The fundamental fact that Wolf ignores is that we live on a finite planet. The gains of the past, about which he enthuses, were built on cheap energy, abundant abuse of materials without taking into consideration the consequences of doing so, and a willingness to ignore the external costs imposed on society as a result of that indifference. That era is over. We face climate breakdown now. We are already on a dire path to 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming because we pretended that infinite growth was possible, and Wolf still wants more of the same. This is economic, social and climate madness. He might wish for increased productivity from consuming (and abusing) ever more of the world ‘s natural resources, whilst showing complete contempt for the rights of working people, but the stalling productivity numbers he quotes in his article do not show a failure of effort or the consequence of laws protecting labour rights; they show the natural consequence of economies hitting planetary and social limits.
Sigh.
First, growth is not coming back in the form he imagines, whether he thinks it necessary or not. Wolf might lament the collapse of postwar productivity miracles and clearly longs for their return, believing a combination of AI, other disruptive technologies, and greatly relaxed labour laws — allowing companies to dispense with their employees at will to the detriment of employees everywhere — might deliver them again.
Double Sigh.
Rising productivity allows you to do more with the same resources. That’s the very definition of rising productivity – more value of output from the same inputs. So, if 20th century growth wsa largely driven by rising productivity – it was – then 20th century growth is exactly the sort of growth that *we insist upon* for this new world of limited resources. Because the whole point of increasing prouctivity is greater value of output *from the same resources*.
Seems Bill Gates has stopped drinking the Climate Catastrophe koolaid – https://www.gatesnotes.com/work/accelerate-energy-innovation/reader/three-tough-truths-about-climate
The cynic might note that changing political moods in the US might have helped this along…
Bill’s a technology guy. Not a hippy, nor a commie. Most of his side of the Gates Foundation work is about things like developing technology to improve things. I think this is about spot on:-
To be clear: Climate change is a very important problem. It needs to be solved, along with other problems like malaria and malnutrition.
Now, I happen to think the numbers are cooked, fanciful, models not half as good as what people say. I can’t prove that, there’s just a gut feel about how they’re presented. But Bill’s at least got his head screwed on that this is one of many things. He’s in the Lomborg camp (Lomborg has numbers that show that malaria is a better spend).
Gates flip flops. Just remember his book of a couple of years ago: “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need. In that book Bill’s position was very clear-climate change is real, climate change is caused by carbon emissions and human activity, and only the radical transformation of the entire energy supply and industrial output and underpinnings of modern society (Net Zeto, getting that carbon imprint to 0%) will avert vast scale disaster.
Don’t trust the slippery git
The thing is that he is a long-term professional grifter. When he found a way of protecting his interests by being a Climate crusader, he took that route. Now Trump has dented the paradigm, he has found another path to protecting his interests. It is nothing to do with fundamental beliefs. Follow the money
Good to see he finally realised that it’s “time to put human welfare at the center of our climate strategies”. Yeah, duh, Bill. Any human strategy which is not ultimately focused on human welfare is a bit pointless.
I suspect it’s also because a fair bit of his wealth and his foundation is invested in companies which need abundant and reliable energy.
Isn’t the definition of economics “study of the allocation of scarce resources…”? Scarce, not infinite?
Asking for a friend.
It’s classic Spud. Start with a fundamental misrepresentation or misunderstanding and spiral hysterically from there.
You can look at the RAC’s chart of petrol and diesel consumption and see that it peaked around 2007/8.
https://www.racfoundation.org/data/volume-petrol-diesel-consumed-uk-over-time-by-year
There’s a load of technologies that caused that:-
People get their panties in a wad over how much energy computers use, but it’s a COMPARED TO WHAT thing. You can power a lot of computing with the energy to move a car 1 mile. My shift to bus and train was a lot about the apps. Not the vehicles. But that I could plan, figure out routes, which used to be a lot of friction compared to a car. I don’t stand in the rain waiting for a cancelled bus. Stagecoach tell me and I stay in the warm for the next one.
