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Vodka and cigarettes sustainability
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For a little while now, in the relentless inner monologues where I
try to sort out my views on complicated issues like the appropriate
attitude toward technology in the face of environmental/ecological
concerns, I have started using the phrase "vodka and cigarettes
sustainability" to refer to what I had previously called "mainstream
sustainability". By this I mean the vision where we "save the
planet" by replacing fossil fuel burning power plants with solar and
wind plants, replacing petrol powered cars with electric ones, and
transition to a circular economy, making everything is fine and
dandy. Oh, and how could I forget, by sticking teeny tiny computers
absolutely everywhere so we can automatically turn our lights and
heaters on and off at *exactly* the right times.
I've written previously about my scepticism toward this vision, which
I think results from obsessively focusing on the peak oil phenomenon
and on "decarbonisation" in response to the threat climate change.
It tends to ignore or downplay the fact that low-carbon or
zero-carbon technology still involves destructively removing finite
resources out of the biosphere and refining/transforming them via
chemical reactions that produce nasty waste products which inevitably
end up back in the biosphere, because where else are they going to
go? The circular economy idea is certainly something to strive for,
but we need to be wary of magical thinking. Most manufacturing
processes are largely irreversible. If you cut down a tree and turn
it into a pile of toothpicks, you can't take those toothpicks and
then turn them into solid beams of structural-grade timber suitable
for building houses or boats. A bad example, perhaps, because you
can always grow more trees. You can't turn a pile of Z80s into a
modern ARM chip? Whatever. Even with stuff like glass, which *is*
extremely reusable, there are always going to be *some* losses. If
you can recover 99% of the raw materials from a manufactured item,
then after 10 manufacturing-recovery cycles you're left with 90% of
what you started with, and after 50 cycles only 60% is left. A
circular economy is better than a "straight line into the bin"
economy, no question, but all circles are leaky and nothing can
circulate forever. None of this "green tech" is really sustainable,
it's just slightly less unsustainable than what it's replacing.
So why "vodka and cigarettes"? It's part of a larger metaphor
wherein the status quo, the ever increasing industrial production of
single-use stuff using fossil fuels, is something like a heroin
addiction. Transitioning from a heroin addiction to drinking a
bottle of vodka and smoking a pack of cigarettes every day is
actually going to markedly improve your health and extend your life
expectancy. It's also going to be really hard work. These two facts
combined suggest that efforts to make this transition ought to be
encouraged and supported, and successful transitions ought to be
celebrated. True enough. But it's also undeniably true that after
the transition you're still very much bound for an early grave.
Depending on where you start out, daily vodka and cigarettes is
indeed somewhere you might want to get to - but it's not somewhere
you ever want to stay long term.
What you *actually* want, rather than vodka and cigarettes, is
something like "water and granola" sustainability. I think a lot of
people, particularly the "bright green environmentalism" movement,
perhaps ascribe water and granola status to solutions/technologies
which are actually vodka and cigarettes. I don't know how often this
is a sort of white lie people consciously engage in or if its a
genuine delusion. I can kind of understand the arguments for not
emphasising or dwelling on the reality that "sustainable" technology
is actually just "less unsustainable" technology. There is a sense
of urgency to kicking the heroin habit, and rightly so, and it seems
a very real risk that loudly and regularly reminding people that the
real end goal is water and granola (which I suspect looks a lot like
what most people will consider "unacceptably reduced standards of
living") will leave people depressed and/or overwhelmed, slowing that
urgent transition down. A kind of "tactical denial" might actually
make sense.
Personally, when I first started seeing things in these terms, my
initial knee-jerk reaction was to reject the vodka and cigarettes
solution in favour of moving directly to water and granola as quickly
as possible. Just rip off the bandaid. After all, it's not as if we
don't know how to live in a way that is genuinely long-term
sustainable. Humanity has been around for 300,000 years and for
almost all of that time we've lived with an ecological footprint
orders of magnitude lower than the present one. There are no
technological breakthroughs necessary, just a willingness to give an
awful lot up (but certainly not everything, particularly not
immaterial things like scientific knowledge or modern moral values,
which is why I don't think any *actual* period in human history is a
good analogue for what a water and granola future might look like).
