[yoyohello13]

I’ve come to terms with the fact that there is no stopping human consumption. It is simply not possible to get enough people to reduce to make an impact. The failure of the environment movements over the last 60 years are proof. The only way is ‘up and out’ developing clean, cheap methods of energy generation and lobbying to get that infrastructure built out as quickly as possible. At this point, investing more in Fossil fuels is a joke and anyone claiming “coal” or whatever is the future is simply a conman or a clown.

[CalRobert]

The crazy thing is that we have basically everything we need right now.

You can live in a well-insulated fully electric home powered by renewable energy and have most things you need within a walk, bike, or public transport ride away, _OR_ use an electric car for the things that aren't. If you combine that with a mostly-plant based diet (or at _least_ swapping chicken for most of your beef and lamb) and have 2 kids or fewer you're... basically there.

The main reason most people can't do this is because of political choices, not technological limitations.

Granted this doesn't include luxuries like jetting halfway around the world for a 1 week holiday or living in a 4000 square foot house in the desert and driving a studio apartment an hour to work every day, but really, is that a better life?

[graeme]

>The crazy thing is that we have basically everything we need right now.

Have you travelled? This doesn't describe most of the world. Most of the world would need to increase carbon emissions to live the way you're describing.

You aren't describing a zero carbon lifestyle, you're describing a lower carbon lifestyle. And we still use carbon in building the things in your scenario: the building, the car, etc.

Lower carbon lifestyles can slow the speed of the increase in global warming, but as long as we're emitting any carbon we're increasing global energy forcing.

By all means choose lower carbon lifestyles, but fundamentally we need nuclear or renewables + battery or all of the above such that we don't face a tradeoff between energy use and getting stuff people want.

Energy is extremely useful.

[Loquebantur]

The idea of average individuals being the relevant actors in global carbon emissions is pure misdirection. They're not, it's systemic with industry being the main culprit and the rich being the ones who benefit from that socialization of pollution costs.

The AMOC shutdown isn't merely "possible" and due "this century" either. The math of the dynamics of complex systems shows the current behavior to be signs of a phase transition in the process of happening. The speed of that shutdown isn't "decades" either, it's more likely just years.

The voices of "experts" telling you it was all some incomprehensible conundrum should deeply worry you. They're either not being honest or they're no experts.

[vladms]

> They're not, it's systemic with industry being the main culprit and the rich being the ones who benefit from that socialization of pollution costs.

You two might agree if we consider that when you say "rich" you might describe the average individual on this website (if we consider all people alive).

I do believe that 90% of the people would not want to actually destroy the planet the way it seems to be happening, but I also believe that 90% of the people can't refrain themselves from bad health habits either. So, to fix the root cause I would discuss more about people's bad emotional/impulse control, otherwise we will just change one issue (climate) to any of the others (violence, unhappiness, etc.)

[Loquebantur]

No, you're entirely wrong.

The impact an individual has on carbon emissions is directly correlated with their wealth. The distribution of which is extremely uneven: as of 2024, the top 1% worldwide possessed as much as the lower 95% combined, 57 trillion US$. That has gotten only worse in the last two years.

It's not about "bad habits", impulse control or whatever, at all.

[Paradigma11]

Most of that wealth is just a tag on physical things that would happen anyway, just with another tag.

[vladms]

Wealth distribution is an issue, but lots of "wealth" is due to stuff that is owned by some and used by many.

Take a landlord as an example: he might have 100 houses and own 99% of the wealth in a village, but if the houses are inhabited, people still use them. If those people want to use a 300 sq meter houses rather than 50 sq meter studios, they do contribute as well to the climate issue.

This holds for other fields as well. Example: "... private air travel accounted for 6.3% of the ‘total commercial plus private aviation emissions’ in the USA in 2019, and 7.9% in 2021." https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01775-z

I honestly can't say that 92.1% which is from "normal" population is ignorable.

There are no easy solution and everybody is responsible by different degrees. Pointing fingers and wanting "others" to fix it first is not in my view something that ever worked.

[tovej]

It's an even smaller percentage of people that are most responsible. Any multimillionaire is already someone who could have an impact, but mostly it's the 100 million club and up that are causing the most damage. And bug LLCs in general, since those are essentially optimising for profit only.

[graeme]

This isn't true at all. If all of the global rich immediately became carbonless monks....we would cut only a portion of emissions. And continuing to emit increases global warming. Even if you estimate that the top 1% use 70% of our carbon (implausible) that still just pushes threshold back a few decades.

