Always wanting to run... away somewhere

[auroraglacialis]

Originally Posted by Human No More

For the most part, yes, for the vast majority of people. There will always be exceptions, but most people have nice things becasue they like them.

And this is why gains in efficiency sadly rarely create a real reduction in total consumption. That way even a stable population of people usually does not decrease its resource consumption by increasing efficiency, but rather are increasing the number of "nice and shiny things" that they describe as standard of living. And the current mythology is that this has to improve and increase all the time. Thats the trap, I think that has to be broken. People see zero-growth as stagnant and bad. But really lets say people would have stuck to the standards of living of the 1960ies, a time that certainly had its luxuries and people probably liked it a lot in respect of comforts. And now lets say people nowadays would have the same standards of living but with efficiency of technology applied to all aspects. So people would for example still rarely fly airplanes, have one TV per household and so on. In that case, efficiency would have had the effect of really reducing total consumption, especially if population growth also would have stopped. But that is not what happened. People instead used these gains in efficiency to fly airplanes for a weekend trip acroiss the country, have two cars and three TVs and computers ,... etc.
Only if we accept that the way we live at the moment is fine and we aim to stay at that level but use the improvements in technology to actually decrease our impact on the planet - only then can improvements in the efficiency of technology actually solve something. That is not to say what standard of living (1960ies? 1980ies? 2012? 1900? 1200? iron age? stone age?) is actually sustainable overall, but thats another topic.

If you only have a week's holiday, your employer is breaking the law.[...]Humanity is not at a stage of development where it can be allowed to reproduce without external checks on the rate because too many people want to do so at a rate above replacement.

Its kind of interesting that you are in some way calling for state regulation and control here. Many of your posts are sounding a lot like free-market liberal advocacy.

As for efficiency, if you're talking about flying, then it's actually less of an impact that driving all the way. [...] - yes, it can enable growth past capacity, but that's another case for a hard population cap.

The part on flying is certainly true. I do not argue so much that there have not been increases in efficiency compared to other ways of doing so. Though certainly taking a bike from Munich to Berlin is more efficient in terms of energy than any fossil fuel driven mode of travel - but of course it is less efficient in terms of time. Efficiency always has to have a parameter to which it is applied. And presently certainly time is one of the parameters that is most important - this society takes care to improve time-efficiency of any act at the expense of energy in order to increase productivity overall. But maybe thats another point. What I wanted to reply to this is that even though a dingle flight of a single person is more efficient than that person driving a car for the same distance, the overall effect of that increase in efficiency is, by this society, used to increase the numbers of miles travelled per person overall. So lets say as an example if flying takes 50% of the fuel compared to driving a big car as a single person, that translates to a person being able to fly twice as much for the same cost as when that person drives a car - and that is generally what is going to happen. That person will actually fly twice as much and thus not reduce the cost. I don't see how a cap on population would solve that issue at all. An end to population growth certainly is a necessary requirement for sustainability but it is not a sufficient condition for it. There is more to it, namely that consumption has to decrease and this is only possible by a cultural change that destroys the mythology of growth and progress in the sense that people in this culture expect to have permanently increasing standards of living. If that reduction in consumption of resources then comes from effectively used gains in efficiency in production or from decreasing consumer-side consumption is the same then. What will not work is a cap on population coupled with a continued increase of consumption by those people.

Greetings

[Moco Loco]

Originally Posted by auroraglacialis

Its kind of interesting that you are in some way calling for state regulation and control here. Many of your posts are sounding a lot like free-market liberal advocacy.

I think you deserve the non sequitur award for that one.

Originally Posted by auroraglacialis

That person will actually fly twice as much and thus not reduce the cost. I don't see how a cap on population would solve that issue at all. An end to population growth certainly is a necessary requirement for sustainability but it is not a sufficient condition for it. There is more to it, namely that consumption has to decrease and this is only possible by a cultural change that destroys the mythology of growth and progress in the sense that people in this culture expect to have permanently increasing standards of living. If that reduction in consumption of resources then comes from effectively used gains in efficiency in production or from decreasing consumer-side consumption is the same then. What will not work is a cap on population coupled with a continued increase of consumption by those people.

This definitely depends on how much the population is reduced and the way in which standards of living increase. If consumption per person doesn't increase (or doesn't increase enough to result in the same amount of consumption as there was before population reduction), we're no more worse off than we are now and have better standards of living. It's not a solution as far as sustainability, but it would make finding a solution far easier.

