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Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

economist.com

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Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#51

Post by rjmunro »

bheadmaster wrote: post #30
leethargo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, you're saying, hopefully we will soon have "abundant supplies of cheap GHG emission-free energy" and no other resource scarcity to support that infrastructure? I count myself as sympathetic (but also skeptical) towards the degrowth movement. I don't interpret it as saying that we should (only) reduce consumption and ignore progress in the form of efficiency/decoupling. Rather, the message seems that doing both, s…

Degrowth necessarily implies population control - you can't reduce sum consumption if population keeps growing, as there is a lower bound on the amount of consumption a single person can live off. And population control necessarily implies government control of reproduction, which sets a precedent for controlling other aspects of people's lives. I am not sympathetic towards the degrowth movement, since the "solutions…

> there is a lower bound on the amount of consumption a single person can live off.

That may be true, but that bound is clearly a lot lower than many people currently operate at. The has about twice the inflation adjusted per-capita GDP that it had 40 years ago, and about 5 times the current world average. https://www.statista.com/statistics/996758/rea-gdp-growth-un...

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#52

Post by bheadmaster »

andrepd wrote: post #48
bheadmaster wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Degrowth necessarily implies population control - you can't reduce sum consumption if population keeps growing, as there is a lower bound on the amount of consumption a single person can live off. And population control necessarily implies government control of reproduction, which sets a precedent for controlling other aspects of people's lives. I am not sympathetic towards the degrowth movement, since the "solutions…

My god, two incredible leaps in such a short post! You drive a 3-ton SUV, burn coal for electricity, and produce literal mountains of plastic crap in China which get shipped around the world. Don't worry pal, there's plenty to cut back before you need to roll out the forced sterelisation. Second, the population of the developed world is already declining. The population of the world is on track to plateau in the comi…

I'm not your pal, buddy.

> Your caricature is just silly.

Funny, I feel the same way about yours.

Sure, everyone in the world is driving SUVs, flying private jets, and building nuclear reactors in their backyard. Let's stop people from consuming - force everyone to be vegan and eat the bugs! People consuming are the problem - not the military-industrial complex spending enormous amounts of energy on things that have nothing to do with consumption and spends an order of magnitude more energy than all human consumption combined!

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#53

Post by lettergram »

collyw wrote: post #43
lettergram wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That said, even if economic activity was fully decoupled from emissions, Earth's environmental problems would remain overwhelming. Biodiversity loss, deforestation, aquifer depletion, desertification, etc. are just as concerning for most people here as rising global temperatures. The issue I take with the “Global warming” crowd is that there’s a lot inaccurate predictions (nearly all of them thus far) and the evide…

It amazes me that climate activists never seem to push for nuclear, the most obvious solution.

It’s the tell.

Lots of reports pointing out Russia funds environmental groups. China does the same - but more openly - advertising cheap solar and wind (neither function as well as nuclear).

https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/596304-invest...

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#54

Post by zztop44 »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #36
zztop44 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve got a horrid feeling you’re waiting for this precise question, but any source on degrowth being the aim of a “lot” of climate activists to the extent that it’s vaguely mainstream (as opposed to just being a minor current, which I’m aware exists)

Environmentalist groups often oppose construction of solar and wind farms [0]. The Sunrise Movement has explicitly advocated for degrowth policies (e.g. [1], with some in the movement claiming it does not go far enough [2]). [0] https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/americas-top-environmental... [1] https://twitter.com/sunrisemvmt/status/1328770319843287041?l... [2] https://medium.com/@xxcapsxx1964/to-the-sunrise-movemen…

[0] is classic NIMBYism not degrowth as an aim (I hope you can acknowledge those are different things). [1] is a tweet just saying that capitalism won’t solve the climate crisis, which I hope you can also distinguish from advocating degrowth as an objective (capitalism and economic growth are not synonymous). And [2] is an individual volunteer posting something to the public internet under their own initiative, which (absolutely no disrespect to them) does not make the mainstream of the climate movement.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#55

Post by randomsearch »

perfunctory wrote: post #47

For me personally, the only climate metric worth paying attention to is this one: https://www.climate.gov/media/13611 All other "Good news" and "reason(s) for optimism" I consider to be accounting tricks.

