Wealthy nations decreasing consumption will have a knock on effect on habitat loss in South America for example, where a shit ton of rainforest is being killed to make pastures for beef that’s exported.
Poorer nation’s peak population estimates are declining every year, as life gets better and child mortality falls population growth lowers everywhere (another racist shit that’s spreading that poor nations are reproducing too much, btw).
Energy consumption is more or less useless measure with the rapid rise of renewables, although there are also efforts there to lower that everywhere.
Poorer nation’s peak population estimates are declining every year, as life gets better and child mortality falls population growth lowers everywhere
Yes, that’s a good thing.
(another racist shit that’s spreading that poor nations are reproducing too much, btw).
Race doesn’t enter into it. If we accept that we crossed into overshoot over 50 years ago, then any birth rate above replacement is ultimately unsustainable.
Energy consumption is more or less useless measure with the rapid rise of renewables, although there are also efforts there to lower that everywhere.
Energy consumption is the measure. It’s a direct reflection of the degree to which our lifestyles impact our environment. People seem to have this idea that the only real issue with industrial civilization is that it runs primarily on a fuel that destabilizes our atmosphere, and that if we could simply transition away from this fuel (to solar/wind/nuclear/fusion) we’d be on our way to utopia.
But let’s consider what we direct all that energy towards: first, we use it to harvest massive amounts of natural resources, degrading and destroying the environment in the process. (Mining, logging, farming, fishing, etc.) We then transform those natural resources into towns and cities, which pave over and fragment the natural environment in which they’re built. We transform them into consumer goods (cars, electronics, plastics, clothing, etc.), the vast majority of which end up as waste in less than a decade. We transform them into all manner of industrial chemicals, many of which end up becoming individual ecological disasters of their own.
Transitioning to a “clean” form of energy does nothing to address what we do with it. Living sustainably requires drastically downscaling our total ecological footprint.
Wealthy nations decreasing consumption will have a knock on effect on habitat loss in South America for example, where a shit ton of rainforest is being killed to make pastures for beef that’s exported.
Poorer nation’s peak population estimates are declining every year, as life gets better and child mortality falls population growth lowers everywhere (another racist shit that’s spreading that poor nations are reproducing too much, btw).
Energy consumption is more or less useless measure with the rapid rise of renewables, although there are also efforts there to lower that everywhere.
Yes, that’s a good thing.
Race doesn’t enter into it. If we accept that we crossed into overshoot over 50 years ago, then any birth rate above replacement is ultimately unsustainable.
Energy consumption is the measure. It’s a direct reflection of the degree to which our lifestyles impact our environment. People seem to have this idea that the only real issue with industrial civilization is that it runs primarily on a fuel that destabilizes our atmosphere, and that if we could simply transition away from this fuel (to solar/wind/nuclear/fusion) we’d be on our way to utopia.
But let’s consider what we direct all that energy towards: first, we use it to harvest massive amounts of natural resources, degrading and destroying the environment in the process. (Mining, logging, farming, fishing, etc.) We then transform those natural resources into towns and cities, which pave over and fragment the natural environment in which they’re built. We transform them into consumer goods (cars, electronics, plastics, clothing, etc.), the vast majority of which end up as waste in less than a decade. We transform them into all manner of industrial chemicals, many of which end up becoming individual ecological disasters of their own.
Transitioning to a “clean” form of energy does nothing to address what we do with it. Living sustainably requires drastically downscaling our total ecological footprint.