Environmetalism in an ideal system

I hear a lot of talk about the means of production, but let's talk about production itself.


And ideal society should be environmentally sustainable.
I see no stable solution for this.


People want new shit
No. It will happen in every system.
At the very least, it denotes social status. That is why phony environmentalism is so prevalent: everyone can say they give a fuck, but nobody wants to be the first outcast to actually classify garbage and keep old stuff. Instead they might wear some hippie rustic-looking handwoven sweater, and will change phone's every two years.
The cost (as in "amount of work you need to get it") of consumer products do not factor in environmental sustainbility, ethical labor nor whatever animal ethics you care about.


There is not way in hell, no political framework, no economic system, in which you can realistically solve this (and remain in power).
People will fucking overthrow any government if they were forced to adopt actual sensible and not phony green meassures. If they had to pay a fair price for the African child labour. If the cost of getting a new car/phone was prohibitely high (costing enough "effort" mas it would take to remedy environmental damage cause by it's production). If they were forced to abandon the cheap industrialized treatment of farm animals.


My blood boils when I hear shit like "promoting production to solve unemployment".
Christ. All that wasted effort. If you want to remedy unemployment, instead of producing more shit for people to buy, produce less shit at a slower pace but hiring more people to involve in the redesign of the industrial complex and account for environmental sustaintability.


I love industrialization and technology, but I'd rather there were fewer people, and they didn't throw their curtain away because it has a stain.

Why do people hate old stuff?
I wish everyone had to live with the damage they cause in their backyard. Then they'd become concious.

Environmentalism is a first-mover loses game.


You were right, this is a much more productive subject

I was getting back into my car today after going to the store and a woman was getting out of the car next to me. She opened her door and kicked out some trash. She seriously just kicked it out onto the tarmac and left it.

I was astonished.

there is a lot more to our society than the environment, but I agree.
I say we go all the way. Humans should live in harmony with mother earth, not capitalize on it.

Stopped right there, siberia next stop for you my friend

People primarily want enough shit to get by. The "People want more shit" meme is the result of poor people who have little wanting enough and rich acquisitionists who will never be satisfied wanting everything. Most people would be content to live comfortably off the value of their labor.

You're talking about people who are well-off. Most people don't give a fuck about hipster shit like handwoven clothes. And as for phones, most people don't buy them regularly - just when the old one (inevitably) stops working well enough.

That's because of a number of factors, but the biggest one is planned obsolescence. Electronics are built with low quality and the expectation that they will wear out. If we built shit with good quality and did a better job recycling the parts, the overall cost would drop by an order of magnitude at least.

Based on your incomplete understanding of the way these industries work, yes.
But then Africans would have more money and be able to pay first-worlders the full value of their labor. Black people aren't black holes that suck in all the money from gibsmedats, ya crypto-Holla Forumsyp. Besides, the consumers are also being paid the value of their labor, which is much higher than they're used to.
Most environmental damage from any production is due to shipping and producing electricity to run machines, which is mostly powered by fossil fuels. Solar is already cheaper, but the oil titans are doing everything they can to keep their market share.
If people were paid the value of their labor more people could afford grass-fed beef and free-roaming eggs. And we'd be a lot closer to synthetic meat products anyway.

That's not profitable which is why it won't happen in capitalism. In socialism it will though because the cost of environmental damage is borne by the people, and the people control production.

Because capitalism taught them to so it could sell them new stuff.
Right now we have to live with the damage Porky causes our back yard and can't do shit. If we controlled production we could stop that from happening.

It shows
I didn't say "consumerism will happen in every system", I said that the problem of unsustainable production will arise in every system, and that brushing it off as just consumerism's fault doesn't cut it.

Social status works at every level of society. Not even poor people want to look poor, and eventually create demand for their own kind of affordable shiny beads to brag about, even if it's just cooler sunglasses. Every social class had it's own power signaling.
Well, we disagree completely on this one, so maybe we'll discuss this part further later.

Not at all. I know a lot of people who struggle to make ends meet, and still talk about it like they were doing anything. People who go through trouble to make wallets from "recycled" Tetra Paks as if it had any consequence, and don't gaf about battery recycling. Maybe phony is a strong word, as their situation is more excusable, well-off people just make it look a bit sadder.
Also HW clothes, or whatever, maybe they aren't, but they go for that look too.

