[makerofspoons]

"Salvaging a decent future requires keen awareness, quantitative assessment, deliberate preventive action, and—above all—recognition that prevailing assumptions about human identity and destiny have been cruelly misshapen by the profoundly unsustainable trajectory of the last 150 years."

Brilliantly said. I believe a lot of resistance to the idea that our way of life is unsustainable stem from grief that the future that we were "promised" by the last century of media and marketing isn't coming. The first step towards adapting to the imminent collapse of the high-consumption lifestyle due to energy and resource limitations is to process this grief.

[ben_w]

The way you’re phrasing that gives me a certain impression of your beliefs about what is and isn’t sustainable that may not be warranted, so I should ask explicitly:

What do you think a sustainable way of life looks like? In terms of both global population size and typical life experiences.

[makerofspoons]

To me a sustainable lifestyle would be one where if every person alive today's annual consumption was at the same level humanity’s demand for ecological resources and services could be regenerated over the course of that year- effectively balanced. I'm a fan of Earth Overshoot Day and their approach to this problem so I am using their definition: https://www.overshootday.org/about-earth-overshoot-day/. A sustainable way of life therefore looks like the average life of someone in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal etc. I'm not holding up the average lives of people in these places as ideal (and I'm not considering anything other than consumption) but instead realistic about what level we can consume at with our current level of technology. Within that consumption envelope we need to figure out how to improve healthcare and education outcomes.

That's why I expect we're headed for tragedy- we can't and won't collapse everyone's consumption to that level. The people who consume the least will be the most hurt by the ecological consequences of what we in the high-consumption regions of the world do.

[helloworld11]

Do you not even consider the possibility and usefulness of advancing technologies for the production of energy and resources more robustly AND efficiently so that all of humanity can live at a very high level of social and economic development? These notions aren't fantasy, and in many ways the technical capacity to realize them already exists. The push is what's largely missing still.

I'm not saying that this applies to your arguments, but what I notice among many people and groups claiming to be concerned with our impact on the environment is more of a fetishism towards doom and pushing forward a notion of personal sacrifice for billions of people, while actively making any excuse for decrying numerous suggestions for technologies and social advancements that could possibly let us make the world cleaner while also being able to live better on a much broader scale.

That kind of thinking teeters on the verge of pseudo-religious, ideological instead of being something reasoned and practical.

[ben_w]

That’s what I was expecting.

Bad news, I’m afraid: If you keep the population and technology constant, the maximum sustainable consumption per person is lower than basic metabolic needs. Either the tech or the headcount needs to change, and nobody is going to let it be their head that gets dis-counted.

The main reason for this isn’t energy (current tech includes really cheap PV we just have not yet gotten around to building but could and likely will), it’s phosphorus. Phosphorus is mined for use in fertilisers, it isn’t renewed, the run-off flows into oceans.

Only thing we know of that might help is more tech, and the tech seems like it needs high-consumption societies to get proper funding.

Naturally, if you can get good research going without that, that’s a massive win for everyone, not just in this aspect.

[kiba]

It's already unsustainable enough that people are decrying how urban planning policies are destroying the tax base and social fabric of society.

[ben_w]

I think you’ve misunderstood the concern by several orders of magnitude here — mere tax bases and so on are about as far from the fundamental functioning of the ecosystem as “living in a dumpster under a bridge” is from “needing to borrow the use of your neighbour’s bathroom when you have a plumber in to fix your own”.