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Ecological Wealth of Nations

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Re: Ecological Wealth of Nations

#71

Post by DominikR »

booli wrote: post #2

Just wondering, how can a small country like for example the Netherlands, with no vast tree wildlife for example, get to a neutral or even positive foot print? A trading nation by roots, is it even possible to get to 0 deficit?

There is no technology available today that would allow an industrialised country like the Netherlands to get to a zero carbon dioxide footprint.

It sounds like sarcasm but the only realistic way to do this is to significantly reduce your population and have the remaining people live in mud huts or caves like our ancestors did many millennia ago. (which would be insane)

Re: Ecological Wealth of Nations

#72

Post by mseebach »

daniel-cussen wrote: post #65
legulere wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with your argument is that it assumes technical progress continuing eternally. For instance Malthus himself was mostly preoccupied with the idea, that the population might increase faster than the agricultural output. Through the use of chemical fertilizers there has been a breakthrough in how much food we can produce, so the malthusan catastrophe was averted. Agricultural output is still growing, but the…

Malthus was aware of increasing agricultural progress, but the argument he made was that it would increase arithmetically (linearly f(x+1)=f(x)+c), whereas population would increase geometrically (exponentially, f(x+1)=f(x)*c). It's a hugely important, contentious, and complicated issue (here's a thought: populations can't actually grow exponentially even given unlimited resources, with a loose, but strict, upper bou…

Population growth is slowing down rapidly, there's even a chance that the global population will peak in the next century (and this is due to people living in industrialised countries having less than 2 children per woman, not due to any global calamity). We may have one more doubling of the global population, and then it's pretty much flat, even decreasing. Very, very far from exponential growth, that's for sure.

On the other hand, technological improvements aren't exactly stalling. In food alone there are huge benefits yet to be reaped from GMOs and hydroponics, just to mention two. It may not be exponential growth anymore, but there's little to suggest that it will just stop.

So no, the Malthusian limit may very well not be there at all.

Re: Ecological Wealth of Nations

#73

Post by zardo »

cubano wrote: post #31
rplnt wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend of mine is a big advocate of space habitats. Apparently they are far superior to Mars as a place where we could expand in foreseeable future. Maybe someone knowledgeable could chime in?

> A friend of mine is a big advocate of space habitats. Apparently they are far superior to Mars... Interesting...did he work at NASA working with real space habitats? I was a summer hire at NASA many moons ago in the medical/habitat programs and there sure wasn't much their that looked superior to anything.

Current space habitats probably aren't what he had in mind.

Re: Ecological Wealth of Nations

#74

Post by CalRobert »

DominikR wrote: post #71
booli wrote: post #2

Just wondering, how can a small country like for example the Netherlands, with no vast tree wildlife for example, get to a neutral or even positive foot print? A trading nation by roots, is it even possible to get to 0 deficit?

There is no technology available today that would allow an industrialised country like the Netherlands to get to a zero carbon dioxide footprint. It sounds like sarcasm but the only realistic way to do this is to significantly reduce your population and have the remaining people live in mud huts or caves like our ancestors did many millennia ago. (which would be insane)

People had moved on from mud huts by the 1600's, and yet had a pretty small (though non-zero) carbon footprint.

I do agree that population, especially the population of people living a carbon-intense lifestyle, is a serious concern. Many people point a finger at poor nations with high population growth rates while failing to acknowledge that people in those countries tend to emit very little.

Re: Ecological Wealth of Nations

#75

Post by hx87 »

schallertd wrote: post #20

I'm pretty sick of all that hype around Tesla for example, pretending to be the real solution for independence of oil and gas. That is simply not the case. Tesla hasn't solved any of those issues so far, they only shifted the problem once again. Of course they design very beautiful electronic cars, but this isn't a solution for our energy and resource problem either.

Even if every Tesla was 100% powered by coal power plants, it would still be an improvement since it's much easier to control efficiency and emissions at a single 4GW plant than in a fleet of 40000 100kW cars.

Re: Ecological Wealth of Nations

#76

Post by hx87 »

DominikR wrote: post #63

> A national ecological deficit means that the nation is importing biocapacity through trade, liquidating national ecological assets or emitting carbon dioxide waste into the atmosphere. Before we had this trade and industrial activity that outputs all of this carbon dioxide waste life spans of humans were 3 times shorter than today. And by the way the world population was also 8 times smaller, meaning that we today…

> if we go down this path they'll simply slaughter us

Not before they "slaughter" themselves with pollution.

Re: Ecological Wealth of Nations

#77

Post by bpodgursky »

miloshadzic wrote: post #34

"Ideal" growth of an economy is 3%. Growth takes resources(fossil fuels, ore, etc). Compound growth takes more and more resources over the whole planet. Free market fundamentalism means we're not investing so heavily into alternative sources but burning what we've got. Compound that 3% and it's just a metter when we'll be fucked unless things change a lot.

> Growth takes resources(fossil fuels, ore, etc).

This is simply wrong. We produce vastly more GDP per unit of energy than we did a century ago, and will do the same a century from now.

The size of an economy is a measure of what people will pay for a good. It's not a measure of how big a pile of steel you can make. The most expensive goods nowadays, services and computing, do not take vast piles of resources. In fact, the most expensive computers use the LEAST energy per unit of computation.

Re: Ecological Wealth of Nations

#78

Post by hx87 »

daniel-cussen wrote: post #65
legulere wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with your argument is that it assumes technical progress continuing eternally. For instance Malthus himself was mostly preoccupied with the idea, that the population might increase faster than the agricultural output. Through the use of chemical fertilizers there has been a breakthrough in how much food we can produce, so the malthusan catastrophe was averted. Agricultural output is still growing, but the…

Malthus was aware of increasing agricultural progress, but the argument he made was that it would increase arithmetically (linearly f(x+1)=f(x)+c), whereas population would increase geometrically (exponentially, f(x+1)=f(x)*c). It's a hugely important, contentious, and complicated issue (here's a thought: populations can't actually grow exponentially even given unlimited resources, with a loose, but strict, upper bou…

I don't think people here (or anywhere) dispute that here is a hard upper limit on the maximum population the Earth can support at any given time. The dispute is in the proposition that population is fated (or probabilistically likely) to grow faster than agricultural production. That may have been true when pro-natalist dogma held sway and agricultural technology was stagnant, but that's no longer the case--people who advocate having as man kids as possible no matter are seen as crazy in most parts of the world today, and for good reason.

Birth control is likely and is effective if you don't try to actively suppress it.

Re: Ecological Wealth of Nations

#79

Post by miloshadzic »

zardo wrote: post #52
jylam wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Ideal" growth of an economy is 3% Would you mind to source and explain that ?

Three percent shall be the number thou shalt grow, and the number of the growing shall be three. Four shalt thou not grow, neither grow thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out.

Here you go, straight from Zardoz.

Re: Ecological Wealth of Nations

#80

Post by TeMPOraL »

Loic wrote: post #11
booli wrote: post #2

Just wondering, how can a small country like for example the Netherlands, with no vast tree wildlife for example, get to a neutral or even positive foot print? A trading nation by roots, is it even possible to get to 0 deficit?

Take a look at Germany, they are steadily increasing their biocapacity while reducing their ecological footprint (I wonder how they increase the biocapacity so steadily over such long period of time). So, you may not achieve a balance, but maybe at the scale of a region like Europe, we can achieve it.

Well, they're exporting their pollution to China and some of the other European countries, by switching to PVs and buying coal-produced electricity, respectively.
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