I think most electronics replaced before their working life ends. For mobile phones, there is much faster "fashion" obsolescence. This is still exacerbated by capitalist consumer society, but it will happen all the same whenever tech is so absurdly cheap. Maybe I'm exagerating, though.

I don't get your point, nor how I'm a polyp implying that about blacks.
In a huge part of the third world people are exploited by first world corporations. This results in the corp's host society benefiting from it (even if unwitingly). If this mechanism of exploitation didn't exist, people would bitch about it, even if it's the "fair" thing, that's all I'm saying.
Africa having more money doesn't mean it will literally all come back to you, what are you talking about? And anyways, the end result is you have the exploited country's goods, but now you also give them goods, how is that not loosing? Saying African children living in shit conditions mining rare earths deserve more, is not saying that would be "gibmedats".
And I never talked about applying this in the first world to begin with.

All this is taken into account in what I said: the cost of getting a new car/phone would get prohibitely high to be shallow about it.
And from that, how do you expect to solve shipping with solar? Oil is shit, coal is shit, batteries are shit, solar on boats don't work, solar and wind have lots of problems to provide a constant, reliable supply. What then? Nuclear? Hydroelectric? Try and convince a nation to reformat their whole power grid and remain in power. No matter the economic context, they'll see it as work they don't care to do.

No, it takes too much space and resources. There's a reason why it's done like it is. Mass production of those will result in terrible pandemics too.

I think you understimate severly the cost. People will literally say "fuck the environment", as they do now but more openly

I wish

I think you underestimate the power of propaganda, especially if it's posed as rational egotism (it's in my self interest to care about the environment) rather than posts like which more often than not come across as preachy lifestylism

Just admit you don't give a fuck
Nobody anywhere gives an actual fuck

False. Capitalism relies on endless growth and endless consumption to not fall apart. Communism has production for use and doesnt need to have growth for it to function.

Wew lad. Fucking neck yourself with your absolutist bullshit about "muh hyuman naytjur"

Have you considered, for a second in your life, that you could just have everybody work only 2 days a week, instead of 40+ hours a week in the west and 60+ hours in the rest of the capitalist world? No need for busywork. Stop thinking in terms of capitalism.

Lets start with you, you genocidal maniac.

They do you fucking moron. Lots of societies in human history were highly sustainable, taking care of the soil and forrest, their buildings for their descendants. Its only when the age of capitalism started that everything changed and people were forced to move, when there's new shit after new shit, that people forget the permanence of the world.

You're fucking retarded if you think that the current culture of consumerism and temporarity, where all the old has to go for the new, is anything but the result of capitalism.

Even when you effortpost you can't refrain from acting like a massive faggot.

There are literally islands in the ocean made of garbage, and islands covered in nothing but garbage. Could find yourself something like a big diamond ring or something afford the plane ride back to shore of you're lucky.

Radical democratization and decentralization of political power is the solution to this. People naturally don't want their local environments strip mined, plowed up or pillaged in order to feed production and growth. In the current system only a handful of rich fucks are able to translate this attitude into effective political power to preserve public lands or open space. By expanding this power to everyone and allowing the public to organize and act to protect their own interests, the pace of development and exploitation of the natural environment can be slowed down dramatically or reversed. It's a lot harder to generate piles of trash or plop down a wasteful, destructive development when you actually have to get the people living next to it to agree, and can't just scoop up the space from the local land baron and rely on the state to protect your rights at the expense of everyone else.

Also I'd welcome any tankies to provide their own answers to OP so we can start dumping pics of Magnitogorsk and the Aral Sea.

post pics

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Humanity was a mistake.

That's why rich folks spend millions of dollars filling their houses with century old furniture? And their children wade through second hand shops buying vintage shit?

This fixation with buying all new crap is only present among the nouveau riche or aspiring poor who are desperate for something shiny in their lives.

