[dohboi]

"mass transit by electric rail"

At 125 million total population, many of whom would presumably doing the agrarian work, I'm not sure there will be many masses to transit.

[KaiserJeep]

No, we might disagree about the exact sustainable population figure, but that's a nit.

The real problem is the 6B or 8B or 10B overshoot population, whatever it may reach before the final crash. (Remember that the population increase continues exponentially.) The billions of excess people, some who possess nuclear weapons, who will not go quietly into the night. Those humans who will, in their struggle to live, consume every remaining source of food, all the fresh water, all the fossil fuels, who will spoil all the arable land, re-define "Food species" until nothing much is left, and who will in general spoil the Earth for quality human lifestyles.

Beyond this I think we begin to disagree. I think that once the Earth's eco-system is wrecked, and 90+% of existing species extinct, and with radioactive oceans and land and atmosphere, that humans need to live in space habitats. I even would go so far as to say this is Nature's plan, when a species matures, they leave behind the world they evolved upon.

As for your question concerning loincloths, no, hunter/gather lifestyle with modern tech requires about 10X the land as agriculture. Not to mention, you pretty much need an unspoiled eco-system, upon which you perch as the new apex predator, with your steel weapons. Not at all viable as an alternative to a FF-driven society.

Quality life in space, or sqaulid, unhealthy life on a ruined planet, those are the alternatives.

[Ibon]

I even would go so far as to say this is Nature's plan, when a species matures, they leave behind the world they evolved upon.

I'm dreaming dreams,
I'm scheming schemes,
I'm building castles high.
They're born anew,
Their days are few,
Just like a sweet butterfly.
And as the daylight is dawning,
They come again in the morning.

I'm forever blowing bubbles,
Pretty bubbles in the air,
They fly so high,
Nearly reach the sky,
Then like my dreams,
They fade and die.
Fortune's always hiding,
I've looked everywhere,
I'm forever blowing bubbles,
Pretty bubbles in the air.

[KaiserJeep]

I've explained to you several times that the occupation of space requires only the civilian control of the spacecraft technology. The government efforts such as the Apollo program and even the Space Shuttle were technology demonstrators, not means for the economic exploitation of the abundant energy and materials and manufacturing opportunities available in space.

Ever wondered why there are so many partial-vacuum crystal-growing experiments on the ISS? We are discovering more and more advanced materials and production opportunities as time passes. The "super materials" thus produced will spark a second Industrial Revolution once they are in production.

I'm a believer already, a lot more people will be when SpaceX lands a civilian craft on Mars. Others will remain Luddites forever, including probably YOU. Do you also think that the world is flat, and the US Government faked the lunar landings?

[KaiserJeep]

Oh, so bitter. Go eat a rich dessert, and feel better.

[dinopello]

I was eating a locally made bratwurst from a locally raised pig, with some homemade sauerkraut - only I had three kinds of mustard - all imported. I starting worrying about where my mustards would come from. Can't have brats without some good mustard - preferably a variety of them.

[dohboi]

William Reese has a nice response to a kinda stupid essay: http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014- ... resilience

[Newfie]

Unfortunately I find the Reese response poorly reasoned as well.

Kinda depressing.

[Graeme]

Will 2015 be the year the world agrees how to live sustainably?

Next year will be critical in environmental diplomacy. World governments will be negotiating important global agreements in two areas that will have a major impact on our well-being in coming decades, including the legal framework for climate action beyond 2020.

The second, far less well-known – but potentially just as important – agreement is about setting global Sustainable Development Goals, to follow on from the poverty-focused Millennium Development Goals that will end in 2015.

After a year and a half of negotiations, a picture is emerging of what those goals are likely to be: tackling poverty, hunger, inequality and environmental damage, not just in the developing world but throughout the globe.

Setting the goals

This week, an Open Working Group of the United Nations General Assembly released a set of proposed Sustainable Development Goals and targets. This proposal will form the basis of negotiation between countries about the goals over the next year, leading to a final decision at the United Nations in September 2015.

theconversation

[Graeme]

Executive Survey: Sustainability Important, But More Needs to Be Done

Executives increasingly see sustainability as an important aspect of their business, but implementing it as a priority throughout their organizations represents a challenge for many, according to a survey by McKinsey & Company.

When asked about their companies’ reasons for pursuing sustainability in previous surveys, executives cited cost cutting or reputation management most often. Now 43 percent indicate their companies are looking to align sustainability with their overall business goals, mission or values, which is an increase of 30 percent from those who said this in 2012.

However, execution is clearly a challenge for many companies. Respondents noted that a lack of performance incentives and short-term earnings pressure often run at odds with the sustainability agenda, and 34 percent of executives (up from 23 percent in 2011) say that too few people at their companies are accountable for sustainability.

environmentalleader

[Graeme]

Dow Jones Sustainability Index: why winning isn’t everything

There are fewer than two months to go before the rankings are announced for the 2014 Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI). That may mean little or nothing to some people, but for AkzoNobel, it’s a big deal.

