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A new book asserts that rich countries grow with lighter environmental impacts

technologyreview.com

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Re: A new book asserts that rich countries grow with lighter environmental impacts

#61

Post by wazoox »

This is all fine and reassuring and soothing, but the fact is that we need to entirely decorrelate economic output from resource usage, and that just doesn't happen, nor is there any way to make it happen, even in theory. This sounds for me like a call to wishful thinking, something like "we can go on like we always did, we won't crash and collapse but will find a way out".

Basically, a propaganda piece for neoliberal capitalism which is driving us into the ground fast. Borderline criminal, maybe.

Re: A new book asserts that rich countries grow with lighter environmental impacts

#62

Post by wazoox »

drdrey wrote: post #25
Expez wrote: post #8

I recently finished Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker and this exact point was made in that book. I'll paraphrase a salient quote from the book: poverty is the greatest polluter. Intuitively this makes great sense: when you're eking out a subsistence living you're not going to care about the environment, but when resources are plenty you can afford to consider other living things too.

That's just not true. The US emits 16 tons of CO2 per capita. For many African countries, that number is 1-2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_... The greatest polluter is everybody living in large single family homes full of things manufactured on other continents, with AC, multiple cars, eating red meat every day.

That's both untrue and ethically disgusting, by pretending that some poor people toiling in some remote countries, using no pesticide and no machinery, eating mostly rice or yam, harm the planet more than MIT professors flying around the world from conference to conference with their macbooks under their arm. This is so wrong...

Re: A new book asserts that rich countries grow with lighter environmental impacts

#63

Post by lordgrenville »

dmix wrote: post #41
mushufasa wrote: post #20

This is also called the Environmental Kuznets Curve (1991) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuznets_curve#Environmental_Ku... . There's a lot of criticism in the literature. The statistics rarely live up to the theory at face value. ( https://steadystate.org/wp-content/uploads/Stern_KuznetsCurv... ). And often, new pollutants emerge in rich countries as others decline. For example, in the USA, water pollutants targeted…

> The researchers found intersex smallmouth bass everywhere they looked. About 85 percent of the males collected in the refuges were intersex. At least some males at every site had female egg cells. It was less prevalent in largemouth bass—about 27 percent. Wow that's the vast majority, sounds like it could be a serious issue. What's interesting is how it's been found near cities and Agriculture but also in remote ar…

Scott Alexander wrote a post [1] about how this was a serious ecological concern, but because Alex Jones picked it up (and augmented it with some wacky government-conspiracy stuff) it became impossible to raise awareness for it without sounding like a nut.

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/04/respectability-cascade...

Re: A new book asserts that rich countries grow with lighter environmental impacts

#65

Post by hackeraccount »

wazoox wrote: post #62
drdrey wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just not true. The US emits 16 tons of CO2 per capita. For many African countries, that number is 1-2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_... The greatest polluter is everybody living in large single family homes full of things manufactured on other continents, with AC, multiple cars, eating red meat every day.

That's both untrue and ethically disgusting, by pretending that some poor people toiling in some remote countries, using no pesticide and no machinery, eating mostly rice or yam, harm the planet more than MIT professors flying around the world from conference to conference with their macbooks under their arm. This is so wrong...

The MIT professor is a lot more productive though - per unit of production he pollutes a fraction of what a poor farmer does.

Re: A new book asserts that rich countries grow with lighter environmental impacts

#66

Post by dmix »

lordgrenville wrote: post #63
dmix wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The researchers found intersex smallmouth bass everywhere they looked. About 85 percent of the males collected in the refuges were intersex. At least some males at every site had female egg cells. It was less prevalent in largemouth bass—about 27 percent. Wow that's the vast majority, sounds like it could be a serious issue. What's interesting is how it's been found near cities and Agriculture but also in remote ar…

Scott Alexander wrote a post [1] about how this was a serious ecological concern, but because Alex Jones picked it up (and augmented it with some wacky government-conspiracy stuff) it became impossible to raise awareness for it without sounding like a nut. [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/04/respectability-cascade...

Love Star codex. It's the best science/rationality blog! Never read a bad article on it.

Re: A new book asserts that rich countries grow with lighter environmental impacts

#67

Post by wazoox »

hackeraccount wrote: post #65
wazoox wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's both untrue and ethically disgusting, by pretending that some poor people toiling in some remote countries, using no pesticide and no machinery, eating mostly rice or yam, harm the planet more than MIT professors flying around the world from conference to conference with their macbooks under their arm. This is so wrong...

The MIT professor is a lot more productive though - per unit of production he pollutes a fraction of what a poor farmer does.

The ratio doesn't count for the planet. Only the total impact. Having "less impact per unit of resource" doesn't help when resources are exhausted.
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