Is economic growth fuelling climate change?

Is economic growth fuelling climate change? | Crunched

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FT data journalists Federica Cocco and John Burn-Murdoch look at the numbers behind George Monbiot's argument that pressures for GDP growth of 3 per cent are in conflict with the drastic changes needed to prevent the worst impacts of climate change.
"A new approach to measuring green GDP" International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Sustainability Issues
jssidoi.org/jesi/uploads/arti...
The Growth Delusion by David Pilling www.penguinrandomhouse.com/bo...
Why it is time to change the way we measure the wealth of nations by David Pilling www.ft.com/content/765781fe-f...
UK’s ONS calculates natural capital www.ons.gov.uk/economy/enviro...
Why GDP is meaningless ideas.ted.com/why-we-shouldnt...
Green GDP accounting www.sciencedirect.com/science...
Green GDP and ecological debt www.jagranjosh.com/general-kn...
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Пікірлер: 75

@TheCJUN 5 жыл бұрын

A bigger economy allow for higher consumption and the latter rather than the former is what ultimatly harms the environment.

@MRAROCKERDUDE 5 жыл бұрын

The FT, using facts to combat rhetoric. I love it and that’s why I love your organisation

@FinancialTimes 4 жыл бұрын

Thank you, that's very nice to hear. Let us know if there are specific topics you'd like us to tackle.

@Doctor_Subtilis 3 жыл бұрын

They are using facts, only some of which are true, to mislead their audience on behalf of their corporate benefactors. This is pure propaganda my friend, you aren't going to find anything else outside of the academic literature. Economic growth is strongly coupled with climate change and much more, from species extinctions, to the death of the cultures that sacrifice everything in the name of endless growth, or cultures chosen to be sacrificed by the marginal calculations of the international finance monster. Official rhetoric claims economic growth brings prosperity, jobs, flourishing, etc. This narrative is only partly true as well, its constructed to keep people from learning the truth, from discovering that greed has this world in a death grip, that what is called prosperity only comes at the sacrifice of what can't be bought, for what can. The funny thing is the pundit hacks don't know what they are doing. They arent paid to speak the truth, they are paid to speak the talking points that are handed down to them by executives. a 'data scientist' working in corporate media is just a trendy new word for sophist. The funny thing is the sophist here probably isn't aware of his role. I'm not using sophist in the pejorative sense, it's an important role for society. My point is if you want something that isn't rhetoric, if you want to know the truth about the facts, you have to find it, it won't be given to you, not even by this comment. [Spoiler] the degrowther in the beginning was correct, the growth cult can't go on. See the limits to growth literature, look at critical development studies, see the literature surrounding the degrowth debate. The development agencies and hack econmist have all the facts in the world, but they don't collect facts for the sake of it, they do it because controlling the flow of information and thus the ability to actively manage and engineer public discourse makes power untouchable and it's secrets imperceptible. This isn't a conspiracy, there isn't a cabal or secret society orchestrating this, there are many, and they all consist of fools that barely know what is going on. The conspiracies, which are mostly banal, naturally spring up in a world where capital is god, it's the will of mammon. the logic of greed and market forces naturally brought us here.

@eleoptera 4 жыл бұрын

The only way we could have economic growth without environmental destruction would be to mine on other planets and asteroids... Just logically how do you imagine that to work?

@michaelochoa914 3 жыл бұрын

are you ok?

@MRAROCKERDUDE 5 жыл бұрын

I would love to see Crunched look into the topic of energy efficiency in the UK and how that relates to climate change. There are a growing number of smaller, renewable energy suppliers (eg. Bulb, Ecotricity etc) that are disrupting the market. I would love to see data looking at how growth of this new sector could affect CO2 emissions, energy prices, energy efficiency, UK- wide going forward.

