Political Memes

I wonder how much of the problem would be avoided if the top personal CO2 emissions per capita were capped at Scandinavian upper middle-class level since 1970 (imported CO2 included). Flying on vacation only occasionally, comfy car yes, SUV just if needed, nice modern house yes, wasteful lack of insulation no, buy what you need and treat yourself to some fashion, electronics etc. yes, mindless consumerism no. Just a comfy standard of living.

I wonder if the mindless consumerism in certain countries with insane emissions per capita makes up a big part of the problem, or if the sheer number of "decent standard of living" would have pushed us over the edge anyway.

This somehow completely disregards the most critical side-effect of overpolulation esepcially when you calculate in dying oceans and trees.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide

The sustainable capacity was calculated to be around 2 billion. This is not affected by food output.

We are living in a false-scarcity society when we could be living in a post-scarcity one.

Scholars, the real deal, are rare for a reason - few people choose knowledge over wealth and power. There lies the crux of the matter, since anyone who pursues the other two paths would be the antithesis of the system so designed.

It's a nice model, but it runs too counter to human nature to work; and there is precious little (if anything) that can change the nature of a species as expansive as humanity.

The problem is a combination of intrinsic psychological biases of those with means. Once they reach a certain threshold, they become driven to keep accumulating until they own everything. Gotta catch 'em all.

This threshold is likely different for everyone, and may not be related to other thresholds of accumulation, such as:

• When you have everything you want, except to upscale your stuff.
• When you make more money than you can spend on personal expenses, including renting Venice for a wedding.
• When you make more then you can spend [on large business transactions, unrelated to the] threshold where you can't possibly spend all your income without purchasing billion-dollar companies

Some capitalists are self aware enough to recognize the impulse is not sustainable, (also that profits are better had with happy workers) which often comes from having risen to wealth from more modest means. (But not always).

At any rate, rich dudes who drop billions into massive public improvement projects are rare, and when they do they tend to see it as revenue source, or at least something to exploit to improve their brand image.

So the next step for society is to discover a sociological technique that allows rich guys to think I have enough, to drop their surplus into the hands of the community (say the general fund of the local governing body)

That or accept that we are too simple a species to navigate some very imminent great filters. We may not count as a space-faring civilization that might encounter other space-faring civilizations.

This is not a new idea. Fourth International–Posadism opined that developing communism (or a refinement thereof) would be a prerequisite for space colonization. I'd argue changing from capitalism is a prerequisite for societal sustainability more than a couple of centuries from now.

I've seen this before. Last time I looked, it required that everyone live in cities with good public transportation. It also didn't factor in modern necessities like air conditioning (which will be actually necessary in many more parts of the world due to global warming).

Basically, for this to work, everyone needs to live in 2-bedroom apartments... Without air conditioning or anything like a desktop PC. You'd have a small refrigerator and heat your food with a microwave (and nothing else because stovetop and ovens use up too much energy).

It also makes huge assumptions about the availability of food, where it can be grown, and that all the necessary nutrients/fertilizer are already present in the soil and that transporting/processing things like grain is super short distance/cheap.

Also, communism. It requires functioning communism. That everyone will be ok with it and there will be no wars over resources/land.

I'm skeptical. I just skimmed the paper, but most of it seems to be taking a financial/macro-economic perspective without too much analysis on individual resources availability and the damage just current levels of output are causing to our environment/resources. I've seen other research that claim we are already over the carrying capacity of Earth, some say by a large margin (e.g. carrying capacity is 2 billion people). I'm pretty sure humans are already using (and degrading) the majority of Earth's arable land, for instance.

We have already enough resources for everyone. It is just that the 1% is hoarding all of it.

Well, yes. But that'd require fair, sensible distribution and use of available resources, and then how would we be able to support the ability of a handful of billionaires to subvert our democracies for their own gain? /s

How does that quote go? Something like: the future is here, it's just unevenly distributed.

Our problem is distribution. It's a hard problem to solve but it's much better than the easy solution.

"I have a magical reality-changing glove. Should I change the nature of beings to want to share for the benefit of all? Nah, I'm gonna remove a random half of them from existence. It's clearly the ONLY thing I could possibly do to solve the problem! I'm so smart and awesome!"