Well, as usual with these articles (see below) it is all about technology. There is not much on behavior except maybe a carbon voucher of sorts. Vouchers are just like Band-Aids that come off in the water of reality. They work a little but the real healing process comes from being careful with the wound. The tech ideas are nothing new. It is more like many of these examples mentioned will likely become a niche player. There is nothing affordable on the horizon to replace mass travel. All options suffer the same problems as all other tech that try to replace fossil fuels and that is net energy, on demand power, and storage issues. Nothing new with all this tech and with all the usual FAKE Green ideas of how we will keep the status quo going. Same FAKE Green wild forecasts of the situation in 2050. Same shit and no reality testing of actual situation of the boundary to human activity. We are in the neighborhood of peak everything but are in continued denial of this reality. You know limits are around 2050 or 2100 not in a few years for technophiles.
What about behavior? Just say no. My wife is in Italy now seeing her mom. I stayed home. She is a little disappointed in me because I didn’t go. I hate travel anymore. I don’ like leaving the farm because so much I do needs daily attention. You can’t find good help and it is expensive to have someone watch the place. Jet lag sucks and going somewhere interferes with my routine that I feel makes me stronger and Greener. That is the selfish side of why I have said no to travel. It is easier for me than others and I acknowledge this. My REAL Green side says no because I am pursing localization in a relative way. I have family pressures that force me to travel or I would rarely fly. So I say no when I can to a point then I give in. To be fair to the young I have seen the world so the young should be given a chance at education travel but this should be structured to be Greener. Too many young just do joyrides today instead of being educated. A trip to China to learn a skill is something. I trip to backpack around not so much. One way to travel is VR with google earth. I tried that the other day on the kids VR and it was amazing. Yea like the kids need all these electronics but that is another topic.
Instead of a vacation every year go every 3rd year. If you are one of these FAKE Green academics or scientific activists then see the writing on the wall that all those trips to FAKE Green meetings are a waste of time. You are talking about the same things over and over with the same results. Sometimes that is called insanity. We know what works and what doesn’t already. What works best is lower consumption. These FAKE Greens think it is ok to do all this travel but it isn’t. They could do the every 3rd year travel effort to address lower consumption. To be fair these FAKE Greens are better than the rich elite who travel as a way of life on private jets. My family has one and they know my opinion of it. The solution to this issue is stop trying to make the status quo work by new ways and just adapt the status quo. There are many that represent vital travel people. There are many that have skills that translate into more efficiency and travel leverages this. Some travel actually makes life more sustainable and resilient. These people need to be recognized as high value skilled people that should fly.
There is the systematic side of adapting travel. We could realize a lot of savings to our sustainability and resilience ledger but the consequences are unemployment and lower economic activity caused by reducing the travel and leisure industry. Going into an era of decline we have to be very careful about the pace of economic abandonment of degrowth both forced by circumstances and also managed behavior. Our system is a high performance and complicated machine in a complex human ecosystem. Bright ideas often don’t result in real life benefits.
Degrowth is coming by forces of nature and hopefully our own realization that tech alone cannot make us sustainable. Degrowth also is taking us into a new paradigm that man has not been to in recent history. This means changes are ahead that we won’t understand fully by our status quo thinking. It is obvious the 300% to 700% forecast in the article is bogus. I see a meaningful decline coming soon how steep that may be is not well know because a lot depends on how decline affects globalism systematically. How poor will we become once decline affects all aspects of life? Population will continue to grow even if people start dying more because of that growth. That is the nature of population and demographics. Economics is a little different because of human nature. What we need to do is address the human behavior side of the equation going forward. Instead FAKE Greens will tell us all about electric flight and Zeppelins. Ye Ha sounds like fun on paper. The reality is it is mostly pain and sacrifice ahead.
“How will we travel the world in 2050?”
https://theconversation.com/how-will-we-travel-the-world-in-2050-121713
REAL Green Adaptation 