You can live in a well-insulated fully electric home powered by renewable energy and have most things you need within a walk, bike, or public transport ride away, _OR_ use an electric car for the things that aren't. If you combine that with a mostly-plant based diet (or at _least_ swapping chicken for most of your beef and lamb) and have 2 kids or fewer you're... basically there.
The main reason most people can't do this is because of political choices, not technological limitations.
Granted this doesn't include luxuries like jetting halfway around the world for a 1 week holiday or living in a 4000 square foot house in the desert and driving a studio apartment an hour to work every day, but really, is that a better life?
This is at odds with lots of other relevant topics that go beyond just "consumption".
2 or fewer is below the replacement rate of 2.1 This _has_ already happened, but there are a lot of voices voicing a lot of reasons why they believe that that might actually be not the best situation.
If we need unbounded growth to jeep our economic system to function, its the economic system that is wrong, not nature.
The funny part is that it should terrify you whether there are 10 humans or 10 billion. At the current rates, it's over in about 12-13 generations regardless of the number you start with. That's how it works... no matter how big the starting number, it's how many generations you have left.
Think of it this way? You know the dumb story they taught us in school, about the guy whose payment from the king for doing something clever was to have one grain of rice on the first chess square, and 2 on the second, 4 on the third, and so on... and how it bankrupted the king long before the 64th square? That's the same math with fertility rate of 1.0! (The Chinese have a fertility rate of 1.0, famously.) Each generation will be half the size of the previous. But how long before that is effectively zero? Will it be 1 million years, 250,000 years? No, about 300ish. 300 years. But long before you reach that point, your civilization has fallen apart. Those last 4 or 5 generations live life without electricity, anything but muscle power, or metallurgy.
And China's fertility rate isn't even the lowest! South Korea's rate just dropped to around 0.5! That's where each generation is one quarter the size of the previous.
The best part of all is that these rates haven't even bottomed out. We will almost certainly see rates right around 0 long before the century ends.
>but there are almost ten billion simultaneous humans, we're fine.
At least math illiteracy ought to console you guys towards the end.
India still has a long way to go, but China is doing the right things. Same can't be said about USA under current administration.
Most individual and collective consumption driving polluting production is overwhelmingly traditional western/first-world economies, though China is catching up.
The reason half the population won't take climate alarmists seriously are statements like this.
Saying the West, generally, or the US, specifically "aren't doing anything" is ridiculous.
That doesn’t fit my understanding at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_greenhous...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_greenhous...
India and China today emit more than Europe and North America combined. https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
China's solar panel and battery manufacturing industries are humanity's best chance of "electric everything". Without them we're all cooked.
Have you travelled? This doesn't describe most of the world. Most of the world would need to increase carbon emissions to live the way you're describing.
You aren't describing a zero carbon lifestyle, you're describing a lower carbon lifestyle. And we still use carbon in building the things in your scenario: the building, the car, etc.
Lower carbon lifestyles can slow the speed of the increase in global warming, but as long as we're emitting any carbon we're increasing global energy forcing.
By all means choose lower carbon lifestyles, but fundamentally we need nuclear or renewables + battery or all of the above such that we don't face a tradeoff between energy use and getting stuff people want.
Energy is extremely useful.
The AMOC shutdown isn't merely "possible" and due "this century" either. The math of the dynamics of complex systems shows the current behavior to be signs of a phase transition in the process of happening. The speed of that shutdown isn't "decades" either, it's more likely just years.
The voices of "experts" telling you it was all some incomprehensible conundrum should deeply worry you. They're either not being honest or they're no experts.
You two might agree if we consider that when you say "rich" you might describe the average individual on this website (if we consider all people alive).
I do believe that 90% of the people would not want to actually destroy the planet the way it seems to be happening, but I also believe that 90% of the people can't refrain themselves from bad health habits either. So, to fix the root cause I would discuss more about people's bad emotional/impulse control, otherwise we will just change one issue (climate) to any of the others (violence, unhappiness, etc.)
And if industry stopped producing with carbon billions would starve. Industry makes stuff for people. Energy is useful, we aren't just taking oil, coal and gas and burning it in factories for fun.
For this to be the most effective it really needs to be deployed somewhere like India. How are they coming along with that?
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/india
USA is at 80%, which isn't much better, but at least trending down:
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/united-states
China is also at 80%, but trending down far steeper:
Why? Most people there already live like that, minus insulation and reliable electricity.
Household electricity self-sufficiency obscures the vast requirements to support it and extend this self-sufficiency to billions of other people.
'political' is true but it covers so many different problems.
For example, while there is a grocery store very accessible to me, you have to plot the route carefully due to the road design.
Then there's the problem of the condo I currently live in not having the infrastructure for charging. (My compromise in that case is a hybrid. Kinda want a plug-in hybrid for my next car, they've gotten to where it very well could handle 80% of my driving.)
> Granted this doesn't include luxuries like jetting halfway around the world for a 1 week holiday or living in a 4000 square foot house in the desert and driving a studio apartment an hour to work every day, but really, is that a better life?
I've never gotten this lifestyle either... I'm not afraid to do a long road trip once a year or so, but yes in most cases too many costs have been externalized for too long.
As far as charging - I favour car-share, personally (I use mywheels.nl). Usually if you don't need a car every day (so you don't commute somewhere inaccessible via transit or bike) it makes more sense economically.
Even where I live, in a place some people describe as a bicycle Eden, there's plenty of complaining about not having "enough" car parking.