And if industry stopped producing with carbon billions would starve. Industry makes stuff for people. Energy is useful, we aren't just taking oil, coal and gas and burning it in factories for fun.

[Loquebantur]

Them becoming carbonless would already cut 16.5% of emissions. Together with their investments they are responsible for 25% of emissions.

But more importantly, the reason nothing is happening to cut the systemic reasons for the pollution is due to them.

You present a straw man when you point at simplistic nonsense like "energy is useful". There is no dichotomy "either carbon pollution or we sit in caves". You argue from ignorance.

[triceratops]

> Even if you estimate that the top 1% use 70% of our carbon (implausible) that still just pushes threshold back a few decades.

Getting a few more decades to handle this thing would be amazing!

[CalRobert]

Indeed I have traveled, and I am in favour of nuclear and renewables and batteries for pretty much the reasons you state. There are other issues (concrete production comes to mind, and it always bugs me that houses in Europe are so dependent on concrete when its a huge emissions source) but when you're running your building equipment and factories and transit networks on zero emissions electricity (so we can include nuclear, which I suppose isn't renewable but is still very low carbon) then the building, the car, etc. have lower embodied carbon as well.

[hypfer]

> have 2 kids or fewer

This is at odds with lots of other relevant topics that go beyond just "consumption".

2 or fewer is below the replacement rate of 2.1 This _has_ already happened, but there are a lot of voices voicing a lot of reasons why they believe that that might actually be not the best situation.

[jandrese]

You see a whole lot of panic from industrialists over the birth rate drop in the industrialized world. They claim it is an extinction level event for humanity. This is not quite correct. It is an extinction level event for economic models that assume unbounded growth of the consumer base.

[gorjusborg]

This is an important distinction: what is good for ecology is not necessarily good for economy.

If we need unbounded growth to jeep our economic system to function, its the economic system that is wrong, not nature.

[kruffalon]

Capitalist economy.

Economies can exist in many different ways. At its core it is just a way to describe how we move resources between ourselves and that can be done in many, many ways.

[nradov]

What are the other ways that are proven to work over the long term at scale?

[triceratops]

Non-capitalist economies don't really have a better record on environmental protection. It's almost like the problem is human nature, not the specific economic system.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Environment...

[CuriouslyC]

Hence why the die hard capitalist shills are so set on going to space.

[jay_kyburz]

We should help by shooting them into space.

[TitaRusell]

They did research on how many people you need to keep the human species alive. It was not ten billion.

[archagon]

If you read other things these industrialists say, it’s clear that their actual argument is a xenophobic/white supremacist one. The panic is entirely political, not economic. We have no shortage of viable immigrants to keep the economy going.

[georgeburdell]

It’s disingenuous to imply “industrialists” are the only ones unhappy. Anyone who doesn’t want to die a stranger in their own land is also concerned.

[archagon]

Yes, Native Americans ought to get their land back. (What do you mean “no, not like that”?)

[surgical_fire]

If the concern is one that sounds horribly like eugenics, perhaps this hypothetical "people" should indeed go the way of the dodo.

[georgeburdell]

An agreeable platitude, but such a people are not born, they’re made as their neighborhoods close off, their favorite restaurants and stores disappear, their children are excluded from playdates with school friends, and they’re rejected from employment in favor of one of the tribe.

Also do consider that you’ve advocated for the elimination of people holding a belief that is far more common in the world in aggregate than in the few high HDI countries

[jandrese]

Here I thought I was being more diplomatic to elide the blatant racism when discussing this topic.

[sosomoxie]

What does "die a stranger in their own land" mean and how does it relate to birthrate?

[InsideOutSanta]

Probably "fewer kids means immigration is required to maintain social safety nets, but I don't like to look at people who don't look like me."

[tialaramex]

Below replacement would be terrifying if there were one thousand humans, it would be worrying if there were a million, and at least worthy of consideration if there were a hundred million, but there are almost ten billion simultaneous humans, we're fine.

[hypfer]

On a humanity-level: yes.

On an individual state-level: no.

[giantg2]

"On an individual state-level: no."

This might actually be a yes if you believe in the potential impact of automation and AI.

