Everything is not getting worse

[erowind]

.

[Vakanai]

The issue is that there are not enough rare earths to convert even our existing infrastructure from fossil fuels into renewables let alone the infrastructure of a planet with billions more people who all desire the same wasteful consumer "quality" of lives that we pursue in the "developed" countries. There isn't enough accessible lithium on Earth to replace every internal combustion engine with a battery. The use of alternative liquid fuels encounters issues with high energy costs in refining (hydrogen fuel) and or land use issues in competing with agriculture and wildlands (biofuels.) Plant based plastics still require land usage. What may not use petroleum in the future often still requires rare earths, which are by definition, rare. We can't build something like a microwave out of hemp for example. There is a genuine calculus to the statements that degrowthers are making, this isn't just ideology or rhetoric, it is physics.

I think this is where we differ greatly. Remember, I said climate change is going to get bad. You're imagining a future with billions more people on it than today all wanting to live the consumer lifestyle of the west. I'm imagining a future with a billion or two fewer people alive on it than today. A crash of untold historic proportions is coming. Just because I think technology won't let society sink back into pre-industrial times doesn't mean I'm an optimist. Rare earths are rare, but we won't need to cover 10-12 billion people. More in the realm of 5-7 billion.

Hopefully I'm just a doomer and it won't get that bad. But technology is really the only part of the future I have any good feelings about.