I don't wish for an alternative to "sustainable" living, just to be clear. Only I doubt people will voluntarily give up all the amenities of our unsustainable way of living.
> Wait until "technology" saves us ?
Is that really too far fetched? Like "technology" saved us from food shortage [0], bacterial infections [1], horse manure [2] and so much more.
Technology like airplanes also saved us from being unable to leave our home town in a lifetime.
Today's problems are mostly side-effects of yesterday's solutions, often accelerated by greed and selfishness.
> If the human race prefers autodestruction over self restraint, let it be.
Maybe the next iteration of intelligent life on this planet is less selfish and more sensible? Less prone to social traps [3]?
> You better start planning the pitch you'll give to your grandchildren
That's not a pitch. If that happens, it's more like "We fucked it up, we're going to die. End of the story". Nothing someone needs to buy. No one "pitched" the demise of the Ancient Rome to the people. It was just inevitable, yet painful.
> this one will be much more of a hard sell than mine
It would be a more fateful talk than yours, but your's is a big one to sell:
"We've identified a bunch of problems, like nuclear weapons and climate change. Climate change is the only thing, YOU personally can do something about. So, yes, you would be able to buy an iPhone every year, watching TV on a big plasma while bbq-ing pulled beef and fly to any beach you can dream of just to get plastered with cheap beer over there, BUT we take ALL this away from you to save the planet. You can emit only as much CO2 as the poorest people in the world do. Yes, we try to reinvent all this stuff from scratch, but in a sustainable way, but this could take ages - if it happens at all. We don't really believe in technology, which is why we need to take it away from you NOW, but we hope for the best.
The nuclear weapons and stuff, you ask? Yes, we talk to the world leaders. They are unregenerate at the moment, but YOU will join us for the good cause, won't you?"
My point here is not that we would not be better off, if we all lived sustainable. But taking a single threat to humanity out of a big list of threats and conventionalise the one with the solution imposing the biggest cuts on an individual level, to the most detrimental one, might do more harm than good.
And, according to science, every cut above these 0.6-1.2t per capita per year would just delay the catastrophe to the grand-grand-children. So, yes, this would sound a bit like "middle ages" to most people.
I don't wish for an alternative to "sustainable" living, just to be clear. Only I doubt people will voluntarily give up all the amenities of our unsustainable way of living.
> Wait until "technology" saves us ?
Is that really too far fetched? Like "technology" saved us from food shortage [0], bacterial infections [1], horse manure [2] and so much more.
Technology like airplanes also saved us from being unable to leave our home town in a lifetime.
Today's problems are mostly side-effects of yesterday's solutions, often accelerated by greed and selfishness.
> If the human race prefers autodestruction over self restraint, let it be.
Maybe the next iteration of intelligent life on this planet is less selfish and more sensible? Less prone to social traps [3]?
> You better start planning the pitch you'll give to your grandchildren
That's not a pitch. If that happens, it's more like "We fucked it up, we're going to die. End of the story". Nothing someone needs to buy. No one "pitched" the demise of the Ancient Rome to the people. It was just inevitable, yet painful.
> this one will be much more of a hard sell than mine
It would be a more fateful talk than yours, but your's is a big one to sell:
"We've identified a bunch of problems, like nuclear weapons and climate change. Climate change is the only thing, YOU personally can do something about. So, yes, you would be able to buy an iPhone every year, watching TV on a big plasma while bbq-ing pulled beef and fly to any beach you can dream of just to get plastered with cheap beer over there, BUT we take ALL this away from you to save the planet. You can emit only as much CO2 as the poorest people in the world do. Yes, we try to reinvent all this stuff from scratch, but in a sustainable way, but this could take ages - if it happens at all. We don't really believe in technology, which is why we need to take it away from you NOW, but we hope for the best.
The nuclear weapons and stuff, you ask? Yes, we talk to the world leaders. They are unregenerate at the moment, but YOU will join us for the good cause, won't you?"
My point here is not that we would not be better off, if we all lived sustainable. But taking a single threat to humanity out of a big list of threats and conventionalise the one with the solution imposing the biggest cuts on an individual level, to the most detrimental one, might do more harm than good.
And, according to science, every cut above these 0.6-1.2t per capita per year would just delay the catastrophe to the grand-grand-children. So, yes, this would sound a bit like "middle ages" to most people.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_productivity
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penicillin
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_horse_manure_crisis_of_1...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_trap