We can either have sustainability, or we can have a world in which everything is electronic and digital and connected to everything and "intelligent" and so on, where everybody drives around in an electric car, but which suddenly collapses, maybe next Thursday, maybe 25 years from now.
The real problem is growth, which has become virtually impossible. We can't grow the economy anymore, the economy is already far too big for the planet, and whatever some marketing bastards tell you about #TheCloud or how digital devices are so bloody efficient, don't believe them.
People only look at how much electricity devices use. They don't look at how much of which raw material goes into the production, what kind of dangerous chemicals are used in the process, where the energy for processing the materials comes from (a lot of it is heat, not electricity), and which ecosystems get damaged by which partial process in what kind of manner.
We won't solve anything if we just replace internal combustion engines with electric motors and tanks with batteries, we'll just continue in our rape of Mother Earth, only on a slightly different path.
Our entire way of life is unsustainable. There is no magical technology that can fix this; in fact, every tiny bit of technological complexity we add to the mix makes everything just more fragile, more likely to collapse. I don't believe there is any way we can avoid the upcoming End of the Industrial Age. However, there are still pathways on which our civilisation ends in a slow decline over the next two or three centuries, and there are others in which we just drop off a cliff and civilisation is over within a few decades, peaking in some kind of cataclysm.
And we won't avoid the apocalypse if we continue to tell ourselves we can just consume our way out of the #Polycrisis by making "sustainable" consumer choices. You can't buy a better tomorrow, tomorrow will be bleak and ugly no matter what we do because today is already bleak and ugly, we just choose to hide it behind the curtain. Industrial civilisation is an attempt to build an entirely man-made world and keep the real world out. It has been fuelled by fossil carbon, beginning with coal, then adding oil and gas to the mix. It has been destroying the real world, the living world, all the fucking time. We didn't want to see the land around us suffer, so we created nature reserves and planted entire new "forests" (as if a hundred year old tree plantation could replace an ecosystem that had grown for a thousand years or many), stopped dumping toxic chemicals in the rivers, and just let that kind of shit happen where only poor people live because nobody cares about the poor, anyway, especially when they're not even White.
We're living on the last scraps. We're dependent on huge masses of very rare elements and gigantic masses of more common ones, we're digging up entire landscapes to get all those sweet, sweet metals, and people keep dreaming about asteroid mining to avoid facing the fact we're running out. And at the same time, we let economists run our world. People who believe that the economy can exist even if the ecology collapses, because they totally ignore the simple fact that we are just monkey, we are upright walking storytelling naked apes, we have the same needs and wants and drives and emotions and instincts as bonobos and chimpanzees, and we're living on the same fucking planet where non-human primates are dying, their numbers are dwindling. Why isn't anybody worried about that? A planet that is bad for primates is bad for us because we are bloody primates.
If you look closely at all the technology which is marketed as "sustainable", you will notice that if yu look at the entire production process, it is everything but. Using things that are a lot less bad than what we're doing today is a huge improvement, of course, but it means that we're still following the wrong road, just at a slower speed. The entire concepts around which our civilisation has organised itself are unsustainable, that's the bitter truth. This civilisation must inevitably end, one way or another. If we want it to end by slowly petering out while new civilisations grow from the widening cracks, we need a revolution which ends #Capitalism on a global scale ASAP, and which rapidly dismantles nation-states, replacing them with a federation of small collectives of humans that share the same landscape, collectives which will then figure out ways of repairing and restoring the ecosystem of which they are an essential part. Industrial design must change significantly, putting the longevity and repairability of complex artifacts at a very high priority in order to reduce overall production.
Sorry for the long rant. #climatechaos #ecocide #extinction #biodiversitycollapse #collapse #mining #asteroidmining