[generic92034]

And if you believe in the fair distribution of the benefits of automation and AI in the population. IMHO, this belief is the more unrealistic one, at least in the short term.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>Below replacement would be terrifying if there were one thousand humans,

The funny part is that it should terrify you whether there are 10 humans or 10 billion. At the current rates, it's over in about 12-13 generations regardless of the number you start with. That's how it works... no matter how big the starting number, it's how many generations you have left.

Think of it this way? You know the dumb story they taught us in school, about the guy whose payment from the king for doing something clever was to have one grain of rice on the first chess square, and 2 on the second, 4 on the third, and so on... and how it bankrupted the king long before the 64th square? That's the same math with fertility rate of 1.0! (The Chinese have a fertility rate of 1.0, famously.) Each generation will be half the size of the previous. But how long before that is effectively zero? Will it be 1 million years, 250,000 years? No, about 300ish. 300 years. But long before you reach that point, your civilization has fallen apart. Those last 4 or 5 generations live life without electricity, anything but muscle power, or metallurgy.

And China's fertility rate isn't even the lowest! South Korea's rate just dropped to around 0.5! That's where each generation is one quarter the size of the previous.

The best part of all is that these rates haven't even bottomed out. We will almost certainly see rates right around 0 long before the century ends.

>but there are almost ten billion simultaneous humans, we're fine.

At least math illiteracy ought to console you guys towards the end.

[yoyohello13]

This whole comment rests on a very big assumption that these rates will never recover. Just because you can fit a trend line doesn’t mean the projections will pan out. It could just as easily be the case that once population starts meaningfully decreasing, the opportunity cost of children will also decrease and fertility rates will recover. This happens all the time in nature.

Our population absolutely exploded over the last 100 years. This can easily just be a reversion to the mean. There really is no reason to be worrying about human extinction right now. In fact, the ‘extinction’ rhetoric is harmful and dangerous since so many ‘solutions’ to fertility rates are less education and less freedom. I have no trouble believing a handmaids tail like faction emerging because they believe they are saving the species.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>This whole comment rests on a very big assumption that these rates will never recover. J

The opposite, actually. Your assumption is that the rates bounce up and down, mostly because you don't want to believe there's a problem.

The rates are transmissible, older generations to the younger. No one growing up in a world where people have few or just one child will say to themselves "hey, you know what, I want 10 kids when I'm an adult!"... but that's what would have to happen. You and everyone else on HN whines "the reason people aren't having kids is the economy is awful and we can't afford them"... but in a world with a shrinking, aging population the economy just gets worse.

You're the one making the very stupid assumption, and you can't even say why. I can, it's because you haven't thought about it. Perhaps it's uncomfortable to think that you're driving your species to extinction.

>Our population absolutely exploded over the last 100 years.

More nonsense. Our population isn't exploding, it's just big. And it will shrink rapidly. I already laid out the math... how long before 8 billion becomes 1000 when you're splitting it in half every generation (a generation is commonly held to be 20-25 years)? Can you do that math puzzle for us? There are only about 5 generations living on Earth at any given time. Just do the math already. None of this is pretty.

>There really is no reason to be worrying about human extinction right now.

Yes, there is. People are only generally capable of reproduction from the ages of 16 to 36... just 20 years. Every moment you waste "not worrying about it now" is the problem compounding with interest. You've already waited too long to worry about it.

>In fact, the ‘extinction’ rhetoric is harmful and dangerous since so many ‘solutions’ to fertility rates are less education and less freedom.

Well at least when our species dies out, the last few people will have masters degrees. That's the important part, right?

>I have no trouble believing a handmaids tail like faction emerging

It'd be because you and those like you forced the issue. Go ahead, stick your head in the sand some more. We all know that willful obliviousness to reality can change the rules of the universe themselves, right? Wish it all away!

[AnimalMuppet]

When will the trend recover? When civilization falls to the point that nobody can make birth control pills, if not before.

[CalRobert]

The way emissions are going we* won't make it another 12-13 generations either.

* Some humans will likely survive, but modern civilisation won't.

[InsideOutSanta]

No, this should absolutely not terrify anyone, at all. The only reason it is a concern is that our economic system is built on infinite growth, which is going to fail one way or the other eventually. It's better it fail by people voluntarily having fewer kids than any of the other possible fail states.

The solution is to fix the economic system, not to worry that teenagers aren't getting accidentally pregnant so much anymore.

