#resourcedepletion — Public Fediverse posts

#Mistral AI conducted a comprehensive #lifecycle #analysis of its #LLM, Mistral Large 2, to quantify its #environmental #impact. The #study, #peerreviewed and compliant with international standards, revealed the model’s #training and #inference #impacts, including #greenhousegas emissions, #water use, and #resourcedepletion. https://mistral.ai/news/our-contribution-to-a-global-environmental-standard-for-ai?eicker.news #tech #media #news

John Scales Avery (1933-2024) was an American theoretical chemist. In his book "Civilization's Crisis" he argues that civilization as a whole faces a set of linked challenges. #ClimateChange is caused by consumption of non-renewable #FossilFuels but it is just one aspect of a bigger crisis. Other aspects are #Deforestation, #OceanAcidification, #NuclearWaste and #pollution in general. #ResourceDepletion and #VanishingResources in combination with #OverPopulation will eventually lead to a #collapse of #civilization in this century according to #systemdynamics and classic #limitstogrowth models. The turning point is #PeakOil or the #HubbertPeak which we are reaching now.
https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/10501

More articles from John can be found here
https://www.johnavery.info/

The end of #shale #oil and #gas may be ending sooner than predicted by some:
https://blog.gorozen.com/blog/the-depletion-paradox

Seems this might be not out of reason, but rather because of #ResourceDepletion.

#Fracking #TooLittleTooLate #StopOil #NoLNG

@berlinerwassertisch @Andy_Gheorghiu @Speckdaene @faxe @kaliagainstallodds

Great vid on "free" returns
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WG8idKaX9KI

(oh and, manually attaching thumbnail pic bc link/card previews are broken between YT and Masto, YAY!!)
#Amazon #Returns #FreeReturns #ClimateChange #eWaste #OverProduction #Waste #Consumerism #ReverseLogistics #Logistics #Shipping #Recycling #ResourceDepletion #FossilFuels #Plastic #Bezos

@tuxom I'm afraid 1,5 is dying all around us. +1.5°C would have been possible if CO2 emissions had been declining rapidly in the past four years, but instead they have been growing. The only thing that could save +1.5°C now would be the immediate collapse of the world economy and the world market, production and consumption of goods dropping by more than half within a year or two. Especially all the petrostates would have to collapse completely, with all their wealth annihilated.
But then again, the economy will collapse anyway. We need to build a different type of economy, one that is about sharing the wealth of this planet rather than exploiting and destroying it so that very few people can have more than half of it and half of humankind gets barely anything. We cannot afford rich people anymore. We cannot afford #Capitalism anymore.

At the root of the #polycrisis lies simple economic growth. #ClimateCatastrophe , #ResourceDepletion , #SixthExtinction , #collapse , all of this is just the cancerous #growth of the Capitalist world economy. The world has exceeded the #LimitsToGrowth since the 1980s, and it has been getting worse ever since, weakening the very foundations upon which every civilisation since the Late Stone Age has been built. Capitalism is the cancer that is killing the world, an economy that still tries to grow when growth isn't even needed anymore, when there is enough for everybody already, and which rather destroys unsold goods than just give them to the poor.
I fear all those tiny island nations will cease to exist, they will probably have to move to larger nations like NZ or Australia, and then they will get absorbed by them. Nobody will stop that from happening anymore. Stopping it would need an immediate world revolution against the industrial economy, no matter whether the industries are owned by private capital or by the state in the name of the people. People just won't do that, at least not now, and if it happens later, the machines will have caused so much more irreversible damage... it's quite awful, this entire situation. Those who survive the next few decades will go through ghastly ordeals and see horrors few of us dare to imagine.

Things seem hopeless? Good. Enough of these hopium pipe dreams, it's time to get angry and smash things. The Club of Rome told us 52 years ago that the end of growth and the beginning of the collapse was coming, nobody has ever done anything big or radical enough to stop it, we have known what was coming for decades. It's time to stop playing nice. It's time for revenge.

#πολυκρίσης #polykrisis #polycrisis

Maybe we need to revisit the ecological wisdom of the Aztecs with their floating "Xinampas" food gardens.
Our mega-cities are not sustainable.
#WaterScarcity
#ClimateCrisis
#ecocide
#MexicoCity
#ResourceDepletion
#populationGrowth
#urbanSprawl

North America's Biggest City is Running Out of Water.
https://www.vox.com/24152402/mexico-city-day-zero-water-resource-management-solutions

Over Consumption is the Biggest Elephant

I was listening to a program on the CBC this afternoon talking about de-carbonizing the shipping industry. The person being interviewed was part of an alliance of professionals in British Columbia taking on the challenges and problems of getting cargo ships and the whole industry to net zero. It’s apparently estimated that the conversion to a net zero system will cost between 1.0 - 1.4 trillion US dollars.

