as an aside in the latest Trillbillies episode Terrence said that we need degrowth communism and it got me wondering what that means to everyone. to hopefully stifle any silly debates i’ll clarify that i’m talking about the West, not underdeveloped/overexploited nations in the Global South.
an end to oil drilling, gas extraction, and coal mining will obviously be necessary to stop climate change. how much modern technology can we replicate without relying on those things or other ecologically violent resource extraction? what does an agriculture system that doesn’t rely on petrochem-derived fertilizers and herbicides look like? how do we repair the immense damage that’s already been done?
i’d really appreciate some book recommendations on this topic as well as everyone’s thoughts
We don’t really know what level of consumer goods and their availability is sustainable because we’ve never attempted to make it sustainable. Denser living will help immensely though, and building things to last and be repairable should go a long way. I suspect humanity can easily do it, just not when those making the decisions are incentivized to protect their own destructive monopolies.
As far as carbon capture goes, I think we’re going to end up planting a ton of trees, maybe some kind of ocean CO2 scrubbing algae or something as well, then cutting them down, and sealing the decaying wood underground. Basically the reverse process that we’ve been doing at breakneck speed for a century… And probably stratospheric atmospheric injection to slow cooling, which hopefully won’t affect anything else as drastically as the greenhouse effect.
We’re just making coal for the octpus society that will rise up and kill us all
Unfortunately, there isn’t really a way to do that on a scale meaningful enough to make a difference. Plus it’s not really great for the rest of the ecosystem to abstract out all that biomass. There’s some slim hope that we can come up with some renewable-energy-catalyzed conversion of CO2 into a solid or liquid state that could be stored, but the problem there is preventing its use in further fossil fuel extraction or as its own source of energy. For all practical purposes it’s better to assume that all the CO2 in the atmosphere is going to stay there.
If you just look at the dollars, direct air capture can be done for ~20 percent of global GDP.
You just need a lot of power and the political will to carry it out.
we did just this some years ago in the soviet union, perfectly doable.