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I'll be casting my vote with the skeptics for this one. That said, even if economic activity was fully decoupled from emissions, Earth's environmental problems

I'll be casting my vote with the skeptics for this one. That said, even if economic activity was fully decoupled from emissions, Earth's environmental problems would remain overwhelming. Biodiversity loss, deforestation, aquifer depletion, desertification, etc. are just as concerning for most people here as rising global temperatures. My inner cynic sees headlines like the above and assumes that A) the writer/publisher wants people to think everything is OK, and B) the writer/publisher wants people to narrowly focus on global warming as opposed to the greater health of the natural environment. While obviously not easy, transitioning to lower-emissions energy sources is far,far easier than fully acknowledging the material basis of our economy and factoring in actually sufficient environmental protections to our systems of production and distribution. If we suddenly weren't allowed to replace old-growth forests with mono-culture, pollute our groundwater, fill the earth with plastic, kill off a majority of animal species, and so forth, how much would the economy shrink? More than anyone published in The Economist would ever admit, I suspect.

lettergram 4y ago
> That said, even if economic activity was fully decoupled from emissions, Earth's environmental problems would remain overwhelming. Biodiversity loss, deforestation, aquifer depletion, desertification, etc. are just as concerning for most people here as rising global temperatures. The issue I take with the “Global warming” crowd is that there’s a lot inaccurate predictions (nearly all of them thus far) and the evidence misrepresented and questionable. Personally, this makes the “warming” tied to “emissions” just seem like a red herring. If I was a company producing forever chemicals, but low “carbon emissions” and I could afford the carbon tax, and extra carbon reducing infrastructure. Of course I’d promote the “green agenda”. It’s a barrier to new comers and it distracts people from the poison I’m adding to the environment. If it becomes too burdensome the whole “carbon reduction” crowd just moves to a different country. One that slows higher level of pollutants. These policies, to me, are really just business decisions.
- collyw 4y ago
  It amazes me that climate activists never seem to push for nuclear, the most obvious solution.
  - lettergram 4y ago
    It’s the tell. Lots of reports pointing out Russia funds environmental groups. China does the same - but more openly - advertising cheap solar and wind (neither function as well as nuclear). https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/596304-investigate-russias-covert-funding-of-us-anti-fossil-fuel-groups/ https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/596304-invest...
    - mountainb 4y ago
      The Gulf countries do, too, such as when the UAE paid Matt Damon for an anti-fracking film https://www.cnbc.com/amp/id/49218229 https://www.cnbc.com/amp/id/49218229 I don’t blame them for playing the game well.
      - erlich 4y ago
        I don't think people realize that when you have a huge commodity income stream under threat of ceasing to exist, it's quite realistic to spend a huge percentage of this on lobbying to stretch it as far as it will go.
        Schroedingersat 4y ago
        Such as by constantly filling the internet with lies about how the technologies that are eating 1% of your market share per year, and growing by 20-40% per year can't possibly solve the problem and we must divert all funding from it to a technology that costs 3x as much, has consistently gotten more expensive with time, and can't scale?
      - fakedang 4y ago
        Tbf, fracking does have proven issues with geological stability and soil contamination. But it would be very hypocritical of the UAE to go on an anti-nuclear tirade, since they themselves use nuclear energy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barakah_nuclear_power_plant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barakah_nuclear_power_plant
- pelasaco 4y ago
