I can only assume you are living in a mud hut, with no personal transportation, and you walked to a public library to use their computer so you could make this comment.
Everyone wants to talk about reducing other people’s consumption.
Out of all the countless times you've surely seen this particular argument play out on the internet, have you ever seen it go somewhere productive?
"Yet you participate in society, curious!" is not a productive response to the suggestion "We should improve society somewhat"
Either we do this voluntarily and as orderly as possible, or it just happens for us. Your response seems to indicate a complete unawareness of the impending situation our species is going to be facing.
> Either we do this voluntarily and as orderly as possible, or it just happens for us. Your response seems to indicate a complete unawareness of the impending situation our species is going to be facing.
I think it's a pretty natural reaction against the relentless push of this false choice by people who cannot imagine a third way that actually makes life better.
Your response seems to indicate a complete unawareness that there are other options besides enforced poverty.
>Either we do this voluntarily and as orderly as possible, or it just happens for us. Your response seems to indicate a complete unawareness of the impending situation our species is going to be facing.
Or we use the fact we can still run an industrial society to build CO2 scrubbers using nuclear energy to power them, keeping our improving our living standards while fixing our mistakes.
It's quite likely to be a far better use of those resources to invest them in tree planting initiatives if your goal is to sequester carbon.
But if you want to satiate your techno-lust a technological solution to some of our climate problems may lie in the form of space based optical systems that reduce the amount of sunlight from falling on glaciers and the poles.
This simply opens a "hole" for new trees to grow up around them. It's not that any one tree holds carbon forever, it's that an acre of forest in dynamic equilibrium holds a lot more stored carbon.
When people suggest planting trees, the process isn't one-and-done. It's actually re-afforestation, where the land is permanently forested. Otherwise yes, if you cut down all the trees and then also prevent anything from growing back in its place, then of course you're undoing future benefits.
There is also 'mild' re-afforestation, where you simply increase the equilibrium amount of stored biomass in a landscape. You can plant 20-40 trees per acre in agricultural landscapes (this actually improves crop yield if you choose the right species, search for "farmer's trees"), or re-green suburbs that have lost their vegetation cover over time.
These projects are less stark than Atacama-desert-to-Amazon-rainforest, so many folks will neglect the possibility entirely and therefore conclude that "the only solution is to green deserts." :-\
--
It's also probably related to cultural biases that view deserts as useless, worthless, and most important uninhabitable spaces. However if you actually try to green a desert, you'll suddenly find lots of terribly inconvenient "desert people" actually do live there, and oppose you destroying their home and displacing them. See the real reason behind building "The Line" in Saudi Arabia.
It is fair to point out that people in the third world that already live on "less cars, smaller homes, less concrete, less meat, less gadgets and more trees" choose to ramp up their consumption of those things as soon as they can afford to. The Chinese for example probably have more cars per capita than the US did when its GDP per capita was what China's is now -- and mopeds and motorcycles (and bicycles if my hours spent watching Youtube videos of urban outdoor environments in China are any indication) are banned in the Tier 1 cities: to travel on the roads, you have to have a car or ride a bus -- and the privately-owned cars vastly outnumber the buses just like in any US city.
And the Chinese eat many times more meat than they used to.
It is fair to point those things out because it is evidence that living on "less cars, smaller homes, less concrete, less meat, less gadgets and more trees" really sucks and that it is possible for us to overdo our response to climate change and ocean acidification.
"less" doesn't mean "none", it's not hard to find plenty of evidence of better living standards without car dependency or smaller average houses compared to the US for instance. Active mobility is good for your health, so is a moderated consumption of meat. Lots of benefits to organizing society better while respecting the finiteness of all our resources.
It's always the same rhetoric with your kind, you pretend to fight for the poor, when all you really want is freedom to keep on grabbing as much as possible for yourselves.
You'd be better off nuking the rich, they are the ones who are actually producing the bulk of the CO2.
The debate on degrowth isn't whether a Somalian family should have access to a decent home, healthcare, clothing, enough food etc. The answer is a very obvious yes.
The debate is whether a middle class American family really should own 2 trucks, live in a 200sqm house and eat that much meat. But you always make it about the poor.
Everyone wants to talk about reducing other people’s consumption.