Inventor / engineer in the utility solar PV industry here. I'm afraid that unless we price in negative, external costs at the market level, prosocial inventions won't be able to compete in the current system. The problem is a capitalist system corrupted by psychopaths. I've lost hope that anything can be done until this version of capitalism collapses.
I was a controls engineer for over 20 years. You are correct that our current system will continue to drive the crisises we see today. Profit is the only metric used in industry which is fundamentally apposed to environmental and human safety. I was always at odds with project management and field service because i put a high priority on operator safety in my equipment design. My greatest tool was safety annalize standards I could apply to the design.
Yes, I read your story as something that can only be experienced within an “industry” narrative. We are mostly unable to imagine tools or resources (stuff we use) _outside_ of whatever we call “modern”. We may think that earlier societies were “stupid” or economically constrained _not_ to scale their needs towards an industrial scale. What we for 150+ years just call “natural” - There’s no other way… Well… Our (western) culture _is_ “older” than the modern era. We obviously brought _some_ ideas forward from this 2500 years known timeline. Which ideas weren’t? Why? Who stopped what? I obviously don’t know, but so many like mr. Hagens point to such questions. Maybe again, the questions are more important to us than the quick answers…?
In the Neil Howe book The Fourth Turning, I believe these changes, and changes to capitalism in its current end stage setting, discussed here may become reality by the early 2030s. We will see. But I do agree that change is absolutely mandatory.
@@Dan5482 I agree - and base my other comment here on that. Why I “discredit” modernism as the era it is, comes from it covering the timeline of “modern” politics, economics and scale of human activities. In a raw sense, ecological constraints are “social” by sheer emergence. “We” created and realised them, and no individual (government, corporate nor person) can autonomously relieve them. That’s where my issues with “modern” national borders, currencies, markets and legal boundaries come into play - but _not_ by leaping into anarchy. If real power now resides within international finance and corporate entities - taking agency back to meat-and-blood people is very different to engaging in wars against other just-as-real people. What about our very powerful legal entities…?
Thanks Nate, possible addition to goldilocks tech - as low tech as possible. Low tech advances have the greatest leverage for the least affect in the other mentioned parameters. The brick making frame is a good example. Low tech but provides consistently shaped bricks that are easier to build with. This will challenge the optimal foraging principle that urges humans to use thinking, energy inputs etc to increase returns further. And here we are. In overshoot. Also, any furtherance of tech increases complexity, inputs, resources, energy usage etc, exactly what we are trying to avoid, even with a goldilocks approach. Our best bet may be to go back to the low tech (low energy/resources etc) advancements already made and attempt to improve. Of course any increase in efficiency will create Jeavon’s paradox and increase resource usage. And all these goldilocks choices will require a shift in human consciousness to a more connected view where individual gain is not the leading driver. The dairy farm you mentioned is a classic example. Fully aware of the damage but has more personal (seperate from the whole) priorities. Education has no effect here, and I feel for the most part, it is the same in a great majority of adults. Education must start with the children but we don’t have that much time for generational change and self interested and misguided adults are influencing this opportunity! The Australian Aboriginal culture had been able to sustain for tens of thousands of years- the longest living continuous culture in the history of humanity. Maybe there is something to learn here? There is a prophecy from that culture - white man will come for 10 generations and then it will return to the old ways. White man came in 1788…
What about having a store of goldilocks technologies appropriate for certain situations. Where's there's an excess or pollution of some material/resource then use goldilocks technology X, once the resource/pollution is under control or used up, then shut it down or scale it down. Then go about and manage each situation like that.
Some of the best techniques to deal with climate change & land degradation are using Stone Age and Iron Age tech. Building rocky check dams or woody beaver dam analogs and digging swales can retain water on landscapes and recharge aquifers. Preventing grazing can allow shade plants to grow in semidesert, reducing temperature & storing water. In southern Spain, simple gates & canals are used to farm saltwater marshes. The irrigation canals are used for seawater to grow salt tolerant crops, or halophytes. The biomass yield per acre is 3x soy. With zero pesticides, fertilizer, or fresh water used. From Africa to the Mideast to India, salt marshes and mangroves can feed people and stop coastline erosion.
Loved this frankly! I'm an engineer trying to develop a durable way to generate home electricity from multiple sources. I've already started the simplification lifestyle by building a permaculture homestead. We sustainably harvest wood for our kitchen stove and I'm trying to harness more of that heat to try and generate electricity. In stead of storing electricity in lithium batteries I'll be storing heat in a sand battery. Hoping to soon have something to show for my words. In the meantime, keep up the awesome work you're doing!
@@dbadagna A sand battery stores heat in stead of electricity. So in my case I would store the heat from my stove, or from a solar boiler, and slowly use it to power a turbine. For now I think it's a little less efficient than lithium batteries, but it doesn't need any funny materials or mining.
Superuseful Frankly podcast Nate. As an engineer I would add to the list the quality of the products and the focus on durability. It is not only about the obvious environmental and economical advantages, but about the meaningfulness of the creation, the artisan bound that make our work worthy beyond the usefulness of our products. That would foster the development and the improvement of our gadgets.
@tinoyb9294 Why? I remember a time when product durability was a key value for people. I just found an all metal craftsman circular saw that my father owned during the 1960s. It sat in a box for 55 years until I discovered it after his passing. It worked fine, and I will use it. Durability at its finest. P.S. I first saw this tool as a 5 year old in 1965 as dad cut wood for a fort he built for us.
I've started replacing as many "modern" products as I can with old ones. Mostly furniture and tools so far. Love the quality and enjoy being able to repair them. "Time is money" doesn't factor into my decisions when it comes to quality. I scrounge, rescue and repair things because it brings me joy and happiness that I'm no longer dumping stuff to replace with more poor quality junk, just because it's cheaper to live that way.
@@mr.makeit4037I have thought about this a lot, but personally I think there is too much of an obsession with things "lasting long". I think it's ok for products to decay for instance. Plastic was sold to us as something that wouldn't break down, and now we are dealing with the consequences. Stainless steel requires a lot of energy to manufacture, lots of stone products require intensive mining correct? Maybe it's ok to have wood tools that wont last forever and eventually decay.... Maybe it's ok to have tools that aren't 100% efficient, but are far lower cost to create. Horses aren't the best transportation by a longshot, but they are probably more eco friendly than cars, but horses die and can't really be repaired lol, but that's probably a good thing. They help us, and eventually they pass on, unlike cars that either get scrapped or sit in a field to slowly decay, where it can take 100s of years for things to break down. I think if we slowed down then it would be ok for things to break and decay. Not everything needs to be built to last 10,000 years. If you can build something that lasts a long time with little resources and little environmental impact then I would say that is goldilocks tech. Like, wood can last generations, and can take hard abuse in tools. That's pretty goldilocks tech right there right?
It's funny the juxtaposition between this conversation and some recent adverts I've seen on TV, for the quest headset (to help someone to build some DIY furniture?!) and for smart fridges. I don't think I've ever thought to myself "Man, I need a smart fridge in my life - to tell me what's in my fridge". As you ask your various guests "what would you do if you could wave a magic wand?", my response would be to eradicate all forms of advertising. I'm pretty sure that if everyone wasn't under a constant barrage of pressure to buy all this new shiny stuff, we'd realise as a society that we're perfectly ok with all the stuff we've already got.
We never left the stone age, we still use grinding wheels, sandpaper, emery cloth, sharpening stones, honing compound, these things and more today are generally using man made "stone", but it wasn't very long ago that we were still using natural stone for them. A problem comes up for me with making things like sandpaper, sanding cloth, of what kind of natural adhesive can be used. In the past some sand was put on a piece of cloth or leather without any adhesive. Some kind of natural wax, like beeswax, can probably be used for honing compound. What you would use for the honing material is an interesting problem that I've wanted to experiment with but haven't had the time or energy. I think you need to avoid saying "we" don't want to go back to the stone age, as metals are very resource expensive and using them very sparingly makes a lot of sense if you want a long term sustainable system. I am not in your "we" with this pronouncement. A piece of flint, chert, obsidian, etc, chipped and flaked as in the distant past can still make a variety of useful tools. You don't always have suitable stone locally available for that, but you may not have much scrap metal or ore and energy locally available either. And that brick making device, is using a lot of relatively heavy pieces of commercially made steel, was no doubt using a lot of fossil fuel made and run tools to build it as well. It does not look like goldilocks technology at all to me. If you want to see an alternative way of making bricks and roof tile, check out the "Primitive Technology" website on youtube. He isn't making large amounts because he is using muscle power, simple forms for these shapes, and a wood fired kiln that he made with bricks he made. He has also tried making iron, made a very crude small knife from his efforts on this, has also had failures, making iron from ore on a small scale is possible but it is not as simple as making bricks and tiles, though that also requires knowledge and practice. I think his local source of iron ore is not rich enough to give very good results, but having suitable ore is a problem to deal with. Yes, there is a lot of scrap metal we can recycle, but if you actually try doing this as I have, you are likely to realize very fast that a charcoal forge can go through a lot of wood, and if you have large pieces of steel, cutting off a small piece by hand is going to take a significant amount of time and energy. We aren't going to be using power tools with abrasive cutting wheels, or oxy acetylene torches to cut steel with. We aren't even going to have hand powered hack saws. The "primitive technology" man has experimented with different ways of making charcoal, and different simple hand powered blowers of natural local organic materials to get the needed temperatures. He has built small structures with the brick and tile he has made, and also used thatch and other organic materials to build small structures. Your dismissal of thatch makes no sense to me, you have to use what is available and thatch is still used to some degree in different parts of the world. You may not have a good local source of clay and or enough wood to fire roof tiles and make bricks, either. in the age of making iron with charcoal, of making bronze the same way, mines were exhausted and forests were cut down with doing this and also making bricks, tile, in later times with this, glass was being made, it requires a lot of wood, pots, new farmland to replaced exhausted soil, and building materials for structures, heating and cooking. I don't want to be part destroying forests this way. Even without metals, farming and building with just stone tools in the Americas led to forests being cut down, soil damaged, the civilization collapsing. Some of these made a lot of lime plaster, which can use a lot of fuel. I think this is really showing that your dismissal of stone tools as "too cold", has a major problem, when civilizations have grown and collapsed using stone tools. Whatever we use, if we want the use to be sustainable, we have to think very carefully about how that is going to happen. Population growth is a major issue with that. We have only had stable population with Neolithic technology and farming, in climates that were relatively harsh, which I would guess was part of prevented the population from growing- but there was also still fighting between different tribes that also no doubt had a role in that.
Great topic. I think this is one of the most important matters is how we techno -primates can use tech with enviro-harmonious mindset. Because if we use tech in the service of life and nature then that seems like "good" tech.
Need not Fear Nate you have So opened up my exploring mind that am now organising my clise community meditation group not only in our relax meditations sessions in house but am organising group walks in mornings for those who like a wee bit of a challenge when finding beautiful secret places away from our normal busy tracks and in the afternoon an hour before meditation just to stroll in our flat walking trails along an estuary filled with Godwits Black Swans Cormorants Stilts etc And in doing so our meditation circle had grown to embrace not only ourselves but to truly appreciate how our natural world awakens us to take care of All living things 🕊🌏😇💖
I am listening to this Frankly and having feelings of solidarity to the awareness of our predicament as humans. Given what we know about the diversity and complexity of modern human beings and trappings, we would be naive to expect change to come easily. But to know ourselves better is a prerequisite to getting into the more expansive and greater thinking on how to approach collective change. I applaud the organization of this prerequisite to a conversation we need to be having.
I think it may have been George Monbiot who coined the phrase public luxury, private sufficiency and this maybe the key for switching our attention from novelty and crap to a daily dose of luxury, parks, public swimming baths, public transport but done in a way that it becomes inspirational and say better than your car.
A quotation to share: "There are ships traveling from America to Europe full of biscuits and ships traveling from Europe to America also full of biscuits. As Herman Daly once said, why can't they exchange recipes?" -- William Rees, 2019
John Kempf of Advancing Eco Agriculture says that some of the farms he helps manage are now cycling nutrients with no required inputs. Also he mentions a few concepts that would potentially multiply the eroei, other benefits of this cycle is that it creates soil, cycles carbon and produces more nutritious, healthy and shelf stable fruit vegetables meat and fibre. Agriculture is the most likely energy source of the future.
Well I am 75 next month and grew up in Britain. We had a galvanized dustbin and it was emptied weekly and often not full. The reason is packaging. Everything is over packaged and mostly made from plastic. I buy a gallon of milk. It’s in a plastic container. The cashier asks do I want a bag? I always say no thanks it’s got a handle. But in my town we don’t have recycling, we used to but it cost money so often you can buy a product in a box and from Amazon that box will now be in another box. As a middle class kid I had a school uniform and one pair of jeans and one pair of shoes for school and a pair of pumps. If my jeans got holes they were repaired and I did not get new ones unless they were now beyond repair or I had grown out of them. Kept the old ones to repair the next pair. Now have loads of stuff and as do 4+billion other people. The other 4 billion want to live like us. This is crazy. Our replacement species after the 6th extinction will be partly made of plastic!😮
There are people in China melting plastic to "recycle" it over open vats whose lungs are coated with plastic such they are dying from pulmonary fibrosis. :(
The Japanese people have a strong cultural connection with the concept of Mottainai, which sort of translates to “what a waste” or “don’t waste.” If you read about this further you will find this cultural artifact is tied into Shinto and Buddhism. Material things have intrinsic value and represent interconnectedness. This guitar has a spirit imbued by the living tree from which it was shaped into its current form. It is not a Western way of thinking, I understand.
I see the high value in relating the guitar to the tree. As an atheist, I'm unable to believe in a "spirit," but I don't want to dismiss the Japanese concept you describe. Perhaps I can replace spirit with a "sacredness" for the guitars former existence as a living entity. My version is a bit awkward, and could be improved upon. I'll research the concept some more. Thanks for contributing 🙂
@user-tw4un8tt6d It is really interesting tho that my sister in laws Japanese daughter in law will have nothing to do with anything secondhand, not even a childrens book! It's brand new everything.
Thank you Nate! Excellent again. Out here paddling from NC to the Gulf. Raising water crisis awareness on my watch. River Warrior Documentary 2024 coming soon!
I know it’s unsavory to say out loud but steel hand tools and draft animals can cover so much of our needs and require only basic supply chains and relatively low carbon emissions. The difference between iron farming tools and steel ones is a pretty significant difference. I see steel hand tools as the pinnacle of goldilocks tech even if it would be super unpopular. It’s not 100% renewable but human muscle is renewable and the externality of manual labor is health benefits from exercise. The majority of humans lived lives with far worse technology than affordable steel hand tools. I think solar thermal systems for heating and cooking are also probably the most practical. Electricity is cool but I think it’s not strictly speaking necessary (most humans never lived with electricity). Using solar thermal systems would have very short supply chains, not worry about power grids, and aren’t as fragile. I think talking about legitimate goldilocks tech is something unpopular since people basically want more and more complex tech regardless of the externalities and strategic/ecological limitations. Critical thinking and muscle power seem to be the bottlenecks of human acceptance for goldilocks tech.
