Comment by JumpCrisscross
3 days ago
> we should work harder to mine critical resources in as low impact way possible
This is easy to say in theory. It's harder if you have a population that wants rising material living standards. (Increasing living standards in middle-income economies is vastly more energy and material intensive than at the upper or lower ends of the scale.)
If you have a population that want rising material living standards, that's easy too. Any increase in living standards should be balanced against a concomitant decrease in population. Resource usage (meaning pollution, waste, energy production) stays steady or even goes down.
Apparently population control is anathema to most people though, so the unrelenting environmental rape continues unabated.
> Apparently population control is anathema to most people
Well yeah that too, but first and foremost when a population shrinks it leads to a demographic crisis. The government actively attempts to prevent that.
But also the issues you point to aren't inherently due to population. Most of our activities don't need to impact the environment to the extent that they currently do. We just cut corners to save money on a massive scale.
That seems to happen naturally, just with a lot of lag in the system. Declining birth rates can be seen in almost all modernised societies that have had a strong middle class.
I mean mining currently available resources more responsibly. I do not think we need modules to meet demand?