Comment by TeMPOraL
4 years ago
> The problem in my view is that we take limited resources and combine it with slave labor to create landfill. Those few years of usage are not even that relevant.
That's an important insight.
I only recently realized this too, and conceptualized it as a pipeline:
RAW > PRODUCT > FINISHED > A BIT > WASTE
MATERIALS > COMPONENTS > GOODS > OF USE > MATTER
Now when we say that our economy grows exponentially, it means that the amount of matter traveling through this pipeline is growing exponentially too! The economy, as it is today, is essentially a rapidly growing system for turning usable resources into useless waste.
Here's the bad part though: adding recycling to any stage of this pipeline doesn't alter the overall behavior. It only recirculates some of the matter - recycling is never perfect. But as we know, if you recycle less than 100%, and then re-recycle that, and then re-recycle again, it still converges to zero. With an exponentially growing pipeline, recycling is only delaying the crisis a little bit.
Ultimately, we need to remove the exponent (or at least couple it to population growth, in the scenario where humanity expands into space). For now, we need to reduce it. And one of the best ways of doing that is... reducing use. Buying less. The less matter flows through the pipeline, the longer we have before it runs out.
While I agree that minimizing waste is important, I do have an objection to part of your description of economic growth.
>Now when we say that our economy grows exponentially, it means that the amount of matter traveling through this pipeline is growing exponentially too!
The relationship between economic growth and environmental damage is more complicated than this. Something like transitioning from fossil fuels to cheap renewables is both a case of economic growth, and a reduction waste matter. Similar principles might apply to everyone having an iPod instead of buying new CDs, miniaturization in computing, productive uses of what used to be considered waste, building mass transit infrastructure over cars, etc.
If you want to slow damage to the natural environment, I'm all for it, but if you aim to do that by slowing economic growth, rather than accepting slowed economic growth as a potential side-effect, you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Economic growth often means more people can have better lives using fewer resources.
Bear in mind matter isn't the only component. Energy is another huge input to the system. E.g. blockchain and its derivatives use tiny amounts of matter to use enormous amounts of energy.
We can and must develop more environmentally responsible sources of matter and energy. Trying to change human behavior with our current regulatory controls have been demonstrably inadequate. There are sources of matter and energy that do not run out, I believe them to be in space.
> That's an important insight.
Say the world (after some unfortunate incident) turns into [say] something like Cuba? In just a few years no one will have a phone.
>Now when we say that our economy grows exponentially, it means that the amount of matter traveling through this pipeline is growing exponentially too!
If there are people out there who buy phones by weight it is to buy phones that are thin and light, and therefore contains fewer materials.
I remember the phones of the early aughts. They were bigger and could only do phone things (and snake), which meant that you needed a computer, maybe a calculator, a form of MP3 player, a camera, maybe some DVDs to watch in the back of the car along with a DVD player to watch them on.
Today you have all of that in a phone.
> Today you have all of that in a phone.
But you replace them every two years. And the market for them is still growing. And there's now a resurgence of a market for single-purpose appliances that happens on top of the smartphone market - not replacing it.
(It's also possible more matter goes into making a modern smartphone than a bunch of devices it replaced, because of the demand for more exotic and more pure materials in the processes along the way. But maybe it doesn't, maybe an individual smartphone is a net matter and energy saver. I can totally buy that, we've made a lot of efficiency improvements in manufacturing in the past decades. But there are limits to such improvements, and in the meantime, manufacturing as a whole keeps growing.)
Perhaps I've simplified my diagram too much - I should've drawn an additional "bypass" into "WASTE MATTER" from every other node, because every step in the pipeline loses some of its input as waste.
I was merely making the observation that the growth of the value of something is not necessary a linear function of the amount of materials used. I am not convinced, as an example, that the first iPhone caused drastically more waste to produce (or drastically less) than the last one. Yet the last one is clearly much better.
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