World's Water Crisis

[zurew]

13 hours ago, trenton said:

  I didn't know about the Jevons paradox because that is commonly overlooked.  It seems plausible on the surface that it reduces energy consumption, but in reality the increased efficiency results in an increase of demand for what it produces.  If this leads to using the resource faster, than the energy consumption could get worse.

@trenton

Yeah, we could definitely argue, that paradoxically the more efficient we get thanks to the technology, the more resources we use.

Before the industrial revolutions, we only used a very small portion of resources and energy to maintain out lives.But inventing new technology is not neutral and it has a lot of impact on our lives, and we don't know  before the invention how its going to affect us,  and we are not interested in contemplating before we drop the new tech, that what impact it will have, and what it will cause.

The more efficient we get the more resource we use due to a lot of reasons.

Firstly, we require more and more resource to build more and more machines, if we replace humans with machines, which we already did in many cases, most of the time to run those machines we use energy sources that need a lot of time to reproduce for example oil. Thanks to the efficiency some workers lose their jobs they need to be applied somwhere else, its immediately changes up the workplace, and the economy. With more efficiency we produced more food, built better security, started bulding up new systems, at one point we started building everyone a lot better and more abundant life, which wasn't required or expected before.

Population growth was somewhat connected to the efficiency as well. Nowadays, you could argue thats not the case, but before, when the conditions were so much worse and most people died because of diseases and lack of food and nutrition, the population growth couldn't be as fast as it is now. We can see now, that at one point this dynamic changes up, and after that point it doesn't matter if you have better lifestlye and more abundant life or not, because you don't want to have more kids than before, rather we could argue we want less and less kids now.

Just because of the invention of the plow, that invention itself drastically changed our lifes and our view on ourselves and on the world. Before, there were more religions and traditions that admired some animals as gods. But we realised that we could use them to work for us ,so we immediately had to change our view about them because we can't use gods as our slaves. Because we could make more food, population growth started to emerge. Thanks to the more rapid growth of population we had to build better systems to produce enough food, shelter, water, jobs and so on. Because we had to build a new infrasturcture, new jobs were coming up, new problems emerged,  new and more developed thinking and mindset had to be taken place. We could go down more deep in this rabbithole, but yes it is very interesting, how just inventing one tech can change up everything even on a fundamental level. I could add here, that now because we could use animals to work for us , now we felt that we are a superiour creature compare to them, because we can make them do what we want.

Our expectations and requirements to survive is vastly different compare to the past. Ironically, we need so much more resources to survive in this ages, than what we needed before. So overall one big reason for the growing energy consumption is thanks to the development of new tech, and the better efficiency. 

 

13 hours ago, trenton said:

I can't say that I see our society getting the prices right until the resources are scarce

I agree with this 100%. We can manipulate some things to achieve some result, but that result won't be sufficient or it doesn't look like that it could be sufficient enough. This shows us how much we should change just the economy system.

The biggest problem here is that if only one nation is conscious about this problem, and they change their prices up(to make it harder to accumulate certain resources that are scarce) then they will be in a worse geopolitical position immediately and also it will hit that nation on an economic level as well. This could only work, if every nation would  change up their prices simultaneously, but it sounds ridiculous right now just to say that.

13 hours ago, trenton said:

To be honest, a lot of the video seemed very complicated and went over my head.  I should probably listen to more stuff like this over liberal podcasts which serve more so as entertainment than real education.

Yes, it is very complicated and nuanced. The first time i listened to it, most of the stuff went over my head as well. It requires a lot of attention and studying to start to understand and to make sense what is really going on and why. The more you study it, the more you realize, that it doesn't have one big cause, but a lot of different causes that are all interconnected with each other.

13 hours ago, trenton said:

Do you know about the scandals with Chevron?

No, i don't.

13 hours ago, trenton said:

Do you have any other ideas for moving away from consumer culture,  Or is this too much to ask of our growth oriented society? 

It seems to me , that it is too much to ask for right now, but i need to study this issue a lot more. Thankfully more and more conscious person is thinking about these global issues. I think we managed to collect a good amount of tactics and ideas to use. 

