TBF there are far, far too many technological solutions that are “science will save us” but haven’t been fully fleshed out, studied, or require some modest form of unobtainium to work in mass deployment. Also, a huge chunk of those solutions would have to have been implemented 20 years ago, yet haven’t even made it off the proverbial drawing board yet.
IMO solutions need to be implemented now, like wind, solar, especially nuclear power, EV, etc. Yeah, nuclear is temporary, and yes, nothing stays in place longer than a temporary solution, but it’s a known and can be built now rather than yet another 5-15 years of waiting for untried tech solutions. Unfortunately the comic isn’t entirely wrong, we are going to need to lose some things if we want to save ourselves.
Yeah, nuclear is temporary, and yes, nothing stays in place longer than a temporary solution, but it’s a known and can be built now rather than yet another 5-15 years of waiting for untried tech solutions.
I guess you could say nuclear power can be built “now”. From a certain point of view.
The last nuclear reactor to go online in the United States took 14 years to build - from breaking ground in 2009 to going online in 2023 - at a cost of thirty billion dollars.
And that wasn’t even a new nuclear power site, it was a additional reactor added on as an existing site, so planning and permitting and so on were significantly faster then a new nuclear power plant would be.
So yes, we could start the process of building a new nuclear reactor in the United States and commit 30 billion in taxpayer money to it. And after 20 to 30 years that reactor might come online.
Or we could commit 30 billion dollars to subsidizing wind and solar power, and get that power generation online in the next few years, at a significantly lower cost per kilowatt.
This doesn’t have to be the binary choice you’re making it. Both can be done. Furthermore I also disagree with the premise that imperfect solutions should be immediately discounted. There is no perfect solution.
Both can be done, of course, and we live in a world with limited resources. There’s no reason to commit resources to nuclear when those resources can, demonstratively and statistically, be used far more efficiently to implement other options.
It’s like saying, yes, I can buy a used car for $5k cash now, or, on the other hand, I could pay $50k to get on the waiting list for a Tesla Cybertruck to be delivered in like five years.
And when I point out that the Cybertruck is less reliable, more expensive, and will leave me without a car for 5 years while I’m waiting, you say “well, why don’t you buy the used car and put yourself on the Cybertruck waiting list?”
And I haven’t even touched on the moral and environmental issues with nuclear power. I shouldn’t have to. New nuclear is clearly the least efficient form of non-emitting power generation in the world. That should be the end of the discussion.
Conservatism is a plague that is long overdue for a cure.
They say this and then reject every technological solution that exists. Like wind or solar energy. Trains. Ebikes. The goalposts always get moved to some not yet existant technology so nothing needs to change.
To be fair, I don’t know exactly what is meant.
But my mind went to meat consumption, which is higher in the developed world, is considered indicative of a high standard of living, and, in my opinion, is best addressed not by lab-grown meat (or other technological solutions), but by reduced consumption (the reduced living standard).
The idea that eliminating meat reduces your standard of living is a preconceived bias. It is not an accident you believe that. You are being manipulated. If you investigate you will find that people who do it report improvements in their standard of living, not reduction. Meat is simply a way of refining cheap, sustainable, healthy plants into scarce, expensive, toxic and addictive processed food, by abusing the bodies and minds of sentient creatures. It is literally killing you and everyone you know. The more meat you eat, the younger you die and the more diseases you experience. Nearly all the top ten killers of humans on Earth today, and especially in the Western world, is caused by an animal-based diet: heart disease, stroke, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, cancer, and more. Heart disease, diabetes, AND RECENTLY ALZHEIMER’S have all been reversed in massive clinical trials, by doing little more than eliminating toxic animal products from the diet.
I would argue that reduced meat can be either the result of a lower living standard or a higher one. This is the issue a lot of people on each side refuse to see, a higher standard of life can be more efficient with systems either technological or social which make it possible.
Really we need a blend of each, yes the techphobes are right we don’t want to live in battery farms where only efficiency matters but also we don’t want to live in the drudgery of a Neolithic existence. We need to identify and adopt systems that allow a good quality of life and enables diversity of thought and lifestyle, tech can make this possible but is unlikely to do it alone.
Yes it’s difficult but we need social growth, that means people tying new things and demonstrating them to the world. We should be using our absurd luxury and wealth here in the developed nations to help develop solutions everyone can use to live a good life, instead of flexing fast cars and designer clothes we should be spreading knowledge of healthy food, useful educational and organizational tools, community project structures which enable people to work on shared goals and mutually beneficial platforms…
We have a very privileged platform in the world, we should use it to show that even the richest most well educated, traveled and socialised people prefer a low or no meat diet.
The classic fallacy that industries have sold us over the past decades that technology would solve all our problems. So funny. They are doing the same again with AI
The thing is they have solved an endless litany of problems and improved life for everyone on a radical scale thousands of times, but then people get born into the world snd never see those problems - have you ever even had to worry about milk souring let alone storing produce to last the winter? Have you ever even been attacked by a predator? That was a way of life for our ancestors before technology, the concept of clean drinking water didn’t even come close to meaning the same thing but their version of it was a daily struggle which often went unmet regardless.
Go back in time before the industrial revolution and ask.a serf what their problems are, I bet.you nor I have ever faced a single one of them. It’d be fun to listen to the conversation you explaining that politicians are corrupt and avocados are expensive, he doesn’t know what they are but he says he’s thy literal property of a baron that doesn’t even pretend to care what he thinks and mice got into his grainstore so some of his kids will starve this winter.
Tech had made your life significantly better and the coming wave of ai tools is going to make it much better again and allow things you never even imagined possible like localized food networks and community based industry, you’ll use it all snd move on to complaining asteroid mining is over hyped or whatever comes next
I offer myself up for this. I already lowered my living standards years ago and I am quite comfortable with it.
