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Kache@lemmy.zip 2 weeks agoEfficiency of living is not static, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were possible to sustainably support 10B people with a relatively high standard of living.
I heard the following metric recently:
But in China, in 2013, China had terrible particulate air pollution. It was known around the world as the airpocalypse (ph) on a - a 700 on a scale of air pollution from zero to 500, the U.S. embassy reported. And, you know, over the decade after 2013, the size of the Chinese population grew by 50 million people. And so if more people were always worse for the environment, you might think that particle air pollution in China would have gotten worse. But, in fact, particle air pollution in China fell by half, even while the population grew.
Thedogdrinkscoffee@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Efficiency of living is indeed critical to a solution, but I think you are operating under some misunderstandings if you want 10B at a high average standard of living.
We’re at 8B and have already grossly exceeded our planetary boundaries. Non-ecologists don’t tend to understand what this means; we’ve already overshot earth’s carrying capacity and we’re degrading it rapidly so each year the total levels that could be considered sustainable are shrinking. To illustrate, the equivalent of sustainable is having a pile of money and being able to live off the interest forever. Overshooting your carrying capacity is the ecological equivalent of withdrawing all the interest and some of the principle to live large. The pool of interest you have to live on is shrinking and you not only have to curtail your spending to live on interest only, it’s a smaller interest than what used to be possible. As you ramp down your life style gradually, you are spending less principle each period of time, but your pool of interest is also shrinking. The solution is to rapidly reduce spending to below your income, use the saving to build back your principle, then decide how big a family you can support on that income.
If you’ll pardon the mixed metaphore, You are saying that that we can bridge the gap in overspending by adding 2 billion people and giving everyone a high living standard by switching insurance providers on your Maserati.
You must be an economist. ;) It’s pure madness and folly.
Climate change alone is already at 1.5°C and we are on a pathway to 4-8°C. All our renewables are nice, but we only added it to the energy mix, we didn’t displace fossil fuels. 2C is baked in already as there is a 20 year lag time between leveling of global average temperatures and CO2 concentrations.
It’s essential to understand what 2°C does to agricultural output and biodiversity. Fish stocks are collapsing as are the food chains they depend on. Agriculture has to suffer more frequent and more intense droughts and floods. Productivity will suffer immensely.
It gets worse. The reason for the Paris accord at 1.5°C was because the scientists models said at 2°C the risks of tipping points that can dwarf human emissions push the earths climate into a positive feedback loop. Stopping fossil fuels at 2C doesn’t help because melting permafrost, sub-oceanic clathrates and changes in albedo from reduced snow cover and melting ice caps. Before 1.5, if we turned off emissions, there was a reasonable chance of suffering some warming, but it would stop and stabilize at a new level. Its too late for that now.
We’re blowing past 2C no matter what now. Oceans and agriculture are going to be devastated. 8°C is not off the table. What do you propose feeding 10B high consumption people? If the answer isn’t eachother you do not understand the scale of the problem.