Comment by HourglassFR | Hacker News Reader

Comment by HourglassFR | Hacker News Reader

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You are right, I had misunderstood you. We can be more efficient with our ressources, what I had in mind was the total ressource consumption/extraction. Any efficiency we gain is largely offset by the rebound effect in our current system of production, i.e the GDP grows faster than the ressource intensity can catch up with.

And of course, the data has to be world-wide since the economy is globalized [1].

[1]: https://yearbook.enerdata.net/total-energy/world-consumption...

> The universe of digital goods and services, for one.

Digital goods consume energy, more and more of it. For now gain in efficiency almost (not quite though) offset the growth [2], and that is discarding all the energy and ressources needed to build the servers and chips in the first place.

[2]: https://www.iea.org/reports/digitalisation-and-energy#energy...

> efficiency we gain is largely offset by the rebound effect in our current system of production, i.e the GDP grows faster than the ressource intensity can catch up with

We agree on this. But nothing requires the base resource load to increase. That's my point.

Blaming capitalism for our ecological problem is a cop out. It makes it sound like we have to re-engineer our civilization to escape resource over-use. We don't. The changes are simpler. But making it look like our entire financial system has to be rebooted to effect real change helps punt the issue.

> But nothing requires the base resource load to increase. That's my point.

And again the data we have shows that GPD is positively correlated with energy consumption. I take your point that it does not have to be this way though, let's just say I am not convinced.

>Blaming capitalism for our ecological problem is a cop out.

Ok I deserved that, it is true that blaming capitalism is a bit of my go to card. But to be fair lets not act like our system of production has no impact on how we consume ressources. You have a point though: ressource over-use is not strictly a problem of capitalism, a thing to keep in mind for the proponent of the fully automated luxury communism utopia.

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