Why Is Europe Burning?(newyorker.com) |
Why Is Europe Burning?(newyorker.com) |
https://bsky.app/profile/mparrington.bsky.social/post/3md3w3...
Let me look at cause-and-effect chain for the past 100 years. It is the unbridled industrialisation, captial markets, business push, desire to dominate other countries, vote-bank democracies, exploitation of natural resources and so on. It is not something caused by single person or policy over past few years or decades.
You want to funnel the causes and effects into a political or economic framework that suits your ideology, but humans were great at ruining their polities and destroying their ecosystems long before industrialization or capitalism existed.
What industrialization and capitalism have done is to triple the life expectancy and quarter the infant mortality rate in most countries, as well as provide things like, idk, refrigeration and rapid transportation.
Doomers are getting closer and closer to outright Luddite ideas. But the practical consequences of doing away with modern capitalism or industry, the things which have led us to environmental danger, would be the mass extermination by starvation or violence of most of humanity. If that's cool with you, if that's what it takes to save us from capitalist driven climate change, then you're not really much of a humanist.
We are consigned to this road. We are the residue of many empires. We produce a lot of waste and heat and carbon. We also produce life-saving medications and air conditioning and the highest standard of living of any society in history, even in the poorest places in the world. The alternative to this system would incur mass death for most of the population on the planet. And yet so many privileged people think that would be alright if it fixes their pet political issues. Think about how anti-human that actually is.
These are just your imaginations and exaggerations, while the effects of climate changes are real and here to be seen. Even then, the effects of climate change are not going to be any lesser evil than the scenario you projected.
For example, globally food is already losing nutritional value upto 50% compared to the 60's and becoming toxic due to use of chemicals and modified rapid yield, thanks to your "progress" ideology. Chicken is grown in 40 days, rice crop yield time is reduced to half. Add climate change to this, you as a humanist are proposing people to eat plastic.
Maybe we could produce less plastic waste, like action figures and other toy junk?
Children need/benefit from having toys, sure, but do we need mountains of options, many of which are destined for the landfill without ever leaving their packaging?
There's a lot of areas we could cut back on excess without necessarily giving up the life saving medications, air conditioning and high standard of living. Maybe just maybe?
If it wasn't humans, it'd be lightning strikes and other natural phenomena.
We have so many plastic toys because plastic is cheap. Plastic is cheap because the feedstocks fall out, practically for free, from the refining of fuel that we absolutely need for society to function at the scale that provides us a healthy and comfortable standard of living.
So the main problem we need to solve is to eliminate the use of fossil fuels. The rest will follow. When the economies of scale for oil and gas extraction go away, the balance will massively tip in the favour of renewable solutions.
We will still make lots of useless plastic toys though. But perhaps it’ll be bio plastics and perhaps the scale will diminish a bit as the price increases.
And I think they’ll end up in trash burning facilities with district heating rather than landfills. That’s already the trend in Northern Europe, and they’ve started importing trash to burn. Yeah, recycle first. But eventually everything degrades and should be burned.