I believe that a renewed debate on what sustainability means is offered by the need to cap CO2 emissions, and what it would take for countries to really do this. Ie. how much reduction in emissions/production is required from wealthy countries, and, in the end, from poor countries. But this is just part of the debate, as to do this we really need to reduce waste/production across all sectors – and this is true within countries – down to household and individual levels.

I’ve submitted this preprint – https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/201812.0176/v1 – titled “The Three Horses of Sustainability—Population, Affluence and Technology”; I know it rehashes in different ways what Paul Ehrlich and colleagues wrote in the 1970s … but it seems a renewed public and political dialogue needs to be informed on this, and able to take up its simple message to reduce, reuse and recycle to the point of achieving the proportionate reductions in impact every person, family, company, country should undertake.

Is this a useful re-visit? Comments welcome here, or in the comments to the preprint!