[Luis Dias]

Curiously, the biggest drop in CO2 emissions for the past 30 years were not due to the depression but due to the gas fracking revolution,

Can I get a citation on that?

Everyone reported this, so if you google it you'll find a lot of it, for instance:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/energysource/2012/12/07/surprise-side-effect-of-shale-gas-boom-a-plunge-in-u-s-greenhouse-gas-emissions/

[Aardwolf]

Would you like to know why I keep repeating what is and is not part of my argument? It's because I came to this thread to talk about one specific thing. The first thing I said, in fact:

If everyone consumed less, emissions would decrease.

Everything about stagnation, and economics in general, was secondary. And yet you have engaged with it exclusively. I am not trying to "dodge" or "backpedal", I am trying to talk about the idea I came here to talk about. I will make one more attempt to rephrase it, and from now on I will not allow myself to waste any more of my own time addressing these secondary issues.

End-user consumption drives all of the (mid-)manufacturing processes that result in the emission of greenhouse gases. Reduce end-user consumption to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases.

[Luis Dias]

So you are saying that we should forget all the other stuff you've thrown at us, we should now focus on this stuff you cherry picked out of the whole because it suits you better?

Clearly you have some issues with expressing yourself, but fine, let's also deconstruct all this shenanigan too:

If everyone consumed less, emissions would decrease.

Untrue. In fact the developing world is about to teach you a lesson on this. While per capita consumption (and wealth) is way way lower in China and other developing countries, their impact on emissions and other pollution indices are beggining to match the developed world's.

This means that "consumption" per se is not sufficient to understand emissions. It's a very small part of the story even. What really matters is how the whole economy is organized, what practices are acted on throughout the entire economic chain.

End-user consumption drives all of the (mid-)manufacturing processes that result in the emission of greenhouse gases. Reduce end-user consumption to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases.

Untrue. And really obnoxious if you consider all the effort Battuta made into trying to make you understand how we are all consuming way way more today not because we retrieve from "mother earth" more, or pollute more, etc., but mainly because we found more efficient means to do so. IOW, with the same raw materials and with even less pollution than before, we are able to produce so much much more than before. And let's not even mention that "wealth" itself, GDP, is not even prima facie about "material goods". It's been mostly about that for the past millenia because without material goods we can't do much of anything, but when you reach a certain point of wealth, then materiality doesn't matter as much as other ****, like cultural goods (IPs), human services, etc., etc. Any actual minimal study of the stats will show you this, but you are so focused on your shenanigan "Argument" that you don't even care to actually read anything factual about the subject matter.

I will try to ignore the rest of the discussion, my spider instincts are shouting to me that this discussion is a really unproductive, inneficient one. And unproductive, inneficient **** is what is driving CO2 emissions, SO.

[zookeeper]

Uh... when producing/consuming X of Y causes Z emissions, then producing/consuming <X of Y does cause <Z emissions, regardless of how efficiently or inefficiently one produces/consumes.

[Luis Dias]

And that resolves what I was discussing with Aardwolf how exactly?

Read the exact sentence he said and reconsider your comment zookeeper. You're attacking a strawman.

[zookeeper]

And that resolves what I was discussing with Aardwolf how exactly?

Read the exact sentence he said and reconsider your comment zookeeper. You're attacking a strawman.

I don't see how that's a strawman. This was your exchange:

If everyone consumed less, emissions would decrease.

Untrue.

End-user consumption drives all of the (mid-)manufacturing processes that result in the emission of greenhouse gases. Reduce end-user consumption to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases.

Untrue.

He was saying that consuming less would reduce emissions, and you said it's not true. I pointed out that of course it's true. To me it seems I was attacking exactly what you yourself said.

[Luis Dias]

Very well, you are right.


I'll refrain from commenting here further because I'm just not enjoying it at all. Please continue at your pleasure.

[General Battuta]

Everything about stagnation, and economics in general, was secondary. And yet you have engaged with it exclusively. I am not trying to "dodge" or "backpedal", I am trying to talk about the idea I came here to talk about. I will make one more attempt to rephrase it, and from now on I will not allow myself to waste any more of my own time addressing these secondary issues.

You don't get to cherrypick components of your own argument and claim they're important. Intention isn't magic. You opened with the assertion that the developing world would be better off after an economic collapse and a return to Malthusian subsistence. That claim has been engaged with. If you didn't come here to talk about that claim, then you shouldn't have made it.

Remember: you claimed that people were resorting to absurdities to make you look like an asshole. It turned out the 'absurdities' were things you had explicitly said. There wasn't even any interpretation required. Bold-text shouting that you always meant to talk about something else does no good.

Would you like to know why I keep repeating what is and is not part of my argument? It's because I came to this thread to talk about one specific thing. The first thing I said, in fact:

If everyone consumed less, emissions would decrease.

