New technologies have not helped yet. Just covered part of increased demand. So it doesn't seem like technology is going to save us.
It is all just distraction. Only way is one that will never happen: de-growth.
It is all just distraction. Only way is one that will never happen: de-growth.
Those two statements are in direct conflict. Look at these two graphs, one for UK CO2 emissions [0] and the other for England's population [1] (Sorry I couldn't get a UK population graph, but to the best of my understanding they're proportional). Population is up 20%, CO2 emissions are down 50%. If that's not technology helping, I don't know what it is.
> It is all just distraction. Only way is one that will never happen: de-growth.
Disagree. We have plenty of resources, we're just incredibly, incredibly wasteful with them.
Here in the UK, there is a group trying to advocate for insulating houses who are being met with "it's too hard, it's too expensive, insulation doesn't work, causes damp, heat pumps don't work in -24c, it's a ploy from the government to limit our resource usage", but the reality of the situation is that slapping up insulated plasterboard on the inside of half of the UK's homes and putting a trickle vent on the window would save an enormous amout of CO2 and make people more comfortable. There are loans and grants available for those who can't quite afford it, and for those who absolutely can't afford it it's often done for free (yes there's a gap in the middle, but honestly we can deal with them when we've dealt with the other two categories), and yet still people won't do it.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/449503/co2-emissions-uni... [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/975956/population-of-eng...
And meanwhile require a complete redoing of all interior finishes, including the finish carpentry, in the home. IMO, that's the real barrier (no pun intended) here.
Near Boston, I live in a 1920s structural brick house (I think what the UK would call cavity wall construction). The house was built without any explicit "this material is insulation" and has been retrofitted with attic fiberglass, attic floor cellulose, and I spray foamed one room we renovated. Some of my rooms are painted, which would be manageable cost-wise, but still would have a 20+ year payback period if money had no cost to borrow. Other rooms have intricate wallpaper or decorative wood paneling which would be much more expensive to recreate (pushing the payback period much farther out).
With interest rates above 5%, a 20-year-at-0-interest project literally never pays to do. Even grant programs will often cover the direct insulation work but don't (and frankly, probably shouldn't) pay for intricate finish carpentry work or wallcoverings.
That's called deindustrialisation and delocalisation
I meant that the natural outcome will happen, and likely that will negatively affect the planet's carrying capacity, which will have a negative affect on population and economics.
Like you, I do not see how the collection of world governments will align on all scaling back their economies together.
Of course for decades this has been offset by population growth even in those nations. And that's not accounting for the parts of the world where populations exploded due to better agriculture, medicine and trade. If we had time to let it play out for another 200 years without climate issues we might be fine. Sadly we don't.