I can’t speak for the anarcho-primitivists but I can say I’ve been alive long enough to understand that a lot of miracle tech is just a cash grab or a way or distracting from the real solutions. Like carbon capture instead of just investing in renewables and zero emission solutions that exist.
Tech bros are intellectually and morally careless and if what they say seems to good to be true, it’s likely not.
So is “AI”, what is your point? Some are great, some are an absurd waste of resources.
And aren’t magic. Switching fully to renewables is probably both impossible (still require non-renewable materials to make) and requires lowering of living standards (unless you want to build a dyson swarm you need to stop growing your energy use, which pretty much means recession, because our economy is energy driven - and if you need a different economic system for a technological solution to work it’s not really a technological solution, is it. Also renewables are still pretty annoying when it comes to matching your output to your supply, and not being able to turn your AC whenever you feel like it is already a lowering of living standard for the richest countries).
And while we wait for them to “solve” the problem, we’re already likely past 1.5°C, even if we just stick to not starving, having water to drink, and not freezing during winters from tomorrow.
So why is it that everyone pushing for ‘reduced living standards’ is also always shilling some new technologies to solve that problem?
If you go through life believing that people are never intentionally doing harm, you are setting yourself up for nefarious characters. Instead, we should behave as it people are not intentionally doing harm (until inculpatory evidence is demonstrated) while reserving judgement on intentions.
Provoking others to consider that exact issue is why I asked the question. :)
Hello, I’m shilling a technology to solve reduced living standards problems. Hear my pitch:
Has this ever happened to you: you want to reduce pollution from your car, but it’s so hard to get everywhere without it. Well have I got the solution for you! Introducing the bicycle. This revolutionary transportation method is powered by your own legs, and uses a similar effort to walking while going several times as fast. You can ride a bicycle to work, to the local grocer, or even to the doctor’s office. And with my second technology, mixed use zoning, the distances you ride to get where you’re going will be even shorter! Interested? Of course you are! If you want to participate, push for mixed use zoning at your local council meetings and buy a bicycle from your nearest retailer.
Stay tuned for further innovations, like our new invention, the “tram”!
“Clean” coal, corn based ethanol, hydrogen vehicles, plant a tree offsets, planet scale carbon filters, on and on…
If the owners want me to believe technology can solve the climate problem that is caused by their greed so their greed can continue destroying civilization socially unabated, they need to stop selling climate action policy snake oil to world governments for a quick buck.
And also maybe stop forcing workers who can work at a computer at home to drive into work to maintain the capital value of your commercial real estate as you bark orders from the luxury resort tour that is your life.
Until then, we know not living lives powered by burning ridiculous quantities of dead flora/fauna juice wouldn’t further destabilize our only, increasingly uncomfortably hot habitat. We also know that simply stopping won’t reverse the damage already done on a time scale humans can perceive.
We are literally turning the habitat of any future humans into 🔥Hell🔥. And if we couldn’t make it work here, on easy mode, with enough pre-existing water/air/waste recycling to support millions to billions sustainably, we certainly aren’t going to thrive on worlds where a single mistake means oops, everybody dead instantly try again. Im glad of that honestly, as the idea of growing/metastasizing into space and exploiting new world’s resources almost makes dollar signs pop out of billionaire’s eye sockets, and if thats the core reason they’re so eager for us to spread out there, may we die on the vine.
And also maybe stop forcing workers who can work at a computer at home to drive into work to maintain the capital value of your commercial real estate as you bark orders from the luxury resort tour that is your life.
Maybe tell the government to stop zoning land as either commercial or residential, so the market can solve the housing crisis naturally with all that artificially-undervalued real estate.
I know for a fact that real estate is not lacking in demand. If people can’t sell their commercial real estate it’s because it’s been artificially categorized as such too strictly.
I both agree and disagree, because this comic is dangerously vague.
A good example is electric cars. It would be great if everyone switched to electric cars, but it would be even better if we built a city that didn’t treat pedestrians, cyclists, and public commuters as second class.
The difference being the latter doesn’t let private equity make fat returns.
And yes ofc we can both.
Honestly it would not be better if everyone switched to electric cars. Yes, we should prioritize new cars being electric, but building an electric car is worse than using an existing car all the way to the end of its lifecycle. And yes obviously public transport and infrastructure to promote pedestrians/cyclists is also ideal.
Replacing a gas car with an electric car would only be worse than running your current gas car into the ground, if you were buying a brand new EV and were junking your old gas car. A lot of people won’t do that. If you buy a used EV and sell/trade-in the gas car to someone else to use, a new EV isn’t built and someone who can’t afford EV can get your used car.
