Thread by @leashless

People love to make this shit complicated. It's a profession.

It's not complicated: we're using *far too much stuff* because we have no design discipline for "human satisfaction with minimal footprint" and no law to enforce that discipline.

Everything is downstream of that.

https://twitter.com/adam_tooze/status/1586410646639460357

Nearly everything is toxic if you do it 8 **billion** times, right down to brushing your teeth with a plastic toothbrush.

The first world high consumption niche is *gratuitously* and vehemently unsustainable on every single axis: power, water, toxics, ag footprint.

It must stop

But almost nothing produced by the First World Lifestyle actually produces happiness: see the antidepressant use data.

We're miserable *because* of the High Burn Lifestyle, not in spite of it. We need more time and more fun: more puppies, less pay-per-view.

There is good data.

The overwhelming optimisation is that we need stability and security, and these are cheap to produce. Health insurance for a nation is incredibly cheap per person compared to health care only for elites. Social security gets stability from its scale. Public transport etc. too.

The "polycrisis" itself is just another bunch of thinkers rediscovering VUCA (1987) / Wicked Problems (1973)

We all know the territory. I (uniquely) went through this territory **AND FOUND A FUCKING SOLUTION**.

Read on.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volatilit… en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_pr…

So if you map the problem as "how do we turn the current 10x or 20x planet lifestyle of the rich into a sustainable thing" you get the VUCA / WP / polycrisis landscape as a way of *obscuring the truth* which is 20x Planet Lifestyles are never going to be sustainable, period.

Let me make that clear up front: VUCA / WP / polycrisis as applied to sustainability etc. *are simply lies we tell ourselves* to suppress the knowledge that we are the Monsters of All History, destroying the planet so we can have a 3 car garage. And three cars.

Jung's Shadow.

So what then is the way to truth and light?

On a modern technology base, with solar panels and antibiotics and vaccines, providing everybody on earth with a pretty fair standard of living is not only possible, it is easy. Bucky Fuller says it's been possible since the 1980s.

You can't make the math work if two billion people are living a 4x planet lifestyle, and the rest have to share nothing. Unworkable.

The only way you get the carrying capacity for the entire planet is if the rich stop consuming: no longer rich, or rich no longer eats the world.

For example imagine a culture where ingenious full-body tattoos are the primary indicators of wealth and privilege. The rich can squander fortunes on the most expensive artists in the world to cover their every square inch of hide and the net environmental impact is negligible.

So let's be clear: we can still have rich ("many big tattoos!") and poor ("one anchor and one butterfly") but if they're both bicycling to work and wearing durable clothing which will last for years it makes very little difference.

If you *must* have classes and class war, do.

Just stop using material hyperconsumption as the battle field for this stupid cultural war to show who has the most toys.

This is not rocket science: in the Renaissance it was sculptures and frescoes. Guess what: Michelangelo's "David" is made from stone, pasta, and steel.

So let's look at the simple path.

Take two worked examples, both agrarian communist societies.

Cuba lost access to fossil fuels and chemical fertilisers in 1991. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_P…

Kerala's been on the path a bit longer. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala_mo…

Both societies work fine.

Kerala's life expectancy is about the same as America. Cuba's is a little higher.

Cubans have about as much money as Americans would on $20,000 per year. Kerala it's about $15,000. (GDP per capita PPP adjusted.)

CO2 emissions are *tiny* - 0.5 tons in Kerala? 2 tons in Cuba.

So why isn't the response to the Polycrisis "hey let's live like the people do in Kerala and Cuba?"

It's sustainable. You get a long and healthy life. I don't know what their antidepressant use rate is, but it's not 10%.

See how shocking this is? Polycrisis? Learn from Cuba.

Nobody globally is talking about these kinds of models. Even degrowthers are acting as if it's some Hip New Thing rather than "learning to live like the most successful of the poor societies"

Let me say that again: learning to live like the most successful of the poor societies.

Rather than embrace the simple truth that there are hard limits on sustainability, and the more the rich consume the less the poor have as their share, we talk "polycrisis."

It's a dark psychological pattern, to try and obscure how the world works with complexity to hide truth.

When a person is very ill from malnutrition they can show up with 50 different specific systemic breakdowns. Maybe it's their skin, or their kidneys, or whatever. The solution is pretty much always water and food, maybe some vitamins.

You don't treat malnutrition symptomatically

If you (say) diagnose the malnutrition as a parasitic infection the patient is going to die. You have to get the initial diagnosis right.

We are dying of hyperconsumption. The "polycrisis" story is like looking at each individual body system failing in a malnourished patient.

The patient needs water, food, vitamins. They need a protocol to get enough nutrition into their body that they thrive again.

This is us, and industrial mass production. We're literally being poisoned by the glut of (mostly garbage) goods churned out by out-of-control industry.

We can get industrial mass production under control - less stuff, lasting longer.

