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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

#71

Post by bryanlarsen »

pyrale wrote: post #67
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #18

Unfortunately, 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 ot…

> abundant supplies of cheap GHG emission-free energy Feel free to research that in your free time. In the current state of the world we can't really wait for you to find it before we make a change.

It's not hard to find. I had to close my curtains to prevent it from glaring off my monitor.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#72

Post by weberer »

leethargo wrote: post #23
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #18

Unfortunately, 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 ot…

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…

>So, you're saying, hopefully we will soon have "abundant supplies of cheap GHG emission-free energy"

We've had it since the 60's. Various green parties fought against it tooth and nail.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#73

Post by philosopher1234 »

collyw wrote: post #49
practice9 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t help that most visible activists don’t have clear and measurable goals

How dare you! Listen to the scientists! No not those scientists!

All those earth lovers are so lame. I’ll burn as much oil as I want

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#74

Post by refurb »

andrepd wrote: post #39
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #18

Unfortunately, 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 ot…

>(it is impossible to convince societies to take massive quality-of-life reductions) Why do you say degrowth = lower quality of life? Let me give you a simple and practical example: an American living in a suburb takes her gas-guzzler 3-ton SUV to go shopping or to the park, stands in traffic in a 4-lane freeway for one hour. A Dutch living in a suburb takes her bike to go shopping or to the park, rides it through a…

Who has the better quality of life?

I don't know, isn't "quality of life" a personal, subjective measure?

The best example I can give is Singapore. Fantastic public transit, high vehicle import taxes (like 100%) and a system where you need a separate permit to own a care that costs >$100,000 for 10 years.

And yet no lack of people who buy cars. The people I worked with there all owned cars. They could certainly get around without one, but they wanted one, despite the alternatives.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#75

Post by radicalbyte »

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…

I was skeptical until I saw how good my sun panels work. We only have installed about 50% of capacity and they generate enough to cover 120% of our annual electric usage.

Everything here is electric except the heating and I work from home all day (with an energy-drinking PC set-up).

I live in The Netherlands - the same panels will generate about 2x as much energy a year if they were in Spain or North Africa.

I wouldn't be surprised if we could run our houses and light industry for 6 months a year purely on solar panels if we put them on every roof top in the country.

Then you look at wind: we have a huge potential for wind energy especially off-shore (and in our big lakes).

Like most of the EU the main problem is heating in winter - that requires a reduction in energy usage through insulation and heat-pumps combined with energy import from countries which have high potential for solar and wind (North Africa has huge potential here).

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#76

Post by samatman »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #56
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 mas…

This is an important point.

To pick an example which is both low-stakes and topical: many, probably most, of the 11,000 Facebookers who just got canned, were misallocated. Zuck was just paying them not to work for anyone else, whether that was explicit in his mind (as it was for Brin and Page), or not.

Does that layoff reduce human productivity? Rather the opposite: the majority will be hired by companies which expect them to actually deliver value (not saying FB employees are lazy, far from it, just that they mostly do useless and harmful things), which is good.

As long as we stay out of broken window territory, banning or tax-restricting harmful practices will increase productivity, especially if (as I do) you don't consider actions where the eternality outweighs the profit to be productive.

Obvious example: if California struck down the traditional water rights system and replaced it with auctions, this would do good things for water conservation.

It would also increase the productivity and market value of California's agriculture, I would bet a lot of money on this. The land currently used for alfalfa, an insultingly poor crop for the central valley, would be converted for other uses. The tragedy of alfalfa in California is that it's barely profitable, even with robbing the commons of enormous amounts of water they should have to pay for.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#78

Post by bheadmaster »

cfhhgtyg wrote: post #60
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…

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.

> You imply that population will increase indefinitely

You imply that it won't.

I don't see a fundamental reason why humans would stop at 8 billion - yeah, currently, (my hypothesis is that) the world is kind of shit, so people stopped procreating due to stress. However, there's no reason to think that people won't procreate once the world becomes a better place to live.

> or that degrowth needs to happen forever

Assuming population keeps growing (which I see no fundamental reason to doubt will happen eventually), degrowth needs to happen forever in order to keep the consumption from growing - basic math:

    total consumption = number of people * avg. consumption per person
To keep total consumption constant, avg. consumption per person needs to decrease proportionally to the increase of the number of people.

> Also, slippery slope argument.

Not a real counter-argument.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#79

Post by collyw »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #57
collyw wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As I pointed out the most obvious way to to that at present is by increasing peoples wealth.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#80

Post by pixl97 »

radicalbyte wrote: post #75
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…

I was skeptical until I saw how good my sun panels work. We only have installed about 50% of capacity and they generate enough to cover 120% of our annual electric usage. Everything here is electric except the heating and I work from home all day (with an energy-drinking PC set-up). I live in The Netherlands - the same panels will generate about 2x as much energy a year if they were in Spain or North Africa. I wouldn…

I think the new question then becomes, can we make enough solar panels for everyone without destroying the Earth?
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