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I think that the analysis in the linked article is fundamentally flawed, because it assumes a simple one-dimensional axis of more or less resource use and a dir
by jdietrich 9y ago
I think that the analysis in the linked article is fundamentally flawed, because it assumes a simple one-dimensional axis of more or less resource use and a direct relationship between using more resources and creating better lives.
Most of their social performance indicators aren't inherently resource-intensive. Education, social support, democratic quality and equality have no direct ties to environmental resources. Life satisfaction and healthy life expectancy are only weakly tied to resource use - Cubans live about as long as Americans, the Bhutanese are more satisfied with their lives.
Good sanitation and nutrition can easily be achieved at a very low resource cost; in the case of nutrition, excess intake of high-calorie and high-carbon foods is now an equal or greater cause of mortality than malnutrition. Reducing meat consumption in the developed world would massively reduce resource use while also increasing life expectancy. Britons have never eaten a healthier diet than during wartime rationing.
That leaves us with income and access to energy. I can't really address the issue of income; I have no idea if it's possible to maintain current levels of economic growth while reducing resource use. The issue of access to energy is more straightforward. We know that we can produce close to our current levels of energy with entirely sustainable means. Energy consumption has diminishing marginal utility - getting an electric light in your house makes a huge difference to your quality of life, but trading up from a subcompact to an SUV doesn't. There are some big outliers on the plot of social progress vs energy use.
I think that this research has taken a really elaborate route to arguing "countries with high living standards tend to use lots of natural resources, ∴ high living standards require lots of natural resources". I don't dispute the correlation, but I think that the causal relationship is almost entirely illusory.
- maxander 9y agoAs mentioned in the article, the relationship between most of the social goods and resource use is complicated. Education requires a certain percentage of the workforce to be teachers, the management of a sufficiently large organization, a bunch of buildings and moving of students around, etc, each of which in turn requires a set of other things. It would be incredibly difficult- and the authors don't try- to trace all of these all the way back and get a final accounting of the natural resources being used. But if you don't do that, neither can you say that they don't require a certain amount of natural resources. Education might turn out to be as resource-intensive as the airline industry, somehow. Tl;dr I guess, "no direct ties to environmental resources" != "no significant environmental resource requirements." On the other hand, of course, the whole article is observational based on existing societies with present-day technology; change society or the available technology, and resource requirements would presumably also change (also in ways we don't know.)
- Retric 9y agoWhen you say something must use X resource that's very hard to support. EX: Education does not actually need separate buildings and transportation. It could operate completely online. Further, most of we think of as nature exists in fairly narrow bands. We could for example have a city going 10 miles into the earth with a fairly normal ecosystem existing above it.
- maxander 9y agoThat’s just more speculation. Could education operate entirely online? Some quirk of human psychology might make widespread remote education absolutely disastrous. All sorts of things could make udeground cities unworkable. Complex systems full of humans are have been often found to be surprising, to say the least. “X sounds roughly possible, so we can count on X”-type thinking doesn’t answer any questions or solve any problems, it just conceals how little humanity actually knows about this predicament we’re all in.
- Retric 9y agoThat's not my argument, if you say Education must take X resource then you need to demonstrate that's the only way it can possibly work. Everything from year round alternating days education (MWT,TH so 1/2 the teachers 1/2 the facilities), distance education, subliminal education, matrix style skill uploading, or simply allowing more people to test out are all counter points. You can make arguments that solar power must be lower than X efficiency from Quantum mechanics, but something as nebulous as education is more a goal than a specific approach. PS: As to your specific objection, Alaska already does a lot of distance education and it works fairly well though not necessarily cheaper.
- sametmax 9y agoIt also assume current population size and civilization values, which are far, far from being optimum. There are many forms of progress that are not technical.