Shit's as freaky as those hi-def pictures of sunken ships

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I'm not arguing it will be at the same scale, I argue that your "production for use" will still be very damaging unless the industrial complex is rethought thoroughly, and population cut down.
I argue that this is greatly unlikely to happen, even without capitalism, and everyone ITT just wants to point out that the scales are different without adressing that.

Social status is not economic in origin, it's biological.
Stop reading political theory and open an anthropology book. Even if it's just hanging three shiny stones from your tits, indicators of social status go back tens of thousands of years at the very least.

An "egalitarian society" is in terms of labor, the means of production, opportunities, representation, etc.
You are delusional if you think humans will ever not create social structures. It's hardwired into us.
"Keeping up with the joneses" will always be a thing, and people will always want things that look nice and new unless a deep mentality change appears (or is enforced, whatever).

You are high on theory pal, you ideolize the human spirit too much. It's not about whatever "system" you can design, but how people will react to it, and you fail to see the problems if you deny human behaviour.
Humans are built the same way they were for thousands of years.

Stop being just angry and read what I said before replying.
What the fuck did you understand by "producing at a slower pace"? I didn't mean you'd *literally slow down the process*. I meant you should cut down on production, just like you said. Then I added that actually it'd be a good idea too to rethink the processes into greener ones. Doing stuff but taking care about the env. damage is a much more complex process that takes a lot of work. So yes, there might still be a lot of "busywork" even with a huge cut down on production.

Get your head out of the ground about overpopulation. Pointing it out is not genocide apology.
Are you spooked against contraceptives because muh sacred unborn life?

cont.

I said "everyone", and no, they don't. The first world literally ships containers of old tech to the third for """"recycling"""", specially Africa.
Also, we are talking about the industrial globalized society, we are living in a time where this problem takes not only new scales (both in quantity and quality), and not just because of the population boom. Damage is greatly outsourced, be it through shipping or just minning in foreign countries without doing shit about the damage (great example is Areva fucking over Central Africa Republic, with frenchies getting their uranium and then Sarkozy backing the rebels that destroyed compromising documents).

But if you really want to get there, still wrong.
Pure myth. You are fucking high if you bought into that bullshit.
Early in human history they just consumed from the environment below replacement level, humans were very sparse and nomadic. Why do you think we were nomadic to begin with??? People roamed the Earth because food would have run out, and as populations started growing, they expanded, and started slowly devastating the environment.
Pic related . Do you think ancient people just liked building cities in shit desolated places? Why the fuck do you think they abandoned them?
Dessertification. Mesopotamia, the cradle of mankind, took a huge fucking toll from thousands of years of agriculture. There are lots of fertile farmed lands, but not like before.
The same with Europe. I heard accounts of people not believing the tales of those who travelled to the Americas, they just wouldn't believe the soil was that rich and easy to grow stuff in. The americas have the most fertile extensions of land because lack of early civilization and mass farming.
The forests of the world were cut down by the most part.
Overhunting to the point of extintion was recorded many times in prehistory.
So the contamination from minning activities.

Still not my point.
Even if "sustainable" societies existed, I insist that a modern day communist egalitarian utopia will still build batteries and CTR scanners without regard for nature.
Plus, the problem of the mere scale of today's populaiton.

Say we agree. So?
The fall of capitalism and consumer culture will be a great step forward at the very least.
But my point stands that even if the bare necessities are produced, people won't accept the hard work that would take to lessen the environmental damage.
That's what I wanted to discuss

I think people ITT completely understimate the damage that is constantly generated, and *how fucking difficult it is to produce stuff without environmental repercussions*.
If you think just abandoning consumerism will solve things magically, you are fucking high.
It's a terrible meme blaming capitalism for the destruction of the environment as if it would all magically go away.

Just look around your house, and tell me how could any kind of political system produce all you see without tons of by-products.

I try to discuss what would you do in an ideal society, and most people are at my throat basically calling it a non-issue.

You are high if you don't accept that:
>Green production is a whole lot more difficult

Nobody gave any answer to my question:
What would you do in your ideal society?

"The problem will go away without capitalism" is a shitty answer, but the only one I got from most of you


Best answer.
I still disagree in something: People are selfish and won't stop minning gold to say one thing.
Distribution of wealth will still mean that people end up having a better quality of life if their nation just exported their gold and imported, say tastier food, whatever.

