{"id":33143,"date":"2018-04-05T10:37:03","date_gmt":"2018-04-05T15:37:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=33143"},"modified":"2018-04-05T10:37:03","modified_gmt":"2018-04-05T15:37:03","slug":"the-magical-thinking-of-ecomodernism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=33143","title":{"rendered":"The Magical Thinking of Ecomodernism"},"content":{"rendered":"
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THE MAGICAL THINKING OF ECOMODERNISM<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
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I recently wrote an article for Fast Company<\/a> explaining why \u201cgreen growth\u201d is not a thing.\u00a0 I looked at three high-profile studies showing that even aggressive taxes and rapid improvements in technological efficiency will not be enough to cut global resource use as long as we keep growing the world economy.\u00a0 Right now we are consuming about 85 billion tons of material stuff per year, exceeding the sustainable threshold by 70%.\u00a0 According to the UN, our resource use will rise to at least 132 billion tons per year by 2050, and possibly as high as 180 billion tons.<\/p>\n

It is on this basis that scientists have concluded that absolute decoupling of GDP from aggregate resource use is not possible.\u00a0 But the ecomodernists at the Breakthrough Institute aren\u2019t convinced.\u00a0 Linus Blomqvist wrote a blog post<\/a> responding to my article, arguing that focusing on aggregate material flows is \u201cmisleading\u201d, and that in reality absolute decoupling \u201cis still a very real possibility.\u201d\u00a0 The stakes are high.\u00a0 After all, decoupling is the central objective of ecomodernism. \u00a0No decoupling, no ecomodernism.<\/p>\n

Blomqvist seems to agree that absolute decoupling of GDP from aggregate material use is not possible; or at least he doesn\u2019t dispute the point.\u00a0 But we needn\u2019t worry about this fact, he says; it doesn\u2019t matter if we keep using more and more resources each year, because aggregate material use is not a meaningful proxy for environmental impact.\u00a0 Industrial and construction materials, for instance, \u201caccount for a pretty small portion of environmental impacts like greenhouse gas emissions or land use,\u201d and while biomass use keeps growing, land use has peaked (at least for now).<\/p>\n

But this is cherrypicking indicators.\u00a0 Industrial and construction materials may contribute relatively little to greenhouse gas emissions and land use, but anyone who has ever seen (or lived next to) an open pit mine will know that they are ecological disaster zones in all sorts of other ways.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

THE MAGICAL THINKING OF ECOMODERNISM I recently wrote an article for Fast Company explaining why \u201cgreen growth\u201d is not a thing.\u00a0 I looked at three high-profile studies showing that even aggressive taxes and rapid improvements in technological efficiency will not be enough to cut global resource use as long as we keep growing the world […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,4,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-environment","category-survival-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33143"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33143\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33144,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33143\/revisions\/33144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}