Richer is Cleaner and Greener
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The good news keeps rolling in. I hope to do a few more of these before real life resumes. Enjoy!
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Use Energy, Get Rich and Save the Planet
By the 1990s, researchers realized that graphs of environmental impact didn’t produce a simple upward-sloping line as countries got richer. The line more often rose, flattened out and then reversed so that it sloped downward, forming the shape of a dome or an inverted U — what’s called a Kuznets curve. (See nytimes.com/tierneylab for an example.)
In dozens of studies, researchers identified Kuznets curves for a variety of environmental problems. There are exceptions to the trend, especially in countries with inept governments and poor systems of property rights, but in general, richer is eventually greener. As incomes go up, people often focus first on cleaning up their drinking water, and then later on air pollutants like sulfur dioxide.
As their wealth grows, people consume more energy, but they move to more efficient and cleaner sources — from wood to coal and oil, and then to natural gas and nuclear power, progressively emitting less carbon per unit of energy. This global decarbonization trend has been proceeding at a remarkably steady rate since 1850, according to Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University and Paul Waggoner of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station.
The Good News
These Kuznets graphs confirm that the best way forward for the environment is by way of technological and economic development. Technological progress gives us the means of producing energy in increasingly clean ways and adds to our ability to mitigate damage that's already been done. Malthusian and Luddite approaches are wrong because they assume a zero-sum world (which this is not) and they ask the developing world to forego many of the benefits of technology and economic growth that we in the developed world take for granted, meanwhile demanding that the developed world to take this whole standard of living thing down a notch. Yet somehow a philosophy which is as indifferent to the human misery it allows (and causes) as it is ineffective in protecting the environment -- the developing world will just revert to burning charcoal and peat once you take all the other infrastructure away -- dubs itself Sustainability.
True sustainability requires adopting an approach that improves the lives of the people involved. There is only one truly sustainable direction for humanity...forward.
UPDATE: Check out these 10 Technologies on the Green Frontier.
Live to see it!