Obviously pedestrian infrastructure and public transit is preferable if viable, but it isn’t always viable for the average person (at least in the USA/Canada) to switch to those, so having both options is best
There around 1000 life cycle cost analyses that disprove this idea by now. It takes only a few years of driving electric to pay off the carbon debt from manufacturing, assuming average driving behavior.
Of course, this is complicated because we should be dramatically reducing driving. But for most people it does not make sense to keep a gas car as a daily driver.
Yeah, this is something many climate advocates say - that it is better to keep the car you have - but I don’t think this is backed up by data at all. It’s very clear that that EVs are able to save more carbon emissions than in a fairly short period than you would save by not continuing to drive an ICE vehicle, with manufacturing included.
If we were going to have a simple rule, replacing all ICE vehicles today with EVs will be far better for the climate than keeping them.
We need to phase out oil and shift to better technologies with room for growth and use change that fits better with future realities.
If we keep some cars it means we need oil refineries running, we need oil processed to fuel and delivered to gas stations… if though we could totally cut sections of that out then we could build solar and wind infrastructure and remove gas stations (which are a horrible thing in so.many regards, if your house is next to a gas station it’s value will go up when it closes)
Electric infrastructure is different, no toxic and explosive liquids to worry about so it’s possible and increasingly common to have a charging pad at a supermarket or even here in the uk there putting them in at woodland trust carparks so you can have a twenty.min walk in the woods and recharge your own.battety while the car charges.
We will likely see an increase in supermarkets and malls using their vast carpark and roof.space for solar panels, likewise remote places like national parks so cars and busses can be charged off-grid with totally green power meaning that no lorries carrying petrol or pilons need to blight the landscape.
We might also see developments in grid management tech to support them too, for example a train station carpark might have a system where all cars are plugged in then charged in batches so as to use only the available excess load currently in their system - if you know your car will be there all day then it doesn’t matter when it charges but it will make it cheaper for the rail operator, likewise electric bikes of course though I imagine they’ll be taken on the train more often than not where a similar system charges them before the ticket holders destination is met.
Of course this shouldn’t be an overnight thing but a transition where ICE vehicles are replaced with electric at.EOL, I (rarely) drive a tiny and very fuel efficient 15 year old car which i brought second hand, hopefully it’ll last long enough that my next car can be a second hand electric, even if I have to replace the battery and charge controller to whatever aftermarket system is available. Though I’d love if self-drive allows me to give up car ownership and simply call one to me when required, unfortunately Uber or traditional taxis are too expensive and unable to fill my usecase requirements in most situations.
in an ideal world (heh) – our primary choice would be pedestrian, bicycle, electric micromobility, public transit – electric cars reserved for accessibility (personal ownership) – gas cars reserved for remote sites (rent or checkout only, no personal or private ownership)
Would you care develop your argument? It is not so much that I disagree with you that I don’t understand you.
It also ignores that everything has a cost and how much corporations like to pretend that “no study proving bad stuff means there’s no bad stuff” for brand new things that haven’t existed long enough for bad stuff to show up.
Some bad things take a very long time to show up though; the idea of putting the brakes on any new development until we had complete knowledge of potential bad things resulting simply isn’t practical.
Lets take a really basic example: chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). Ammonia was–and is–used a refrigerant. It was the first one that really worked, and many large-scale industrial systems still use it. It’s cheap, it’s very effective, and it’s environmentally friendly. Unfortunately, ammonia has two problems: first, it’s highly reactive with copper, so you can’t have any copper in your system, and second, a leak in a refrigeration system can kill you because ammonia gas is toxic. A number of industrial accidents in the 1920s that resulted in a lot of deaths led to the search for non-toxic refrigerants. Enter CFCs; unlike ammonia, sulfur dioxide, and other early refrigerants, they’re non-toxic, so a leak in your refrigerator (or the air conditioner in your car!) does risk killing you.
…Except that CFCs absolutely wreak hell on the ozone layer. They were eventually banned. HCFCs were used for a while, because those tend to break down before they get to the ozone layer, but it turns out that if they do get up there, they do more damage than the CFCs they replaced.
But we didn’t know that in the 1920s. Hell, I don’t think we realized that was a significant problem for 40-50 years after CFCs were in common usage. In that time, food had gotten considerably safer, because refrigerators had become common, and were now in ever home. Without CFCs, we might have never gotten to the point of refrigeration being in common usage in homes. (For reference, the house I had in Chicago was built in the 20s, and had a bricked-over window that went into the pantry. That window used to be where blocks of ice were delivered daily or weekly to an ice box.)
We’re still looking for alternative refrigerants–and insulating blowing agents–that are both non-toxic, environmentally friendly, and are can be made cheaply enough to realistically replace the current generation of refrigerants.
Sure, but that’s not how most people read the term. Going back to my point about how I both dis/agree with this because of how vague it is.
