
There Might Be No Way to Live Comfortably Without Also Ruining the Planet - SirLJ
https://www.sciencealert.com/maybe-we-can-t-live-comfortably-without-ruining-the-planet
======
jdietrich
I think that the analysis in the linked article is fundamentally flawed,
because it assumes a simple one-dimensional axis of more or less resource use
and a direct relationship between using more resources and creating better
lives.

Most of their social performance indicators aren't inherently resource-
intensive. Education, social support, democratic quality and equality have no
direct ties to environmental resources. Life satisfaction and healthy life
expectancy are only weakly tied to resource use - Cubans live about as long as
Americans, the Bhutanese are more satisfied with their lives.

Good sanitation and nutrition can easily be achieved at a very low resource
cost; in the case of nutrition, excess intake of high-calorie and high-carbon
foods is now an equal or greater cause of mortality than malnutrition.
Reducing meat consumption in the developed world would massively reduce
resource use while also increasing life expectancy. Britons have never eaten a
healthier diet than during wartime rationing.

That leaves us with income and access to energy. I can't really address the
issue of income; I have no idea if it's possible to maintain current levels of
economic growth while reducing resource use. The issue of access to energy is
more straightforward. We know that we can produce close to our current levels
of energy with entirely sustainable means. Energy consumption has diminishing
marginal utility - getting an electric light in your house makes a huge
difference to your quality of life, but trading up from a subcompact to an SUV
doesn't. There are some big outliers on the plot of social progress vs energy
use.

I think that this research has taken a really elaborate route to arguing
"countries with high living standards tend to use lots of natural resources, ∴
high living standards require lots of natural resources". I don't dispute the
correlation, but I think that the causal relationship is almost entirely
illusory.

~~~
maxander
As mentioned in the article, the relationship between most of the social goods
and resource use is _complicated_. Education requires a certain percentage of
the workforce to be teachers, the management of a sufficiently large
organization, a bunch of buildings and moving of students around, etc, each of
which in turn requires a set of other things. It would be incredibly
difficult- and the authors don't try- to trace all of these all the way back
and get a final accounting of the natural resources being used. But if you
don't do that, neither can you say that they _don 't_ require a certain amount
of natural resources. Education _might_ turn out to be as resource-intensive
as the airline industry, somehow.

Tl;dr I guess, "no direct ties to environmental resources" != "no significant
environmental resource requirements."

On the other hand, of course, the whole article is observational based on
existing societies with present-day technology; change society or the
available technology, and resource requirements would presumably also change
(also in ways we don't know.)

~~~
Retric
When you say something must use X resource that's very hard to support.

EX: Education does not actually need separate buildings and transportation. It
could operate completely online.

Further, most of we think of as nature exists in fairly narrow bands. We could
for example have a city going 10 miles into the earth with a fairly normal
ecosystem existing above it.

~~~
maxander
That’s just more speculation. _Could_ education operate entirely online? Some
quirk of human psychology might make widespread remote education absolutely
disastrous. All sorts of things could make udeground cities unworkable.
Complex systems full of humans are have been often found to be _surprising_ ,
to say the least.

“X sounds roughly possible, so we can count on X”-type thinking doesn’t answer
any questions or solve any problems, it just conceals how little humanity
actually knows about this predicament we’re all in.

~~~
Retric
That's not my argument, if you say Education _must_ take X resource then you
need to demonstrate that's the only way it can possibly work. Everything from
year round alternating days education (MWT,TH so 1/2 the teachers 1/2 the
facilities), distance education, subliminal education, matrix style skill
uploading, or simply allowing more people to test out are all counter points.

You can make arguments that solar power must be lower than X efficiency from
Quantum mechanics, but something as nebulous as education is more a goal than
a specific approach.

PS: As to your specific objection, Alaska already does a lot of distance
education and it works fairly well though not necessarily cheaper.