The DJSI ranking is based on research by RobecoSAM, a renowned investment group based in Switzerland. Every year, they assess the sustainability performance of around 90 publicly listed global companies in the chemicals and coatings industries.

This involves carrying out detailed analysis of management practices and performance measures. We are measured against 86 chemicals companies, of which the top nine are included in the DJSI World Index. I’m proud to say we’ve been ranked number one in our sector for the last two years. But it’s not necessarily about finishing first.

Let me explain. The DJSI is the most respected independent sustainability ranking system. It benchmarks our performance across the industry and enables us to assess what progress we are making in terms of achieving our strategic sustainability goals. And this is crucial, because achieving a high ranking is not an end in itself. The fundamental value of the DJSI is as a management tool, which helps to continuously improve the sustainability performance of our business.

Being ranked first means you are doing a lot of things right of course, but more importantly, the assessment also highlights areas for improvement. And you need to take action, because if you don’t make progress and adopt a continuous improvement mindset, you’ll drop down the list or fall off it altogether. For example, in 2013, operational eco-efficiency and talent attraction and retention were identified as areas where we could do better. So since last September, we’ve been working hard to improve in these areas.

theguardian

[kublikhan]

First, I will argue that the perception that there is a hard tradeoff between the goals of economic growth and environmental sustainability rests on a contestable empirical premise. While it is of course true that the transition from a high-carbon to a low-carbon energy economy would carry positive economic costs, a large body of literature in the fields of engineering and economics establishes that those costs would be too small to substantially affect the overall rate of economic growth.

Taken together, these arguments suggest that the contestation over what Daly termed “growthmania” presents a rather delicate set of issues. On the one hand, a narrow emphasis on growth can and sometimes does lead to a failure to implement policies even in cases where the long-run benefits exceed the short-run costs as measured using conventional economic tools. On the other hand, presenting growth as the core problem and the cessation of growth as the solution may actually serve to reinforce the political influence of the pro-growth narrative, since it forces decision-makers to frame things in terms of an either/or choice. Instead, environmentalists may be better served by the WCED approach to sustainable development, which de-centers growth to focus more directly on the achievement of social justice and the conservation and protection of ecosystem services. This hardly implies that unlimited growth is possible or desirable, though it provides a framework for balancing the costs and benefits of growth and for directing goods and services to ends that best reflect society’s values.
...
Energy economists have long stressed that the relationship between energy use and economic output is flexible and elastic, especially in the long run. It is certainly true that the production of all goods and services involves physical transformations that require inputs of energy as stipulated by the laws of thermodynamics. It is also true, however, that the current economy is far from its thermodynamic limits and that large reductions in carbon dioxide emissions could be achieved through changes in technology, the structure of the economy, and the mix of final products that consumers demand.


Conclusions

In this paper, I have argued that accepting substantial reductions in the future rate of economic growth may be unnecessary to safeguard and sustain the biophysical systems that provide the basis and underpinnings for human livelihoods and well-being. In the long run, the growth of material production and consumption is limited by natural resource constraints, and achieving a sustainable future will require policies and institutions that maintain the economy within the bounds set by nature. But significant growth of GDP—a measure of the subjective value of goods and services—can nonetheless be achieved in the interim through a move to technologies and consumption patterns sufficient to sharply reduce the economy’s “ecological footprint.”

The way forward is perhaps not so very hard to envision. A sustainable future will emerge if we build institutions that, on a practical level, sustain the natural environment and the social and technological conditions that will empower future generations to define and pursue their own conception of the good life. As the Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen wrote in his book Development as Freedom, the path to enhanced human flourishing will be built by expanding the scope of choices and opportunities. While policies that promote sustainability may well lead to (some, but not unlimited) economic growth, the converse is certainly not assured. As the WCED framed this point, achieving sustainability will require an approach that de-emphasizes growth and that explicitly embraces environmental and social goals as a core and self-standing dimensions of “development.”

Sustainability, Well-Being, and Economic Growth

[dohboi]

"a measure of the subjective value of goods and services"

Great, since it's 'subjective' turn it we can turn it into whatever we like. Better get to that pretty fast.

But historically GDP has tracked almost exactly with energy (and material) consumption, and that energy has been since the industrial revolutions, and still mostly is, almost all fossil carbon.

And there have already been many clarion calls that the material economy is over and that the information age had arrived. Unfortunately, so far it has turned out that a whole lot of the information that became most highly valued was about how to every more effectively rip the skin off of and the guts out of baby earth, something we are exceedingly and acceleratingly good at as a global industrial culture.