Hacker News Reader

Comment by pinipedman | Hacker News Reader

What if the necessary change is something like lowering the standard of living in order to reduce net resource consumption? If people will never voluntarily do that, then how do you propose to sell that as leading to a sunny future?

This might be why these articles are never positive. Because there isn't a solution that people will like or vote for. No one is going to publish your article if it says we need to impose limits on births or reduce everyone's standard of living to that of sub-Saharan Africa.

> And in the western democracies, you (by design), won’t get dramatic, sweeping change until there’s broad bottom-up support.

Yes, this is precisely why there won't be the necessary change. And it's a great argument against democracy.

View on HN

One possibility is that it will never happen and we’re doomed. Unfortunately, a lot of people believe that.

But how does Tesla sell its cars for double the price of comparable gas-powered autos? How does Whole Foods sell people on $6 tomatoes?

Both of those represent a choice to consume less, since inherently if you spend more money on something than you have to, then you have less money with which to consume other things.

Yet nobody buying Whole Foods thinks they are “decreasing their standard of living.” Its the opposite!

So the very first thing, if you want to pursue change, is get this idea of “standard of living” out of your head. Think of lifestyle instead.

Can you sell people on an alternative lifestyle that results in less consumption? YES. This happens all around us all the time.

It doesn’t even have to be glamorous. During the world wars, gas was rationed and slops were collected for pigs... people bought war bonds, etc.

Free people can and do rise to meet collective challenges when they are well-led.

Right now it’s very hard to argue the west (as a whole) is well-led.

But things can change. There is a recipe that has a better chance of success, and historical precedent. So don’t give up hope.

I guess it hasn't occurred to you yet that most people can't afford Teslas and $6 tomatoes even in 1st world countries?

That’s a needlessly insulting way of disagreeing.

My point is not that everyone can afford these things. It’s that, among the people who can, they are consuming _less_ and seeing it as a lifestyle upgrade, not as a lowered standard of living. But you could argue that it is both, since it means less net consumption. This is why “standard of living” arguments are fruitless IMO and “lifestyle” is where we should focus.

For something that most first-world folks can afford, look at Apple products. They cost more, so people who buy them necessarily have less money to spend on other things. But nobody thinks their standard of living went down because they bought one iPhone instead of two Androids.

The point is I believe it is possible to get people to voluntarily consume less stuff if and when they feel that their quality of life is better as a result. That’s a lot about perception and social norms, and about things feeling “nice.”

If we put as much energy into thinking of how to make a sustainable low-impact lifestyle enjoyable as we do worrying about environmental harm, we would make more progress. Maybe a lot more.

> But nobody thinks their standard of living went down because they bought one iPhone instead of two Androids.

What?!

> The point is I believe it is possible to get people to voluntarily consume less stuff if and when they feel that their quality of life is better as a result. If we put as much energy into thinking of how to make a sustainable low-impact lifestyle enjoyable

Suppose I told you that the richest 10% of humanity - most of us reading - would have to give up 90% of our consumption?

There isn't going to be some "enjoyable" way to give up 90% of our consumption, because most of us are hooked on consumption.

Think of humans as a drug addict, where the drug is fossil fuels in specific, and unlimited consumer consumption in general.

Withdrawal from the drug isn't going to be "enjoyable" and a lot of people are going to hate it.

I think that's partially because we've built a society where the only good thing that society provides most people with is consumption. If we want things to change, then society is going to need to change.

> One possibility is that it will never happen and we’re doomed. Unfortunately, a lot of people believe that.

It's unfortunate, but gosh, there are a whole lot of people on the planet. Something like 8 billion? I mean, that is a really high number for megafauna. People need to eat a lot, pets eat a lot, people want a warm house and hot water and so on. Setting aside cars and air travel and useless consumerism entirely, the energy it takes to provide all this food and heating is just a stupefyingly high amount. It is challenging to imagine people will set aside fossil fuels, raising crops with pesticides, and even procreation until absolutely forced to by external, nonpolitical, non-negotiable factors.

Getting wealthy people to spend a little more on things to which they might assign some luxury value / extra quality / better virtue is just spitting into the ocean. People-at-large simply do not live long enough and are not wired to do what's necessary to avoid eventual catastrophe. It'll be "let's try to be comfortable for a few more years while we figure this out," and then the next wave will try the same thing, and so on. Thanks to better living through chemistry, the species has gone from zero to looming disaster within the span of a few individual lifetimes.

I guess the good news is, in the long run, the Earth will be just fine.