There are no known sustainable ways to generate electricity. Also stop exaggerating with the stone age rhetoric. We are in the iron age still as it never really ended (steel is 95% of our metal usage) and would end up still being in the iron age. As long as people can make food shelter clothes and pursue things like art and religious/spiritual practices there’s really no valid reason to keep doubling down on unsustainable technologies. It all boils down to people wanting ease and not thinking about externalities or depletion. The economy of 1976 Canada was still sourcing the majority of its energy from oil and gas. I expect that we will just burn all the viable coal oil and gas rather than stop willingly in all fairness tho.
@@civitasparisiorum-o8u - As I have been saying for several decades, electricity will be the last to go. Before then, we will have started down the dieoff slope and much of our food will be local. I grow a lot of food with less than 20 liters of gasoline for my tiller and weed-whacker and a few kilowatts of electricity for my irrigation pump.
I@@evilryutaroproi agree and am quite fearful that the time to start living a frugal life where using some technology like solar panels and staying to grow a garden and improve yr local biosphere and start sharing knowledge and tools and currency as long as it can buy useful stuff to survive the next decade or two would be a great start❤
Perhaps an additional category would be something to do with aesthetics. We have a trommel style sifter on our farm that we use for compost and earthen building materials. It runs on electric motors, is quiet, has many slow moving parts, and many people find it enjoyable to watch. Kinetic art with a function. Thanks for all you do!
Thanks Nate. Don't forget that we are undergoing a spiritual revolution and when competed all these points will fall in to place. And frankly, the inventions in a century to come will be literately out of this world and will be aligned with the common goal to rebuild the mother planet. The far future is much brighter than one thinks.
Thank you, this checklist is extremely useful. I and many other engineers will find it extremely helpful. I would add repairability. For example, many vehicles today are not repairable. Some cars require the front taken apart to replace the headlight bulbs. $500 to change a light bulb?
I just changed a parking light bulb in my 24 year old car. Bit fiddly but at least I didn't have to dismantle the whole front end! That's my worry about replacing the old bomb with an EV. Will I still be able to repair and replace parts myself?
@@gilbertosughrue3766 i have a fiat 500 and bought new headlight bulbs for $25 at the autoparts store. the left one was no problem, but the right one I have to remove the coolant tank, and loosen a few other things no too bad. took an hour for me. but still I hear horror stories about this!
@@gilbertosughrue3766very logical question, I think about that too. I think EVs are more repairable in the long run; they are actually simpler than internal combustion, but I suspect their relative unfamiliarity gives us the illusion of greater complexity. Battery packs are fairly modular too-essentially it’s just a black box with specifications re: voltage and available current, capacity is negotiable. As an anecdote my grandfather used an electric golf cart for light work and transport around his farm. In 30 years of heavy daily use, the golf cart itself was replaced only once, because of theft. The second cart needed a battery pack replacement only once, and it used simple and cheap Sealed Lead Acid (SLA) packs. Really not bad. Overall a beautifully simple, useful, and reliable machine.
The most important invention of our times may be the “restoration economy “. That would look like abundant resources available for the needed work and an accurate accounting and reward system.
For the last 50 years I have believed in the Great Train Wreck Model of Modern Civilization and the End of the Golden Age. The Dark Age is coming. Don't even pretend this will end well. The four horsemen are saddling up!
Planned obsolescence is one of the biggest reasons I don't believe any of the rhetoric by corporatists/technocrats/WEF about how they want to stop "climate change".
Nate, it would be phenomenal to have an interview with Jill Stein on the podcast. She is the only candidate who vocally expresses concern over climate change, and as someone for whom this is a large issue, her position is appreciated. However, she co-signs a lot of “Green Growth” model ideas (including switching the economy to 100% green energy, transferring jobs from fossil to renewable, etc.) which have been thoroughly weakened from the likes of yourself, Art Berman and others. Would make a great and pertinent pod.
Great episode and compliment to your discussion with Rockstom! I feel like testing applications under scrutiny of folks applying these guidelines could start building some fun stuff. Determining the midground between superhot and too cold really requires trials and strict oversight (by like-minded experts). Lots of wonderful open-source applications have been ignored or hijacked by folks convinced economic growth should prioritize scalable, net positive impacts in global change impacts. Perhaps socio-cultural/social-behavioral innovation is requisite to getting the right middle ground for the world ahead...
The societal context will determine which technology will/can/should be used... Some tech relies heavily on available infrastructure while other technologies do not i.e. concrete vs compressed earth block aka industrial vs vernacular.
Hi Nate, great frankly. I would add "soil health" which obviously = planet health and human health. Soil health is fundamentally dependant on photosynthesis and fungi (only known way to effectively remove CO2 from our atmosphere + only known way to put nutrients back into our food) So the check would be ---------- will this increase green plants, photosynthesis, soil health and our health ?
The local family farm where I sometimes pick vegetables covers the soil where they grow their crops with black plastic sheeting, I guess as a clever, modern way to deal with weeds. They've done this for many years now, and, between growing seasons, the sheeting, having weathered due to the sunlight and rain, gets partly plowed back into the soil. At the edges of the fields I can see a large amount of tiny black particles, indicating that the plastic sheeting has broken down into microplastics. A 2020 study found micro- and nanoplastics in fruits and vegetables (especially apples and carrots, whose roots are more porous) in amounts ranging from 52,050 to 233,000 plastic particles per gram (!) of fruit or vegetable.
Nate's really refined his message lately. Great look at the 'other side' and giving the devil his due as far as cornucopian thinking, marketeers relying on innovation to dig us out of this mess, and clear caveats to that perspective
China has put the first 100mega watt sodium based grid scale battery on their grid. I was just reading about that this morning. They got that chemistry into mass production quickly.
Maybe a good amount of energy to use long term for technology (outside of feeding ourselves) would be roughly the amount of energy our body needs, so technology use doubles the amount of energy needed. 2000 kcal per day is 850 kWh per year. Coincidentally, this isn't far off the total renewable electricity produced today when multiplied by 8 billion. Based on that you could start budgeting. For example X% for heating/cooling, Y% for transportation, Z% for communication and computation, etc.
I read about this in the book Half Earth Socialism, I agree it would be a good starting point but socialism ain’t gonna fly until there’s a revolution or a “great simplification”.
I think we have left the Holocene, and nowadays we are in the Anthropocene era. I deeply wish to find some hope on the future both for Earth and it ecosystems. Thank you for your kindness.
MY first thought is to add something to the effect of "locally adapted" or "fitted to the bioregion". I am a bit uncomfortable with the term scaleable (appeals to the growth mindset) and would prefer replicable as that implies the ability to adapt and apply the technology to unique local conditions.
Nate, I think this is a great guide! One thing i might critique is the maslow hierarchy idea. Indigenous culture have always had novel toys, art pieces and other things that are important to religion, etc. I realize you were talking about the polyester plushy-esque toys in the airports, but i don’t think novelty is something we should reduce. We need to find creative and ecological ways to entertain ourselves. And indeed I am optimistic about that because humans are incredibly good at imagination, creativity and resourcefulness!
Your focus on technology and economics is really important and useful. If only! As a former history grad I have to point out the other people driving development in technology and economics are the military. Whether it was fighting off the huns on horses or some advanced nuclear superpower, generals needed an economy to support a powerful army and some ingenious technological superiority to deliver a crushing blow. Maybe sometime in the future the military might see renewables as the way to win wars, but until then they will be the ones retarding sustainable technological development and eco-friendly economies. Alternatively we could look at what's causing all the wars.
What is causing wars right now and what will most likely cause wars in the future, yes. I suspect many nation states are already aware but do not take action.
Subsidies are not always negatives. I am in Panama where subsidized cooking gas has prevented deforestation. In many places wood for cooking, has resulted in loose of trees to prevent landslides and damage to the watershed.
recent reporting about the negative impacts of synthetic impacts on the human, have led me to try to avoid them when possible. For example, replacing the stretchy form fitting t-shirt with a 100% cotton t-shirt, to avoid synthetic to skin transfer of undesired chemicals. Almost all places grow some kind of fruit, which can, be made into juice, which, can be made into vinegar. Besides, culinary use, vinegar is a disinfectant which can be used in a number of ways. In my home I use it to clean not only countertops but also contaminated surfaces like cutting boards or moldy showers.
In short, the framework definitions currently in use call anything that is not in the service of profit an "externality". There is no profit, no stock market, no technology on a planet with no life. Nothing is truly an "externality", if the goal is technologies in the service of life, aka, making the ecosystem healthy. Second, the appropriateness of a new, or new and "improved" technology depends in part on the state of the biosphere across numbers that approximate metrics of ecological health. I do not believe that is "bimodal" - technologically/ economically driving human activity that is immediately very rewarding, but as Dr. Johan Rockstrom pointed out in TGS 134, driving us past planetary boundaries into overshoot, OR back to the stone age. Given the current pace of, and apparent ongoing acceleration of biosphere destruction, I believe most ecologically appropriate technologies are going to have to be significant overshoot reducing ones currently. Ms. Benyus made many excellent points in TGS 135, but capitalism is required to make profit the metric of success. Period.
This all feels very abstract. I think we're going to be dealing this concrete issues very soon. I can appreciate the view from 40,000 feet, but to me, we need to focus on the base of Maslow's Hierarchy: air, water, shelter, food. I don't really see things on your list that address that! I think people must take personal control of their food supply, preferably by growing with others of like mind, or working out trading with neighbours. The entire long-haul transportation system and the industrial agriculture system are horribly exposed to energy shocks, such as reduced diesel imports, which Art Berman sees as soon as 2027.
Here in Cleveland, Ohio, USA, more than 250,000 customers (a quarter of the population of Cuyahoga County) have been without power for days because a horrible storm knocked over several hundred power poles, knocking them over like toothpicks. And the weather isn't going to be getting any better soon!
Great assessment of this video, by the way. From the number self-identifying as engineers in the comments here, it seems that a significant proportion of Nate's viewers are techno-solutionists, as, I guess, he is also.
Easy insta-fix to save a little without even having to improve anything would be to stop intentionally making stuff worse. As "planned osolence", intentionally preventing repair, forcing a new buy by phasing out service, etc. and all the social pressure mechanisms to incentivise completely unnecessary consumption to maximize profits
I teach appropriate technology as part of a permaculture program. To me, the future of technology could be based on ecology as resource depletion, particularly crude oil, kicks in. No guarantees of course, and if the same thinking and motivations that we use now are applied to future technologies then we're screwed. I'm particularly concerned that goldilocks tech gets twisted to some sort of AI led biotech nightmare.
I appreciate your efforts here, and it's all right on the money. The problem is that humans are just another animal on this planet, and technology can not overcome the basic instinct to procreate. You need technology to reduce the desire to increase the number of humans on the planet if you want more than just humans, trees, and cows on the planet. Alas, I think it's too late for that.
@tinoyb9294 Only 10 years ago the world population was expected to level out at 11 billion around 2100. But the third world has adopted family planning faster than predicted and the population growth is slowing quickly, so maybe too little too late. It shows that humans are not just about procreation, however, so maybe cause for hope regardless?
Nate I admit energy is the biggest problem without a huge teleology advancement which is likely years away and may never happen. Ans reducing such likely will be impossible as I tried to teach minimalism and my kids know this but others resist. I also teach people to seek out and buy into their local organic farms and this at least is finding traction and buy local day exists out here at least once a year. I also push building a compost system as even if one never uses that compose the trees and plants around it do. These ideas in the second paragraph get more traction but most of those I speak with create very little and work for someone else. So getting them to start buying local reduce stuff and try to get out of debt which is another issue with the slanted economy, is what most watching this need and can do. And maybe a Frankly can look at this, what non inventors or little poor folk just trying to get by can do, where the idea of 'just insulate" isn't easy because they have maintenance problems on their home they have to fix first or rent. This is because we want to help too, but lack those resources others have likely because our value system is already aligned with that rebooting of the culture. Hope this helps.
Share economy: in liue of each person/family having a unique car, washing machine, dryer, etc. we have shared appliances, car pooling, etc. We currently have the computational capacity to manufacture less and share technology more.
Mechanical clocks?! Timekeeping is so important for basic societal function in cities, and all modern clocks are relient on grids and heavy industry. We need more clock makers!
I have shared this frame of understanding a couple of years now. However, I struggle to make them “alive” to loved ones, friends or political colleagues (on the left - and in dialogue with the right). I think “we” are trapped within the framework imaginary of _modernity_ - what the classic “left and right” share. The recent decades of slashing general philosophy from even higher education, or at least externalising what’s regarded as heterodox thinking in most fields - is holding us back. Individually, and as the emergent fact of us existing in social ‘lumps’, the “dreaded” civilised society. How can we _communicate_ beyond “facts”, when trust in them is deflating…?
Everything is contract and must be ritten in : Quantum-language-syntax-parce. : the now-space. Trust is dead. The globalist want you to get into theyr new trust system. Cbdc/ economic slavery+ surveillance. You will owned nothing and be happy. Changing venue is the 1st step
Hi Nate, I would another criteria around justice, and the impact of the technology on justice for different communities, especially those already marginalized and extracted from
Thank you 🙏🌞 This is the episode I’ve been waiting for. The only thing missing is examples. The only one you share is sodium based batteries. I’d love to see you take a deep dive into that Goldilocks technology. What do they look like, what would it mean to our current lifestyle if we made the switch to sodium based batteries? What would it mean for places like Congo? I realize it may not age well but I would, of course, like to see a lot more concrete examples🤞😇
I wonder if these sodium batteries also have lots of plastic in them, and are ground into powder to "recycle" them, as is currently done with lithium-ion batteries.
Products and services relevant to the coming great simplification can already be seen. Fast food and products of questionable use for example are going by the wayside in my opinion. Hopefully forever also in my strong opinion.
Great video. I believe the average person is unequipped to deal with the complexities of the issues we now face. There’s so many unintuitive things about the way the world works, things that we simply never encountered on the African savannah-concepts like exponential growth, feedback loops, probability and statistics, and the laws of thermodynamics. Would you say that the average person you encounter has a solid grasp of these topics? If the answer is no, then how can we reach a positive consensus that moves us in the right direction? If we literally don’t have the tools needed to understand the problem, then is there any hope to solve it outside of an autocratic government run by scientists? Maybe A.I. overlords? I’m not being facetious here…this is a serious challenge that anyone who wants to solve these monumental, planet-wide issues is going to have to overcome if they want to enact change in a democratic way.
Anyone who has had family pass on, and gets to deal with the Junque that they have to dispose of, understands the "consumption" issue. But they just usually keep what is useful and sentimental and discard/donate the rest. Some of this gets reused for sure. But the recipients of the estate(s) usually say that "not me" in that they will not be like their parents, etc who hoarded all the stuff. And some may. But most just do the same. Consume. That was what their parents et al have taught them to do. Consume. And it will take a huge change to shift from that paradigm to NOT Consume or Consume MUCH less will things have a chance of changing. This includes any technologies that make it still easy to consume. Any focus on business as usual, Consuming the same or even more, every day, every year, will not work to reverse the march to shattering the planetary boundaries. The younger generation, to an extent gets this. But like all younger generations, they are very limited in their economic and political power. So they can only make changes on a mostly personal level. But this is where it starts. Where it MUST start. Eventually as all the huge consumers die off, then the younger, will take their place and insitute the changes needed. But as we know. We don't necessarily have a generation or more to wait on their ascendency. More of us older folks have to join them. And I'm hopeful that will happen.
I'm more inclined to start from a place of need. Water & Food, Shelter, Family and Community. Then connect to place, climate, soils, etc. Build things that bring joy in their creation, use, outputs and appearance....
