Hacker News Reader

Comment by biglenny | Hacker News Reader

>How callous and sheltered do you have to be to say something like that?

Keep the dialogue civil.

It turns out that industrializing a society creates a lot of pollution. That pollution, as we've recently found out, is responsible for "the massive humanitarian crises and greater suffering" we are going to experience as impoverished nations continue to industrialize (ie. get lifted out of poverty).

See: IPCC

View on HN

Your premise is wrong. This is called the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC):

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

The solution to pollution is more economic development, not less. This becomes even more true once demographic transition effects (like declining birth rates) start to kick in.

You don't understand what you are talking about.

EKC works with pollutants that have short term, acute consequences. Think sulfates, nitrates, carbon monoxide, etc.

EKC has not been proven true with pollutants whose effects are less concentrated and whose effects take longer to realize (CH4, CO2, etc). The catastrophes I'm referring to have little to do with the paper you cited.

According to https://www.oxfordenergy.org/wpcms/wp-content/uploads/2011/0..., it seems that there is a positive correlation between GDP per capita and carbon emissions per capita at first, but the correlation stops after that and becomes neutral. In the UK and US, for example, carbon emissions per capita remained roughly constant over a 50 year period even as GDP per capita increased significantly.

Area under the curve.

What do you mean?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com