These days I'm starting to moderate this view a little bit in light
of the (retrospectively obvious) realisation that none of those
historical low-impact lifeways, pre-industrialisation and
pre-agriculture, are likely to scale up to a projected near-future
peak global population of 10 billion or so people. I'm happy enough
proclaiming that drastically decreased standards of material comfort
are necessary for genuine sustainability, but I'm distinctly
uncomfortable advocating mass death due to inadequate water, food or
medicine production. I'm certainly not some kind of eco-fascist
that's happy to let billions die in misery for the good of the
planet. So I've accepted that a transitional period of vodka and
cigarettes is genuinely necessary. This transitional period would
need to last at least as long as it takes to reduce the population to
levels where water and granola level technology is adequate to
sustain everybody. I have no idea how long that population decrease
might take. I have no idea how long we can conceivably live on vodka
and cigarettes before the situation gets roughly as dire as it is
today, living on heroin. If the first takes longer than the second,
that's bad news. I'd like to have better ideas about both of these
things. But it already seems pretty clear to me that, barring mass
death, nobody alive today is going to live in a world where the
majority of the planet leads a lifestyle which is genuinely very long
term sustainable. Vodka and cigarettes are realistically the best we
("we" as in those of us alive right here, right now, not "we" as in
humanity) can hope for - at least in some aspects of life. The
transition period is necessarily going to have to be long in some
domains, like food and medicine production. It could be much shorter
- really, as fast as we want it - in domains like entertainment and
recreation.
For the record, I'm pretty pessimistic about the population reduction
thing. I am absolutely opposed to any kind of top-down authoritarian
intervention in human reproduction. I do not and will not endorse
anything like one or two child policies, any kind of "parenting
licensing", any kind of involuntary sterilisation or anything else
like that, no matter what the "greater good" demands. It's a step
too far, for me. Even if it weren't, I suspect the process would
need to take several centuries (it took about two centuries to get
from 1 billion humans to 6 or 7 billion, but I *think* reversing this
would need to take longer, as reducing birth rates too much leads to
heavily skewed age distributions which bring problems of their own),
and it seems unlikely that any kind of authority structure capable of
enforcing this sort of intervention could be maintained for that long
without falling apart or being overthrown. I don't know where that
leaves us. Non-coercively maintaining a global birth rate in a
narrow "Goldilocks" band for several consecutive centuries seems to
me like a *much* harder problem than decarbonisation. You can't
achieve that by just throwing money at some kind of Manhattan Project
style effort to design amazing new green tech as quickly as possible.
Organised religion is the only thing that's come close to being able
to achieve anything remotely like this kind of long term societal
coordination, and it certainly hasn't always nailed the
"non-coercive" criterion. I just don't have high hopes.
I certainly don't claim there's any deep insight or new ideas in any
of the above. I'm just thinking out loud and trying to come to grips
with these issues in my own time and on my own terms. Not because I
think that by doing so I personally can do anything about these
problems, just because I feel the need to satisfy myself that I
haven't stuck my head in the sand or waited to be told what to do by
"world leaders", but that I've made a genuine and honest effort to
confront the issues head on and made decisions about what kind of
life *I* want to aspire to, regardless of what everybody else does.
No doubt many are shaking their heads at how foolish I am for falling
into the Malthusian delusion and not leaning hard into scientific
solutionism. It's not like I'm unaware of prospects for escaping the
undeniable finitude of resources on Earth. I read Drexler and Zubrin
in high school, too. I know that nanobots *could* turn toothpicks
into 2-by-4s, and that the asteroid belt is full of valuable material
resources. Twenty year old me would have dismissed everything above
as the ramblings of an ignorant hippy. Suffice to say I think
otherwise these days, perhaps as much for philosophical reasons as
practical ones. But that's something for another post.