The answer is simple. Consume less. If you have to consume (you gotta eat) then consume better (sustainably, regeneratively) or get ready for a hard crash. Getting to a sustainable place is hard for a bunch of reasons but up front and centre is the reality that, essentially, the entire planet operates on a model that assumes perpetual growth of consumption. The economy is a pyramid scheme of the first order. Works fine in an infinite world. Not so well once you come to terms with the fact that, for all practical purposes, we exist in a finite closed loop. Despite the moonshot dreams of Musk and his ilk to solve the problem by spreading our cancer off planet, at some point there will be a reckoning here on earth that will require us to find a balance or perish. That point seems to be getting nearer at an accelerating pace. We know the solution is accepting that, when it comes to “stuff”, there is a place, not that far beyond subsistence, where less is truly more. We also should realize by now that we have a deeply rooted psychological “defect” that causes us to judge our satisfaction by relative comparison. If we are starving we think, rightly I would suggest, that becoming the one with enough food to survive will bring us to a better place. When have enough food we surmise , perhaps still rightly, that having safe, stable shelter will bring us to a better place. When operating at this level, more may indeed be better. Unfortunately too many of us for too long have been operating at a level that is so far beyond this that we have emptied the larder. We know this intellectually yet we seem not to have the ability to suppress the drive that still tells us more is better, even when we are drowning in stuff and the evidence is staring us in the face that getting more stuff is about to kill us. The disconnect between our individual actions and the fate of the planet and the life it supports is vast. It is so vast that it allows almost everyone, no matter where they may stand in the relative order of consumption, to rationalize abdicating personal responsibility for the problem. Until those of us consuming well beyond the level of basic necessity acknowledge that we have done nothing of note to deserve the privileged place we occupy and agree to accept less as enough the hard crash will be our repeating fate until we ultimately bring on the crash from which there is no recovery. We are indeed our own worst enemy. Don’t despair. A new year is coming. Resolve to do something really hard. Stop blaming the other and work honestly to be the example of a better way.
Seems to me that we do want to buy what he's selling. Everyone associates petroleum with gasoline and diesel which is bad...
What about the things that people will not do without, like plastics and the millions of things that are made cheaply of plastic? Lubrication is another, did you know some electric motors have oil in them to help cool and insulate them? And then their are the synthetic flammable fabrics such as polyester, oh wait, never mind on that example. Baby oil, which is mineral oil, and I don't know where that comes from.
But you do see the problem of an oil-free society, and how, without major rethinks among the world population, and some decent substitutes it is not going to happen.
I like this line: "Demand-siders dream of bicycling to small homes that keep warm from body heat." We call those sleeping bags.
I also like the comparison between demand and supply siders, and the insights about upfront carbon and overall resource usage that many folks seem to be blind to.
Al Jaber took a lot of heat at the COP 28, but he is right about low-input petroleum being a far better choice than high-input like the Tar Sands oil. The demand for oil is not going to go away for many, many decades, if ever--it is way too useful and many products beyond transportation utilize it. So, yes, we have to become very efficient and even miserly when using it, and try to make it last for centuries perhaps until we learn how to replace it.
Al Jaber also got the big oil interests to agree upon methane management--a big success that the critics ignore.
Lloyd wrote: "It’s up to us to work the demand side. We know this goes; we saw this movie in 2020 at the pandemic's peak. As I wrote in my book Living the 1.5 Degree Lifestyle, 'We saw what happens when we stopped consuming during the pandemic: Oil companies lost billions.' "
This has to be the most idiotic, incompetent, misguided, and nescient comment you have *EVER* made, full stop.
A few billion dollars in lost profit from oil companies pales in comparison to the $9+ ***TRILLION*** shelled out by the U.S. Treasury in an attempt to keep the country's economy afloat (which was unnecessary to destroy, BTW.) You're such a climate zealot you're willing to overlook the trillions in federal debt we added as a result of a failed attempt to stop the pandemic—along with the loss of millions of jobs, small businesses, their retirement plans (or to pass on to the next generation), dreams, hopes, sleepful nights, and more. And you want to permanently replicate this lockdown? To what end? I've yet to hear or see a tree that grows money out of it—have you? So where is the money going to come from to pay people NOT to work, NOT to consume?
