Buddha said - Possessiveness is the cause for violence, quarrel, argument, dispute, lying …
Lao Tzi said -
No ruler, no war;
No treasure, no crime;
Eat the meal, weaken your will.
Power and possession are not in positive nor negatively ratio to the intensity of greed. A rich entity is considered greedy and it would be curious to know if it is any more greedier than its counterpart.
What we need is not that much, and we have enough to go around. After we have what we need, we go on wanting more. Some succeed and some fail. But they are both categorically the same.
Me too, though I constantly get flak for it from my wife n kids. Just last week, the entire family was making fun of my mobile phone … a five year old budget Android. My elder daughter (who lives and works in Melbourne) lovingly offered to buy me a new Samsung. “You don’t have to save money for our education any more daddy …” Its tough to explain that I rather like having few possessions and that I don’t feel the need to change what I have unless it stops working.
In case anyone was wondering what the numbers are for China’s solar power compared to other countries, here’s what about 120 seconds of research yields:
The group Climate Action Tracker offers a systematic overview and assessment of the action undertaken by different countries and their compliance with the Paris Agreement targets.
Meanwhile, compassion for our friends in the US who are still suffering incredible heat. 47°C is the hottest I’ve been in, and it is brain-melting, I can’t even imagine 53°C! The Mahapajati Monastery must be hot right now!
That’s a graph of manufacturing, mining, and gas and electric utilities. Find us a graph of manufacturing by itself. Numbers don’t lie, but they do hide behind each other and skewed ranges.
That’s a great resource. I have to wonder what the meeting was like when they decided on these adjectives “critically insufficient” etc. Such restraint!
It’s pretty clear that manufacturing leveled off with much less growth after NAFTA, and then went completely flat after the crash in 2009. I was working in the electronics industry during those years, and the company that I worked for was thriving in 2000, lost half its business after 2001, and then continued to shrink slowly after that. I got out after 2009 because the writing was on the wall. Electronics was headed overseas and “those jobs [weren’t] coming back” as Steve Jobs famously told President Obama.
This chart tells the story of why there’s unrest in the rust belt of America. Lower middle class jobs disappeared starting in the 1990s and were continuously replaced with subsistence wage temp jobs to a large extent. It was the only way to compete with labor in other countries if the industry stayed at all.
The green house gas (GHG) emissions problem is much more than about manufacturing sector.
It is all about a system of measurement and pursuit of economic growth and development which relies and drives a massive and wasteful consumption of fossil fuels.
I call it wasteful because, due to real-world constraints, indeed, the most efficient of the fossil fuel energy extraction system only returns 40-50% of useful energy in the process at most.
An internal combustion engine like the one in 99% of all cars and trucks running around is at most 40% efficient, this meaning that when we burn 100 liters of fuel in it we only get back in motion the energy of 40 liters or so of that fuel. The rest gets wasted as heat, etc. But 100% of the carbon in those 100 liters gets released in the air.
And 90% of that wasteful consumption of fossil fuels and associated carbon emissions usually falls in two main super buckets: energy as the first (73%) and agriculture, forestry and land use (18%) as the second.
We human beings created a shared ideology of what progress and growth means which only causes, incentivizes and prizes the growth of consumption of energy and therefore carbon emission within / from these two buckets. It doesn’t matter the ideology or type of government and/or economic system…
As someone whose livelihood is all about understanding and trying to solve for this problem we have created ourselves I can tell you that no obvious answer or solution has been found to the challenge yet. And I doubt we will find in time…
We became a species heavily addicted to energy and our shared understanding of what makes a society developed, wealthy or advanced is such that those more addicted to all that energy are taken as the winners and leaders.
Yes,but as per above, electricity generation is just a small part of the problem of the emissions, totalling 17-18% of the total.
This means the even if we were to instantly “greenify” all of the electricity grids in the planet we would still be left a truckload of emissions to reduce or offset.
And let’s not talk about the elephant in the room of the increased manufacturing and transportation emissions achieving that full grid conversion would cause!
You’ll need a truckload of iron, cement, steel and other quite carbon intensive basic materials to make into steel and many billions of litters of diesel to transport by land and water freight all those solar panels and wind turbines to where you need to place them to produce electricity at that competitive levelised cost of generation the article talks about.
There is no silver bullet. It will take a multi-pronged approach to address all of these problems. I’d say this is just one step in the right direction, but many others are needed.
Yes, and the report linked below is a nice resource for those seeking to understand the options we have and their potential to partially address the issue:
Among key findings:
Proven technologies for a net-zero energy system already largely exist today. Renewable power, green hydrogen and modern bioenergy will dominate the world of energy of the future.
A combination of technologies is needed to keep us on a 1.5°C climate pathway. These include increasingly efficient energy production to ensure economic growth; decarbonised power systems that are dominated by renewables; increased use of electricity in buildings, industry and transport to support decarbonisation; expanded production and use of green hydrogen, synthetic fuels and feedstocks; and targeted use of sustainably sourced biomass.
In anticipation of the coming energy transition, financial markets and investors are already directing capital away from fossil fuels and towards other energy technologies including renewables.
Energy transition investment will have to increase by 30% over planned investment to a total of USD 131 trillion between now and 2050, corresponding to USD 4.4 trillion on average every year.
A main reason I am so skeptical about any of this is that the USD 4.4 trillion/year the paper above mentions we have to invest to achieve stall the temperature increase at 1.5 degrees is more than 2 times the USD 2 trillion/year the world currently burns every year in military expenditures.
I dont think the human species will ever decide to spend in minimizing its damage to the global climate twice as much it spends to be ready to kill each other…
Shiva in Hinduism is known as “The Destroyer”. One may interpret the name to connote “one who can kill the forces of darkness”. So, based on this idea it seems certain destructive karmic forces of nature environment, pandemic, etc. may not be entirely negative for living beings.
Thanks for this post! You are quite right that there’s much more to an economy. I wasn’t attempting to argue that manufacturing is everything, though I think it was the catalyst used to kick off development in the third world, replicating what Japan, Taiwan, and other countries had done.
The whole crisis is one of competing problems. Despite the climate change crisis, countries in desperate poverty don’t see why they should just accept it so the developed world can be the special people who get to have the “good life.” So, they are going to develop anyway if given the opportunity. And, besides that, development seems to be the only practical way to deal with the population explosion, which I think Westerners tend to wave off, but it’ll become quite desperate. Nigeria is projected to reach a population density of over 900 people per sq. km, but would that actually happen without a collapse and famine?
Humans see problems present as more real than problems in the future. When the long term problem reaches the present, then they take it seriously because it’s obviously real at that point. Not many people have the abstract thinking required to treat a distant crisis to be as real as one that’s right in front of them. So, here we are, right where we were going to be. Now that climate change driven by global warming is obvious to anyone who’s honestly paying attention, there’s movement on it. The big question is whether it’ll be reversible or the efforts will accelerate enough to make a difference.
