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The backlash against overtourism

economist.com

221–230 of 311 posts

Re: The backlash against overtourism

#221
post #181
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We can't all have a car because we'll boil the earth. If we > develop EV's and don't boil the earth, they won't all fit > downtown. > > We can't all live in the country, that's not sustainable > either. You hit the nail in the head. The only way for 7+ billions humans to live sustain-ably on planet earth, is to accept high density living and shared spaces. High density living in the form of apartments with common g…

You don't need extremely high density, and you can still grill on your own balcony (or little terasse). Theres an important density threshold which allows communities to be walkable and servable by rapid transit. Many areas of Montreal are comfortably above that threshold by using triplexes, even just duplexes.

20 houses per hectare is low density, with a decent garden and local roads. At that level you can fit 20,000 houses, or 50-70k people, within a short 2km walk of a station, and a few local shops around the place too, and on average you’re about 800m from the edge of town.

Have 1 town every 10km (so 6km of country between them) and that’s a 6:1 country:town ratio and a density higher than that of even the Netherlands.

Re: The backlash against overtourism

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, you also have to understand that humanitarianism must have limits. The resources of nations are not infinite and individuals that are unable to provide for themselves are a tremendous burden on society. And when you accept people that fail to integrate you risk imperiling the very policies that you hold to be worthwhile. For instance, Sweden will be a phenomenal test case. The Globe and Mail ran an…

Just pointing out that 'piece' is an editorial, not a news article. The US has had multiple waves of immigration from most of the world, over the last few centuries. And there has been similar pushback from nativists over and over again. If that long history is any indication, Sweden will be fine.

...for someone, presumably.

It'll merely no longer be recognizable as "Sweden" for people whose ancestors considered themselves "Swedes".

Re: The backlash against overtourism

#223
post #55

Mass tourism is being treated as unique when really, we're discovering that everyone cannot have a "good" standard of living. We can't all go travelling, we won't fit in the same place and we'll boil the earth doing so. We can't all have a car because we'll boil the earth. If we develop EV's and don't boil the earth, they won't all fit downtown. We can't all live in the country, that's not sustainable either. We can'…

> It sucks. But what's the alternative? It's perfectly reasonable to drag people out of poverty. But the idea that everyone should be able to do the same things implies a set of "things" very different from what, say, the middle class families on my suburban street do today. Exactly. The "eternal growing of the economic cake" which the majority of the related policies are based on, ignores limits to growth (e.g. ener…

> Under reality, there will be huge cutting back and, quite possibly, big human toll ...

i don't know if this counts as a huge cutting back or a big human toll or something else, but Southern California residents could save millions and millions of gallons of gasoline if they would just stop sitting in traffic one person per car

pretty much anyone who's ever driven to work in Los Angeles must have noticed what a magnificent, prodigious bacchanalia of petroleum product wastage that place is

Re: The backlash against overtourism

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We either eliminate these experiences, accept economic inequality, or watch the experiences be eliminated via attrition You're not thinking broad enough! It seems to me that you view the determination of what can be done as derived purely from economics. I have money so I can do what I want, you don't so you can't, and you view that as natural. But economic determination of our freedom is as unnatural as the world i…

It took me a while to interpret this, but I think I see what you're getting at here. You're right that the competition dynamic doesn't have to be the one we choose. So I suppose there's a fourth option which involves some sort of other distribution mechanism. You're still going to have a privileged group though, unless you choose to eliminate experiences (e.g. there's no way of fairly distributing private jets, they'…

Yes, even if we just switched to pure lottery for traveling, we'll have a privileged class of people who win that lottery and get to travel somewhere they like. However, this inequality is at least independently distributed from other forms of inequality. To me that's already an improvement. There's also lots of other areas where I think competition could be entirely eliminated. Take healthcare, there's basically no need for that to be a competitive system.

Re: The backlash against overtourism

#225

Mass tourism is being treated as unique when really, we're discovering that everyone cannot have a "good" standard of living. We can't all go travelling, we won't fit in the same place and we'll boil the earth doing so. We can't all have a car because we'll boil the earth. If we develop EV's and don't boil the earth, they won't all fit downtown. We can't all live in the country, that's not sustainable either. We can'…

It'd be really interesting to figure out what we actually can all do, though, based on first principles and some basic math. Right now there's a lot of rhetoric on both sides, either of the form "The universe is scarce. Either we compete over natural resources, or we die" or "There's plenty for everybody! Let's guarantee everyone a middle-class American lifestyle as a basic human right." I suspect that both extremes are quite inaccurate, and being manipulated for political gain.