Or is the plan—as others have hinted at both here and back on TreeHugger—to "do away" with a few billion people so that the rich can be our new overlords in the New World Order fiefdom, while developing nations will be granted direct monetary payments from our tax dollars to leapfrog traditional energy infrastructure and go straight to nothing but intermittent, highly variable, and unreliable renewables??
Modern Western society will not—NOT—go quietly into the night just because their elected officials demand they lower their standards of living by a few decades. They will fight, and fight hard, to preserve what they have and what is NOT a crisis no matter how manufactured the media tries making it out to be. So will all those people need to be "hushed up" as I hinted at above?
Good luck with all of that, Lloyd. The pandemic lockdown response was a COLOSSAL clusterfuck of ineptitude and failure, and We The People will not allow our leaders to force their idiotic and ineffective control measures on us any longer. Wanting to repeat this failure, and keep it repeating forever and ever, says everything anyone ever needs to know about how unbased, illogical, and nescient you really are.
While I absolutely agree demand reduction is vital, but you are missing one key point: the fossil fuel industry is fighting demand-side reductions every step of the way. They do this in the US with pre-emption laws preventing cities from banning new gas hook-ups, they do this with things like Aramco's recent plan to hook Africa on oil (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/27/revealed-saudi-arabia-plan-poor-countries-oil), and many other ways besides. By not mentioning this it feels like you are somewhat letting the oil and gas companies of the hook, though I am sure that is not your intention.
While we shouldn't buy what they are selling, attacking oil and gas companies for their actions in trying to kill us all is essential. The IEA concluded in 2021 that there was no need for any new fossil fuel extraction globally; we should listen and end all new oil and gas licensing, Insulate building, install heat pumps, enable active transport and public transport etc. It is time to just stop oil.
Thanks for introducing me to Nick Grant - those comments of his you quoted are compelling. I went back to read his original posts. Bit depressed they are so old yet still so relevant.
The answer is simple. Consume less. If you have to consume (you gotta eat) then consume better (sustainably, regeneratively) or get ready for a hard crash. Getting to a sustainable place is hard for a bunch of reasons but up front and centre is the reality that, essentially, the entire planet operates on a model that assumes perpetual growth of consumption. The economy is a pyramid scheme of the first order. Works fine in an infinite world. Not so well once you come to terms with the fact that, for all practical purposes, we exist in a finite closed loop. Despite the moonshot dreams of Musk and his ilk to solve the problem by spreading our cancer off planet, at some point there will be a reckoning here on earth that will require us to find a balance or perish. That point seems to be getting nearer at an accelerating pace. We know the solution is accepting that, when it comes to “stuff”, there is a place, not that far beyond subsistence, where less is truly more. We also should realize by now that we have a deeply rooted psychological “defect” that causes us to judge our satisfaction by relative comparison. If we are starving we think, rightly I would suggest, that becoming the one with enough food to survive will bring us to a better place. When have enough food we surmise , perhaps still rightly, that having safe, stable shelter will bring us to a better place. When operating at this level, more may indeed be better. Unfortunately too many of us for too long have been operating at a level that is so far beyond this that we have emptied the larder. We know this intellectually yet we seem not to have the ability to suppress the drive that still tells us more is better, even when we are drowning in stuff and the evidence is staring us in the face that getting more stuff is about to kill us. The disconnect between our individual actions and the fate of the planet and the life it supports is vast. It is so vast that it allows almost everyone, no matter where they may stand in the relative order of consumption, to rationalize abdicating personal responsibility for the problem. Until those of us consuming well beyond the level of basic necessity acknowledge that we have done nothing of note to deserve the privileged place we occupy and agree to accept less as enough the hard crash will be our repeating fate until we ultimately bring on the crash from which there is no recovery. We are indeed our own worst enemy. Don’t despair. A new year is coming. Resolve to do something really hard. Stop blaming the other and work honestly to be the example of a better way.
Seems to me that we do want to buy what he's selling. Everyone associates petroleum with gasoline and diesel which is bad...
