Tom Ritchford
1 min readSep 5, 2021

--

Things going "wrong" implies there was a way for things to go "right". I'm not sure that's true.

The end of industrial capitalism, if it were at all possible, about which I'm truly skeptical, would not mean an end to industry or technology. Giving up on that would result in immediate collapse and no one would do it as you point out.

The world's 26 richest people own as much as poorest 50% put together.

The richest 10% of humans produce 50% of the greenhouse gases - the poorest 50% produce 10%.

We're a very rich planet - the wealth is simply poorly distributed.

Our best hope would be to put increasingly punitive taxes on fossil fuels, pour the money into a crash program to develop fusion power (we are almost certain it's possible at this point), convince the richest 20% of humanity to live modestly (that's the impossible part), and use the fusion energy to start pumping CO2 out of the atmosphere instead of producing more consumer goods (also hard).

---

Honestly, I just think it's built into humanity to compete and grow and continue to use all the resources we can get our hands on until they're all gone, and nothing we can do can stop it - that any creature that evolved to create technology would end the same way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter

If it had to be this way, I guess it’s exciting for us to live to see it happen. To be honest, I mostly feel grief.

Thanks for a civilized reply.

--

--

No responses yet