Isn't (2) a traditional anti-progressive refrain? Along the lines of "on the one hand, you demand full employment and a generous welfare state, but on the other you condemn the consumption both serviced and enabled by full employment and a generous welfare state; for your hypocrisy, we require a reduction in the capital gains tax."
Sure, it's traditional, but they have a point. Taking myself as a sample progressive (I always feel like I don't quite qualify for calling myself that, but it does seem closer than 'liberal') I do believe that unrestrained economic growth has a real potential to be an environmental problem, and I am willing to accept tradeoffs on economic growth for enough in the way of environmental benefits. I hope the apparent opposition can be evaded, but if it can't be, I'm not wholeheartedly on the growth-at-all-costs, damn-the-environment side.
They don't have a good point as it usually gets stated, but there's something there.
I think economic stagnation is a lot worse for the environment than growth. If you look at the environmental problems in poor countries vs. rich countries, they are far greater scale (eg, oil pollution in the Niger Delta, air quality in China, industrial pollution in Eastern Europe, as compared to that in Western Europe). Moreover, things tend to improve as economies get bigger, and societies can afford to dedicate more resources to projects such as, say, the Clean Water Act, or encouraging the transition to electric cars.
Meanwhile, economic stagnation means that environmental regulations become political targets, old buildings don't get weatherized, and the technological solutions to move people past using fossil fuels remain under-developed and unimplemented.
4: We also ship more of our nastier acts of production overseas... see, e.g., the shipbreaking industry.
This is all very well but the oil is running out and I think this is going to bring a halt to growth like it or not. And I suspect we won't like it.
I don't think 1 and 2 are necessarily in conflict. 1 isn't about whether we should plan on driving endlessly bigger cars. It's about the existence of involuntary unemployment.
If we need to cut back on consumption because of the environment , then we should be investing in technologies that reduce the damage we do to the environment. But instead of consuming or investing, we're doing a third thing: involuntary unemployment. It's pure waste, surely as BP dumping that oil in the ocean was pure waste.
As the leaders of every energy project seminar I have ever attended delight in telling the audience, we already use a hell of a lot of coal.
re: 7
In the UK at least, many/most of our mines were closed and cannot be reopened. This is/was despite the fact that they contained large coal reserves. 9 is of course true, though.
I think economic stagnation is a lot worse for the environment than growth. If you look at the environmental problems in poor countries vs. rich countries, they are far greater scale (eg, oil pollution in the Niger Delta, air quality in China, industrial pollution in Eastern Europe, as compared to that in Western Europe).
Eh? Air quality in China isn't bad because of economic stagnation. It's bad because they've built hundreds of coal fired power stations and thousands of polluting factories during a period of extraordinarily rapid growth. Similarly in Nigeria, though with less dramatic growth and different axes of pollution. Eastern Europe is about the only one where stagnation has played a meaningful part. And even there, it's because the stagnation came after a period of rapid development at a time when industry was highly polluting. Stagnation meant they couldn't clean up the industry they had, but it's not why they had dirty industry in the first place.
That said, I agree with this:Meanwhile, economic stagnation means that environmental regulations become political targets, old buildings don't get weatherized, and the technological solutions to move people past using fossil fuels remain under-developed and unimplemented.
Strict environmental regulation is, alas, in practice a luxury of developed, growing economies. There are notable exceptions, but when you're struggling to feed your people, it's poltically difficult to, say, stop clear-cutting rainforests.
How to reconcile growth with arresting environmental degradation?
1. Environmental quality is a luxury good (in the technical sense of the word). People (societies) demand more of it as they become richer. Spike makes this point above.
2. Many (not all, but many) luxury goods are comparatively low environmental impact. To the extent that the fruits of economic growth are spent on, say, building parks or supplying nursing care, the energy intensity of GDP declines with time. N.B. this has implications for the optimal ratio of public to private consumption (J.K. Galbraith was saying this in the 1960s).
