Splinter is your home for news and opinions that challenge power in our political and economic system that's becoming more unhinged each and every day.
Doing it as fast as possible would crash the world economy because everything is setup up for oil. So it seems obvious what needs to happen, it’s a different story when you personally are now homeless and you just want a roof and food. We can do a lot better than we are though
The alternative, parts of the world will be uninhabitable. Always gotta think about the economy… no matter how many people this is going to kill, or how much biodiversity we lose along the way.
Is there any point of loss where we will say the economy isn’t important anymore, or do we have to be experiencing the loss already?
If you look at it on a case-by-case basis, it’s harder to catastrophize. Would the world economy collapse if petroleum-derived food additives vanished? No. Plastic bags? No. The vast volumes of cheap plastic packaging? No. Shipping? That’ll take a while. Fertilizers? Partial substitution can happen immediately, but a full changeover will take years. And so on through the list. You can rack and stack each case by its social value, how hard it will be to eliminate or replace, and the lead time needed to transition. Beyond that it’s engineering, planning and politics.
Doing it as fast as possible would crash the world economy because everything is setup up for oil. So it seems obvious what needs to happen, it’s a different story when you personally are now homeless and you just want a roof and food. We can do a lot better than we are though
The alternative, parts of the world will be uninhabitable. Always gotta think about the economy… no matter how many people this is going to kill, or how much biodiversity we lose along the way.
Is there any point of loss where we will say the economy isn’t important anymore, or do we have to be experiencing the loss already?
The problem is crashing the economy will kill a lot of people right now, no need to wait or come up with a better solution
If you look at it on a case-by-case basis, it’s harder to catastrophize. Would the world economy collapse if petroleum-derived food additives vanished? No. Plastic bags? No. The vast volumes of cheap plastic packaging? No. Shipping? That’ll take a while. Fertilizers? Partial substitution can happen immediately, but a full changeover will take years. And so on through the list. You can rack and stack each case by its social value, how hard it will be to eliminate or replace, and the lead time needed to transition. Beyond that it’s engineering, planning and politics.