The "solution" is climate change, which will collapse civilisation sometime this century. There's zero paths that lead to sustainability with 8-9 Billion people all trying to consume more (consumption is just energy density)

I think the author makes an argument for what next though.

After that, who knows, the biosphere will have changed considerably so hopefully there's no more, or very little agriculture, simply because there's not that weather stability ag. needs.

it's not just me saying that, it's human behavioural experts

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2006923-understand-faulty-thinking-to-tackle-climate-change/

DANIEL KAHNEMAN is not hopeful. “I am very sorry,” he told me, “but I am deeply pessimistic. I really see no path to success on climate change.

Kahneman’s views are widely shared by cognitive psychologists. As Daniel Gilbert of Harvard University says: “A psychologist could barely dream up a better scenario for paralysis.”

A big part of deforested land is used for animal agriculture. Watch how many people instantly tune out when the topic is brought up, though.

A more nature-based society will feature fewer people living closer to the land, with a throughput of energy and materials far smaller than is the case in industrialized nations today. We will be less urbanized, more rural.

Oh, that's bad. Whenever you have people move out of cities and into nature, they build wide 1 story buildings, have lots of kids, cut down all the trees, and those kids grow up to build more 1 story buildings for their families.

We need people building tall structure in urban settings, so we can scale up without cutting down the trees in between our homes.

There was a week during covid up here in Canada where even the main street was empty during "rush hour" and it was quiet like being in the forest. I remember thinking that this gives a chance for the earth to breathe for a bit and I swear I could feel it healing.

It's rather simple really. Either we restore nature, or nature will do it herself. She will not do so gently.

Hard to take the article seriously when it dismisses renewable energy in favor of household bike generators of all things.

This is in no way practical. Restoring ecosystems is a very important task for building climate resiliency and mitigating some of the damage, but we'd effectively lose the ability to do anything by hampering energy production to such a degree. Hard to make a bunch of pyrolysate to regen the soil when the ovens are pedal-powered.

Wait now, if you're going to have ONLY ONE solution to global warming affecting climate, it's obviously to stop or reduce the production of fossil fuels. Don't anyone skip that. Carry on.

If we ban meat consumption, we get a lot of land back. Seems doable.

This article makes a lot of good points, but

Wind and solar power are intermittent, requiring energy storage (e.g., batteries) and a major grid overhaul. Building these energy sources at sufficient scale to replace our current energy usage from fossil fuels would require enormous amounts of materials, some of them rare, and mining those materials destroys habitat and pollutes the environment.

It's obvious the author isn't very educated on renewable energy.

Energy storage isn't batteries. Renewable energy storage is hydroelectric dams. Solar and wind during the day, and hydroelectric dams operate only at night. If your hydro is running during the day, you've done fucked up and need batteries

Do it right, and no batteries are needed, which drastically alters the rare earth materials needed.

But, yeah, we do also need to reduce our energy usage and our population too.

I'm glad to see pushback on this article. I expected, frankly, knee-jerk reactions, but i'm pleased to see that people see through a lot of the bullshit.

The aspect I wanted to discuss: We're not losing our forests. At least not in the US.

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

We started out with a billion acres of forest in the US before Europeans came. We've lost about a quarter of that, but most of that was before a hundred years ago - for various reasons, it's pretty stable, and we're not only growing new wood for the most part instead of chopping down old growth, we're gaining forest instead of losing it.

I think we're - overall - doing a not bad job on the forestry front.

We need to keep moving away from petrochemicals (i.e. not just oil/gas/coal for power/transportation, but working towards finding replacements for all this damn plastic, too), and keep improving alternate energy sources.

I have some hope on that front - for a tiny example, studies have looked at electric vehicles with higher miles, and the batteries are lasting much better than was feared (90% after 90k miles is not bad), and with new battery tech we should be able to better store wind/solar energy for use when it's needed. There is some great news along those lines.

We need to get rid of regresive politicians who are keeping polluting energy alive (along with shitting on human rights), and to do that we need to focus on getting rid of our oligarchs powering that system.

But on the actual "nature" frnt, things are not bad in many ways (while not being great in others, sure).

There is no climate solution. The planet's own dynamics now dominates. Stopping burning now (we won't) won't make a difference. Better luck next species.

The widespread use of biochar and parolysate materials could also capture significant amounts of carbon. In their book Burn: Igniting a New Carbon Drawdown Economy to End the Climate Crisis, authors Albert Bates and Kathleen Draper suggest that the amount of carbon that could theoretically be sequestered in buildings, roads, and consumer products is in the range of hundreds of billions of tons.

How would burning organic material capture carbon more than releasing carbon?

Humans are nature.

Nature created us. Nature will destroy us. Nature will carry on long after us.

Life...finds a way. Every physical science will tell you that a balance is always met.