I own three fridges one was my mother's who owned it for at least 15 years before she died in 2010, one given to me by my son which is in excess of 20 years old. The third is in a house we built in 1999 and is the third fridge bought since the house was built. I expect the old fridges to outlive the newer one. I subscribe to our local Consumer magazine and learned recently that products now have a life expectancy of 8 years which i expect will further diminish as time goes by. I find it difficult to accept this as the status quo - why does everyone live for the moment and not for lifetime?? (That was a rhetorical question, my intuitive explanation is capitalism!!)
This was an excellent podcast. A great list you have come up with and included. I have to wonder if our overshoot problem could be added to the checklist in some way. Or is slowly decreasing our population numbers a natural outgrowth of moving toward such a checklist?
We need new Goldilocks Culture. I'm reading a lot of books and papers about cultural evolution and diversity. There is a common understanding in the English literature with which I don't agree as a member of one other cultural background. Those ideas are well express by Ronald H. Inglehart in his book "Cultural Evolution" when he states: " Various analysts, working from different perspectives, have described these cultural differences as Collectivism versus Individualism, Survival versus Self-expression values, or Autonomy versus Embeddedness, but they all tap a common dimension of cross-cultural variation that reflects a society’s level of “existential security” - the degree to which survival seems safe or insecure. During the decades since World War II, growing existential security has been propelling most of the world’s societies toward greater emphasis on individualism, Autonomy and Self-expression values [...] Moreover, countries that have high levels of Self-expression values are much likelier to be genuine democracies than countries that rank low on these values." Those statements are quite a dogma in the Anglo-American culture. It looks to me like a supremacist belief of an individualist society that looks only at its nombril. Quebec's French Canadian culture gives an important role to collective values as the individualist-collectivist scale shows it... and it's a democratic society with rules stronger than in the USA that prohibits billionaire fund upraising for political parties, a society that excludes Gerrymandering and with more equality among citizens. In their book "Region Apart - The Four Societies of Canada and the United States," Edward Grabb and James Curtis wrote (page 149): " The findings from Table 7.2 that may be most surprising are those for the Quebec subsample. Given the historical evidence reviewed in Part II, which suggested that early French Canada was marked by religious, political, and social structures that were generally more authoritarian, hierarchical, and collectivist than elsewhere in North America, we might have expected that, even in the present day, the people of Quebec would adopt the least liberal and most traditional views on a variety of issues. However, the evidence clearly belies this expectation, at least with respect to questions of sexual morality and family values. Before seeking to explain this outcome, we should make the initial observation that our findings for Quebec are not anomalous. On the contrary, they are consistent with a considerable amount of attitudinal and behavioural evidence on family values, gender roles, marital practices, and sexuality in Canada and the United States. Taken together, this previous body of research generally suggests that, in all of these topic areas, Quebecers are the most liberal or least traditional population in the two nations, followed by English Canadians, northern Americans, and southern Americans." So where do you think I am going ? I'm just saying that the self-expression values are nothing good if they are not tempered by collective values. It's in a balance between those two poles where Cultures should move. Goldilocks Technology is wasteful without Goldilocks Cultural change of the sort I've described here.
Just for fun I've summited to GPT-4o my previous comment. Here what it answered: Your reflection touches on an important critique of the dichotomy often drawn between individualism and collectivism in discussions of cultural evolution, particularly within the framework of Anglo-American scholarship. By highlighting the example of Quebec's French Canadian culture, you challenge the assumption that self-expression values are inherently superior or more conducive to democratic societies. The passage from Ronald H. Inglehart emphasizes a linear progression from collectivism towards individualism as societies achieve greater "existential security." This perspective implies that individualism, autonomy, and self-expression are the ultimate markers of cultural and societal advancement. However, your argument suggests that this view overlooks the value and strength of collective values, particularly in maintaining social cohesion, equality, and democratic integrity. The example from "Region Apart" illustrates how Quebec, despite its historically collectivist and hierarchical roots, has evolved into a society that blends collective values with progressive social attitudes. This indicates that societies do not have to choose between individualism and collectivism but can find a "Goldilocks" balance that incorporates the strengths of both. In this context, you argue for a more nuanced understanding of cultural evolution-one that does not simply favor individualistic values but recognizes the importance of tempering self-expression with collective responsibility. This "Goldilocks Culture" would avoid the extremes of both individualism and collectivism, promoting a cultural evolution that balances personal autonomy with social solidarity. Such a perspective challenges the supremacy of individualism as a universal ideal and underscores the diversity of cultural pathways that can lead to democratic and egalitarian societies. This approach aligns with the idea that cultural evolution should not be seen as a monolithic process but as one that can vary significantly depending on historical, social, and cultural contexts. In advocating for this balance, you're calling for a reassessment of the dominant narratives in cultural evolution, pushing for a model that appreciates the complex interplay between individual and collective values. This would lead to more sustainable and equitable societies that are not solely driven by self-expression but are also grounded in mutual respect, cooperation, and shared responsibility.
Joseph Tainter is useful to listen to about the mechanisms of collapse, which of couse is where we mwy all end up if we dont pay attention to a simplification but its bloody hard to do even when the life of everything on the planet depends on it!
Modern marketing creates wants not needs. I think there is a difference between marketing, education and storytelling with the latter two being necessary for a move to a more ecological existence. The former feeds the consumerism.
What's wrong with thatched sandals? I wish I could get some. I am stuck with cheap Merrell barefoot shoes that I bought over five years ago. I do have a pair of Irish Setters (now made in Vietnam instead of Red Wing) when I need a stiff sole for digging with a spade or weed-whacking protection. But I try not to stray too far from t-shirts, shorts and bare feet. The same with what I grow. I don't NEED to eat meat and the occasional piece of chorizo in my green beans is a real treat. This episode dovetails nicely with the earlier "Dial It Down" Frankly. However, from a structural level, any technology that is "just right" will become "not quite right" as the social conditions move on. And that is key to the structural level of technology. Culture trumps (your topic here). As an example, stone tools were just fine for ealy humans and allowed Homo erectus/ergaster to move to the edges of the ice sheets in Asia and Europe. It is likely they already had trade too - BEFORE the increases in brain size that mark Homo neandertalensis, Home heidelbergensis and Homo sapiens. Ten years ago I pointed out (in my first book) that we have traded culture for cheap oil at an increasing pace over the last 150 years. Since culture is an evolutionary adaptation and evolution doesn't work backwards, assuming we can go back through the ages to the 18th century - before large-scale industrialization - is a false concept. Therefore, the parsimonious conclusion is crash and burn until enough humans have died off that state-level society is no longer powerful enough to quash tribal social organization. Then the inflection point of human societies will change sign and move upwards on the sine wave. But until that time we are on the down side of the saddle point of human society - worldwide. The question now is: Long Emergency or Long Descent. [Full faith and credit to Kunstler and Greer for coining these terms of course.] Goldilocks technology - in my view at least - is just another attempt to have an affluent society without paying the price. Energy use is still paramount and decreasing the energy flows will mean more starvation in Africa and Asia as affluent Americans and Europeans strive to have their cake and eat it too.
Yes. So if someone can come up with a scaleable technology which has great potential but has a long development gestation and which wouldn't be easy to make money out of (for various reasons) - guess what's going to happen ?
Great Q: "What do we need technology for -- drones to deliver "JIT Mellows" to kids' birthday extravaganzas in social circles where releasing hydrogen gas filled balloons or hapless butterflies is "over"?" Let's move from this micro-Me making-memories setting to the macro level to see and question how this Q has been answered for the provision of, first, food and then transport. Spoiler alert: Might entire industries be shrunk and thereby end the need for the manufacture of much technology? The dominant world culture -- the technologically advanced economic civilization effectively in charge of shaping global decision-making -- has apparently decided that we need the technology that enables Big Ag "to feed the world." That's how we're "Going to end starvation!" Big Ag has been lionized as the hero that will not only "end starvation" and "make sure the food you eat is safe" but also free up people to "do other things" besides grow their own food or find it in open air markets or little shops, or for that matter spend time identifying, cleaning, picking, or preparing and cooking and preserving it themselves. Just get in the SUV, arrive to push a grocery cart that 10 frat boys could fit in down aisles so long they have dwindling size perspective, load up, pay, and drive home with "tasty, scrumptious, healthy, natural" bags and jars and plastic packets of food -- or, "food." Big Ag entails technology that includes $400,000 combines other farm machines that cut, thresh, bind, plow, seed, fertilize, poison, weed and harvest -- as they pack down the soil; drones and airplanes that apply -cides manufactured in chemical plants and lately are outfitted to collect lotsa datadatadata to be downloaded and studied; complex irrigation systems with miles of plastic plumbing outfitted with pump systems tapping into aquifers and rivers; plastic covered greenhouses for hydroponic growing can now be labeled "organic" in the outlier-USofA; refrigeration for weeks and months of storage in containers in warehouses and grocery stores and the factories that manufacture the sophisticated temperature controlled systems and their replacement parts; trucks to move the food -- a head of lettuce averaging a 1500 mile TRIP after being sprayed with an from warehouse to table -- and the factories to manufacture the warehouses and combines, trucks and their replacement parts including tires that shred and disperse microplastics and the mining that provides the fuel for the combine and truck engines and the fossil fuel based fertilizers; cargo ships to get products to tables --, the mining to get the fuels to power the machinery, the industrial plants to make the machinery to maintain the machinery used to plant, harvest, sort, "process," refrigerate, wrap and label, transport. Growing most food organically and locally with simple hand tools would shrink Big Ag's giant upstream, on site and downstream ecologically corrosive footprint -- and give worms now doomed to suffer from ingesting microplastics in contaminated soil new places to call home -- forest gardens, foodscapes, and more where 1000 feet of lawn per American now stand. Technology also enables Big Transport. Let's decrease big heavy loud polluting motorized local traffic with lightweight quiet non-polluting traffic and in the process increase both personal and planetary health. And let's do it before I need another new car with its no-choice self-opening self-starting no key "performance." I want Toggle Times to reduce local noisy dangerous polluting ecologically damaging stop and go traffic ASAP!!! Most Americans spend 10-18% of their income on buying, insuring, fueling, maintaining, repairing and parking 2000-4000 pound privately owned or leased motorized vehicles (and on costs of accidents in them) -- and will spend in their lifetimes yet more on dealing with their lifestyle diseases that sitting an average of an hour a day in their vehicles -- nearly motionless, inhaling the tiniest, most dangerous, fresh-off-the-tires microplastics when WITH TOGGLE TIMES they could on days when they feel like it be CYCLING TO DESTINATIONS ON ROADS FREE OF MOTORIZED TRAFFIC. Local transportation engineers would need to PAUSE MOTORIZED TRAFFIC for micro-transport only. Micro-transport includes walking, jogging, running, CYCLING (on bicycles, adult and child tricycles, cargo bikes, taxi-bikes, rickshaws, unicycles), skating, boarding, wheelchairing. (For purposes of definition, micro could exclude all internal combustion engine boosters, any electric boosted travel exceeding 20-mph while unboosted cyclists could stay far left cruise to 28). Based on research, best-times schedules would be developed, widely publicized, and evolved over time. IN DESIGNATED ZONES, LOCAL TRAFFIC ENGINEERS WOULD TOGGLE ALL TRAFFIC SIGNAL LIGHTS TO FLASHING GREEN AND YELLOW, USING TECH THAT SETS TRAFFIC LIGHTS FLASHING RED AND YELLOW AFTER HURRICANES. Research shows AVERAGE DOOR TO DOOR TRAVEL TIME WILL DECREASE. In less than a year, Toggle Times in places now stifled with stop-and-go traffic could have 60% and more of all trips be NON-STOP micro-transport. IN THE US, THIS WOULD SLASH EMISSIONS AND POLLUTION FROM OUR HIGHEST EMITTING SECTOR and greatly improve the health of our out of shape, over scheduled, under exercised populace. Scaling the idea? In Asia and Africa, urban and suburban road networks providing safe, non-stop travel with motorized vehicles paused might increase already high birth rates by providing new mobility for goods and people.
Yes, of course, if people living in these suburbs were all in for changing their lifestyles and if the laws that govern them allowed them to do so. TECHNOLOGY USED TO SUPPORT THEIR GROWING FOOD ORGANICALLY CLOSE TO WHERE IT IS CONSUMED AND TRAVELING MAINLY BY USING THEIR OWN BODIES would be a smart use of technology -- fine tuning to coordinate people and the elements in the system and its lightweight accessory transport aids. Right now, in the US a lot of money is tied up in office parks and housing governed by strict ownership laws that assure all properties have particular landscaping, some "communities" as developers call them going so far as to require homeowners pay for "landscaping services" provided by the developers so everything gets sprayed with -cides and fertilizers that create golf course like color and growth uniformity, hedges trimmed to the same heights and shapes, lawns edged along concrete identically, grass height strictly controlled, trees pruned in swoops on schedules like power companies do. Add in a few draconian restrictions on vehicle -- in particular pick up truck -- parking and gates and even surreptitious "foodscaping" like RUclips's Brie The Plant Lady "invented" might kill you from poisoning by "landscaping crews." Here in Florida we have fought successfully for state laws that restrict the rights of local government to forbid people to use their own property to grow some food. Locally in Orlando, "Fleet Farming" fleetfarming.org/ has hand in hand with our foodie culture worked to improve human and environmental health and happiness while simultaneously saving money and providing INTERESTING VARIED PLANTINGS FOR PASSERBY'S TO OGGLE. Millison shows how in Oregon at Yes, of course, if people living in these suburbs were all in for changing their lifestyles and if the laws that govern them allowed them to do so. TECHNOLOGY USED TO SUPPORT THEIR GROWING FOOD ORGANICALLY CLOSE TO WHERE IT IS CONSUMED AND TRAVELING MAINLY BY USING THEIR OWN BODIES would be a smart use of technology -- fine tuning to coordinate people and the elements in the system and its lightweight accessory transport aids. Right now, in the US a lot of money is tied up in office parks and housing governed by strict ownership laws that assure all properties have particular landscaping, some "communities" as developers call them going so far as to require homeowners pay for "landscaping services" provided by the developers so everything gets sprayed with -cides and fertilizers that create golf course like color and growth uniformity, hedges trimmed to the same heights and shapes, lawns edged along concrete identically, grass height strictly controlled, trees pruned in swoops on schedules like power companies do. Add in a few draconian restrictions on vehicle -- in particular pick up truck -- parking and gates and even surreptitious "foodscaping" like RUclips's Brie The Plant Lady "invented" might kill you from poisoning by "landscaping crews." Here in Florida we have fought successfully for state laws that restrict the rights of local government to forbid people to use their own property to grow some food. Locally in Orlando, "Fleet Farming" fleetfarming.org/ has hand in hand with our foodie culture worked to improve human and environmental health and happiness while simultaneously saving money and providing INTERESTING VARIED PLANTINGS FOR PASSERBY'S TO OGLE. Millison shows how in Oregon in 13 minutes at ruclips.net/video/b5Xgw_DqmEw/видео.html UCF a few decades ago lost a brilliant UCF PhD student to a school where she was supported in developing a sophisticated program for SHARING INFORMATION by connecting neighborhoods to share knowledge about foods -- for example extra foods they had from their backyard gardens to trade, sell, or give away, and the same re seeds, cuttings, tools. Once set up, such programs could expand to communicate about free compost materials, water collection and watering, recipes and cooking, health, plant based beauty and body care, permaculture, plant rotation, chickens and ducks for eggs, pet goats, bee keeping. Transportation planning as taught in US civil engineering programs emphasizes LOS -- "level of service." The primary goal of the trained engineer is to provide a high "level of service" in planning that moves as many motorized vehicles as possible as fast as possible with as few accidents with accompanying fatalities (8th cause of death globally, bad trajectory to be 7th by 2030) as possible to their desired destinations. Using our right-brains and aiming to add goals of personal mental, physical, spiritual health, a wise use of global resources, low benzene, microplastics and GHG emissions, leads to the low-emitting, low resource use innovation of Toggle Times. So does googling "microplastics shredding from car tires and coalescing" and researching the fascinating story of tiny tiny tiny bits shredding off motorized vehicle tires that inhaled into the human body may be able to freely move from lungs to veins to brains. So interesting to visualize their brief opportunities before they coalesce into larger glumps a few yards away from the road. Those interested in bringing Toggle Times to their area could research the success of car-free Sundays in Bogota and Paris including data on precipitous drops in local air pollution and might want to call on the bright mind, warmly open and lucid communication of US Secretary of Transportation Peter Buttigieg to check out the possibilities. @@RubenKemp
@@RubenKemp Science has identified ag as now practiced as the biggest destroyer of nature. ruclips.net/video/TNR8JfHah00/видео.html ruclips.net/video/Ax0SIbxgqDw/видео.html ruclips.net/video/l3U_xd5-SA8/видео.html
Nate your TGS/Frankly’s covers so many environmental and ecological areas impacted by human behaviour (human predicament): Climate change, Loss of biodiversity, Air pollution, Ocean health, Water pollution, Overpopulation, Energy use, Weather events, which you and many of your expert/scientific guests have discussed. All of the above areas as you’ve pointed out are converging, forming the meta and polycrisis leading to humanity’s most dangerous predicament and the greatest threat to its survival. But problems have solutions, predicaments don’t. From your earliest TGS I’ve come to believe the first to trigger the greatest threat to humanity’s survival will be humanity’s access to energy specifically FREE FINITE flammable fossils in particular Oil. But as Oil and Gas becomes more expensive, difficult to access, geologically and or geopolitically, we’ll revert to using more Coal, alongside peat and forests, so the heat and CO2 will continue to rise exponentially, with the heat continuing to raise ocean temperatures and accelerate the melting of the ice caps and glaciers. Humanity (we) are in ecological overshoot. Technology isn’t going so save humanity, majority of solutions ain’t gonna’ happen. There are just too many of us (Superorganism) we may not do anything to dramatically reduce our numbers but nature will as nature doesn’t respect human rights or any other creatures rights for that matter. Jack Alpert (of “Jack Alpert -- Civilization's “Running Out of Gas” Story”) thinks a maximum of 600 million is about what nature would reduce humanity to when we’ve run out of Oil, anyone thinking in the billions is just fooling themselves. Whilst I may not see any of these problems a child born today will🤔
I think Nate already knows all of this, and confided in a video several months back that he has privileged access (I guess via the government officials and captains of industry for which he serves as consultant) to information about what is in store for humanity and the planet in the near future that he cannot share with his viewers, as it's apparently much too dire.
