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Comment by ttiurani | Hacker News Reader

OP takes a historical view about the actual economy, and where it in real life can go from here. Your argument – a very common one and very influential in today's society – however is purely theoretical. As John O'Neil points out:

"It is logically possible to have increasing GDP and a decreasing physical and energy throughput in an economy. However, it is a fallacy to move from claims about what is logically possible to claims about what is physically possible and another from what is physically possible to what is empirically actual."

If you actually look at the coupling of environmental pressure with historical empirical economic growth measured by GDP, we can't go on like this for even a few decades more, if we want to avoid complete ecological collapse. Trusting humankind's future on theoretical armchair economics magically becoming a reality, despite decades of evidence to the contrary, is complete madness.

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Most US states grew their GDP while shrinking emissions from 2005 to 2017: https://www.wri.org/insights/ranking-41-us-states-decoupling...

Nothing theoretical about it.

energy use != emissions

Emissions aren't the only thing you need to measure - you would also need to factor in resource consumption for manufacturing. The conjecture that the economy can continue growing on virtual goods is an interesting idea, but you can't eat virtual goods and if the economy growing also depends on population growth, something will break at some point.

Note: I'm not entirely convinced economic growth depends on population growth, but historically that has been the case in most countries that haven't exhausted their windfall natural resources like oil and have healthy export markets.

> you can't eat virtual goods

There's a limit to the physical quantity of non-virtual goods you can eat, as well. If you switch from eating a $3 burger to a $100 steak with the same nutritional content, that contributes to economic growth with no change in resource consumption.

There are limits to how far you can take the price of these marginal quality improvements. At some point you get into side grades and Veblen status goods, which also have limits - their positioning relies on scarcity.

Plus, the $100 steak is more environmentally expensive too, even if lab grown.

A $3 burger is made from mechanically reclaimed scraps with a high level of automation. A $100 burger is made from prime cuts by hand by skilled butchers. It's not inconceivable that the resource consumption is 30x more.

This apparent decoupling in western nations is an illusion made possible by globalization, where resources are extracted from the global South. When you count in production, no more decoupling can be found.

Find the sources for these from for example:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13563467.2019.15...

Edit. Here specifically on decoupling:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S14629...

This is a very important aspect, we really must stop looking at country specific environmental impact (and some other metrics) without its attached outsourced production.

This would mean we're responsible for emissions in China - I'd imagine that's not a popular opinion

Popular or not, there is a lot of merit to that view. After all a lot of the emissions are driven by manufacturing of goods for export to the West, thus it makes sense for us to take some responsability for them

That's just outsourcing their manufacture, nothing special about it.

You can do whatever you want to entropy if you ignore stuff going on to a connected external system.

You must understand that the emissions problem is global : western countries are shrinking their emissions because they are totally outsourcing polluting activities to other countries.

CO2 is totally diffuse in atmosphere and the climate change is global. Outsourcing pollution has no effect on this issue. And the fact is, global CO2 emissions are at an all time high year after year.

> Outsourcing pollution has no effect on this issue.

It has the effect that it makes it worse, because goods have to travel longer distances.

The relationship between the distance a good travels and the amount of emissions produced by that travel is not linear. Further it's a mistake to underestimate the reduction in emissions that come from productivity.

87% of Chinese emissions are attributable to domestic consumption. The remaining 13 % is the rest of the world, not just the West. So it doesn’t seem like what you’re saying is accurate.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-worlds-largest-co2-import...

[1] seems to imply it is context dependent. China is shown to be an insourcer of emissions while the trend of many Western countries (except some Nordic ones) is outsourcing emissions.

“Taken as a collective, developed countries are found to be outsourcing emissions to developed economies; however, this is largely due to the U.S. and China”

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S146290111...

Do you have any numbers to back this up on a global level?

And 2005-2016 saw a sufficient deterioration of conditions for the US public to vote in Donald Trump (!) on a platform of ... there wasn't a lot of agreement on what the platform was, but "the economy is terrible and you're all getting screwed, it must be foreigners ripping us off!" was certainly an element of it.

There are signs that the energy-lite economy growing isn't as useful to people as the old energy-connected one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwfejPdonnU

Well, it's not the foreigners ripping the US off. It's the US willingly providing the reserve currency without having a high enough percentage of the world GDP to deal with the negative effects.

Having a country offer their own currency as the global reserve currency was stupid to begin with. It's no surprise that it will have to end one day.

And yet the economy of the western world is heavily dependent on trading with nations such as China.

> OP takes a historical view about the actual economy, and where it in real life can go from here.

If we know anything about the economy, it's that past trends are a bad predictor of the future.

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