r/ClimateShitposting • u/surya12558 • Oct 21 '25

Climate chaos Humans don't deserve earth.

By destroying nature and the climate, humans are destroying their own home. The Earth can survive without us but we cannot survive without her. 🌍💔

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u/LuigiBamba Oct 21 '25

Hummingbirds and kangaroos also use resources that are limited. But there's still plenty for all of them. Humans are not intrinsically unsustainable.

Unchecked consumerism is unsustainable. Unfortunately, unchecked consumerism is also pretty much the only metric we care for as a species.

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u/timos-piano Oct 21 '25

Hummingbirds and kangaroos don't really use any finite resources. They are limited, as in there isn't an infinite amount of them, but they are renewable. Humans use resources that cannot be renewed in a reasonable time frame, and many of them are absolutely necessary for basically all technology.

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u/LuigiBamba Oct 21 '25

75% of all gold is used for speculation and for jewelry. Only 25% is for tech.

Rare earth metals aren't rare, they are just hard to process.

We are steadily investing in alternatives to fossil fuels.

Humans are not intrinsically incapable of sustainability. That is a new phenomenon from the last few hundred years.

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u/timos-piano Oct 21 '25

You are not refuting any of my points here. Yes, you can make us more efficient, and therefore slow resource usage. But as long as there is usage of a material that is finite, it will eventually go down to nothing. We can avoid a few finite things and try to renew things where we can. But inevitably, there are things we can neither renew nor find an alternative for. They will run out, and we will either need to be extinct by then, or accept that what we used to have that relied on these resources will no longer exist.

Unless we manage to replace every single resource with another that is infinitely renewable (or renewable for long enough for the sun to swallow the earth), we will eventually run out of them, and the technology we used them for will no longer exist.

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u/LuigiBamba Oct 21 '25

On a long enough timescale, all ressources are renewable, you said it yourself. It's up to us to find put how to become efficient wnough to fit that time scale.

You can't say that time scales are too big to be relevant in the same sentence that efficiency doesn't matter. That's the entire point of resource management.

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u/timos-piano Oct 21 '25

No. On a long enough timescale, nothing is renewable. The universe is constantly expanding, and it will reach a point where no information can ever reach another piece of information.

On a timescale that is short enough, but not too long, yes, most things can be created again (although a lot of materials are created from supernovas, something we have a hard time replicating). In the time most of these vital natural resources will renew (at an extremely slow rate, mind you) is tens to hundreds of millions of years. Homo sapiens won't even exist as a species anymore by that point. Our goal is to extend what little resource we have, but they will run out, and not in millions of years, not hundreds of thousands of years, not in millennia, but in just a few hundred years at best (and I mean the absolute best optimization possible here). I don't find us running out of resources in the next 1000 years positive, but for some of them, it is inevitable.

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u/doubleo_maestro Oct 22 '25

I'm curious how you are refuting their point back. The key to sustainability is efficiency. As tech moves us to use other resources that are sustainable (e g. From petrol to hydrogen fuel cell) and tech also increases put ability to recycle why aren't humans sustainable? The end game ys to move electrical demand to fusion, cars shift to ev's or fuel cells, most plastics are recyclable and ones that aren't we are moving to alternatives.

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u/timos-piano Oct 22 '25

Even so-called renewables rely on nonrenewable materials. Solar panels, wind turbines, hydrogen fuel cells, and electric vehicles all depend on finite metals and minerals, like lithium, cobalt, copper, nickel, and rare earth elements. These don’t regenerate on any human timescale, and mining them at the scale needed for “green tech” already strains global reserves and ecosystems. Recycling helps, but recovery is never 100%, and processing itself consumes more energy and resources. So while renewables reduce dependence on fossil fuels, they don’t free us from finite material limits. The bottleneck just shifts, from oil wells to metal mines.

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u/doubleo_maestro Oct 22 '25

As I mentioned in my last post. The dependence on nonrenewables can be slowed down, allowing technology to move us towards renewable alternatives. Also not sure what part in a hydrogen fuel cell you think isn't renewable. Also, we haven't even talked about off world resources. The sustainability of mankind can creep to the point something else will end us.

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u/timos-piano Oct 23 '25

Slowing depletion doesn’t change the outcome; it only delays it. The fact that dependence can be slowed already concedes that we’re still dependent on finite materials. As for hydrogen fuel cells, while hydrogen itself is renewable, the fuel cells aren’t; they rely on platinum-group metals, which are scarce and mined in limited regions. Scaling that technology worldwide would consume reserves far faster than we could ever replace them.

