow corporations and the rich to make a few more billion dollars than have clean water and air. To, I guess, somewhat answer your OP, we need a radical shift in our thinking from the idea of “growth is good” (and infinite growth is best!) to “sufficiency is good.” Personally, I have enough. I’d like to own a house, but other than that I’m perfectly happy with my material wealth (granted on a world scale I am the 1%). I’ve really tried the past decade or so to reduce my own personal consumption. And not because I believe the lie that we, and not corporations, are largely to blame but because I try my best to practice what I preach. But we need people to be happy with what they need to lead a good life, and not just more more more more. I won’t be holding my breath.
I’d thought/felt that the sentences previous to the one you quoted sufficiently expressed the scope of what I was asking.
Still pondering the basic point; I find myself wondering if the analysis really is as “simple” as dividing global GDP by the number of people, and what the implications are if so. (I realize you said you were bowing out; this is just for others to pick up on if they wish.)
It’ll either be the government or the market. Which one is preferable?
Well, keep in mind that the CA style rolling blackouts didn’t happen because of the government, but because of the “free market”. So, if left to its own devices, “less power” means much higher costs per KWh, as well as rolling blackouts as the suppliers have no incentive to meet peak demand.
In the free market scenario, it means that the average citizen will probably have extreme difficulty buying enough gas to make it to work, and thoughts of going beyond the state borders are fantasy.
“Most” travel will be ended one way or the other, so it’s not like there’s a choice being made here. The choice is whether or not we have a habitable planet. So, sure, I can blame the public, including conservatives, for selfishness that still hurts them in the not so long term.
At the same time, people complain about being in flyover territory. You can travel the same distance by train as you can by plane for orders of magnitude less energy consumed, and you have more chances to meet the people living along the way.
It certainly is not that simple. That was intended only to give the most basic ballpark figure of where we stand. I believe @LSLGuy even indicated he was grossly oversimplifying.
That said, I don’t know that reducing it to dollars makes as much sense as reducing it to resources. How many watt hours a day can you have, how many calories, how much carbon can you emit, how much material can you consume, and how much can you dispose of? Those are the real questions that will need to be answered, and it’s possible to reduce each one of these without actually reducing your quality of life.
The free market isn’t going to do that, however, it needs incentives from governments. Individual action isn’t going to do anything either. If you choose not to eat meat or not to have a car that is all well and good, but unless everyone makes that decision, it’s meaningless, as your unused “share” will just be absorbed by someone else.
So, the choice is to allow government regulations to begin restricting some of these things for everyone, or wait until the “free market” begins restricting even more for everyone but the wealthy.
See, that’s my purpose in starting this discussion; I had similar thoughts in the early stages of the Covid pandemic: at what point is it expecting too much selflessness to give up a substantial amount of quality of life without complaint? I mean, sure, we could’ve voted in better politicians and saved gas and not taken that cruise, but I still can’t blame anybody for being in shock if they’re told they can no longer travel and consumption of anything not made locally is no longer feasible. It gets to the point where I’m not sure it has anything to do with that person’s personal beliefs and morals.
Like I said, I struggled with this with Covid too, and maybe yes, maybe this is cold hard proof that most humans, including myself, are simply bad people. In that case, maybe we should just let global warming do its work…?
But you are still looking at it from the wrong perspective. My point is that if we do nothing, then our quality of life will plummet completely out of control. If, OTOH, we make some small changes, like taking a train rather than a plane, or the bus instead of a car, then those may end up being the entirety of the changes that we have to make. The longer we wait, the more sacrifice we will either need to make to mitigate the damages we are doing, or the more we will be forced to make as the planet no longer sustains us. If we’d started on this 40 years ago, the changes would have been pretty minor. If we don’t start till another 40 years, then I don’t know that we can pull this thing out of the shit no matter what sacrifices we are willing to make.
You call it “saving the planet”, which is completely the wrong way to look at it. The planet will be just fine, the question is what kind of quality of life those living on it, like ourselves, will enjoy under different scenarios.
I’m an environmentalist not because I give two shits about horned owls or three toed lizards. I’m an environmentalist because the environment is where I live. It is what provides the air I breathe, the water I drink, the food I eat, and the resources I use. That is what is being damaged by our waste and overconsumption. Is it worth it to take a plane rather than a train to go see your grandma so that your grandkids don’t have to eke out a life in squalor?
This actually exemplifies my reason for creating this discussion very well: as I admit in my OP, I have no context for just what kind of “sacrifices” would be demanded. You say you’d have to take a train rather than a plane to see grandma. I was envisioning more along the level of “no or extremely restricted travel of any kind for anyone” and “nobody has phones or internet access anymore because international manufacture and trade is greatly curtailed or shut down entirely” and “no products in any store not made within a couple hundred miles of your current location.”
So please don’t assume that I have your level of what would be demanded in mind; I probably don’t. Finding that specific thing out is my purpose in creating this discussion!
Coming in late to the discussion because i was out of town. This is such a great question, both because it is interesting and because it is something we really should figure out. I think most posters are being way too optimistic. Public transit? Railroads? Those are things that were created by burning massive amounts of coal.
