251–260 of 350 posts
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If you want to define growth as cash, then sure. If you want to define it by tangible output, then not so much.
The economy is measured in money.
What this means is that if 100% of growth comes just from inflation then "GDP" will have increased but "Real GDP" wouldn't have.
The single most important assumption in this paper is that energy consumption will increase by 2% per year. This kind of exponential growth leads to outlandish estimates for the amount of tidal energy that society will demand. Energy consumption has decoupled from population growth rates and economic growth. How much energy will we consume in 1,000 years? Most projections of the population have it stabilizing at arou…
With this analysis no energy source is renewable, and we'd even run out of sunlight (or surface area that can be dedicated to solar power anyways, or see demand exceed solar power were we to put solar panels on every square inch of the planet's surface). In reality we're already certain to hit a population maximum in just two+ decades, and not only that but the world is very likely to be on a negative population grow…
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Conversely the people who argue against growth never have any answers they want to elaborate on. They have "well we can't have endless growth" and that's where the conversation stops. They never want to examine the consequences of that thought (no growth means we're into a zero-sum game) or whether they think we're even plausibly close to the limit (instead they want to have a proxy argument about environmental damag…
...No crap it's a zero-sum game! We've been screaming it from the bloody rooftops while economists and charlatans have gone on and on chasing alpha, instead of really focusing on breaching the most critical breakthroughs we need. Near limitless clean power, closed cycle industrial processes, and bloody innovations in either transport, agri-husbandry, or medicine. But no. War. War, real estate, and more pretend financ…
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Nobody owned a 747 a hundred years ago. Cheapest flight I've ever taken was 9.99 from Berlin to London — not sure if pounds or euros, but does it matter when either way it is less than I used to spend on a week of school lunches nearly 20 years earlier?
Exceptions like 10 EUR flights aren't sustainable. They're just auctioning off empty seats to cut costs. The comparison was conceptual thing to similar thing. Only the rich own and operate private planes, that hasn't changed. The fact that other, more sophisticated planes exist doesn't undermine the point. There are also diminishing returns. And past leaps in lifestyles aren't guaranteed to continue the same trends,…
No, they are selling off seats that aren't taken. They are making more money since those seats would be empty.
Cutting costs would not be selling the seats and saving on fuel.
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The problem with this, or any other hypothetical "decoupled growth" argument is that, well, it's purely hypothetical. There's no evidence whatsoever that economic growth can be decoupled from resource, and most especially energy, usage. There are instances of increased efficiencies , which thanks to the Jevons Paradox increase overall resource utilisation (economically, efficiency is equivalent to a reduced price, an…
It’s only hypothetical in that the future hasn’t arrived yet. Most predictions are hypothetical by that criteria. We know the economy is decoupled from physical limits because we have built it to be that way. If you go to my bank right now, they are not going to have a physical pile of valuable objects there which is my account balance. They have a computer that stores numbers, and obviously it needs energy to operat…
But that has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with decoupling the actual economy from its physical foundations. Long after Qing, China remained fundamentally dependent on rice and wheat harvests (and suffered tremendous population losses, as much as 8 million deaths) many centuries later.
The wealth-tracking representation has been decoupled from any substance with intrinsic value, but the economy has not.
Put another way: you could have a monetary system in which currency was entirely backed in precious gold and silver, and introduce huge quantities of same to your economy ... without increasing the actual wealth of the nation by Adam Smith's definition, "annual produce and labour of the nation". This was precisely the situation Spain found itself in following its conquest of the Americas and importation of vast quantities of South American gold and silver.
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The economy is measured in money.
"Real GDP", which is the one usually reported on, is already adjusted for inflation and is usually reported as a percentage (i.e. it is unitless). What this means is that if 100% of growth comes just from inflation then "GDP" will have increased but "Real GDP" wouldn't have.
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> The single most important assumption in this paper is that energy consumption will increase by 2% per year. There's a 2nd big assumption: That tidal energy extracted is additional Earth's rotational energy loss above what Earth does by itself. According to the paper, tidal energy is dissipated through friction between ocean water & the seafloor. This dissipated energy subtracts from Earth's rotational energy. And s…
It's a bit absurd the idea that humans living on earth are going to produce more energy than the Sun. Maybe I'm naive and simple minded. But that just seems insane. If I'm doing the math right, at 2.3% growth = we produce more energy than the Sun in 4500 years. It doesn't matter how many years it is. It's never happening. Just look at how damn hot and inhospitable the sun is. We're not producing more energy here! It'…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Real GDP", which is the one usually reported on, is already adjusted for inflation and is usually reported as a percentage (i.e. it is unitless). What this means is that if 100% of growth comes just from inflation then "GDP" will have increased but "Real GDP" wouldn't have.
Growth rates are expressed as percentages. The underlying value, GDP, is measured in money.
Relevant: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/6400/are-tidal-p... This theory is very interesting, although the author presents it with too much confidence for such big claims.
In that link: > The Earth's rotational kinetic energy is about 10²9 J, and the world uses something like 10²² J/year, so you could power the entire world for millions of years before you'd run out of rotational energy. (my phone somehow has a ² but not a ^9; the first number is supposed to be 1e29)
His doomsday scenario of total tidal locking would never occur -- as energy is removed from the rotation of the Earth, the maximum power level that can be extracted would decrease. Also, the cost-efficiency would also drop.
There would be a point where the day is "merely" longer, the Earth is not yet tidally locked to the Moon, but extracting more tidal energy is no longer worth the trouble.
The original point however is still valid. Even if the rotation was slowed to just 1/2 of what it is now, the Earth would have a 48-hour day and that would obviously cause absolute havoc with the environment.