91–100 of 316 posts
"Good news! We’re getting more while using less." Or maybe we just haven't accounted for inflation and the rampant advent of landlords and landlord-like start ups which consumes greater and greater slices of the consumer's money.
From the article: It suggests that economic growth in a mature economy does not necessarily increase the pressure on the world's reserves of natural resources and on its physical environment. Jesse Asubel has been looking at "dematerialization" for a long time[1] but it has only been relatively recently, now with a couple of decades of additional data to look at, that it is getting the attention I think it deserves.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did it occur to you that, like ordinary consumer products, industrial products also oversell their efficacy? There was just a paper released about a widely used pesticide that did not appear to actually increase yields. If the question is, how does crop tonnage go up without water and fertilizer use, maybe the answer really is a computer helped people plan better and be less wasteful. Or all the least efficient farme…
Corn yields have been going up a bit more than 1.5 bushels per acre since hybrid breeding started in the 1930's going from a steady ~25 bu/acre to >170/acre today. Farmers haven't just been adding a bit more fertilizer and water every year, and it has been going on long before computers. Many factors go into it: soil management with tilling practices and fertilizers, pest and weed management, improvements in irrigati…
Nice to believe and it is certainly what growers should be doing, but the evidence clearly indicates that they really aren't.
Nitrate levels in the Mississippi are directly correlated to nitrogen use in agriculture and in the upper Mississippi River and Missouri River, flow-normalized nitrate concentration and flux have increased steadily during 1980–2000 and is most measuring sites accelerated since 2000.[0]
At the two most downstream sites on the Mississippi River, increasing trends in flow-normalized nitrate concentration are a relatively new development and at least partly reflect increases occurring in the Missouri River and the upper Mississippi River.
Many believe this increase in nitrate concentration is directly responsible for the Gulf of Mexico dead zone – an area of low to no oxygen that can kill fish and other marine life – which for 2019 NOAA scientists are forecasting to be approximately 7,829 square miles or roughly the size of the land mass of Massachusetts.[1]
I don't see how Ausubel's conclusion on decreased fertilizer use squares with the measured reality on the ground (or the water) in this case.
[0]: https://pubs.usgs.gov/sir/2013/5169/pdf/sir20135169.pdf
[1]: https://www.noaa.gov/media-release/noaa-forecasts-very-large...
Wages have been mostly flat, so consumers have no extra money to engage in additional buying. Since the Great Recession of 2008, the top 1% of the income distribution have absorbed 125% of productivity gains. This is the reverse of what we saw in the 1940s and 1950s and 1960s when strong labor unions were able to win 110% of productivity for workers, so that the share of national income going to labor increased. Now…
>This is the reverse of what we saw in the 1940s and 1950s and 1960s when strong labor unions were able to win 110% of productivity for workers, so that the share of national income going to labor increased. Now the opposite is happening, with the share of national income going to labor decreasing. Yeah, but this is a good thing. The labor class is a very strong supporter of the political party that pushes policies w…
It's not that hard to spin things in a way that people unknowingly vote for the opposite of what they actually want or need.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There must be a level of economic production that falls below the level of emission that can be absorbed without contributing to climate change You're right, there absolutely is such a level. The important point is that to stay at or below that level, you have to give up on the idea of perpetual, infinite growth. The inputs and outputs must remain constant. My point was that there's no such thing as "immaterial" gr…
Without growth above the population growth, life becomes zero sum or negative sum. That means that taking and fighting becomes more rewarding than building. It is either growth or war, no way around it.
There are two other trends that worry me more. One is visible in the freezer section at the grocery store; a "half-gallon" of ice cream is no longer actually a half-gallon. Many other food items have shrunk. The article's example of lighter buildings is what I view as the same category, something blogger Yves Smith terms 'crapification.' We've now had at least two generations of spreadsheet-wielding MBA's optimizing corporate costs to reduce what is spent on materials and labor. Evidence of their success is showing up across the economy, and politics, and society at large.
The other trend is money supply; One of the chief problems leading to the 2008 financial crisis was that much more credit had been extended than could ever be paid back by those to whom it was loaned. The 'solution' was to have central banks 'pay back' the loans that never should've been made. That put a lot of credit in to the economy, which shows up as economic growth. I'd like to see an analysis of 'economic growth' where the contributions of resources and credit are accounted for separately.
Someone I know posted a picture of an empty rolodex today, saying that they'd moved their friends to 'the cloud.' I'm sure you can look at your phone apps and see other things that would've been physical objects ten or twenty years ago. So, that's one way material use has, at least, shifted. There are two other trends that worry me more. One is visible in the freezer section at the grocery store; a "half-gallon" of i…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are physical limits to efficiency. In different technologies were are different distances away, but there are always limits that we cannot exceed. We can get creative about not needing to get close to the limit, but the limits are always there stopping us.
We might migrate to other planets. Also time and space are relative.
Edit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21207011 which coincidentally happened to be in new articles when I checked...
From the article: It suggests that economic growth in a mature economy does not necessarily increase the pressure on the world's reserves of natural resources and on its physical environment. Jesse Asubel has been looking at "dematerialization" for a long time[1] but it has only been relatively recently, now with a couple of decades of additional data to look at, that it is getting the attention I think it deserves.…
> Its nice to see this reality (of how extrapolating is bad because things change) ...but when they do that same thing on earth temperature everyone loses his mind
"Don't be silly! Just because there is water dripping from the ceiling doesn't mean there is a leak in the roof. Things just get wet sometimes. I'm sure there's a wonderful explanation besides the roof leaking. No sense in hiring someone to come look at the roof either. That would be a waste of resources."