4 ms·
I'm not a degrowther (though I do think we should try to make our economy more symbiotic with nature where possible) but a couple of issues here stand out to me
by beaconstudios 5y ago
I'm not a degrowther (though I do think we should try to make our economy more symbiotic with nature where possible) but a couple of issues here stand out to me:
does his argument that Western countries' use of resource has started to inversely correlate with QoL improvement hold up in the face of those same countries outsourcing almost all manufacturing to other countries? It's all well and good that the US' use of metals is decreasing, but if that's just because China is using the raw materials and shipping the final products over then that's no better.
He also makes the argument that as non-industrialised countries begin to industrialise, they can just make use of non-material goods like we do. Is this not based on the assumption that other countries won't want similar standards of living to the US, ie car ownership, disposable and consumption goods, etc? We're talking about a multiplication of the production of goods.
From a systems standpoint, I think we need to be doing 2 things (for CO2 specifically, that's far from the only concern): reversing the increase of carbon in the carbon cycle (ie, reducing dependence on fossil fuels and sequestering carbon artificially if/where safe), and monitoring and increasing the bandwidth of the decarbonisation phase of the carbon cycle (soil, trees and the ocean playing the main role).
- piokoch 5y agoYup, this is exactly the issue here. Lower CO2 emission, etc. is lower in developed countries because they have off-shored their production. Less developed country (like post-communistic Eastern and Central Europe countries) cannot do that, so they will the one who would pay for all climatism ideas. And those ideas looking good on paper are mostly dumb, as they don't really decrease CO2 emission, just move it elsewhere for those who are wealthy enough. Looking and Carbon Tracker is pretty eye opening, if ones check how many coal based plants are planned in Asia. Funnily enough, Carbon Tracker estimates that 92% of those plants will be uneconomic, so, in theory China, India, Vietnam, Indonesia and Japan want to shoot their own foot for some crazy reason. My guess is that Carbon Tracker estimates are not that great...
- ksdale 5y agoI think he explicitly says in the post that China emits more carbon per capita after accounting for carbon offshoring.
- ernopp 5y agoYep, accounting for carbon offshoring lowers the difference (US emissions gain 7% if you count consumption not just production, and China's lose 14%) but it still holds that China emits more per capita. https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2 https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2
- imtringued 5y agoI'm not a degrowther either but reading their papers is quite interesting because from a first glance nobody will champion degrowth as a movement. Yet at the same time "growthers" are doomed to adopt the policy suggestions of "degrowthers". Why? Because all they did is imagine a sustainable future. Every time growth hits a sustainability cliff, politicians are forced to adopt one more degrowth policy. https://degrowth.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Kallis_2012_The-economics-of-degrowth.pdf https://degrowth.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Kallis_2012_...