I’m not emotional. You’re puzzled by how I brought this back to DoorDash because you didn’t read my whole original post in this subthread and see what I was responding to. You saw something about how resources on Earth are being used up and you’ve been taught that that’s impossible, so you went nuts and started talking about Malthus.
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i’m old enough to remember when mb would lol at you for appealing to authority. ie the good old days
Uh, you were talking about vacuous fuzzy math and I was pointing out that it was something published in a respected journal. You think old mb didn’t believe in science or something? I expect that is what you think because everyone thinks that anyone they perceive to the left of themselves is a uninformed rainbow chasing flower child or something.
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Thomas Malthus did not really write about what most people think he did, and he wasn’t exactly worried about food running out, or anything else. He stated - correctly - that increased food production from technological innovation resulted in larger populations living effectively the same low quality of life as previous generations. The abundance wasn’t used to give people better lives, it was used to breed more people who still lived in poverty. This was roughly true for all known history up to Malthus’ time, and remained true until well after his death in 1834. It was only after the industrial revolution in the late 19th century that this stopped being true.
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And people found that they could dig up coal and oil and water and boost production dramatically and change the math for a while. And now, looking at the limits of that (whether from supply or environmental impacts), people either have blind faith in technology without any specific answer or talk about Mars or asteroids because “degrowth” or “steady-state economy” (something morons like Smith, Ricardo, Mills, and Keynes were talking about) means bad things for stonks.
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And yeah, rich people having fewer babies is good and understandable, but that’s not going to help that much if they are all ordering DoorDash all the time.
Diamond made the same point about food production in Guns, Germs and Steel. Essentially, agriculture led to population explosions and people becoming more sedentary.
It’s debatable whether either of these changes led to an improvement in the average person’s quality of life.
i didn’t say you don’t believe in science. i am saying projections for peak oil production in the next decade are fuzzy, while still remaining science. and warnings like whay you cited are still useful, as long as they change our behavior on using harmful technologies and mitigation of effects.
left of me is rainbow flower children? i don’t know about that. there are plenty of rainbow colored viewpoints to the right of me too. lol.
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I think that reaction is just people justifying doing something unsustainable just because everyone else is. Even from a political macro point of view, DoorDash will never be banned if most people are happily using it. Boycotting it and not eating meat are necessary precursors to those bans.
And lots of behaviors among the population have changed because of social pressure and not because of laws.
There are a thousand other problems besides PEAK OIL. Why are you and CN focusing on that? JiggsCasey is not in the room. This is what I meant by what I said about forest and trees.
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peak industrial production projections are very much LIKE peak oil projections. except with compounded error bars.
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As the atmosphere warms, water tables and topsoil deplete, oxygen depleted zones in the ocean grow, maybe rare Earth or some other resources are used, etc etc etc, there’s nothing more religious than the faith that it will all just work out and people can keep consuming at present rate.
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i don’t know why you keep focusing on doordash, perhpas you are missing the forest? people thought that amazon delivery was going to bankrupt our sustainability budget, until amazon counted up the costs of everyone driving to the mall, and the waste of retail. and it wasn’t close. logistics at scale are more sustainable than leaving the last mile to be upto everyone individually. but it’s fashionable to hate on amazon (deservingly), so they make the error of also hating delivery trucks. 🤷
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+1
Useful. And they don’t have to be perfect to be useful. A lot of people use an imperfection to dismiss everything and…go back to the stock prices.
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a majority of people are simply consumers, not industrial ecologists. it’s not their job to care or freak out about the doomsday in 2009 or 2040.
I’m talking about DoorDash because that’s what brought this all up and the point was about packaging.
The big problem with Amazon that you’re not accounting for there, is that it’s leading to people consuming more, not that it increases average energy inputs per unit consumed.
Which is why fucking up the Earth is already out of control, will likely continue and there’s nothing you or I or Joe Biden or anyone can do about it. I’d rather vainly try than not though.
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ok i’ll play this game. what category of product does amazon increase the consumerism the most? you can be very broad. go ahead. how much more is it? like how kuch worse is it than the next worst category?
i’ll post my answer in 5 minutes.
I don’t know what category. It’s just more of whatever category. Here’s the US apparel market:
People buy more because it’s easy for them and they can easily return something and it gets thrown away. I’m not going to do this for every market though. And I’m not even going to look for another chart for this market that’s historical rather than a projection.
counterpoint, “fucking up the earth” will become better. i doubt it will reverse any climate dangers completely, but it was worse for many decades before 21st century, and industrial ecology is the only reason the great lakes are no longer routinely on fire.