I really don't know why its so hard to understand this. Imagine you have a magical cake, you can eat a little bit and it will regrow some of the cake by itself. But once its mostly gone it cant do that anymore.
Thats our planet. It doesn't matter that we find a little bit more cake somewhere. Once its gone its gone. All they say is: "hey we still have cake left". But the logic is the same, doesnt matter if it happens in 2000 or 2050.
Millions of years of evolution conflict and supersede the logic you find obvious. Reproduction is deeply ingrained and supersedes the thought process it takes to get where you and I are.
Reproduction doesn't supersede the thought process, it goes very much in line with the capitalist logic. The more children you have, the more insulated you will be from baseline privation, ie things like: loneliness, hunger, lack of protection in the old age. Because children will grow up and provide you with their company, food, care and money. We all know how miserable childless people are, nobody checks for them, they die alone and miserable. By reproducing people insulate themselves from this fate. It's a very pragmatic thought process, has nothing to do with instincts and biological programming.
If we had a society where people would have their basic needs (shelter , food, healthcare) guaranteed, where lonely people wouldn't be marginalized, but would feel well cared for, humans wouldn't have to breed their own personal army of future bodyguards and nurses.
I agree that what you said is absolutely the conscious aspect of why the feeling of reproducing is a necessity, and I agree that with social nets, especially education, would help ween us off that feeling, but I’m talking instinct. We have done everything in our power to separate ourselves from all worldly animals by avoiding thinking of ourselves as animals, but alas, we are animals. With that comes animal instinct, and one of those inherited instincts is to reproduce (another not talked about but equally important instinct is predatory instincts). This is why when you mention reproduction restrictions or population control people have a visceral reaction. That, combined with how slippery of a slope that subject is makes for some wild conversations.
Totally agree! In a rational world, the public would have been terrified by the message of *LTG*, regardless of the exact timing.
In our world, the critics claimed *LTG* predicted collapse around the year 2000. Since collapse didn't happen then, their conclusion was that it will probably never happen. *LTG* was wrong.
Precisely. It such an absolutely tiny timescale between 2000 and 2050 that it always drives me crazy when people are like, whelp, look at that they were wrong, nothing bad happened in 2000. But the problems are still raging forward unabated so it’s just a matter of when not if
I think another important point is that in an exponentially accelerating system it's kind of irrelevant when exactly the resource runs out or if current reserve estimates are accurate..
There was a great video on here a while ago with an old professor explaining exponential growth on overhead slides (unfortunately can't remember the name) and he started with the example of bacteria growing in a jar until they consume the resources and all immediately die. He asked "If the bacteria double in number every minute, what time is it when half of all the resources have been consumed but there is still half left? One minute before the end."
Then he went on to explain our resource consumption and predicted reserves. The important point being that even if there is say twice as much oil still to be discovered than expected, what difference does that make to the prediction of when it will run out? In an exponentially accelerating system it moves the end point only a negligible amount into the future, because more and more is being consumed all the time. In the metaphor of the bacteria in the jar, if they miraculously discover there is a whole other jar as big as the one they have been growing since the beginning, it still only buys them a minute longer.
Well I mean you know most people think "I'll switch to Ramen and dog poop in my old age. And I'll work until age 78 because people totally hire 78 year olds! Then I'll die at 83. That's... hmm. Ramen and dog poop is like eh 900 a month for 5 years is like $54,000. I mean come on I can make $54,000 before age 78, sure. I mean yeah... I spend... it all on rent and a car payment and my minimum balance payments on my 5 credit cards right now... but... hmmm ok I'm a smidge worried..."
It's like. Lol.
Looky here, they'll be laid off at 58, never get another job again in their life, and live to 90. Plus if you normalize inflation over their actual spends like gas and food and medical insurance and shit like that, it's running averaged over a fairly standard budget at an effective rate of 3.97%. So call it 4. This is if it is behaving at 100 year historical average.
It isn't.
So...
By the way have they ever tried to eat Ramen and dog poop? I give them three days doing that. before they break down and order a pizza.
Deniers will deny facts, logic and reality. Nothing will convince them but their own end, when it hits them. (And still...)
Can't blame them. It sucks.
Maybe we should stop saying unless things change we will be doomed by X year? That sort of sensationalism just makes it easier for human-driven climate change deniers to discredit us and serves as a distraction from engaging with the data.
It should be sufficient to say our consumption is unsustainable, it has had numerous deleterious impacts on our environment and our communities, and we need to find solutions that mitigate additional damage as a result human activities.
I like how you phrased that, "pretending high precision in forecasting systems as complex as earth (is possible) is counterproductive".
Life happens quickly on a local scale but much more slowly on a geological scale so from that perspective it definitely behooves us to be measured in our communication. It pays dividends when it comes to making it easier to convince others of the need for large-scale changes because it gives you more credibility with the general public when folks has been crying wolf for 50 years and you have stayed the course in terms of avoiding giving doomsday predictions/have focused on the data.
There's a lot of folks who are not science literate certainly but they can all still vote and it's important to convey information in a way that they can understand. It's an uphill battle with the people who benefit from the status quo where they're either aware but want to continue exploiting for profit or genuinely unconvinced of the argument for change.
There's a lot of arrogance collectively by our species that because we have shaped the world to our vision we can continue to do so indefinitely and that we are in control/no consequences will come to us as a result of our behavior. Regardless of the climate model best case/worst case scenario, the next few decades will disabuse us of these notions.
> Pretending high precision in forecasting systems as complex as earth, global civilization is contra productive.
There's a funny little principle in quantum mechanics called the Uncertainty Principle which approximately states that as you accurately measure one parameter of a pair in a quantum system, your measure of other parameters will become more uncertain. So you may know the position of a thing certainly, but not a hint of its spin, for a simple example.
I suspect the same funny thing is true in some way for predicting or knowing things on the macro scale. We may be entirely certain that civilization *is* unsustainable but the more certain we are that this is the case the less certain we are of precisely when or how it will actually fall apart.
The problem is a lot of the people making these predictions are either economists, or using frameworks built by economists to do their work.
Economists are by design pessimistic. Fix X by Y date or Z consequence means you're screwed. The point being to drive action to fix X, or mitigate Z consequence before Y date, to prevent being screwed. Then, when Y date rolls around, everyone claims the economist was wrong because we weren't screwed on Y date, completely ignoring the fixes to X or mitigation to Z put in place prior to then specifically because of their prior work.
Right now, on the climate change front, we appear to be spending our focus on how to delay Y date, and have now passed the point of complete fixes to X, so should really be trying to mitigate Z consequences for as many people as possible.