Productivity is increasing all the time, and we're very likely on the verge of another huge productivity increase with LLMs and robotics. The idea that we need to constantly increase the number of humans to maintain our current economic system is absolutely asinine.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>The only reason it is a concern is that our economic system is built on infinite growth,

This is plainly, factually wrong. A sub-replacement fertility level isn't "the growth has stopped". It's "rapid shrinking has started, shrinking of the sort that causes even more shrinking". That's the concern.

> It's better it fail by people voluntarily having fewer kids

If they have fewer than 2.1 on average, that's not better. It's literally "you should die out and become extinct". That's what you're telling them.

>The solution is to fix the economic system

What you're pushing doesn't fix the economy, it makes it worse. When there aren't enough workers to maintain infrastructure, there will be rolling brownouts. It's food rationing because there aren't enough workers to keep agriculture going. It's "there are no more consumer goods because the factories were hollowed out"... which leads to "there is no retail and no retail jobs".

A shrinking, aging population wrecks an economy.

>Productivity is increasing all the time, and we're very likely on the verge of another huge productivity increase with LLMs and robotics.

"Robots will save us!" is juvenile fantasy. You're deluded.

>The idea that we need to constantly increase the number of humans

No one was talking about "increase the number of humans". Maybe you're just really bad at math. We're talking about "keep the number of humans steady, because shrinking locks us into a never-recovering vicious spiral of shrinking til we hit 0". Which is where we are now.

[dgroshev]

You're missing the vast interconnected network of stuff that's required to sustain that home. From your home battery to cancer treatments that you might need to sewer that runs to your home, all of this needs to be made and sometimes replaced. Most of those things are still unavailable to most humans; in many places we still haven't built roads, much less sewers and water distribution systems.

Household electricity self-sufficiency obscures the vast requirements to support it and extend this self-sufficiency to billions of other people.

[yoyohello13]

You’re right about that. I do think that access to more and cheaper energy has the downstream effect of making all those other things cheaper too and more available too. Energy is the foundation of it all.

[to11mtm]

> You can live in a well-insulated fully electric home powered by renewable energy and have most things you need within a walk, bike, or public transport ride away, _OR_ use an electric car for the things that aren't. If you combine that with a mostly-plant based diet (or at _least_ swapping chicken for most of your beef and lamb) and have 2 kids or fewer you're... basically there.

'political' is true but it covers so many different problems.

For example, while there is a grocery store very accessible to me, you have to plot the route carefully due to the road design.

Then there's the problem of the condo I currently live in not having the infrastructure for charging. (My compromise in that case is a hybrid. Kinda want a plug-in hybrid for my next car, they've gotten to where it very well could handle 80% of my driving.)

> Granted this doesn't include luxuries like jetting halfway around the world for a 1 week holiday or living in a 4000 square foot house in the desert and driving a studio apartment an hour to work every day, but really, is that a better life?

I've never gotten this lifestyle either... I'm not afraid to do a long road trip once a year or so, but yes in most cases too many costs have been externalized for too long.

[CalRobert]

Yeah, it's absurd that you can be 500 feet from a grocery story and still have to drive because otherwise you're risking death to get there.

As far as charging - I favour car-share, personally (I use mywheels.nl). Usually if you don't need a car every day (so you don't commute somewhere inaccessible via transit or bike) it makes more sense economically.

Even where I live, in a place some people describe as a bicycle Eden, there's plenty of complaining about not having "enough" car parking.

[Avicebron]

> You can live in a well-insulated fully electric home powered by renewable energy and have most things you need within a walk, bike, or public transport ride away, _OR_ use an electric car for the things that aren't.

For this to be the most effective it really needs to be deployed somewhere like India. How are they coming along with that?

[coryrc]

They have tons of people using small vehicles, bicycles and public transport. Unfortunately they aren't following China in mass rollout of solar photovoltaic; 90% of their energy consumption is fossil fuels:

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/india

USA is at 80%, which isn't much better, but at least trending down:

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/united-states

China is also at 80%, but trending down far steeper:

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china

[triceratops]

> For this to be the most effective it really needs to be deployed somewhere like India

Why? Most people there already live like that, minus insulation and reliable electricity.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

Because they are likely not living like that by choice. So, when they have the resources to consume more (which will certainly happen), energy-efficient choices need to be available.

[triceratops]

Energy-efficient choices will make the same impact no matter where they're deployed. Arguably they'll have more impact in Western countries since they already emit more carbon.

