people aren't willing to stop paying for conveniences because they're cheaply available, corporations aren't willing to stop selling them because there's a demand for it and money to be made, and governments aren't willing to force anybody's hand because the people and corporations will both force them out of power if they try.
there is absolutely no chance of breaking out of it other than giving up on democracy, but that will only happen when modern society collapses entirely, which will be far too late to prevent unimaginable suffering on a massive scale.
And the leader should be who? Of course you, because only you know the solution! Cheeky ;)
Obviously they are not unsustainable in absolute terms but only when too many people live that way compared to the planetary capacity.
So population is inescapably key because we want everyone to have high standards of living.
everybody knows the solution, *you* know the solution, it's just a hard pill to swallow so mental gymnastics are preferable.
as a species we know that the overconsumption of resources is the problem. there are exactly zero valid arguments against that. anybody who claims that consuming less resources *isn't* the solution is either ignorant or lying.
it isn't, because no solution that require any form of altruism is an actual solution.
The true hard pill to swallow is that YOUR (and a few others') standard of living is unsustainable.
Degrowth is not a viable alternative on a world that's still has a large number of people that need better standards of living, and will still be adding a couple billion to the population. There's no viable economic or political model that would make degrowth work.
Not everyone desires the latter, yet it appears to be the much more environmentally impactful one at least at scale..
degrowth is the only thing that could work at all, the lack of compatible economic and political models that would be compatible with is exactly my point, which is why we will ultimately not solve the problem.
some of the "innocent poor countries" you're talking about are the worst offenders for deforestation, pollution, and other habitat destruction. get off of your high horse, we are all responsible for the state of the planet we live on.
> some of the "innocent poor countries" you're talking about are the worst offenders for deforestation, pollution, and other habitat destruction. get off of your high horse, we are all responsible for the state of the planet we live on.
For their own sake? Or is it, among others, Western offshore companies who partake in what you blame those darn third worlders for? It's a global economy.
Think of coffee for example. Pretty sure we consume orders of magnitude more of it in the West than the rest of the World. Yet, the coffee bean plantations aren't exactly at our doors- Instead they replace forests in Guatemala, Columbia, Indonesia, etc.