Some fallout from the IPCC report on climate change

There's a bit of received wisdom I've been seeing stated as fact as people comment on the IPCC report. "You can have growth in global GDP without growth in the consumption of energy and resources". It's a nice fantasy and has an element of truthiness about it, because obviously increased efficiency and productivity means producing more for less. Except that rises in GDP have ALWAYS resulted in increasing consumption of energy and resources. So where's the counter example? And there's an underlying assumption that continued 3% compound growth is desirable and necessary. Is that true?

There's some interesting lines of macro-economic research here. In each case it needs to provide not just answers, ideas and proofs by example but routes to get there. And solutions need to be appropriate for global macro-economics, not just a tiny self sufficient community in the middle of Wales.

1) Can you have improving quality of life with zero or negative GDP growth?

2) Can you have increasing GDP without corresponding increases in energy and resource consumption?

3) Can we reduce our dependence on borrowing from the future via debt to fund growth in GDP?

4) Can we control the pollution side effects of growth in GDP?

It's not enough to do like Paul Krugman and just use homilies and parables about making shipping more efficient by sailing slower or such like. If it's even true, that's a local solution when answers need to be global models.

All the Limits to Growth models show hockey-stick style exponential growth leading to a brief peak followed by a catastrophic correction. More technical fixes and productivity improvements seem to lead to making the same graph more extreme; faster growth, a higher peak, a more dramatic correction. So I think this leads to the most important question.

What can we do now to create a soft landing as we transition from a growth state to a sustainable state? And that's both personally and as a global society.

If that's not hard enough. Then bear in mind what might be required to force global society to follow the optimum path when most of the actors are ill-informed and are treating the game as an iterated prisoner's dilemma where their own personal short-term gain is all that matters. And there's a lot of them spread all over the world.
[from: Google+ Posts]


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[ 04-Nov-14 12:22pm ]