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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Do we have enough resources?
 
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Dead Reckoning
Sep 13, 2011

Helsing posted:

I guess I'm confused by how you're saying that "the whole moralizing about Western lifestyles isn't true anymore" yet you agree that "It's definitely true that the West emits more than it's fair share, and has historically been responsible for the bulk of emissions". You're absolutely right that we can't reduce a complicated like global warming issue to a single cause but that hardly exculpates the west from some very legitimate criticisms about how westerners and especially North Americans are consuming an extremely disproportionate share of the planet's resources.

While we do need a global response to resource depletion and greenhouse gas emissions it hardly seems unreasonable to say that the west has an additional responsibility to use resources efficiently and responsibly, given the disproportionate share of resources it consumes.
But everyone in the world wants to live like people in the first world, now that such a lifestyle is possible. A billion Chinese bootstrapping themselves from an agrarian economy to an early 21st century consumer one was one of the greatest ecological disasters of the last century, and we're due to see it repeated several times in this one. Our options are either to convince the wealthiest nations in the world to deliberately reduce themselves to a 3rd world standard of living, to forcibly keep the 3rd world from developing (because they aren't going to do it voluntarily) while improving efficiency in the first world, hope like hell that massive, unheard of improvements in efficiency & energy tech bail us out, or other, more odious options.

Thug Lessons posted:

"Technical solutions to environmental and resource challenges are impossible" is as much an article of faith as assuming technology will solve anything. There's a fairly clear path to keeping the Earth below 2 degrees of warming. It may be possible within the existing mitigation framework adopted in Paris or that agreement may have to be expanded, but it's hardly some fantasy. Resource depletion is more complicated and there's no true answer to the OP's question because we simply can't answer it scientifically yet.
If you assume that growing populations & resource demands are unsustainable, technology won't bail us out, and we're heading towards the edge of a cliff, and we act on that, it means that we have to make some really awful choices that we might not have to have made otherwise.

If you assume that technology will bail us out, and that isn't correct, billions of people die and society as we know it collapses in an unguided fall.

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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Do we have enough resources?