I don't see a future with an egalitarian utopia where they just sit on gold and oil to avoid damaging nature.

Okay, skimmed the thread. Imma' split this into two2.2 posts by theme. First off, the scientific angle.

This is focused on both environmentalism, and industry.

While I didn't see much of it in this thread (and I have seen lots of good statements that are sadly rare in such discussions, such as forcing the true price of cradle-to-grave externalities into up-front costs, and the embrace of consumerism as neither inherently bad nor good), common strawmen are that economic development necessarily causes lots of pollution, or that there aren't enough sustainable resources to go around, or that the environment is past the tipping point and we're fucked.

Simply put, the direct correlation between industrial intensity and waste is far less rigid than many imagine. For instance, comparing the US with Europe. There are technologies and policies to fix this, they are being used, and they can be used more, all without significantly harming development.

While it obviously isn't infinite, we have plenty of time, headroom, and capabilities to pursue further development in a healthy way, even before civilization truly extends off-planet.

Due to the 5-image limit, these are basically part of the 1st post. Here, notice that the mainstream models for global warming posit a rise of a few inches in sea level and 1-4℉ by 2050, a little over 1-3' in sea level and 2-8℉ by 2100. That is bad, but it is far from apocalyptic, and (while there are plausible catastrophic runaway scenarios like clathrate guns and deep current inversions) slow enough to be averted, even without the geoengineering technologies we are already developing. Along the same lines, notice how population and fertility levels are already trending down everywhere outside a few African countries, with current likeliest estimates that population will plateau at 11 billion by 2100, with the rosiest estimates peaking at 8 billion around 2050.

And a little more, on our resources and needs. Here, notice the enormous amount of waste, and its concentration in applications ripe for conservation by a variety of techniques (geothermal heat pumps, district heat, cogeneration, fiber-optic centralized lighting, telecommuting, turbosails, electric transport, etc.) that would have little or no impact on quality of life. On the supply side, notice how the price and availability of sustainable energy (and the grid storage needed to fully exploit it's intermittant nature) utterly dwarfs any realistic need in the foreseeable future, especially after even the simplest conservation measures are put in place.

Energy is far from the only resource with these prospects for, but it is the easiest to illustrate clearly. Nearly every segment of our economy from resource extraction, to heavy industry, to agriculture, even to housing, has similar low-hanging fruit for recycling and untapped resources that wouldn't disrupt the pace of advancement.

Second (and finally), the philosophical angle.

This is focused on both environmentalism and personal aspirations.

While the idea of FALC, singularity, post-scarcity and the like have mostly been thought of as connected to AI and computers, this is a product of both dreadful ignorance, and limited thinking. Since the dawn of the Industrial Age, standards of living have advanced (to varying degrees for most people, but steadily) alongside technology, but what if they hadn't? Even from the first few decades of industrialized agriculture, mining, and mass production, the percentage of the population that truly had to work was limited more by how much production was wanted, than by how many workers were needed. "Consumerism" isn't just a meme invented by capitalist advertisers or a byproduct of modern society, it is a significant part of human nature.

Jevons' Paradox is the observation that any increase to efficiency can, and (to date) always has been canceled out by increases in demand caused by its price-drops. And "automation" (short of purely theoretical "strong AI", as distinguished from real-world "weak AI") is, of course, merely another labor-multiplier that increases efficiency of human labor, rather than ever replacing human labor. Simply put, you can't automate your way out of full employment using any foreseeable technology.

But what if the majority of people (porky included) had been content to live like monks? Cells or rustic cabins, dirt floors, bare furnishings, roughspun clothes, basic tools, simple food, little medical care, travel rarely or on foot, pass their time with stories and song, but supported by the might of heavy industry. Even with the primitive technology of the late 1700s, individual productivity had exploded to hundreds of times what it had been before the Industrial Revolution. That means only a single-digit percentage of the population really needed to work in order to sustain the rest, EVER, even with the most basic of "automation".