@waulie_palnuts 5 жыл бұрын

I was excited to see that you were going to be addressing this topic, but, to be honest, a bit disappointed by the shallow treatment. I’m no expert, but from what I’ve read it looks like it’s possible to decouple GDP growth from carbon emissions, but not from environmental damage more generally. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5065220/ This is an enormously serious issue and it’s organisations like the FT that should be getting to grips with it. Unfortunately, this came across as a bit dismissive. ‘Green GDP’ is better than nothing but it really seems like it doesn’t come close to capturing the extent of the damage being done. As much as I like the FT, I can’t help but wonder if this is an issue that requires a kind of radical thinking that the paper isn’t cut out for. (By the way, it’s ‘Monbiot’, not ‘Mombiot’)

@Rnankn 2 жыл бұрын

More than any other times, we live in the environmental times, err financial times, no wait…end times

@hazdude222 5 жыл бұрын

Where on earth are those GDP figures from? Makes it slightly hard to take the stated "green GDP" figures seriously when the UK apparently grew by 10%

@federicacocco9945 5 жыл бұрын

It's absolutely impossible - they are from this academic paper jssidoi.org/jesi/uploads/articles/16/Stjepanovic_A_new_approach_to_measuring_green_GDP_a_crosscountry_analysis.pdf I am not sure where they got 10% from - I am going to get in touch with the academics to ask.

@emperorpicard6474 3 жыл бұрын

Simon Kuznets, the inventor of GDP warned the government not to use it as an indicator of economic health of growth (but of course they just ignored him). GDP is fundamentally flawed as a indicate of economic health or growth, putting a bunch of extra variables on top to make it "green" does not fix it. You cannot create a aggregate metric of economic health or growth because the economy is mad up of individual actors, meaning that neither GDP nor "green" GDP will be of any real use, apart from politics to fool people into thinking that government action somehow helps the economy.

@YoushaAhmad 5 жыл бұрын

I like this idea of a green GDP but there has to be an error with the UK growth figures.

@federicacocco9945 5 жыл бұрын

Hi Yoshua - Federica from the FT here. Absolutely agree those figures were odd and most likely incorrect but they were from an academic paper and for consistency we had to use them. Hope we communicated our scepticism effectively!

@garybobst9107 3 жыл бұрын

El Presidente said he preferred the TRUTH over facts.

@TheJamesthe13 5 жыл бұрын

Those numbers only make sense if you take western economies in isolation. The carbon footprint of GDP may be decreasing in the developed world, but it is nowhere near as positive a ratio if you include Asia, South America, and Africa! So the numbers are skewed at best in this video. Also, I believe the main point raised was the idea that GDP is an inadequate measure for human welfare. Nvm, serves me right commenting before the end of the video... They didn't address that point even a little bit... Love how human welfare never even entered into the conversation.

@Rnankn 2 жыл бұрын

Because they can’t understand welfare outside of commodity consumption

@wcoenen 5 жыл бұрын

I feel that the original point about doubling periods (3%=doubling in 24y) hasn't really been adressed here. As long as the GDP number is measuring something tangible, we're still striving for exponential growth of something tangible. Changing the definition of GDP to be greener doesn't change that. Exponential growth cannot be sustained forever in a finite world. A fun exercise to understand this better is to calculate how long energy use can grow before we get to the point where we use as much power as is currently received by the Earth from the sun. It doesn't take as long as you'd think.

@ajx9747 5 жыл бұрын

Space is practically infinite. We can expand in space

@wcoenen 5 жыл бұрын

@@ajx9747 Even expansion into space cannot keep up with exponential growth. Imagine a civilization expanding at light speed in all directions into an infinite universe. Let's take the volume of that expansion bubble as a proxy for the available resources. The volume of this bubble only increases as time to the third power. An exponential function will always catch up with a polynomial, so the civilization will run out of resources eventually.

@janisnorins5312 5 жыл бұрын

What he said - It is not about the CO2 only. It includes - pollution - deforestation - desertification - animal extinction ( insects included) - water shortage and other stuff. The planet is a resource - we are soon to exceed the overdraft.