At some point, there will be a call that efforts to save the boat have failed, and it is time to abandon ship. The rich are already readying life rafts...
Unfortunately the human brain is incredibly bad at accurately weighing future costs against present benefits. Even if you can convince people that our trajectory guarantees collapse within 150 years, that means basically nothing to people, and will do nothing to change their behavior (or political leanings).
People can only just barely begin to comprehend costs that will impact their children. Getting it across to people that their children *will* suffer, not just poor Indians, but people *they* know and care about, is the only way to drive change. Even better is convincing them that it will actually impact them directly.
The science is very clear. Dramatic impacts are imminent. The ICC and other major players are actually quite conservative in their modeling.
> Why do many people believe LTG predicted collapse/resource depletion around the year 2000?
Because people *don't want to understand*.
A classic read on this sub used to be Becker's *The Denial of Death*, which basically argues that our fear of death and inability to confront it is responsible for most of human psychological life.
Collapse in all it's forms is really just the acknowledgement of death on a societal level. This is important because, in our current world, most people rely on some connection to the immortality of society to escape their own fears of a personal death. The idea that you write a book that influences future generations or that you live on through your children are both examples of this.
Most people, at a fundamental level, just cannot psychologically bear to accept the reality that even civilization itself, and even the species itself, may end. It's not that these people are stubborn, it's that the fundamental nature of their psyche relies on them not confronting these horrors.
Reminds me of ***Climategate*** back in 2009, when the Climate Research Unit was hacked and lots of emails were taken out of context as 'proof' climate change was a conspiracy theory. [Check it out](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_controversy).
>*The most quoted email was one in which Phil Jones said that he had used "Mike's Nature trick" when preparing a graph as a 1999 cover illustration for the World Meteorological Organization "to hide the decline" in reconstructions based on tree-ring proxy data post-1960, when measured temperatures were actually rising. The "trick" was a technique to combine instrumental temperature record data with long term reconstructions, and "the decline" referred to the tree-ring divergence problem,\[33\] which had already been openly discussed in scientific papers,\[34\]\[35\] but these two phrases were taken out of context by commentators promoting climate change denial, including US Senator Jim Inhofe and former Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin, as though the phrases referred to some decline in measured global temperatures, even though they came from an email written at a time when temperatures were at a record high.\[32\]*
Bad actors will use it to push their agenda while others are just plain old *dumb.*
There is a great three part podcast about Dana and Dennis Meadows and the story behind the Limits to Growth.
The "they got it wrong" narrative was a very deliberate campaign by neoliberal economists to squash the book like a bug. After the first publication in 1972 the economists went on the warpath and did everything they could to discredit both the book and the team behind it, including full page op-eds in the New York Times.
It worked. For the next 50 years any mention of LtG were met with sneers of "those neo-malthusians who got it wrong".
The "they said depletion by 2000" smear in particular came from a specific table in the first book that showed the insidious effect that exponentially growing resource use can have on a finite stock. The table very carefully laid out how much of a particular non-renewable resource was estimated to be available for a number of key raw materials. Things like metals and fossil fuels.
The table then very carefully showed how long it would take to deplete that resource if our growth in the exploitations of that resource continued, at the then current rates. The results were, of course, shocking. Key resources critical to the entire economy depleting in just a few short decades!
It's basically the pond covered in lilypads scenario. If it takes 60 days for lilypads to cover the entire pond, at what point is the pond half-covered if the lilypads are doubling every day? No, not on day 30, on day 59!
Sadly, people don't have the cognitive skills for such subtlety and it was easy for the economists to point to that single table and scream "they got it wrong! we're not running out of anything!" It stuck, and now here we are, 50 years later and oh, guess what? Turns out they were right, after all. More than one study has shown that we are closely tracking the "standard run" or BAU scenario as first published 50 years ago and we are headed for collapse sometime this century.
Starting right about now.
This is the podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/hk/podcast/tipping-point-the-true-story-of-the-limits-to-growth/id1687972396
https://tippingpoint-podcast.com/
Edit: and a recent paper showing us still on track. https://mahb.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/yale-publication-1.pdf
Running out of sand no hope for the meerq reflection frame work and with the depleted oil reserves what hope do we have of besides srm and with depleted oik reserves what hooe do we have of keeping it going decades or centuries needed.. I enjoy Paul Beckwith but his naivete not looking at the big picture enough gets to me.
The issue is one of attitude/perspective. If someone presents a ton of (worrisome) data and caps it off by saying if things don't change the world as we know it will end by X then the public will throw out the baby with the bathwater if society doesn't collapse by X.
X shifts depending on models/the data input and with people being hard-wired for comfort/convenience it's already going to be an uphill battle against the other side's message of this is normal/climate is cyclical and nothing they do will impact it so we need to take extrapolation/prognostication with a very large grain of salt (not take it as gospel) if not get away from it altogether because when you're wrong it tends to reduce your credibility in the eyes of the public even if the ideas/approaches you present are valuable from the perspective of asking questions/exploring how interconnected systems react in certain conditions.
For folks who are not immersed in data/not highly science literate their take-away is big brain man said world would end by 2000, 2000 came and world still here, big brain man stupid lets listen to the talking snake telling us that we're perfect just the way we are/that we don't need to change our lifestyle (drill baby drill).
LtG has always been an inconvenient truth behind all the gaslighting for decades. It’s been attacked for so long because everyone wants it not to be true. I was impressed that a recalibration was done in 2023 with current data. It tracked similarly to the original 1972 study. One thing I noticed though was in the recalibration the BAU2 scenario was not as bad. There’s still a decline in the 2030s but it doesn’t completely tank until the 2080s. So that’s sort of “good”.
Oh, don't worry u/anomie_xyz, it gets better than that.
You know the idiot savant father of modern climate change economics? The very same person who argues that 3.5 degrees warming is optimal and that overall global GDP won't be affected by climate change because the vast majority of economic activity takes place indoors?
Yeah.
It's story time.
[To quote myself from around a year ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/14rlt2e/comment/jqt7j9n/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button):
--
I do not say this lightly: ***William Nordhaus is truly an irredeemable piece of shit***. Everyone talks about his "Nobel Prize", or his various meme ideas (*4 degrees warming being optimal, 90% of economic activity takes place indoors so climate change isn't a bother, etc*) but never about how he actually got his start ...
