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Comment by shrubble | Hacker News Reader

I had heard of it, but had not read it before. I am finding some logical fallacies in their statements, haven't finished it yet.

For instance, "Most people intuitively and correctly reject extrapolations like those shown in table 3, because the results appear ridiculous. It must be recognized, however, that in rejecting extrapolated values, one is also rejecting the assumption that there will be no change in the system"

... no, a valid criticism would be that your model is wrong and should be rejected, and you need a better method for doing extrapolations. Table 3 predicted in 1970 (when it was written) that the Chinese GNP per capita in 2000 would be $100 (it was about $1200 according to the stats I can find online).

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GNP is probably not that great a measure, especially nominal GNP. 100 1970 dollars is around 800 2023 dollars. Also the method of GNP/GDP calculation has changed over time, e.g. finance was not counted as productive until 1993.

Edit: The table in The Limits to Growth explicitly states that it predicts real GNP: "* Based on the 1968 dollar with no allowance for inflation."

https://thenewschool.medium.com/accounting-for-gdp-the-histo...

So there was a chance in the system: China moved to a market economy.

Some changes happening in the system right now:

Solar power.

Coal being used less for energy.

Electric cars.

Has the correlation between fossil fuels and energy consumption ended (decoupled) ?

Saying there are changes in the system is even less useful than saying the sky is blue.

There are no system that have zero changes.

Only models that don't or can't account for the changes.

If one is not humble enough to remember all models are wrong, but some are useful, there is not much we can do.

This is a wildly armchair question, but can't we just model human's ability to adapt to change and then as a result determine if technology will be sufficient to save us from impending environmental collapse? I suppose this is a multi-trillion dollar open question...?

I doubt we can model it in a way that is useful.

We have many examples of us both adapting and failing to adapt, and can therefore say things like "adapts X% of the time", except in those cases the solution has often been "move elsewhere and/or fight other people" which I think isn't useful because it doesn't work so well on a planetary scale unless and until interplanetary travel is as easy as the Mayflower/Plymouth Rock journey.

Might still be useful for general governance just by characterising dangerous parts of the phase space[0] where dragons be so they can be avoided.

[0] how does phase space differ from latent space anyway?

> Coal being used less for energy.

I believe that 2023 saw a record use of coal for energy worldwide.

Global peak, falling in many countries, and believed by the International Energy Agency to be Coal's last hurrah ...

    For the forecast period, we expect a net reduction in global coal production starting in 2024, which would mean global coal production peaking in 2023 in line with global coal demand.

    Ongoing declines in the United States and the European Union are likely to be complemented by reduced production volumes in Indonesia, as Chinese demand for seaborne thermal coal is likely to decrease.

    The last bastion of remarkable growth in production is India, serving the growing demand from its power sector. 

    Our model suggests that declines in other countries will more than offset this growth, resulting in global production of 8 394 Mt in 2026.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38652273

https://www.iea.org/reports/coal-2023/supply

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/12/15/global-coal-use-to...

It’s declining in many countries. This is predicted to be global peak coal.

> Has the correlation between fossil fuels and energy consumption ended (decoupled) ?

It seems: no.

https://eeb.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Decoupling-Debunk...

Although the decoupling mentioned there relates to emissions and economic growth (not just energy consumption), it covers a wide range of examples.

Problems caused by disproportionate and continually increasing resource consumption are not limited to securing energy supply.

And energy consumption is not limited to electricity.

E.g. to make an electric car, you will create a lot of pollution and environmental destruction, before it has even got its first battery charge.

Your article is a variant on the tiresome "X won't save us" articles that point out, rather boringly, that one single thing isn't enough to lead us into some eco-nirvana.

It gets bonus points for explicitly pointing this out itself at the end of the introduction.

No, the end of the introduction is a friendly and carefully watered down summary of the content: CO2-neutral growth is not happening as claimed, and it is not scientifically sound to claim the opposite.

The paper lines this out in detail, e.g. for the GDP of Denmark.

I'd suggest you read it instead of going in attack mode. And honestly, I find this kind of statement very tiresome, too:

> Your article is a variant on the tiresome "X won't save us" articles that point out, rather boringly, that one single thing isn't enough to lead us into some eco-nirvana.

Information value zero. It seems you refuse to even try and understand the science and the problems.

If you read the article, you'd know that "Green growth is not feasible as the sole strategy to reduce emissions" is basically sugar coating for "Green growth is a lie".

It is sugar coated in an attempt to reach people in power who, just like you, refuse to think about basic facts and instead retreat to partisanship.

And sorry, but another thing I have to add: this is not "my" article, and it does not need "bonus points" by people who obviously haven't read or understood it (based on the absent content in your response and the time you took to write it)

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