Net zero by 2050 is a fantasy, unless we get serious about degrowth

here are those same numbers compared 00:41:21 against reported global reserves so there's the amount of metal we need and there is the global reserves this column is the proportion of metals required to 00:41:33 phase out fossil fuels as a percentage that is of all the copper we need to make one generation of units current global reserves will get us 19.23 00:41:45 of the way there we don't have enough copper for one generation

we used to have 500 years ago a small human system a big pile of natural resources and a small pollution plume 00:46:47 an industrial ecosystem of unprecedented size and complexity that took more than a century to build with support of the highest calorifically dense source of cheap energy the world has ever known that would be oil 00:46:59 in abundant quantities with easily available credit and unlimited mineral resources and now we've got a system that's a human system that's really large 00:47:10 a depleted natural resources [Music] portfolio compared to what we had but we've now got a massive pollution stream so now we seek to build an even more complex system with very expensive 00:47:24 energy a fragile finance system saturated in debt not enough minerals with an unprecedented number of human population embedded in a deteriorating environment 00:47:35 so at this point i'm going to say this is probably not going to go as planned

it also is summed together so everything we need is summed together per metal and that gives us this column here total metal required to produce one generation of technology units to phase 00:40:15 out fossil fuels and so that the that we've got these numbers here the next column is global metal production as it was from mining in 2019 00:40:28 so this is all from the usgs and the bgo the final column is how many years of production at the 2019 rate um would be needed to hit the actual 00:40:42 volumes needed so 2019's the last year before covert is the last year of stable data that's why i've used it so you might notice some of these numbers are rather large 00:40:55 like we will need seven thousand one hundred and one years of production to produce the needed number of volume of vanadium that's your uh your redox batteries

the idea that we're going to do this in seven or eight years is very amusing so then the question is oh we'll just open more mines it's simple right

current plans are not large enough in scope the task before us is much larger than the current paradigm allows for

assessment of extra capacity required of alternative energy electrical power systems to completely replace fossil fuels

nor can we rely on simply reducing usage, increasing conservation, and constraining consumption. 

Consumerism is a gross failure of imagination, a debilitating addiction that degrades nature and doesn’t even satisfy the universal human craving for meaning.

Doch die stichhaltigere Erklärung für die Unersättlichkeit des Status- und Machtstrebens liegt in der Regression, d.h. der erlernten Unfähigkeit, im umfassenden Gebrauch der Gesamtheit der eigenen Anlagen Sinn und Erfüllung zu finden, und der daraus resultierenden Verführbarkeit durch die attraktiven Eigenschaften der Macht.“

Can we reconfigure growth to mean richness in difference? Flourishing interdependent diversity of networks, network protocols and forms of interaction? What does this mean for digital decay, and can the decay of files, applications and networks become some form of compost, or what might be the most dignified form of digital death and rebirth?

Clearly, the economic contributions of biodiversity are highly significant as reflected in the many efforts to expose and capture economic values of biodiversity and ecosystem services

It’s the first time in the award’s 46-year history that retrofitting, the practice of upgrading buildings rather than knocking them down to start again, has triumphed. Lacaton & Vassal’s victory has shaken up the architectural profession and signals a remarkable shift in priorities among the world’s best city-makers. If embraced more widely, this could transform how buildings everywhere are regenerated.

“Bullets are for killing. I’m more interested in a golden seed. What do we need to plant so we can make the design of our institutions, financial systems, and economic framework regenerative and distributive?”

Over the last decade, degrowth has offered a concrete alternative to eco-modernization, projecting a society emancipated from the environmentally destructive imperative of competition and consumption. Urban development is the motor of economic growth; cities are therefore prime sites of intervention for degrowth activists. Nevertheless, the planning processes that drive urban development have yet to be questioned from a degrowth perspective.

Furthermore, many designers have limited experi-ence working on projects that defy the boundaries of a typical cor-porate design brief.

Narratives that describe time as uniform and evolving throughout history towards more accelerated states have also been critiqued for theirpotential to reinforce social inequalities (Sharma 2014) and for justifyingthe appropriation of natural resources in unsustainable ways (Bastian 2012).

Leider herrscht in der politischen Linken – polemisch zugespitzt – so etwas wie ein technischer Analphabetismus. Da heißt es dann oft, Technik sei etwas, das uns entfremdet. Das ist ein sehr, sehr bürgerlicher Gedanke.

Es ist unsere gemeinsame Pflicht, eine Antwort auf den aktuellen "Techlash" zu finden.

But we as an industry are doing a far better job than ever of abiding by code standards and running our work through linters and validators.

state regulatory boards

Engineers must answer for their work legally and professionally.

I think a properly-designed city could eliminate 80% of daily living expenses while providing a quality of life far beyond what we experience today. And I think this future will have to happen because the only other alternative is an aggressive transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor by force of law. I don’t see that happening.