Fisheries would be one example, agriculture which a sibling comment mentioned, another. But it's also pollution, labour laws, access to housing.
It's tricky because the US is literally the most powerful economy ever, so it must be doing something right, equally it seems other countries care more about their citizens. Not China or North Korea ofc but Europe or Canada etc.
The US’s wealth is in it’s people not it’s fisheries.
Who would have thought spreadsheets and magic market numbers had little material connection to the resources extracted to extrapolate those numbers.
But the whole premise of technology is that you can break the zero-sum and reach arbitrarily high levels.
For example Deuterium–tritium fusion runs on hydrogen that's pretty common to find. Yes, if we learn to exploit it, we will one day run out, but by then we'll have new sources of fuel. Similarly solar energy is just 'free' energy that rains down on our planet.
We could use that energy to farm fish or cultivate natural populations. We don't do that which is bad, but it's not some impossibility.
In many ways these arguments of "there's free energy from hydrogen fusion" feels similar to arguments about solving invasive species with another species because we haven't figured out that the new species will be invasive yet. And in a similar fashion, the local ecology may eventually re-balance (indeed, likely will) but what time scale are we looking at? Humans need human time scales.
For example, most of the energy from the sun that hit our planet are just basically wasted. Meanwhile, the sun uselessly radiate away energy that's not even hitting the planet.
The reason why fisheries are collapsing is because we don't spend much making our environment more habitable and pollute or use up what's already there.
> Eh, only within the current context of society and technology.
> For example, most of the energy from the sun that hit our planet are just basically wasted. Meanwhile, the sun uselessly radiate away energy that's not even hitting the planet.
You can't magick away the problem with sci-fi fantasies. Those technologies don't actually exist and (with a fairly high probability) may never exist.
And in any case, a bigger finite does not an infinite make.
We don't have the technology to pave the planet in solar panels, because we don't have the technology to make it cost effective. Also the solution to the "problem" of "most of the energy from the sun that hit our planet are just basically wasted" is to literally destroy the environment in an industrialization project.
Solving the "problem" of "...the sun uselessly radiate away energy that's not even hitting the planet," is also limited by that cost effectiveness problem AND the problem of we don't have the technology to do anything with energy collected by satellites, especially ones half-way around the solar system. Then there's the issue of putting up a few trillion solar power satellites still would allow the sun to "uselessly radiate away energy that's not even hitting the planet."
We'd need only 254x254 km of solar panels for the whole world.
https://www.dlr.de/tt/Portaldata/41/Resources/dokumente/inst... - page 25
While interesting, that's an answer to a different problem/challenge than I was responding to.
At the expense of *most* of its citizens. I know people who make a shocking amount of money fishing in Alaska every summer. The problem with the US is that it always prioritizes a few of its citizens getting rich, to the diffuse and often intangible detriment of the rest of us.
A good representation of the people I found were Native Alaskans, immigrants, or felons who were attracted to the job because it was one of the damn few available to them. It was brutal work to eke out a basic existence.
Not sure about the natives. Their way of life was wrecked by western influence and fishing even on a modern vessel is about the closest thing they have to continuing their way of life while making some income near their home. I have no idea what they would shift to if they moved.
In any case USA's highly regulated Bering Sea fishing industry is shared with Russia. Even if we eliminated/downsized our fishing it'd have to be done in concert with Russia to get the desired outcome, otherwise we'd just be handing the lions share of our catch to Russian fisherman.
I think the size and heterogeneity of the US is under-appreciated.
Canada is a 1/10th the population of the US. Europeans are more likely to identify as Germans, Italians, etc. and see to their national interests before those of the EU as a whole.
The US is the 3rd most populous country after China, India - ahead of Pakistan, Indonesia, Nigeria, Brazil... And the 4th largest by landmass after Russia, Canada, and China.
Per capita we’re still doing ok but far from #1.
Seriously, the highest population in any state with a higher GDP per capita than the US is the UAE.
#1? Maybe not, but it's certainly pretty close in any useful discussion.
Remove resource extraction and financial services from all economies and the list does look different, but the US’s position is still far from #1. Also, PPP comparisons between countries are rather suspect as costs for housing, food, etc vary widely across the US. There’s plenty of ways to run these numbers but the results are surprisingly arbitrary.