Do you know how much the ppm measure varies by location or altitude?

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#56

Post by bryanlarsen »

anemoiac wrote: post #35

I'll be casting my vote with the skeptics for this one. That said, even if economic activity was fully decoupled from emissions, Earth's environmental problems would remain overwhelming. Biodiversity loss, deforestation, aquifer depletion, desertification, etc. are just as concerning for most people here as rising global temperatures. My inner cynic sees headlines like the above and assumes that A) the writer/publish…

Even in the face of slowing population growth? That's the primary driver of increased consumption, and population growth has slowed dramatically.

> If we suddenly weren't allowed to replace old-growth forests with mono-culture, pollute our groundwater, fill the earth with plastic, kill off a majority of animal species, and so forth, how much would the economy shrink?

But would it? Such a transition would create a massive number of jobs producing the alternatives.

A very small portion of the economy is spent on what people need, 80% of GDP is spent on wants. And if people want a clean environment more than they want the latest consumer crap, that means the clean environment is worth more in dollars, and so cleaning the environment grows the GDP.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#57

Post by wizzwizz4 »

collyw wrote: post #46
lm28469 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> degrowth > it is impossible to convince societies to take massive quality-of-life reductions What about sustainable growth focused on actual quality of life and not on perpetuating a system that produce/consume useless cheap low quality gadgets and services for the sole purpose of keeping the population at work 8 hours a day until they hit 65/67 years old (age by the time 25% of the poorest are already dead) The fa…

How would you measure "sustainable growth focused on actual quality of life"? Generally economic growth goes hand in hand with an objective increase in quality of life, though as i just mentioned, the ways of measuring that are via poor proxies at best.

> though as i just mentioned, the ways of measuring that are via poor proxies at best.

Goodhart's law comes to mind:

> Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.

I don't think we should measure it – at least, not obsessively. We should research and study it, and put in place measures that should theoretically work, and pay attention to whether what we're doing is working, but we shouldn't look at the measurements and go "this is making the numbers go down; we must be doing something wrong!" without at least double-checking that the numbers make sense.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#58

Post by randomsearch »

perfunctory wrote: post #2

> A large and growing group of mostly rich countries has severed the link between economic growth and rising emissions of greenhouse gases so they outsourced production to the poor countries.

> so they outsourced production to the poor countries.

You can't outsource domestic transport and, for the moment, most electricity generation.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#59

Post by fedeb95 »

nathias wrote: post #14
fedeb95 wrote: post #6

The 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 ...

Solved isn't the exact word. It's something. It's the best we can do. That doesn't justify reckless behaviours in my opinion, just because we don't yet have scientific evidence that they are

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#60

Post by cfhhgtyg »

bheadmaster wrote: post #30
leethargo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, you're saying, hopefully we will soon have "abundant supplies of cheap GHG emission-free energy" and no other resource scarcity to support that infrastructure? I count myself as sympathetic (but also skeptical) towards the degrowth movement. I don't interpret it as saying that we should (only) reduce consumption and ignore progress in the form of efficiency/decoupling. Rather, the message seems that doing both, s…

Degrowth necessarily implies population control - you can't reduce sum consumption if population keeps growing, as there is a lower bound on the amount of consumption a single person can live off. And population control necessarily implies government control of reproduction, which sets a precedent for controlling other aspects of people's lives. I am not sympathetic towards the degrowth movement, since the "solutions…

Degrowth doesn't imply that.

You imply that population will increase indefinitely (max peak expected at 12 billion actually) or that degrowth needs to happen forever.

Further you imply population development increases if degrowth is applies.

Also, slippery slope argument.

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