"There are children bearing the weight of a future apocalypse and taking to the streets in anger and desperation. But it’s not climate change that’s stolen their future, it’s the twisted words of malicious and ignorant adults that have infected them with a false doomsday." -Agantýr (@BasedNorthmathr).
From the dawn of humanity, we have always been augmenting ourselves to become more powerful and productive.
Capital accumulation, saving and delaying consumption are the very reason why humanity is thriving today. From human hands, to small nets, fishing rods, skip thousands of iterations of capital investment, and you get industrial-scale fishing trawlers.
This kind of advance would never be possible without markets: they allow humans to coordinate together on small projects, incentivising the creation of productive things that people want and punishing the waste of capital, increasing humanity’s productivity overall and satisfying people’s wants and needs best.
But what does this have to do with environmentalism? What does it have to do with anything other than fish?
Capitalism works
Recently, there has been this wide movement against free-market capitalism calling for policies such “degrowth” or even full socialism. But the truth is that capitalism works. Marshmallows, to chairs, fridges, fresh food, et cetera, all a result of the free market.
We live in a world of abundance compared to those who lived only a hundred years ago. Technological improvements have made things cheaper, global income is rising, and it’s not a coincidence that all these things are correlated with capitalism and freedom.
We can’t step back
“It’s hard to avoid the messages: mankind is bad. There are too many of us. Our problems are too many and they are too hard to solve.
Many people are saying the solution to these problems is to take a step backwards, that the solution is degrowth. But degrowth is a kind of surrender. Degrowth is central planning hopped up on scarcity mindset. Degrowth is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”
-anonymous e/accs, what the f* is e/acc
There, the quote said it all.
There are very few instances in the past where humanity overcame a problem it faced by stepping backwards and regressing in technology. More technology is good, and we have always metaphorically leaped over the obstacles that we face instead of turning back.
We have enough resources
There’s the common argument that we might run out. But, as shown by the graph, the CPI-adjusted prices of commodities are actually decreasing, which shows that there’s most likely more supply!
There are ridiculous amounts of resources in the Earth which we haven’t even scratched the surface of yet. If we somehow do run out of easily accessible resources, it raises the price of said materials, incentivising further innovation in finding new deposits, using the resources we already have more efficiently, and developing substitutes to it.
Additionally, if pointing to our proven stockpiles of different commodities and assuming that they truly represent the total amount of said commodity that we can ever reach, that simply isn’t true. Our proven stockpiles increase year on year as it becomes profitable to start digging deeper.
The Earth is a finite planet, yes. But finite doesn’t mean small.
We’re emitting less
We’re not pumping out nearly as much carbon as we used to per CPI-adjusted dollar of GDP. We are still growing, but our emissions are staying the same or decreasing!
I don’t really know what to say. The graphs speak for themselves.
Short-term and long-term
Unlike our effective accelerationist friends, we focus more on the short term. The philosophy is the same, and so is the end goal, but we focus our efforts on how to fix and protect the planet we live on right now such that later on we can conquer the stars.
Cool, but what do we do?
We can do a number of things, from politics-based (to allow the free market to do its job) to market-based.
Deregulating nuclear
Nuclear energy is reliable, cheap, and safe. The only problem is that it is heavily regulated at the moment, and in fact many (ineffective) environmentalists would support more regulation on it or a total ban as, despite all the evidence to the contrary and stats from the IAEA and other expert bodies, it is obviously bad and evil.
What we need to do here is lobby to get rid of regulations on nuclear energy, then the free market can pick up the pieces and accelerate at full speed.
Experiment with geoengineering
Stratospheric aerosol injection is a very interesting idea, and right now there is a startup called Make Sunsets working on it. They launch balloons filled with sulphur dioxide up into the stratosphere and then release artificial clouds to reflect sunlight, preventing it from getting trapped by the greenhouse effect.
Build artificial general intelligence
AGI is a huge force multiplier for humanity, and although this is mainly over on the e/acc side (our focus is on climate), it is still hugely important.
Fight for freer markets
There must be a widespread pro-capitalist and pro-human-flourishing movement to counter the bad anti-growth ideas that have been allowed to spread within our society, as free markets, capitalism and economic growth are inextricably linked to the rise in human living standards, prosperity and peace.
And finally, build something
Just build something. Anything. A climate startup maybe, or a tech startup making smart inflatable mattresses, or a new energy policy. Everything helps, as even if you don’t try to fix the climate directly through your efforts, you’re providing value to people.
I hope this vision for the future inspires you to do something effective. Take the white pill and let’s accelerate superabundance. For all humanity.
