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Comment by shmageggy | Hacker News Reader

The (600 page) report, including 100 page abriged version that appears highly readable at a glance: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/final-report-the-...

It’s a shame this is getting posted in the middle of the night for much of the western world. IMO this is one of the most crucial things our society must address currently. The inability to properly value natural capitol is a root cause of so many problems. If this report gives a framework for (among other things) properly assessing negative externalities than we can’t afford to ignore it.

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I first realized this while walking through Yosemite national park. I don’t think you can recreate that even if you had a trillion dollars. These sights and areas are literally priceless.

The stark fact is that economic growth as we know it today will come to an end at some point on a finite planet like ours. For those who want an extremely meticulous and data driven analysis of the same I recommend reading Vaclav Smils work. I’m just sharing what I learned.

There are many websites that calculate your “earth footprint”. Ie how many earths are needed if everyone lived the same as you. My earth footprint was 4 earths ! All 8 billion of us cannot live like Americans or even Europeans. And then there is climate change. There’s no known cheap energy substitutes on the horizon. Tesla’s are for now completely coal powered. The amount hydro carbons consumed is still increasing every year. For things like making steel, fertilizer or cement we cannot even begin to design good scalable solar powered methods. Solar plants have a very low load factor. It often only generates 30 % of its installed capacity. So you need to over build by 3x of what you need. Assuming we also need solar power for cars we are talking about building 10x the capacity of all existing energy infrastructure and not to talk about storage.

The existing energy grid is crumbling in many places and we are talking about trillions of dollars in spending to build new high voltage DC transmission to make solar scalable.

The world population will be 10-12 billion by 2100. Its hard to imagine how everyone will have a first world lifestyle without completely trashing the planet.

> There are many websites that calculate your “earth footprint”. Ie how many earths are needed if everyone lived the same as you. My earth footprint was 4 earths !

What kind of metric even is that? What does it even mean, Google doesn't say anything.

Found this cutesy site ( https://www.footprintcalculator.org ), did the test and apparently just because I eat a decent amount of meat and heat my house so I don't freeze to death, I'm using two point something Earths (whatever that means). Everything else is way below average.

When I clicked on "How do you feel" about my Earth footprint, it presents me only with the choices: Shocked, Inspired, Helpless, Intrigued, Worried, Embarrassed and Confused. Nice propaganda, but I feel okay about myself. If this is in any way accurate and what I'm doing is too much for the climate to handle then I officially don't care about the climate. I'm not going to just roll over and die for the greater good, sorry.

As a bonus, I throw in a recently fired MA official, saying that most emissions come from residential heating and they need to "break our will" for doing that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muxVGmgykA4

I’m not judging anyone’s choices. But I think it’s difficult to think about the kind of world we maybe leaving behind for our grandchildren.

If your lifestyle needs 2 earths that point will be hit for the whole earth pretty soon.

Wars are the most likely outcome. The first world will have to maintain their living standards by force and keep out the climate refugees.

I already live a minimalist lifestyle, not because of the climate, but because I simply prefer it that way. If this is not enough, then the climate will be the least of concerns for our grandchildren.

> Wars are the most likely outcome.

Yes, that should go without saying. Not cooperation, but endless wars between nations over scarce resources. Or being subjegated by the world elites and basically soviet style communism. Millions starved to death, because one commissar decided that one particular country eats too much and it's bad for the climate. Assuming any of this is true, which I'm told it is.

Wow, that site is trash. How did I “feel” after taking the quiz? Pretty annoyed that it was trying to guilt trip me into regressing to subsistence farming levels rather than thinking in any critical way how our industries and economies might be making a reasonable lifestyle much less sustainable than it could be.

I went back and adjusted the responses to get 1 earth level, and the result is ridiculous. There’s zero chance we’ll convince 7+ billion people to be zero-waste vegans who live crammed into a tiny apartment and essentially never travel anywhere. And I don’t think we need to! Even assuming their math is correct (of which I’m highly suspect), why should we accept that the solution is to roll over and die (as you nicely put it) rather than improve agricultural methods, energy generation efficiency and sustainability, transportation efficiency, policies that fail to discourage inefficiency, etc, etc, etc. It’s such a thoughtless and uninspired (and uninspiring) take.

edit: ok, after poking around a bit more it seems their proposed solutions are more inline with common sense than it appeared initially. But wow what a terrible way to communicate and inspire people.

It’s based on some estimate of sustainable consumption, i.e. the earth can sustainably support everyone if their average footprint is “1 earth.” Any higher level of consumption is unsustainable. I’ve seen multiple variations on this concept, so you’d likely have to consult their specific methodologies to figure out how they determine what is sustainable.