  > The issue I take with the “Global warming” crowd is that there’s a lot inaccurate predictions (nearly all of them thus far) and the evidence misrepresented and questionable. I think that's a problem with general prediction by experts. There is no consequence for anything that media and experts push daily as "the right thing to do". The "Zero covid" strategy is another similar example. A lot of experts and media tried to push to this, but then later one it proved itself as not sustainable[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-58406526 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-58406526
bryanlarsen 4y ago
Even in the face of slowing population growth? That's the primary driver of increased consumption, and population growth has slowed dramatically. > If we suddenly weren't allowed to replace old-growth forests with mono-culture, pollute our groundwater, fill the earth with plastic, kill off a majority of animal species, and so forth, how much would the economy shrink? But would it? Such a transition would create a massive number of jobs producing the alternatives. A very small portion of the economy is spent on what people need, 80% of GDP is spent on wants. And if people want a clean environment more than they want the latest consumer crap, that means the clean environment is worth more in dollars, and so cleaning the environment grows the GDP.
- samatman 4y ago
  This is an important point. To pick an example which is both low-stakes and topical: many, probably most, of the 11,000 Facebookers who just got canned, were misallocated. Zuck was just paying them not to work for anyone else, whether that was explicit in his mind (as it was for Brin and Page), or not. Does that layoff reduce human productivity? Rather the opposite: the majority will be hired by companies which expect them to actually deliver value (not saying FB employees are lazy, far from it, just that they mostly do useless and harmful things), which is good. As long as we stay out of broken window territory, banning or tax-restricting harmful practices will increase productivity, especially if (as I do) you don't consider actions where the eternality outweighs the profit to be productive. Obvious example: if California struck down the traditional water rights system and replaced it with auctions, this would do good things for water conservation. It would also increase the productivity and market value of California's agriculture, I would bet a lot of money on this. The land currently used for alfalfa, an insultingly poor crop for the central valley, would be converted for other uses. The tragedy of alfalfa in California is that it's barely profitable, even with robbing the commons of enormous amounts of water they should have to pay for.
  - mantas 4y ago
    Why more profitable crops are not grown instead? Maybe Alfalfa is the only profitable thing. And with fair water rights even that wouldn’t be grown. Which would probably be better than current situation.
radicalbyte 4y ago
I was skeptical until I saw how good my sun panels work. We only have installed about 50% of capacity and they generate enough to cover 120% of our annual electric usage. Everything here is electric except the heating and I work from home all day (with an energy-drinking PC set-up). I live in The Netherlands - the same panels will generate about 2x as much energy a year if they were in Spain or North Africa. I wouldn't be surprised if we could run our houses and light industry for 6 months a year purely on solar panels if we put them on every roof top in the country. Then you look at wind: we have a huge potential for wind energy especially off-shore (and in our big lakes). Like most of the EU the main problem is heating in winter - that requires a reduction in energy usage through insulation and heat-pumps combined with energy import from countries which have high potential for solar and wind (North Africa has huge potential here).
- pixl97 4y ago
  I think the new question then becomes, can we make enough solar panels for everyone without destroying the Earth?
  - pbhjpbhj 4y ago
    A more pertinent question is possibly can we make enough storage to smooth the supply sufficiently to allow adoption of solar as the principal electricity supply technology. Seems like we're going to need to become more diurnal and more seasonal in our approach to industry? Make hay while the sun shines, as the idiom says.
    - radicalbyte 4y ago
      We're getting to the point where wind > hydrogen > combustion will be cheap enough to cover that kind of swing. We're going to be connecting electric systems over a huge landmass which will resolve much of the non-seasonal swings.
    - marcosdumay 4y ago