Not any of these ideas is really effective, but maybe combining them and using what we can , maybe we can achieve some results. We use what we have and do our best and thats what we can all do. I think even if we are really pessimistic (as we should be, rationally), we need to use what we can if we really want humanity to survive the 21st century. 

Edited March 7, 2022 by zurew

[trenton]

@zurew I find it interesting how pursuing this efficiency was necessary for humanity survive diseases and to grow our population.  It just doesn't account for our entire relationship with the earth when we were pursuing survival in this regard.  We forgot about a more all encompassing survival because we valued our lives as humans the most.

Also fascinating is the bias you are pointing out with factory farming.  Nowadays we take for granted that animals are just stupid and can be used as food.  It is like a psychopath who thinks stupid people deserve to be exploited.  I like how different religions place a higher value on animals even though it now feels natural and obvious to us that animals are inferior.  It feels like reality, but really it is no truer than paganism.  Our biases can be hard to see from within a single culture.  These biases can change quickly if our survival demands if.

A similar example is how we treat our resources now versus how we will treat them in the future.  I imagine that punishments for wasting water in 20 years will be much worse than they are now in places like California.  This is how survival shapes morality and animals are just another example.

I didn't normally account for all of these geopolitics when I though of these issues before, so it is good that I am seeing a bigger picture now.  Our survival demands that we compete with other nations for oil, hence there is so much controversy about the private military contractors for oil companies in the middle east.  In a sense they must be there.  The issue feels very different when there is no clear bad guy.

As for the chevron scandals, I think addressing something like this is our best bet.  Companies will continue to exploit cheap labor and resources so long as they are able.  Our consumerist culture will worsen the issue until the prices are raised by making the true cost of efficiency paid for.

Basically, chevron owes over 50 billion dollars in lawsuits in 31 different countries.  Of the 70 lawsuits they owe, one particularly bad one is in Ecuador.  A prosecutor named Steven Donziger won a 16 billion dollar lawsuit against them for the environmental damages.  If companies had to pay for this, then put consumerist culture would slow down because of the increased prices.  Chevron had this man arrested through an unfair trial and still didn't pay the lawsuits.  Congress woman Rashida Tlaib of the 13th district of Michigan confronted the CEO who pretended the lawsuits didn't exist.  There were some petitions to free Donziger, but there would need to be more action to hold the company accountable.  Like Tlaib said, this is not about demonizing big companies, it is about accountability and paying the true cost of our livelihood.

I'm sure you know about the Apple sweatshops and factory riots.  When workers are not paid a minimum wage of helps Apple sell the cell phones at a cheaper price.  If they paid the real price for labor by enforcing business transparency throughout the global supply chain, then this would grind our consumerist culture to a halt when the goods are much more expensive.  People have to think "do I really need the cool new cell phone?". You can learn more from the global slavery index.  There are about 91 billion dollars worth of electronic products at risk of slave labor being imported into the U.S.every year.  Clothing, fish, and other products are also included.  There are still cotton picking slaves in Uzbekistan according to anti slavery international.  This feeds our consumerist culture by keeping the price of clothes low.  One important detail about slavery is that although we can force of stop temporarily, it will come back so long as global poverty and overpopulation leaves people susceptible to this exploitation as the abusers try to survive through crime and corruption.

The goal is to frame environmental protection as a human rights issue because the injustice invokes a strong negative reaction in those who learn about them.  The argument is "Although slavery has a lot of good economic benefits, we should still abolish it because the cry for freedom cannot be suppressed forever.  Our way of life is unsustainable so long as we must exploit this cheap labor while failing to pay the true cost for our consumerist culture."  Imagine a Republican making this argument today like they would have before the 13th amendment.

It looks like the world needs more human rights activists, social justice warriors, and environmentalists.  Just be warned that these companies will imprison you on the grounds of false defamation lawsuits and the legal system will likely not listen to you.  They will use their advantage in money to drown you in impossible debt should you try to challenge them legally.  There must be large scale movements to confront these companies so they can't arrest us all, just like MLK.  This approach makes me more optimistic.