With our current technology, the amount of production and labor needed to simply maintain our current quality of life is (as I argued in earlier posts) not that great, even individuals can realize this to an extent as demonstrated by "seasonal NEETs" who slum around humbly on savings between bouts of wageslavery. But as long as most people continue to prioritize greater tech over more free time, demand will expand infinitely within the limits of our civilization.

Obviously, the choice is a continuum, not a stark one between hermits dreaming in mud huts and Renaissance men ascending to godhood in conquest of the stars, but it is a choice we must make, both as people and as a people.

Unsustainable production levels is something that has only arisen in the last 200 years. Before this, people were just completely used to re-using things till they fell apart, and then they would take those pieces and make something new with them.

What the fuck?

Yeah, but no one is talking about production processes pre-capitalism.

Good posts. Environmental problems are nothing some long term central planning of our economy won't fix.

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TBF, while it wasn't about planned obsolescence or whatever, peeps were talking about pre-capitalism (and prehistoric) unsustainable production: e.g. 2nd paragraph

How will we preserve the ability of reversing the effects most environmental problems when we hit peak oil? The amount of our current (and capitalist) production and infrastructure is maintained by oil which will have truly apocalyptic consequences due to global oil depletion if not significantly addressed.
Basically, if we don't achieve eco-socialism by 2050; I have severe doubts about mankind's ability to accomplish much without the required technology, rate of production and infrastructure which we currently have because of oil.
Unless of course; we use the peak oil apocalypse as a eco-posadist opportunity to bring about the revolution.

Before the advent of ICEs that could be powered with oil which IMHO has always been a negative-ERoEI charade in front of positive-ERoEI coal and methane, research was centered on powdered, liquified, and gasified coal products. We still have centuries worth of coal, and I'm sure porky will be all too happy to transition back to it after we've wasted all our precious polymer feedstock on inefficient fuel.

Thanks for all that.
I agree with you in everything, and I didn't want to sound apocalyptic.

But I want full restoration of the environment. Tthings not being so bleak still fit what I said in all those walls of text; I doubt a lot anyone else is down for it.
I just don't see it. Too much effort.
Create a worker's utopia and people will be content with just not polluting immensly, they'll rather reast than make full restoration.

Not really concerned with that. Polution is by far greater damage, and already very noticeable. Idk why people care more about that meme.

I think the African curve is already overexagerated. Still, you probably saw me bitch about African demographics a lot, but globally I really care more about Asia, I fear India and China might invade and colonize, realeasing their population preassure elsewhere, and continuing expanding. I don't see Africa getting out of Africa.

Yes, but the other things are inreadibly difficult. For one, energy production has physical constraints, and no matter how efficient it will be linear to population.


I've always wanted this (although houses should be kinda modern for energy efficiency actually)
Fully agree with the post, but I want to know what would you do, how far would you take it.


I'd try and go all the way
I want to go the full way.

read the second paragraph on

Some more, because people love walls of text.

Just to be on the same terms, I know. I don't want to imply it's impossible. There are lots of basic stuff that make a huge difference.
But going that extra mile, challenging the almost impossible ones, that's a gargantuan task.

The objective of industrial complex is to produce goods.
The better, cheaper, more effortless, less resource-intensive the better.
Take hard drives for example. Just by nature their designs are being optimized into little , and will keep getting smaller. I'm going to guess that pic related is by far more contaminating, from minning to disposal and transportation.

The main problem is energy production.
Your charts treat just a part of the problem.

Energy production has physical constraints. No matter how efficient you make the process, you cannot create, trasmit and use energy without a huge impact. The different methods have very different effect, but within each one it's almost linear.
>There's so much energy you can get from each chemical interaction for fossil fuels. Full carbon capture is a bitch, and even basic increases the cost a lot. Not even viable (at current production levels) long-term. Minning, extraction and transport are dangerous and impacting. I won't explain much about this one, I hope everyone already know it's shit.
>There's so much power you get from the surface of solar panels, and wind turbines. Minning, melting, production, transport, maintenance, disposal are a bitch and are usually ignored. They are not "just metal and silicon", those arevery special alloys and crystals that are a bitch to dispose off, if actually mass-produced you'll start having huge graveyard. You don't see them now because by far more plants are newly built. Wait twenty years. The terrain used becomes littered with fallen parts of those weird allows. For wind turbines the noise is very damaging to animals (wild or farm animals), and they are always put (of course) in the path of strong air currents which birds always use for migration, that's why them killing birds galore is not just a meme. Plus you run out of viable terrain. I believe solar is better, I think it works best in dessertic areas to begin with.

