A Lot of Heat in the City of Lights

COP21 has been over for a while now and I was feeling like engaging with the notion that, just maybe, economic development on its own will sort out the problem of greenhouse gas emissions.

This seems to show per capita CO2 emissions declining for the US, the EU, the Russian Federation, Canada, South Africa, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, the United Arab Emirates, and Uzbekistan.

This seems to be two-fold; those countries that are not wealthy are oil and natural gas exporters save Uzbekistan which is tiny and outlier Ukraine.

As of 2012 Taiwan is a rich country but was not back in 1990, explaining its big increase.

Those countries rich in both years almost without exception see a decrease in per capita emissions - the only outliers are Japan and Australia, with Spain being too close to call.

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Comments

Zeitardation

A Youtuber called axe863 made a video in which he used scientific, mathematical and statistical common-sense to deliver the KO that the Venus Project and Zeitgeist Movement so richly deserved. If his approach seems weird and unconventional it's because he's not attacking from a tradition neoclassical or Keynesian perspective. Axe863's poison is complexity economics, something a good deal more dangerous to ideas like TVP and TZM. [ 2 ] Now to a couple of comment threads from below the video that I thought could od with being replicated just in case they get deleted at source! ~~~ AstralLuminary 1 year ago Why can't we generalize the consumption patterns of middle-income people in the western world, set our constraints equal to the amount of localized resources, and the rate of resource recovery, derive a population growth model that would be sustainable to said consumption patterns, and derive the necessary quantifiable amount of work required to expen...

RIP Macroeconomics

This post has no intellectual rigour, but I'm posting it anyway, because neither does macroeconomics. Most economists love spending all day doing macro, preferring it to the prosaic small-scale world of microeconomics. This is where the brazen hypocrisy of many heterodox folks will make itself known, as they decry the fallacies of composition rife within neoclassical economics and then go away and commit the same daft mistakes themselves (sometimes quite well disguised) using aggregates of demand, supply, and labour time. Further friction for modern economists can be had when contending with the tripartite division of economics into land, labour, capital, and the action of classes (the 'class' praxis) of the owners of those three economic resources. So, to all of macroecon... you're drunk. Go home and rethink your life.* * Yes I know I just committed a fallacy of reification.

Foreign Policy hates you...

In Foreign Policy a hardcore fluff piece * talks about young Americans falling out of love with capitalism. The closing paragraph is very artful but also insipid and inaccurate. Read it and weep! ~~~ * A fluff piece that does a very bad job of grappling with a subject that is actually important.

AynCrap

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