------
gaius
_These include moving beyond the pursuit of economic growth in wealthy
nations, shifting rapidly from fossil fuels to renewable energy, and
significantly reducing inequality._

The one thing not mentioned is that only actual solution: managing
populations. The number of people on the planet has nearly doubled just in my
lifetime! Also on HN today

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16339467](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16339467)

But making more people is not a problem the human race has.

~~~
jdietrich
Population control isn't a solution to anything.

We're already at or very close to "peak child". There are about two billion
children in the world, a figure we don't expect to ever significantly
increase. We expect the population to grow to between 9 and 11 billion by the
end of the century, but the cause of that growth is simply survival.
Increasing life expectancy means that the population is turning over more
slowly - there's no increase in the number of children being born, but people
are surviving longer.

Most of the developed world is already at or below a replacement fertility
rate. The developing world is catching up very quickly. The birth rate in
India has fallen from 5.91 per woman in 1960 to 2.4 today. Bangladesh has done
even better, with their birth rate falling from 6.95 in 1970 to 2.14 today.

If you're proposing that we reduce the global population, you have two
options. Option one is to reduce the global fertility rate to well below
replacement and accept an increasingly ageing society. With current trends in
life expectancy, this option would leave us completely unable to care for the
elderly. At best, this means millions of elderly people being warehoused in
robotic care facilities; at worst, it means leaving people to die, especially
in middle-income countries. Option two is some kind of genocide.

Unless you're willing to volunteer yourself or your child as a sacrifice, I
suggest we all figure out how to share our resources more equitably and use
them more efficiency.

~~~
gaius
_We 're already at or very close to "peak child". There are about two billion
children in the world, a figure we don't expect to ever significantly
increase. We expect the population to grow to between 9 and 11 billion_

Who's "we" in this context? Because every time someone makes one of these
predictions the human race blows through it and keeps going. I wouldn't be
surprised if we reach 20Bn. I expect it only to be curtailed by environmental
catastrophe.

 _Unless you 're willing to volunteer yourself or your child as a sacrifice_

I'm child-free, so I can look at this objectively.

~~~
jdietrich
>Who's "we" in this context?

Homo sapiens. The global fertility rate has more than halved over the last 50
years. The developed world now has a birth rate substantially below
replacement. Birth rate in the developing world is falling precipitously,
matching the rate of decline that happened in the developed world 50 years
ago.

This isn't a blip. It isn't speculation. It's an undeniable and epoch-defining
change in how our species reproduces. The age of Malthus is over.

[https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN/](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN/)

~~~
rabidrat
The rate may be dropping, but we're still adding 80m+ real people every
_year_. N*rate is holding steady because N keeps increasing even though the
rate is dropping.

~~~
naasking
You're just confusing the issue. Population growth is decelerating and is
expected to plateau within the next 80 years. Overpopulation is not going to
be a problem, depopulation may actually become a problem.

~~~
gaius
_Overpopulation is not going to be a problem_

Overpopulation is already a problem, everywhere you look: pollution, climate
change, depleted marine stocks, loss of biodiversity, antibiotic-resistant
bacteria, melting ice caps, resource wars, all have one single root cause: too
many people fighting over too little planet.

~~~
naasking
> Overpopulation is already a problem, everywhere you look: pollution, climate
> change, depleted marine stocks, loss of biodiversity, antibiotic-resistant
> bacteria, melting ice caps, resource wars, all have one single root cause:
> too many people fighting over too little planet.

No, there is not one single problem. I can just as easily blame incorrect
market structures which enable negative externalities. A carbon tax corrects
one such market distortion, for instance.

The Earth can support many more humans than are currently living if our
production methods didn't allow for negative externalities.

------
anfilt
Depends on the resources. I would say if we can get a handle on the energy.
That goes a long way. For building materials we are not going to really run
out of steel, clay for bricks, and concrete. Wood is renewable if managed
properly.

I remember reading something that said the population will peak around 10 to
10.5 billion, and not really grow beyond that. So when it comes to housing for
that many people there is plenty of land.

That mainly leaves food. I have heard some people say meat is quite
inefficient, but how much land do we need to feed 10.5 billion people?

It would be interesting to see other resource like copper plotted as how much
is needed per person vs world supply. I do know aluminum is 3rd most abundant
element in earths crust and iron is the 4th most abundant.

Really, for energy we should just be using renewable, and nuclear. Also when
reading about how much the fuel for nuclear is actual used only like a few
percent we need better reactors.

~~~
jdietrich
>concrete

Concrete is staggeringly carbon-intensive. You need to burn a lot of fuel to
produce cement, which itself emits carbon during the calcination process.
Every ton of cement produces about 900kg of CO2, making up about 5% of global
carbon emissions.

