[panick21_]

This is one of these philosophies that I hate more then almost any other.

The idea that is bad that poor Indian and Chinese people now have access to anything from clean water to planes is absurd. You can sit there in your luxury house and cry about consumer culture but for millions of people its basic stuff that they have access to for the first time.

And in Europe, despite increasing quality of live, both total energy consumption and fossil fuel consumption is going down.

Now part of this is export of emissions to China but China own growth explains the majority of it.

Continued growth is good, and only continued growth and better technology will get humanity off fossil fuels.

Fossil fuels have been a net good for society and still are!

[myaccountonhn]

The reason it's seen as bad is because there are not enough natural resources to sustain such a consumption, and many of these countries (esp India) will practically become unhabitable if global warming continues like it does. There are very few signs that technology will be able to fix this.

No one is against clean access to water...

[amelius]

The real villain here is advertising, which pushes us to always want more than we need.

[pas]

there are of course more than enough "natural resources" to sustain such consumption, the problem is paradoxically the opposite, too much easy to extract shit that we then emit into our own environment

the fix is also not complicated (remove GHG from the air, remove endocrine disruptors from the food cycle, etc.)

the costs are high though, but not that high, compared to - for example - the famines of past

but as population will peak - at least for now - and as we continue to ramp up renewable energy generation these problems are not insurmountable in any sense

...

places affected by storms and extreme heat/cold days need better infrastructure, but since urbanization continues to drive people to cities (as it did for the last few hundreds of years) these places need new and better infrastructure anyway!

[simgt]

> the fix is also not complicated (remove GHG from the air, remove endocrine disruptors from the food cycle, etc.)

Are you abstracting away the technical complexity when stating that it's not complicated? GHG removal tech that would scale simply doesn't exist if we intend to have some energy left to do anything else, as for removing pfas and microplastics from the environment, we are at the stage of running experiments in petri dishes.

And even if we abstract away the technical complexity, good luck convincing anyone to stop burning the free fuel we have lying around doing nothing now that we have everything-nuclear-solar and GHG removal at scale. We can barely convince our councils to build cycle lanes in dense areas if that removes any space for SUVs.

I wish I'd share the blind optimism of people like you, it seems pleasant to live in your heads...

[pas]

ah, sorry, I am not optimistic, I just accepted that it's not a technical, logistical, or "resource constraints" problem

it's a coordination problem as you mentioned

based on this I moved to a place where I think things are a bit less crazy with regards to that (well, famous last comments ...eheh)

[simgt]

Ha, that was really not obvious in your initial comment, thanks for clarifying!

> based on this I moved to a place where I think things are a bit less crazy with regards to that (well, famous last comments ...eheh)

Mind telling us pessimists where that might be? ;)

[pas]

Hungary -> Spain

[rizs12]

Lmao how can you say 'poor Indian and Chinese people' in the same sentence? China is a first world country

[djfivyvusn]

No it's not. 50c army out today.

[mandmandam]

You're giving a very poor reading of OP's argument, first of all. Jumping to the conclusion that they don't want Chinese people to have clean water is downright bad faith.

Second, "continued growth is good" is a hell of a thing to say on a planet with finite resources. There's a limit! And if you expand your worldview to include other life on this planet and not just society then we've pushed far beyond what's wise already.

[rizs12]

China is a developed country! This dialogue about Chinese people and clean water is bizarre

[mandmandam]

Fair point, I ought have made that clear. There are many ways in which Chinese people have it better than Americans these days, if my eyes are to be believed.

[djfivyvusn]

Insane take.

[mandmandam]

That's not how we talk here. Also, I was defending your argument lol.

But still, I'll bite - how so? Because I see videos like this:

https://x.com/Zlatti_71/status/1947556095779610961

or this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiNrcHhDTsI

And I compare them to, say, any American city.

You can't watch those and seriously believe that there couldn't possibly be any aspects of Chinese life which are superior, and further, to think that's "insane".

Those aren't cherry-picked videos. There are thousands out there, if you care to look; watch xiaomanyc's videos and there's simply no denying your eyes. Their cars are better, their night life is better, their food is better, their housing is better, their daily lives are better, in many, many ways. Not every way, but in many ways - which is what I said.

You've been propagandized your whole life to think America is number one, but that was only even remotely true before 'we' pissed away our future on genocidal forever wars to make the 0.1% a little wealthier. Now most people see America negatively. Literally the vast majority of countries have an overall negative opinion of America; and we're seen as the number one threat to peace and stability.

Chinese people used to think they're hearing propaganda when they hear American's stories about health insurance, or the political scene - because to them, that's impossible to believe. Yet what you find impossible to believe is that they might have it better in some ways. I hope you have a good long think about that.

[anthk]

Fossil fuels will crumble down when the ITER gets working well. China already did some experiments on salts based nuclear plants, but no fusion jet.

Still, the days for the uber-polluted Beijing are numbered. It will change drastically.