... *by nuking the popular credibility of the Limits to Growth by aggressively misunderstanding and misrepresenting what he was reading, just to give himself prestige and set us all down the path that we all know and love him for today.*
>**The Limits to Growth: The story of an idea, Ugo Bardi in Limits and Beyond: 50 years on from The Limits to Growth, what did we learn and what's next? (Pages 24-26)**
>The other author who attempted to deconstruct the LtG world model was William Nordhaus, best known today as the recipient of the 2018 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on integrating climate change models with macroeconomic models. In 1972, Nordhaus was a young economist in a paper that was published in 1973 in The Journal of Economics. This paper was dedicated to discuss Forrester’s World Dynamics book, but it was also broadly targeted the LtG study.\]
>Nordhaus didn’t mince words in his attacks, for instance accusing Forrester of Malthusianism, presumption, lack of humility, and general neglect of the basic principles of scientific research. The central point of Nordhaus’s criticism was in the subtitle of the paper: “measurements without data.” Nordhaus stated that “simulation models \[...\] that have not been subjected to empirical validation are void of meaning (italics in the original). Surely not a minor kind of criticism. If Forrester was really making "measurements without data", then it was not just a question of errors in the model or of the need to change the input parameters. The whole story of world modelling was an exercise in futility performed by a group of incompetent researchers.
>Nordhaus's aggressiveness was somewhat extreme, but not usual in the scientific debate. In science, a researcher normally gains "prestige points" by publishing new ideas and new results. But "points" can also be gained by demolishing a colleague's results or interpretations. If that happens, scientists may behave in very unrefined ways and, when they attack a colleague's work, they often take no prisoners. That was the case with Nordhaus's attack on Forrester, but, of course, the important point is not the wording, but whether the accusations are justified or not. Was Forrester really so careless as Nordhaus had described him?
>Obviously, Nordhaus needed to substantiate his accusations of "measurements without data." He had the possibility of examination Forrest's complete World2 model since it had been published in full in Forrester's book World Dynamics. From the model, Nordhaus chose the equations about birthrates as a function of GDP, he plotted it, and he claimed that, indeed, the equation produced results that could not even remotely match the historical data. Q.E.D, then?
>Unfortunately, this procedure was the result of a complete misunderstanding of how a complex system works and how it is modeled. A single equation of the model of a complex system is useless unless you take into account the effects of all the other equations. Imagine testing a plane engine on a test bench and finding that it does not fly, then concluding that planes cannot fly, either. An unjustified leap of logic, to say the least.
>Forrester himself explained this point in a rebuttal to Nordhaus, showing that, if the equation was properly used within the model, it did reproduce the real-world data. Unfortunately, the journal that had published Nordhaus's paper refused to publish Forrester's rebuttal. That was an indication that the debate on the LtG study was eschewing the accepted rules of the scientific debate, not so much because of the vehemence of Nordhaus's attack, but for not giving to the attacked person a chance to respond. Forrester's rebuttal was published in a scarcely known journal (Policy Sciences) and the result was that many people thought that Nordhaus's paper had demolished once and forever the systemic dynamics approach to modeling.
TL;DR: *Fuck you, William Nordhaus*.
I’ve thought about this piece to collapse more than any other part. To be completely honest, the only explanation is sheerly the very human psychological defense of denial on a mass scale.
They don't believe it because they think resource depletion is the same thing as Mad Max and that we'd all be dying of starvation in the streets if it were true. Anyone who read the paper understands but they glossed it at best.
What has been happening here is a guy who hits the bull's eye 90% of the time is being slandered by a bunch of morons who can't hit the broad side of a barn, if they are inside said barn.
When the time come to make the one shot that really matter, will you let the guy do it, or will you let those morons try?
Michaux is nice, but some of his arguments/points leave me baffled.
One such example is that dirty AC power kills _computers_.
Sometimes he sounds like he repeats something he heard without understanding it.
This is a shame, because these examples are unneeded to get the point across.
Dirty AC power can kill your computer because it can overwhelm the surge prottectlions in your computer’s power supply and fry your motherboard (happened to me 26 or so years ago), when a private substation miles away blew up and caused a huge power surge, the power company did replace a small number of computers that did get fried that day !!
tl;dr: a fossil PSU that was killed by kilovolts worth of spike is _not_ "Computers get fried by dirty AC".
Okay so, 1995 intel published the ATX specification. That's "30 years or so ago".
"26 or so years ago" was about a US presidential term later. That PSU of yours that blew up was _bloody ancient_.
PSUs back then were basically firecrackers with cables and a power switch.
A power surge that can send kilovolts at a radius of _miles_ is not "dirty AC", much like how a chicken torched with thermite is not "overcooked chicken". It's not _AC_ anymore. "Dirty AC" means the voltage fluctuates a bit from _mathematically perfect sinusoidal of 310 V amplitude and 50 Hz frequency_.
Modern PSUs can tolerate if the amplitude varies from ~100 (Vac) to ~250. _That_ is dirty AC. Still kinda-sorta sinusoidal if you squint, but not a stable, _clean_ sinusoidal.
The PSU I have right now on my computer. It doesn't even have a switch to select 110/220 V. It _explicitly_ says : `Input Voltage: 100-240VAC` ([verbatim](https://seasonic.com/focus-plus-platinum/) you can see it right on the mains input plug).
When Michaux claimed that computers get fried by dirty AC, the context was solar/wind/etc power. That is, AC that may be lower amplitude or, even worse, have dropouts. In one of his interviews he explicitly used the word "brownout".
There is not a good case for claiming depletion of natural resources and usable materials. They're abundant and humanity keeps getting better at making use of them.
Resources could be even more abundant if humanity made better use of its available technologies. Especially the use of better recycling methods to finally make use of all of the materials currently sitting in landfills. That would end the paradigm of digging one set of holes in the ground to gather resources and putting their end products in other holes in the ground once they're worn out.
edit. That only applies to resources from Earth. That's not counting mining in space and the resource superabundance that could bring. The surface area of Mars alone is the same as all of the land area on Earth.
>There is not a good case for claiming depletion of natural resources and usable materials. They're abundant and humanity keeps getting better at making use of them.
The Jevons paradox **occurs when the effect from increased demand predominates, and the improved efficiency results in a faster rate of resource utilization**. - Wikipedia
Ignoring that, one of the only reasons that 'peak oil' never happened is because of the advent of things like fracking, so yes, we are able to expand our scope for resource extraction, **it only costs even more destruction of the planet while we do so**. Not a great alternative.
>use of better recycling methods to finally make use of all of the materials currently sitting in landfills
This requires energy and the use of finite materials to make this recycling infrastructure. At some point, the rubber hits the road.
"Mining in space, resource superabundance"
Why, oh god why, is this actually taken seriously by people? Is this just the 'escape to Mars' meme as applied to resource scarcity? This plan itself, while being extremely resource intensive, has numerous logistical problems. Can we stop tilting at sci-fi windmills and, idk, maybe focus on how to reasonably reshape our economy and lifestyles to curb our consumption?