[Crickett]

Originally Posted by Theorist

I do try to go on runs everyday, and it is on a nice back path, only problem is it is always the same back. (I do run because I enjoy, but I also do try to run competitively).

We all have our ups and down I suppose. I live in a city, but still know the locations of a decent number of nature walks/preserves/parks within walking/driving/longer driving distance.

But I can't run. I can walk for miles, and I can do the sort of half walk/half run that people do when they're in a hurry, but a full out sprint? Can't do it.

Originally Posted by Moco Loco

I think you deserve the non sequitur award for that one.

And that's why honey nut cheerios is the best cereal ever.

[auroraglacialis]

Well I am not sure if reducing population as a means to increase standards of living is going to be all that popular. Hehe - thats another things by the way for HNM: In many discussions, you kept saying that reducing energy consumption or therelike is not going to be popular, so people will not want to do it, so it cannot be done, so we need more clean energy - preferrably nuclear. I would say it is as hard or harder to tell people that they can only have increases in standard of living if population decreases, so basically it translates to having only one or no kids as the cost of having new iphonies and flatscreen TVs and moon colonies.

Anyways in a simplified equation,
total Consumption = number of people * average consumption per capita
and that translates into
total Consumption = number of people * (average standard of living / Resource Efficiency)
Thats a very simplified model, I know, but its an approximation.
Now you can think of what to do - the constraints are, that total Consumption may not rise if we want to stop degrading the planet and actually has to decrease if we want to revert some of the changes and slow down degrading processes that already have some inertia. It boils down to reducing population and/or decreasing standard of living and/or increasing the efficiency of the processes that fuel that standard of living. If one of the factors goes in the opposite way, the others have to compensate. The question is what is sustainable on the left side of the equation, theories say that we are in overshoot by a factor of 3-10. Interesting is also that the global average of per capita consumption and standard of living is much less than what we have here in Europe or the US. That means of course that if the millions of people that are below the average want to reach that average at least (not to mention the consumption of Western Countries), either the consumption of the richer countries has to drop drastically or one of the other factors in the equation has to change. In addition to that, I would say that a certain standard of living is only possible if there are enough people to support it, in case of our western culture this is even imperialistic in that our standard of living is maintained to a large degree by the very fact that there are other people that have much less. An iPhone would by far not be as cheap as it is if the people producing it would demand the same kind of payment, health care, vacation, work hours etc as we do in the West - and a price increase in these appliances (e.g. Smartphones, Computers, Laptops, Flatscreen TVs, cars,... etc would all double or triple in price) would in turn equate to a decrease in average standard of living as people would not be able to afford these things as easily as they do now.

So to just say we need less people and then all will be fine is ignoring the complexity of the problem by far.

P.S.: Interestingly just after I wrote this, I listened to a related interview with Paul Ehrlich, the author of the "population bomb" book from some decades ago. It is only 18 minutes, so maybe this may be an interesting piece related to the topic of population.
http://www.ecoshock.org/downloads/ec...lapse_LoFi.mp3
The scientific paper he mentions is to be found here:
Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided?
at the Royal Society, it is a peer reviewed article without experimental data or therelike, so it is rather a Review paper, in this case it is filed under "Perspective", meaning that the author is presenting information from a vast number of scientific articles and draws conclusions from their totality.

P.P.S: BACK ON TOPIC - I am just reading a good book. It is called "The long Earth" by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter. In it, a simple device is invented that allows people to "step sideways" in the quantum universe and go sequentiall to one of millions of Earths that are without humans. It explores in the form of a novel the desire of many people to get away from this, to run away somewhere. Some people take only one or 5 steps and remain in contact with Datum Earth, others - like the main characters - are going far far away in search of "the silence" that can only be heard or felt when they are far from all these people. I am just beginning to read this but it promises to be really good and I feel it relates to the original topic of this thread...

[Niri Te]

Now that we have returned to what I think the original post brought up, I will say this. You can change your location, (run away), to change the weather, the language spoken, the government. But you CANNOT run away from YOU. If your problem is generated by you, no matter how far, or how fast you run, you are still stuck with you. In that case, you need to change you, not your location.

[Moco Loco]

Originally Posted by Niri Te

Now that we have returned to what I think the original post brought up, I will say this. You can change your location, (run away), to change the weather, the language spoken, the government. But you CANNOT run away from YOU. If your problem is generated by you, no matter how far, or how fast you run, you are still stuck with you. In that case, you need to change you, not your location.

That is a nice way of saying it, and something I often think of when people go on about wanting to be on Pandora (though I know I missed the real thick of it by not being here until a year and a half after Avatar released).