[Manglano]

The almost-invisible consumer habits of the past 100 years circumscribe virtually all of the greatest environmental disasters of the next 100, bearing in mind that "environmental disaster" has only existed since the steam engine or the logging of the Old Growth forests, depending upon where your measure of advanced development begins.

When you visit a grocery store, there's a garbage dump wrapped around most of the products. Some of it's biodegradable, compostable, and recyclable, much of it isn't. We can remediate and save some of these processes and luxuries, but that they are mostly unsustainable is evident to anyone who comprehends industrial engineering.

[djsumdog]

When people go on about climate change, it bothers me because the fact of if climate change is man accelerated or not is totally irrelevant. CO2 is the least of our pollution problems, when you look at planned obsolescence, cellphones more powerful than 2000s laptops that are designed to only have a 2~4 year lifecycle, the prevalence of electric cards which all take barrels of oil to produce, the total and complete lack of real rail systems in the US, which use a fraction of the power consumption of cars (a system America use to have and is now gone), etc etc etc

Climate change is irrelevant because if people simply consumed less and demanded products that last longer, we'd reduce carbon emissions as well as other forms of pollution. The real inconvenient truth is that overall consumption needs to go down. It means smaller factories, less industry growth, higher paying factory jobs and a total change in our fundamental value systems ... so really it's never going to change until after the next global collapse .. not that 2008 bullshit, I mean a real one.

[graeme]

>Climate change is irrelevant because if people simply consumed less and demanded products that last longer, we'd reduce carbon emissions as well as other forms of pollution.

Not so. Carbon stays and accumulates. It's not the annual emissions which matter, it's the total emissions to date which matters.

At this point, we've already put too much in the atmosphere. Continuing to emit, at a lower rate, would still be adding to the problem. It would be an improvement over emitting even larger amounts, but we'd still be making the overall situation worse off with each passing year.

[adrianN]

See also: http://www.trillionthtonne.org/

[graeme]

Excellent concept, thanks. The persistence of the stock/flow error with carbon really bugs me. The percentage decline countdown is also helpful.

A curious coincidence that on the site's most pessimistic assumptions, the amount of carbon we can emit is ~the sign of the devil: 666,666,666,666 tons

[jack9]

> Carbon stays and accumulates

Stop hand waving. Trees use it, algae use it, at the very least. Carbon doesn't stick around with the persistence of mercury. Rate of emission is precisely what matters. The problem is that it outpaces the consumption. There's an opportunity to create an industry of carbon consumption that will only arise after the crisis point (depending on which countries blink first).

[adrianN]

A good chunk of the atmospheric CO2 is only removed by geological processes that take tens of thousands of years. Trees and algea only bind carbon temporarily, it's released when they rot. Only a part of the carbon stays in the soil. The carbon cycle is pretty complex:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_cycle

[graeme]

To be clear, I think we should reduce emissions. But even if they drop to zero today, we still have a problem. Trees and Algae don't use more carbon than the used to. The carbon cycle is fairly neutral in terms of the net change year over year, absent us.

My point in commenting was to say that climate change is not irrelevant, and emphasize that using less is helpful, but won't solve the problem on its own.

[yorwba]

Trees and algae also release most of that carbon dioxide, especially at the end of their life cycle. If we wanted to use them to return the atmospheric composition to pre-industrial levels, we would have to prevent the decomposition of large amounts of that organic matter (say by burying it in a coal mine) and I don't see that happening anytime soon.

[jack9]

> Carbon stays and accumulates

It's puzzling how this factualky inaccurate concept, is poisoning the understanding. If it were remotely true, why talk about it at all? We are already dead and the earth will never recover SMH.

[dlp211]

But they don't use more because there is more.

[mistermann]

Until our political mentality changes (and this goes mostly for the right but also the left), we're never going to make any significant progress on the environment.

[pmorici]

I don't think environmental disasters are something unique to modern times. There have been books written about the environmental problems the ancient Romans & Greeks faced.

[labster]

Environmental disasters existed, sure, but they were mostly called something like "the vengeance of the gods". Most of them do represent a form of Themic justice, as our human hubris at being lords of this world causes us to be swept away by storm or fire.

[comicjk]

Let me quote you a passage about Roman gold mines:

"Over the pockmarked landscape there would invariably hang a pall of smog belched out from the smelting furnaces through giant chimneys, and so heavy with chemicals that it burned the naked skin and turned it white. Birds would die if they flew through the fumes. As Roman power spread the gas clouds were never far behind."

I agree, though, that this kind of problem was localized and was not in the minds of Romans the way it is in ours.

[kevin_thibedeau]

> this kind of problem was localized

I wouldn't consider the mass deforestation of the entire Mediterranean basin "localized".

[StanislavPetrov]

Great comment which I almost entirely agree with. I'd like to point that there have been earlier "environmental disasters" (depending on your definition of a disaster). It has been credibly argued that the use of "desert kites" many thousands of years ago led to the extinction of several species at the hands of humans.

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/08/desert-kites-out...