I find the idea that all intelligent species have the same dominator instinct driving them to explore, exploit, and colonize to be flawed. Not even all humans have this instinct, it's just that our western societies are all about domination so we grow up thinking it's the norm.
As expected, the purpose of state is to facilitate relatively safe theft from classes not in control of it, and blocking justice is the primary method.
8 billion is unsustainable, our population will decrease drastically in the coming century. We can choose whether it's via degrowth (a controlled, intentional, intelligent reversal of the economic growth of the last decades) or famine, disease, and war.
I fear you're right that degrowth will never happen and we're just going to march toward collapse.
EVs can't save the environment. EVs are made from oil (tires, plastics), and the metals they are made from are extracted and shipped using huge machines also made from and burning oil.
Switching from pumping oil to mining Lithium isn't a net improvement to the environment.
Any mode of transportation that is heavy and uses tires is going to be a major source of microplastics.
It is not possible to expand into sustainability when it's our massive scale that is at the core of our unsustainability. Degrowth is our only chance.
All the waste a plant ever produces in its lifetime can be contained with ease on site.
Won't that create a bunch of targets all over the country? Then terrorists or enemy states can use simple small bombs to make whole areas uninhabitable for the next millennium.
I don’t disagree with you, but this is unrealistic.
But...we don't have a choice if we are to survive. Continuation with any system like our current system (i.e. exploitation of nature for economic growth) will lead to obvious ecological collapse. Why is certain ecological collapse viewed as the more realistic choice?
This is akin to a person well on their way to a heart attack saying "well, eating healthy is unrealistic, so let's switch to diet coke and pretend that's enough"
The truth is that no system of rule is functional long term, anarchism is the only stable system, it worked for 200k years.
So long as the state is how humans organize, there will be boom and bust cycles until either ecological collapse or invulnerable fascism brings us to a new terrible stable state.
The only logical position (in the U.S.) is to vote blue to buy time in hopes that anarchism can be reached by other means.
Or, we could collectively realize time is but an illusion and transcend this silly problem.