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What Kind of a Green Deal? The implications of material and monetary flows.
What Kind of a Green Deal? The implications of material and monetary flows.
What Kind of a Green Deal? The implications of material and monetary flows1.
Contents
Introduction: the resurgence of New Green Deals.
Green Deals, Growth and Material Flows
Paying for a Green Deal: monetary flows.
Introduction: the resurgence of New Green Deals.
With increasing momentum, the idea of a New Green Deal (or Green New Deal) has entered the mainstream of progressive political debate. While a group of British economists and campaigners promoted the idea more than ten years ago2, it didn’t take off then. Now, however, the seriousness of, and public attention to, the climate emergency has helped to revive the idea: an ambitious transformative programme is needed to decarbonise the global economy, not least in the rich countries. Almost simultaneously, a similar set of policy proposals have emerged in several places, including in the USA, with the (New) Green New Deal3 proposed by leftists in the Democratic Party (the “Justice Democrats”4) and adopted by some of the prospective presidential candidates, in the UK, with the Labour Party’s Green Transformation paper5, in Spain, with the PSOE’s Transformación Ecológica6, and in the programme of Yannis Varoufakis’s pan-EU party DIEM 25. These all share the idea of investing in the rapid decarbonisation of the economy, creating “green jobs” in sectors such as renewable energy and housing retrofit, and offering a Just Transition for workers in those industrial sectors (predominantly fossil fuels) that will have to be closed down and replaced.
However, these policy frameworks all have shortcomings: none is, as yet, sufficiently detailed, each leaves significant gaps in the areas that have to be addressed, and all are promoted by parties that have yet to gain power or (in the Spanish case, with a challenging general election imminent) regain it.
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Vaclav Smil. Making the modern world: materials and dematerialization
Vaclav Smil. Making the modern world: materials and dematerialization
Preface. I can’t believe I read this book, it is just a long litany of the gigantic amounts of materials we exploit, with no analysis, implications, or the meaning of what impact this will have on the planet.
I certainly don’t expect anyone to read even this shortened version of his book, but it might be worthwhile to skim for an idea of how much material we’re consuming.
As I point out in my review of the United Nations 2016 report Global material flows and resources productivity” here, in order to accommodate an additional 2 billion people in 2050, material consumption will need to nearly triple to 180 billion tonnes of materials, almost three times today’s amount. If 180 billion tonnes grows in the future at a 5% compound rate, in 497 years the entire earth will be consumed, all 5.972 x 1021 tonnes of it, and we’ll be floating in outer space.
After reading this book, it’s hard to believe there’s anything left to exploit, though here it is 5 years later and the earth is still being pillaged. But from Smil’s gargantuan numbers and the exponential exploitation of just about everything, clearly this will end badly. The issue of peak sand has been in the news more frequently lately, which is essential for civilization to make concrete, computer chips, solar PV, and fracking.
Smil covers a wide range of materials that are essential to civilization that you may not have thought much about, and all the myriad uses of silicon, plastics, nitrogen, aluminum, steel, hydrogen, ammonia, cement, and more. All of them made possible by oil. All of them essential for civilization, so if one fails….(Liebig’s law of the minimum).
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