The story sounds similar in most other industries. As we try and get our carbon emissions down, the cost to transition to renewable sources of energy feels almost insurmountable. But the experts tell us that this is what must be done to stop runaway climate change, as if it’s not already here.

It is remarkable that these incredibly important environmental conversations are so single focused, as if shifting to net zero is somehow going to solve all our problems. I mean, it’s start, but even I can see the long terms problems that are already starting to present themselves in greenifying a capitalist industrial economy.

And I’m no environmental expert.

We live on a planet with finite resources but every attempt to save our consumption-based economic systems seems to drive another nail into the coffin. Not only are we not considering the potential long term problems of de-carbonizing our industrial complexes to allow them to continue operating business as usual, but the solutions that are being developed aren’t even looking beyond energy consumption. What about resource depletion? What about garbage? What about plastic? What about wealth inequality? What about workers’ rights and cost of living and endless pollution? The shipping industry touches all of these issues but there was no mention of them. I have to imagine that some expert at some table somewhere is considering all of these issues when working on this “de-carboning the cargo ships” idea but I’m not hearing anything about it.

The elephant in the room, of course, is that we can’t keep consuming at our current rate for a myriad of reasons: we’ll run out of resources, the economy demands cheap goods and labour to continue output which causes dangerous and unfair working environments, the devastation to natural ecosystems is often irreparable, we’re experiencing a mass extinction because of habitat loss. I could go on.

It feels like part of the reason no one wants to talk about our culture of over consumption because, of course, it’s not equal across the board. Those with the ability to consume, aka. people with money, consume in vast quantities compared to people without money. So when we point fingers at each other, the blame cannot be places equally and that makes it hard. But hard or not, it doesn’t mean we should avoid the conversation.

I also feel that these large industry-wide planning initiatives are the best time to talk about strategies to shift to an economic system that doesn’t rely on consumption. All the big brains in one place talking about huge systemic change: it seems like the perfect time to address this enormous culture-shifting problem. Even coming out of summits like COP which are strategically focused on climate change, all the focus is on greenhouse gas emissions when there’s a huge opportunity to talk with industry and government leaders about this vast intersectional issue that covers a huge landscape of social, political, and economic challenges.

But it’s like crickets. More empty policies with little tangible action and all of it targeted specifically at reducing carbon emissions, even if that reduction never happens.

Why are we so scared to talk about shifting away from a consumptive-based economic system? Is it really all capitalist lobbyists buying out the decision makers? Like I said, I’m just a random person with no background in economics, politics, or ecology, and the problem seems really clear to me: as long as we continue to operate under a economic system that requires ongoing consumption while we live on a planet with finite resources, we are just going to create new problems in trying to solve the old ones. In other words, de-carbonizing is going to come at the expense of somethings else, likely resource depletion.

When we fail to have these conversations at the forty thousand foot view we place the responsibility squarely on the individual. People like you and I can clearly see that lowering our own personal consumption is an important step on the path forward, but then the issue becomes “individualized” rather than the systemic. We get this weird egoism that plays into the dilemma: “I’m doing my part by only buying fair trade! What are you doing to save the world??” (while of course continuing to support dozens of other unethical industries because there’s no other options). And, as mentioned, all consumerism is not created equal. Asking people struggling to make ends meet to spend all their money on ethically produced clothing is ridiculous when billionaires buy yachts.

I don’t want to appear reductionist: I know these problems are huge and complex and it’s likely that resource depletion and over consumption are being talked about behind more than one door. I know that there is no simple solution, but I’d really appreciate hearing more in the news and media about what it might look like to transition to an economy that isn’t just post-carbon, but post-over-consumption. I believe this conversation is integral, requires collective visioning, and must be part of the conversations around mitigating the effects of climate change as well as our current economic collapse.

#overconsumption #consumerism #consumption #ecocide #anticapitalism #climatechange #climatecollapse #consuming #resourcedepletion #greenhousegasemissions #swimmingupstream #anticapitalist

Originally posted at https://swimupstream.substack.com/p/over-consumption-is-the-biggest-elephant