[ralfy]

So industrial efficiency is bad? We should go back to sticks and digging tools?

Efficiency in free market capitalism is motivated by increased profitability. That is, businesses will invest in efficiency only because it will lead to more production given the same cost (or lower). This is important because they are in competition with each other (which is what takes place in free market capitalist systems) and need to gain more market share. This is also why their employees are under constant pressure, e.g., to meet quotas and sell more goods and services each time while business investors want the best returns.

At the same time, markets have to keep expanding because they may soon be saturated, which is why businesses also spend a lot on marketing while banks extend more credit to consumers (which is what they have to do anyway as that's their business). More credit also has to be extended to extract resources that are becoming more difficult to obtain because they are deeper, require more processing, etc.

Meanwhile, together with marketing businesses have to introduce "new and improved" products because they need consumers to constantly buy in order to ensure a steady flow of revenues. That means at some point products that they bought should become obsolete or even break down.

Finally, many of these goods and services include middle class conveniences, such as smart phones, ICE and EV passenger vehicles, and services like trips to local beach resorts and vacation spots and shopping sprees abroad, because the profit margins for these are high.

Hence, industrial efficiency takes place because of promises of higher returns and profits, which in turn involves increased production and consumption of goods and services through combinations of overproduction and planned obsolescence. Results include increasing levels of ecological degradation and pollution, CO2 emissions, and higher energy costs as more oil, etc., is needed to obtain material resources that are more difficult to obtain due to diminishing returns.

In which case, at some point the world will probably go back to something like sticks and digging tools, and only because it will have no choice, as the combined effects of limits to growth (including peak oil), environmental damage (together with the effects of global warming), increasing debt, etc., take their toll on the world population.

[derhundistlos]

Ibon:

"The irony to own a reserve and share wildlife with folks from all over the world while their travel to get here imperils our biosphere. I can't resolve this."

Sure you can. I own and operate two wildlife reserves in Colombia totaling 1.977 hectares or 4.943 acres in the Departments of Antioquia and Guaviare. I resolve the dilemma you are confronting by using the revenues generated to purchase neighboring properties. My goal is for each reserve to total at least 5.000 acres, which is the minimum size required for sustainability.
Then at the time of my death, the properties will be donated to a well established Colombian wildlife NGO.

[Newfie]

That’s no average size piece of land you have there.

How are you making it produce profit while protecting it?

My own little piece of land is far smaller than your, 168 acres in Nova Scotia, Canada.

[ralfy]

That reminds me of one feature, where the family had managed to lower its footprint considerably through various means, but a year's worth of resource and energy savings were offset when one of them had to take one trip by plane for business purposes.

[dissident]

Just for the record, this is a different chart this one pre-retirement — working age people—

middle 40% still get substantially more than the bottom 50%


ibid

Wow, the tag team of Bush and Obama certainly skewed the system. The legacy of those two has produced a large anomaly that is hard to justify given the job situation. The government can't engage in such generosity with all the chronic underemployment, medical and other costs.

[SeaGypsy]

That reminds me of one feature, where the family had managed to lower its footprint considerably through various means, but a year's worth of resource and energy savings were offset when one of them had to take one trip by plane for business purposes.

https://science.howstuffworks.com/trans ... ion192.htm doesn't make a lot of sense. Unless the family were riding bicycles & living in tents.

[Newfie]

We have our tree lot, 168 acres. Supposedly that off sets about 44 cars. Also we are living a pretty low energy lifestyle. The summer in Newfoundland is more energy intensive. No heating or cooling, but we don’t make our own electricity and here we need to drive a LOT. 40 miles one way to the nearest super market. 150 miles to the big city, 250,000, where you can get a more “normal” USA selection, but limited even at that.

[dohboi]

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/08/03 ... in-crisis/

It is time we consider the implications of it being too late to avert a global environmental catastrophe in the lifetimes of people alive today

... several non-mainstream climate scientists of stature believe climate change is no longer simply change in the abstract. Rather, it is an ongoing crisis with real time dimensions and substance that is unavoidably dangerous for society...

...existing CO2 in the atmosphere “should already produce global ambient temperature rises over 5C and so there is not a carbon budget – It has already been overspent.”

...conclusion:

“Disruptive impacts from climate change are now inevitable.

Geoengineering is likely to be ineffective or counter-productive.

Therefore, the mainstream climate policy community now recognizes the need to work much more on adaptation to the effects of climate change… societies will experience disruptions to their basic functioning within less than ten years due to climate stress.

Such disruptions include increased levels of malnutrition, starvation, disease, civil conflict and war – and will not avoid affluent nations.”

[Tanada]

Duh! I have been telling Ya'all that for several years now!

[Newfie]

Yeah, even Obama said that.

But only about 3 years ago, sometime after Paris.

[Ibon]

Ibon:

"The irony to own a reserve and share wildlife with folks from all over the world while their travel to get here imperils our biosphere. I can't resolve this."

Sure you can. I own and operate two wildlife reserves in Colombia totaling 1.977 hectares or 4.943 acres in the Departments of Antioquia and Guaviare. I resolve the dilemma you are confronting by using the revenues generated to purchase neighboring properties. My goal is for each reserve to total at least 5.000 acres, which is the minimum size required for sustainability.
Then at the time of my death, the properties will be donated to a well established Colombian wildlife NGO.