Oh great, degrowth discourse this should go smoothly
Lol true. They’re like communists, but honest.
the fuck is this shit doing in a solarpunk community lmao, this is just made up nonsense you’d see on facebook
Plot twist: The technological solution requires resources of five earths.
We live much more efficiently than we ever have, there aren’t enough trees and wild game for us to live like the Neolithic - the non tech solution is mass genocide or total ecological destruction of the planet. Not really solutions.
That’s what quantum computers are for. We can use parallel universes to eliminate lag in our bitcoin calculations. It’s like we’re stealing their money.
If everyone lived like developed countries we would need even less resources because the birth rate is so low we wouldn’t suffer over population. Also look at how less developed countries dispose of garbage.
Not denying how some developed countries send their trash to developing countries for disposal on the beaches. Fuck them. CEO’s and politicians responsible need the rope.
do you really think the population would be allowed to reduce? GDP growth would never be allowed to slow down (or heaven forbid GDP shrink) and right now countries with low birth rates use immigration to fill that gap.
look at Canada: small birth rate, but aiming for 100 million population by 2100.
capitalism demands unsustainable growth
It doesn’t matter what is “allowed”, people in highly developed countries, especially ones with low immigration, are experiencing freefalling birth rates that are already well below the replacement rate, and governments are BEGGING women to have more babies See South Korea, China, and Japan
you’re talking about incentives. I’m talking about restrictions women’s rights and education.
do you think that’s out of the question? abortion bans are one part of this
lol who’s not gonna “allow” the population to shrink?
abortion bans, contraception bans, sex education bans, sabotaging the education system, limitations on a woman’s right to work
Multiple wealthy countries have put incentives in place to encourage increased birth rates, all have failed. Other than forcibly inseminating women there’s not much they could do.
Forced birth Republicans aren’t far from that
I heard they kill kittens with hammers for fun
Kudos to you for finding a way to be so naive in today’s world.
Yeah “naive” lol. How many Republicans do you discuss these things with, to find out what Republicans believe.
why do I need to talk to the voters to see the policies that they support by voting Republican?
it seems like you’re a Libertarian, voting Republican might make sense to you I guess, because Libertarians with critical thinking skills are Left-Anarchists
Next you’re all gonna say I should use dentures to chew my own food rather than have my underage slave girls chew it and spit in my mouth. You people disgust me.
Let’s see the technological solutions our top men at Silicon Valley have invented to save the earth
Underground tesla roller coaster
Clean coal
Stop farming food to make fuel instead
More people should just die, also, eugenics
Wait… It’s developed countries using up all our resources? Isn’t that, like, the opposite of the truth? And technical solutions are a panacea? Is what tech bros have shown us? This seems like a very odd meme
Afaik, Americans use about 20% of the world’s resources with about 4% of the population. China and India both do use a lot of resources, but they’re also a third of the world’s population
What percentage of the resources do Americans produce?
Does that matter? It’s not an attack on Americans: Europeans, Japanese people and South Koreans also use more than their fair share, along with many other countries, roughly correlated with wealth.
Yes, but when taking regional inequality in account, the picture becomes clearer. There are regions in both China and India where the per capital consumption is nearly as bad as in the US.
Certainly, but those are the wealthy regions, which don’t really fit into the “developing” stage anymore imo. They’re more developed than the (mainland) UK was when the terminology became common.
Yes, but in a hypothetical world where Mexico was part of the US, the per capital consumption of the US would also look much better on paper.
I think we agree, lol. Richer areas use more resources and poorer areas use fewer. It’s not 1:1, but it’s pretty close.
Giant strawman. Not everyone advocating for degrowth is a primitivist.
How are those 2 different?
AFAIK, anarcho-primitivism advocates for stopping anything they deem to be “civilizational technology”. Live like the amish in the best case, do away with agriculture in the worst case.
Degrowth is a movement away from a growth-at-all-costs economy and towards one where production that benefits the majority of people.
Hum, I see.
So your comment does make sense, except on the part you claim it to be a straw man. You even know the name of the people it’s criticizing…
The comic seems as if it’s targeted at degrowthers.
I thought it was targeted at ecofascists who want the global south to stay poor because having clean water and malaria treatments is bad for the environment somehow.
Like there’s a lot of people saying that China’s ongoing industrialisation and raising the standard of living is bad. But China is actually implementing renewables much faster than the West did, so China’s industrialization is not the same story. Now yes, there are problems with what China is doing. For example, as they transition away from coal they are selling their leftover coal to poorer and less advanced countries, and that’s fucked. But this isn’t a technological inevitability of industrialization, it’s simply a policy failure. China is doing better than the West did, and China has the technological potential to be doing even better if their politicians so chose. So the fundamental assumptions of ecofascism are not true. China should be industrializing in a greener way, rather than remaining a production center for cheap plastic garbage the West uses, which is what ecofascists prefer.
That’s a lot of your own political convictions put into that reading. I don’t see an ecofascist statement in the comic.
I think green shirt’s statement is a dogwhistle. I don’t think someone advocating degrowth would have used the same words. As a supporter of degrowth myself, I don’t think degrowth means the same thing as “reducing living standards”. For example I don’t own a car, and I’m happier riding a bike every day. Less growth increased my standard of living. I’m also vegan, and I rarely miss meat. I prefer the lack of guilt over the taste of meat. So I don’t think my standard of living is any lower for having abandoned my reliance on animal subjugation and excessive land and water use. I don’t think degrowth has to mean giving up the internet, or clean drinking water, or medicine, or many of the actual benefits of living in a developed nation.