>Both of those represent a choice to consume less

There's something wrong with this idea, that spending more on consumption means consuming less.

When you spend $20K extra on your Tesla, doesn't it enable that much extra consumption by their employees, stockholders, etc., which in turn has an average carbon intensity or other environmental impact that is roughly in line with anyone in their society?

Like, the electric car is green, but the money pays for salary which buys a ham sandwich, which pays for a hog farm, which pays for a diesel tractor, and so on. The green-ness of the first transaction seems to me a fig leaf to avoid the truth that every dollar of consumption has about the same environmental impact in the long run.

If the Tesla were not a lot more expensive, then it would be significant that it was green. But people use the concept of externalities as if they were always an infinitely flexible amount and I think it's self-deception.

You just can't do what's right for the environment or social justice via conspicuous consumption, and yet virtually nobody endorses that ethic, because then what are you? You're Scrooge. It's simple, and impossible for normal human beings to accept. You consume, you take away from the poor, and you pollute the environment.

I think there is a lot of good to talk about, with just a little creativity: hundreds of thousands of jobs in a green economy, cleaner cities, ending the dependence on oil from autocratic nations, devices that you can repair and use for decades instead of discarding after eighteen months. You will never convince people to willingly downgrade their standard of living, but you can convince them to side-grade. Can you convince billions of people to turn vegan? Probably not, but you can convince them to eat synthetic meat, specially if it is cheaper, safer, and more consistent than beef from a live cow.

If the future is going to be bleak anyways, then why bother trying to avoid climate change?

Presumably to make it less bleak than it would be otherwise.

I don't see how it would be possible to avoid climate change. But attempting to minimize it, or at least minimize humans' contribution seems preferable to doing nothing.

Lowering our standard to sub-Saharan Africa is a shortcut to extinction. We need science and accompanying "standards" to remain as they are. I'd personally rather look elsewhere before resorting to authoritarianism.

What we IMO need is a push towards more technology, actually more resource use, more science and more rational thinking of any kind in general. We need to get out of the sub-Saharan mindset. Living in harmony with nature is not, and never was, sustainable and if it ever held any weight it is now a hollow, unproductive pipe-dream. We are created to do interesting things, hence the brains. So let's make interesting shit happen instead of waving flags in each-other's face and complaining about not being in harmony with the gods.

You ask how we sell that as a sunny future? Assuming the unwashed masses want to face the truth I'd think after some scrubbing they'd generally be onboard with a rational, abundance-filled, space-faring fucking utopia. Engaging further with our cultural and religious psychoses should be disincentivized and probably banned as the extinction-level threat it is. If you ask me, nationalism is the greatest threat humanity ever faced.

Also - while we still have nations - not voting for raging religious demagogues would be a start.

> Lowering our standard to sub-Saharan Africa is a shortcut to extinction.

> Living in harmony with nature is not, and never was, sustainable

> need is a push towards… more resource use

> We are created to do interesting things, hence the brains

Nothing above is true. Humans are exactly like cancer cells on Earth and may be universe is we go everywhere. Grow at any cost and kill the host finally. If we are capable of doing good ethical things does not matter because we never did that and will not. Uncomfortable but truth.

It's all every species are though. Consume the resource, survive yourself. There's a natural way of balancing the amount of consumers if resources aren't enough. Wolves population will die out to a smaller number if there's not enough food even after moving places. We could be limited by that, or we could step over it using science. After all wild cats don't think if it's ethical to eat prey. Or understand the concept of ethics. But we do.

What saves Earth for now is the fact that we can't move away easily. Even with all the money and desire we don't have an independent settlement outside of the planet. There's lot of things required before we are able to, and then even more before moving to Mars, for example, is as easy as moving between Europe and Americas. Then the Earth will be doomed. Who would care about not only insects, but the fate of the planet, when we could just move residents somewhere else. Like we do now on a smaller scale, and always did.

> Engaging further with our cultural and religious psychoses should be disincentivized

The sort of techno-optimism you're espousing here amounts to a religion as well. It's a religion to which the majority of the developed world appears to subscribe. It seems to be losing adherents to disillusionment, albeit incredibly slowly.

The prevalence of views similar to yours are one of the reasons why I don't foresee a positive future. I suspect society will continue down your suggested path of more technology and more resource consumption believing it to lead to some sort of salvation. I see it instead as the furtherance of human's destructive tendencies which have only grown more potent with every increase in humanity's capacity to effect its will via technological development.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com