r/Sustainable

I find the large wastewater treatment plant, landfill gas, and municipal anaerobic digesters for organic waste as an alternative / supplement to composting all very interesting and was wondering how these pencil out in terms of emissions and cost-effectiveness.

Is the value of the natural gas attained for local use usually not equal to cost of implementing and maintaining these versus just dumping and buying natural gas from other sources?

My impression is that these are not the usual way that wastewater or organic waste are dealt with in urban areas, less sure about landfill gas, but I'm also not sure about that.

Libertarians love to make the broad statement that “socialism always fails”; however, currently, capitalism is failing on a global scale, a scale never seen in human history. It is not a matter of if socialism works, it is a simple and clear necessity to save the biosphere.

To prove that capitalism fundamentally requires the exploitation of the environment on ever greater scales, we must first establish that capitalism requires infinite exponential growth, and that this growth cannot be decoupled from environmental harm.

Firstly, capitalism requires infinite economic growth.

Let’s imagine a fixed pie scenario where there is no economic growth whatsoever. Even if we assume complete structural changes, like the abolition of the credit system and interest that require growth, among other structural pillars, we are left with a glaring fact of capitalism: private ownership of the means of production requires a positive average rate of return. If the rate of return was <= 0, then no private investment would occur whatsoever, and production would completely seize to exist privately. On the other hand, if the rate of return > 0, in a fixed pie scenario, the rate of return can only be funded by the shrinking of the workers slice of the pie. Inevitably, what this causes is the complete impoverishment of the proletariat, the average person, and the eventual collapse of capitalism. This cannot be fixed with taxes because after calculating taxes there will fundamentally be a rate of return. OK, so capitalism needs growth, that is for sure, but how do we prove that this growth cannot be absolutely decoupled from environmental destruction?

Decoupling is a neoliberal fairytale

Let me preface this by clarifying the terminology, relative decoupling is when an increase in economic growth corresponds to a lower (but still positive) increase in environmental destruction. Absolute decoupling on the other hand means that the economy grows while the rate of environmental destruction decreases. With this in mind, relative decoupling is unimportant. We have the business as usual calculations for climate change, if emissions decrease because of currently enacted policies (relative decoupling means they increase) then we will surpass 2.5C of warming by 2100. This is the temperature where large, currently inhabited geographic regions would reach wetbulb temperatures, capable of killing an adult man sitting in the shade with adequate water.  So anyways, if we want to avoid the most catastrophic global warming effects, we MUST decrease our emissions substantially, this means absolute decoupling. Unfortunately, the rate of absolute decoupling in the wealthy nations that have achieved it is nowhere near the scale needed to avert the worst climate scenario. It is simply too little and too late. When we expand our scope to the global scale, absolute decoupling has never occurred globally, and without EXTREME local absolute decoupling in wealthy nations, we cannot expect it to, as the global south is currently industrializing rapidly (as they have the right to do so). The absolute decoupling that has been achieved has mostly relied on shutting down old coal burning power plants and on the further exploitation of the environment in other ways.

Source: https://eeb.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Decoupling-Debunked.pdf

Climate Tunnel Vision

In face of the most eminent threat to our survival, it seems quite clear that climate change is the most important environmental issue; however, this does not mean we should get environmental tunnel vision. The absolute decoupling of emissions in certain nations has relied on the externalization of other environmental destruction. For example, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions we must build solar panels, but this astronomical mass of solar panels is made by the mining of finite metal resources in the global south, using dirty energy. Then, the solar panels themselves need batteries to replace fossil fuels, meaning we have to spend more dirty energy and environmental destruction to mine rare earth metals like lithium, or platinum for hydrogen fuel cells. Climate change is only one of the major ways in which we are destroying the environment, and they are interconnected. Our deforestation of the amazon rainforest to fuel economic growth by harvesting timber and creating farmland accelerates greenhouse gas emissions while pushing towards the amazon rainforest dieback tipping point. Climate change reduces the amounts of available freshwater, a resource we are already abusing. Synthetic fertilizers, whose use will increase when climate change decimates global breadbaskets, is causing eutrophication and hypoxic dead zones on a mind boggling scale. The collapse of biodiversity and ecosystems from all of these different processes of destruction are making the remaining ecosystems more vulnerable to the effects of climate change and our continued pollution, etc, etc, etc. When we look at greenhouse gas emissions, it may be the easiest form of environmental destruction for us to mitigate. There are simple, and most importantly, profitable solutions like renewable energy that can drastically cutback emissions rapidly. Despite this, we are still failing.

Jevons paradox and thermodynamic limits

Jevons paradox states that as our efficiency and productivity increases, we do not use less resources, we just consume more of the now cheaper products, leading to an increase in resource use. If the near limitless source renewable energy makes energy super cheap, what will we do? We will use more energy. If the price of fossil fuels drops because of decreased demand from green energy adoption, what will we do? Industry and developing economies will use those cheap fossil fuels. This same idea applies to nearly everything we can consume. And it makes sense, GDP growth is not the only thing that has historically been exponential, so is productivity increases, and yet have those productivity increases helped the environment? Beyond just the logical paradox, there are thermodynamic limits. If we keep increasing our energy use exponentially, then very quickly we will reach a point where we will not be able to even extract enough energy from renewable energy. Pushing this even further, the physicist Tom Murphy, using historical data on energy use increases, predicted that within 400 years, our energy waste would boil the earth’s oceans.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-022-01652-6.epdf?sharing_token=yNwL92oPzcpklZSqVsr-ndRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0N0u2htmeT1Hou6SrdtT_vjhsjDi8mPyrY6gILuO1cIPYM5r9vTrCV6dFSGWkHiq63t24rvELuWNN1w82farMIezAYiWj7ialZ8KkzI_SEgHP98WBPRE6PFu8lx9H4EP5A%3D

Final Notes:

-          Sorry if this post was kind of long and incoherent, I mostly wrote this from memory.

-          Do not go into the comments and claim climate change is not real.

-          Do not go into the comments and claim that some magical technology like Negative Emissions Technologies or some source of infinite energy (fusion) will just fix everything, that is purely skeptical, unscientifically backed fairytale hope.

-          I mainly want to hear your arguments regarding the possibility of drastic sustained absolute decoupling across not just greenhouse gas emissions, but environmental destruction in general, under capitalism.

-          The fact that previous socialist countries were productivist does not take away from the actual argument because this post serves to illustrate why capitalism fundamentally requires environmental destruction, the same argument cannot be made for socialism.

I am a Libertarian, and after studying economics that degrowth is actually good not bad when used right

Libertarian hear degrowth and immediately think it means killing the economy. That’s not what it means. It just means shrinking a harmful activity so the system can grow better later.

Simple example: fishing. If everyone fishes as much as possible, fish stocks collapse and the industry dies. If you reduce fishing for a while, fish recover, and later you can catch more every year without destroying the resource. Short term degrowth, long term growth. This is basic economics.

Libertarians already accept this logic. Removing subsidies makes bad industries shrink so capital moves to better uses. Letting bubbles pop causes short term pain but avoids bigger crashes later.

Capitalists accept it too. Firms shut down unprofitable divisions to become stronger in the long run.

Liberals accept it when regulation prevents irreversible damage that would kill future growth.

Degrowth is not anti market. It is about incentives, scarcity, and long run efficiency.

What honestly scares me is that when I explain this, leftists start agreeing with me, even though they don’t understand how decentralised economy works , the argument is coming from markets and long run growth, not planning.

We should not be scared of degrowth. as we understand decentralised economy

We should be scared of protecting destructive growth just because it shows up in GDP.