3. Pigovian taxation (at much higher levels than currently exist in the U.S.) goes a long way toward encouraging sustainable growth, both by reducing resource use in the production process, and by favoring less resource-intensive consumption choices.
4. Scarcity engenders substitution. Not that I buy into glib cornucopianism, but Julian Simon got some things right.
7
We won't just switch back to coal?
Substituting for oil would require large scale coal to oil conversion which is feasible (but expensive and bad environmentally). Possibly this is the way we will go. The coal will eventually run out also of course.
Walt gets it right, I think. If we're going to solve our environmental problems, it's going to take a lot of work -- I don't see how we can do it without a healthy economy.
12 the energy intensity of GDP declines with time
I've never understood why I should care about "energy intensity" if we're still using more energy and the total amount we're using is what's doing the damage.
Fracked natural gas is the new coal. So cheap and plentiful right now that its brutalizing the market for actually clean alternatives.
Also, since we've apparently decided to go ahead with squeezing the Alberta tar sands, I don't actually think we will run out of oil particularly soon. The oil will be more expensive and worse for the environment than ever, but it will still be there.
Environmental quality is a luxury good (in the technical sense of the word). People (societies) demand more of it as they become richer.
And also they tend to demand more of it from other countries. Wealthy tourists like to dive on untouched coral reefs and breathe unpolluted air and drink the tap water without getting the shits.
If we're going to solve our environmental problems, it's going to take a lot of work -- I don't see how we can do it without a healthy economy.
What about a plague that kills 3-4 billion people?
What about a plague that kills 3-4 billion people?
Ambiguous impact. The Black Death is thought to have had an overall positive effect on the long-term growth trajectory of Europe, but the post-Colombian holocaust occasioned the total collapse of some fairly advanced civilizations in the Americas. So it's a roll of the dice, really.
I think the key to bringing 2 in line with the others has everything to do with the highlighted clause, I believe that growth, as most people understand it, is unsustainable at anything like recent rates. And people understand it that way for a pretty good reason--despite lowering energy intensity, it is not clear that we have an economic system that can move far enough in that direction quickly enough.
This thread has been up for over two hours, and mcmanus hasn't weighed in yet? Somebody check if he died in his sleep.
Barring technological miracles, there is just no way we can bring everyone in the world up to middle class American standards. If we could somehow get around the oil limitation, I can't imagine we could do it without massive environmental damage.
is just no way we can bring everyone in the world up to middle class American standards.
This is probably true, but I think standards that are, in my opinion, as desirable as middle-class American standards might be within reach. All the clean water, sufficient food, universal education and internet access, but nowhere near as much the car ownership and single-family-house-surrounded-by-watered-lawn.
25. I suspect that the technological miracles have already been performed in principle to permit this. What we have the capacity to do do is get everybody close to that level of utility*; what we can't do is achieve it on an individualistic basis, as per middle class America, Europe, Canada, Japan, Australia... such that goods are simply not used when their owner isn't using them. Achieving this would involve a restructuring of social attitudes that's even less likely than everybody buying a Chevy Volt next year.
*There are, of course, huge exceptions to this generality: cheap air transportation springs to mind.
nowhere near as much the car ownership and single-family-house-surrounded-by-watered-lawn.
Agreed.
I grew up in suburbia with large lots (2 acres plus).
I couldnt understand why anyone would ever want to live in a city. Live without your own, large, actual plot of grass-covered land surrounding you.
What do those city kids do? How awful!
Then, as an adult, I moved into the city and realized the benefits of being able to walk to the museum, dinner and the grocery store. We hang out on the porch with neighbors.
The kids can still play in communal areas.
It works great. I love it. But it is so foreign to suburbianites. Plus, they are scared silly about the alleged crime and the schools.
Improve the schools in cities (and the perceptions about them). Then, you will see more people who want to live in urban clusters.
