/sci/ - Science & Math

Human nature, the socioeconomic sytem, education/environment/nurture, missing technology, some other barriers: what do you believe is preventing sustainable resource use?

>>10847302
Meth being illegal, otherwise I would still have stash.

That means both. Artificial scarcity for profit of oligarchs and getting resources out of stupid hands.

What exactly are we running of? I think we can switch plastics and fuel really fast. ( Algae ethanol ) and stuff like that can be useful, combustible hydrogen.

I can't guarantee that all you have to change in current cars to run on ethanol is computer.

>>10847302
don't wanna

>>10847302
Oligarchs with embedded systems that has a problem with "finishing race".

>>10847350
I mean like... The "tournament of eternal competition" not "the niggers"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_depletion

Now there are a lot of people thinking we could just fix damage done afterwards and dream about mining asteroids for rare Earth metals.

The deforestation-rate of the Amazon just hit 3 football fields a minute and we're throwing away huge amounts of unneeded products and packaging and electronic waste. Water wars coming up next and oceans are getting overfished.

50 years seem like a long time but how old do you think you'll get to be? It'll get worse sooner than that and resources will get harder to extract.

Is it an issue of cognitive capacity to draw appropriate conclusions? Are we locked into our system and just can't find a way to escape?

>>10847302
It rhymes with luck n' figures. Or maybe the answer really just is luck n' figures

>>10847302
Because the 3rd world pops out babies like rabbits. People who can't take care of themselves. They go to productive civilizations that have already learned to stabilize their population and immediately overpopulate whatever nation they just invaded.

>>10847302
Roger Waters said it best

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpbbuaIA3Ds

population is the root of the problem
but that's not PC to talk about so it will never get fixed

>>10847302
Because we do not have a powerful and efficient government. There's lots of corruption at every level of procurement process in our modern world.

>>10847302
Battery Life -> Fidelity -> Observer

>>10847302
Modern ideologies are all about infinite growth and progress. There are no premodern ideologies alive today outside of the blind grasping of disparate individuals, and postmodern ideologies are largely modern ideologies using postmodernism as a weapon for their ever more simplistic and modernist aims.

>>10848240
This

>>10847302
>we manage
What do you mean by "we", Peasant?

>>10847302
There's too many men
Too many people
Making too many problems

>>10847515
>Water wars

Yep this is happening very soon, almost every country and certainly every major power is depleting aquifers and rivers at a fucking frightening rate. Also with aquifers that border the sea, even if they extend hundreds-thousands of miles inland, the whole thing will be poisoned by saltwater and turn everything above it into a dustbowl long before it's dry, just when it starts to get low enough for saltwater to leech in. No one is investing in desalination at anywhere near the required amount either and for the amount of water needed we would have needed to start mass nuke plant construction decades ago.

So yeah, water is going to be a real fucking problem in 10-20 years, possibly sooner.

>>10847302
Because politics has grasped anything environmental and taken it into its left v right paradigm. Some people seem to think that in order to be right wing they have to not care about the environment. It shouldn't be hard for it to be just a bipartisan goal for everyone but instead it's become left v right

>>10847302
People are greedy, selfish, shortsighted, corrupt, and generally morally bankrupt.

>>10848240
>>10848628
No it isnt, the gross consumption per capita is.
>>10848198
The first world was never stabilized, people always want to, and will, consume more if given the opportunity.

>>10848772
It is an inherently partisan issue, because the rich, which the right supports and is controlled by, are insulated from the problems of environmental degradation while reaping the benefits of resource exploitation at the public's expense. This is a structural weakness of capitalism, and only worker control of the means of production (via government if necessary, but preferably via worker co-ownership - both of which are very left wing positions) can orient productive forces to benefit the majority, environmentally and in general.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=5WPB2u8EzL8

>>10848729
>10-20 years
Every 10-20 years?
t.40

>>10847302
People tend to want to do their own thing

And doing their own thing often requires extraction of resources.
Resources are finite to a geography.

Governments are the only thing that can enforce resource protections from it people
1.governments do a shit job at enforcing protections
Read:carbon buyback shits
2. Governments want to do their own thing.

>>10848198
Based

>>10849306
retarded boomer
our current exploatation is faster than it ever was in the history
we're now draining unrenovable sources of fresh water and once they're gone shit's gonna hit the fan

>>10849349
I don't see how people want to do their own thing or how the rest of your statements follow from that.
For considering this a governance failure: it doesn't look like they are even trying to enforce protections. And resources being finite to a geography usually requires adaptation and / or crossnational cooperation without an uncoordinated, unlimited exchange of goods and resources (for uncoordinated use cases). I'm not sure of it's only governments that can enforce resource protections and whether any alternatives would be government reforms or just government too.
Basically I can't see any significant attempt from governments to effectively manage available resources in a sustainable way and hence I can't see much of a failure there as they haven't really tried it that way. I'd consider the economic calculation problem to be both long overcome and not necessary to get overcome before at least some suboptimal attempt at such resource management.
To conclude I don't think it's an issue of government performance (which also includes corruption and maybe also it wanting to do its own thing: not entirely sure what you meant by that) but likely something superordinate to it.