Plus the devastation of farmland (virtually impossible to restore chemical balance in the soil).
Plus building cities and disposing the debris, garbage disposal, human waste disposal, potabilization of water (all related to overpopulation).
Plus energy storage, distribution and storage (car batteries are all shit, no matter how efficient, as by design they need very reactive chemicals).
Fuking transport: Moving mass follows Newtonians constraints.
As your graph on shows, a whole 80% of household consumption is heat-related (refrigeration, cooking, space cooling, water heating, space heating). No matter how efficiently, controlling the temperature of objects requiere energy linearly to their mass.
These are very difficult to surmount, because they follow physical constraints by design.

At least industrial processes can be contained by better research, tech, etc. Their polution isn't by nature, just by the current design of the processes, and there are always alternatives (I guess).


Let's not start with reparations of already existing damage.

Me too. Replant the old-growth forests, push the Sahara and Gobi back to their limits, exterminate invasive species, go full Jurassic Park with creatures like the megafauna in Europe and America that humanity exterminated, turn the clock back on the natural world like humanity never left Africa. It would be a fun side-project for humanity after we've sorted out our own problems as a civilization. And an interesting discussion later when natural climate change crept up, whether we would want to preserve things at a certain phase, or allow the cycles of ice age and deglaciation play out over the coming millennia.

I gave it as a representative example. Much the same applies to a lot of other looming crises like habitat destruction, air/water/soil contamination, biodiversity, resource depletion, etc.

Current trends indicate their population pressure is already vanishing internally, much like Europe's did decades ago. All the neoliberalism in the world wasn't enough to counteract the social effects of (especially medical and agricultural) technology.

I'm very much in the opposite direction. I'm a lifelong outdoorsman, but I like the fruits of science and art, I like expressing my strength as an individual and a member of civilization, I like living in the age when humanity has taken its first steps out of our cradle. I won't begrudge folks who just want to kick back and enjoy FALC, but I (and most people IMHO) would prefer to sacrifice a significant amount to push forward. Obviously, less hard than typical now (~20-hour workweek except for really fun jobs).

In line with the top of the post, of course, this would occur in a "permaculture" civilization divorced from nature (I have a, probably uncommon, fantasy of building underground, able to access virgin wilderness on a whim simply by stepping out my fronttop door), neither hurting nor dependent on it beyond a fixed footprint. A footprint that might shrink as earth shifted from our only source of resources, to merely our home, to a monumental tourist attraction in the far future.

(1/2)
Diminishing returns. My perspective is those things make up a tiny portion of human impact on the environment (not to mention inefficiency impacting human life); deal with the three or four biggest problems in any given sector, and you've already licked 90% of the problem, also giving yourself 10 times more leeway to tackle what's left.