(and the perceptions about them)
Should I brag on my brilliant daughter's inner-city school some more? I did have an excellent moment the other day -- her philosophy class is debating the ethics of organ transplantation, and I got to pull Kieran Healy's book on the subject off the shelf, as something that might have some useful background for her.
You should! I make it a point to brag about the local city middle school. It is great!
31: Come to think, that wasn't exactly bragging about the school, more about my well-stocked bookshelves. The school's good too, though.
I get that sometimes these goals are in tension with each other, but calling them contradictory seems weird.
I have to go, but this chart from Yglesias hints at the scale of the problem. Forget the US, forget Europe. Try to bring India and China up to Brazil.
Well, they're in a lot of tension. The 'free trade' argument that gets made is 'why are we protecting the jobs of wealthy (by global standards) American manufacturing workers at the cost of impoverishing the global poor?" I think that choice is usually not a fair representation of the effects of whatever real policy is being discussed, but sometimes it may be, at which point there's a problem. Same with economic growth/environment. We may be able to figure out how to grow economically without using more resources, but it's going to be difficult.
36 We may be able to figure out how to grow economically without using more resources, but it's going to be difficult.
There are two issues: knowing how to grow economically without using more (bad) resources (sunlight is a resource we can use as much as we want...), and having the political will to do it. The latter seems like the bigger difficulty to me.
Forget the US, forget Europe. Try to bring India and China up to Brazil./i>
That's a chart of oil consumption per head. In what way should we be trying to bring India and China up to Brazil's level and why?
Given the inherent contradictions in different goals, I suppose we can take comfort from the fact that we're not going to actually try to accomplish any of this stuff.
I don't know that I'd call that comfort.
There aer many flaws in the definition of GDP, but I don't see that GDP growth necessarily has to be bad for the environment. Growth in services is GDP growth too. Sitting in the forest composing poetry about the beauty of the trees can add to GDP as long as someone will pay cash money to read your product.
38: I was using oil as a proxy for energy consumption (a better chart. We can maintain our lifestyle (or some better planned version) with less energy usage, the large gulf between us and some of the populous poorer countries necessitates an impossibly large increase in energy production.
The Do the Math blog has been, um, doing the math on the limits on economic growth constrained by energy availability and efficiency.
I figure we make our best estimate of how much CO2 we can dump in the atmosphere, also how much water pollution the oceans can handle, and everyone on Earth gets an equal share per year. Then we let our existing trade systems work. It's a floor for the poor, an incentive to dematerialize consumption, and caps our most dangerous environmental problem.
Of course, we need Santa Claus to enforce it precisely ; or Skynet.
IIRC, CO2 have been rising since Industrial Revolution kicked off, so the answer is not very damn much.
Busy,busy.
Walt at 8 and KR at 12 are right. We need insane growth to be able to develop the extremely advanced technologies the combat PO and GW and the high-end luxury economies to get past peak credit.
Japan is always the best example. And currently China, with its flaws.
Contrary to common wisdom, Japan had its miracle 1945-75 based on absolutely insane domestic consumption and huge government intervention in the economies, very close to central planning.
The problems governments ran into the 1970s was not resources but too much fucking social democracy for the taste of plutocrats, bureaucrats, and other elites collecting social and rents. Japan's move to an export economy kept the plebes in line, and other developing nations like China learned a lesson.
Now everybody wants to be an export economy, not for economic but for domestic political reasons. Give the plebes too much infrastructure and they get uppity. But it is economic suicide.
Long, complicated story.
It's all connected. The Reagan & Bush tax cuts were to not only move distribution upwards, but to move asset prices way high. This not only entrenches the rentiers, but makes finance the growth and opportunity sector, and makes manufacturing, infrastructure (parks, schools, trains), and social spending relatively inefficient and unattractive.
The economics, all economics isn't really difficult. What's difficult is the political consequences of economic ideologies and systems, and human nature.
DeLong, Krugman, and Thoma are just trying to do it without guillotines and burning shit down.
