For a somewhat encouraging counterpoint to this statement, check out the book "More From Less." It describes a lot of positive trends including decreasing demand for many resources whose extraction is damaging to the environment. Some examples: we farm far less land in the United States than we used to while producing more food, and that unused area slowly reverts to forest; we use less metal to make containers for the same volume of liquid. There's still plenty to worry about, but more positive signs than you'd think.
> we use less metal to make containers for the same volume of liquid.
But we use x% more containers every year. This is exactly like plane engines getting x% more efficient, it doesn't matter if you double the number of flights over the same period.
You can always make micro adjustments here and there but it won't do much in the long run, they just give us excuses to stay collectively lazy. If your house is on fire, throwing water at it with a table spoon instead of a tea spoon won't do much of a difference.
It's much easier to pat ourselves on the back than look at the harsh truth... there is no more room for being optimistically stupid
The point is that overall demand for many specific resources has peaked. Feel free to argue with the book's research, but here's the thesis:
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"In recent years we’ve seen a different pattern emerge: the pattern of more from less. In America—a large, rich country that accounts for about 25 percent of the global economy—we’re now generally using less of most resources year after year, even as our economy and population continue to grow. What’s more, we’re also polluting the air and water less, emitting fewer greenhouse gases, and seeing population increases in many animals that had almost vanished. America, in short, is post-peak in its exploitation of the earth. The situation is similar in many other rich countries, and even developing countries such as China are now taking better care of the planet in important ways."
Peaked for who ? Wait for India and Africa to catch up with US lifestyle, that's when things will start getting interesting. We over polluted for the last 100+ years, even if we start plateauing we're still in for a bad time (and we're not even plateauing)
It's easy to save a few grams of metal here and there and ban plastic straw when we already live like kings while the rest of the world is barely starting to access the lifestyles we had in the 60s.
Peaked for the United States, which represents something like 25% of world economic activity. That's also accounted for the in the book. You're right about certain long-lived problems like CO2 because of how long it takes them to clear from the environment, but that doesn't mean that it isn't good news that we've decreased our consumption/pollution of a particular resource. It's certainly better than continuing to increase demand. The farmland one is a great example: I defy you to explain to me how it isn't good news that the amount of farmland in the United States has decreased by an area equivalent in size to the state of Washington. Blind optimism is indeed stupid, but willful pessimism is equally stupid.
> I defy you to explain to me how it isn't good news that the amount of farmland in the United States has decreased by an area equivalent in size to the state of Washington.
It's not bad per say but it's a drop in the bucket, they import and export more than every before, which means insane amount of pollution due to the shipping industry, this alone would defeat everything else they attempt: https://container-xchange.com/blog/shipping-emissions/
Out of sight out of mind I guess...
Zoom out, look at the big picture, we shouldn't stop at borders but look at the global scale. France banning plastic bags when China builds so many coal power plants is no more than virtue signalling. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-coal-idUSKBN2A308U
All of these "reasons for optimism" trends in the US (and, to a big extent, Europe as well) are to be ignored, since the US is simply moving production of everything outside the country on an unprecedented scale. Every farm that gets released in the mid-west is likely made up by another swath of Amazon rain-forest burned down in Brazil . Even in internal production, every increase in productivity is met with an increase in the push to get people to consume more, so there are no real gains to be had in the current system.
That's not true, according to the book. Both the US and many foreign countries have peaked in their consumption of many important resources. Feel free to argue with the book's research, but I found it compelling.
I didn't read the book but listened to the econTalk episode with the author and read an article by the author with the same thesis. When I looked into it a bit I came away unconvinced. As much as I want to believe, I don't think he fully accounted for shifts in manufacturing.
I forget exactly what I found, but if I where to guess it would be something like our imports of certain resources might have peaked, but that doesn't account to things that are manufactured in part/whole outside the US. If I buy an inflatable Kayak made in China, then how is that oil/rubber accounted for? US oil/rubber imports maybe have gone down, but have our inflatable Kayak imports gone down and is it tracked?