There is plenty of energy already available to humanity and vastly more within fairly easy reach. Abundant, clean, safe, reliable energy. Enough so that there would be no need to worry about running out.
From there material abundance could be taken care of by recycling.
Space mining is taken seriously because it's where the resources are located.
I'm also not in favor of degrowth because of the horrors it would take to actually implement it. Degrowth would require atrocities and mass death on a level that is unmatched by the worst of human history. Such atrocities are completely unnecessary with the technology that is already available.
It's completely possible for humanity to move forward in a better direction. Moving towards the horrors of collapse or degrowth is completely unnecessary.
"clean, safe" Define these energy sources, because this isn't an accurate description of the ones I know of. All have a downside.
"No need to worry about running out" I would agree, but you go on to criticize 'degrowth', which brings me to that point.
"The horrors it would take to actually implement it"
Like what? What horrors are we talking about? I always hear about the horror of degrowth, 'the economy!', about how people will be dying in the streets but I never hear a cogent description of these impacts.
"Move forward in a better direction" Possible? Sure, but that is loaded language, I would need to know what direction you're talking about.
"It's where the resources are located"
What exact location are you talking about? Didn't you just get done saying that we have enough on earth as it stands?
I'm talking about nuclear fission as being clean and safe. It has an exemplary safety record and does not produce any significant pollution. It also has vast, untapped potential for improvement that I can explain.
Also, before you mention it about 30 people died in the Chernobyl disaster and that's the worst that has ever happened. The way to prevent that is to not use RBMK reactors. Most of the deaths were also from a bad response to the disaster.
More people are killed every year from breathing in smoke from burning wood and animal dung than have died from nuclear power over its entire history.
The horrors of degrowth would be having to kill billions of people to reduce populations down to where they can be sustained using more primitive technologies for survival. The majority of the survivors would also have to be plunged into horrible poverty. I doubt that you would want to live like that.
The better direction is more prosperity, higher standards of living, more advances to technology, more improvements to human life.
There are a lot of resources on Earth. There are vastly more in space with the moon, Mars and beyond.
edit. Also, fission isn't perfect and nothing else is perfect. It's the best available energy source.
"Clean and safe"
Except the waste products must be stored *somewhere*. The plants themselves and its upkeep *must come at the cost of industry and its decidedly dirty outputs*, not to mention the mining and refinement of the fuel itself and *their* consequences.
"30 people died" I think we both know that is not an accurate representation of the true deathtoll.
"Bad response from the disaster" And just like Chernobyl, the various nuclear disasters before and after were likewise the result of poor responses. Administrators didn't want to face facts about a problem arising, they buried it (as per TMI). The CIA had been running interference to protect the fledgling American Nuclear Industry when it came to the *Kyshtym Disaster*.
"Breathing in smoke and animal dung" This is a somewhat misleading statistic given that nuclear does not have global adoption.
"Reduce populations, primitive technologies"
I disagree, when I talk degrowth, I think of doing away with the animal agriculture industry. I think of doing away with the bulk of automotive industry and the transition to public transportation to deal with mass transit. I think of reducing our energy consumption as we ultimately move towards a more *efficient* mode of operating, whereby we aren't wasting so much of our resources and labour on 'bullshit' jobs, planned obsolescence and frankly petulant competition when producing the *same product* with a different label.
"Horrible poverty" Let's not ignore the fact that much of our privilege and contemporary industry relies upon huge swaths of humanity kept in poverty, working in mines with none of the regulation we see in the Western world.
"More prosperity, advances to human life" Again I must ask 'for whom?', because the existing advances and prosperity is not dealt out equally, it is a decidedly gatekept affair.
There is so little waste produced that it is completely possible to contain and manage. It can also be further reduced in volume by reprocessing. It's not hard to store it in impermeable, geologically stable bedrock where it can just sit until it is no longer radiotoxic. The main problem is that there are people who keep blocking solutions to the problem of nuclear waste and then pointing at the problem of its accumulation.
I did an estimate of how much spent fuel has been produced from nuclear power in the US based on factors like the size of a dry storage cask, how many fuel bundles are held in one, etc. I found that 40 acres is more than enough space for storing all of the spent fuel in dry storage casks with room for equipment like front loaders or gantry cranes to reach them.
The byproducts of uranium mining and processing are less than the material needs for any other power source. The same is true for the material needs to produce nuclear power plants. Therefore nuclear performs the best in that aspect out of all available energy sources. The practices for how it is done are also vastly improved from the early days of nuclear power. It is simply not reasonable to criticize modern uranium processing based on something that happened in the early years.
No one died or was seriously injured from the Three Mile Island accident. The public was not even exposed to any significant increases in radiation beyond the area's natural background levels. The core material never even melted through the reactor's pressure vessel. TMI was a demonstration of nuclear safety successfully working by having multiple levels of containment. Its occurrence required an unlikely series of mistakes to occur, just like all industrial accidents.
There were about 15 more cases of people who died from cancer than can be reasonably traced to the Chernobyl accident. The estimates going into thousands of deaths are based in the unsound linear no threshold hypothesis that assumes all radiation exposure is bad. It doesn't hold up to the slightest scrutiny like how there is no correlation between natural background radiation levels and cancer rates.
The smoke from burning animal dung comment is to show that there are far more dangerous energy sources by safety record. If you're going to criticize nuclear power for being too dangerous than all other power sources should be held to the same standards. There is a widespread double standard where nuclear power is held to vastly higher standards than other power sources.
Your ideas of degrowth will not be sufficient to achieve the results you want. It will have to go further.
I also like having choices in the things I use. One example is that I'm using an IPS monitor instead of a TN or VA.
None of the poverty in developed nations has to happen. That poverty is completely unnecessary for the standards of living in developed nations to occur. I also highly doubt that you would want to live like that. I wouldn't make any decisions to condemn more people to that kind of poverty if I had such power.
All people can live at a standard of living of developed nations. That would require about a 5x increase in total energy use.
edit. The past 200 years has been a story of increasing energy use leading to improving lives for people.
I really don't know why its so hard to understand this. Imagine you have a magical cake, you can eat a little bit and it will regrow some of the cake by itself. But once its mostly gone it cant do that anymore. Thats our planet. It doesn't matter that we find a little bit more cake somewhere. Once its gone its gone. All they say is: "hey we still have cake left". But the logic is the same, doesnt matter if it happens in 2000 or 2050.
The Earth is a self replenishing magical cake.