Thats awesome. Habitat preservation and creating refuge populations of flora and fauna is like a seed bank. These are the refuge populations of biodiversity that can then one day spread and recolonize former human landscapes when our population one day recedes. In my comment I was referring to something more immediate in reference to all of the air travel required for several hundred tourists from Europe and North America to come down here to experience and enjoy the intact habitat our reserve provides and yet their very choice of flying down here aggravates imbalances in our biosphere.

The main reason for me bringing up this point is that today, no matter how virtuous your actions might be, for example in preserving habitat and providing the education opportunities for folks to enjoy this, you can never completely exonerate yourself from how you contribute and aggravate the imbalances. We are simply too many people and consume too much regardless of how virtuous we may think that consumption may be. Flying across the planet to watch birds is a form of consumption.

Where are your reserves in Colombia? What a wonderful country.

[Newfie]

Gas,
Sometimes I feel like a fish in water. I may realize that my being in the water is decaying it’s environment for the other fish and plants. But I am a fish so my options are limited.

Conundrums.

[Revi]

I have begun to think about how my actions affect things. I pissed off everyone on facebook by figuring out how much Co2 we spew on a daily basis. It's about 1/4 lb. per mile per passenger in a plane, 1/2 pound per mile in a car and about a third per mile for a train. This information really bugged people. I think it makes it easy to figure out what we are doing, like having a budget. For example I drove to work yesterday in my electric car, which uses nothing but then took a trip to a nearby town in my gasoline truck. That put 32 pounds in the air. My average is 27 lbs per day, so that put me about 5 over. I'll use less today, so it will be a below average week, hopefully. I just think it's a good way to figure it out. Most people would rather avoid thinking about it at all.

[Cog]

What generates the power for your electric car?

[Revi]

My electric car is a GEM car, and it uses very little electricity. What it does get is mostly from hydro and wind in our neck of the woods. The Kennebec Valley has 4 big hydro dams.

[longpig]

One day our sun will die, expand and consume this planet - not on our watch though !!
Gas

Life on the timescale of earth is pretty much near it's end. Life began evolving 4.5 billion years, in 500 million years the sun will have expanded enough to boil away all the oceans and end all life on earth. Earth is like a 90 year old man who will die at 100.

[Outcast_Searcher]

One day our sun will die, expand and consume this planet - not on our watch though !!
Gas

Life on the timescale of earth is pretty much near it's end. Life began evolving 4.5 billion years, in 500 million years the sun will have expanded enough to boil away all the oceans and end all life on earth. Earth is like a 90 year old man who will die at 100.

Well, first earth is about 4.5 billion years old and life evolved roughly 3.8 billion years ago. (These things can be googled, obviously. Or you could provide credible citations.)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/history_of_the_earth

The time estimate for the oceans boiling away has been delayed in recent years, but whether it's in hundreds of millions of years or over a billion years, that timeframe GREATLY dwarfs the amount of time homo sapiens have been a species.

https://www.newsweek.com/sun-losing-mas ... hy-1094007

So what is "fast" about this?

In a blink of an eye on a cosmological scale, either humanity will have destroyed itself (and sadly, likely taken the vast majority of the biosphere with it), or have evolved to such an extent in terms of technological ability that we can't even BEGIN to imagine how it might adapt.

Gradually moving the orbit of the earth away from the sun sounds completely preposterous to us, for example. And yet, the internet age would have seemed the same to people before the dark ages. Or modern medicine (re the science it's based upon, like our ability to manipulate viruses, bacteria, genes, etc).

[Outcast_Searcher]

Mother nature is above all - she has the power via volcanic events, meteorites etc to wipe everything out. It's (nearly) happened before in the planets distant past so I believe .

Yup. I think it's fair to say the day the moon was created via the earth being struck by a roughly Mars sized object would have been pretty rough had anything been alive at the time.

https://www.space.com/35291-moon-age-pinned-down.html

[derhundistlos]

"That’s no average size piece of land you have there. How are you making it produce profit while protecting it? My own little piece of land is far smaller than your, 168 acres in Nova Scotia, Canada."

Firstly, the expenses are virtually N/A. Annual property taxes amount to $137 US combined. Each reserve is maintained by a forest guard. Each guard lives on the reserve with his family. Each guard is paid $211 US monthly. The reserves are located along spring-fed rivers teeming with fish. Electricity is generated via mini-hydro. Clean, potable water is always abundant. Water is supplied via a gravitational system. No AC required.
Revenue is generated through eco-tourism and sports fishing. We also plant platanos, banana, yucca, and vegetables.

Colombia contains more biodiversity than any other country.

We have an excellent relationship with the guerillas (Las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarios de Colombia: El Ejercito del Pueblo). La FARC are true conservationists. Poaching, trade in wildlife, hunting of wildlife are all STRICTLY PROHIBITED and the justice is swift for those who violate this law. You may have read about a gang comprised of six Chinese poachers were caught in the Cauca Department by the guerillas. They were turned over to the local Indians and executed.