Item — HN Reader

Thanks for this. I don't own a house and I live in a poorly insulated apartment building that gets full sun all day most of the year. It's a great candidate for solar panels but mostly out of my control. I already drive a civic and work from home, eating as sustainably as budget allows.

I'm wondering if there are some ideas out there on tackling the deeper cause. People are living longer, population is still growing and even if we were all 100% on renewable energy we would still be destroying the planet; the bugs are disappearing, the oceans are overfished, the bees are dying and we're even extracting an unsustainable amount of _gravel_ for goodness sake.

Something along the lines of changing the economic incentives to consume and expand, because short of terrible war or calamity, people in developing countries are still going to want refrigerators, cars, and beef and people in developed coutries aren't going to want to get rid of those.

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> I'm wondering if there are some ideas out there on tackling the deeper cause.

One rough way to think about it is I=PAT, where I is total environmental impact, P is population, A is affluence per capita, and T is environmental impact per unit of affluence.

Population has grown exponentially, per capita affluence has grown dramatically, and reductions in the last factor T haven't been able to keep up.

Worse, if you consider the "goals" of our major systems of economic organisation - or at least the observed behaviour - they aren't set up to minimise I, or even really consider it - it's more like our ways of large scale cooperation are focused on economic growth, i.e. roughly trying to maximise P*A.

If you live in an affluent western "free market" democracy it is probably politically difficult to push for major reduction or limits to population P or affluence A.

In terms of what can be done, it's probably better to focus on smaller scope/smaller scale problems. Not realistic for one person to solve the whole world's problems. If you can help push politically to regulate environmental impact in your area of local politics, that's probably very helpful. Not necessarily aligned with skills as an engineer, but this is probably more valuable than building something within current political/market framework.

If you're able to set up a small business or not for profit that is able to help others save money with side effects of reducing environmental impact, that's probably also helpful. This is less ambitious and isn't tackling the main root causes, but is something that is more in your control.