36: We may be able to figure out how to grow economically without using more resources, but it's going to be difficult.
Sadly, we need fewer people.
41: Sitting in the forest composing poetry about the beauty of the trees can add to GDP as long as someone will pay cash money to read your product.
This frustrates me to no end. Cash money paid for such a thing is a luxury expenditure, obviously, affordable only by those who have raked in enough disposable cash by other means, which means inevitably do a disservice to the very environment about which the poet is epiphanizing.
45: so more Skynet than Santa Claus. One feared as much.
27: What we have the capacity to do do is get everybody close to that level of utility*; what we can't do is achieve it on an individualistic basis, as per middle class America, Europe, Canada, Japan, Australia... such that goods are simply not used when their owner isn't using them.
I'm not sure I entirely follow all of 27, but this strikes me as an important point: certainly, the developed western lifestyle involves a great deal of individual ownership which is painful to witness and participate in. (Goods going unused, often discarded, pressing the demand for manufacture of replacement items, and so on.) Yet that individual ownership has driven production for some time.
Well. Obviously we need a sea-change in our orientation toward such things. Unfortunately, we don't know any more how to form a society in any other way, I think. It would be socialism! What do you mean, we should share things?!
48:Sadly, we need fewer people.
You first, parsimon.
The world could support 20-50 billion if we got the technology and social structure right.
We need fewer rich people.
When we got assholes like Yggles, Drum, and Klein on top of the discourse. We're doomed.
By contrast, if you finance your capital gains tax cut by reducing SNAP and WIC benefits, it's hard to see how that wouldn't increase overall investment. To be sure, you'd be stealing food out of the mouths of poor children to offer a regressive tax cut, but the net impact will be to increase the national savings rate.
Yes, this is exactly what and how we need to be talking about, right. You're second, up against the wall, dude. Guillotine's too good for you.
I'm gone. Ain't no point reading this shit til the cities are burning. Which is why I have been around less anymore.
Revolution's gonna choose you, not you choose it.
I think the solution to all these problems is to kick poor Ugandans off thier land so we can use it to grow trees for carbon offsets.
44
Of course, we need Santa Claus to enforce it precisely ; or Skynet.
Yeah, that's the problem. As I've alluded to before, I believe (with basically no evidence, but anyways) that given the resources on this planet and our existing technology or refinements to it on the level of engineering tweaks, with proper organization we could get the population of the entire world or maybe even slightly more to live sustainably at something close to a developed-world middle-class. I mean, plenty of people in the developed world live carbon-neutral lives right now, or damn close to it. It requires lifestyle changes that would be large for some people but quite small for others. And it requires a certain infrastructure, and while in some ways the developing world is at a huge disadvantage in infrastructure, in other ways they've ahead of the game. Cell phones, though it's not much of an environmental issue like we're talking about, is a good example - coverage is actually better in some parts of third world countries than it is in some parts of the USA, because they're just getting around to putting in new infrastructure for phones in those developing places so they just happen to use the most modern stuff, whereas in the USA there's an existing phone infrastructure for landlines and cell phones wouldn't be a big enough upgrade to justify throwing out the landline stuff.
But without proper organization, just one billion people would run out of resources eventually. And as for how to get things properly organized, I'm at a loss.
Mostly pwned by bob, I see on preview... not that I'd agree with him on every detail.
plenty of people in the developed world live carbon-neutral lives right now, or damn close to it.
Really? I don't know, but this surprises me. Unless plenty means something like thousands of people, all of whom are living in yurts someplace.
The world could support 20-50 billion if we got the technology and social structure right.
Sleeping in pods, moving around only according to a centralised queuing system and eating soylent green. The social structure would need to privilege brain surgeons to perform all the lobotomies.