      Sodium-sulfur batteries are made of two very abundant elements, where the other active elements are mostly aluminum oxides and the structural elements are iron and carbon. Hydrogen is hard to store, but there is sufficient space for satisfying most of our needs by itself. Hydrogen generators are also mostly made of iron, carbon, and aluminum, or alternatively a lot of organic chemicals and aluminum. Pumped hydro has some problems to compete on the open market, but it also can satisfy most of our storage requirements by itself. Pumped hydro systems are made mostly of steel. What kinds of resources do you expect we to run out of?
ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
"Now this decoupling must accelerate" says the article's subtitle. What is generally missed in this kind of discussions is how much better, both in kind and in degree, electricity is as an interface to power than natural gas, petroleum, biomass, and so forth. The "win" is not that once you have everything electric you won't need to burn all these irreproducible resources, but the win is that the consumer now operates with a more "generic" interface, electricity, and is "decoupled" from the burning itself, think of "Burning as a Service" instead of "Self-Burning". And maybe, in some kind of future, we will be able to produce electricity without burning at all: maybe fusion, maybe arrays of solar panels in GEO [1] beaming power to Terra [2], maybe some kind of bacteria eating all the plastic we've been landfilling [3], who knows. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_orbit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_orbit [2] https://emrod.energy/emrod-partners-with-airbus-and-the-european-space-agency-for-demonstration https://emrod.energy/emrod-partners-with-airbus-and-the-euro... [3] https://elifesciences.org/digests/43959/generating-electricity-from-bacteria https://elifesciences.org/digests/43959/generating-electrici...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
Who told you it would hurt the economy to not pollute groundwater or clear cut old-growth forests? And what have those same people been saying about our ability to transition to lower-emissions energy sources, which you think is possible? Presumably along the lines of "we don't need to do that, it's fine", "actually we do need to do that, but it's impossible", "okay it is possible but it would cost too much", "okay, it would actually be cheaper but it'll put all the poor groundwater-polluters and clear-cutters out of a job, why do you hate poor people" and finally "It's a conspiracy by the gays and the jews and the authoritarian left to control you by passing laws to not let you pollute groundwater, not that I want to pollute groundwater, but I'll defend to the death your right to do so etc."
scythe 4y ago
>Biodiversity loss, deforestation, aquifer depletion, desertification, etc. are just as concerning for most people here as rising global temperatures. The disconnect is between the recognition that there are problems and the assertion that we cannot simply solve those problems. Wastewater reclamation, urban planning, and the at least partial displacement of dietary animal protein can address the cited problems without "degrowth". Furthermore, while several trends are concerning, they mostly do not represent an immediate threat on the level of climate change except in the writings of click-chasing environmental journalists and the appeals of donation-funded activist organizations. We have time to study and refine our approach. For example, the largest biodiversity loss event actually happened before the dawn of recorded history — the Quaternary Extinction. Yet this massive 'crisis' failed to prevent the rise of human civilization. Degrowth advocates usually want to impose a lot of pain on society very soon — in your words, 'suddenly' — which is more punk rock than practical reason. In reality, most of these trends are things we need to be aware of and plan for, but the sky is not falling. Climate change is still the biggest threat, and the one thing that may require a little pain. Attaching pain in service of other causes becomes a lead shoe as we are trying to swim to the shore.
mytailorisrich 4y ago
Sure but we then need to acknowledge that the root cause is the level of the human population on this planet. I don't think we should get to sustainability by in effect keeping people poor and restricting what they are allowed to consume. Rather we should get to a sustainable number of human beings allowed to be free, to travel, to have a good life.