Trying for a Fermi estimate type guess: the last time we burned fossil fuels at around replacement level was maybe circa 1700 or so. And even then we were cutting down forests at an unsustainable rate (we started letting forests grow back once we were burning fossil fuels instead). Take a 1700 level of global production, maybe double it because we’re better at using hydro and wind power. So, maybe the lifestyle of an average person (not a rich person) in western Europe at the time. That was richer than the global average, but I’ll let that stand in for the “double 1700’s production”. It is fair to say that anybody who posts on here would consider it a major reduction in standard of living. Really “shivering in the dark”. That was with a population of 600 million or so. So divide that among 2022’s 8 billion and we’re starving to death while shivering in the dark.
I left nuclear and solar out of the equation because I don’t think that level of production could produce solar cells or nuclear power plants. Digital computers and chip fabs are right out.
I don’t think we can have anything like sustainable existence without a huge reduction in population. Maybe 0.01% of current levels. That could happen with voluntary birth control but the more traditional population controls of war, famine and disease are more likely.
It just might be possible to have something like technological civilization for that 0.01% if automation can increase the production per person by several orders of magnitude. Robot factories building the solar cells, nuclear power plants, etc. Even then that reduced population would not be living the standard of living that we in the rich parts of the world have now. Probably closer to that $10k per year lifestyle that LSLguy mentioned.
Much more likely sustainable existence: early iron age subsistence farming. Global trade does happen, but 99% of everything you touch was made within 100 miles of you. Transportation is walking, oxcart, ride a horse (if you’re rich) or sailboat. You can’t go to another state to see grandma, but that doesn’t matter because she lives in the same house you do. A spell of bad weather means you starve, even if half a continent away has surplus food that is rotting. Knowledge of germ theory should improve medicine, if that knowledge can be kept. (Books are expensive, so knowledge is hard to hang on to).
Ezekiel: “Sodom was destroyed because its people were greedy and selfish.”
Modern people reading the story: “the moral of the story is, no butt sex!”
Okay, this is the kind of level I was talking about in my previous post, and I’m glad you bring it up directly, because I think this kind of thing directly impacts our discussions, politically and otherwise, about what to do with climate change. I mean, if the truth is, we’re going back to subsistence farming with an almost catastrophically reduced global population one way or the other, then what would previous posters think of pushback? If we’re on an inevitable decline to an apocalyptic scenario, is there any point in doing anything now?
As this thread demonstrates, there are beliefs all along the sliding scale, and getting a sense of where the possible and probable lies is why I created this discussion!
We are not on an inevitable decline to an apocalyptic scenario. We certainly seem to be on the highway to apocalypse, but we can turn off it, if we choose to do so.
The sooner we do so, the less apocalyptical our future is. We can choose to take a train rather than a plane to see grandma now, and your grandkids can visit you by train in 20 years, or we can take a plane today, and in 20 years, we don’t get trains either.
That’s why there’s no straight answer to your question. If we do nothing, then we’ll be reduced to bronze age level against our will, not by government, but by reality closing in. The more we do now, the more we voluntarily lower our footprint, the better our standard of living a couple few decades out.
That’s why I said “if,” and why I asked what was sustainable. If anything significantly more advanced than a 600 million global population at “early Iron Age subsistence farming” is “unsustainable,” then wouldn’t you call that at least apocalypse-equivalent, given where we’re starting from in the modern era?
Re: Iron Age farming.
Is there any reason why we couldn’t re-prioritize the economy, and deploy resources accordingly? We could, for example, use fossil fuels to aid in the production and transportation of food, while simultaenously deciding that no plastic souvenirs would ever again be manufactured on earth.
In other words, recognize that food and medicine are worth it, but other sectors of the economy are not.
I can’t see this happening, because anything that requires individuals or groups to give up wealth, power, and / or prestige is going to mean a long and protracted fight, but in theory, we could live a much more sustainable lifestyle without necessarily sacrificing access to food.
IMHO the big issue is that if we as individuals decide to do those things, the impact will be minimal. It has to be something mandated by law for everyone, not just in the US, but Europe, China, India, and the other large countries. Exactly what the restrictions should be is almost beside the point. What matters is that it has to be a global effort. I don’t know how that’s feasible given the current political climate.
And that’s why I said it depends on what we do in the next decade or so.
I think that a population of 25 billion with everyone living an extremely comfortable lifestyle is entirely sustainable if we invest in nuclear and renewables, hydroponics and vertical farming, and use less wasteful alternatives for things like transportation. This is not a comprehensive list, but those are three of the bigger ones.
If we don’t, then 600 million at an early Iron Age is unrealistically optimistic.
Agreed, and I was using the “example” of visiting your grandma by train vs plane as an analogy of the sorts of minor sacrifices we, as a species, can make to avoid having to make much more drastic ones later.
And that’s the real problem. We have the technology to make a difference, and we know the consequences if we don’t implement it. But do we have the collective will to do so? That’s the part I’m not optimistic on. People will scream and yell about having to take a train to visit grandma, even if they know that taking a plane will harm their grandchildren.