"India (or China) has to do <something>" is bullshit. Everyone has to do go lower carbon right now. Richer countries can afford more expensive technologies today so they should go first. By doing so they'll drive down the cost for everyone else.

[mc32]

All of the Western nations are at 2 kids or fewer but also so are China and India. Most of the 2+ children come from the ME and subsaharan Africa and areas in Oceania/SEAsia, Maybe some parts of South America. One could slow consumption by not importing people from low carbon footprint into high carbon footprint countries -though many countries, except Japan, aren't comfortable adjusting to lower populations.

[oldandboring]

Let me guess: you live in a European city.

[dmitrygr]

Western nations reducing will DO nothing - it is too small a fraction of greenhouse emissions. The large fraction is coming form india and china. And they do not have electric everything. they don't even have running water in most places.

[rwyinuse]

Your view is outdated. China is building renewable power generation at an extremely high rate, and also exporting cheap solar panels worldwide. China has a higher share of electric vehicles in cities than most of Europe and America does. It appears their emissions are now starting to go down as a result, although the economy keeps growing.

India still has a long way to go, but China is doing the right things. Same can't be said about USA under current administration.

[contingencies]

China's solar industry has some growth pangs right now but will recover: https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/chinas-solar-... (Aug 2025) + https://archive.is/6hCFU + (May) https://www.carbonbrief.org/chart-why-chinas-solar-boom-is-s... (June)

Most individual and collective consumption driving polluting production is overwhelmingly traditional western/first-world economies, though China is catching up.

[budsniffer952]

>Same can't be said about USA under current administration.

The reason half the population won't take climate alarmists seriously are statements like this.

Saying the West, generally, or the US, specifically "aren't doing anything" is ridiculous.

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/co2/united-states

[brewdad]

That chart conveniently ends at the end of the Biden Administration.

[budsniffer952]

Yes. It "conveniently" stops after showing 50 years of declining per captita carbon footprint. The last 4 years are what matter. Classic hacker News take. This is why you will continue to lose.

[lostlogin]

> Western nations reducing will DO nothing

That doesn’t fit my understanding at all.

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

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

[triceratops]

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co2-emissions-... Western developed countries have emitted 54% of all CO2 in history.

India and China today emit more than Europe and North America combined. https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions

China's solar panel and battery manufacturing industries are humanity's best chance of "electric everything". Without them we're all cooked.

[RajT88]

> anyone claiming “coal” or whatever is the future is simply a conman or a clown.

I've seen people on social media seriously claiming that coal plants are cleaner than wind energy or solar energy. It's aggravating. Never mind that it's easy to show that for the same amount of energy output, you get a similar amount of tons of coal ash yearly to the amount of materials it went into building a wind or solar plant...

I go back and forth if they are bots, or somehow people who are just really susceptible to this kind of garbage shill clickbait.

[Loquebantur]

The "shill" phenomenon goes much further than ignorant laypeople.

The AMOC shutdown isn't merely "possible" and due "this century". The math of the dynamics of complex systems shows the current behavior to be signs of a phase transition in the process of happening. The speed of that shutdown isn't "decades" either, it's more likely just years.

The voices of "experts" telling you it was all some incomprehensible conundrum should deeply worry you. They're either not being honest or they're no experts.

[sph]

People are stupid. I almost had a fight with a friend I have seen in a long time, a usually smart person, that wanted to convince me that solar power is more polluting than non-renewable alternatives. He’a not a shill, he is a farmer and like many just believes the propaganda and the skepticism. One of the biggest flaws of human rationality is wanting to believe that ‘the man’ is lying to you and the stupid conspiracy meme on Facebook has a valid point. We all have seen the American public completely implode with the COVID and mask and antivax idiocy.

[cameldrv]

The environmental movements of the past 60 years have been extremely successful, certainly in the U.S. The ozone hole problem has been essentially solved, acid rain has been essentially solved, mass scale water pollution like rivers catching on fire has been essentially solved, massive smog has been essentially solved.

[dualvariable]

And the people involved in climate policy have solutions to climate change which don't involve enormously large restrictions on consumption, but just require more energy efficiency (which is savings) and investment into carbon-neutral energy. And they've had those solutions for at least the past 20 years.

This isn't an insolvable problem, but the carbon-based energy sector will be big losers, and they're fighting tooth and nail against it.