lettergram 4y ago

> That said, even if economic activity was fully decoupled from emissions, Earth's environmental problems would remain overwhelming. Biodiversity loss, deforestation, aquifer depletion, desertification, etc. are just as concerning for most people here as rising global temperatures. The issue I take with the “Global warming” crowd is that there’s a lot inaccurate predictions (nearly all of them thus far) and the evidence misrepresented and questionable. Personally, this makes the “warming” tied to “emissions” just seem like a red herring. If I was a company producing forever chemicals, but low “carbon emissions” and I could afford the carbon tax, and extra carbon reducing infrastructure. Of course I’d promote the “green agenda”. It’s a barrier to new comers and it distracts people from the poison I’m adding to the environment. If it becomes too burdensome the whole “carbon reduction” crowd just moves to a different country. One that slows higher level of pollutants. These policies, to me, are really just business decisions.

collyw 4y ago
It amazes me that climate activists never seem to push for nuclear, the most obvious solution.
- lettergram 4y ago
  It’s the tell. Lots of reports pointing out Russia funds environmental groups. China does the same - but more openly - advertising cheap solar and wind (neither function as well as nuclear). https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/596304-investigate-russias-covert-funding-of-us-anti-fossil-fuel-groups/ https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/596304-invest...
  - mountainb 4y ago
    The Gulf countries do, too, such as when the UAE paid Matt Damon for an anti-fracking film https://www.cnbc.com/amp/id/49218229 https://www.cnbc.com/amp/id/49218229 I don’t blame them for playing the game well.
    - erlich 4y ago
      I don't think people realize that when you have a huge commodity income stream under threat of ceasing to exist, it's quite realistic to spend a huge percentage of this on lobbying to stretch it as far as it will go.
      - Schroedingersat 4y ago
        Such as by constantly filling the internet with lies about how the technologies that are eating 1% of your market share per year, and growing by 20-40% per year can't possibly solve the problem and we must divert all funding from it to a technology that costs 3x as much, has consistently gotten more expensive with time, and can't scale?
    - fakedang 4y ago
      Tbf, fracking does have proven issues with geological stability and soil contamination. But it would be very hypocritical of the UAE to go on an anti-nuclear tirade, since they themselves use nuclear energy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barakah_nuclear_power_plant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barakah_nuclear_power_plant
pelasaco 4y ago
> The issue I take with the “Global warming” crowd is that there’s a lot inaccurate predictions (nearly all of them thus far) and the evidence misrepresented and questionable. I think that's a problem with general prediction by experts. There is no consequence for anything that media and experts push daily as "the right thing to do". The "Zero covid" strategy is another similar example. A lot of experts and media tried to push to this, but then later one it proved itself as not sustainable[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-58406526 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-58406526

bryanlarsen 4y ago

Even in the face of slowing population growth? That's the primary driver of increased consumption, and population growth has slowed dramatically. > If we suddenly weren't allowed to replace old-growth forests with mono-culture, pollute our groundwater, fill the earth with plastic, kill off a majority of animal species, and so forth, how much would the economy shrink? But would it? Such a transition would create a massive number of jobs producing the alternatives. A very small portion of the economy is spent on what people need, 80% of GDP is spent on wants. And if people want a clean environment more than they want the latest consumer crap, that means the clean environment is worth more in dollars, and so cleaning the environment grows the GDP.

samatman 4y ago
This is an important point. To pick an example which is both low-stakes and topical: many, probably most, of the 11,000 Facebookers who just got canned, were misallocated. Zuck was just paying them not to work for anyone else, whether that was explicit in his mind (as it was for Brin and Page), or not. Does that layoff reduce human productivity? Rather the opposite: the majority will be hired by companies which expect them to actually deliver value (not saying FB employees are lazy, far from it, just that they mostly do useless and harmful things), which is good. As long as we stay out of broken window territory, banning or tax-restricting harmful practices will increase productivity, especially if (as I do) you don't consider actions where the eternality outweighs the profit to be productive. Obvious example: if California struck down the traditional water rights system and replaced it with auctions, this would do good things for water conservation. It would also increase the productivity and market value of California's agriculture, I would bet a lot of money on this. The land currently used for alfalfa, an insultingly poor crop for the central valley, would be converted for other uses. The tragedy of alfalfa in California is that it's barely profitable, even with robbing the commons of enormous amounts of water they should have to pay for.
- mantas 4y ago
  Why more profitable crops are not grown instead? Maybe Alfalfa is the only profitable thing. And with fair water rights even that wouldn’t be grown. Which would probably be better than current situation.

radicalbyte 4y ago

I was skeptical until I saw how good my sun panels work. We only have installed about 50% of capacity and they generate enough to cover 120% of our annual electric usage. Everything here is electric except the heating and I work from home all day (with an energy-drinking PC set-up). I live in The Netherlands - the same panels will generate about 2x as much energy a year if they were in Spain or North Africa. I wouldn't be surprised if we could run our houses and light industry for 6 months a year purely on solar panels if we put them on every roof top in the country. Then you look at wind: we have a huge potential for wind energy especially off-shore (and in our big lakes). Like most of the EU the main problem is heating in winter - that requires a reduction in energy usage through insulation and heat-pumps combined with energy import from countries which have high potential for solar and wind (North Africa has huge potential here).