[http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2012/05/09/emissions-from-
the-c...](http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2012/05/09/emissions-from-the-cement-
industry/)

~~~
sunstone
If you do some quick and dirty calculations of a 3000 sqft concrete house with
5 people lasting 100 years then the CO2 burden comes out to around
43kg/yr/person. An average american produces about 1000kg/yr so that's around
5% of a person's total CO2.

~~~
jotm
Ha, and they're living in some shabby plywood houses, at that.

------
stuntkite
I just don't buy it, there is so much waste and the gap between what the
0.001% have and everyone else is so big. I've played enough simcity to know
it's tough and takes planning, but you can balance the needs of everyone and
not go bust. Many people are coming to realize that the consumer wealth dream
being sold to them does not actually contain comfort, satisfaction, or
personal fulfillment.

Greed, corruption, and willful ignorance/incuriousness however are a cancer on
the system that makes for a race condition that keeps us from actively
investing in that balance. It's hard not to be apocalyptic, but it's even
crazier to think that our collective consciousness can't figure out a way to
arrest that cancer before we all end up eating jellyfish out of acidified
plastic oceans supplemented with snowpiercer cockroach bricks.

The corruption rife ganges river sanitation project[1] is a great example of a
massive opportunity to increase quality of life for a staggering amount of
people sucked dry financially by said cancer. There are ways to NOT do that.
We have the ability to figure out how. We also at this moment, still might
have enough time.

[1] [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/what-it-
takes-...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/what-it-takes-to-
clean-the-ganges)

------
SlowBro
Permaculture seems to be the answer. It’s not that there aren’t sufficient
resources for a comfortable life, it’s that the way those resources are used
is incredibly poor. Some Permaculturists estimate the globe actually has a
carrying capacity of 50 billion people, were it managed better.

I like the study of permaculture in part because it treats human beings as
part of the solution, not the problem. Get more people moving in the right
direction for positive change. It is a way of love, not fear.

------
diyseguy
I have also suspected that it's not possible to live a comfortable lifestyle
(e.g. all the modern conveniences most Americans enjoy) without indirectly
relying on slave or poverty labor somewhere else

~~~
gaius
Oh, it would be perfectly possible - remember when "mod cons" were invented,
most if not all of them were manufactured on-shore. If the human race
comprised only a billion or two people, the whole world could easily live at
that standard indefinitely.

------
drallison
Julia Steinberger (Leeds) wrote: "Radical changes are needed if all people are
to live well within the limits of the planet" but she got the timing wrong.
Now, I fear, we are too late.

Consider: what is the likelihood that we can reach a global consensus on
population control which will have any significant impact in the next 25
years? What social structure will suddenly appear which will change our value
system? Who among us is going to be willing to give up our automobiles? And so
forth. How can we have a future when we have a President who does not believe
what scientists are telling him? How can we support leaders who have no
understanding of the physical world? These are existential questions that need
to be resolved quickly or all is lost. And they are being ignored.

------
rasengan0
It's nice to know we're all gonna die with generational suffering down the
road. I'd like to know what Vietnam is doing and how might that model be
improved. Data --> ML --> policy, etc With all this bickering on who's right
or wrong, it is no wonder that nothing will change and humanity will go the
way of the cynical comedian:
[https://youtu.be/7W33HRc1A6c?t=2m39s](https://youtu.be/7W33HRc1A6c?t=2m39s)

------
WheelsAtLarge
The problem is the population size. There's no way the environment can recover
from 7+ billion people using the resources we need. Additionally, the term
comfortably is relative, the more we have the more we think we need to live
comfortably. Ask a hunter-gather what he/she need to be comfortable vs an
upper-middle-class individual in New York and you'll get an extremely
different answer.

I see a future where we get our food directly from the sun and with most
animals and plants destroyed- pets and house plants will likely be the
survivors we pick.

Very sad!

~~~
jdietrich
The average American uses twice as much energy as the average Briton, five
times more than the average Brazilian and eleven times more than the average
Indian.

Is the problem that we've got too many people, or is it that the resources we
have are being distributed completely unequally?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_co...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_consumption_per_capita)

~~~
Turing_Machine
The "problem" (to the extent that it is a problem) is that Britain has 65
million people on an island smaller than the U.S. state of Oregon, most of
which has an extremely moderate climate. The U.S. is orders of magnitude
larger (i.e., more transportation costs) and has significant regions that
require large-scale heating or air conditioning to make habitable. Some
require both.

Also, Canada uses even more energy per capita than the United States, for
pretty much the same reasons.

