If consumerists become marginals (currently minimalists are marginals instead), things change dramatically, in the good side
We need to find a way to live well and decrease the GDP. The article talks about the limits of growth for, those who don't know what it is you can watch this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kz9wjJjmkmc
Are we going to tell high fertility populations and high density populations that they must stop and reduce growth for the future of the planet?
All of the above are necessary but you have to achieve it through growth (i.e. middle class economies)
People won't accept that. People have chosen to doom the planet. The problem here isn't technology or economics. It's people and politics. People don't want to survive, they want cheeseburgers and air-conditioning.
I hear this a lot, please reconsider the position, because as I will try to demonstrate, it implies a pretty big misunderstanding of what the GDP is, especially as it relates to CO2 problems.
We can definitely 'increase the GDP' and have higher standards of living, 'consume' even more at the same time. Paradoxically, we could feasibly grow the GDP significantly while standards of living decrease!
'Natural Resources' - some of which are finite, represent a fairly small portion of the GDP. Most of the GPD is in labour, IP, services etc..
Canada, with a high concentration of natural resources, the sector represents about 10% of the economy, for most other nations, it's a lot smaller. Globally, about 2% of the economy is spent on 'natural resource rents' which is roughly royalties and such. [1]
We should including agriculture in there as well of course, which is about 1% of GDP in the US.
Though many natural resources are in fact 'finite' they don't pose a big existential challenge to the world like CO2. The stuff we want either gets 'more rare' - or - we figure out more advanced ways of getting at it. 'Peak Oil' for example, was supposed to happen 40 years ago, lo and behold, we're getting much smarter at accessing it. Some things are just expensive to get at, and we spend a lot on it, it doesn't necessarily mean it's 'energy intensive'.
The economy is pretty magical in terms of how it adapts to substitutes etc. finding replacements, recycling, cutting back on certain more expensive inputs, being more efficient. Case and point: cars, which at least on a unit basis are far more efficient than they were 40 years ago though on the aggregate, offset by how many more miles we drive.
But the bulk of the economy isn't really related to 'natural resources' consumption anyhow: better restaurants, faster cars, faster chips, better graphics cards, 'better' social networks, faster internet, speedier checkout, more diverse selection of goods, fine tuned customer service, more accessible financial products, better writing for sitcoms, more energy efficient homes, smart home appliances - most of this isn't fundamentally derived from 'resource extraction'.
Yes - there's a correlation - more bodies will mean more water, electricity, fuel in the system that we have, but it's only part of the equation.
The shift to Solar Energy would yield a lot less energy output per dollar invested and spent, but guess what? That means more GDP, not less! It literally takes more labour, Engineers, assembly, installation, monitoring coordination ona 'Per Watt' basis, it means more GDP, but less 'surplus' (which is like consumer profit). There's more economic effort in the economy, but possibly less measured output. This might imply a situation where GDP grows but standard of living decrease.
But it doesn't have to be that way either. Economies are resilient, farmers grow more and more every year with less and less (though not always sustainably) and we adapt by getting more productivity, using a different input of energy, intelligence, automation etc..
Efficiencies in a lot of sectors has improved quite a lot over time, and there's no reason to believe it will stop. If prices of gas include carbon offsets, and therefore goes way up ... we'll likely see a huge shift from these massive SUVs, into smaller cars as they drive in Europe. For the most part, I don't suggest that would entail a huge decrease in living standards.
We may have to use less water, this is entirely feasible, we waste a lot. Less energy - a challenge but feasible. North Americans already use way more than Europeans as well. Canadian homes only 40 years ago were not built to hold heat very well - now we build homes that are 'sealed', with double paned windows that keep the heat in.
And not that much material goes into making our silicon chips, computers and such.
We do have to use somewhat less of certain resources on he aggregate, and per capita - but whatever happens with climate change, is basically no doubt the economy will grow pretty consistently at least in terms of GDP, and there's a very good chance we don't have to decrease our standard of living either.
I am not a climate denier, just a reasonable person with a brain. Obviously global warming/global climate change is real. Obviously, green house gas emissions by humans are the main culprit.
But I do not for one second believe that civilization will collapse, at least not in say the next couple of hundred years.
Ecosystems are already toast -GBR will mostly die in the next 50 years. Rainforests and biodiversity, deforestation etc are history. Already dead. But will human beings and our civilization “collapse”? No way.
These “climate refugees” everyone talks about “overwhelming” us actually stinks of xenophobia. And in what way is a climate refugee different from a regular refugee? The developing world is already a catastrophe, yet I wouldn’t say refugees are overwhelming us.
Bacially my view is this: yeah it’s bad but saying that 6 billion people will die which is what this article suggests is alarmist nonsense.