Huge? Substantial, sure, but if you can meet your needs, needs that have been slashed by conservation measures, without depending on external resources at an unsustainable rate? You've won, game over, forever.
Yup, though the bigger problem is burning our precious industrial feedstocks. Those fossil hydrocarbons are an irreplaceable birthright we're very unlikely to find a cheap replacement for extraterrestrially.
>Photovoltaic and earlier paragraph about computer parts
While the complaints about rare earths and pollution are absolutely legitimate in theory, PV and other electronics are both highly recyclable, due in particular to the fact that their most environmentally harmful materials make up such an infinitesimal proportion of their requirements, so very intensive recovery methods are entirely economical. In fact, while very few PV panels are actually old enough to be decommissioned yet, mature processes to recycle or directly refurbish large volumes of dying PV panels as a valuable commodity are standing by, and PV manufacturing has long been among the leading consumers of reclaimed materials from all e-waste.
Much the same is true of high-end batteries, which are already designed for efficient recycling or refurbishment. Furthermore, a shift from conventional batteries to fuel cells would reduce the expensive and materially demanding cell stack to the minimum size necessary for maximum instantaneous load, leaving most of the cheaper and less exotic electrolyte needed for continuous load in a simple inert tank.
My above defense of PV aside, I honestly think thermal is probably a better choice for utility-scale, even with its lower efficiency. The technology is inherently simple, the materials mundane, and it can be used in cogenerative configurations with anything else that requires heat, such as compressed air/hydrogen storage. And like hydro, there are some systems other than the usual mirror concentrators, like tower and pond designs.
The hype about hurting animals is almost total disinfo, both the noise thing (including for people), and especially the birdstrike garbage. The impact compared to trees, buildings, geological formations, and vehicles, is microscopic. Aside from being deployed wherever, wind works superbly on top of other simple development like agriculture and offshore structures.
It can take many forms. For one thing, most of the devastation wrought by hydro's typical reliance on dams isn't strictly for generation, but for pumped storage, which I would prefer be replaced with other grid storage. And don't forget ocean hydro, which also takes a variety of forms, like tidal, wave, thermal gradient, osmotic gradient, etc.
This is obviously limited to favorable areas, but where it's doable (Iceland, Hawaii, etc.), nothing can touch it. Agreed that it can have the same issues as fracking, but I think fracking gets a (practically deserved, but theoretically unfair) bad rap from the (needlessly) substandard methods that are most popular.
Yeah, fission is dumb, for a variety of environmental, technical, economic, and security reasons. As for fusion, IMHO energetically confined (e.g.: tokamak) fusion isn't actually practical using any known or theorized technology. There is one type of fusion that does seem in reach: Inertially confined fusors.
This is a two-pronged thing. On the one hand, we will of course need dedicated utility-scale energy storage. Compressed air, fuel cells, molten salt, etc. On the other hand, many other desirable technologies such as electric vehicles and geothermal heat pumps for HVAC, will create a "free" distributed grid storage infrastructure that will take much of the load off utilities.

(2/2)
Again, diminishing returns, shooting for big game:
The big one. On the demand side, eliminating the perverse incentive of 1st/3rd-world arbitrage would wipe out offshoring, shifting agricultural subsidies away from cash crops and altering property taxes would bring back local agriculture, and of course telecommuting would chop away enormous swathes of ridiculous whitecollar traffic jams, while bringing back milkman-style delivery routes would eliminate many needless shopping trips. On the supply side, electrification would increase efficiency tenfold over ICE drivetrains, turbosails on water cargo would nearly eliminate their energy use, pushing rail/streetcars/busses/etc more would enormously increase ground efficiency, while pushing maglev more would siphon away much air transport with superior pricing and adequate speed.
Geothermal heat pumps can greatly reduce energy requirements for temperature control, by banking daytime heat and nighttime chill, as well as seasonal changes, even in very mild climates, plus exploiting the naturally constant subterranean temperature gradient. Even greater savings, as well as more intense concentrations of hot or cold, can be produced by district systems, tying together residences, businesses, heavy industry, dedicated energy facilities, and natural sources of thermal gradients like the ocean. For heat in particular, rooftop thermal solar is an extremely easy source of intense heat.
Many processes incidentally produce large amounts of thermal, mechanical, or chemical energy. While these are often reclaimed after conversion (usually to easily transported electricity), such conversion is much lossier than more direct use. Simply by moving some installations around and building more infrastructure (like the aforementioned district heating), an astonishing amount of waste can be eliminated.
Centralized lighting, using lightpipes and fiber-optics, greatly increases the efficiency of night lighting (already improved leaps and bounds by LEDs), while eliminating energy consumption for daytime lighting.

Just these alone would win the war, everything else is mop-up.

