The single best move against climate change, counterintuitively, is to accelerate global economic growth (the accumulation of knowledge).
As I have written many times before, many of the ills that face humanity appear to follow a Kuznets curve. CO2 emissions are dropping in wealthy countries as they find ways to growing without using more fossil fuels.
We are on the right path, we just need to move faster.
Economic growth is when you produce more with the same cost per unit. e.g you need one piece of wood to make one table and you grow economically by using two pieces of wood to make two tables.
Economic development, on the other hand, is when you manage to produce the same or even more goods with less cost per unit (due to productivity increases, economies of scale, knowledge, technology, substitution of materials, etc.).
I assume in your comment you mean economic development. However, do you think that economic development can happen fast enough that it would allow us to decrease significantly greenhouse gas emissions? I don’t. This is why I think it is important to also decrease the amount of goods we produce.
(By fast enough I mean the next ten years. By decreasing significantly I mean around 50% of the global emissions that are currently emitted.)
The two are linked as well. Material and energy efficiency or economic development as you defined empirically leads to more consumption overall. It's the Jevon's paradox (not actually a paradox) where the falling cost of use induces increases in demand enough that resource use is increased, rather than reduced; and it has happened again and again in human history
The single best move against climate change, counterintuitively, is to accelerate global economic growth (the accumulation of knowledge).
As I have written many times before, many of the ills that face humanity appear to follow a Kuznets curve. CO2 emissions are dropping in wealthy countries as they find ways to growing without using more fossil fuels.
We are on the right path, we just need to move faster.
Economic growth is when you produce more with the same cost per unit. e.g you need one piece of wood to make one table and you grow economically by using two pieces of wood to make two tables.
Economic development, on the other hand, is when you manage to produce the same or even more goods with less cost per unit (due to productivity increases, economies of scale, knowledge, technology, substitution of materials, etc.).
I assume in your comment you mean economic development. However, do you think that economic development can happen fast enough that it would allow us to decrease significantly greenhouse gas emissions? I don’t. This is why I think it is important to also decrease the amount of goods we produce.
(By fast enough I mean the next ten years. By decreasing significantly I mean around 50% of the global emissions that are currently emitted.)
The two are linked as well. Material and energy efficiency or economic development as you defined empirically leads to more consumption overall. It's the Jevon's paradox (not actually a paradox) where the falling cost of use induces increases in demand enough that resource use is increased, rather than reduced; and it has happened again and again in human history
Yes certainly!