We can get energy use under control - smaller, better insulated houses. Lightweight cars.

But we cannot make sustainable SUVs. There's no such animal, nor is one coming anytime soon. Maybe fusion.

Now I want to drive this point home incredibly clearly.

I'm not proposing a model which has worked nowhere: Kerala is 35 million people. Cuba another 10 million.

Scandinavia is 30 million. How often do you see propaganda about Hygge, compared to "Cuban Sustainability model"?

The most advanced sustainable civilisations in the world are Kerala, Cuba, and a few other corners of the world.

We should all be studying these societies, and replicating whatever we can learn, in our quest to become an Advanced Sustainable Civilization.

We can't do it alone.

Western civilisation is not the peak of civilisation. It's an unsustainable death machine that throws out nuclear and chemical weapons and other horrors as a byproduct of its burn rate.

We have to learn sustainability from the people who are already sustainable. It's a skill.

Nothing about this is easy.

But if you treat the polycrisis as a set of isolated systems, the patient will die: you can't treat systemic breakdown.

We need to feed the starving patient. Treat the root causes, and general health will be restored.

Overconsumption is the disease.

Now I want to bear down again on the psychological defense mechanism.

We are the bad guys in this story: a civilisation so blind and destructive it poisoned the entire earth while making itself grossly and profoundly miserable in the process.

Just stop and let that sink in.

History will judge us. Possibly our grand children will judge us. "Oh, look grandpa, there's you in your FIVE BEDROOM MC MANSION with TWO SUVS out front, one each for you and gramma."

And they're going to look at us like young Germans looked at the WW2 Nazi generation in Germany

I am not kidding here: the hellfire that climate change (and possibly nuclear war) are going to bring down on this planet will overshadow the Holocaust - hundreds of millions may die in famines and resource wars.

And that's directly driven by our consumer behaviour, *and laws*.

Take the Tiny House movement. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny-hous…

The legal loophole is the TH is built on a trailer. In theory you can tow it behind a car.

As a result they're too damn small. Why can't you just build a small house and live in it?

Building codes. It's usually illegal.

tinyhousejoy.com/2014/09/12/min… there's a massive forest of regulations, but all driven by a single overwhelming imperative: protect the valuations of existing housing stock.

If poor young Americans buy empty lots and self-house, the mortgage market *dies*. The McMansions are worthless.

So to protect the "vested interests" of their parents and grandparents, the young must be prevented from building 144 square foot tiny houses out of aluminium sheet and solar panels on cheap land they bought dried-out former farms.

Can't let the Starlink Exodus happen. No no.

Same with transportation vehicles. Self-driving electric trike, 300kg, carbon fibre shell?

I'm sure SV could knock them out for ten grand.

When you're home it charges off the solar/wind turbine. Powers the house for days in a pinch. Rarely used diesel in the shed for emergency.

Oh and it's not like we have to invent these from scratch: in China there are $4500 electric runabouts which work just great

See what I'm saying?

Climate change *is being forced upon us by laws to protect old industries from change*.

There's your fucking polycrisis: the law won't let us build small houses, drive small cars, grow food on what was the front lawn, collect rainwater, and so on.

The net result of this stupidity is "the polycrisis" or "wicked problems" or "vuca" or whatever they're calling it now.

Fashion blogs and instagram program people to spend their money on hot garbage which goes straight into landfill after a quarter of a season. Now no law defines that behaviour, really.

What drives it is sneering and competitive warfare among (mostly) women for status. Law-like.

Just while I'm here: the "meaning crisis" is "we can't face the face the polycrisis is caused by Western Civilization passing laws which mandate environmental destruction through building codes and similar."

That's all the meaning crisis is. Blame-shifting-is-hard-work-crisis.

The patient, our world, is being poisoned by industrial overproduction. All our symptoms as a civilization are driven by this one core disease.

Fixing it means:
* effective socialisation of risk
* permitting green behaviours by law in all areas
* sin taxes to push us off oil etc

Of course *doing this* is going to destroy the accumulated wealth of generations.

* big houses become near-worthless because of heating costs

* old cars are gas guzzling death traps

* half of culture goes up in smoke because it's just PR for overconsumption

A revolution kinda

In your own personal life, just look at every time "the system" makes you over-consume.

You want a smaller, cheaper place to live.

You want a safe, fast way to get to work and that means a 2 ton steel car.

You kinda like this sweater, it has a hole, you can't wear it now.

This basic, basic stuff is what our environmental crisis is made of. It's meat and commuting and heating too-big houses. It's lack of insulation.

And we're stuck in this mode because the law protects the entrenched interests which are (intensely) profitable in this configuration

To see it in the most brutally clear terms, google "energy companies record profits" on Google News. That's it, right there.

google.com/search?q=energ…

While at the same time theguardian.com/environment/20…

This is your "polycrisis"

It's the unwillingness to admit who is right and wrong