CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@kzodasnowman @benlockwood Not sure about “leaving a substantial surplus for additional consumption, public luxury, scientific advancement, and other social investments”. Most analyses I’ve seen say we need to reduce consumption to around 30% of current levels just to avoid exceeding planetary boundaries. Not sure that there is much of a surplus.

@johnzajac @benlockwood That is potentially promising. Let me know when it is out of the research phase and can be used at scale.

@australopithecus @benlockwood We might have the technology “in the lab” but we don’t have it at scale. To ramp up would be very expensive (as you said) but it would also take time, time that we really don’t have.

@benlockwood Not sure I understand. It seems to me that knowledge of what is needed without the technology to accomplish it is not that useful. It is a start though.

I don’t even think we really know what levels are sustainable. We have guesses but all we really know is that current levels are most certainly not sustainable.

@benlockwood I agree with your sentiment but not necessarily with the facts. For example, we don’t have the technology to make cement without using fossil fuels. Same for metals needed for electrification. All our large machinery runs on diesel fuels and there is no technology to electrify them.

We do have the technology to do better than we currently are but it is not clear if that will be good enough.