@longnewton1 Жыл бұрын

The chart showing reducing energy intensity of economic growth is highly misleading and drawn in a way that implies we can separate carbon emissions from growth when in fact is doesn’t. What it shows is that the relative amount of carbon emissions is reducing per unit of growth. So we still have CO2 emissions and CO2 in the atmosphere continues to increase and with it, global heating. Absolute decoupling of growth form carbon emissions is theoretically possible, but we’re nowhere near this and it can’t be done quickly enough. In addition certain key material like lithium and copper are also limited and this will constrain green growth. Changing how we measure growth to green GDP doesn’t solve the problem. You would still need to measure carbon emissions. What all governments should measure is how they are improving our wellbeing and the wellbeing of the planet. Instead of trying to distract us with biased and misleading charts, we need to get to the heart of the problem. How can we ween ourselves off economic growth because if we don’t, we are in deep trouble. And scientific consensus is that we have already missed the chance to limit global heating to 1.5 degrees. We need real action, now!

@Enzo500S 5 жыл бұрын

This content is spot on and so interesting! Although I don think its funny that the FT think connecting with 'The Youth' means having their experts sit on the floor and hand each other's macbook back and forth. #MidclassThursdays

@giolag5593 5 жыл бұрын

Haha it may be that they are currently moving out of their current offices to return to the offices they occupied (next to St Paul's) almost three decades ago...

@peterrees6346 4 жыл бұрын

Enzo500 the subtext is that; “this is all child’s play.” How could anyone not understand that growth is good!?

@andrewpaterson5192 2 жыл бұрын

The efficiency argument is a problem ( Jevons Paradox ) because we need absolute emissions to cease rising and actually decline. Slowing down exponential growth just changes the doubling time a bit. And trees cannot be part of any equation try to calculate "neutrality". Every tree on the plant, old, new, public , private has 100% of its capacity occupied in the natural, pre-industrial, pre-fossil carbon cycle equilibrium 350pp. No tree has any surplus capacity to compensate for fossil fuel or agri-methane emissions. The offset concept is a self evident scam, like the Pope selling indulgences for eternal life. A fraud.

@krishnanair9390 3 жыл бұрын

What will the value got by - GDP*(1-(Gini Coefficient)) tell us? Will it tell us how much of a country's economic growth has been wealth unequal? One issue I have with this value is that economic growth almost always results in pretty natural wealth inequality, so this value could give us a false depiction of how well the citizens of a nation are doing. Or, what if we replace the GDP in the formula with Green GDP? This is just an arbitrary thought I had got one random day. Could anyone tell me what they think about this? Thank you

@uplisrinivasan 5 жыл бұрын

When did China reached 9%gdp??.. This video says in spite of us withdraw from green peace agreement, they are the best in maintaining green energy things..

@helenawagner345 2 жыл бұрын

what is the gdp?:) thanks for an answer!

@RaffaeleSantagati 5 жыл бұрын

Very nice video guys but the growth of gdps are wrong. Uk gdp growth in 2014 was 3.1% (1.6% green gdp).

@federicacocco9945 5 жыл бұрын

Agreed! They are from this academic paper jssidoi.org/jesi/uploads/articles/16/Stjepanovic_A_new_approach_to_measuring_green_GDP_a_crosscountry_analysis.pdf

@MrRobtwothirds 5 жыл бұрын

And the good news is that there are now four times as many polar bears than there were in 1960, and all 73 of the climate models used by the UN/IPCC predicted temperature rises of between 2 and 10 times what they actually were- guessing by rolling dice would have yielded better predictions. We would be well served by more CO2 in the atmosphere- pollution is the problem. The best estimates suggest that 500,000 people living in Europe are killed each year as a result of toxic emmissions. Nobody is killed by CO2 in the atmosphere, and wouldn't be even at 10 times what it is now.

@hlobert1 5 жыл бұрын

And what about using something like the Gross National Happiness (GNH) to measure a country's growth? Like Buthan is trying to do? Or some kind of mixture of the green GDP and the GNH? After all, only growth is not enough. The population happiness is important as well.

@philipmurtagh5093 5 жыл бұрын

We are at 415ppm CO2 and rising quicker than ever. This stuff stays there for a long time - as in centuries. There is no feasible tech to remove it at scale. Throw in methane and NOx emissions and we are at 450ppm equivalent. Our emissions have to be negative. Yet our civilisation is 80-90% fossil dependent. Its nearly 2 deg C on the north pole today.