Consider the fact that when the US was colonized, the native population was small and had a significant technological disadvantages - also true to some extent for central/South America. That gave the colonists a whole continent for virtually free, whereas in their territories of origin they would have had to compete with large incumbent populations that had similar technology, from weapons to the administrative organs of states.
If youg et a huge resource boost you will surely find ways to profit, just as if you received a billion $ to play with. But getting thins for free - especially land - also means you can afford to care less about externalities, because you don't have as many neighbors or you are not jammed as closely together. And so it's easy and natural for people in that situation to prioritize resource extraction and profit maximization. California's gold rush is a relatively recent example of the same phenomenon.
My pet theory is that when you do this on a continental scale, you end up with a culture that defaults to thinking of economic inputs as infinite, and even if they're not, to maximizing output for as long as possible and then moving on. It's slash-and-burn agriculture's mentality (with a side dose of captive labor) but on an industrial-technological scale.
Fast-forward to the present, and there's an awareness that the civilizational free lunch is over, resources and livable territory are finite, and pollution has a nasty habit of ending up somewhere, but where it's still profitable to do business with the attitude described above. A lot of the bitterness in contemporary politics is due to the economic calculus being increasingly obvious thanks to widespread availability of scientific data and network infrastructure.
Incumbents and wannabes whose economic interests/preferences tend toward extraction of resources or rents cannot publicly admit the validity of data about the downsides of their economic activity, because then they would also have to admit that they simply don't care and prefer making money in the short term to any sort of sustainability in the long term. Though numerous, they are too few in number to sustain such a position in face of broad opposition, so they maintain a set of policy arguments (and a polity) based around different but more emollient axioms. The more questionable or untenable those axioms, the more fervently they must be upheld, to maintain the support of their polity.
In the US, the hardline extraction position has a significant overlap with Chrisitan Nationalism, a belief strongly held by ~10% of the population and accepted/supported by another ~20%. The CN position, when you get down to it, is that mankind was meant to exert total dominion over the Earth by divine fiat, and that in the not-too distant future the divine power will return and re-establish itself on earth following a period of apocalyptic upheaval.
Those neighborhoods don’t get renewed - their cheaply-built houses just get passed down the economic ladder, while the previous residents buy bigger, nicer houses further out in a new subdivision.
The Dominionist worldview is, as you said, quite common in my home region, and I was told in church youth group that environmentalism was basically paganism.
I nearly turned down my JHU admission because there was no on-campus parking and freshmen were strongly discouraged from having cars - I couldn’t fathom life without a car. One of the first people I met at freshman orientation was a guy from NYC who not only didn’t have a driver’s license, much less a car, neither did his parents! We managed to throughly culture shock each other, as he’d never met an Evangelical or a Texan before, and couldn’t understand why I was so apprehensive about not having access to a car.
Resource constraints can have appalling results (I live near Nuremberg, so I’m well aware), but no sense of them (what I and many middle-class and up Texans grew up with) carries its own dangers to oneself and one’s world.
Well this rather neatly explains New Orleans East as well.
If you were to look at the details, I do not doubt that it would be the same in Europe. Please don't think that any of the 'developed' countries are holier-than-US.
If you buy "stuff", you participate in the exploitation of nature.
1. "Addition of a carbon" tax is highly misleading because it was enacted almost half a decade ago, and while there was an increase in carbon taxes during an inflationary period, that was scheduled years before.[1]
2. Dropping carbon (or similar) taxes to fight inflation is terrible policy. It's untargeted, benefits rich people more (the more gas you use the more you benefit), and encourages more consumption by lowering prices. If you want to provide relief, targeted subsidies work far better.
3. Carbon in the atmosphere is fungible so whether there are trees or not in your country is irrelevant. If your country is pumping 20 tons (or whatever) of carbon into the air, that's still 20 tons of carbon that's heating the atmosphere, or 20 tons that a developing country can no longer emit.
4. Forests are "carbon sinks" in the sense that if you keep them around you'll keep a lot of co2 from entering the atmosphere, but mature forests don't suck much carbon out of the atmosphere (on net).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_pricing_in_Canada#2020:...