Reply #41: We won't reduce our resource usage [View All]

[The2ndWheel]

At least voluntarily. We'll get more efficient at using the resources, but that just makes our extraction rate better, which gives us more energy to use, and we don't voluntarily, on any meaningful scale, reduce our usage.

Since there are a few billion people who aren't hooked into the global system, whatever resources we don't use, will be used up by those few billion people. Since there will be an additional few billion added before the population even starts to level off, they will also need everything that everyone else has, which will further increase our resource usage.

More people is what causes what we know as progress. If we have fewer people, progress will stop, because at some point everyone will have everything they could ever need. However, if we stop, physics starts to catch up to us, and then we have to increase our usage even more so that we don't get caught.

So we have to reduce the total population(which won't happen until everyone, everywhere, has everything they need), and reduce our total consumption(which won't happen until everyone, everywhere, has everything they need), but then we have to increase either our total population(so that material progress doesn't stop), or increase our total consumption(so that all the material progress up to that point wasn't a giant waste of time). All that while decreasing the impact we have on the habitat while increasing the efficiency with which we can use the energy. That has never happened.