56: Well, yeah, probably less than one percent of the population. But I'd still guess millions, not thousands, between people going out of their way to do it for environmental reasons and people in environmentally-conscious municipalities who just happen to live low-impact lifestyles (note that I also included "or damn close to it".) All this is ex recto of course.
people in environmentally-conscious municipalities who just happen to live low-impact lifestyles
I don't think this gets you anywhere near carbon neutral, I think you need a yurt. Figure we're talking someone in an apartment in San Diego or the Bay Area who bikes everywhere and doesn't need heat or AC. They're still eating and wearing clothes and using computers and so on, and they're not doing anything that lowers CO2 levels. That's not going to be carbon neutral. Better than me, in a cold city, and much better than most people, but not close to neutral.
I couldn't find the blog, I think Rittholz, where the discussion of competition among buyers of Mega-Yachts is sky-rocketing. We are talking a minimum of $1 million a foot-length, with 150 feet sheer peasant quality. A half billion dollar yacht is becoming very common.
No, we on this blog don't need to start eating dirt. We are in a New Gilded Age when the maldistribution is killing us all.
We really do need the fucking guillotines. There is no doubt, there is no other option. They will not surrender peacefully.
Matt at 52 has just been brain-podded by supplysiders. Don't fucking ever worry about investment, worry about demand and consumption among the middle class that you make as large as possible, after you have culled the over-greedy and their willing courtiers.
We really do need the fucking guillotines.
And here we are stuck with nothing but fucksaws.
Malthusian Fucksaw would be an okay band name, as long as commercial radio play wasn't a concern.
62: Commercial radio play is no longer an important consideration. More significant -- would LB's netnanny allow access to the band's web-site?
If you buy carbon offsets for your food and your clothes, and power your apartment entirely with solar (or other carbon-neutral sources), you could probably get close. But that's not millions of people. Although theoretically it could be.
I'm not counting buying carbon offsets; they seem kind of fundamentally bogus.
Watering the lawn. That counts, right?
Fine, but then what do you consider an activity that someone can do to lower CO2 levels?
I'm thinking. That's really a hard one, because anything I can think of is sort of pushing on a string. You plant trees someplace, how do you know that that's any net change in the number of trees in the world -- maybe someone else cut down more because you locked up a piece of land. But maybe there's something I'm not thinking of.
But that's why I'm thinking of carbon neutral as so hard -- I'd think you'd need for everything you used to be made only with non-fossil fuel/renewable energy.
Hey, maybe people in Southern France get close, they're all nuked-out.
Maybe I could acheive carbon neutrality by bombing a coal mine, or an oil rig. Certainly I coudl get there by killing enough people, but that gets into morally sketchy territory.
bombing a coal mine,
You want to be careful there. Mine fires aren't carbon neutral.
Dropping biomass in a subduction zone, if you see what I mean, would do it -- literally taking carbon out of the cycle. But I don't think it's practical.
You could see if your local electric company allows you to pay for renewable sources rather than coal.
That's not lowering, just not-raising, IISWIM.
Oh. Yes. Lowering is difficult. You can, um, weather lots of rocks. (Not totally joking.)
I think not enough thought has gone into this kind of thing.
I'm serious about 74, though -- I think it's not extremely useful in terms of actual change in carbon used, but if enough people do it it might start to become useful in a social-signaling kind of way ("I care about climate and I'm willing to pay for solutions.")
Hey, come to the other thread and talk about the speed of light to ignorant people.
Fine, but then what do you consider an activity that someone can do to lower CO2 levels?
The idea that I recently read about which sounded interesting is charcoal sequestration.
charcoal sequestration
Now that I think about it, I saw that described in this book which I would generally recommend.
I also read this book around the same time and, I have to say, I suspect that may be the more likely direction in which the climate change conversation heads.
80.3: so true. Having been blindsided (not really) by the side effect of one process, we'll lay our hopes on something new we don't know the side effects of!
76.1.last: I love the chart on slide 9 of that link. I expect the Republican "Job-Saving Patriotic Mirrors in Space Act" to be introduced any day now. We'll nickname it Photon Wars.