What about the things that people will not do without, like plastics and the millions of things that are made cheaply of plastic? Lubrication is another, did you know some electric motors have oil in them to help cool and insulate them? And then their are the synthetic flammable fabrics such as polyester, oh wait, never mind on that example. Baby oil, which is mineral oil, and I don't know where that comes from.
But you do see the problem of an oil-free society, and how, without major rethinks among the world population, and some decent substitutes it is not going to happen.
Thanks for the credit Lloyd, I thought those blog posts were ignored! Really looking forward you your book.
I like this line: "Demand-siders dream of bicycling to small homes that keep warm from body heat." We call those sleeping bags.
I also like the comparison between demand and supply siders, and the insights about upfront carbon and overall resource usage that many folks seem to be blind to.
Al Jaber took a lot of heat at the COP 28, but he is right about low-input petroleum being a far better choice than high-input like the Tar Sands oil. The demand for oil is not going to go away for many, many decades, if ever--it is way too useful and many products beyond transportation utilize it. So, yes, we have to become very efficient and even miserly when using it, and try to make it last for centuries perhaps until we learn how to replace it.
Al Jaber also got the big oil interests to agree upon methane management--a big success that the critics ignore.
Lloyd wrote: "It’s up to us to work the demand side. We know this goes; we saw this movie in 2020 at the pandemic's peak. As I wrote in my book Living the 1.5 Degree Lifestyle, 'We saw what happens when we stopped consuming during the pandemic: Oil companies lost billions.' "
This has to be the most idiotic, incompetent, misguided, and nescient comment you have *EVER* made, full stop.
A few billion dollars in lost profit from oil companies pales in comparison to the $9+ ***TRILLION*** shelled out by the U.S. Treasury in an attempt to keep the country's economy afloat (which was unnecessary to destroy, BTW.) You're such a climate zealot you're willing to overlook the trillions in federal debt we added as a result of a failed attempt to stop the pandemic—along with the loss of millions of jobs, small businesses, their retirement plans (or to pass on to the next generation), dreams, hopes, sleepful nights, and more. And you want to permanently replicate this lockdown? To what end? I've yet to hear or see a tree that grows money out of it—have you? So where is the money going to come from to pay people NOT to work, NOT to consume?
Or is the plan—as others have hinted at both here and back on TreeHugger—to "do away" with a few billion people so that the rich can be our new overlords in the New World Order fiefdom, while developing nations will be granted direct monetary payments from our tax dollars to leapfrog traditional energy infrastructure and go straight to nothing but intermittent, highly variable, and unreliable renewables??
Modern Western society will not—NOT—go quietly into the night just because their elected officials demand they lower their standards of living by a few decades. They will fight, and fight hard, to preserve what they have and what is NOT a crisis no matter how manufactured the media tries making it out to be. So will all those people need to be "hushed up" as I hinted at above?
Good luck with all of that, Lloyd. The pandemic lockdown response was a COLOSSAL clusterfuck of ineptitude and failure, and We The People will not allow our leaders to force their idiotic and ineffective control measures on us any longer. Wanting to repeat this failure, and keep it repeating forever and ever, says everything anyone ever needs to know about how unbased, illogical, and nescient you really are.
Hi Lloyd,
While I absolutely agree demand reduction is vital, but you are missing one key point: the fossil fuel industry is fighting demand-side reductions every step of the way. They do this in the US with pre-emption laws preventing cities from banning new gas hook-ups, they do this with things like Aramco's recent plan to hook Africa on oil (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/27/revealed-saudi-arabia-plan-poor-countries-oil), and many other ways besides. By not mentioning this it feels like you are somewhat letting the oil and gas companies of the hook, though I am sure that is not your intention.
While we shouldn't buy what they are selling, attacking oil and gas companies for their actions in trying to kill us all is essential. The IEA concluded in 2021 that there was no need for any new fossil fuel extraction globally; we should listen and end all new oil and gas licensing, Insulate building, install heat pumps, enable active transport and public transport etc. It is time to just stop oil.
Thanks for introducing me to Nick Grant - those comments of his you quoted are compelling. I went back to read his original posts. Bit depressed they are so old yet still so relevant.