An exercise in madness
Hi all. I was wondering what you think of the following:
Barring a world changing discovery such as efficient energy to matter conversion, the 'Western' industrialised, comsumer way of life is not indefinately sustainable.
Environmental damage caused by this way of living reduces the capacity of the earth to support human and other life.
To achieve maximal long term survival for human life, both in population and duration, our manner of living must cease and be replaced by one that is sustainable.
My immediate reaction to this is that it is trite, the premises generally accepted and the conclusion is simply not going to happen voluntarily.
Given that there will be no voluntary change to alter our way of living to be sustainable which is the most suitable course of action?
a) become a tie-dyed anarchist running about attempting to monkey-wrench 'the system'
b) try to support the development and dissemination of knowledge of how to stay alive once there is no local supermarket
c) make conscious efforts to make sure I'm in the coolest car with the go-faster stripes as we careen off the cliff of collapse
d) go about my day much as I did yesterday in the naive belief that doing exactly what I did before will produce completely different results
I know which one I'll be picking and I like to think of it less as being a definition of madness and more 'creative inertia' 
I normally reconcile this problem by reminding myself that, in 50 years time, I'll most likely hate my ungrateful grandkids for never coming to visit me, and not sending thank you cards for their birthday and christmas presents.
They deserve that charred, blackened wasteland.
Bah change will come about when it is needed, look at the housing crisis, the oil prices and a general glut of nice cars on the market spurring change in the cars now a days.
When we need it and someone can make some coin it will come, till then sit back drive your SUV, if you can afford it and live your life as normal.
Xfire: Pharacon
Tempest says: "A team hat doe snot communicate and talk to each other about what the next move will be is going to lose."
Mex is my hero = "f*ck it, I'll do it. WE'LL DO IT LIVE."
I think the argument is that change is needed now, but the consequences are either not immediate enough or obvious enough for people to take notice. I basically feel that most people do have Pharacon's attitude and that we won't take any big steps toward change until it's already a serious problem (perhaps too serious to fix).
Even then, we're more likely to treat the symptoms than the cause. More severe hurricanes? Build stronger levies and buildings. Glaciers melted? Switch to desalinization or importation of water. Rash of extinctions? Polar bears are mean and probably not delicious.
And it'll work, to a degree. We will survive. Our planet will be severely injured, things will never be the same, but we'll find a way to keep going. Even if all the predictions about global warming come true there will remain a great many people who do not believe it was caused by humans. At least some of our leaders will continue to say it's not man-caused because that's what some people will desperately want to hear. In the end, we will survive. Whether or not that's a happy ending is pretty subjective.
NOTE: This is not a doodle bug.
Spore
So true. While I was watching TV the other day, I realized that there was a really large number of car ads for Hybrid vehicles. That's not something I would have expected a few years ago.
Of course, there'll always be someone around to c*ck it up. Take, for instance, the Escalade hybrid.
God, i can't believe people pitch ideas like that and get paid for it.
"Personally I'm looking forward to buying a PC with a 128 core processor integrated with 32tb of memory in about 10 years time. Shortly there after Will Wright's Spore 3 will become self aware and annihilate humanity in a nuclear holocaust."
I wonder what's so bad about the Escalade hybrid? I mean, they're obnoxious cars in general, even moreso than most SUVs, but the sort of person who wants an Escalade isn't the sort of person to buy something else in the interest of going "green." If they have a choice between a normal Escalade and a hybrid one, maybe they'll take the hybrid. Isn't that a good thing?
NOTE: This is not a doodle bug.
Spore
I suppose in that light it's a marginal good. I think my grievance comes with the fact that they're microbranding the Hybrid concept. These people aren't getting a X-over SUV because they're green, they're getting it because 4 other moms at their private school showed up with PZEV/NVEZ/Hybrid Priuses.
They're turning a technology into a status symbol.
On another level, it drives me bonkers that people are wasting their time adding "green" tech to a tank that in no way would benefit from it. For half a second, I think "hey, maybe people are getting it". Then I see something like this and think "nope, just another lunge at profit margins".
"Personally I'm looking forward to buying a PC with a 128 core processor integrated with 32tb of memory in about 10 years time. Shortly there after Will Wright's Spore 3 will become self aware and annihilate humanity in a nuclear holocaust."
It's a lot to ask for the mainstream to become more environmentally conscious. It's too much to ask they only do it for the right reasons.
NOTE: This is not a doodle bug.
Spore
While I do believe that sustainability is a key, this line of thinking has mostly been used as a short-cut by radicals to rationalize violence or at least working outside of the system to bring about change. In a similar manner to the Islamic fascists using sharia and the "stolen land" to justify their use of violence or the Christo-fascists using "the right to life" to justify killing abortion doctors, or socialist fascists (yeah, yeah, historical enemies and all, but it's the device I'm using) using the ownership of the means of production to justify their violent grab for political power.
All in all, it seems like just another way of short-cutting the difficulties of dialogue and making it "immoral" for anyone to disagree with a group's basic tenants. It makes it easier to say "I'm right, you are wrong, and because I'm right any action is justified in pursuit of my goals. The end justifies the means and all that.
Now it is another conversation altogether whether or not there are any things that are absolute enough to justify being used like this. I imagine that there are, but I also believe that the world would be a better place if nobody acted on them. That is to say, I think more evil is done in the name of fighting evil than in the name of evil itself.
As for how we respond to unsustainable economies, I'm all for a little informed indolence.
*Legion* wrote:
informationgames.info
Entirely status symbol and a fashion statement. The "green" rationale behind a hybrid Escalade is tenuous at best -- you only get 20/21 mpg versus 19/20 for the regular model.
Xbox Live tag Gorilla800lbs
Every little bit helps.
NOTE: This is not a doodle bug.
Spore
Change has to be profitable. People will do anything to survive, and a company is no different.
The good way: Current methods/resources will become so expensive that more sustainable ones will become the best way to go. Society shifts over until this problem repeats itself in 20 years.
The bad way: Anarchy, chaos, dogs and cats living together, etc.
bnpederson wrote:
I disagree!
XBL Gamertag: Effin Bear | PSN Name: Effin Bear | Steam ID: MechaSlinky | Wii Console Code: 5185 2886 9649 1657 | Spore: MechaSlinky
This is pretty much where I am, perhaps out of a profound sense of impotence.
What I don't think people really appreciate is that ultimately inputs into the system will determine the outputs. The energy input for life sunlight; directly by plant life and indirectly by animal life. Machines and techniques allow us to use this sunlight more efficently, but for some time now we've been essentially cheating. Coal, oil, gas, etc can truly be considered to be ancient sunlight coverted and stored over time.
Granted, radioactive decay is a source of energy independant of the sun, but we don't seem to be very good at exploiting it without truly huge expenditures of other energies.
The biggest long term question is what standard of living can be supported by only the energy input of sun? A follow-on question would be can we figure out a way to start exploiting another sun before ours runs out? I just hope we dont ruin our chance to do so by using up millions of years of stored sunlight making bobble-heads, working to relieve teenage acne and determining if a person's rights are based on them being human or based on how much property society lets them accumulate.
Well bugger all this, I'm off to watch the cool Fallout 3 trailer where it shows you can punch people's heads off.