pixl97 4y ago
I think the new question then becomes, can we make enough solar panels for everyone without destroying the Earth?
- pbhjpbhj 4y ago
  A more pertinent question is possibly can we make enough storage to smooth the supply sufficiently to allow adoption of solar as the principal electricity supply technology. Seems like we're going to need to become more diurnal and more seasonal in our approach to industry? Make hay while the sun shines, as the idiom says.
  - radicalbyte 4y ago
    We're getting to the point where wind > hydrogen > combustion will be cheap enough to cover that kind of swing. We're going to be connecting electric systems over a huge landmass which will resolve much of the non-seasonal swings.
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    Sodium-sulfur batteries are made of two very abundant elements, where the other active elements are mostly aluminum oxides and the structural elements are iron and carbon. Hydrogen is hard to store, but there is sufficient space for satisfying most of our needs by itself. Hydrogen generators are also mostly made of iron, carbon, and aluminum, or alternatively a lot of organic chemicals and aluminum. Pumped hydro has some problems to compete on the open market, but it also can satisfy most of our storage requirements by itself. Pumped hydro systems are made mostly of steel. What kinds of resources do you expect we to run out of?

ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago

"Now this decoupling must accelerate" says the article's subtitle. What is generally missed in this kind of discussions is how much better, both in kind and in degree, electricity is as an interface to power than natural gas, petroleum, biomass, and so forth. The "win" is not that once you have everything electric you won't need to burn all these irreproducible resources, but the win is that the consumer now operates with a more "generic" interface, electricity, and is "decoupled" from the burning itself, think of "Burning as a Service" instead of "Self-Burning". And maybe, in some kind of future, we will be able to produce electricity without burning at all: maybe fusion, maybe arrays of solar panels in GEO [1] beaming power to Terra [2], maybe some kind of bacteria eating all the plastic we've been landfilling [3], who knows. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_orbit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_orbit [2] https://emrod.energy/emrod-partners-with-airbus-and-the-european-space-agency-for-demonstration https://emrod.energy/emrod-partners-with-airbus-and-the-euro... [3] https://elifesciences.org/digests/43959/generating-electricity-from-bacteria https://elifesciences.org/digests/43959/generating-electrici...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

Who told you it would hurt the economy to not pollute groundwater or clear cut old-growth forests? And what have those same people been saying about our ability to transition to lower-emissions energy sources, which you think is possible? Presumably along the lines of "we don't need to do that, it's fine", "actually we do need to do that, but it's impossible", "okay it is possible but it would cost too much", "okay, it would actually be cheaper but it'll put all the poor groundwater-polluters and clear-cutters out of a job, why do you hate poor people" and finally "It's a conspiracy by the gays and the jews and the authoritarian left to control you by passing laws to not let you pollute groundwater, not that I want to pollute groundwater, but I'll defend to the death your right to do so etc."

scythe 4y ago

>Biodiversity loss, deforestation, aquifer depletion, desertification, etc. are just as concerning for most people here as rising global temperatures. The disconnect is between the recognition that there are problems and the assertion that we cannot simply solve those problems. Wastewater reclamation, urban planning, and the at least partial displacement of dietary animal protein can address the cited problems without "degrowth". Furthermore, while several trends are concerning, they mostly do not represent an immediate threat on the level of climate change except in the writings of click-chasing environmental journalists and the appeals of donation-funded activist organizations. We have time to study and refine our approach. For example, the largest biodiversity loss event actually happened before the dawn of recorded history — the Quaternary Extinction. Yet this massive 'crisis' failed to prevent the rise of human civilization. Degrowth advocates usually want to impose a lot of pain on society very soon — in your words, 'suddenly' — which is more punk rock than practical reason. In reality, most of these trends are things we need to be aware of and plan for, but the sky is not falling. Climate change is still the biggest threat, and the one thing that may require a little pain. Attaching pain in service of other causes becomes a lead shoe as we are trying to swim to the shore.

mytailorisrich 4y ago

Sure but we then need to acknowledge that the root cause is the level of the human population on this planet. I don't think we should get to sustainability by in effect keeping people poor and restricting what they are allowed to consume. Rather we should get to a sustainable number of human beings allowed to be free, to travel, to have a good life.