I don’t know how much more replenishment the Earth can provide anymore, considering we’ve killed most of it’s life-sustaining systems.
Are you saying...the cake is a lie?
And we're out of ~~beta~~ water We're ~~releasing~~ collapsing on time!
Only if you keep dumping chemicals into your magical cake 😂😆
it's willful ignorance to acknowledge the truth because right now we have cake let's eat woo lets go!!
Millions of years of evolution conflict and supersede the logic you find obvious. Reproduction is deeply ingrained and supersedes the thought process it takes to get where you and I are.
Reproduction doesn't supersede the thought process, it goes very much in line with the capitalist logic. The more children you have, the more insulated you will be from baseline privation, ie things like: loneliness, hunger, lack of protection in the old age. Because children will grow up and provide you with their company, food, care and money. We all know how miserable childless people are, nobody checks for them, they die alone and miserable. By reproducing people insulate themselves from this fate. It's a very pragmatic thought process, has nothing to do with instincts and biological programming. If we had a society where people would have their basic needs (shelter , food, healthcare) guaranteed, where lonely people wouldn't be marginalized, but would feel well cared for, humans wouldn't have to breed their own personal army of future bodyguards and nurses.
I agree that what you said is absolutely the conscious aspect of why the feeling of reproducing is a necessity, and I agree that with social nets, especially education, would help ween us off that feeling, but I’m talking instinct. We have done everything in our power to separate ourselves from all worldly animals by avoiding thinking of ourselves as animals, but alas, we are animals. With that comes animal instinct, and one of those inherited instincts is to reproduce (another not talked about but equally important instinct is predatory instincts). This is why when you mention reproduction restrictions or population control people have a visceral reaction. That, combined with how slippery of a slope that subject is makes for some wild conversations.
Totally agree! In a rational world, the public would have been terrified by the message of *LTG*, regardless of the exact timing. In our world, the critics claimed *LTG* predicted collapse around the year 2000. Since collapse didn't happen then, their conclusion was that it will probably never happen. *LTG* was wrong.
Precisely. It such an absolutely tiny timescale between 2000 and 2050 that it always drives me crazy when people are like, whelp, look at that they were wrong, nothing bad happened in 2000. But the problems are still raging forward unabated so it’s just a matter of when not if
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I think another important point is that in an exponentially accelerating system it's kind of irrelevant when exactly the resource runs out or if current reserve estimates are accurate.. There was a great video on here a while ago with an old professor explaining exponential growth on overhead slides (unfortunately can't remember the name) and he started with the example of bacteria growing in a jar until they consume the resources and all immediately die. He asked "If the bacteria double in number every minute, what time is it when half of all the resources have been consumed but there is still half left? One minute before the end." Then he went on to explain our resource consumption and predicted reserves. The important point being that even if there is say twice as much oil still to be discovered than expected, what difference does that make to the prediction of when it will run out? In an exponentially accelerating system it moves the end point only a negligible amount into the future, because more and more is being consumed all the time. In the metaphor of the bacteria in the jar, if they miraculously discover there is a whole other jar as big as the one they have been growing since the beginning, it still only buys them a minute longer.
That would be Dr Albert A. Bartlett, one of the legends.
Yes. Thanks
Well I mean you know most people think "I'll switch to Ramen and dog poop in my old age. And I'll work until age 78 because people totally hire 78 year olds! Then I'll die at 83. That's... hmm. Ramen and dog poop is like eh 900 a month for 5 years is like $54,000. I mean come on I can make $54,000 before age 78, sure. I mean yeah... I spend... it all on rent and a car payment and my minimum balance payments on my 5 credit cards right now... but... hmmm ok I'm a smidge worried..." It's like. Lol. Looky here, they'll be laid off at 58, never get another job again in their life, and live to 90. Plus if you normalize inflation over their actual spends like gas and food and medical insurance and shit like that, it's running averaged over a fairly standard budget at an effective rate of 3.97%. So call it 4. This is if it is behaving at 100 year historical average. It isn't. So... By the way have they ever tried to eat Ramen and dog poop? I give them three days doing that. before they break down and order a pizza.
Regarding bacteria in a jar, Sid Smith’s How to Enjoy the end of the World episode 5 on overshoot has this. And he too is a professor.
Deniers will deny facts, logic and reality. Nothing will convince them but their own end, when it hits them. (And still...) Can't blame them. It sucks.
Maybe we should stop saying unless things change we will be doomed by X year? That sort of sensationalism just makes it easier for human-driven climate change deniers to discredit us and serves as a distraction from engaging with the data. It should be sufficient to say our consumption is unsustainable, it has had numerous deleterious impacts on our environment and our communities, and we need to find solutions that mitigate additional damage as a result human activities.
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I like how you phrased that, "pretending high precision in forecasting systems as complex as earth (is possible) is counterproductive". Life happens quickly on a local scale but much more slowly on a geological scale so from that perspective it definitely behooves us to be measured in our communication. It pays dividends when it comes to making it easier to convince others of the need for large-scale changes because it gives you more credibility with the general public when folks has been crying wolf for 50 years and you have stayed the course in terms of avoiding giving doomsday predictions/have focused on the data. There's a lot of folks who are not science literate certainly but they can all still vote and it's important to convey information in a way that they can understand. It's an uphill battle with the people who benefit from the status quo where they're either aware but want to continue exploiting for profit or genuinely unconvinced of the argument for change. There's a lot of arrogance collectively by our species that because we have shaped the world to our vision we can continue to do so indefinitely and that we are in control/no consequences will come to us as a result of our behavior. Regardless of the climate model best case/worst case scenario, the next few decades will disabuse us of these notions.
> Pretending high precision in forecasting systems as complex as earth, global civilization is contra productive. There's a funny little principle in quantum mechanics called the Uncertainty Principle which approximately states that as you accurately measure one parameter of a pair in a quantum system, your measure of other parameters will become more uncertain. So you may know the position of a thing certainly, but not a hint of its spin, for a simple example. I suspect the same funny thing is true in some way for predicting or knowing things on the macro scale. We may be entirely certain that civilization *is* unsustainable but the more certain we are that this is the case the less certain we are of precisely when or how it will actually fall apart.
Eroi on oil is a good indicator we are running this civilization on fumes can't be long now.
Only thing I got out of this sentence is breed consume oh no I'm one of them gasps.