“I don’t stand in the rain waiting for a cancelled bus. Stagecoach tell me and I stay in the warm for the next one.” If only that worked for our local buses.
That’s not the only problem with public transport: another problem is the behaviour of (so many of) the public…
I get no trouble in buses and coaches and there’s no graffiti or vandalism. I reckon teenagers got video games and apps and stopped being so bored. But CCTV probably helped.
Trains are the worst. Groups of lads on the piss.
Brilliant. Ricky Gervais pays for good gags did you know?
He may be right about countries he admires. Dictatorships such as China and Congo need fast economic growth just to be able to afford to clean up the pollution they cause.
There are many examples of doing more with less.
Light bulbs consume less electricity, smart phones are slimmer and make printed maps redundant, the invention of the egg box means fewer eggs are broken, cars would be lighter if they didn’t have those stupid batteries in them, etc.
We’ve barely scratched the surface of productivity gains. There are lighter and stronger construction materials coming soon, smaller cheaper and more local nuclear power stations, etc.
I love that term “marginal revolution”. Most people don’t know what’s going on with improvement, how a slightly better thing allows another thing to happen.
Yesterday I was reading about a Canadian IoT tracking company called BeWhere that did a successful test with AST Spacemobile. This means that you can track things moving, get updates, even outside of a cell tower and with a regular 5G SIM card. That’s a lot cheaper than satellite kit. That means a lot more stuff gets tracked better. I’ve know idea how much better that makes logistics or tracking stolen goods, but a bit. And you add thousands of “a bit” and you get a lot.
cars would be lighter if they didn’t have those stupid batteries in them, etc.
They’d also be a lot lighter & smaller if they weren’t all built to survive high speed impacts. Speeds the majority of them never travel at & mostly legally shouldn’t travel at. Most vehicles on the road now are capable of speeds 50% higher than they were in the 60s. But they’re still traveling on the same roads. These days, often with lower speed limits. Way the manufacturers build them.
“Climate change is a very important problem. It needs to be solved, along with other problems…”
Nope. The climate changes all on its own and isn’t a problem. The idea that CO2 causes it have been falsified by numerous failed predictions based on it. Even if it was a problem there is nothing that humans can do apart from adapting to the changed weather. Something that we have done, admittedly imperfectly, for thousands of years.
Yes, there’s no climate crisis or emergency. There’s been some “luke-warming”, as Matt Ridley puts it, with slightly higher average night- and winter-time temperatures globally. So we might have a climate problem, but nothing to justify pre-emptive action on the scale of Nut Zero.
The thing I’ve learned about scientists is that it’s the ones that are very cautious of their claims that you should listen to. “We’ve observed A, checked it against B and C and it seems like maybe D is the case”. People like that are scrupulous. And if anyone challenges it, they’re open to investigation of it.
The climate people do things like estimate actuals as part of the research. So, no weather station in a particular place, they estimate what it should be from other nearby stations, which strikes me as completely against all scientific principles. They include data from weather stations that don’t meet the rules for data gathering. None of this fills me with confidence that there is scrupulousness about the whole thing. A friend of mine is involved in medical research and says that if he behaved like climate people, he’d be fired.
The whole “climate crisis” thing strikes me as desperate selling. There is simply nothing in the numbers that says we have gone to “crisis”.
Commie dick Murphy’s outburst is too stupid to comment on.
You’ve got to take his views on Global Boiling seriously because (i) he attended many lectures on Infra Red spectroscopy, and used the instruments in the lab a lot, so he really knows about CO2’s behaviour in the atmosphere. (ii) He has years of experience modelling physico-chemical systems. (iii) Ditto fluid mechanical modelling. (iv) And he’s studied statistics to a useful depth. (iv) There there’s his decades of experience studying temperature measurement and heat transfer. (v) Also he understands clouds, if only because he rails at them quite often.
It’s hard to think of anyone better qualified to advance the climate hysteria position.
Bill Gates has recanted on climate. Does Murph think that he’s smarter than Bill Gates?
Not a smart question.
He doesn’t know what ‘productivity’ means.
The root of all his problems.