so-called good news
Halina Brown
This is what I heard on public radio today as the cause for celebration: in 2022 the U.S. economy grew by 1.9% and GHG emissions grew by only 1.3%. The reason: the use of coal has declined and the use of renewable energy has increased. I suppose this is not all bad though it does not get us anywhere.
Halina
Richard Rosen
This is what I heard on public radio today as the cause for celebration: in 2022 the U.S. economy grew by 1.9% and GHG emissions grew by only 1.3%. The reason: the use of coal has declined and the use of renewable energy has increased. I suppose this is not all bad though it does not get us anywhere.
Halina
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Rees, William E.
Actually, it's still worse than you might think. The focus on the decoupling of carbon dioxide emissions from GDP is misleading at best potentially catastrophic at worst. It illustrates the narrow, reductionist simplistic quality of much human cognition.
The alleged decoupling of CO2 and GDP is often taken to show that the economy is separating from nature and used as a rationale that material growth can therefore continue. This is sheer constructed illusion based on a single isolated variable among hundreds.
The broader reality is that resource consumption and equivalent waste production by human beings makes them the single largest consumer organism in all the world's accessible ecosystems. H. sapiens is arguably the greatest herbivore and carnivore the world has ever seen. We comprise 34% of mammalian biomass (up from a pre-agricultural <1.0%); add in domestic livestock, and the human enterprise comprises about 96% of mammalian biomass, 'competitively excluding' non-human species from their food sources and habitats. The scale of this 'intrusion' increases with every increase in GDP/GWP. Meanwhile, the massive buildup of entropic waste (including CO2) complete the picture of the human enterprise as the largest dissipative structure on the planet.
In short, we are busily consuming and pollution the biophysical basis of our own existence at an accelerating pace, comforted by the shared illusion that the economy is decoupling from the 'environment'.
Enjoy your day.
Bill
Sent: Tuesday, January 10, 2023 7:44:38 AM
To: hbr...@clarku.edu
Cc: sco...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [SCORAI] so-called good news
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