{"id":54207,"date":"2020-07-17T10:25:45","date_gmt":"2020-07-17T15:25:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=54207"},"modified":"2020-07-17T10:32:05","modified_gmt":"2020-07-17T15:32:05","slug":"54207","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=54207","title":{"rendered":"Living the Good Life \u2026 Without Killing the Planet"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Living the Good Life \u2026 Without Killing the Planet<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

How can we live the \u2018good life\u2019 without killing the planet? My last post on energy and empire<\/a> got me thinking about this question. We know that human welfare improves as we use more resources. But it\u2019s suicidal for all of humanity to pursue this path. If the whole world lived like Americans, we\u2019d triple our carbon emissions.1<\/sup><\/a> So that\u2019s not an option (not a sane one, at least).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How, then, can we improve human well-being without consuming more resources? Many people have an opinion on this question. But instead of giving you my<\/em> opinion, I\u2019ll look at the evidence<\/em>. Let\u2019s see what countries actually do to improve human welfare without using more energy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Measuring well-being<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m going to measure well-being using life expectancy (from birth). It may seem like a crude measure, but the more I think about it, life expectancy is probably the best measure of welfare we have. First, people universally want to be healthy. And there\u2019s no better way to measure health than to see how long people live. Second, \u2018health\u2019 is holistic \u2014 it\u2019s affected by your whole life experience. Health tends to worsen when you\u2019re stressed, unhappy, and otherwise malcontent. I think it\u2019s reasonable, then, to use life expectancy to measure human welfare in a holistic sense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So how can we increase<\/em> life expectancy? The route we\u2019ve taken for the last two centuries is to consume more energy. Make no mistake, this works<\/em>. As Figure 1 shows, using more energy (per person) reliably increases life expectancy. The black line is the trend across all the data. Countries that start at agrarian levels of energy use (about 20 GJ per person) can expect to gain, on average, about 20 years of life expectancy as they industrialize.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Living the Good Life \u2026 Without Killing the Planet How can we live the \u2018good life\u2019 without killing the planet? My last post on energy and empire got me thinking about this question. We know that human welfare improves as we use more resources. But it\u2019s suicidal for all of humanity to pursue this path. If the […]<\/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":[3],"tags":[29938,29907,24794,20756],"class_list":["post-54207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","tag-blair-fix","tag-economics-from-the-top-down","tag-life-expectancy","tag-resource-use"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54207","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=54207"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54207\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54209,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54207\/revisions\/54209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}