I completely agree, and this point reinforces my comment that the transformation should be to different methods of consumption, not just less of the same. However, in terms of the climate crisis, emission reduction is a form of delayed gratification, whereas the paradigm I am calling for is actually about a transformed ethic of human existence on our planet.DWill wrote:people may perceive sacrifice in holding back from getting everything they might want, but a lot of that is superfluity anyway, not needed for a happy life lived by humane principles.
The strain on world resources will be far worse if we fail to focus enough on technological transformation. How I visualise a transformed world is one where the massive unused resources and energy of the world ocean become available through new simple large scale technology, and as a result the grossly inefficient traditional rural systems that perpetuate poverty and impact the environment can be replaced by new modern urban lifestyles in which people have a light ecological footprint but still have abundant energy and resources. A shift to a high technology urban lifestyle, with materials built from carbon, can create universal abundance for high human populations while also enhancing global biodiversity. Failing to explore such a path leaves open the risk of catastrophe.DWill wrote: I also believe that we need to greatly increase world wealth. This means enabling most people to escape degrading poverty, and it is a massive undertaking that in itself will strain world resources.
I agree with your point that current affluent lifestyles are not sustainable and replicable, but the key phrase in your comment is “in the manner of the First World.” It is actually possible physically on our planet to shift the world economy to a system of abundance rather than scarcity, but this needs a paradigm shift in terms of both technology and culture.DWill wrote: If we project some kind of cornucopia fantasy in which everyone (the burgeoning population of the earth) will be affluent individual consumers in the manner of much of the "First World," we're into delusion territory. Investing faith into unrealized and perhaps unrealizable transformative technologies is an irresponsible course. Even were they to materialize, the weight of our specie's success will probably still unbalance the ecosystem.
My view is that it is entirely physically possible to achieve sustained global abundance through an algae based economy. This is not an irresponsible fantasy but a practical reform agenda. Putting our eggs in the basket of sacrificing wealth by reducing energy and resource use is actually the really irresponsible attitude, since it is a recipe for failure and conflict, whereas discussion of a technological path to universal abundance is a basis for successful stable global peace and justice. The environmentalist ideology that stymies technological solutions is a genuine barrier to progress.
We do need to shift from a linear waste mentality to a culture of cyclic reuse. Such a shift could sustain vastly higher productivity and happiness than we now have.
I used to share your view on this DWill, and my point here is counterintuitive from a traditional linear view. We naturally assume that the most wealthy cause the most damage. But that is not true. It ignores the role of education in enabling biodiversity protection by improving understanding and accountability.DWill wrote: This is simply wrong Robert, this coupling of 'universal abundance and biodiversity.' How would more abundance, heretofore a cause of species extinction, foster biodiversity? It's a serious case of having cake and eating it.
Among the real causes of biodiversity loss, one of the biggest factors is poverty, for example in the use of firewood for cooking and in activities of subsistence farmers to clear land. I propose as a core reform to develop efficient industrial processes to grow algae on immense commercial scale at sea. The results of that would be immediate direct protection of marine biodiversity by increasing the nutrient available at the base of the food chain, and also by stabilising the carbon cycle, enabling rapid removal of the excess carbon our linear methods have added to the air and water.
Yes Dwill you are correct that I ignore and denigrate these sort of irrelevant stunts. Worthy as it may be for Karwat’s personal spiritual fulfilment, imagining that his sort of sacrificial attitude amounts to a hill of beans in this crazy world is the height of delusion. What we need is an unbending focus on the big picture, which is the question of how we can mine twenty billion tonnes of carbon from the air and sea each year. Once that is answered then there will be plenty of time for stylites like Darshan to indulge their sense of moral superiority.DWill wrote:You ignore or denigrate social change that right now can be effective, as difficult and incremental as it is, and as needing of technology to assist it as it admittedly is. A guy named Darshan Karwat has an article in the Washington Post on his 2-year experiment in reducing consumption. The second year, his total yield of both trash and recyclables came to six pounds. Like Thoreau, he presents this as an experiment, and one that he knows not everyone can conduct. But it serves to illustrate how much can fairly easily be done with no real sacrifice. In fact, he found his life enriched by the different patterns he needed to adopt.