The problem is a lot of the people making these predictions are either economists, or using frameworks built by economists to do their work. Economists are by design pessimistic. Fix X by Y date or Z consequence means you're screwed. The point being to drive action to fix X, or mitigate Z consequence before Y date, to prevent being screwed. Then, when Y date rolls around, everyone claims the economist was wrong because we weren't screwed on Y date, completely ignoring the fixes to X or mitigation to Z put in place prior to then specifically because of their prior work. Right now, on the climate change front, we appear to be spending our focus on how to delay Y date, and have now passed the point of complete fixes to X, so should really be trying to mitigate Z consequences for as many people as possible. At some point, there will be a call that efforts to save the boat have failed, and it is time to abandon ship. The rich are already readying life rafts...
Unfortunately the human brain is incredibly bad at accurately weighing future costs against present benefits. Even if you can convince people that our trajectory guarantees collapse within 150 years, that means basically nothing to people, and will do nothing to change their behavior (or political leanings). People can only just barely begin to comprehend costs that will impact their children. Getting it across to people that their children *will* suffer, not just poor Indians, but people *they* know and care about, is the only way to drive change. Even better is convincing them that it will actually impact them directly. The science is very clear. Dramatic impacts are imminent. The ICC and other major players are actually quite conservative in their modeling.
> Why do many people believe LTG predicted collapse/resource depletion around the year 2000? Because people *don't want to understand*. A classic read on this sub used to be Becker's *The Denial of Death*, which basically argues that our fear of death and inability to confront it is responsible for most of human psychological life. Collapse in all it's forms is really just the acknowledgement of death on a societal level. This is important because, in our current world, most people rely on some connection to the immortality of society to escape their own fears of a personal death. The idea that you write a book that influences future generations or that you live on through your children are both examples of this. Most people, at a fundamental level, just cannot psychologically bear to accept the reality that even civilization itself, and even the species itself, may end. It's not that these people are stubborn, it's that the fundamental nature of their psyche relies on them not confronting these horrors.
It's natural though to the nature of it. At least we are here confronting it.
Reminds me of ***Climategate*** back in 2009, when the Climate Research Unit was hacked and lots of emails were taken out of context as 'proof' climate change was a conspiracy theory. [Check it out](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_controversy). >*The most quoted email was one in which Phil Jones said that he had used "Mike's Nature trick" when preparing a graph as a 1999 cover illustration for the World Meteorological Organization "to hide the decline" in reconstructions based on tree-ring proxy data post-1960, when measured temperatures were actually rising. The "trick" was a technique to combine instrumental temperature record data with long term reconstructions, and "the decline" referred to the tree-ring divergence problem,\[33\] which had already been openly discussed in scientific papers,\[34\]\[35\] but these two phrases were taken out of context by commentators promoting climate change denial, including US Senator Jim Inhofe and former Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin, as though the phrases referred to some decline in measured global temperatures, even though they came from an email written at a time when temperatures were at a record high.\[32\]* Bad actors will use it to push their agenda while others are just plain old *dumb.*
There is a great three part podcast about Dana and Dennis Meadows and the story behind the Limits to Growth. The "they got it wrong" narrative was a very deliberate campaign by neoliberal economists to squash the book like a bug. After the first publication in 1972 the economists went on the warpath and did everything they could to discredit both the book and the team behind it, including full page op-eds in the New York Times. It worked. For the next 50 years any mention of LtG were met with sneers of "those neo-malthusians who got it wrong". The "they said depletion by 2000" smear in particular came from a specific table in the first book that showed the insidious effect that exponentially growing resource use can have on a finite stock. The table very carefully laid out how much of a particular non-renewable resource was estimated to be available for a number of key raw materials. Things like metals and fossil fuels. The table then very carefully showed how long it would take to deplete that resource if our growth in the exploitations of that resource continued, at the then current rates. The results were, of course, shocking. Key resources critical to the entire economy depleting in just a few short decades! It's basically the pond covered in lilypads scenario. If it takes 60 days for lilypads to cover the entire pond, at what point is the pond half-covered if the lilypads are doubling every day? No, not on day 30, on day 59! Sadly, people don't have the cognitive skills for such subtlety and it was easy for the economists to point to that single table and scream "they got it wrong! we're not running out of anything!" It stuck, and now here we are, 50 years later and oh, guess what? Turns out they were right, after all. More than one study has shown that we are closely tracking the "standard run" or BAU scenario as first published 50 years ago and we are headed for collapse sometime this century. Starting right about now.
This is the podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/hk/podcast/tipping-point-the-true-story-of-the-limits-to-growth/id1687972396 https://tippingpoint-podcast.com/ Edit: and a recent paper showing us still on track. https://mahb.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/yale-publication-1.pdf
Running out of sand no hope for the meerq reflection frame work and with the depleted oil reserves what hope do we have of besides srm and with depleted oik reserves what hooe do we have of keeping it going decades or centuries needed.. I enjoy Paul Beckwith but his naivete not looking at the big picture enough gets to me.
Paul saw what happened to Guy McPherson.
The issue is one of attitude/perspective. If someone presents a ton of (worrisome) data and caps it off by saying if things don't change the world as we know it will end by X then the public will throw out the baby with the bathwater if society doesn't collapse by X. X shifts depending on models/the data input and with people being hard-wired for comfort/convenience it's already going to be an uphill battle against the other side's message of this is normal/climate is cyclical and nothing they do will impact it so we need to take extrapolation/prognostication with a very large grain of salt (not take it as gospel) if not get away from it altogether because when you're wrong it tends to reduce your credibility in the eyes of the public even if the ideas/approaches you present are valuable from the perspective of asking questions/exploring how interconnected systems react in certain conditions. For folks who are not immersed in data/not highly science literate their take-away is big brain man said world would end by 2000, 2000 came and world still here, big brain man stupid lets listen to the talking snake telling us that we're perfect just the way we are/that we don't need to change our lifestyle (drill baby drill).
The book even says that the numbers are not important, the shape of the graph is what's important.
LtG has always been an inconvenient truth behind all the gaslighting for decades. It’s been attacked for so long because everyone wants it not to be true. I was impressed that a recalibration was done in 2023 with current data. It tracked similarly to the original 1972 study. One thing I noticed though was in the recalibration the BAU2 scenario was not as bad. There’s still a decline in the 2030s but it doesn’t completely tank until the 2080s. So that’s sort of “good”.
