What WOULD a "sustainable existence" actually look like for the average person? Is it feasible?

Great Debates
41

The way this is phrased makes it sound to me like you’re thinking of mostly the elites, the people with actual direct power. Is this the case or no?

In general, though, one thing I’d like to emphasize is that I feel that the question of will we do it is sort of a side point. My interest is more along the lines of can, in a practical sense, because of its effects on the “will.” It will be substantially harder to get things done if anything above Iron Age is actually unsustainable, and thus my question: who in this thread, if anybody, has it closest to what a “sustainable” lifestyle for humanity looks like, regardless of will or won’t.

We already have one person in this thread who I believe thinks that vision is completely, almost ludicrously unsustainable for the planet and humanity. Thus this thread. Which of you is closer to right, if either?

Yes, I get it’s important to address climate change. But I think our odds change significantly if we all had a better idea of what our best case goal is, especially since we all pretty much have an idea of worst already. The less it looks like 2022, the harder it will get, regardless of whether we’re sliding towards that inevitably or not. The less it is, the less I blame the average person for balking, and the harder it’ll be. That is just, I think, reality, and I’d like a better view of it.

42

Just because I think that 99.99% of everybody has to die and subsistence farming is the most likely outcome by several orders of magnitude doesn’t mean we can’t do anything. Technology has pulled our fat out of the Malthusian fire every time so far, it might happen again.

WWII style existential investment in carbon neutral energy sources might come up with methods that are cheap enough for the developing world to jump straight to those sources skipping over the fossil fuel steps. Massive carbon taxes force ordinary people like me to stop our wasteful ways because we can’t afford to do otherwise. Cultural change so that people just stop having children. It could happen. And even if the technology doesn’t work out, moving that direction now will reduce the intensity of the fall.

Or not too many generations hence our descendants will be killing each other over who gets to eat grandma’s corpse amid general ecosystem collapse. That could also happen. I won’t be around long enough to find out.

Either way (and like usual it will probably be somewhere between these extremes) eventually we end up with something sustainable, as once resources run out there won’t be any other choice. Sustainable in the millions of years sense, eventually the sun expands, the oceans boil and everything on the planet dies. I doubt humans make it that far.

43

I understand that. But I wasn’t asking about “the most likely outcome” in this thread. I apologize if I wasn’t clear.

44

No, it’s not the case: I meant giving up any level of wealth, power, or prestige that doesn’t fly under the radar (the way that losing wealth to inflation does, or, for that matter, increasing costs due to climate change that are too indirect to easily perceive).

I imagine that the greater the loss, as with the elites, the greater the resistance, but I think it is a human tendency to cling to one’s wealth, power, & prestige.

45

It certainly would be if we keep doing things the way we are doing. If we make some changes, albeit some pretty major changes, in the way we develop resources and produce energy, then there is no reason why it wouldn’t be.

Obviously I think that I am. OTOH, I’m not optimistic that we will take the path that leads towards tens of billions living in luxury, but that we will instead take short sighted paths that end with whatever remains of humanity living in squalor.

I don’t think we do have a good idea as to the worst case. I mean, the worst case is the extinction of the human race, the next step up is a few million humans living short, brutal, miserable lives that may make them wish they’d gone extinct. Things can always get worse, and they will, the more we “balk” at addressing the problem.

How are they going to “balk” at reality? If there just isn’t enough food, then they starve, regardless of their views on the matter. If areas are left uninhabitable due to warmer climate or disastrous weather, that’s just how it is. You seem to think that these are artificial restrictions imposed by a government, but they aren’t, they are real restrictions imposed by reality.

The view is just like any other investment. You can spend your 20’s and 30’s partying and spending everything you make and more, running up the credit card, and then when you start closing in on retirement, you find yourself fucked, unable to maintain even the most modest lifestyle, or you can choose to sacrifice a bit now, work a bit harder, party a little less, and then you can actually enjoy your golden years.

And just like saving for retirement, the sooner you do so, the less you have to save, and the more you have when you retire. In this analogy, we’re in our early 60’s after a lifetime of partying, we have no savings, only debt, and we are still spending much more than our income. We really need to make some investments in our future, and putting it off longer will only make things worse for us. (In this analogy, there is no social security or other safety net.)

46

Okay, this may be a key misunderstanding here. You seem to think that this is relevant to what I’m trying to get at and discuss. I don’t think it is at all.

We have strong reasons to believe that we have to “make sacrifices” and “live sustainably” in order to save human lives and the general planetary ecosystem. I’m asking what that means, in a practical sense, other than being meaningless buzzwords. Will it look more like the Jetsons or a hippie commune? 2022 or 1650? Does it mean giving up cruises, or giving up modern technology in general?

I think the answers, or at least theories, have a direct impact on how easy or hard it will be to put those plans into action, and whether to think of resistance as more like antivaxxers in 2020 or the average vaccinated citizen in August 2022. Yes, there’s “well, it’ll be really bad if we don’t,” and I acknowledge that, but unless you’re saying that the end result of doing nothing and the end result of doing everything are fairly equivalent, I don’t see how it’s relevant to this thread.