@@dbadagna So are you saying Nate’s an 'Apocaloptimist' ; someone who knows it's all going to s#%t but still thinks things will turn out ok, well maybe for some. Or perhaps Nates’s a closeted Ecological Doomer, like myself, where we’re damned if we (humanity) do and damned if we don’t, accept we’re all F%#ked, enjoy life to the full like there’s no tomorrow, help everyone you can within your means, family, friends, everyone else, don’t tell them why unless they really want to know, and then apologise to those generations you’re responsible for their being born, that way when you depart this life your conscience will be clear for what ecological terrors are going to happen. If you want a preview of how bad things can get read Kurt Dahl’s “An American Famine - A Rosetta Stone for the coming collapse”🤔
Yes, profit is part of a working economic system, for the reasons Nate mentioned and more. But the great disparities of wealth (and the most wealthy are the highest energy and resource users by far) are not a result of "earned" profit in large part but rather due to massive market failures (e.g., monopolistic power of oligarchies) and the perversion of our political and financial systems to siphon off wealth from those whose work benefits us all (maldistribution). Adam Smith would be appalled at what exploitation has occurred. Related is our current neoliberal economics in which return to owners and shareholders is all that is allowed (legally?) to matter (claimed to be amoral, but truly immoral) and the focus is on the most short term gains (note how the stock market reacts to missed quarterly earnings targets). BTW, I saw in the May 9, 2024, journal Nature and article on Limitarianism. Great to see the idea receiving wider visibility. I could say more, but will stop here.
A marketing campaign would operate in a corrupt system controlled by those who maximize profits at all costs. The system needs to crash for a new one to emerge. 🤷♀️ I would add ‘universality’ to the list. Don't build in a vacuum.
Humans who are currently wealthy enough to be venture capitalists got rich off the carbon pulse in 1 way or another, some more directly than others. We now all face great danger because of the harm done in pursuit of that general accumulation of wealth. If humanity fully wakes up to the metacrisis, and the need for a safely managed Great Simplification, wont there be reasonable demands for the nullification of that wealth? Especially from a large portion of the youth, who wont have the opportunity. If the Great Nullification happens, we can then decouple "venture capitalists" from "inventors" and "technological tinkerers", which could be helpful.
Dear Nate please bring back on that wonderful English Historian Helen Thompson especially with Donald Trumps Project 2025 I just watched an awakening podcast of Brian Tyler Cohen with American Historian Heather Cox Richardson And had the exact same conclusion of Trump wanting to be Americas next Dictator 🧐
goldilocks action ... technology if you like ... a consciously redesigned cultural model (in select locations likely) ... that's my lifetime focus, not a 'gadget' technology per se
The last time humans lived sustainably with nature was the paleolithic era. Everything we've done since then (with the exception of some fortunate tribes who have avoided civilization) has been inherently unsustainable. If you want to develop "technology" then, you'll need to go back to that level and start there.
Need massive subsidies(temporarily--years/decade?) from private donors not looking for a return. And from the government too. Thinking Billionaires looking to not get liquified in the Eye of the Needle, for example like they might if they went into a black hole, and instead are willing to become mere millionaires or God forbid thousandaires.--one can dream.
It's minimalist, however depends how much fuel their using. Driving one mile in a vehicle is as much joule of energy, that if converted to KWH would be more than enough to meet someone's basic needs for a day. For around 1.5 kwh a day averaged out all year, I can manage all my hot water needs for showers and dishes, laundry, media and device charging, refrigeration, vacuum ect. Some use of tools here and there, some enjoyment of retro games and crt displays in winter evenings where the heat isn't wasted and the utility goes the furthest... The way I manage all these activity's is very particular though, however moving the better part of 2 tonne of weight or more a mile is definitely not trivial and is so ubiquitous its beyond the pale. However of course someone living in a van or something doesn't necessarily drive more distance than someone bumbling/commuting about everywhere between a suburban home and everywhere else every day.
Of course you also have to consider the maintenance of roads which is very intensive as tarmac surfacing is perishable only lasting a decade or two without constant renewal.
It is definitely a fall from the 1960s when a single income would support a family of 4 including a house with a white picked fence. From Norman Rockwell paintings back to the dust bowl depression era photos of homeless people unable to get by on their skills.
It is my belief that natural externalities need to be given an intrinsic value that reflects their sustainable/unsustainable balance. This can be done through a countries taxation system where all the considerations that you mentioned are taken into account for any product/activity under consideration... Anybody who has read Jared Diamond's book Collapse will understand that the threat of civilization collapse is very real. Corrupt politics currently prevents this proposal from taking place. Consequently this proposal is best developed in a grass roots up proposal... Ecological Models are developed to help set appropriate tax value levels to activities; which in term can be used by all entities to gauge the sustainability of their products/activities... with the goal of eventually being adopted by all world governments.
Thank you, Nate! Nice to see some consideration of technology requirements for a society constrained by biophysical reality. You might enjoy reading a book on exploring requirements written by systems engineers that includes techniques for building consensus among various stakeholder constituencies: Gause, D. C., & Weinberg, G. (2011). Exploring requirements: Quality before design (Paperback). Dorset House. It's available on libgen.
The checklist needs to include a pragmatic energy solution for the future. Yes we must reduce consumption, but equally important we must reduce fossil use. We need a viable nonfossil, reliable source of energy. My intuition is nuclear power in the near term and geothermal in the long term, with a little wind and solar to arbitrage when the wind blows and the sun shines. But I believe 'the basics' needs to include a recommendation for the energy strategy that replaces fossil fuels.
Everyone here needs to understand a very basic fact that somehow has not propagated to the average person: All technological societies (once the bulk of people move off of farms) they do not raise enough children to sustain themselves. They go down in population. Out of every industrial society the only exceptions right now are: The US, and Mexico. One important factor that helps the US is: everyone wants to come to the US and live, and we can allow those who get advanced degrees here to stay, etc... In other words everyone wants to come here so we can keep our population from declining and so we are not in a desperate situation - we have an easy mechanism for avoiding inevitable population decline. Elsewhere around the world industrialized countries had long been in decline. Back in the days of family farms naturally we all had a lot of children and the children kept the farm running. After moving to cities or suburbs, children are very expensive and modern young people are not sustaining the population. Imagine, every young boy/girl (man/woman) needs to pair up and have 2.2 children on average in order to just sustain the population. We tend to ignore all of the young folk who do not pair up this way and so those more rare couple who do have children now need to overcome this deficit, they need to have more children on average. A technological society does not sustain it's population level. Look at Japan for example. The population is very old on average - they do not have enough workers. The same thing has been happening in Germany (and just list all technological societies and you'll find this problem). So, we people of Earth do NOT have a problem of overpopulation now. Human population growth peaks and then heads down in a near run-away fashion. Our lifestyle does not support itself. So we do not actually have to take any action to reduce population growth. Just look at and follow the math and you see the problem was solved as each country pursued industrialization. Call this "modern society." Modern Society does not create enough children to keep itself going. As this information finally gets out to the average person we more and more will begin talking about steps we need to take to solve the fact that we don't replace ourselves. So in this one case our lifestyle is solving the human overpopulation problem. Please read more about this. Please educate yourself. Look at the statistics. Ha! Read Peter Zeihan's book: "The End of the World is Just the Beginning." Cheers!
@TheOriginalRaster The industrialised nations populations are dropping, yes, but the world population is dropping because the poor countries have finally adopted family planning. This is terrible for the current growth economy, but great news for the biosphere. 3 billion is the current maximum population for a sustainable future so all good, as long as it's not too late.
Honestly it’s crazy how people are complaining about underpopulation when we are at the most people to occupy the Earth ever at the same time and we do it with an entirely unsustainable agricultural system. Feels Orwellian. The ponzi scheme needs population growth but few if any can afford children so then it’s an economic problem but it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that economic strife would happen considering how plundered the Earth is now.
@@chastetree Agree with “ A healthy earth does not need any more humans” and there’s a simple remedy to that : “There is ONE THING we can do to save the planet: Keep your pecker in your pants, and do not let your knickers down. Period. End of story. It will have the added benefit of phasing out coal to zero. Ditto for oil, gas, lithium, copper, cobalt, nickel, plastic, chemicals... I think you get my drift. This is not rocket science.” - Sam Mitchell at Collapse Chronicles. As regards colonising space 🚀 , in your dreams🤔
stupid in, stupid out. no fertilizer, no food, endless wars. DOESNT MATTER IF RATE OF POPULATION INCREASE SLOWS OR POPULATION ACCELERATES IN DECREASING IF THE SIZE IS TOO BIG AND IS STILL CONSUMING
I disagree that people would be happy with less. What we need is to make our way of life sustainable. We want to continue living in suburbs and get around by car. All we need is a lower population.
@@evilryutaropro I understand what you mean. But a lower population would make it far easier to recycle all our stuff and to implement renewable energy. People could be relocated to places where there’s hydroelectricity.
And no one in this comments section has mentioned the Internet (which we're all using), which requires an enormous amount of energy and materials to keep running.
A marketing campaign would operate in a corrupt system controlled by those who maximize profits at all costs. The system needs to crash for a new one to emerge. I would add ‘universality’ to the list. Don't build in a vacuum. The
I don't understand how you talk about this stuff and are still flying around here and there demonstrating you can't put your money where your mouth is. Meanwhile, what is this about profit and technology? How are you not at least a semi primitivist by now?
Look Nate - you can't just blithely acknowledge our extreme human ecological #overshoot with one breath, and with your next, go on to say how human civilisation 'can live sustainably with much less'. No - we can't. Not any more. For a host of reasons! Whilst isolated examples of sustainable human habitat do still currently exist (for the moment #climatechange), what you seem, like many others, to refuse to recognise is how the effect of overshoot serves to radically diminish the previous baseline carrying-capacity. We are rapidly travelling back in time from the Holocene, through the Eocene to a pre-human climate that existed 500 million years ago. Habitat? What habitat? As for 'simplification', degrowth, or similar transformation, understand that these proposals are inherently growthist - all 'transformation' requires energy and creates entropy/waste/pollution. That's basic physics. Transformation of any kind of the global enterprise of #8billion humans is a #hypergrowth of material use, extraction, energy, with associated ecological throughput. The best we can do, is repurpose what already exists as it falls apart and collapses. Don't just collapse - #JustCollapse! JustCollapse.or g
Inventor / engineer in the utility solar PV industry here. I'm afraid that unless we price in negative, external costs at the market level, prosocial inventions won't be able to compete in the current system. The problem is a capitalist system corrupted by psychopaths. I've lost hope that anything can be done until this version of capitalism collapses.
I was a controls engineer for over 20 years. You are correct that our current system will continue to drive the crisises we see today. Profit is the only metric used in industry which is fundamentally apposed to environmental and human safety. I was always at odds with project management and field service because i put a high priority on operator safety in my equipment design. My greatest tool was safety annalize standards I could apply to the design.
You are right. I would only add that the way to go is not another versions n of Capitalism, but Eco-Socialism.
Yes, I read your story as something that can only be experienced within an “industry” narrative. We are mostly unable to imagine tools or resources (stuff we use) _outside_ of whatever we call “modern”.
We may think that earlier societies were “stupid” or economically constrained _not_ to scale their needs towards an industrial scale. What we for 150+ years just call “natural” - There’s no other way…
Well… Our (western) culture _is_ “older” than the modern era. We obviously brought _some_ ideas forward from this 2500 years known timeline. Which ideas weren’t? Why? Who stopped what?
I obviously don’t know, but so many like mr. Hagens point to such questions. Maybe again, the questions are more important to us than the quick answers…?
In the Neil Howe book The Fourth Turning, I believe these changes, and changes to capitalism in its current end stage setting, discussed here may become reality by the early 2030s. We will see. But I do agree that change is absolutely mandatory.
@@Dan5482 I agree - and base my other comment here on that. Why I “discredit” modernism as the era it is, comes from it covering the timeline of “modern” politics, economics and scale of human activities.
In a raw sense, ecological constraints are “social” by sheer emergence. “We” created and realised them, and no individual (government, corporate nor person) can autonomously relieve them.