If that was what you wanted to talk about, then it's the argument you should have made, not 'maybe the developing world would be better off after Malthusian collapse'! But since I think you've acknowledged that the 'let the developing world suffer' argument is untenable -

Ah, but let's wait. I'm going to prune out the rest of this post and sit on it until you have a chance to read Luis' post and think about it.

Uh... when producing/consuming X of Y causes Z emissions, then producing/consuming <X of Y does cause <Z emissions, regardless of how efficiently or inefficiently one produces/consumes.

This is a great toy model to engage with (I don't mean 'toy' patronizingly, it's a really useful tool). The problem is this:

We decide to produce <X. The supply shock has economic ramifications. We can't build our new hydroelectric dam and fund our new bus system. People keep driving their cars and getting power from a coal plant.

Emissions increase.

[Luis Dias]

That is kind of the thing that is obvious in my head but it's really hard to get other people thinking hard into it. Efficiencies need economies of scale and actual usage of products and means of production in large large quantities. IOW, there exists a paradox of "more is less!" involved here, wherein large economies go through a process of creating a huge environmental destruction while they are growing their GDP until the ecological destruction starts to flatline and then we actually begin improving things aorund us while GDP continues going up, which goes against any simple and basic intuition in the form of "if we consume less, we pollute less!".

This is a complex phenomena that is overwhelmingly ignored in any usual conversation over ecological matters in public (not so in academia) because it is "complex" and it might give people the "wrong impression" that their consumptions are not that problematic or that ecological issues are not so black and white, we should not really confuse simple people with these "adult" nuances. Better to get rid of problematic people like Bjorn Lomborg et als who dare speak these little trade secrets to normal people.

Ah, I'm so cynical today I even forgot my pledge to not talk about this here... sorry.

[zookeeper]

Uh... when producing/consuming X of Y causes Z emissions, then producing/consuming <X of Y does cause <Z emissions, regardless of how efficiently or inefficiently one produces/consumes.

This is a great toy model to engage with (I don't mean 'toy' patronizingly, it's a really useful tool). The problem is this:

We decide to produce <X. The supply shock has economic ramifications. We can't build our new hydroelectric dam and fund our new bus system. People keep driving their cars and getting power from a coal plant.

Emissions increase.

Indeed, something like that would probably happen. However, pretty much anyone who advocates an overall downshifting of consumption/production (hopefully) wouldn't disagree with you if you tell them that our current economic system doesn't deal with that sort of thing very well, and that things like your example can happen if we only decide to produce <X and do nothing else. The need to fix the system to allow for degrowth without disaster is an implied (even if often neglected) part of the suggestion.

[General Battuta]

I completely agree - except in cases where the advocate explicitly suggests that the developing world would be better off after economic disaster, which was the case here.

[Aardwolf]

You don't get to cherrypick components of your own argument and claim they're important. Intention isn't magic. You opened with the assertion that ...

It's called a TOPIC SENTENCE. It usually is the first sentence of a paragraph (or a post).

You have been making inferences about my intentions, and those inferences are WRONG. Furthermore you are telling me my intentions were something other than what I said they were, when I am the only one who can POSSIBLY know what my actual intentions were. In other words, you are accusing me of LYING, which makes you NOT A NICE PERSON.

If you didn't come here to talk about that claim, then you shouldn't have made it.

Evidently not. I wasn't expecting to have to deal with a NOT NICE PERSON.

[General Battuta]

Oh, my vile fabrication - the assertion that you said:

If everyone consumed less, emissions would decrease.

Impoverished... so like if a bunch of industrial jobs dried up... bleh. Maybe they'd be better off with a total economic collapse. You don't need money to get food, water, and shelter¹... maybe you need money for decent medical care, but... bleh.

BLEH


¹Talking about living off the land, not 4-finger discount

How devious. How evil. It's as if, by quoting exactly what you said, I'm somehow changing what you said into a lie!

You asserted that the developing world might be better off after a total economic collapse. That assertion was engaged with. You can panic about the realization that you made that assertion, and lash out - or you can accept it and move on with the discussion.

[Luis Dias]

Apparently I'm also an awful person, but come to think of it, it might also be just probably that my english is way way more subpar than I thought it was. So I think I'll take the opportunity to go back to school and learn English all over again because clearly when I read someone saying "X" I'm being a terrible person for trusting my eyes and my backwards knowledge of the language.

I'm so sorry, back at school now kthnksbye

[Aardwolf]

you have made claims about what my intentions were.
i have told you what my intentions were.
you have claimed my intentions were not what i told you they were.
therefore you are accusing me of lying.

edit: not you luis, you didn't claim to know what my intentions were (afaik?)

[General Battuta]

I walked you through your argument already. Now let's walk you through your responses to counterarguments, so you can understand those too.

If your premises have led you to an absurd conclusion, e.g. that Aardwolf is a colossal dick (see quote above), you should probably reëxamine those premises, e.g. stagnation¹ must always lead to poverty, famine, etc..