Two surprising ones that I've found:

We can feed everyone on earth. Current daily food production per capita exceeds the recommended 2500 Cal/day in all regions [1], even in Africa, and exceeds 3500 Cal/day in some regions (North America, Europe). With current technology, we could feed the expected 2050 population of 9B. We may not be able to feed them meat, because it takes roughly 25x as much energy to produce beef than corn, and roughly 6x as much for chicken or pork. [2] We also need to fix severe distribution and supply chain leakage problems to get the food to where it needs to be.

We also can produce enough renewable energy to give everyone a developed-world standard of living, subject to construction & storage costs. Energy use in the U.S. was 4.1 TWh in 2016 [3]; divided by 8760 hours/year, that's a mean power usage of 472.2 GW. (Peak power generating capacity in the U.S. is about 1100 GW, so that implies 50% utilization, which is about right.) Scaled up to 9B people (30x), that implies a global energy consumption of around 14 TW. Solar flux on the earth is 1.361 KW/m^2 [4], so at 10% efficiency, that requires an area of 104,010 square kilometers covered by solar panels. This sounds large, but laid out into a rectangle, it's only about 250 * 400 km. Such an array could easily fit into the Mojava, Sahara, or many other deserts on earth, with plenty of room left over.

We likely can't all live in the country - total habitable acreage on earth is about 15.77 billion acres, so with 9B people, each person gets about an acre and a half, and that has to include all the public commons, infrastructure, industry, etc. as well. We also probably can't all have a car - we could if we all lived in the country, but if you take say SF's density (20K/mi^2), give everyone a car, and multiply that by the space the car takes up in parking (say 200 ft^2) and roads (depends on density, but let's say equivalent), you're looking at 8M ft^2 taken up by vehicles alone out of a total available space of 27M ft^2. If everybody used motorcycles, pods, or scooters to get around, it could work, though.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/food-per-person

[2] http://www.pnas.org/content/115/15/3804

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#Co...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_constant

Re: The backlash against overtourism

#226
post #16

Honest to God, the best take on this theory was actually the Consul's tale in Hyperion explaining why he was against the Hegemony. The degradation of Maui-Covenant is just so very realistic and easy to visualize. Reading that as a child actually led me to travel less than I really want to as an adult. Instead, I enjoy making my small part of the world 'mine' instead of trying to make the rest of the world 'mine'.

Upvoted just because it's the only time I've heard anyone else talk about this (read Hyperion some time back, can't believe it took me this long to get to it) :-)

Re: The backlash against overtourism

#227

Mass tourism is being treated as unique when really, we're discovering that everyone cannot have a "good" standard of living. We can't all go travelling, we won't fit in the same place and we'll boil the earth doing so. We can't all have a car because we'll boil the earth. If we develop EV's and don't boil the earth, they won't all fit downtown. We can't all live in the country, that's not sustainable either. We can'…

> It sucks. But what's the alternative?

Fewer people.

Re: The backlash against overtourism

#228
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should be fun telling the Japanese government that shutting down all of their nuclear plants in the last few years is 'anti-science'.

Why are they shutting them down?

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

Re: The backlash against overtourism

#229
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It sucks. But what's the alternative? It's perfectly reasonable to drag people out of poverty. But the idea that everyone should be able to do the same things implies a set of "things" very different from what, say, the middle class families on my suburban street do today. Exactly. The "eternal growing of the economic cake" which the majority of the related policies are based on, ignores limits to growth (e.g. ener…

The thing is not all wealth is raw materials. While we are at least thousands of times richer than peasant herders from ancient times we don't have 17k head of cattle each. While there is likely still a limit assuming economic growth must stop entirely is overly simplistic. There are many areas where the limit is research - drugs themselves are fairly cheap to manufacture but expensive to develop, test, and set up in…

Exactly. People tend to look at a chart of energy use per capita and GDP growth and assume that the same correlation must continue to hold.

But a better designed game or app doesn't necessarily require more energy to run. I can envision a economy where people trade trade digital goods, and that economy can keep growing pretty much without limit because the value is all based on intangible factors.

Imagine a hypothetical world where everyone is a programmer and everyone has the same small 20 watt computer. Would people just give up and stagnate? Or would they continue to improve and create more value for other users by making more efficient use of the 20 watt computers they are stuck with?

Re: The backlash against overtourism

#230
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Momentary inconveniences of todays technology and productivity. In our lifetime we will see people go to space with private funds, that not the wealthiest person on earth could have achieved 50 years ago.

Sure. Cool story. How are you getting that guy from the CAR to Venice using one of the methods you mentioned in a reasonable way? I'll wait while you address the actual line of conversation I was involved in instead of making up sci fi stories about how cool 2050 is going to be.

Not the OP, but wasn't the purpose of this a thought experiment in whether or not it is possible to increase the global standard of living. If so then of course we are talking about what's theoretically possible in a hypothetical future.

I don't think anyone was making the claim that it was reasonable to get the average person from CAR to Venice today.

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