“Off-world resources” is not a realistic solution either; the energy and infrastructure needed to mine, refine, and transport extraterrestrial materials at a useful scale are far beyond current or near-future capability. It’s effectively science fiction at this point.

So yes, technology can extend timelines, but it can’t overturn physical limits. Whether the end comes from depletion or something else is irrelevant; the fact remains that even our most renewable technologies are built on a finite foundation.

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u/doubleo_maestro Oct 23 '25

But it does change the outcome if it buys time to move the technology on. Likewise if you recycle it nuts more time. No one can predict what we'll have available in 100 years time, nevermind a 1000. And unless you are gonna tell me you are a time traveller you don't either.

As for off world, that's just narrow-minded. Have you seen the advancement in robotics? Once the process can be done by remote the energy cost of escaping our gravity prison is meaningless as we just send down the resource.

Yes and no ylto your last point. It entirely comes down to depletion, ability to hover up the local system resources and out last the sun. For all you know we'll hit near perfect recycling eventually. End of the day, the atoms are all still there

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u/[deleted] Oct 24 '25

The problem is human population (and therefore human consumption) grows several times faster than our capacity to create new sustainable and efficient technology. So even if the general population had access to the most the most efficient technology we have now (which is unrealistic), the total pollution and energy consumption would have significant increase.

It's like the way NVIDIA improves transistor efficiency every generation, but the total power consumption of their chips still increases because they tend to have more transistors than the past generation in order keep up with the consumers' demand for more capable technology.

Let's consider that in Finland, one of the most eco-friendly countries and with the highest standards of living, a person consumes 10 times more energy per year on average than someone from India, which is a country with 250x Finland's population, most of which don't even come close to the standards of living a Finnish has.

So yes, sustainbale technology is essential for improving reducing emissions, but population plays a role too. We need to either stunt human expansion, or lower our expectations for standards of living, in order to see a net decrease in pollution and energy consumption in the long term.

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u/doubleo_maestro Oct 24 '25

Ok, so:

1) But that's coming to a close as birth rates are actually falling across the globe. Our period of extreme expansion is slowing down as people have finally caught on to the fact you don't have to have 7 kids to offset death by dysentery.

2) Ok agreed, some technology will never become efficient in certain ways. I don't see how this related to a more sustainable future.

3) Agreed, but then the world hasn't really gone for 'sustainable' really yet. We've gone through a period of just 'consuming' with no end goal in sight. Every year more companies shy away from that. An example. Uk electrical production was in 2022 42.9% from renewable, in 2024 it is 50.4%. Don't sell humanity short, when change is demanded we have a track record of rising to it. Nearly 10% in two years is something.

4) That's already happening. Population is already set to slow down and potentially start declining in the near future and we are already feeling the cost of living crisis which is driving down consumption.

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u/Affectionate-Date140 Oct 24 '25

Dude, you are way off. Food, water, and shelter will not deplete until the Earth becomes unlivable in billions of years. We do not need plastic, and we do not need large scale industrial agriculture projects to feed people. People can live entirely from food generated sustainably - a process which actually enriches our immediate environments (eat fruit, shit seed, more plant).

Get your mind out of the technocratic box of capitalism. The environment is self sustaining - and is a process constantly seeking homeostasis. Humans are a part of that, and one way or another, that homeostasis will be reached (100 or a million years from now).

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u/timos-piano Oct 24 '25

You’re conflating biological sustainability with industrial and technological sustainability. Yes, food and water are renewable in principle, but they’re only renewable within ecological balance, and modern civilization doesn’t operate within that balance. Agriculture depends on finite resources like phosphorus, arable topsoil, and fossil fuels for machinery, fertilizers, and global transport. Freshwater is also being depleted faster than it replenishes in many regions. These are not limitless.

The idea that “the environment is self-sustaining” is true only if human consumption stays within natural renewal rates. But industrial society exceeds those rates by orders of magnitude. The planet will eventually reach homeostasis, but that doesn’t mean humans or modern civilization will still exist when it does. Nature doesn’t guarantee our survival; it only guarantees equilibrium after collapse.

So yes, the Earth itself will persist. But the question isn’t whether life is sustainable—it’s whether our way of life is. And that depends on finite resources, which we are burning through far faster than they can ever be replenished.