That’s where my issues with “modern” national borders, currencies, markets and legal boundaries come into play - but _not_ by leaping into anarchy. If real power now resides within international finance and corporate entities - taking agency back to meat-and-blood people is very different to engaging in wars against other just-as-real people.
What about our very powerful legal entities…?
Thanks Nate, possible addition to goldilocks tech - as low tech as possible. Low tech advances have the greatest leverage for the least affect in the other mentioned parameters. The brick making frame is a good example. Low tech but provides consistently shaped bricks that are easier to build with. This will challenge the optimal foraging principle that urges humans to use thinking, energy inputs etc to increase returns further. And here we are. In overshoot. Also, any furtherance of tech increases complexity, inputs, resources, energy usage etc, exactly what we are trying to avoid, even with a goldilocks approach. Our best bet may be to go back to the low tech (low energy/resources etc) advancements already made and attempt to improve. Of course any increase in efficiency will create Jeavon’s paradox and increase resource usage. And all these goldilocks choices will require a shift in human consciousness to a more connected view where individual gain is not the leading driver. The dairy farm you mentioned is a classic example. Fully aware of the damage but has more personal (seperate from the whole) priorities. Education has no effect here, and I feel for the most part, it is the same in a great majority of adults. Education must start with the children but we don’t have that much time for generational change and self interested and misguided adults are influencing this opportunity! The Australian Aboriginal culture had been able to sustain for tens of thousands of years- the longest living continuous culture in the history of humanity. Maybe there is something to learn here? There is a prophecy from that culture - white man will come for 10 generations and then it will return to the old ways. White man came in 1788…
What about having a store of goldilocks technologies appropriate for certain situations. Where's there's an excess or pollution of some material/resource then use goldilocks technology X, once the resource/pollution is under control or used up, then shut it down or scale it down. Then go about and manage each situation like that.
Some of the best techniques to deal with climate change & land degradation are using Stone Age and Iron Age tech. Building rocky check dams or woody beaver dam analogs and digging swales can retain water on landscapes and recharge aquifers. Preventing grazing can allow shade plants to grow in semidesert, reducing temperature & storing water. In southern Spain, simple gates & canals are used to farm saltwater marshes. The irrigation canals are used for seawater to grow salt tolerant crops, or halophytes. The biomass yield per acre is 3x soy. With zero pesticides, fertilizer, or fresh water used. From Africa to the Mideast to India, salt marshes and mangroves can feed people and stop coastline erosion.
Loved this frankly! I'm an engineer trying to develop a durable way to generate home electricity from multiple sources. I've already started the simplification lifestyle by building a permaculture homestead. We sustainably harvest wood for our kitchen stove and I'm trying to harness more of that heat to try and generate electricity.
In stead of storing electricity in lithium batteries I'll be storing heat in a sand battery.
Hoping to soon have something to show for my words. In the meantime, keep up the awesome work you're doing!
Never heard of sand batteries before. How does it work, exactly?
@@dbadagna A sand battery stores heat in stead of electricity. So in my case I would store the heat from my stove, or from a solar boiler, and slowly use it to power a turbine. For now I think it's a little less efficient than lithium batteries, but it doesn't need any funny materials or mining.
@@AP-Engineergoogle "sand shortage"
Superuseful Frankly podcast Nate. As an engineer I would add to the list the quality of the products and the focus on durability. It is not only about the obvious environmental and economical advantages, but about the meaningfulness of the creation, the artisan bound that make our work worthy beyond the usefulness of our products. That would foster the development and the improvement of our gadgets.
Good luck with that.
@tinoyb9294 Why? I remember a time when product durability was a key value for people. I just found an all metal craftsman circular saw that my father owned during the 1960s. It sat in a box for 55 years until I discovered it after his passing. It worked fine, and I will use it. Durability at its finest. P.S. I first saw this tool as a 5 year old in 1965 as dad cut wood for a fort he built for us.
@mr.makeit4037 Look around.
I've started replacing as many "modern" products as I can with old ones. Mostly furniture and tools so far. Love the quality and enjoy being able to repair them. "Time is money" doesn't factor into my decisions when it comes to quality. I scrounge, rescue and repair things because it brings me joy and happiness that I'm no longer dumping stuff to replace with more poor quality junk, just because it's cheaper to live that way.
@@mr.makeit4037I have thought about this a lot, but personally I think there is too much of an obsession with things "lasting long".
I think it's ok for products to decay for instance. Plastic was sold to us as something that wouldn't break down, and now we are dealing with the consequences. Stainless steel requires a lot of energy to manufacture, lots of stone products require intensive mining correct?
Maybe it's ok to have wood tools that wont last forever and eventually decay.... Maybe it's ok to have tools that aren't 100% efficient, but are far lower cost to create.
Horses aren't the best transportation by a longshot, but they are probably more eco friendly than cars, but horses die and can't really be repaired lol, but that's probably a good thing. They help us, and eventually they pass on, unlike cars that either get scrapped or sit in a field to slowly decay, where it can take 100s of years for things to break down.
I think if we slowed down then it would be ok for things to break and decay. Not everything needs to be built to last 10,000 years.
If you can build something that lasts a long time with little resources and little environmental impact then I would say that is goldilocks tech.
Like, wood can last generations, and can take hard abuse in tools. That's pretty goldilocks tech right there right?
It's funny the juxtaposition between this conversation and some recent adverts I've seen on TV, for the quest headset (to help someone to build some DIY furniture?!) and for smart fridges. I don't think I've ever thought to myself "Man, I need a smart fridge in my life - to tell me what's in my fridge".
As you ask your various guests "what would you do if you could wave a magic wand?", my response would be to eradicate all forms of advertising. I'm pretty sure that if everyone wasn't under a constant barrage of pressure to buy all this new shiny stuff, we'd realise as a society that we're perfectly ok with all the stuff we've already got.
Yep, the more I see the less I want!
We must all push for nature positive laws
We never left the stone age, we still use grinding wheels, sandpaper, emery cloth, sharpening stones, honing compound, these things and more today are generally using man made "stone", but it wasn't very long ago that we were still using natural stone for them. A problem comes up for me with making things like sandpaper, sanding cloth, of what kind of natural adhesive can be used. In the past some sand was put on a piece of cloth or leather without any adhesive. Some kind of natural wax, like beeswax, can probably be used for honing compound. What you would use for the honing material is an interesting problem that I've wanted to experiment with but haven't had the time or energy.
I think you need to avoid saying "we" don't want to go back to the stone age, as metals are very resource expensive and using them very sparingly makes a lot of sense if you want a long term sustainable system. I am not in your "we" with this pronouncement. A piece of flint, chert, obsidian, etc, chipped and flaked as in the distant past can still make a variety of useful tools. You don't always have suitable stone locally available for that, but you may not have much scrap metal or ore and energy locally available either. And that brick making device, is using a lot of relatively heavy pieces of commercially made steel, was no doubt using a lot of fossil fuel made and run tools to build it as well. It does not look like goldilocks technology at all to me. If you want to see an alternative way of making bricks and roof tile, check out the "Primitive Technology" website on youtube. He isn't making large amounts because he is using muscle power, simple forms for these shapes, and a wood fired kiln that he made with bricks he made. He has also tried making iron, made a very crude small knife from his efforts on this, has also had failures, making iron from ore on a small scale is possible but it is not as simple as making bricks and tiles, though that also requires knowledge and practice. I think his local source of iron ore is not rich enough to give very good results, but having suitable ore is a problem to deal with. Yes, there is a lot of scrap metal we can recycle, but if you actually try doing this as I have, you are likely to realize very fast that a charcoal forge can go through a lot of wood, and if you have large pieces of steel, cutting off a small piece by hand is going to take a significant amount of time and energy. We aren't going to be using power tools with abrasive cutting wheels, or oxy acetylene torches to cut steel with. We aren't even going to have hand powered hack saws. The "primitive technology" man has experimented with different ways of making charcoal, and different simple hand powered blowers of natural local organic materials to get the needed temperatures. He has built small structures with the brick and tile he has made, and also used thatch and other organic materials to build small structures. Your dismissal of thatch makes no sense to me, you have to use what is available and thatch is still used to some degree in different parts of the world. You may not have a good local source of clay and or enough wood to fire roof tiles and make bricks, either.
in the age of making iron with charcoal, of making bronze the same way, mines were exhausted and forests were cut down with doing this and also making bricks, tile, in later times with this, glass was being made, it requires a lot of wood, pots, new farmland to replaced exhausted soil, and building materials for structures, heating and cooking. I don't want to be part destroying forests this way. Even without metals, farming and building with just stone tools in the Americas led to forests being cut down, soil damaged, the civilization collapsing. Some of these made a lot of lime plaster, which can use a lot of fuel. I think this is really showing that your dismissal of stone tools as "too cold", has a major problem, when civilizations have grown and collapsed using stone tools. Whatever we use, if we want the use to be sustainable, we have to think very carefully about how that is going to happen. Population growth is a major issue with that. We have only had stable population with Neolithic technology and farming, in climates that were relatively harsh, which I would guess was part of prevented the population from growing- but there was also still fighting between different tribes that also no doubt had a role in that.
Great topic. I think this is one of the most important matters is how we techno -primates can use tech with enviro-harmonious mindset. Because if we use tech in the service of life and nature then that seems like "good" tech.
Need not Fear Nate you have So opened up my exploring mind that am now organising my clise community meditation group not only in our relax meditations sessions in house but am organising group walks in mornings for those who like a wee bit of a challenge when finding beautiful secret places away from our normal busy tracks and in the afternoon an hour before meditation just to stroll in our flat walking trails along an estuary filled with Godwits Black Swans Cormorants Stilts etc
And in doing so our meditation circle had grown to embrace not only ourselves but to truly appreciate how our natural world awakens us to take care of All living things 🕊🌏😇💖
I am listening to this Frankly and having feelings of solidarity to the awareness of our predicament as humans. Given what we know about the diversity and complexity of modern human beings and trappings, we would be naive to expect change to come easily. But to know ourselves better is a prerequisite to getting into the more expansive and greater thinking on how to approach collective change. I applaud the organization of this prerequisite to a conversation we need to be having.
#1 tech improvement - design cars out of the city - vast improvement in quality of life - vast reduction in all costs.
I think it may have been George Monbiot who coined the phrase public luxury, private sufficiency and this maybe the key for switching our attention from novelty and crap to a daily dose of luxury, parks, public swimming baths, public transport but done in a way that it becomes inspirational and say better than your car.
oYou are right - I was George. You listen to a speech he made on it at the Schumacher institute
A quotation to share:
"There are ships traveling from America to Europe full of biscuits and ships traveling from Europe to America also full of biscuits. As Herman Daly once said, why can't they exchange recipes?"
-- William Rees, 2019
John Kempf of Advancing Eco Agriculture says that some of the farms he helps manage are now cycling nutrients with no required inputs. Also he mentions a few concepts that would potentially multiply the eroei, other benefits of this cycle is that it creates soil, cycles carbon and produces more nutritious, healthy and shelf stable fruit vegetables meat and fibre. Agriculture is the most likely energy source of the future.
Well I am 75 next month and grew up in Britain. We had a galvanized dustbin and it was emptied weekly and often not full. The reason is packaging. Everything is over packaged and mostly made from plastic. I buy a gallon of milk. It’s in a plastic container. The cashier asks do I want a bag? I always say no thanks it’s got a handle. But in my town we don’t have recycling, we used to but it cost money so often you can buy a product in a box and from Amazon that box will now be in another box. As a middle class kid I had a school uniform and one pair of jeans and one pair of shoes for school and a pair of pumps. If my jeans got holes they were repaired and I did not get new ones unless they were now beyond repair or I had grown out of them. Kept the old ones to repair the next pair. Now have loads of stuff and as do 4+billion other people. The other 4 billion want to live like us. This is crazy. Our replacement species after the 6th extinction will be partly made of plastic!😮
There are people in China melting plastic to "recycle" it over open vats whose lungs are coated with plastic such they are dying from pulmonary fibrosis. :(
Use it up, wear it out, make do, or do without was indeed the norm once upon a time.
The Japanese people have a strong cultural connection with the concept of Mottainai, which sort of translates to “what a waste” or “don’t waste.” If you read about this further you will find this cultural artifact is tied into Shinto and Buddhism. Material things have intrinsic value and represent interconnectedness. This guitar has a spirit imbued by the living tree from which it was shaped into its current form. It is not a Western way of thinking, I understand.
I see the high value in relating the guitar to the tree. As an atheist, I'm unable to believe in a "spirit," but I don't want to dismiss the Japanese concept you describe. Perhaps I can replace spirit with a "sacredness" for the guitars former existence as a living entity.
My version is a bit awkward, and could be improved upon. I'll research the concept some more. Thanks for contributing 🙂
@user-tw4un8tt6d
It is really interesting tho that my sister in laws Japanese daughter in law will have nothing to do with anything secondhand, not even a childrens book! It's brand new everything.
Thank you Nate! Excellent again. Out here paddling from NC to the Gulf. Raising water crisis awareness on my watch. River Warrior Documentary 2024 coming soon!
I know it’s unsavory to say out loud but steel hand tools and draft animals can cover so much of our needs and require only basic supply chains and relatively low carbon emissions. The difference between iron farming tools and steel ones is a pretty significant difference. I see steel hand tools as the pinnacle of goldilocks tech even if it would be super unpopular. It’s not 100% renewable but human muscle is renewable and the externality of manual labor is health benefits from exercise. The majority of humans lived lives with far worse technology than affordable steel hand tools. I think solar thermal systems for heating and cooking are also probably the most practical. Electricity is cool but I think it’s not strictly speaking necessary (most humans never lived with electricity). Using solar thermal systems would have very short supply chains, not worry about power grids, and aren’t as fragile. I think talking about legitimate goldilocks tech is something unpopular since people basically want more and more complex tech regardless of the externalities and strategic/ecological limitations. Critical thinking and muscle power seem to be the bottlenecks of human acceptance for goldilocks tech.
There are no known sustainable ways to generate electricity.
Also stop exaggerating with the stone age rhetoric. We are in the iron age still as it never really ended (steel is 95% of our metal usage) and would end up still being in the iron age.
As long as people can make food shelter clothes and pursue things like art and religious/spiritual practices there’s really no valid reason to keep doubling down on unsustainable technologies. It all boils down to people wanting ease and not thinking about externalities or depletion.
The economy of 1976 Canada was still sourcing the majority of its energy from oil and gas.
I expect that we will just burn all the viable coal oil and gas rather than stop willingly in all fairness tho.
@@civitasparisiorum-o8u - As I have been saying for several decades, electricity will be the last to go. Before then, we will have started down the dieoff slope and much of our food will be local. I grow a lot of food with less than 20 liters of gasoline for my tiller and weed-whacker and a few kilowatts of electricity for my irrigation pump.
@@wvhaugen I applaud you. What is 'a lot', though?
I@@evilryutaroproi agree and am quite fearful that the time to start living a frugal life where using some technology like solar panels and staying to grow a garden and improve yr local biosphere and start sharing knowledge and tools and currency as long as it can buy useful stuff to survive the next decade or two would be a great start❤
Thank you for talking about these things which I really struggle to find other conversations on.
Perhaps an additional category would be something to do with aesthetics. We have a trommel style sifter on our farm that we use for compost and earthen building materials. It runs on electric motors, is quiet, has many slow moving parts, and many people find it enjoyable to watch. Kinetic art with a function.
Thanks for all you do!