~~~
jdietrich
>significant regions that require large-scale heating or air conditioning to
make habitable. Some require both.

People only moved to the really hot parts of America in significant numbers
because of the invention of air conditioning. They abandoned vernacular
architectural techniques that kept buildings comfortable using passive
cooling.

The entire population of the US could comfortably fit into the climatically
mild parts. Vast areas of the US never get particularly cold in winter or
particularly warm in summer.

As with suburban sprawl, the human geography of the US is built around
wasteful energy use. Those trends were established over time and they can be
reversed over time.

[https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/thermal-
delight/](https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/thermal-delight/)

~~~
Turing_Machine
"The entire population of the US could comfortably fit into the climatically
mild parts."

Yeah, well, the entire population of the US could be put in giant warehouses,
eating in cafeterias and hotbunking the beds in three shifts.

But that's no way to live.

"Vast areas of the US never get particularly cold in winter or particularly
warm in summer."

Where are these "vast areas"? Outside of maybe the Pacific Northwest and
Hawaii, I can't think of any.

------
badcede
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c)

------
edem
There just have to be much less people on the planet and it will be ok. Simple
as that.

------
coldtea
Sure, but first define "comfortably".

------
westurner
"A good life for all within planetary boundaries" (2018)
[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-018-0021-4](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-018-0021-4)

> Abstract: Humanity faces the challenge of how to achieve a high quality of
> life for over 7 billion people without destabilizing critical planetary
> processes. Using indicators designed to measure a ‘safe and just’
> development space, we quantify the resource use associated with meeting
> basic human needs, and compare this to downscaled planetary boundaries for
> over 150 nations. We find that no country meets basic needs for its citizens
> at a globally sustainable level of resource use. Physical needs such as
> nutrition, sanitation, access to electricity and the elimination of extreme
> poverty could likely be met for all people without transgressing planetary
> boundaries. However, the universal achievement of more qualitative goals
> (for example, high life satisfaction) would require a level of resource use
> that is 2–6 times the sustainable level, based on current relationships.
> Strategies to improve physical and social provisioning systems, with a focus
> on sufficiency and equity, have the potential to move nations towards
> sustainability, but the challenge remains substantial.

> "Radical changes are needed if all people are to live well within the limits
> of the planet," [...]

> "These include moving beyond the pursuit of economic growth in wealthy
> nations, shifting rapidly from fossil fuels to renewable energy, and
> significantly reducing inequality.

> "Our physical infrastructure and the way we distribute resources are both
> part of what we call provisioning systems. If all people are to lead a good
> life within the planet's limits then these provisioning systems need to be
> fundamentally restructured to allow for basic needs to be met at a much
> lower level of resource use."

Perhaps ironically, our developments in service of sustainability (resource
efficiency) needs for a civilization on Mars are directly relevant to solving
these problems on Earth.

Recycle everything.

Survive without soil, steel, hydrocarbons, animals, oxygen.

Convert CO2, sunlight, H20, and geothermal energy to forms necessary for life.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Mars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Mars)

Algae, carbon capture, carbon sequestration, lab grown plants, water
purification, solar power, [...]

Mars requires a geomagnetic field in order to sustain an atmosphere in order
to [...].

"The Limits to Growth" (1972, 2004) [1] very clearly forecasts these same
unsustainable patterns of resource consumption: 'needs' which exceed and
transgress our planetary biophysical boundaries.

The 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (#GlobalGoals) [2] outline our
worthwhile international objectives (Goals, Targets, and Indicators). The
Paris Agreement [3] sets targets and asks for commitments from nation states
(and businesses) to help achieve these goals most efficiently and most
sustainably.

In the US, the Clean Power Plan [4] was intended to redirect our national
resources toward renewable energy with far less external costs. Direct and
indirect subsidies for nonrenewables are irrational. Are subsidies helpful or
necessary to reach production volumes of renewable energy products and
services?

There are certainly financial incentives for anyone who chooses to invest in
solving for the Global Goals; and everyone can!

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth)

[2] [http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-
develop...](http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-
goals/)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement)

[4]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Power_Plan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Power_Plan)

