I believe this to be true to the extent that energy sources are decoupled from emissions. Energy is still the foundation of economic activity.
Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions
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Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions
#12There are some big open questions there though - this may easily be the knell tolling for economic growth as an interesting measure of progress. We don't care about GDP because we really love indexes, but because it used to be a close proxy of energy availability.
GDP doubling used to mean 2x as much energy and an almost unbelievable improvement in the median living standard. Doubling energy availability is huge! You can tell from the political pressures building that a lot of countries with positive GDP are missing that sort of comforting tailwind that keeps everyone happy and working together.
Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions
#13GDP is still very much almost exactly correlated to energy consumed. Current inflation is also almost directly caused by energy loss. At this point people should not read any narratives. Look at direct physical evidence and do the math.
Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions
#14The real problem is that people are usually blind: almost nobody reasons about philosophic implications of induction. What I mean is this: can we know that in the portion of knowledge we don't know there isn't an even worse problem? In general we can't know the unknown, but we should at least try to look
problems of induction are solved by the scientific method, bit by bit there is nothing better we can do except try to lean more, but on the side of what to do with information we have quite large leaps to go still ...
Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
From TFA: "Strikingly, consumption emissions, which include a measure of the carbon embedded in imports, have fallen by 15% over the same period."
Also, here's a graph from Our World In Data using consumption-based accounting for CO2 emissions. Note that US, Europe, and even India are declining in consumption (and China seems to be plateauing) https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/co2?facet=none&country=...
per capita*
Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, here's a graph from Our World In Data using consumption-based accounting for CO2 emissions. Note that US, Europe, and even India are declining in consumption (and China seems to be plateauing) https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/co2?facet=none&country=...
per capita*
The population of all these places are stabilizing too.
Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions
#17GDP is still very much almost exactly correlated to energy consumed. Current inflation is also almost directly caused by energy loss. At this point people should not read any narratives. Look at direct physical evidence and do the math.
Energy may not equal emissions always and energy to GDP conversion ratio can change. Does a 100W incandescent bulb produce more value to GDP than a 14W LED bulb of same luminosity?
Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions
#18Unfortunately, a lot of climate activists’ primary goal is not stopping climate change but rather advocating for degrowth. They are thus vehemently opposed to any solutions that don’t involve massive reductions in consumption. This is not only politically untenable (it is impossible to convince societies to take massive quality-of-life reductions) but also alienates the majority of people from the cause, who might otherwise support it. Hopefully degrowth advocates’ voices will be drowned out by abundant supplies of cheap GHG emission-free energy.
Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions
#19Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions
#20The subtitle (or supertitle?) says "Debunking degrowth", implying that the idea of degrowth is that no decoupling is possible and that proponents of degrowth promote negative growth as measured in GDP per capita.
From my limited understanding, degrowth actually stands for different ideas, such as:
- GDP is not a relevant measure for wellbeing
- reduced consumption can lean to higher wellbeing for the individual (reduced working hours, more time for family, gardening etc)
- worth of policy should be measured by new, more holistic criteria