Like I said, maybe I’ve completely failed to communicate. Or it may be people just want to rehash old arguments and don’t think this angle is interesting, I don’t know. But what can I do to make my goal with this thread clearer?

47

I don’t really know how to answer that question, but what occurs to me is, should we try doing one of those “carbon footprint calculator” things and see how the numbers shake out?

For example, The Nature Conservancy suggests that

48

Those folks need instruction in reading comprehension.

49

@Crane: True. But an awful lot of the butt-f***ed interpretation is the official position of organized churches who are supposedly the teachers of this topic.

@Leaper: We can perhaps / probably hi-tech our way out of this. Where the actual reduction in lifestyle is rather minimal, even for USA people. This is, IMO, technologically possible.

But it requires accepting that, e.g., you can’t keep driving gasoline cars, but you can keep driving just as many miles in an electric car. Provided it’s powered by nuclear & solar and wind power. But to do that before it’s comprehensively too late, we need to be building all that stuff RIGHT FRIGGIN NOW!!!, not whining about how that’s all just a plot to hurt right-leaning folks from oil- and gas-producing states.

I posted early in the thread talking about fair shares economically. What that was really saying was that’s how much carbon you/me/we can emit on average. As @Kimstu posted a cite about a couple posts above this one.

There’s nothing that says e.g. driving has to be carbon intensive. Unless we keep doing it the same way we do now. If we don’t (radically) change the tech, we will be forced by Nature to (radically) change the quantity. Which change will be far more painful to far more people.

The problem is not whether it’s technologically possible. Though it will be a close-run thing as the Brits say. At best we’ll be pulling out a save at the last possible minute and suffer some non-trivial adverse consequences for all our dawdling to date.

But whether it’s a socio-politically possible thing is a very different and IMO much harder question. One for which I have very close to zero optimism.

50

I guess the problem is that you are asking for exact answers to a question that doesn’t have exact answers. I thought I outlined things in much better terms than “meaningless buzzwords”, but if that’s really all you got out of it, I don’t know that there is anything that will satisfy you.

There are far too many factors, based on what communities, governments, and businesses choose to do to give you the answer that you seek.

I really don’t get where this is coming from. The end result of doing nothing is probably pretty terrible for the future of humanity. The end result of doing something varies based on what that something is. I don’t see how they could possibly be equivalent, and them not being equivalent seems to me to make them more relevant, not less.

Not really. I am pretty sure that I have a good grasp on what the only answer you will accept is, it’s just that that answer is not the answer that reflects reality.

Stop coming into it with assumptions and assertions. It really seems as though you aren’t really asking a question, but trying to make the point that trying to prevent massive human suffering is by inflicting massive human suffering, and that’s simply not true.

51

Okay, one more attempt at making myself understood. If this fails, I’m not sure what to say.

So you think it IS possible for humanity to have a sustainable existence without severe impact on life, if not lifestyle! Great! That is absolutely, directly relevant to my question!

So is this reply:

So when you tell me that it’s not impossible to “prevent massive human suffering by inflicting massive human suffering,” what are you personally imagining the end result is, regardless of whether anybody achieves it?

Something like The Jetsons, or even exactly equal to life in America right at this second? I’ll say, wow, what technological advances do you think can make that possible, or is there a point of waste that is primarily keeping us from achieving this right now, and the discussion continues from there.

Subsistence farming? I’ll say, wow, if you are indeed correct, and it’s absolutely not possible for current technology and lifestyle to be environmentally sustainable, what does that mean for getting people on board, and the discussion continues from there.

There are a lot of people in the Western world who seem to think that “living sustainably” does not involve making fundamental changes to their lives and lifestyle (or else they don’t allow themselves to think otherwise). Government and business alike encourage this point of view, the former for the sake of having political will to get anything done, the latter for more profit related reasons. What I’ve wondered is, are those people in my first sentence above correct? If not, how close are they to correct?

I’m starting to think that maybe I should’ve just asked something like, suppose human civilization lives for another 300 years completely sustainably. What is the best case scenario for what that civilization looks like?

Does any of this help? If not, feel free to ignore. :stuck_out_tongue:

52

I think it requires a near total change in how we POWER our society. Which also affects how we manufacture and deliver goods and services. Massive revolutionary change.

At the same time, I’m not suggesting we need a massive reduction in the volume of stuff we create & consume. Just how we do it.

Where you’re not getting through to us (or at least me) is that you keep talking about “life and lifestyle”. I have no clue what those words mean to you.

If somebody says his life will be ruined if he doesn’t have a Diesel F-350 pickup so he can coal-roll on Friday nights, yeah, his life will be ruined. If instead he’s happy with a pickup that hauls twice as much weight twice as far but uses electricity to make it go, then his life is improved, not ruined.