No they aren't dead. The world has literally gotten greener in recent decades.
Look up "dematerialization." Because of increased technology and wealth, we're actually starting to use fewer raw resources (both per capita and in absolute terms) and therefore our negative impact on the environment is decreasing now.
You don't often hear of this but the data is pretty clear. "More From Less" by Andrew McAfee has the data.
But no matter if we talk about the US only or about Earth as a whole, biodiversity is way down and the earth is much, much less greener then it was, say, fifty years ago. Much of the 'greening' that has happened are artificial woods (see; China's failing reforestation projects) that suffer from lack of biodiversity, falling prey all kinds of "pests". Like one single fungus killing wast swaths of wood within months.
Our environmental impact is not decreasing. It's still increasing and it will for a long time (until it all comes tumbling down like the house of cards it is).
I'm happy that you are so confident, I just wish I could share it.
... and while people do talk about 'climate refugees', nobody is talking about them 'overwhelming us'. And FYI it definitely does not take too many people to overwhelm a social system with benevolent impetus, as we saw starkly in Sweden, 2016.
As for the materiality of the article and what should set off alarm bells:
"“For example, it appears that the USA is entering a long period of decline in many aspect of its society, with a potential for a more rapid collapse in the coming decade,” said Steffen.
"Samuel Alexander, a lecturer with the University of Melbourne and research fellow at the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, told Voice of Action that the coming collapse would not be a single black or white event.
“With respect to civilisations, what is more likely is that we have entered a stage of what JM Greer calls ‘catabolic collapse’ – where we face decades of ongoing crises, as the existing mode of civilisation deteriorates, but then recovers as governments and civil society tries to respond, and fix things, and keep things going for a bit longer,” said Alexander.
“Capitalism is quite good at dodging bullets and escaping temporary challenges to its legitimacy and viability. But its condition, I feel is terminal.”
"“As economies deteriorate and as inequalities deepen, more people get disenfranchised, incentivising resistance and sadly sometimes making people look for scapegoats to blame for new or intensifying hardships (e.g. the so-called alt-right),”"
“I think global capitalism is realising that the parasitical nature that has emerged (where the top 1% own the vast majority of the world’s wealth), can only be sustained for so long,” said Buckley"
We have:
A) America in social decline (political statement)
B) the other boogey man 'capitalism' as the root cause obviously!
C) The 'alt right' (are we talking about the environment here?)
D) Researchers work cancelled for ostensibly political reasons, which is not good, but it's also not objective either.
So the problem with the article, is that a lot of the authorship is deeply ideological. This is hard issue to escape when trying to put an economic value of such things as 'pollution and traffic' vs other elements.
Far too many references to their representation of 'inequality', and major gaps in their assumptions as to how that leads to social decay, for this to be a serious treatise on climate.
And of course, no mention of Nuclear Energy, which is odd, given 'existential threat' you'd think we'd try to use something that is already fairly well proven.
For example, that inequality of asset ownership leads to social decay. That there is even actually social decay or real instability in America.
One thing missed by in the treatise and a lot of comments, is that 'consumption' is somehow tantamount to 'resource utilisation'. Obviously, there is a correlation. But a considerable amount of what we 'consume' does not entail necessarily excessive resource consumption. Plastics, electronics doesn't eat up a lot of 'resources', though some parts perhaps more than others i.e. 'alkaline batteries'. Huge swaths of our consumption aren't even related to resources: entertainment, video games, software, social networks etc..
If they are really smart, they would take some time to decouple the 'resource intensive' aspects of consumption, with those that are not, and help industry to optimise along those lines.
https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Aashermoses%20marx&src=ty...
This of course doesn't make anything claimed in the article any more or less true, but the purportedly scientific conclusions here do align nicely with his politics.
As to the article, Malthusian predictions have a long history of being incredibly wrong. It seems likely to me that global warming will continue to a point that many current agricultural practices must be abandoned for new ones, and that this transition will result in many deaths; but that's not the "collapse of civilization". Maybe scientists frustrated by the public's slow response to this serious problem have decided to try falsely portraying it as an apocalyptic problem, to see if that gets a faster response; but I doubt that it will, and it's a lie either way.
[0] https://mobile.twitter.com/ashermoses/status/118064266205285...
the above was published by U.N. official in 1989, with point of no return being year 2000, not 2030. People knew it for more than 20 years already.
It is important to keep in mind that alarmism can actually be harmful, where instead of doing anything people just have their burger whole try can, as there is no point doing anything anymore. [1]
[0] https://apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/11/25...
I assume this is just a typo, but I can't for the life of me figure out what the original was
If "top climate scientists" want to argue that preventing climate change is better than adapting to it, then that's something I'd engage with. But this? Absolute drivel.