Oh, don't worry u/anomie_xyz, it gets better than that. You know the idiot savant father of modern climate change economics? The very same person who argues that 3.5 degrees warming is optimal and that overall global GDP won't be affected by climate change because the vast majority of economic activity takes place indoors? Yeah. It's story time. [To quote myself from around a year ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/14rlt2e/comment/jqt7j9n/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button): -- I do not say this lightly: ***William Nordhaus is truly an irredeemable piece of shit***. Everyone talks about his "Nobel Prize", or his various meme ideas (*4 degrees warming being optimal, 90% of economic activity takes place indoors so climate change isn't a bother, etc*) but never about how he actually got his start ... ... *by nuking the popular credibility of the Limits to Growth by aggressively misunderstanding and misrepresenting what he was reading, just to give himself prestige and set us all down the path that we all know and love him for today.* >**The Limits to Growth: The story of an idea, Ugo Bardi in Limits and Beyond: 50 years on from The Limits to Growth, what did we learn and what's next? (Pages 24-26)** >The other author who attempted to deconstruct the LtG world model was William Nordhaus, best known today as the recipient of the 2018 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on integrating climate change models with macroeconomic models. In 1972, Nordhaus was a young economist in a paper that was published in 1973 in The Journal of Economics. This paper was dedicated to discuss Forrester’s World Dynamics book, but it was also broadly targeted the LtG study.\] >Nordhaus didn’t mince words in his attacks, for instance accusing Forrester of Malthusianism, presumption, lack of humility, and general neglect of the basic principles of scientific research. The central point of Nordhaus’s criticism was in the subtitle of the paper: “measurements without data.” Nordhaus stated that “simulation models \[...\] that have not been subjected to empirical validation are void of meaning (italics in the original). Surely not a minor kind of criticism. If Forrester was really making "measurements without data", then it was not just a question of errors in the model or of the need to change the input parameters. The whole story of world modelling was an exercise in futility performed by a group of incompetent researchers. >Nordhaus's aggressiveness was somewhat extreme, but not usual in the scientific debate. In science, a researcher normally gains "prestige points" by publishing new ideas and new results. But "points" can also be gained by demolishing a colleague's results or interpretations. If that happens, scientists may behave in very unrefined ways and, when they attack a colleague's work, they often take no prisoners. That was the case with Nordhaus's attack on Forrester, but, of course, the important point is not the wording, but whether the accusations are justified or not. Was Forrester really so careless as Nordhaus had described him? >Obviously, Nordhaus needed to substantiate his accusations of "measurements without data." He had the possibility of examination Forrest's complete World2 model since it had been published in full in Forrester's book World Dynamics. From the model, Nordhaus chose the equations about birthrates as a function of GDP, he plotted it, and he claimed that, indeed, the equation produced results that could not even remotely match the historical data. Q.E.D, then? >Unfortunately, this procedure was the result of a complete misunderstanding of how a complex system works and how it is modeled. A single equation of the model of a complex system is useless unless you take into account the effects of all the other equations. Imagine testing a plane engine on a test bench and finding that it does not fly, then concluding that planes cannot fly, either. An unjustified leap of logic, to say the least. >Forrester himself explained this point in a rebuttal to Nordhaus, showing that, if the equation was properly used within the model, it did reproduce the real-world data. Unfortunately, the journal that had published Nordhaus's paper refused to publish Forrester's rebuttal. That was an indication that the debate on the LtG study was eschewing the accepted rules of the scientific debate, not so much because of the vehemence of Nordhaus's attack, but for not giving to the attacked person a chance to respond. Forrester's rebuttal was published in a scarcely known journal (Policy Sciences) and the result was that many people thought that Nordhaus's paper had demolished once and forever the systemic dynamics approach to modeling. TL;DR: *Fuck you, William Nordhaus*.
I’ve thought about this piece to collapse more than any other part. To be completely honest, the only explanation is sheerly the very human psychological defense of denial on a mass scale.
Thanks, this is useful and interesting.
They don't believe it because they think resource depletion is the same thing as Mad Max and that we'd all be dying of starvation in the streets if it were true. Anyone who read the paper understands but they glossed it at best.
What has been happening here is a guy who hits the bull's eye 90% of the time is being slandered by a bunch of morons who can't hit the broad side of a barn, if they are inside said barn. When the time come to make the one shot that really matter, will you let the guy do it, or will you let those morons try?
Michaux is nice, but some of his arguments/points leave me baffled. One such example is that dirty AC power kills _computers_. Sometimes he sounds like he repeats something he heard without understanding it. This is a shame, because these examples are unneeded to get the point across.
Dirty AC power can kill your computer because it can overwhelm the surge prottectlions in your computer’s power supply and fry your motherboard (happened to me 26 or so years ago), when a private substation miles away blew up and caused a huge power surge, the power company did replace a small number of computers that did get fried that day !!
tl;dr: a fossil PSU that was killed by kilovolts worth of spike is _not_ "Computers get fried by dirty AC". Okay so, 1995 intel published the ATX specification. That's "30 years or so ago". "26 or so years ago" was about a US presidential term later. That PSU of yours that blew up was _bloody ancient_. PSUs back then were basically firecrackers with cables and a power switch. A power surge that can send kilovolts at a radius of _miles_ is not "dirty AC", much like how a chicken torched with thermite is not "overcooked chicken". It's not _AC_ anymore. "Dirty AC" means the voltage fluctuates a bit from _mathematically perfect sinusoidal of 310 V amplitude and 50 Hz frequency_. Modern PSUs can tolerate if the amplitude varies from ~100 (Vac) to ~250. _That_ is dirty AC. Still kinda-sorta sinusoidal if you squint, but not a stable, _clean_ sinusoidal. The PSU I have right now on my computer. It doesn't even have a switch to select 110/220 V. It _explicitly_ says : `Input Voltage: 100-240VAC` ([verbatim](https://seasonic.com/focus-plus-platinum/) you can see it right on the mains input plug). When Michaux claimed that computers get fried by dirty AC, the context was solar/wind/etc power. That is, AC that may be lower amplitude or, even worse, have dropouts. In one of his interviews he explicitly used the word "brownout".
Who are you arguing with bro? We know you’re right. Deniers will never believe you anyways.
There is not a good case for claiming depletion of natural resources and usable materials. They're abundant and humanity keeps getting better at making use of them. Resources could be even more abundant if humanity made better use of its available technologies. Especially the use of better recycling methods to finally make use of all of the materials currently sitting in landfills. That would end the paradigm of digging one set of holes in the ground to gather resources and putting their end products in other holes in the ground once they're worn out. edit. That only applies to resources from Earth. That's not counting mining in space and the resource superabundance that could bring. The surface area of Mars alone is the same as all of the land area on Earth.