An awful lot of our politics and geopolitics right now is symptomatic of the carbon energy sector fighting against the reality that it needs to die for the good of the human race, but it is also extraordinarily powerful.

[mastermage]

this exactly this. They are trying to keep their money sources alive even if it costs the entire world. Which is Supervillain amount of selfish.

[graemep]

> The ozone hole problem has been essentially solved, acid rain has been essentially solved, mass scale water pollution like rivers catching on fire

All far less expensive to fix. Never actually heard of rivers catching fire?

Has acid rain been solved globally?

The ozone hole problem we got lucky on. It required global action but a lot of things lined up. Things like the British prime minster at the time being a former research chemist and therefore understanding the issue, and being successful at influencing both the US President at the time and European countries.

[rsynnott]

> Never actually heard of rivers catching fire?

This is the most famous example, though there have been a few of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuyahoga_River

> Has acid rain been solved globally?

Not entirely, but largely.

[graemep]

On the rivers catching fire. Wow!

I think I may have heard of it as a freak event (e.g. an oil spill) but the same the same river catching fire 14 times is not something i realised happened.

[cameldrv]

The general environment in the 60s and 70s was extremely dirty. Every once in a while when I’m out with my kids, a classic car will roll by and I’ll admire it, but then my kids will hold their noses at the awful exhaust smell. That used to be every car.

It used to be that almost every river was unsafe to swim in.

It’s possible to fix environmental problems. It just requires the will.

[zerobees]

I'm not as negative about this, but with the benefit of hindsight, it's easy why the current initiatives didn't go anywhere.

It's not that people are not willing to make sacrifices. We repeatedly did this in times of famine or war. Europe during WWII is a perfect example. Another good example of a major cultural shift in response to a new threat was the AIDS epidemic. The entire sexual revolution went out the window and we're now in a world where young people have a lot less sex than ever before. We like to talk about gender and sexuality, but we do a lot less with it, so to speak.

Anti-consumption / degrowth arguments face an uphill battle because they basically say "you should live a harder life". There should be less stuff, the stuff should be more expensive, there should be less of you. So you need a good answer why this is the right choice. Doing it "for the planet" doesn't sound too convincing because we're also a part of the planet and most people feel entitled to it. It's hard to get others to make real lifestyle sacrifices because you showed them some photos of koalas or coral reefs.

Because koalas don't cut it, we started giving increasingly apocalyptic, doomsday-type answers, all the way to renaming "climate change" to "climate crisis" or "climate disaster / catastrophe". That was probably a mistake. It created a sense of inevitability (so might as well have fun while you can) and undermined the credibility of the proposed solutions. Is it really going to save us all if I'm sorting my recyclables into five different bins?

So in a sense, I think this is a PR disaster more than anything else.

[smartbit]

> The entire sexual revolution went out the window and we're now in a world where young people have a lot less sex than ever before.

Source?

Not withstanding that people are not willing to make sacrifices, my impression is that the last decades young women gained the freedom of enjoying sex as much as they like not restricted by religious or other norms. Sleeping with several different partners a week is not frowned upon but encouraged by friends & family ’Good for you, enjoy!’.

And related to the discussion: safe sex with contraception imho is among the most environmental friendly activities as long as one travels by foot or bike.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

> safe sex with contraception imho is among the most environmental friendly activities as long as one travels by foot or bike.

This is leaving no space for privacy behind "Steamy Windows" within "Nutbush City Limits".

[Saline9515]

Ressources are not infinite, and most of the consumption doesn't bring much happiness to the consumer, if not the contrary.

A good empirical example is the success of GLP-1 inhibitors, for which people are ready to pay a lot to allow them to consume less food.

Inflation is already here anyway, and 8 billion humans simply can't consume like Americans. Either you anticipate what's coming, or you will have to endure it.

[nikanj]

WWII was much easier to sell to the people, because the nazis were invading _now_. It seems impossible to sell reduced standard of living today to respond to a problem tomorrow

[graemep]

Even with the obvious danger the Nazis presented it took a long time for most countries to respond. Britain and France could have stopped them (from a much stronger position) earlier but did nothing until after they had conquered Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland) and very little until the Nazis actually invaded France. The US did not enter the war until it was attacked either. Nor did the Soviet Union.

There was reluctance to act on an obvious and imminent threat. People just hoped it would go away.

[xnyan]

Nazis were invading other places now. The US cut off Japan's oil supply, triggering an existential crisis for Japan that led to a military attack.

