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Renewable Tuesday: The World has Never Been Sustainable [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-03-18
We continue today with the first of six truths from Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie of Our World in Data. Humans have never been sustainable, often overloading their environments and driving species to extinction. In 1987, the UN defined sustainability as
meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
First, therefore, we must put an end to dire poverty, vicious oppression, many dread diseases, and so on. Second, we must rein ourselves in, abandoning environmental poisons, fossil fuels, overuse of natural resources, and much more that damages our entire world. Much of what we need comes under the heading of Renewable Energy, including solar, wind, geothermal, storage, EVs, heat pumps, agrivoltaics, and so on. All of them were far too expensive in the beginning, but each has seen momentous technological advances and huge drops in costs. We now have, among many examples, Norway and China showing us the way toward ending gas guzzler dominance on the roads, and the possibility, starting in Iceland, of using reactive minerals to capture and store CO 2 permanently.
Some have tried to pit these two goals of present and future need against each other, or to deny that one or the other or both is important or even real. But the message of this book is that we can do both if we actually want to.
We have the opportunity to be the first generation that achieves sustainability. Let’s take it.
This is the best time in human history to be alive. We have made astonishing progress in
Child mortality, down from nearly half to about 3% worldwide. Maternal mortality, down by a factor of more than 30. Life expectancy, up from 30 or 40 to about 80 in the richest countries, 70 worldwide. Hunger and malnutrition are still devastating to about 10% of the world’s population, down from 35% not long ago. There is in fact enough food for all. Famines are no longer natural events, but are exclusively manmade. Every day 300,000 people get access to electricity, clean water, and basic sanitation. This has been true every day for a decade. In 1820 only 10% of people worldwide could read. Now it is almost 90%, and more than 60% of girls finish basic schooling. In 1820 more than ¾ of the world lived in what we define today as dire poverty. Now it is about 10%. Not only the fraction living in poverty is declining, but the absolute numbers, too, by the billions.
But in accomplishing all of this undoubted good, we have also done vast damage.
Air pollution, killing 9 million annually Global Warming Deforestation Not just growing enough food, but doing it without vast damage Biodiversity loss Ocean plastics Overfishing
There are two extremely bad ideas that have some currency today, depopulation (impossible and beyond immoral) and degrowth (impossible).
The world is past Peak Child, and when current children reach old age will arrive at Peak Humanity. That could be 11 billion people in 2080. There is no viable way to speed that up, or reduce the peak. A decrease in population in the 22nd century is possible. Our descendants can talk about that as the time approaches. We can’t redistribute what we have to make everyone reasonably prosperous. We need five times the current Global Economic Product for that, and it has to be carbon negative until the world cools off to where it was before the Industrial Revolution.
We will look at each of the causes of damage in weeks to come, and the cures that the author and others propose.
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