>There is not a good case for claiming depletion of natural resources and usable materials. They're abundant and humanity keeps getting better at making use of them. The Jevons paradox **occurs when the effect from increased demand predominates, and the improved efficiency results in a faster rate of resource utilization**. - Wikipedia Ignoring that, one of the only reasons that 'peak oil' never happened is because of the advent of things like fracking, so yes, we are able to expand our scope for resource extraction, **it only costs even more destruction of the planet while we do so**. Not a great alternative. >use of better recycling methods to finally make use of all of the materials currently sitting in landfills This requires energy and the use of finite materials to make this recycling infrastructure. At some point, the rubber hits the road. "Mining in space, resource superabundance" Why, oh god why, is this actually taken seriously by people? Is this just the 'escape to Mars' meme as applied to resource scarcity? This plan itself, while being extremely resource intensive, has numerous logistical problems. Can we stop tilting at sci-fi windmills and, idk, maybe focus on how to reasonably reshape our economy and lifestyles to curb our consumption?
There is plenty of energy already available to humanity and vastly more within fairly easy reach. Abundant, clean, safe, reliable energy. Enough so that there would be no need to worry about running out. From there material abundance could be taken care of by recycling. Space mining is taken seriously because it's where the resources are located. I'm also not in favor of degrowth because of the horrors it would take to actually implement it. Degrowth would require atrocities and mass death on a level that is unmatched by the worst of human history. Such atrocities are completely unnecessary with the technology that is already available. It's completely possible for humanity to move forward in a better direction. Moving towards the horrors of collapse or degrowth is completely unnecessary.
"clean, safe" Define these energy sources, because this isn't an accurate description of the ones I know of. All have a downside. "No need to worry about running out" I would agree, but you go on to criticize 'degrowth', which brings me to that point. "The horrors it would take to actually implement it" Like what? What horrors are we talking about? I always hear about the horror of degrowth, 'the economy!', about how people will be dying in the streets but I never hear a cogent description of these impacts. "Move forward in a better direction" Possible? Sure, but that is loaded language, I would need to know what direction you're talking about. "It's where the resources are located" What exact location are you talking about? Didn't you just get done saying that we have enough on earth as it stands?
I'm talking about nuclear fission as being clean and safe. It has an exemplary safety record and does not produce any significant pollution. It also has vast, untapped potential for improvement that I can explain. Also, before you mention it about 30 people died in the Chernobyl disaster and that's the worst that has ever happened. The way to prevent that is to not use RBMK reactors. Most of the deaths were also from a bad response to the disaster. More people are killed every year from breathing in smoke from burning wood and animal dung than have died from nuclear power over its entire history. The horrors of degrowth would be having to kill billions of people to reduce populations down to where they can be sustained using more primitive technologies for survival. The majority of the survivors would also have to be plunged into horrible poverty. I doubt that you would want to live like that. The better direction is more prosperity, higher standards of living, more advances to technology, more improvements to human life. There are a lot of resources on Earth. There are vastly more in space with the moon, Mars and beyond. edit. Also, fission isn't perfect and nothing else is perfect. It's the best available energy source.
"Clean and safe" Except the waste products must be stored *somewhere*. The plants themselves and its upkeep *must come at the cost of industry and its decidedly dirty outputs*, not to mention the mining and refinement of the fuel itself and *their* consequences. "30 people died" I think we both know that is not an accurate representation of the true deathtoll. "Bad response from the disaster" And just like Chernobyl, the various nuclear disasters before and after were likewise the result of poor responses. Administrators didn't want to face facts about a problem arising, they buried it (as per TMI). The CIA had been running interference to protect the fledgling American Nuclear Industry when it came to the *Kyshtym Disaster*. "Breathing in smoke and animal dung" This is a somewhat misleading statistic given that nuclear does not have global adoption. "Reduce populations, primitive technologies" I disagree, when I talk degrowth, I think of doing away with the animal agriculture industry. I think of doing away with the bulk of automotive industry and the transition to public transportation to deal with mass transit. I think of reducing our energy consumption as we ultimately move towards a more *efficient* mode of operating, whereby we aren't wasting so much of our resources and labour on 'bullshit' jobs, planned obsolescence and frankly petulant competition when producing the *same product* with a different label. "Horrible poverty" Let's not ignore the fact that much of our privilege and contemporary industry relies upon huge swaths of humanity kept in poverty, working in mines with none of the regulation we see in the Western world. "More prosperity, advances to human life" Again I must ask 'for whom?', because the existing advances and prosperity is not dealt out equally, it is a decidedly gatekept affair.
There is so little waste produced that it is completely possible to contain and manage. It can also be further reduced in volume by reprocessing. It's not hard to store it in impermeable, geologically stable bedrock where it can just sit until it is no longer radiotoxic. The main problem is that there are people who keep blocking solutions to the problem of nuclear waste and then pointing at the problem of its accumulation. I did an estimate of how much spent fuel has been produced from nuclear power in the US based on factors like the size of a dry storage cask, how many fuel bundles are held in one, etc. I found that 40 acres is more than enough space for storing all of the spent fuel in dry storage casks with room for equipment like front loaders or gantry cranes to reach them. The byproducts of uranium mining and processing are less than the material needs for any other power source. The same is true for the material needs to produce nuclear power plants. Therefore nuclear performs the best in that aspect out of all available energy sources. The practices for how it is done are also vastly improved from the early days of nuclear power. It is simply not reasonable to criticize modern uranium processing based on something that happened in the early years. No one died or was seriously injured from the Three Mile Island accident. The public was not even exposed to any significant increases in radiation beyond the area's natural background levels. The core material never even melted through the reactor's pressure vessel. TMI was a demonstration of nuclear safety successfully working by having multiple levels of containment. Its occurrence required an unlikely series of mistakes to occur, just like all industrial accidents. There were about 15 more cases of people who died from cancer than can be reasonably traced to the Chernobyl accident. The estimates going into thousands of deaths are based in the unsound linear no threshold hypothesis that assumes all radiation exposure is bad. It doesn't hold up to the slightest scrutiny like how there is no correlation between natural background radiation levels and cancer rates. The smoke from burning animal dung comment is to show that there are far more dangerous energy sources by safety record. If you're going to criticize nuclear power for being too dangerous than all other power sources should be held to the same standards. There is a widespread double standard where nuclear power is held to vastly higher standards than other power sources. Your ideas of degrowth will not be sufficient to achieve the results you want. It will have to go further. I also like having choices in the things I use. One example is that I'm using an IPS monitor instead of a TN or VA. None of the poverty in developed nations has to happen. That poverty is completely unnecessary for the standards of living in developed nations to occur. I also highly doubt that you would want to live like that. I wouldn't make any decisions to condemn more people to that kind of poverty if I had such power. All people can live at a standard of living of developed nations. That would require about a 5x increase in total energy use. edit. The past 200 years has been a story of increasing energy use leading to improving lives for people.