¹Stagnation, the cessation of growth. The world economy cannot expand indefinitely.

"If it seems like my argument implied horrible things, you must have misunderstood it. The world doesn't work in a way that would cause my argument to imply something horrible."

If you continue to push an absurd argument that makes you look like a colossal dick, perhaps you should reexamine your argument.

No. You made assumptions about what my argument is, and those assumptions were untrue.

Specifically, it seems you assumed that I was advocating reverting to ye olden food/medicine/shelter technology. Why would I advocate cutting the essentials, when there are things that are wasteful and unnecessary like automobiles and bottled water¹ that could be cut? I wouldn't, and I didn't.

In case you didn't understand the rationale for including the Sitting Bull quote: we have the technological and industrial means to leave no person unfed, unclothed, or unsheltered. We also have the means to make a whole lot of unnecessary consumer goods and to burn a whole lot of unnecessary fuel getting people and things from one place to another, and turn this planet into Venus II in the process. We can do one without the other. Take a guess which one I'm advocating.

"You assumed I said the third world would be better off after a total economic collapse! You were wrong. What I really meant was that we should reduce unnecessary consumption of goods not vital to a humane standard of living." (I'll break from summary here to note that this is logically incompatible: you proposed that the third world would be better off after a total economic collapse, and now you are claiming you never advocated 'cutting the essentials', which contravenes 'total economic collapse.')

Your next step is to misremember your own argument:

Here is an absurd argument:

Let their development stagnate, in all fields, including the essentials for survival, i.e. food/water/shelter/clothing/medicine, while at the same time continuing to increase their population and rate of consumption.

Notice how as your remove some of those caveats the argument becomes less absurd.

You frame an 'absurd argument' as a rhetorical device, yet the 'absurd argument' is actually less severe than 'total economic collapse.'

Now let's try looking at my actual argument:

Consume less, and don't reproduce so much. If reduced consumption causes factories to close and people to lose their jobs, there is still enough food/water/shelter/clothing/medicine to hypothetically support everyone, if only it can be distributed sanely.

You frame a new argument and insist it was your original argument. The argument is also factually incorrect, since it ignores the role of capital in distributing resources, but we can set that aside since it's unnecessary to the task here: walking you through how you abandoned your own original position and now insist it never existed.

Note that "consume less" was effectively the first thing I said. Then notice how I considered the fact that people would lose their jobs, and said "bleh" a lot, because if we can't distribute stuff sanely that's going to be a bad time¹ for a lot of people. And the thought of that displeases me, hence "bleh".

I then proceeded to ask what's so bad about stagnation. Apparently people can't take a "what's so bad about" question at face value. It would've been nice if somebody would've articulated what the problem is. The best answer I can extract from what you guys have said is "If you do it stupidly, it will be very bad." (which I already knew), and I had to come up with "To do it smartly would require a significantly different economic system" on my own (although I sort of already knew that one too).

Here you are worried that people did not take your question 'at face value'. You proceed to become upset that people took your advocacy for total economic collapse in the third world at face value. You ignore the efforts that have been taken to explain factor productivity development to you, and muse that you had to come up with the solution on your own.

When did I ask if we can't be more efficient? When I used the words "wasteful and unnecessary?, I wasn't talking about "make the process of making plastic for bottled water more efficient", I'm saying "drink tapwater".

This is not a vital part of your argument, but I think it is revelatory: you see the problem as a choice between 'bottled water' and 'tapwater', rather than a choice between 'tapwater' and 'filthy groundwater, if water is available at all'.

Your very first assertion was that 'if everyone consumed less, emissions would decrease'. More than a day, and considerable words, have now been spent examining this viewpoint and explaining its nuances to you. What have you learned from this? Do you have a better understanding of why 'reduce demand' may not be a plausible solution to the problem of rising emissions in the developing world? Would you still assert that the third world would be better off after a total economic collapse, and that this is a viable solution in order to reduce emissions?

[General Battuta]

you have made claims about what my intentions were.
i have told you what my intentions were.
you have claimed my intentions were not what i told you they were.
therefore you are accusing me of lying.

Just one post ago, you were the one accusing me of lying. Which is it? Is it bad, or not bad, to accuse someone of lying? Is it acceptable to accuse someone of lying when you are the person doing it, but not when others accuse you?

[mjn.mixael]

I only read the first page of this thread (and enough of the last to see things have gotten tense).. I loved the first page.

I also love modern reporting.

[Scotty]

I've locked this topic to give everyone a day or so to compose themselves and take it back from the edge of turning ugly.  It might get unlocked again, but for right now it's generating an undue number of reports.

[Scotty]

It's been a few hours and I know that there has been discussion on the subject.  Re-opened on the condition that discussion of the actual issues resumes.  The issues, not who said what and when.