We should be using the term correctly so that people learn to read it correctly. Otherwise we’ll have a society of people who think technology is whatever Elon Musk is up to, and that’s no good at all.
Those aren’t purely technological solutions though (except in the loosest sense of the word, where any non-hunter-gatherer behavior a human engages in is a technology), as they involve changing the way people live.
The electric car is a mostly drop-in replacement that fits in fine with the existing car centric suburban development model. The transit, cycling, and pedestrian oriented city involves changing how people think about their lives (many people in the US ask how it’s even possible to get groceries without a car) and even changing some of the ways we structure our society (the expectation that the cost of housing will increase forever, or even the expectation that housing should be treated as a commodity to invest in at all, as well as many other things to do with the intersection of finance and landuse).
To give another example inventing new chemical processes to try to make plastic recycling work is a technological solution to the problem of petroleum use and plastic waste. Reducing or eliminating the use of single-use plastics where practicable is a non-technological solution, because it doesn’t involve any new technologies.
In principle I’m not opposed to new technologies and “technological solutions”. However you can see from the above examples that very often the non-technological solution works better. Technological solutions are also very often a poison pill (plastic recycling was made to save the plastic industry, not the planet).
In practice I think we need to use both types of solutions (for example, massively reduce our plastic use, but also use bio-plastics anywhere we can’t). But people have a strong reaction to the idea of so-called technological solutions because of the chilling effect they have on policy changes. We saw this with the loop and hyperloop. Rather than rethinking the policies that lead to the dearth of High-Speed rail in the US and investing in a technology that already existed a bunch of states decided to wait for the latest whizz-bang gadget to come out. And it turns out this was exactly the plan. The hyperloop was never supposed to work, it was just supposed to discourage investment in rail projects.
I think that innovative forms of policy are technologies. If chemistry can have chemical engineers that implement chemical technologies, then political science should have civil engineers who implement political technologies.
My background is in chaos magick, where we refer to our magic spells as techs all the time. And this approach isn’t novel. Psychologists consider things like meditation or applications of the placebo effect technologies. I mean, the brain is a thinking machine just like a computer, and we consider software technologies such as websites and applications to be technologies. Psychological technology is software for a brain, and political technology is software for a society.
I think gardening is a technology, even though it’s just a different way of treating seeds that already exist. Sewing is a technology, the written word is a technology, money is a technology. And words and money exist only inside our heads.
We should be getting techbros excited about actually useful technologies instead of their AI crypto bullshit. I’m a techbro for magic spells and bicycles! There should be political hype over social technologies.
Why would the comic be referring to technology that has been around for hundreds of years? To me it’s clearly about the belief that we’ll “technology” our way out of the overconsumption crisis of capitalism
That’s a false dichotomy in a lot of the comments here
We do both
Carbon capture isn’t so we can continue to use fossil fuels. It’s because once we get to 0 emissions we still need to draw down the carbon in the atmosphere
An ounce of prevention is almost always worth a pound of cure but we’re still going to want that cure because every extra tenth of a degree we can bring the Earth back to normal is going to be worth it
Nah, we don’t do both. Carbon capture projects are bullshit for the most part, see https://time.com/6264772/study-most-carbon-credits-are-bogus/ for example. Some are actually generating more carbon, not less overall. Instead, companies have been using this as a way to “buy” their target metrics, except they are buying offsets that don’t really exist. And they use this to market their products as green/net zero products, which incentivizes even more consumption.
So overall this whole thing is most likely a net negative, as in we would be better without them. And honestly is not surprising at all, technology is not magic. It’s just people want perfect solutions so we don’t have to do anything and the problem goes away, so they keep falling for this bullshit. Case in point, your comment lol.
Carbon capture isn’t so we can continue to use fossil fuels.
But that is literally how it is used in the official plans and projections by governments and the UN. They nearly all plan with an increase of fossil fuel use and later (unrealistic) draw-down to reach “net zero” by the 2050ties or so.
Carbon capture isn’t so we can continue to use fossil fuels. It’s because once we get to 0 emissions we still need to draw down the carbon in the atmosphere
‘Carbon capture’ technology is stupid. Planting trees and not cutting down any more, that is the way to go. They capture carbon, lots of it. That ‘technology’ has worked for millions of years.
Yes that is a great solution if we had infinite space and time also if we weren’t concerned about the natural world and were happy to destroy all the biodiversity and unique biomes by converting into forests. Oh and if it would actually work of course, but that doesn’t matter in feelgood fantasy world.
I love trees, I’ve volunteered planting trees and donates to woodlands and all sorts of things but they are not going to save us from the mess we’re in. They’re also not as simple as they should be, management is crucial as there’s a surprising amount of things that can go wrong on a large scale which would totally fuck the environment - especially with foodweb issues and soil chemistry.
