Comment by pcstl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pcstl | Hacker News Reader

Shrinking consumption would mean either that developing countries would need to stay in poverty forever, or to somehow find a way to greatly impoverish people in the developed nations that would not lead to widespread rioting.

Additionally, the bulk of world emissions currently comes from developing countries: https://www.cgdev.org/media/developing-countries-are-respons...

So shrinking consumption in developed countries would be far from enough. We'd need to find a way to make China, for instance, accept that they should accept a vast diminution in their living standards in order to satisfy mostly Western activists.

Solutions to climate change based on shrinking consumption or reducing growth in general are political and technical nonstarters. We need to focus on decoupling growth and consumption from resource usage and emissions. Only by developing the technology to do so do we have any hope to mitigate the effects of climate change.

> the bulk of world emissions currently comes from developing countries

And the bulk of emissions in developed countries comes from corporations. I don't know offhand, but I'd be shocked if the same bulk for developing countries isn't produced by corporations as well, and not shocked but wildly surprised if it's not the exact same corporations.

Thank you. Countries are just lines on a map. They may have their own politics, but they're still just a part of the whole. Global heating, Global Pollution, are things that bypass country borders.

When there's multi-national corporations contributing to these things, you cannot fault the countries, the people. You can only fault Capital, those keen on extracting every little bit from the Earth, until nothing remains.

Corporations build only things people want. Nothing less, nothing more. So if you want to fault somebody, sorry - it’s back to the people.

I do not believe it is the exact same corporations, as China is the single largest contributor to emissions right now and they are not very friendly to the idea of foreign corporations acquiring a significant foothold in their domestic market.

However, I believe this discussion is completely orthogonal to the point I was making. I was not talking about the bulk of emissions coming from developing countries as some kind of moral judgement about developing countries, simply to state that reducing emissions in developed countries would not be enough - which means that reduced consumption in developing countries would be required, which would in turn mean condemning a significant amount of the world's population to perpetual poverty.

You don't believe corporations are just doing emissions for the hell of it, do you? They have to sell to someone in the end.

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