this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2024
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Mankind has been cheating for decades now, building a super consuming inefficient society without the means to actually do so sustainably.
We failed the Candy challenge, we chose to eat our candy now instead of receiving more candy in the future. We wanted to have new toys constantly, make stuff cheap and throw-away, because we want new stuff anyways. We wanted to eat large amounts of meat every day. We wanted to travel across the world. We wanted to have our own large homes with large gardens and heat/cool them to be perfect for living in all the time. We wanted to have our own personal tanks to drive around in perfect comfort, to use as we wish, to go as we wish. But we wanted it, so we made it so. We used the ultimate cheat code called fossil fuels.
Using fossil fuel is like going to a bar and putting everything on the tab. You can drink and eat all you want, but at one point in the future you are going to have to pay up. Previous generations didn't really care, they would just pass along the tab to the next generation, they will figure it out. And with technological progress as it was, it would have seemed likely a solution would be found. Especially in the atomic era the solution to a lot of problems was within our grasp. Unfortunately because a lot of reasons that never panned out.
No solution is within sight and the bill is coming due. But in order to at least pay some of that bill, it would mean we are going to have to give up a lot of riches we've come accustomed to. With a lot of people it isn't they don't want a better future for the Earth and the next generations, it's that they don't want to be the one who gives up those riches. They don't want to give up their car, not even for a day. They don't want to stop eating meat, even if it's only half of the time.
its nicely written, but i think ur wrong abt some of these points.
Most of this stuff only got popular bc of mass advertising. For example, the idea that bacon & egg makes a good, healthy breakfast was made up and marketed by paying doctors to say its true (look into Edward Bernays). This ofc helped the meat industry sell their dead animals to more ppl. and yet nearly 50% of our food produce is thrown away bc it couldnt be sold. why do they produce so much??
SUVs were heavily marketed to ppl in the US bc theyre classified as "light trucks", making them not subject to "cafe" (corporate average fuel economy) standards in the US and were therefore cheaper to produce and sell. Look into what cars are around in europe today; most of them are still small, efficient, and safe.
the real issue of this is that corporations have a need to make more money every year. it all needs to keep growing to please their shareholders.
this means more aggressive advertising; more shit nobody really needs has to be sold to those who can barely afford it bc we need to be paid less for them to make more.
capitalism is the real problem here. and it needs to stop. we need an economic system thats based on ppls necessities, not on making the most money (selling the most stuff).
That doesn't make them wrong. It just helps explain how we got here.
i think the "we wanted it, so we made it so" implies this is some inherently human thing.
i see it all too often unfortunately, that ppl just think human do bad, therefore human is bad and theres no changing it. we should murder a large chunk of the population or just go extinct entirely.
as if those were the only "solutions" there could ever be.