If United States had joined the Axis powers, leadership very plausibly could have continued the practice of isolationism (which was the popular opinion before Pearl Harbor). It might have been a shortsighted move, but Nazis invading Europe did not sell the US population on entering the war.

[nikanj]

Comment I replied to was talking about Europe during WWII

[rwyinuse]

Yep, all the talk about individual "carbon footprint" is just a distraction designed by the fossil fuel lobby. Universally in the world people who live most environmentally friendly lives are those that are too poor to consume much, not those who are the most aware, or claim to care the most about climate change.

The only way forward is developing as much solar, wind and nuclear as possible, driving down energy prices. Obviously stuff like carbon tax can help accelerate the process, but mostly it's happening because renewables have become the cheapest way of generating energy in most parts of the world.

[lumost]

I really think the environmental movements were a red herring. It was always impossible to make a meaningful dent in your personal emissions while still existing in your location. There was never any reduction proposal which could mitigate this.

Government mandates for e.g. large nuclear construction, geo-engineering, BEV adoption, or other similar proposals would have had an impact. These all exposed the real tradeoffs which would need to be accepted of cost, hardship, or whatever the opposition to nuclear was.

The environmental movements of the last 60 years focused on impossible goals which were easy to rally behind.

[JeremyNT]

> The environmental movements of the last 60 years focused on impossible goals which were easy to rally behind.

Is this true? Americans elect leaders who won't even acknowledge the issue is real. We have at times managed to gather some momentum towards using government to address the issues through incentives and regulation - even as recent as the Biden administration - then reactionaries gain power and dismantle the efforts.

The "environmental movement" was not focused on the personal responsibility angle, it's just that the American political system rejected proposals to do any meaningful government interventions because long term thinking is never rewarded.

[snovv_crash]

Agreed. You aren't going to convince people in India that their children should stay poor when there is an option to uplift them. That's an extra billion people of energy and material needs, all by itself.

[islandfox100]

''Now, the total population of well-off countries in the world is about 1 billion, while China has more than 1.3 billion people. If we are all to become modernized, the well-off population must more than double. If we are to consume as much energy in production and daily lives as the present well-off people do, all the existing resources in the world would be far from enough for us! The old path seems to be a dead end. Where is the new road? It lies in scientific and technological innovation, and in the accelerated transition from factor-driven and investment-driven growth to innovation-driven growth.'' -Xi Jinping, Governance of China

[coryrc]

The question is whether you use solar PV or build more coal plants to supply them. The latter makes people sicker, but more dependent on the government, so you can guess which one gets the tax breaks and which one gets tariffs and international politics to make it more expensive to acquire.

[budsniffer952]

Coal technology is cheap and wide spread. PV technology is not, yet.

[dalyons]

Huh? Solar is widely acknowledged to be significantly cheaper than building new coal. And it is everywhere, you can just buy containers of it and have it delivered anywhere in the world.

[budsniffer952]

Yes. You can just buy containers of PV equipment from China and have it delivered anywhere in the world. Until they decide not to sell it to you, or they decide to stop subsidizing it. Or we go to war with them. Then you're gonna wish you had built those coal plants.

Have you paid attention to anything since 2020? Are you paying attention to anything now?

Suggesting PV is "cheaper" because of the per-watt cost to install it misses so much reality it's hard to take seriously. We live in the now, not some idealized future state. We need energy NOW. Do you think solar cells are immune to supply and demand? And that the economics will not be affected by a global shift?

[snovv_crash]

PV can't be switched off once sold, coal can stop being delivered. Coal is the one that brings centralisation and dependency on external parties, unless you happen to live somewhere with large coal deposits, and even in that case you get all the health problems of putting radioactive soot into the air.

[coryrc]

PV panels can't be switched off remotely because China doesn't like you. Once within your country's borders, they are yours.

[FooBarWidget]

On top of that, I see more and more people actively resisting what they call "the degrowth mind virus". For example levelsio on Twitter. He regularly complains about EU environmental regulations and the lack of AC, or inability to set it to lower than 22 C. He sets it to 18 C (which is too cold for me to sleep, but his cup of tea I guess). And regularly posts about how hot temperatures make people dumber and drive down productivity.

What I don't see is these anti-degrowth people discussing substance with pro-degrowth people. No discussions about the merits of the idea that planet's carrying capacity has been reached or exceeded. Both camps seem to treat their thesis as a given, a religion even.