The other things:
As for chemical balance, we change that routinely and precisely, what's "difficult" is to stop doing that and stick with intercropped organic permaculture that doesn't require it. Aside from the locovore thing I mentioned above (which can also extend into more direct conservation, like using sheep and goats to do landscaping), there are plenty more conservation measures. First and foremost is simply reducing waste of agricultural products, infamous under capitalism. And using more byproducts as feedstocks for both outside sectors and agriculture itself, from fertilizer to feed. After that, more radical measures such as aquaculture, hydroponics, unconventional crops, and synthetic cultures can all be useful for applications unaffected by their quality.
Widely proven purification systems and greywater loops are already in use to greatly reduce consumption of fresh water (and, on the topic of sewage, reclaim valuable chemicals), while porous construction measures can ease groundwater management, and the "final solution" of desalination is of course ready and within our means where needed.
I will agree this is a tough nut to crack. For biodegradable garbage, sorting and composting can get incredible rewards, but it requires enthusiastic participation by practically everyone and very careful waste-chain design to ensure maximum effectiveness and safety. For other trash, I think the only realistic solution is absolutely ruthless cradle-to-grave externality mandates on manufacturers, passing punishing costs onto consumers, thus hopefully browbeating people away from trash or recycling into "closed-loop" designs for everything. Silver lining: It would be much easier to do all of these things to the more coordinated business/government than the unorganized personal sector.

As I said idk much. I mentioned that because it seems plausible, but for the most part I'm cool with geo. Really sounds like a good choice.

afaik there's a lot of research going into fuels with very different decay chains, that make for much more maneagle materials. Also the molten salt reactors by design apparently stop working in case of accidents, preventing Fukushima situations where they take years to even find the melted core fuel (never discarding a little China syndrome situation).
Sounds like propaganda, but I've talked to researchers I trust who studied the subject.

I think the main problem is regulatory.
Japan having nuclear power plants on the tsunamiest place in the world has always been a matter of debate on the nuclear community. But here we are.

This is the one I hate the most because it's like transaction fee. A mean, not an end.
Energy is usually produced for the sake of having energy, but transport is just moving things about.
This. A lot of energy is wasted just on the inefficiency of individualistic transport:
>jams (accelerating and breaking every ten seconds is a huge waste)
Capitalism is the reason public transport isn't what it should be.
I'd like to phase cars out for the most part, and introduce fast transport systems with bulk deliveries (of goods, packages, cargo or commuters).
Still leave streets in use for localized delivery (packages, home movers), emergency services (ambulances, firefighting, police). This needs a lot of research though.

Every ounce of energy lost on moving mass around is 100% inefficiency. Nothing of value is added other than presence, which I hope becomes less necessary in the future.

I forgot these were a thing, thanks for mentioning
In this aspect, like transportationa and many others, central planning can optimize society a lot, although it presents lots of issues.

This will be one of the first things to improve greatly. Transportation is about mass, energy about force, products about materials.
Lighting is about information, you just need enough to see, no more no less.
Intelligent lighting (emissor tech, colorimetry, auto-adjusting to human presence or time of day) will make an important difference.


You are much better versed on this than I am, thanks for shedding light into it.
I still feel you are overly optimistic, but we both aim for the same, so what we think will come out of it is second to that.


On the side;
You seem to prioritize contact with nature, while I'm more of a techno-greenie; I'd like to live inawoods, but with my head and daily effort of living focused on tech and math. ie. Unabomber but believing a benign industrial society is possible instead of speging out reminder he was a math PhD.
The thing is, today's tech doesn't fare well with dirt, water, etc. I can't be rolling in the dirt with a notebook, as the screen gets scratched, the keyboard full of dirt, the ports will stop working, etc. Same for every other aspect of life. You need pulcritud for growing solar panel crystals, etc.

But tech is getting more "organic". Components are ever less fragile and better/tightly packed, more resistant to "nature". Systems are ever more flexible which means some part could break and still work. This is an important design principle for some control system's OS, like an airplane computer, which needs to keep on working even if some part kicked the bucket. Scripting languages evolved into handling errors like it was nothing. It resembles more an organic brain that just takes note of an error but still works, and less like an autistic child that crashed when dividing by zero.
Flexibility needs a bit of redundancy, but in time with the low cost of tech it will become desirable to spend more resources on achieving this flexibility. Tthink about redundantly stored key information, flexible file formats that are corruption-friendly, hardwired backup hardware controllers/pathways, extra backup OS that could take over in case of fatal error, etc.
Probably tech will become (literally) less cold to the touch, as new materials are used

Tech will naturally evolve the same advantages that organic life has, and in my lifetime I'll be able to leave my computer by the lake near my house in the woods. Speakers and all.