Perfect timing for a new project!!! Thanks Nate, once it’s up and running, I’ll be sure to let you know and make sure you get a sample!!!
Thanks Nate. Don't forget that we are undergoing a spiritual revolution and when competed all these points will fall in to place. And frankly, the inventions in a century to come will be literately out of this world and will be aligned with the common goal to rebuild the mother planet. The far future is much brighter than one thinks.
Thank you, this checklist is extremely useful. I and many other engineers will find it extremely helpful.
I would add repairability. For example, many vehicles today are not repairable. Some cars require the front taken apart to replace the headlight bulbs. $500 to change a light bulb?
I just changed a parking light bulb in my 24 year old car. Bit fiddly but at least I didn't have to dismantle the whole front end! That's my worry about replacing the old bomb with an EV. Will I still be able to repair and replace parts myself?
@@gilbertosughrue3766 i have a fiat 500 and bought new headlight bulbs for $25 at the autoparts store. the left one was no problem, but the right one I have to remove the coolant tank, and loosen a few other things no too bad. took an hour for me. but still I hear horror stories about this!
@@gilbertosughrue3766very logical question, I think about that too. I think EVs are more repairable in the long run; they are actually simpler than internal combustion, but I suspect their relative unfamiliarity gives us the illusion of greater complexity. Battery packs are fairly modular too-essentially it’s just a black box with specifications re: voltage and available current, capacity is negotiable.
As an anecdote my grandfather used an electric golf cart for light work and transport around his farm. In 30 years of heavy daily use, the golf cart itself was replaced only once, because of theft. The second cart needed a battery pack replacement only once, and it used simple and cheap Sealed Lead Acid (SLA) packs. Really not bad. Overall a beautifully simple, useful, and reliable machine.
The most important invention of our times may be the “restoration economy “. That would look like abundant resources available for the needed work and an accurate accounting and reward system.
For the last 50 years I have believed in the Great Train Wreck Model of Modern Civilization and the End of the Golden Age. The Dark Age is coming. Don't even pretend this will end well. The four horsemen are saddling up!
Planned obsolescence is one of the biggest problem facing the collective going forward.
Agreed. If we are going to invest resources might as well not DESIGN things to break on purpose.
Planned obsolescence is one of the biggest reasons I don't believe any of the rhetoric by corporatists/technocrats/WEF about how they want to stop "climate change".
@@emilymiller1792 I'm with you on that. In my opinion, transformation with only come about through collective suffering, oligarchs and All.
@@troygoss6400
I'm not confident the oligarchs will suffer, though.
@@emilymiller1792 perhaps, climate change has that power.
Nate, it would be phenomenal to have an interview with Jill Stein on the podcast. She is the only candidate who vocally expresses concern over climate change, and as someone for whom this is a large issue, her position is appreciated. However, she co-signs a lot of “Green Growth” model ideas (including switching the economy to 100% green energy, transferring jobs from fossil to renewable, etc.) which have been thoroughly weakened from the likes of yourself, Art Berman and others. Would make a great and pertinent pod.
Super duper excited for this perspective analysis and presentation. Thank you and your team.
Great episode and compliment to your discussion with Rockstom! I feel like testing applications under scrutiny of folks applying these guidelines could start building some fun stuff. Determining the midground between superhot and too cold really requires trials and strict oversight (by like-minded experts). Lots of wonderful open-source applications have been ignored or hijacked by folks convinced economic growth should prioritize scalable, net positive impacts in global change impacts. Perhaps socio-cultural/social-behavioral innovation is requisite to getting the right middle ground for the world ahead...
The societal context will determine which technology will/can/should be used... Some tech relies heavily on available infrastructure while other technologies do not i.e. concrete vs compressed earth block aka industrial vs vernacular.
Hi Nate, great frankly. I would add "soil health" which obviously = planet health and human health. Soil health is fundamentally dependant on photosynthesis and fungi (only known way to effectively remove CO2 from our atmosphere + only known way to put nutrients back into our food) So the check would be ---------- will this increase green plants, photosynthesis, soil health and our health ?
The local family farm where I sometimes pick vegetables covers the soil where they grow their crops with black plastic sheeting, I guess as a clever, modern way to deal with weeds. They've done this for many years now, and, between growing seasons, the sheeting, having weathered due to the sunlight and rain, gets partly plowed back into the soil. At the edges of the fields I can see a large amount of tiny black particles, indicating that the plastic sheeting has broken down into microplastics. A 2020 study found micro- and nanoplastics in fruits and vegetables (especially apples and carrots, whose roots are more porous) in amounts ranging from 52,050 to 233,000 plastic particles per gram (!) of fruit or vegetable.
Thatch sandals are gonna be all over the fashion runways next spring now.
Nate's really refined his message lately. Great look at the 'other side' and giving the devil his due as far as cornucopian thinking, marketeers relying on innovation to dig us out of this mess, and clear caveats to that perspective
China has put the first 100mega watt sodium based grid scale battery on their grid. I was just reading about that this morning. They got that chemistry into mass production quickly.
Thanks for the heads up about Substack.
Maybe a good amount of energy to use long term for technology (outside of feeding ourselves) would be roughly the amount of energy our body needs, so technology use doubles the amount of energy needed. 2000 kcal per day is 850 kWh per year. Coincidentally, this isn't far off the total renewable electricity produced today when multiplied by 8 billion. Based on that you could start budgeting. For example X% for heating/cooling, Y% for transportation, Z% for communication and computation, etc.
I read about this in the book Half Earth Socialism, I agree it would be a good starting point but socialism ain’t gonna fly until there’s a revolution or a “great simplification”.
I think we have left the Holocene, and nowadays we are in the Anthropocene era.
I deeply wish to find some hope on the future both for Earth and it ecosystems. Thank you for your kindness.
MY first thought is to add something to the effect of "locally adapted" or "fitted to the bioregion". I am a bit uncomfortable with the term scaleable (appeals to the growth mindset) and would prefer replicable as that implies the ability to adapt and apply the technology to unique local conditions.
Nate, I think this is a great guide! One thing i might critique is the maslow hierarchy idea. Indigenous culture have always had novel toys, art pieces and other things that are important to religion, etc. I realize you were talking about the polyester plushy-esque toys in the airports, but i don’t think novelty is something we should reduce. We need to find creative and ecological ways to entertain ourselves. And indeed I am optimistic about that because humans are incredibly good at imagination, creativity and resourcefulness!
Your focus on technology and economics is really important and useful. If only! As a former history grad I have to point out the other people driving development in technology and economics are the military. Whether it was fighting off the huns on horses or some advanced nuclear superpower, generals needed an economy to support a powerful army and some ingenious technological superiority to deliver a crushing blow. Maybe sometime in the future the military might see renewables as the way to win wars, but until then they will be the ones retarding sustainable technological development and eco-friendly economies. Alternatively we could look at what's causing all the wars.
What is causing wars right now and what will most likely cause wars in the future, yes. I suspect many nation states are already aware but do not take action.
great content
Subsidies are not always negatives. I am in Panama where subsidized cooking gas has prevented deforestation. In many places wood for cooking, has resulted in loose of trees to prevent landslides and damage to the watershed.
recent reporting about the negative impacts of synthetic impacts on the human, have led me to try to avoid them when possible. For example, replacing the stretchy form fitting t-shirt with a 100% cotton t-shirt, to avoid synthetic to skin transfer of undesired chemicals. Almost all places grow some kind of fruit, which can, be made into juice, which, can be made into vinegar. Besides, culinary use, vinegar is a disinfectant which can be used in a number of ways. In my home I use it to clean not only countertops but also contaminated surfaces like cutting boards or moldy showers.
Thank you
My mind often drift off to this very topic while im interacting with various technologies in my daily life
In short, the framework definitions currently in use call anything that is not in the service of profit an "externality". There is no profit, no stock market, no technology on a planet with no life.
Nothing is truly an "externality", if the goal is technologies in the service of life, aka, making the ecosystem healthy. Second, the appropriateness of a new, or new and "improved" technology depends in part on the state of the biosphere across numbers that approximate metrics of ecological health. I do not believe that is "bimodal" - technologically/ economically driving human activity that is immediately very rewarding, but as Dr. Johan Rockstrom pointed out in TGS 134, driving us past planetary boundaries into overshoot, OR back to the stone age. Given the current pace of, and apparent ongoing acceleration of biosphere destruction, I believe most ecologically appropriate technologies are going to have to be significant overshoot reducing ones currently. Ms. Benyus made many excellent points in TGS 135, but capitalism is required to make profit the metric of success. Period.
Quite amazing Nate hasn't discovered MEER yet, which seems to check all of them.
This all feels very abstract. I think we're going to be dealing this concrete issues very soon.
I can appreciate the view from 40,000 feet, but to me, we need to focus on the base of Maslow's Hierarchy: air, water, shelter, food.
I don't really see things on your list that address that! I think people must take personal control of their food supply, preferably by growing with others of like mind, or working out trading with neighbours. The entire long-haul transportation system and the industrial agriculture system are horribly exposed to energy shocks, such as reduced diesel imports, which Art Berman sees as soon as 2027.
Here in Cleveland, Ohio, USA, more than 250,000 customers (a quarter of the population of Cuyahoga County) have been without power for days because a horrible storm knocked over several hundred power poles, knocking them over like toothpicks. And the weather isn't going to be getting any better soon!
Great assessment of this video, by the way. From the number self-identifying as engineers in the comments here, it seems that a significant proportion of Nate's viewers are techno-solutionists, as, I guess, he is also.
Easy insta-fix to save a little without even having to improve anything would be to stop intentionally making stuff worse. As "planned osolence", intentionally preventing repair, forcing a new buy by phasing out service, etc. and all the social pressure mechanisms to incentivise completely unnecessary consumption to maximize profits
I teach appropriate technology as part of a permaculture program. To me, the future of technology could be based on ecology as resource depletion, particularly crude oil, kicks in. No guarantees of course, and if the same thinking and motivations that we use now are applied to future technologies then we're screwed. I'm particularly concerned that goldilocks tech gets twisted to some sort of AI led biotech nightmare.
I appreciate your efforts here, and it's all right on the money. The problem is that humans are just another animal on this planet, and technology can not overcome the basic instinct to procreate. You need technology to reduce the desire to increase the number of humans on the planet if you want more than just humans, trees, and cows on the planet. Alas, I think it's too late for that.
@tinoyb9294 Only 10 years ago the world population was expected to level out at 11 billion around 2100. But the third world has adopted family planning faster than predicted and the population growth is slowing quickly, so maybe too little too late. It shows that humans are not just about procreation, however, so maybe cause for hope regardless?
Nate I admit energy is the biggest problem without a huge teleology advancement which is likely years away and may never happen. Ans reducing such likely will be impossible as I tried to teach minimalism and my kids know this but others resist.
I also teach people to seek out and buy into their local organic farms and this at least is finding traction and buy local day exists out here at least once a year. I also push building a compost system as even if one never uses that compose the trees and plants around it do.
These ideas in the second paragraph get more traction but most of those I speak with create very little and work for someone else. So getting them to start buying local reduce stuff and try to get out of debt which is another issue with the slanted economy, is what most watching this need and can do.
And maybe a Frankly can look at this, what non inventors or little poor folk just trying to get by can do, where the idea of 'just insulate" isn't easy because they have maintenance problems on their home they have to fix first or rent. This is because we want to help too, but lack those resources others have likely because our value system is already aligned with that rebooting of the culture.
Hope this helps.
Share economy: in liue of each person/family having a unique car, washing machine, dryer, etc. we have shared appliances, car pooling, etc. We currently have the computational capacity to manufacture less and share technology more.
thought provokiing discuss today Nate !
Mechanical clocks?! Timekeeping is so important for basic societal function in cities, and all modern clocks are relient on grids and heavy industry. We need more clock makers!
Perhaps another item for the checklist could be something like “ability for new product (not just new tech) to displace existing junque”
I have shared this frame of understanding a couple of years now. However, I struggle to make them “alive” to loved ones, friends or political colleagues (on the left - and in dialogue with the right).
I think “we” are trapped within the framework imaginary of _modernity_ - what the classic “left and right” share. The recent decades of slashing general philosophy from even higher education, or at least externalising what’s regarded as heterodox thinking in most fields - is holding us back.
Individually, and as the emergent fact of us existing in social ‘lumps’, the “dreaded” civilised society. How can we _communicate_ beyond “facts”, when trust in them is deflating…?
Everything is contract and must be ritten in : Quantum-language-syntax-parce.
: the now-space.
Trust is dead.
The globalist want you to get into theyr new trust system.
Cbdc/ economic slavery+ surveillance.
You will owned nothing and be happy.
Changing venue is the 1st step
Hi Nate, I would another criteria around justice, and the impact of the technology on justice for different communities, especially those already marginalized and extracted from
Thank you 🙏🌞 This is the episode I’ve been waiting for. The only thing missing is examples. The only one you share is sodium based batteries. I’d love to see you take a deep dive into that Goldilocks technology. What do they look like, what would it mean to our current lifestyle if we made the switch to sodium based batteries? What would it mean for places like Congo? I realize it may not age well but I would, of course, like to see a lot more concrete examples🤞😇
thank you. i intend on doing that but wanted a framework first. 🌎💚
I wonder if these sodium batteries also have lots of plastic in them, and are ground into powder to "recycle" them, as is currently done with lithium-ion batteries.
Products and services relevant to the coming great simplification can already be seen. Fast food and products of questionable use for example are going by the wayside in my opinion. Hopefully forever also in my strong opinion.
Great video.
I believe the average person is unequipped to deal with the complexities of the issues we now face. There’s so many unintuitive things about the way the world works, things that we simply never encountered on the African savannah-concepts like exponential growth, feedback loops, probability and statistics, and the laws of thermodynamics. Would you say that the average person you encounter has a solid grasp of these topics? If the answer is no, then how can we reach a positive consensus that moves us in the right direction? If we literally don’t have the tools needed to understand the problem, then is there any hope to solve it outside of an autocratic government run by scientists? Maybe A.I. overlords?
I’m not being facetious here…this is a serious challenge that anyone who wants to solve these monumental, planet-wide issues is going to have to overcome if they want to enact change in a democratic way.
Anyone who has had family pass on, and gets to deal with the Junque that they have to dispose of, understands the "consumption" issue. But they just usually keep what is useful and sentimental and discard/donate the rest. Some of this gets reused for sure. But the recipients of the estate(s) usually say that "not me" in that they will not be like their parents, etc who hoarded all the stuff. And some may. But most just do the same. Consume. That was what their parents et al have taught them to do. Consume. And it will take a huge change to shift from that paradigm to NOT Consume or Consume MUCH less will things have a chance of changing. This includes any technologies that make it still easy to consume. Any focus on business as usual, Consuming the same or even more, every day, every year, will not work to reverse the march to shattering the planetary boundaries. The younger generation, to an extent gets this. But like all younger generations, they are very limited in their economic and political power. So they can only make changes on a mostly personal level. But this is where it starts. Where it MUST start. Eventually as all the huge consumers die off, then the younger, will take their place and insitute the changes needed. But as we know. We don't necessarily have a generation or more to wait on their ascendency. More of us older folks have to join them. And I'm hopeful that will happen.
This is great
Brazil also have a dust brick...is called "tijolo ecológico" - eco brick
I'm more inclined to start from a place of need. Water & Food, Shelter, Family and Community. Then connect to place, climate, soils, etc. Build things that bring joy in their creation, use, outputs and appearance....