[graemep]

I often have discussions of substance about religion! I love them.

I think one of the problems is that,as with many political things, people assume bad faith on the other side in this argument so there is no point having a discussion about the substance.

[tootie]

We are essentially there now. We have begun the mass deployment of renewable energy and it's only accelerating. The problem is that energy consumption is also growing so it's a moving target. We are within reach of hitting peak emissions, but the fact is that most emissions will still hang in the atmo for decades. So even when we hit the point of decreasing emissions, that's still only proximate to decreasing the amount of GHG in the atmo which is proximate the heating effects on the earth. So even at our current breakneck pace of remediation, the end effects are still locked in and getting worse for at least several decades if not centuries.

[nradov]

Ironically the "environmental" movement has in some ways actually set us back by opposing clean, safe nuclear power.

[junto]

> Ironically the "environmental" movement has in some ways actually set us back by opposing clean, safe nuclear power.

Problem is it’s not exactly clean because you’ve got nuclear waste to dispose of and nobody wants it in their backyard. It’s mostly safe, but when it does go wrong it contaminates large swathes of land for thousands of years.

Its biggest problem is that it’s expensive[1].

Not only that - it’s getting more expensive.

Not only that - it will never achieve economies of scale.

[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3A3-Learning-curves-...

[dnautics]

> It is simply not possible to get enough people to reduce to make an impact

What are you talking about? The united states is currently ~-30% off peak carbon emissions.

[don_esteban]

How much of that reduction has been achieved by outsourcing the production to China/other places?

Are there good links to articles/papers where proper accounting has been done?

[asveikau]

Outside the US, countries are doing a better job of electrifying. The US has deliberately retrograde policies right now.

[stinkbeetle]

> I’ve come to terms with the fact that there is no stopping human consumption.

I really felt _sure_ that billionaires and monarchs and rest of the ruling class flying their private jets to meet their private mega yachts before attending very important meetings in luxury chalets where they lecture the filthy commoners about how horrible and greedy they are for not wanting to eat cockroaches and pay them more taxes for the greater good was going to do it. Are you sure that a few more decades of that won't finally convince people how awful they are?

> It is simply not possible to get enough people to reduce to make an impact. The failure of the environment movements over the last 60 years are proof. The only way is ‘up and out’ developing clean, cheap methods of energy generation and lobbying to get that infrastructure built out as quickly as possible. At this point, investing more in Fossil fuels is a joke and anyone claiming “coal” or whatever is the future

If only the "environment" movements had failed. They were instrumental in destroying nuclear power, with support of fossil fuel interests. The coal industry has had no better friend than the anti-nuclear "green" movement in the past 50 years.

> is simply a conman or a clown.

There's lots of conmen and clowns around. The trick is not sniffing out the ones twirling their mustaches and adjusting their monocles while demolishing orphanages, it's the ones who tell you things that make you feel good that are the dangerous ones. That's where the "con" in conmen comes from.

[mistrial9]

> The failure of the environment movements over the last 60 years are proof

superficial and incorrect

[supertroop]

Explain your reasoning or stop wasting bits.

[dahinds]

For the past ~60 years... with maybe just a bit of slack on the start of that, it would include tremendously impactful things like: - the clean air act and clean water act - endangered species act and restrictions on international trade for protected animals and plants - creation of the EPA, and reductions and regulation of pesticides and herbicides - the emergence of the organic food industry - the Montreal protocol and global reduction in CFC production - contribution to the development of clean energy technology -- you could argue that now the boom in clean energy is just economics in action but that comes after decades of basic science and technical innovation motivated by environmental concerns.

[dnautics]

it's hard to argue that the environmental movement has had "no effect" considering how much carbon the US and Europe have reduced in the last 15 years. SOx and NOx, have basically gone to zero, and water is cleaner, etc.

Sure, some of that is "dollars and cents" and not the movement directly, but most of that (technological improvement) had nonzero influence on the technologists who built the impromevents.

[flyinglizard]

Environmental movements had a huge impact on public awareness and climate change mitigation. It sure didn’t come from the government themselves. We take many everyday steps to reduce our environmental impact, from energy to transportation to building to recycling. It’s all happening to one degree or another pretty much everywhere.

[calgoo]

No, you stop wasting all our time. We are all aware that the world is going to shit because of people not accepting their part in the destruction.