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Comment by blindhippo | Hacker News Reader

"The doom-mongers will tell you that we cannot sustain worldwide economic growth without ruining our environment. But while the rich world’s economies grew by 6 per cent over the last seven years, fossil fuel consumption in those countries fell by 4 per cent. This remarkable (and, again, unreported) achievement has nothing to do with green taxes or wind-farms. It is down to consumer demand for more efficient cars and factories."

Statement is made that it's all because of capitalism - yet no evidence is cited or even presented. The chinese reference is amazing too, because we all know the Chinese government has had nothing to do with the economic boom they have undergone in the past decade.

Let alone how nearly 2 generations have been raised to "reduce, reuse and recycle" through educational programs promoted by Government initiatives.

But no... it's all consumer demand that fixed emissions issues. Simple arguments for simple minds.

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Simple arguments and lack of citations cut both ways... where is your evidence that "reduce, reuse and recycle" initiatives have had a non-negligible effect on fossil fuel consumption? Here's a factor I bet was bigger: US emissions hitting a 20-year-low this year due largely to electricity generation switching from coal to natural gas[1] due to record low prices of abundant natural gas.

[1]http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/02/us-emissions-idUSB...

That's precisely what I was trying to illustrate. This isn't an issue that has one simple answer.

Cracking is extremely harmful to the environment. Might not be right now, but future generations aren't going to thank us!

Not to mention: "According to China’s 12th Five-Year Plan for Economic and Social Development (2011-2015), the country will spend $473.1 billion on clean energy investments over the next five years. China’s goal is to have 20 percent of its total energy demand sourced from renewable energy by 2020." (http://www.forbes.com/sites/jackperkowski/2012/07/27/china-l...).

Nope, government had nothing to do with this at all.

I don't see any reason to reinterpret this as an anti-government pamphlet. It's just pointing out that economic conditions and mentality are changing around the world, but that this is often overlooked in the news cycle because politicians don't report on it when it is not their personal achievement.

I agree entirely with the sentiments about politicians - but this article confuses "government" with "politics" and assumes the market solved problems without any influence from prior sources.

There is zero analysis or even allusion to what factors might have influenced the demand that ultimately caused the market to react. Just a blanket statement about how the governments of the world aren't doing anything useful.

What part of "consumer demand" excludes the source of that demand being educational programs? Your inference of a political motive here seems like projection.

Kinda what I was highlighting...

The part that doesn't explicitly spell out the possibility of this, to make it seem like consumer demand can rise out of the mere market itself, without educational programs and the like...

"because we all know the Chinese government has had nothing to do with the economic boom they have undergone in the past decade."

No I do not know that. Please provide a reference.

I believe there should have been a /s after that statement.

I'll leave it up to you to research why I possibly might have inferred that the Chinese government has a hand in their economic boom.

It isn't responsibility of people reading your comment to research why you're correct. If you make a claim, you need to be prepared to back it up if you want it to carry weight.

For starters, the Chinese government has artificially tied the Yuan to the US Dollar in a way that the exchange rate favors the rest of the world out-sourcing their manufacturing to China (i.e. cheap labor).

So? That is the opposite of "has had nothing to do with [it]".

The parent post was being sarcastic since it's fairly well-known that the Chinese government does not have a 'hands off' approach to their economy.

Measuring in GDP is ridiculous (assuming that is how the comparisons are made), given that any person who researches the topic can rather quickly realize the numbers are heavily manipulated.

Prior to Deng Xiaopeng's reforms in the early 80's, the Chinese economy was mired in central planning and excessive bureaucracy. People were literally starving and had been for decades; there was no hope for anything better in life.

And then China opened its doors to foreign direct investment, the government relaxed its grip on the economy and declared the quest for riches to be a glorious endeavor rather than a shameful one, and almost instantaneously, the Chinese economy began growing. Thirty years later, China has gone from an economic disaster to being the second largest economy in the world, and despite its burgeoning size, it is still growing rapidly today. In the process, literally hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of abject poverty, and the Chinese people are hopeful of the future again.

It was not the government that did this; it was globalization, it was capitalism, it was the desire to make a profit. And of course, there were naysayers the entire way whining about sweatshops and the loss of American jobs, but meanwhile, poor Chinese people were happily migrating from the farms to work for what we considered a pittance, but for them, it was a godsend, and over the years, their wages have risen along with China's per capita income. Today, they are among the highest paid workers in the third world, and that trend continues.

The same cycle has played out in numerous countries around the world: abandon communism, embrace capitalism, experience rapid economic growth.

If you cannot see for yourself that capitalism is what has driven this explosion of economic activity around the globe, then you, well... Perhaps the problem is not that our argument is too simplistic, but that yours is too complex.

Missing the forest for the trees comes to mind.

>> Today, they are among the highest paid workers in the second world, and that trend continues.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_World

My apologies.

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