I own three fridges one was my mother's who owned it for at least 15 years before she died in 2010, one given to me by my son which is in excess of 20 years old. The third is in a house we built in 1999 and is the third fridge bought since the house was built. I expect the old fridges to outlive the newer one. I subscribe to our local Consumer magazine and learned recently that products now have a life expectancy of 8 years which i expect will further diminish as time goes by. I find it difficult to accept this as the status quo - why does everyone live for the moment and not for lifetime?? (That was a rhetorical question, my intuitive explanation is capitalism!!)
would composting fit the bill?
This was an excellent podcast. A great list you have come up with and included. I have to wonder if our overshoot problem could be added to the checklist in some way. Or is slowly decreasing our population numbers a natural outgrowth of moving toward such a checklist?
We need new Goldilocks Culture. I'm reading a lot of books and papers about cultural evolution and diversity. There is a common understanding in the English literature with which I don't agree as a member of one other cultural background.
Those ideas are well express by Ronald H. Inglehart in his book "Cultural Evolution" when he states: " Various analysts, working from different perspectives, have described these cultural differences as Collectivism versus Individualism, Survival versus Self-expression values, or Autonomy versus Embeddedness, but they all tap a common dimension of cross-cultural variation that reflects a society’s level of “existential security” - the degree to which survival seems safe or insecure. During the decades since World War II, growing existential security has been propelling most of the world’s societies toward greater emphasis on individualism, Autonomy and Self-expression values [...] Moreover, countries that have high levels of Self-expression values are much likelier to be genuine democracies than countries that rank low on these values."
Those statements are quite a dogma in the Anglo-American culture. It looks to me like a supremacist belief of an individualist society that looks only at its nombril. Quebec's French Canadian culture gives an important role to collective values as the individualist-collectivist scale shows it... and it's a democratic society with rules stronger than in the USA that prohibits billionaire fund upraising for political parties, a society that excludes Gerrymandering and with more equality among citizens.
In their book "Region Apart - The Four Societies of Canada and the United States," Edward Grabb and James Curtis wrote (page 149): " The findings from Table 7.2 that may be most surprising are those for the Quebec subsample. Given the historical evidence reviewed in Part II, which suggested that early French Canada was marked by religious, political, and social structures that were generally more authoritarian, hierarchical, and collectivist than elsewhere in North America, we might have expected that, even in the present day, the people of Quebec would adopt the least liberal and most traditional views on a variety of issues. However, the evidence clearly belies this expectation, at least with respect to questions of sexual morality and family values. Before seeking to explain this outcome, we should make the initial observation that our findings for Quebec are not anomalous. On the contrary, they are consistent with a considerable amount of attitudinal and behavioural evidence on family values, gender roles, marital practices, and sexuality in Canada and the United States. Taken together, this previous body of research generally suggests that, in all of these topic areas, Quebecers are the most liberal or least traditional population in the two nations, followed by English Canadians, northern Americans, and southern Americans."
So where do you think I am going ? I'm just saying that the self-expression values are nothing good if they are not tempered by collective values. It's in a balance between those two poles where Cultures should move. Goldilocks Technology is wasteful without Goldilocks Cultural change of the sort I've described here.
Just for fun I've summited to GPT-4o my previous comment. Here what it answered:
Your reflection touches on an important critique of the dichotomy often drawn between individualism and collectivism in discussions of cultural evolution, particularly within the framework of Anglo-American scholarship. By highlighting the example of Quebec's French Canadian culture, you challenge the assumption that self-expression values are inherently superior or more conducive to democratic societies.
The passage from Ronald H. Inglehart emphasizes a linear progression from collectivism towards individualism as societies achieve greater "existential security." This perspective implies that individualism, autonomy, and self-expression are the ultimate markers of cultural and societal advancement. However, your argument suggests that this view overlooks the value and strength of collective values, particularly in maintaining social cohesion, equality, and democratic integrity.
The example from "Region Apart" illustrates how Quebec, despite its historically collectivist and hierarchical roots, has evolved into a society that blends collective values with progressive social attitudes. This indicates that societies do not have to choose between individualism and collectivism but can find a "Goldilocks" balance that incorporates the strengths of both.
In this context, you argue for a more nuanced understanding of cultural evolution-one that does not simply favor individualistic values but recognizes the importance of tempering self-expression with collective responsibility. This "Goldilocks Culture" would avoid the extremes of both individualism and collectivism, promoting a cultural evolution that balances personal autonomy with social solidarity.
Such a perspective challenges the supremacy of individualism as a universal ideal and underscores the diversity of cultural pathways that can lead to democratic and egalitarian societies. This approach aligns with the idea that cultural evolution should not be seen as a monolithic process but as one that can vary significantly depending on historical, social, and cultural contexts.
In advocating for this balance, you're calling for a reassessment of the dominant narratives in cultural evolution, pushing for a model that appreciates the complex interplay between individual and collective values. This would lead to more sustainable and equitable societies that are not solely driven by self-expression but are also grounded in mutual respect, cooperation, and shared responsibility.
Continentalism! A logical step from nationalism but without the risks of globalism.
There's also bioregionalism
Convert an old car to EV , right to repair is built in. Gypsy Vardo, build your own damn RV!
Ho Chi Minh sandals!
Joseph Tainter is useful to listen to about the mechanisms of collapse, which of couse is where we mwy all end up if we dont pay attention to a simplification but its bloody hard to do even when the life of everything on the planet depends on it!
Modern marketing creates wants not needs. I think there is a difference between marketing, education and storytelling with the latter two being necessary for a move to a more ecological existence. The former feeds the consumerism.
What's wrong with thatched sandals? I wish I could get some. I am stuck with cheap Merrell barefoot shoes that I bought over five years ago. I do have a pair of Irish Setters (now made in Vietnam instead of Red Wing) when I need a stiff sole for digging with a spade or weed-whacking protection. But I try not to stray too far from t-shirts, shorts and bare feet. The same with what I grow. I don't NEED to eat meat and the occasional piece of chorizo in my green beans is a real treat.
This episode dovetails nicely with the earlier "Dial It Down" Frankly. However, from a structural level, any technology that is "just right" will become "not quite right" as the social conditions move on. And that is key to the structural level of technology. Culture trumps (your topic here). As an example, stone tools were just fine for ealy humans and allowed Homo erectus/ergaster to move to the edges of the ice sheets in Asia and Europe. It is likely they already had trade too - BEFORE the increases in brain size that mark Homo neandertalensis, Home heidelbergensis and Homo sapiens.
Ten years ago I pointed out (in my first book) that we have traded culture for cheap oil at an increasing pace over the last 150 years. Since culture is an evolutionary adaptation and evolution doesn't work backwards, assuming we can go back through the ages to the 18th century - before large-scale industrialization - is a false concept. Therefore, the parsimonious conclusion is crash and burn until enough humans have died off that state-level society is no longer powerful enough to quash tribal social organization. Then the inflection point of human societies will change sign and move upwards on the sine wave. But until that time we are on the down side of the saddle point of human society - worldwide. The question now is: Long Emergency or Long Descent. [Full faith and credit to Kunstler and Greer for coining these terms of course.]
Goldilocks technology - in my view at least - is just another attempt to have an affluent society without paying the price. Energy use is still paramount and decreasing the energy flows will mean more starvation in Africa and Asia as affluent Americans and Europeans strive to have their cake and eat it too.
why are you worried about genetically unintelligent people. the only reason we went there is to extract resources.
The "thatched" part refers to roofs made of reed or straw.
@@dbadagna- I know that! Nate was making a rhetorical point. So was I. Nit-picking about throwaway lines is useless.
Yes. So if someone can come up with a scaleable technology which has great potential but has a long development gestation and which wouldn't be easy to make money out of (for various reasons) - guess what's going to happen ?
Great Q: "What do we need technology for -- drones to deliver "JIT Mellows" to kids' birthday extravaganzas in social circles where releasing hydrogen gas filled balloons or hapless butterflies is "over"?"
Let's move from this micro-Me making-memories setting to the macro level to see and question how this Q has been answered for the provision of, first, food and then transport. Spoiler alert: Might entire industries be shrunk and thereby end the need for the manufacture of much technology?
The dominant world culture -- the technologically advanced economic civilization effectively in charge of shaping global decision-making -- has apparently decided that we need the technology that enables Big Ag "to feed the world." That's how we're "Going to end starvation!" Big Ag has been lionized as the hero that will not only "end starvation" and "make sure the food you eat is safe" but also free up people to "do other things" besides grow their own food or find it in open air markets or little shops, or for that matter spend time identifying, cleaning, picking, or preparing and cooking and preserving it themselves. Just get in the SUV, arrive to push a grocery cart that 10 frat boys could fit in down aisles so long they have dwindling size perspective, load up, pay, and drive home with "tasty, scrumptious, healthy, natural" bags and jars and plastic packets of food -- or, "food."
Big Ag entails technology that includes $400,000 combines other farm machines that cut, thresh, bind, plow, seed, fertilize, poison, weed and harvest -- as they pack down the soil; drones and airplanes that apply -cides manufactured in chemical plants and lately are outfitted to collect lotsa datadatadata to be downloaded and studied; complex irrigation systems with miles of plastic plumbing outfitted with pump systems tapping into aquifers and rivers; plastic covered greenhouses for hydroponic growing can now be labeled "organic" in the outlier-USofA; refrigeration for weeks and months of storage in containers in warehouses and grocery stores and the factories that manufacture the sophisticated temperature controlled systems and their replacement parts; trucks to move the food -- a head of lettuce averaging a 1500 mile TRIP after being sprayed with an from warehouse to table -- and the factories to manufacture the warehouses and combines, trucks and their replacement parts including tires that shred and disperse microplastics and the mining that provides the fuel for the combine and truck engines and the fossil fuel based fertilizers; cargo ships to get products to tables --, the mining to get the fuels to power the machinery, the industrial plants to make the machinery to maintain the machinery used to plant, harvest, sort, "process," refrigerate, wrap and label, transport.
Growing most food organically and locally with simple hand tools would shrink Big Ag's giant upstream, on site and downstream ecologically corrosive footprint -- and give worms now doomed to suffer from ingesting microplastics in contaminated soil new places to call home -- forest gardens, foodscapes, and more where 1000 feet of lawn per American now stand.
Technology also enables Big Transport.
Let's decrease big heavy loud polluting motorized local traffic with lightweight quiet non-polluting traffic and in the process increase both personal and planetary health. And let's do it before I need another new car with its no-choice self-opening self-starting no key "performance."
I want Toggle Times to reduce local noisy dangerous polluting ecologically damaging stop and go traffic ASAP!!! Most Americans spend 10-18% of their income on buying, insuring, fueling, maintaining, repairing and parking 2000-4000 pound privately owned or leased motorized vehicles (and on costs of accidents in them) -- and will spend in their lifetimes yet more on dealing with their lifestyle diseases that sitting an average of an hour a day in their vehicles -- nearly motionless, inhaling the tiniest, most dangerous, fresh-off-the-tires microplastics when WITH TOGGLE TIMES they could on days when they feel like it be CYCLING TO DESTINATIONS ON ROADS FREE OF MOTORIZED TRAFFIC. Local transportation engineers would need to PAUSE MOTORIZED TRAFFIC for micro-transport only. Micro-transport includes walking, jogging, running, CYCLING (on bicycles, adult and child tricycles, cargo bikes, taxi-bikes, rickshaws, unicycles), skating, boarding, wheelchairing. (For purposes of definition, micro could exclude all internal combustion engine boosters, any electric boosted travel exceeding 20-mph while unboosted cyclists could stay far left cruise to 28). Based on research, best-times schedules would be developed, widely publicized, and evolved over time.
IN DESIGNATED ZONES, LOCAL TRAFFIC ENGINEERS WOULD TOGGLE ALL TRAFFIC SIGNAL LIGHTS TO FLASHING GREEN AND YELLOW, USING TECH THAT SETS TRAFFIC LIGHTS FLASHING RED AND YELLOW AFTER HURRICANES. Research shows AVERAGE DOOR TO DOOR TRAVEL TIME WILL DECREASE.
In less than a year, Toggle Times in places now stifled with stop-and-go traffic could have 60% and more of all trips be NON-STOP micro-transport. IN THE US, THIS WOULD SLASH EMISSIONS AND POLLUTION FROM OUR HIGHEST EMITTING SECTOR and greatly improve the health of our out of shape, over scheduled, under exercised populace. Scaling the idea? In Asia and Africa, urban and suburban road networks providing safe, non-stop travel with motorized vehicles paused might increase already high birth rates by providing new mobility for goods and people.
Do you think the suburbs can be adapted?
Yes, of course, if people living in these suburbs were all in for changing their lifestyles and if the laws that govern them allowed them to do so. TECHNOLOGY USED TO SUPPORT THEIR GROWING FOOD ORGANICALLY CLOSE TO WHERE IT IS CONSUMED AND TRAVELING MAINLY BY USING THEIR OWN BODIES would be a smart use of technology -- fine tuning to coordinate people and the elements in the system and its lightweight accessory transport aids.
Right now, in the US a lot of money is tied up in office parks and housing governed by strict ownership laws that assure all properties have particular landscaping, some "communities" as developers call them going so far as to require homeowners pay for "landscaping services" provided by the developers so everything gets sprayed with -cides and fertilizers that create golf course like color and growth uniformity, hedges trimmed to the same heights and shapes, lawns edged along concrete identically, grass height strictly controlled, trees pruned in swoops on schedules like power companies do. Add in a few draconian restrictions on vehicle -- in particular pick up truck -- parking and gates and even surreptitious "foodscaping" like RUclips's Brie The Plant Lady "invented" might kill you from poisoning by "landscaping crews." Here in Florida we have fought successfully for state laws that restrict the rights of local government to forbid people to use their own property to grow some food. Locally in Orlando, "Fleet Farming" fleetfarming.org/ has hand in hand with our foodie culture worked to improve human and environmental health and happiness while simultaneously saving money and providing INTERESTING VARIED PLANTINGS FOR PASSERBY'S TO OGGLE. Millison shows how in Oregon at Yes, of course, if people living in these suburbs were all in for changing their lifestyles and if the laws that govern them allowed them to do so. TECHNOLOGY USED TO SUPPORT THEIR GROWING FOOD ORGANICALLY CLOSE TO WHERE IT IS CONSUMED AND TRAVELING MAINLY BY USING THEIR OWN BODIES would be a smart use of technology -- fine tuning to coordinate people and the elements in the system and its lightweight accessory transport aids.
