Growth Decoupled from Emissions
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Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions / The Economist
A truism of economics and governance for the past three-hundred years or so has been that more emissions equals more productivity and wealth.
If you can burn coal, amazing: you’re capable of producing more, faster, because that’s a lot of condensed energy you have available to use for all sorts of purposes.
Got oil? Even better. There are an abundance of use-cases for such a versatile energy source.
Because of this seeming one-to-one relationship in which more energy leads to more flourishing, it’s long been assumed by some that an energy transition away from abundant and relatively easy to process fossil fuels would require that we step back from modern amenities and assumptions, reducing our standards to clean up our ecosystems and truncate the impacts of human-amplified climate change.
This long-held assumption (which has been amplified by fossil fuel interests for obvious reasons) is no longer widely held, however.
Recent data shows that many nations have already started decoupling economics from fossil fuels, and GDP levels (one of many measures we could use, but a common one) are no longer tied to burning oil and coal: in fact, many of the countries that have been most ambitious in their adoption of solar, wind, hydro, and other such power sources are performing at the top of the list according to these energy-source-agnostic measures.
Thus, it’s looking likely that the economic argument against making this pivot won’t hold up much longer, and that there’s a real opportunity for developing nations to skip the fossil fuel-dependence step and segue straight into a cleaner, abundance-associated energy setup.
Also: The ugly story of how corporate America convinced us to spend so much on water
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