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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   25097 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 25, 2023

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One of the major reasons for progressives to take up both causes is due to resource constraints. As an Indian you'd surely have to acknowledge the relative unsustainability of 1.3 Billion Indians living anything remotely like a westerners lifestyle. It simply cannot scale up, and India lacks the ability to take resources from distant parts of the globe to sustain its lifestyle. Even in the West, we have a stark choice between living a relatively resource constrained lifesytyle that would still make the average Indian person jealous; which unfortunately would be considered an affront on the non-negotiability of the American way of life. It's the inconvenient truth, our lifestyles are unsustainable and we are approaching multiple eco-system limits with a blissful disregard for the sheer terror we might have unleashed upon ourselves. We can culture war all day every day about the relative decline of our own lifestyles and who is truly to blame for that, but relative lifestyle adjustments for us are an inconvenience; whereas in the third world they carry a body count.

If I recall some of the details from this correctly, we're actually using less "stuff" than in the past, while obviously still experiencing great advances in quality of life. That is not that we're consuming marginally less per increase in quality of life, we're consuming absolutely less. The reason for this is because we're getting more efficient with the use of stuff even faster than people are consuming more utils.

There was some press release I recall reading, some study which said it would take something ridiculous like 14 Earths to provide all 8-billion-plus humans with a middle-class American lifestyle (might not have said specifically American, I don't remember).

I disagree with everything you've just said.

We are nowhere near "resource constrained", the primary concerns with giving everyone First World/American lifestyles is energy and carbon emissions, both of which are solvable problems. Invest in nuclear, or continue waiting for renewables to be even more competitive (they already are, even without market subsidies), and then do one of the many forms of geoeningeering needed to deal with the climactic changes.

I see no fundamental barriers to drastically raising the global standard of living. Certainly none that can't be solved, or won't inevitably be solved.

We are nowhere near "resource constrained", the primary concerns with giving everyone First World/American lifestyles is energy and carbon emissions, both of which are solvable problems.

In the specific case driving this subthread, which is giving everyone convenient private transportation, the binding constraint is not resources (electric cars charged from nuclear power are a thing) but geometry. There are only so many cars (both moving and parked - separate problems with different issues, both of which need to be solved to make car culture work) that can be in any given space at the same time, and the demand for space scales faster with the available space as the metro area population increases. Above a metro area population of about 100,000, you need to demolish any pre-car neighborhoods and purpose-build the whole city around car travel if you want it to not suck. Above a metro are population of about 5 million, there isn't room for enough more roads and suckage is inevitable.

Quite right, one of the great things about our world is that matter is fungible. Once we dig up some iron and smelt it into steel, we can keep on using that steel, reforging and casting it. 20% of China's steel production is recycled from scrap metal.

I think a lot of people subconsciously fall into a video-game logic of 'once I exhaust that gold mine the gold is gone, have to find new gold deposit'. The gold is still there!

Do they actually need to take resources from distant parts of the globe to provide 1.3 billion people electricity, internet access, indoor plumbing, air conditioning, decent food, and urban public transportation? That is the core of what I would consider "a good living standard," and I think these things are all surprisingly cheap. There won't be much left over to play signaling status games with, but you don't need to do that.

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