[kaba0]

Every people is in my opinion eligible for some sane amount of resource usage on Earth - that is not a problem, the Earth is rich and would have enough to provide for the current population.

But we should not have people that travel with private jets at all, neither should we transport locally easily produced goods across the world due to salary arbitrage, should build small, walkable cities, communities. There are plenty appliances/tools we could easily share and thus not opt for cheaper, low lifetime ones — e.g. how often do you use you drill? Or power washer? Wouldn’t renting/lending it between a few houses be more environmentally responsible? Also, multi-generational houses are not a bad thing if the relation between people is not bad — the elderly get to experience the joy of their grandchildren, parents get “free babysitters”, later on the parents can care for the elderly. It’s how humanity has been since forever, and I believe it would have positive effects on everyone, not just ecology. Also, there should be barely any need for single use plastic packaging besides medicinal use — create standard container dimensions for various kinds of products and create dispensers in supermarkets that take in your previous container, and give you your product in a new one. If you break it/don’t bring it back, you have to buy that again. Yoghurts, drinks, huge swathes of supermarkets could be replaced that way.

The problem is the huge inequality — my Western ass is in huge luxury, when my African counterpart is hungry with barely any potable water. Wouldn’t they also deserve equal treatment? But if everyone were to live in Western lifestyle we would be even worse off. We should strive to cut back a bit on the Western side, and bring up the rest of the world in a sustainable way. We have the tech for that, mostly.

[hashxyz]

I agree with some of your points about excesses of American lifestyle (where I live), but there is another side to this. A pretty good proxy for wealth is basically how much stuff you can waste and not care about. I can leave all the lights on in my house because electricity is cheap, or I can afford to eat so much delicious food I become overweight and get heart disease.

You could argue that I should turn off the lights, and on that point you might have some ground. But more generally there are many things in my life that I save time on by basically throwing a little money in the trash, and I am very fortunate to have this opportunity. This is on a spectrum and we should obviously not cause obscene long term damage so I can save 2 seconds per day, but we are not at that point yet.

And regarding inequality, it is also on a spectrum, and at some point it is definitely too much, but I don’t think we have necessarily crossed that line. 99% of the people in my city have enough food to eat. And the right amount of inequality is certainly not 0, the only way to achieve that is by killing all life on earth. Some inequality is a natural consequence of the different branches of possibility that people explore with their lives. To the extent that we have anything in our society it’s because we are able to share ideas and cooperate. A society will necessarily always have the have’s and the have-not’s.