Right now, in the US a lot of money is tied up in office parks and housing governed by strict ownership laws that assure all properties have particular landscaping, some "communities" as developers call them going so far as to require homeowners pay for "landscaping services" provided by the developers so everything gets sprayed with -cides and fertilizers that create golf course like color and growth uniformity, hedges trimmed to the same heights and shapes, lawns edged along concrete identically, grass height strictly controlled, trees pruned in swoops on schedules like power companies do. Add in a few draconian restrictions on vehicle -- in particular pick up truck -- parking and gates and even surreptitious "foodscaping" like RUclips's Brie The Plant Lady "invented" might kill you from poisoning by "landscaping crews." Here in Florida we have fought successfully for state laws that restrict the rights of local government to forbid people to use their own property to grow some food. Locally in Orlando, "Fleet Farming" fleetfarming.org/ has hand in hand with our foodie culture worked to improve human and environmental health and happiness while simultaneously saving money and providing INTERESTING VARIED PLANTINGS FOR PASSERBY'S TO OGLE. Millison shows how in Oregon in 13 minutes at ruclips.net/video/b5Xgw_DqmEw/видео.html
UCF a few decades ago lost a brilliant UCF PhD student to a school where she was supported in developing a sophisticated program for SHARING INFORMATION by connecting neighborhoods to share knowledge about foods -- for example extra foods they had from their backyard gardens to trade, sell, or give away, and the same re seeds, cuttings, tools. Once set up, such programs could expand to communicate about free compost materials, water collection and watering, recipes and cooking, health, plant based beauty and body care, permaculture, plant rotation, chickens and ducks for eggs, pet goats, bee keeping.
Transportation planning as taught in US civil engineering programs emphasizes LOS -- "level of service." The primary goal of the trained engineer is to provide a high "level of service" in planning that moves as many motorized vehicles as possible as fast as possible with as few accidents with accompanying fatalities (8th cause of death globally, bad trajectory to be 7th by 2030) as possible to their desired destinations. Using our right-brains and aiming to add goals of personal mental, physical, spiritual health, a wise use of global resources, low benzene, microplastics and GHG emissions, leads to the low-emitting, low resource use innovation of Toggle Times.
So does googling "microplastics shredding from car tires and coalescing" and researching the fascinating story of tiny tiny tiny bits shredding off motorized vehicle tires that inhaled into the human body may be able to freely move from lungs to veins to brains. So interesting to visualize their brief opportunities before they coalesce into larger glumps a few yards away from the road.
Those interested in bringing Toggle Times to their area could research the success of car-free Sundays in Bogota and Paris including data on precipitous drops in local air pollution and might want to call on the bright mind, warmly open and lucid communication of US Secretary of Transportation Peter Buttigieg to check out the possibilities.
@@RubenKemp
@@RubenKemp ruclips.net/video/TNR8JfHah00/видео.html
@@RubenKemp
Science has identified ag as now practiced as the biggest destroyer of nature.
ruclips.net/video/TNR8JfHah00/видео.html
ruclips.net/video/Ax0SIbxgqDw/видео.html
ruclips.net/video/l3U_xd5-SA8/видео.html
Nate your TGS/Frankly’s covers so many environmental and ecological areas impacted by human behaviour (human predicament): Climate change, Loss of biodiversity, Air pollution, Ocean health, Water pollution, Overpopulation, Energy use, Weather events, which you and many of your expert/scientific guests have discussed. All of the above areas as you’ve pointed out are converging, forming the meta and polycrisis leading to humanity’s most dangerous predicament and the greatest threat to its survival. But problems have solutions, predicaments don’t.
From your earliest TGS I’ve come to believe the first to trigger the greatest threat to humanity’s survival will be humanity’s access to energy specifically FREE FINITE flammable fossils in particular Oil. But as Oil and Gas becomes more expensive, difficult to access, geologically and or geopolitically, we’ll revert to using more Coal, alongside peat and forests, so the heat and CO2 will continue to rise exponentially, with the heat continuing to raise ocean temperatures and accelerate the melting of the ice caps and glaciers. Humanity (we) are in ecological overshoot. Technology isn’t going so save humanity, majority of solutions ain’t gonna’ happen. There are just too many of us (Superorganism) we may not do anything to dramatically reduce our numbers but nature will as nature doesn’t respect human rights or any other creatures rights for that matter. Jack Alpert (of “Jack Alpert -- Civilization's “Running Out of Gas” Story”) thinks a maximum of 600 million is about what nature would reduce humanity to when we’ve run out of Oil, anyone thinking in the billions is just fooling themselves. Whilst I may not see any of these problems a child born today will🤔
I think Nate already knows all of this, and confided in a video several months back that he has privileged access (I guess via the government officials and captains of industry for which he serves as consultant) to information about what is in store for humanity and the planet in the near future that he cannot share with his viewers, as it's apparently much too dire.
@@dbadagna So are you saying Nate’s an 'Apocaloptimist' ; someone who knows it's all going to s#%t but still thinks things will turn out ok, well maybe for some. Or perhaps Nates’s a closeted Ecological Doomer, like myself, where we’re damned if we (humanity) do and damned if we don’t, accept we’re all F%#ked, enjoy life to the full like there’s no tomorrow, help everyone you can within your means, family, friends, everyone else, don’t tell them why unless they really want to know, and then apologise to those generations you’re responsible for their being born, that way when you depart this life your conscience will be clear for what ecological terrors are going to happen. If you want a preview of how bad things can get read Kurt Dahl’s “An American Famine - A Rosetta Stone for the coming collapse”🤔
Quick poll:
If you could buy a $5000 car that got a 1000 MPG, without sacrificing speed, would you do it? Yes or no?
I’m sorry Nate. We’ve innovated ourselves into a dead end with absolutely no way out
I guess he is still in the Denial stage. That's why he hasn't had Eliot Jacobson, Guy McPherson, or Michael Dowd on (though he has had Leon Simons).
Yes, profit is part of a working economic system, for the reasons Nate mentioned and more. But the great disparities of wealth (and the most wealthy are the highest energy and resource users by far) are not a result of "earned" profit in large part but rather due to massive market failures (e.g., monopolistic power of oligarchies) and the perversion of our political and financial systems to siphon off wealth from those whose work benefits us all (maldistribution). Adam Smith would be appalled at what exploitation has occurred. Related is our current neoliberal economics in which return to owners and shareholders is all that is allowed (legally?) to matter (claimed to be amoral, but truly immoral) and the focus is on the most short term gains (note how the stock market reacts to missed quarterly earnings targets). BTW, I saw in the May 9, 2024, journal Nature and article on Limitarianism. Great to see the idea receiving wider visibility. I could say more, but will stop here.
A marketing campaign would operate in a corrupt system controlled by those who maximize profits at all costs. The system needs to crash for a new one to emerge. 🤷♀️
I would add ‘universality’ to the list. Don't build in a vacuum.
Humans who are currently wealthy enough to be venture capitalists got rich off the carbon pulse in 1 way or another, some more directly than others. We now all face great danger because of the harm done in pursuit of that general accumulation of wealth. If humanity fully wakes up to the metacrisis, and the need for a safely managed Great Simplification, wont there be reasonable demands for the nullification of that wealth? Especially from a large portion of the youth, who wont have the opportunity. If the Great Nullification happens, we can then decouple "venture capitalists" from "inventors" and "technological tinkerers", which could be helpful.
Dear Nate please bring back on that wonderful English Historian Helen Thompson especially with Donald Trumps Project 2025 I just watched an awakening podcast of Brian Tyler Cohen with American Historian Heather Cox Richardson And had the exact same conclusion of Trump wanting to be Americas next Dictator 🧐
goldilocks action ... technology if you like ... a consciously redesigned cultural model (in select locations likely) ... that's my lifetime focus, not a 'gadget' technology per se
don't forget robot workers & consumers and crispr will edit or create new creatures in the form of consumers & food & workers
❤
The last time humans lived sustainably with nature was the paleolithic era. Everything we've done since then (with the exception of some fortunate tribes who have avoided civilization) has been inherently unsustainable. If you want to develop "technology" then, you'll need to go back to that level and start there.
Need massive subsidies(temporarily--years/decade?) from private donors not looking for a return. And from the government too. Thinking Billionaires looking to not get liquified in the Eye of the Needle, for example like they might if they went into a black hole, and instead are willing to become mere millionaires or God forbid thousandaires.--one can dream.
Yes and then what... all these points you are making can be applied from people who are the now ones winning fron the current situation..
peeps will innovate...like living in their vehicles...Talk about a low foot print lifestyle.
It's minimalist, however depends how much fuel their using.
Driving one mile in a vehicle is as much joule of energy, that if converted to KWH would be more than enough to meet someone's basic needs for a day.
For around 1.5 kwh a day averaged out all year, I can manage all my hot water needs for showers and dishes, laundry, media and device charging, refrigeration, vacuum ect. Some use of tools here and there, some enjoyment of retro games and crt displays in winter evenings where the heat isn't wasted and the utility goes the furthest...
The way I manage all these activity's is very particular though, however moving the better part of 2 tonne of weight or more a mile is definitely not trivial and is so ubiquitous its beyond the pale.
However of course someone living in a van or something doesn't necessarily drive more distance than someone bumbling/commuting about everywhere between a suburban home and everywhere else every day.
Of course you also have to consider the maintenance of roads which is very intensive as tarmac surfacing is perishable only lasting a decade or two without constant renewal.
It is definitely a fall from the 1960s when a single income would support a family of 4 including a house with a white picked fence. From Norman Rockwell paintings back to the dust bowl depression era photos of homeless people unable to get by on their skills.
Hmm Same old Different Century as far As Wealth goes.
It is my belief that natural externalities need to be given an intrinsic value that reflects their sustainable/unsustainable balance. This can be done through a countries taxation system where all the considerations that you mentioned are taken into account for any product/activity under consideration... Anybody who has read Jared Diamond's book Collapse will understand that the threat of civilization collapse is very real. Corrupt politics currently prevents this proposal from taking place. Consequently this proposal is best developed in a grass roots up proposal... Ecological Models are developed to help set appropriate tax value levels to activities; which in term can be used by all entities to gauge the sustainability of their products/activities... with the goal of eventually being adopted by all world governments.
You're confusing good nation state and local regulations what does international slime mold global corporate bailout
Thank you, Nate! Nice to see some consideration of technology requirements for a society constrained by biophysical reality. You might enjoy reading a book on exploring requirements written by systems engineers that includes techniques for building consensus among various stakeholder constituencies:
Gause, D. C., & Weinberg, G. (2011). Exploring requirements: Quality before design (Paperback). Dorset House.
It's available on libgen.
The checklist needs to include a pragmatic energy solution for the future. Yes we must reduce consumption, but equally important we must reduce fossil use. We need a viable nonfossil, reliable source of energy. My intuition is nuclear power in the near term and geothermal in the long term, with a little wind and solar to arbitrage when the wind blows and the sun shines. But I believe 'the basics' needs to include a recommendation for the energy strategy that replaces fossil fuels.
Everyone here needs to understand a very basic fact that somehow has not propagated to the average person: All technological societies (once the bulk of people move off of farms) they do not raise enough children to sustain themselves. They go down in population. Out of every industrial society the only exceptions right now are: The US, and Mexico. One important factor that helps the US is: everyone wants to come to the US and live, and we can allow those who get advanced degrees here to stay, etc... In other words everyone wants to come here so we can keep our population from declining and so we are not in a desperate situation - we have an easy mechanism for avoiding inevitable population decline.
Elsewhere around the world industrialized countries had long been in decline. Back in the days of family farms naturally we all had a lot of children and the children kept the farm running. After moving to cities or suburbs, children are very expensive and modern young people are not sustaining the population. Imagine, every young boy/girl (man/woman) needs to pair up and have 2.2 children on average in order to just sustain the population. We tend to ignore all of the young folk who do not pair up this way and so those more rare couple who do have children now need to overcome this deficit, they need to have more children on average. A technological society does not sustain it's population level.
Look at Japan for example. The population is very old on average - they do not have enough workers. The same thing has been happening in Germany (and just list all technological societies and you'll find this problem).
So, we people of Earth do NOT have a problem of overpopulation now. Human population growth peaks and then heads down in a near run-away fashion. Our lifestyle does not support itself.
So we do not actually have to take any action to reduce population growth. Just look at and follow the math and you see the problem was solved as each country pursued industrialization. Call this "modern society." Modern Society does not create enough children to keep itself going.
As this information finally gets out to the average person we more and more will begin talking about steps we need to take to solve the fact that we don't replace ourselves.
So in this one case our lifestyle is solving the human overpopulation problem. Please read more about this. Please educate yourself. Look at the statistics.
Ha! Read Peter Zeihan's book: "The End of the World is Just the Beginning."
Cheers!
Colonize space first, then think about population growth. A healthy earth does not need any more humans.
@TheOriginalRaster The industrialised nations populations are dropping, yes, but the world population is dropping because the poor countries have finally adopted family planning. This is terrible for the current growth economy, but great news for the biosphere. 3 billion is the current maximum population for a sustainable future so all good, as long as it's not too late.
Honestly it’s crazy how people are complaining about underpopulation when we are at the most people to occupy the Earth ever at the same time and we do it with an entirely unsustainable agricultural system. Feels Orwellian. The ponzi scheme needs population growth but few if any can afford children so then it’s an economic problem but it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that economic strife would happen considering how plundered the Earth is now.
@@chastetree Agree with “ A healthy earth does not need any more humans” and there’s a simple remedy to that :
“There is ONE THING we can do to save the planet: Keep your pecker in your pants, and do not let your knickers down. Period. End of story. It will have the added benefit of phasing out coal to zero. Ditto for oil, gas, lithium, copper, cobalt, nickel, plastic, chemicals... I think you get my drift. This is not rocket science.” - Sam Mitchell at Collapse Chronicles.
As regards colonising space 🚀 , in your dreams🤔
stupid in, stupid out. no fertilizer, no food, endless wars. DOESNT MATTER IF RATE OF POPULATION INCREASE SLOWS OR POPULATION ACCELERATES IN DECREASING IF THE SIZE IS TOO BIG AND IS STILL CONSUMING
I disagree that people would be happy with less. What we need is to make our way of life sustainable. We want to continue living in suburbs and get around by car. All we need is a lower population.
A lower population of people living in suburbs driving cars is still unsustainable. Do you know how anything is manufactured?
@@evilryutaropro I understand what you mean. But a lower population would make it far easier to recycle all our stuff and to implement renewable energy. People could be relocated to places where there’s hydroelectricity.
And no one in this comments section has mentioned the Internet (which we're all using), which requires an enormous amount of energy and materials to keep running.
A marketing campaign would operate in a corrupt system controlled by those who maximize profits at all costs. The system needs to crash for a new one to emerge.
I would add ‘universality’ to the list. Don't build in a vacuum.
The
I don't understand how you talk about this stuff and are still flying around here and there demonstrating you can't put your money where your mouth is.
Meanwhile, what is this about profit and technology? How are you not at least a semi primitivist by now?
I am projecting here but I think it is because he wants to increase his circle of influence.
Look Nate - you can't just blithely acknowledge our extreme human ecological #overshoot with one breath, and with your next, go on to say how human civilisation 'can live sustainably with much less'. No - we can't. Not any more. For a host of reasons! Whilst isolated examples of sustainable human habitat do still currently exist (for the moment #climatechange), what you seem, like many others, to refuse to recognise is how the effect of overshoot serves to radically diminish the previous baseline carrying-capacity. We are rapidly travelling back in time from the Holocene, through the Eocene to a pre-human climate that existed 500 million years ago. Habitat? What habitat?
As for 'simplification', degrowth, or similar transformation, understand that these proposals are inherently growthist - all 'transformation' requires energy and creates entropy/waste/pollution. That's basic physics. Transformation of any kind of the global enterprise of #8billion humans is a #hypergrowth of material use, extraction, energy, with associated ecological throughput. The best we can do, is repurpose what already exists as it falls apart and collapses. Don't just collapse - #JustCollapse! JustCollapse.or g
This checklist can be summarised as "Is it sustainable". No. It is not. #unsustainability