No, it’s more a narrative issue than anything else.
Nobody says we should go back to Stone Age but we should unleash our narratives of what is a nice future.
Living in a world where everyone is eating healthy local food, where you live longer because it’s safe to use your bicycle and hard to use the car. Living in a world where you can walk everyday because there are trees to give you their shadows. Living in a world where work is meaningful. For me that’s a bright future.
Nobody says we have to abandon all of our technological and cultural advances but that we have to prefer some over others.
Like my grandfather said, plant 2 trees when you build your home and you’ll never need air conditioning. His idea wasn’t that you should ban A/C but rather that you can use it way more efficiently just by adding some shadow.
That’s the world we must live in now : consuming energy is ok but not if it is a countermeasure to our own stupid decisions.
It’s the same with cars. Ok they are nice sometimes. But they are stupid if we use them to go in a far office with the same computer you have at home.
We don’t need to go back to Stone Age but we need to dream of a future where we don’t use the energy for stupid things. And this implies being able to see what is stupid and who have interest in keeping a given stupid thing, stupid.
> Living in a world where everyone is eating healthy local food, where you live longer because it’s safe to use your bicycle and hard to use the car. Living in a world where you can walk everyday because there are trees to give you their shadows. Living in a world where work is meaningful. For me that’s a bright future.
That sounds nice and all (although as a canadian, too much heat due to lack of shade is definitely not the issue around here ;) ). I'd even go as far as to say that those types of life style changes have an important part to play. However, even if implemented to the fullest extent possible, i don't really think it solves the greenhouse gas problem by itself or even comes close.
> i don't really think it solves the greenhouse gas problem by itself or even comes close.
Well, yeah...ok, everyone rides around on bikes. Someone has to make the bike. Is it done by hand? How do you scale that to 8B people? Or is it done by a scaled industrial process, and if so, how do you power this?
The answer to these questions isn't to limit technology, it's to limit population. The scale of our population is the cause of all of these strange threshold-breaking externalities we're now facing. And you can't point at the technology and say "SEE?! It's ruining everything!"
The technology is just a companion to our population. Real primitivists should be arguing for drastically reduced population (however that is achieved ethically), not a reduction of technology.
This is exactly what they did. The reduce population movment was big and is big.
Read "The Population Bomb" its literally what people were obcessed about back then. Save the enviornment because of old zero ideas that German generals really licked too.
The podcast "If books could kill" did a great episode on this book.
Its an incredibly dumb amd harmful idea but its sticking around.
> Living in a world where everyone is eating healthy local food, where you live longer because it’s safe to use your bicycle and hard to use the car. Living in a world where you can walk everyday because there are trees to give you their shadows.
As someone who dislikes physical movement or being outdoors, this sounds terrible. Local food is often heavy in ingredients I don't like or to which I am allergic, or doesn't fulfill my nutritional needs and desires. This is not the idea of an ideal world for many modern people.
I'd much rather we solve the issues related to being sedentary with technology than we try to figure out how to make everyone bike everywhere, which most people don't want to do, even given the option. I don't wash my clothes by hand and I'm not sure why bicycling is seen as some ideal correspondingly. I'd take a 200 year perfect artificial heart over safe bike lanes. I'd take better solar (to run more AC and dehumidification) over more trees. I've swallowed enough bugs whilst cycling for more than one lifetime.
Your position, to me, is still just a yearning for historical lifestyles that we abandoned en masse for good reasons. Using energy on air conditioning and transportation are perhaps the least stupid things one can spend energy on - right alongside spending energy on washing machines for your bedclothes and underwear, which nobody seems to regard as some insanely wasteful luxury. Why is energy for heating seen by europeans as OK when energy for cooling is regarded as a senseless waste? It's just cultural bias and tradition.
When the majority of humans live in space or on bodies without an atmosphere, this whole "fresh air and trees" meme will finally die, I hope.
The heating vs cooling this always gets me. Living in Arizona and cooling your home 30-40 degrees down with a 50% carbon-free electricity mix and 3 or 4x COP is seen as unsustainable, but living Illinois and heating your home 50-60 degrees up by burning fossil fuels is fine.
> Why is energy for heating seen by europeans as OK when energy for cooling is regarded as a senseless waste?
I'm not the type of person who would want everyone to cycle - chiefly because four wheels > two everywhere and everytime, but there's an argument to be made against overusing AC, namely: you're just moving heat around and producing some in the process, so the net effect is that the area around you gets extra hot.
AC is a pretty blunt tool and there are ways of keeping places cooler without it.
Nobody says we should go back to Stone Age but we should unleash our narratives of what is a nice future.
Living in a world where everyone is eating healthy local food, where you live longer because it’s safe to use your bicycle and hard to use the car. Living in a world where you can walk everyday because there are trees to give you their shadows. Living in a world where work is meaningful. For me that’s a bright future.
Nobody says we have to abandon all of our technological and cultural advances but that we have to prefer some over others.
Like my grandfather said, plant 2 trees when you build your home and you’ll never need air conditioning. His idea wasn’t that you should ban A/C but rather that you can use it way more efficiently just by adding some shadow.
That’s the world we must live in now : consuming energy is ok but not if it is a countermeasure to our own stupid decisions.
It’s the same with cars. Ok they are nice sometimes. But they are stupid if we use them to go in a far office with the same computer you have at home.
We don’t need to go back to Stone Age but we need to dream of a future where we don’t use the energy for stupid things. And this implies being able to see what is stupid and who have interest in keeping a given stupid thing, stupid.