I'm not convinced the widening access to American consumerism is a moral win. The amount of fossil fuels we're dependent on as a species is obscene. I worry for our children. There is no offramp, only growth.
This is one of these philosophies that I hate more then almost any other.
The idea that is bad that poor Indian and Chinese people now have access to anything from clean water to planes is absurd. You can sit there in your luxury house and cry about consumer culture but for millions of people its basic stuff that they have access to for the first time.
And in Europe, despite increasing quality of live, both total energy consumption and fossil fuel consumption is going down.
Now part of this is export of emissions to China but China own growth explains the majority of it.
Continued growth is good, and only continued growth and better technology will get humanity off fossil fuels.
Fossil fuels have been a net good for society and still are!
The reason it's seen as bad is because there are not enough natural resources to sustain such a consumption, and many of these countries (esp India) will practically become unhabitable if global warming continues like it does. There are very few signs that technology will be able to fix this.
there are of course more than enough "natural resources" to sustain such consumption, the problem is paradoxically the opposite, too much easy to extract shit that we then emit into our own environment
the fix is also not complicated (remove GHG from the air, remove endocrine disruptors from the food cycle, etc.)
the costs are high though, but not that high, compared to - for example - the famines of past
but as population will peak - at least for now - and as we continue to ramp up renewable energy generation these problems are not insurmountable in any sense
...
places affected by storms and extreme heat/cold days need better infrastructure, but since urbanization continues to drive people to cities (as it did for the last few hundreds of years) these places need new and better infrastructure anyway!
> the fix is also not complicated (remove GHG from the air, remove endocrine disruptors from the food cycle, etc.)
Are you abstracting away the technical complexity when stating that it's not complicated? GHG removal tech that would scale simply doesn't exist if we intend to have some energy left to do anything else, as for removing pfas and microplastics from the environment, we are at the stage of running experiments in petri dishes.
And even if we abstract away the technical complexity, good luck convincing anyone to stop burning the free fuel we have lying around doing nothing now that we have everything-nuclear-solar and GHG removal at scale. We can barely convince our councils to build cycle lanes in dense areas if that removes any space for SUVs.
I wish I'd share the blind optimism of people like you, it seems pleasant to live in your heads...
You're giving a very poor reading of OP's argument, first of all. Jumping to the conclusion that they don't want Chinese people to have clean water is downright bad faith.
Second, "continued growth is good" is a hell of a thing to say on a planet with finite resources. There's a limit! And if you expand your worldview to include other life on this planet and not just society then we've pushed far beyond what's wise already.
Fair point, I ought have made that clear. There are many ways in which Chinese people have it better than Americans these days, if my eyes are to be believed.
You can't watch those and seriously believe that there couldn't possibly be any aspects of Chinese life which are superior, and further, to think that's "insane".
Those aren't cherry-picked videos. There are thousands out there, if you care to look; watch xiaomanyc's videos and there's simply no denying your eyes. Their cars are better, their night life is better, their food is better, their housing is better, their daily lives are better, in many, many ways. Not every way, but in many ways - which is what I said.
You've been propagandized your whole life to think America is number one, but that was only even remotely true before 'we' pissed away our future on genocidal forever wars to make the 0.1% a little wealthier. Now most people see America negatively. Literally the vast majority of countries have an overall negative opinion of America; and we're seen as the number one threat to peace and stability.
Chinese people used to think they're hearing propaganda when they hear American's stories about health insurance, or the political scene - because to them, that's impossible to believe. Yet what you find impossible to believe is that they might have it better in some ways. I hope you have a good long think about that.