For example to enforce resource protection networked digital feedback can be used in a participatory manner. This is shown in the book which is quite a nice read even though I doubt people here read a lot of fiction.

Today I found: https://revolutionz.buzzsprout.com/330161/1438672-ep-14-vision-participatory-planning

>>10848729
There's this thing called evaporation and rain

So everybody here agree that we are about to see the biggest shitstorm in human history ?
No soft landing guy ?

>>10848198 They have so many children partly because due to poverty and lack of support-structures they need them as a labor force / welfare / survival. There's some info on it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility and at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_factor_(demography)#Factors_associated_with_decreased_fertility
Education, access to contraceptives and religious reform, etc. can also decrease birth rates.

But while this is a big problem the countries with the high birth rates are mostly not the ones causing resource overconsumption. At least now: their consumption is rising too. We have all this digital technology, the data and knowledge about the problems and huge (lastly unlimited) amounts of the system's current virtual incentive/evaluation points but effectively nothing is done. For example you can't just help (domestically and externally) accelerate the rise of income in poor countries in isolation without measures that prevent them consuming as much as the developed nations. Lastly these measures are probably rather miniscule compared to what could be achieved rather easily in developed nations. But still pretty much nothing has happened so far - neither in the first nor in the third world - even though these problems should be known of since many decades ago.
I don't think it's (mostly) an issue of lifespan, foresight, comfortableness and experience.

>>10847302
we can and do

>>10847302
the problem with the
>sustainable resources
canard is that whenever a "resource" runs out, we just find some other "resource" to replace it
in reality, the "resource" was just a substitute
we don't need to sustain these "resources" because a replacement always exists

We were too long at realizing that trash is a human thing. Trash doesn't exists in nature, it's something we invented.
Everything in nature is recycled but we produce trash that is burned or removed from the cycle by other means.

The cradle to cradle idea needs to be implemented faster globally.

>>10851139
As long as you live in a 1st world country you should be fine. Luxury things will become more rare, but things will get crazy in 3rd world countries, goddamn civil wars for years everywhere.

>>10847302
Literally nothing is sustainable.

>>10852669
>whenever a "resource" runs out, we just find some other "resource" to replace it
>in reality, the "resource" was just a substitute
>we don't need to sustain these "resources" because a replacement always exists
Do you really believe that? Could be true in some cases but definitely not in all of them and it would put extra demand on the substitute which also might not be very appropriate, might be unrenewable and at risk of depletion as well and might lack some qualities or have poorer ones (e.g. conductivity in metals etc).
Some people have this idea that we can just use "technology" like a magic want to just fix the problems in hindsight (as with geoengineering, creating new substitutes or creating artificial foods, animals and synthetic materials). That's probably one of the most dangerous ideas ever as it can prevent preventive action and structural change in the present which are needed even if a lot of these things would work out well which they won't.
But I'm not sure what you mean by
>in reality, the "resource" was just a substitute
Do you mean we're using suboptimal materials to spare more scarce resources or something like that? Like it's probably the case with gold and diamonds to some extent?
With resources I'm not just refering to materials, fossil fuels etc but also to the natural environment/habitat. For example a lot of resources are renewable or could be recycled but aren't the way we use/deplete/build/dispose them. For example I would also include soil, insects, clean air and water. Sustainable preservation of these are required for the environment to remain well habitable for humans and for it to produce its natural products.

>>10852777
True, so you might as well just start smoking crack.

>>10852672
But how can it be implemented faster and more extensively? Recycling would likely mean a lot of job losses and reduced profits. And products would need to be designed in a recyclable way. Optimum product design currently just equates to most profitable design. Probably it's expected that laws are made that require products to be recyclable and get recycled but I haven't seen many such laws and I'm not sure if they along with some evaluation protocols(?) would be very viable in the current system. Also the process of manufacturing and recycling can be problematic in and of themselves and cause pollution (also due to needed transport) and recycling often requires a lot of 3rd world grade labor. And despite of modern ICTs people often don't have a good idea of how to recycle what and whether it's truly getting recycled nor is there much interest in putting manufacturers under checks and balances. And nothing gets recycled to 100% even if it was designed optimally from a recycling standpoint - partly due to the energy needed for full recovery. Also if resources are depleted faster than they are recovered from recycling or in a way or rate that harms the environment the problems remain.
Basically I don't see much interest in that getting done or good mechanisms that would lead to that getting implemented reliably. The best most relevant thing that happened in that regard was this: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/05/shipping-plastic-waste-to-poor-countires-just-got-harder/ Maybe you have more insights in how current plans are in that regard? Do you think it can be solved by more such laws and maybe some new automated recycling processes? The cradle to cradle idea would certainly be part of the solution.