It's pretty easily done too. It's just that it's not a very fun thing to do. Like eating vegetables. It's pretty easily done but that doesn't mean everyone does it.
Fossil fuels have - at the same time as the pollution - caused a huge improvement of living standards. A substantial part of the human population tripling in size comes from that, and huge number of people would die if fossil fuels magically disappeared.
> Fossil fuels have - at the same time as the pollution - caused a huge improvement of living standards.
And before that we used Whale oil, which we got through a global slaughter of whales and we nearly drove them to extinction. Then it was time to move on.
There's a huge difference between migrating off something because there's something objectively better (oil is cleaner and cheaper compared to whale oil), and migrating off something for environmental reasons. The former doesn't require any sacrifices and will happen voluntarily. The same can't be said for the latter.
It's a rich world perspective to buy new cars every couple years, including electric cars which massively frontload the emissions borne of those cars, or to go home every night and stream 1080p video into your living room for hours on end while serving up gigs of photos and video to your phone through Instagram and TikTok. Datacenters are something like 20% of all energy consumption.
In many parts of the world, even places you've heard of, people walk or bike everywhere they need to go and spend their free time sitting around chatting with neighbors.
No one's arguing to delete fossil fuels, but it makes sense to minimize usage to freight and public transit.
> Datacenters are something like 20% of all energy consumption.
Do you have a source for that? It didn't sound right and my quick Googling suggests that it's off by around a factor of 20 or more. (Some put datacenters as low as 1% of total electricity consumption, which is a subset of all energy consumption.)
It was admittedly hearsay. My research says it's about 2% of energy use in the US and 1% of electricity use worldwide with remarkable constancy in electricity demands due to storage and computing efficiency gains. Thanks for the reality check.
The richest 1% is responsible for 49% of lifestyle emissions. The poorest 50% are responsible for just 10% of emissions. It's really disingenuous to act like most of our CO2 emissions are being spent lifting people out of poverty rather than on luxuries like meat consumption or fast fashion.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/001391651771068...
> "The richest 1% is responsible for 49% of lifestyle emissions. [...] luxuries like meat consumption or fast fashion"
How many megatons of meat do you think Musk eats a month? Does Bezos put a billion burgers into his belly? The vast majority of meat is consumed by people in that bottom 99%. For that matter, how many fast-fashion trendy patterned stockings do you think these men wear? It's really disingenuous to act like you're against luxuries for the 1% and then use meat and cheap clothing as your examples of great evils to be eliminated. Who would be sacrificing if large scale production of these cheap goods were banned? Not the 1%. What you are proposing is not to tear down the 1%, but to suppress the standard of living for the 99%.
Maybe you just chose bad examples by accident though, do you have any proposals that would actually limit emissions from the 1% instead of capping the quality of life for the other 99%?
It's in the pattern of consumption. Obviously Elon Musk can't eat orders of magnitude more beef than the rest of us, but in 2017 he announced that the boring tunnel would dig a tunnel directly to his house. Now I don't know if he ever did that, but it's not particularly far fetched for someone with his resources to do. For arguments sake, the emissions of such a tunnel would be ludicrous when you calculate on a per person basis. Then you have emissions associated with luxury yachts, helicopter rides, private jets, etc. on top of elevated normal consumption (i.e. able to travel more often via normal means, while occasionally also taking the jet for a spin).
The very wealthy are able to afford to not go through the same public channels as the rest of us, and so their emissions don't get amortized over vast numbers of users. This is on top of the fact that they can already consume more anyway, which is to say, I have one car, but the very wealthy might collect them (buying new! another thing I've never done), and just the process of manufacturing a new car releases more CO2 than I could produce in several years of driving.
I knew this was coming, all Americans are the global 1% right? Did I even say anything about America? Regardless...
Get a napkin and sanity check yourself. 1% of 8 billion people is 80 million. There are 330 million people in America. If all of the global 1% are in America and not also in Europe and Asia, which is obvious bullshit, then only 24% of Americans are in that 1% and the remaining 76% are in the lower 99%.
And do you really think only Americans eat meat and wear cheap clothing? Get real.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. We end up having to ban accounts that keep doing it, and we've already had to warn you more than once:
What are you even talking about? The person you replied to didn’t say Americans. Were you trying to use Bezos and Musk as representative of the top 1% of the worldwide population? That’s even worse.
I'm telling you that meat eating and fast fashion are not "global 1% issues". You are the one who brought up Americans, not me or the other guy. Meat eating isn't a 1% thing whether you're looking at the global 1% or the American 1%; meat is consumed by almost everybody in the lower 99% no matter which way you slice it.
Your link doesn't work. I'm getting "The requested article is not currently available on this site."
Also the studies I've seen to this effect use a questionable form of attribution when it comes to the "1%". Specifically they include emissions from companies that they invest in.
Most people's lives suck and the only thing that they have going for them is consumerism. So it's reasonable that they are unwilling to give up consumerism.
Therefore, the hard part is changing the structure of society so that people's lives don't suck.
In some cases micro-gassifier rocket heater/stoves (just because you can make one out of mud doesn't mean it's not high technology!) & coppicing and pollarding will make more sense. In other cases clean atomic power and induction heaters/stoves will be the way to go.
Some times willow bark tea, and sometimes morphine.
I mean, we will eventually live in harmony with Nature one way or another. Shall we cooperate consciously in the process of life and evolution, or let everything crash and burn and hope the survivors do better next time?
Maybe I should have rephrased it. There are fun ways to live a life without emitting a bunch of carbon just as there are tasty ways to cook vegetables. It's just that people don't want to and more importantly, governments don't want to.
I used to live in LA, spend tons of money on my car, not be able to do things because they were on the wrong side of the 405, and eat tons of low quality meat. Now I live in the Netherlands, bike or take the train everywhere, and occasionally eat high quality meat. My emissions are much, much, much lower here. I'm tired of being told how great my quality of life would be with cheaper gas and a bigger house.
It’s multipolar trap/ coordination problem. The costs of carbon emissions are diffuse and borne by everyone, while the costs of changing your behavior are mostly borne by you. It’s just a sad fact of life, and to solve it the only feasible way is to change the rules to making decarbonizing cheaper than continuing to use fossil fuels.
This has nothing to do with what the parent and grandparent comment was talking about, which is that carbon emissions can somehow be made without sacrificing lifestyle quality. Your comment implicitly admit that sacrifices have to be made.