> The world population will be 10-12 billion by 2100. Its hard to imagine how everyone will have a first world lifestyle without completely trashing the planet.

The global annual population growth rate is plummeting. Many countries are well below replacement rates for fertility. While poorer countries lag behind, the world's population is going to peak then decline.

> The stark fact is that economic growth as we know it today will come to an end at some point on a finite planet like ours.

Maybe, but that is a long long way off. Economic growth comes not just from resource extraction, but making greater use of resources than we did before. A raspberry pi zero costs a few dollars and is made with grams of plastic, sand and copper. Only 50 years ago a multi room sized company using tons of metal, requiring a huge amount of energy to run, would have been less powerful.

This does not mean we won't damage the earth. What is means is we need to try harder not to do so.

Information technology is an exception. Nothing in the world improves at that rate. It also doesn’t do much to satisfy our material needs for things like housing, food and basic transportation. The effects of the computer on economic output are far smaller than electricity or the industrial revolution.

You can make your car more fuel efficient but there cannot be a car that doesn’t use fuel. There are physical limits to efficiency and how much work can be extracted. Efficient isn’t infinite.

We need to scale current high living standards 10x from 1.5 billion to 10 billion while having no discernible impact on the biosphere.

Already 70 % of ice free land is shaped by humans for crops or grazing.

Inspite of all this a billion people still living in crippling poverty often going hungry.

The scale of the problem is seriously under estimated.

> Nothing in the world improves at that rate.

This is a bit of a no true scotsman argument. Everything is improving. Look at the past 100 years.

Agricultural output has been skyrocketing. Transport of people are cargo has become vastly more efficient, cheaper and safer. Healthcare is barley recognisable today than it did 100 years ago. Look at solar compared to 20 years ago. And while you discount IT, it has had a huge improvement on every single industry.

It has skyrocketed because of increasing availability of energy. Energy is a conserved physical quantity. Hydrocarbons are basically a giant magic solar battery that was charged over tens of millions of years. We’re basically charging that down to zero in a few centuries like there’s no tommorow.

It doesn’t take much energy to extract this energy. In the case of solar or nuclear it takes a lot more energy to extract it safely and at scale.

You can read about the EROEI of shale, solar etc vs oil. We have fought against it using efficiency but efficiency too has limits.

If we didn’t discover oil / coal none of these changes you mentioned would have happened.

That there will be constant continuous and infinite improvement on a finite planet is far from clear. We can decline, or even go into stagnation for centuries until some major breakthrough.

There was a time when progress was so quick that people assumed flying cars were around the corner and we would all be living in space like the Jetsons. Again energy costs come into play.

> > Nothing in the world improves at that rate.

> This is a bit of a no true scotsman argument. Everything is improving. Look at the past 100 years.

No, it isn't. Computational efficiency has improved by more than 10 orders of magnitude since its inception (arbitrarily taken to be the early 1950s).

Agricultural output: less than 1 OM. Transport efficiency: less than 3 OM. Healthcare: less than 1 OM. Solar (presumed PV; compared to electricity production from fossil fuels): less than 1 OM.

Industrial gains from IT: the growth economist Robert Solow famously quipped "you can see computers everywhere except in the productivity statistics". That was a few decades ago, but we are still well short of 1 OM improvement.

None of your examples comes within 8 orders of magnitude of the rate of improvement of computing efficiency since the 1950s. The comparison stands.

You don't need all industries to see 10 OM improvements to see a >8 OM improvement in total economic productivity. I imagine it's enough to improve how people coordinate resource usage by something like 10 OM to see that kind of improvement.

Ride-sharing, house-sharing, computerized car-navigation, self-driving cars, online banking, online shopping, Wikipedia, online directories of product/service providers, etc are all existing or emerging technologies that didn't exist 30 years and massively increase how effectively people can collectively utilize existing resources.

Hunger is a logistics problem not a production one.

That’s like saying that going to Mars is a logistics problem. Everything involves a logistics problem because it involves profitably using energy to move things around .

There’s plenty of fresh water too it’s just a logistics problem of transporting it from Siberia to all over the earth. It’s simply not feasible.

Energy is not cheap enough to transport food to everywhere it’s needed while also not taking enough away from anyone else by force.

That means we need to live in much more efficient denser setups with mass transport to reduce logistics costs in general. It also means some redistribution of energy and hence wealth.

Agree on your conclusion. Regarding the prior it's messy with local politics, warlords, NGOs, governments etc and if there was the unanimous will there would be no hunger. Food production is a solved problem.

> Hunger is a logistics problem

No, it's a political problem. Much harder to solve.

Yes. But of course it will be swept under the carpet, as the interests of people in power are not aligned with those of the rest of the world, as always.

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