A Happy Future and a Dose of Reality

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A very interesting exercise in imagining a sustainable future.

All sorts of gee-whiz ideas here, some of them quite interesting. A massive shift in power generation and distribution. A re-imagining of how cities are laid out. A re-thinking of housing and transportation and beef production. I feel good about it already!

Not to be a stick in the mud, but this article falls victim to a set of assumptions that are typical, really, of American thinking about the future: We all want desperately for it to look and feel like what we (in our power-drunk state) desperately hope we can keep. OK, we're happy to share it with the rest of the world, but give it up? Never.

What nobody seems interested in talking about is that all this is predicated on the idea of maintaining an already-unsustainable way of life. None of these creative imaginings takes on the vast disparities in resource access that our insane, First World way of life stands upon. 

A very simple example: All the fancy, Earth-saving technologies imagined in this article are incredibly resource-heavy, including especially water. The laptop I am writing this on right now required hundreds of liters of water to produce. How much will be used to build the massive solar farms we need? The new electrical grid? And where will it come from? And who will have to (continue to) do without water to make this happen? 

Likewise the expensive metals and plastics that are needed for all this: Where will they come from and who will pay the price for mining them?

And where will the electricity come from to produce all the technologies that we hope will help us generate clean electricity? Yes…it’s a conundrum.

And then there's the plastic. Lots and lots of plastic. It's already everywhere — in our food, in the water, in the air, in our bodies, in the insects and pollen and trees. The spiffy new electric helicopter one of these futurists imagines — how will it not  be made of plastics? Where will the plastic come from and where will it end up?

The economics implied in all these scenarios, all by itself, make this future implausible in the form it's presented here. There is very little here that addresses the necessary changes to the way we live. I can feel good about this future because I won't have to change my consumption habits hardly at all. 

We’re talking about much, much more than how we will get around and how we will build cities. A sustainable future will have to be an economically just one, as well. Otherwise, we will simply be reproducing the relations of power and privilege that have actually driven us into this mess in the first place!

How did we become so addicted to cars and petroleum? It happened because some very powerful people decided to make a profit by killing mass transit in America. And it worked. The military-security system? Same deal. The communication system? Likewise. It has all fed off of the larger economic system we live within and call ourselves happy: Nothing gets done unless someone can make a killing  from it. All too often, literally. 

We tell ourselves that the "The Market" is a force for democratizing everything. The reality is that we are captives of a globalized for-profit enterprise that drives "The Market" wherever it chooses. What if "The Market" offered us something and nobody bought it? What if they held a war and nobody came?

Mass consumption and consumerism — commercial capitalism, in a nutshell — is the ideology that has produced this mess by exacerbating mankind’s worst qualities: greed, selfish individualism, acquisitiveness, and indifference to the needs of others who are not like ourselves, whether in color or economic standing or gender. Americans thrive on these things and call it culture. We amuse and console ourselves with our alleged generosity, while standing on the necks of hungry and oppressed people all over the globe.

Many Americans realize that, for example, there is more than enough food to feed everyone on the planet. So why are people still starving? The problem is distribution, of course, and that requires us to value millions of people we have never met in places we don't think we will ever want to go. And we are rich enough — and captured enough — not to have to think about that.

The sustainable future this article imagines is more like the proverbial lipstick on a pig. The pig might feel good about itself because it is wearing lipstick, but it remains a pig.

Everyone in this article is talking about how people sort of suddenly wised-up and got with the program. If you live in the US, you know perfectly well that that is simply not going to happen. Americans will have to be forced into doing this; we all know that. 

It is one thing to try to imagine a sustainable way of life in 2050. It's quite another to actually get there. That will require a massive sea-change in the way Americans think about their lives and their pocket books…including, especially, those at the top of the pile who now own more than half of the wealth in the country and all of the wealth that will be needed to make this sustainable future work.

Are Americans willing to hold the super-wealthy accountable? We’ll see.

Picture credits: https://peaceloveandbeyond.weebly.com/anti-war-movement.html; https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/03/11/688876374/its-2050-and-this-is-how-we-stopped-climate-change?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=morningedition