@MrPaddy924 Жыл бұрын

Great, but it sounds like a conversation and line of enquiry we should have been exploring 30 years ago. As things stand it's too late to start tinkering with the current system. We need a radical and immediate re-set. That will probably result in an almighty crash and years and years of universal hardship for all, but I'm afraid that's where we are.

@antistaticandi 2 жыл бұрын

Guys, the environment is WAY more than carbon emissions. It's physically how much wood we have to build, how much pollution ecosystems can absorb, how many fish are in the ocean to keep fishing, how much land is available to do the things we want to do. This whole video is happily ignoring the fact that we only have one planet with finite resources. You cannot grow infinitely. WAKE TF UP.

@beedow9473 5 жыл бұрын

The first graph is so stupid, it shows fossil fuel use still incresing in 2070 and this guy tries to imply it shows a reduction because the ratio is smaller! Does he actually understand the subject matter of the video?...must try harder

@jjjjjpppppbbbbb 5 жыл бұрын

GDP growth is essential to avoid the economic collapse of the current global debt based economy ... "tomorrow's growth will pay off today's debts" The only way to change this is to basically ban usury, and this has been tried before ...

@jjjjjpppppbbbbb 5 жыл бұрын

It is no coincidence that the rate of GDP growth recommended by the World Bank etc. is (roughly) the same as interest rates

@zoephin6205 5 жыл бұрын

@Pagliaccio No such thing as usury, only time-value of money.

@jjjjjpppppbbbbb 5 жыл бұрын

@@zoephin6205 You're right. But go back in time and people would have called it usury. Alas we live in different times

@jjjjjpppppbbbbb 5 жыл бұрын

@@zoephin6205 As we speak your tax money is being used to pay interest to banks which hold your government's issued bonds

@kyh6767 5 жыл бұрын

No it's not lol

@eleoptera 4 жыл бұрын

You can not disconnect economic growth from some form of environmental destruction. Growth always means more goods and services that either have to be created or you create an artificial entitlement for. This means even if we lower emissions, we will still use more land an ressources and exploit cheap workforce. With every good comes an endlessly complex production line which itself means strain on the environment, in the form of all kinds of infrastructure and traffic. If we want to boost renewable energy to meet our energy needs we will create so much carbon on the way there that we will already exceed 2°C. We can't continue this way.

@darrenfenton9280 5 жыл бұрын

Kinda garden couple

@TheCJUN 5 жыл бұрын

Population growth and consumption are what destroys the envrionment.

@user-yv7oi1be8h 2 жыл бұрын

1. Fiat currency. 2. Increase money supply. 3. Federal Reserve target inflation 2%. 4. Economy requires perpetual growth over 2%. 5. Finite energy & assets Ponzi scheme.

@positronicfeed 5 жыл бұрын

Good video, but I love how they sit on the floor to look cool and modern when their souls are crying for chairs and desks.

@federicacocco9945 5 жыл бұрын

We are in the process of moving office and most of our furniture is in the new building! You are right though, never again!

@positronicfeed 5 жыл бұрын

@@federicacocco9945 If its because of a move then that's good. At least it's temporary. A while ago I was asked to work in weird positions by a boss who paid good money to interior designers, who ended up making the office look like a trendy cafe our clients would feel more comfortable in. The clients were perplexed by it all and we felt like nomads migrating from sofas, doubled over low tables, to bistro style high tables with stools. Productuvity plummetted but at least coffee and tea consumption nearly doubled. I thought might have been a similar situation.

@gordonquigg9389 5 жыл бұрын

It doesn't take a rocket scientist or an economist to see what is happening on the planet. Especially if you were born and grew up when, overpopulation, polution, smog, and resource depletion, we're not even household words yet.

@davidbouchard2499 3 жыл бұрын

That's a load off bullcrap.

@djclass005 4 жыл бұрын

this video is pointless, you discus how to measure GDP differently while everybody is still imiting Carbon and pollution at the same rate, so net result? again more time wasted.. however you want to explain it, infinite growth within a finite system (as is our earth) is impossible.. it snaps, like a balloon, and we will be crushed, poor people/countries first..