Ecological Wealth of Nations

This is largely untrue or inaccurate. There has been a small uptick in lignite use for a couple of years, but it's been going down again. But that was not overall coal use, hard coal was in steady decline. The last new coal plant constructions were started in 2009. This was an unfortunate and wrong decision, but it's been a while ago. Most of the investors of these plants regret that decision, because they aren't needed a whole lot. That villages had to be removed due to coal mining is not something that's happening "these days", it's been happening for decades. However none of that has been decided lately. Goes all back to decisions made in the 90s. It doesn't make it better, but your comment makes it sound that this is a recent development. It's not. Recently some existing plans for lignite open casts were reduced and some villages will be saved.

Demand is not growing overall, it's been in decline for a couple of years (with occasional upticks, but that's to be expected).

Germany is the largest total CO2 source in the EU, but it's also the largest country. Per capita emissions are still relatively high though.

It's not all green in Germany, a lot could be better. I'm in full agreement that the huge lignite mines and plants are a terrible thing, but one should still stick to facts. But despite all bads a lot is going in the right direction.

> A national ecological deficit means that the nation is importing biocapacity through trade, liquidating national ecological assets or emitting carbon dioxide waste into the atmosphere.

Before we had this trade and industrial activity that outputs all of this carbon dioxide waste life spans of humans were 3 times shorter than today.

And by the way the world population was also 8 times smaller, meaning that we today by altering the ecosystem of the world can feed a population that was unfathomable a 100 years ago.

I'm not a proponent of producing waste that harms us without any limits or regulations, but these people that simply cannot accept that human activity changes the worlds ecosystem for human benefit seem like fanatics to me.

If we give in to this then I can assure you that we in the West will be conquered by others and rightly so, because our culture has become retarded to a degree that it inhibits our ability to develop technologically, economically and culturally.

I'm pretty sure the Chinese will not stop developing to save some frogs, if we go down this path they'll simply slaughter us. (not physically but from an economic and technological perspective)

Malthus was aware of increasing agricultural progress, but the argument he made was that it would increase arithmetically (linearly f(x+1)=f(x)+c), whereas population would increase geometrically (exponentially, f(x+1)=f(x)*c).

It's a hugely important, contentious, and complicated issue (here's a thought: populations can't actually grow exponentially even given unlimited resources, with a loose, but strict, upper bound at the speed of light. The tight upper bound is unknown, probably multifaceted, but I don't see how anything beyond cubic growth is possible). Anyway. When speaking of grey whales, for instance, we say that the population is limited by the "carrying capacity." OK. But they aren't inventing new ways of getting fat nearly as fast as we are.

It boils down to there being a very real Malthusian limit on population. "History" (which is code for "1929 to 2007 or so" because for many economists history began that year, with a vague notion of there being time before that when Americans lived in some sort of Garden of Eden in which nothing ever happened), "history" proved Malthus wrong. Well, yeah, definitely, the food supply didn't grow linearly, which you figure it could have, nor did population increase exponentially, because it can't. But at any rate, he had a point in that there is a Malthusian limit at any given time, and there is a world population level at any given time, and humanity can move them up or down independently. And that's what the article is about, is unwittingly moving the limit down, by, say, turning whales into butter until they're barely any left. For much of the 20th century, we've been so successful at moving it up faster than the population level that we've come to think there is no such limit. And hey, what about Mars?

Just because we haven't hit the Malthusian limit recently doesn't mean it's not there.

Seriously? Did you not see Canada, Argentina, New Zealand, Australia. For me it was relatively balanced and mainly the US really throws it off. There are also some red countries that I would seriously not want to live in.

I live in a place where the largest sources of electricity are nuclear, wind, and hydro power, simply because they're cost effective for the region. So electric cars here shift not only to an easier problem, but to a largely solved problem.

As in math, transforming one problem into another is often just as good as finding a direct solution.