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Comment by dimitar | Hacker News Reader

Developed countries have grown their GDP while reducing their CO2 emissions. Degrowth is a dangerous distraction

They have grown their GDP how, exactly? Those emissions haven't been reduced; they've been outsourced to China and India, for the most part.

The emissions per killowatt-hour of consumption has gone down, even as energy use has gone up. It has gone down so much that absolute emissions are down, even as absolute energy use is up.

It's not clear to me how this would change if we got more manufacturing here. Energy use would go up, but emissions may not given the continuing decrease per unit energy.

Half of the net CO2 added to the atmosphere since the start of the Industrial Revolution has been in the past thirty years. I'm not saying we need more domestic manufacturing, I'm saying we need less petroleum production, worldwide. That will mean less manufacturing in general, all over the world. Perpetual economic growth is a physical and logical impossibility, and pursuing it is a danger to the individual livelihood of every human being on Earth.

I understand. The argument here is not that we don't need less petroleum use. The argument is that we are accelerating a reduction in petroleum use while still growing the economy, which implies that it's perhaps not true that we need less manufacturing all over the world.

And their point is that petroleum use is still increasing during this time, so that supposition is not likely well supported.

I’d also argue that inflation may be showing that much of that economic increase is ‘fake’ - aka based off money printing more than actual productivity improvements.

This is kind of like saying "I've solved the problem, I'm no longer going 100 miles per hour towards the edge of the cliff, I'm only going 70 miles per hour"

One is making a second order statement and another is making a first order statement. Yes we are merely slowing emissions, but yes a decelerating car is much safer when heading towards cliffs.

An argument can be made that we don't expect the car to speed up significantly anymore. But the steering is haphazard. And the terrain is getting steeper. Some people say they're working on brakes.

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