I genuinely cannot figure out what you’re asking between those two poles.

53

Really basic, fundamental stuff. In the best practically achievable sustainable civilization, does anybody have cars? Does anybody have computers or the internet? Is there any restriction, real or practical, on what the typical Westerner today can buy and what they have available to them? What existing industries and fields are sharply reduced or eliminated entirely? How much of what we’ve come to expect from life and society is only made possible because we’re raping the planet (much the same question as we ask ourselves about “cheap” food and clothes and goods in relation to the exploitation of the people who help make them)?

54

Ironically (since it’s the most recent of the high tech developments that you mention) I think computers, smartphones, the internet, 5G, and such are minimal contributors to the problem. Those would probably be expanded rather than curtailed in a scenario of focusing on sustainable existence.

I think a lot things might not entirely disappear, but would become luxuries that are priced a lot higher than they are currently. Beef is probably at the top of the list. Out of season produce shipped from halfway around the world is another. Cheap flights. Cheap gasoline (just look at how the US has it compared to other parts of the developed world to get a little taste of how that might look). Basically anything that makes a lot of CO2 but would still be in demand by the wealthy, even at a much higher price. For example, I bet that if we curtailed raising cattle, the wealthiest people would probably still be willing to pay several hundred dollars for a steak or burger.

55

There are couple of metrics that can be applied, but there is no consensus

Metric 1 : One way would be to have every country needs to cut emissions so that their per capita carbon emissions should be the same. USA is 15.5, China is 7.4 and India is 1.9 tons per year (2016 numbers). So lets say everyone is asked to bring that number down to 1 ton per year per person. That could be one metric.

Metric 2 : Since countries like India and China have not been heavy emitters over the last 100 years, the second metric can be emissions per person per year totaled over the time since the Industrial revolution. Since the bulk of the CO2 in the atmosphere came long ago, the US and developed countries need to take responsibility for that. That would result in taking far more cuts in the west than say India/China.

56

Exactly. Assuming we get rid of fossil fuel energy, we need to consider the options.

Solar power, for example; every day the Sun sends ten thousand times as much energy towards our planet than we currently use in electricity. If we managed to collect 1/10000th of this energy at 100% efficiency we could supply our current civilisation’s electicity needs. Unfortunately this would not be anywhere near enough. We’d need to account for the real efficiency of photoelectric collection systems, and also account for the fact that we would need to replace cars and other forms of oil-based transport, and the fact that other countries in the world desire an improved standard of living. If PV collection systems are 10% efficient, and we need to supply 100 times as much power to supply an electric luxury lifestyle, the amount of energy we need to collect is now increased to 1/100th of the incident sunlight. Very difficult to implement, but maybe just about doable (with some considerable disruption to the world’s natural ecosystem).

Other options include fission power - one study I’ve seen suggests that we could power a comfortable standard of living for everyone on the planet using fission, if and only if we could extract uranium from seawater with perfect efficiency. This would require technology we don’t currently have, and may never have. On the other hand, thorium-based fission power could augment uranium fission and make the prospect much more attractive.

Another technology that we don’t have yet is fusion power; using deuterium from seawater we could power an electric luxury lifestyle for the indefinite future. But fusion looks to be problematic for the foreseeable future - maybe one day, maybe never.

Yet another uninvented technology is space-based solar power. Environmentalists tend to forget that the Earth isn’t a closed system; energy comes in from the Sun, and is radiated outwards as heat, but the amount of energy coming inwards could be increased to an almost arbitrary extent by increasing the collection area. Given enough space-based solar power we could power an almost arbitrarily luxurious lifestyle - or even melt the surface of the planet with collected energy, if that was seen as desirable in any way. Of course if we imported too much energy in this way, the natural environment would suffer- we might need to deflect some of the direct sunlight to regulate the surface temperature, and most natural biomes would not like that.

Given sufficiently advanced technology we could probably support hundreds of billions of people in luxury, at the cost of the Earth’s natural environment. Nothing apart from humans might thrive in such a scenario, except perhaps stainless steel rats. I’d prefer to move most of the population off the surface of the Earth and allow the natural environment to thrive, but that would also be an energy-intensive option.

57

Your lack of optimism is well founded. Our social-political systems are laughable compared to the current state of technology.

I believe we are headed down a rabbit hole from which we cannot escape. International defense may not be possible for a society limited to a ‘sustainable existence’.

58

The problem is not solely energy input. Water availability and waste disposal may define the limits of growth.

59

It could look like this:

60

Nope. A wood-burning stove is right out.

I recall the flail when the Mideast oil supply crises occurred in the 1970s and much of New England switched to wood-burning stoves for heat that burned either pelleted wood fuel or raw cut firewood. With vastly increased CO & particulate pollution throughout the so-called “pristine” far northeast. Air quality was worse in rural Maine than in then-infamous then-smoggy Los Angeles.