[boucher]

Inequality has nothing to do with feeling superior or inferior to others (though, our culture absolutely does encourage those beliefs).

In a world with limited resources, huge levels of inequality necessarily means that a small group of people are consuming vastly more of the available resources than everyone else. It also tends to concentrate political power in the same small group. Many people would say there is something inherently unfair about this.

I think these things aren't as separate from your concerns as you make them out to be.

[kragen]

The world has limited natural resources, but it doesn't have limited human welfare or enjoyment or wealth. Moreover, natural resources are not consumed, except for helium, energy, and the contents of spacecraft. The natural resources in a big plate glass window are a double handful of sand. The natural resources in a Rembrandt are the sunlight and rainfall needed to grow a sheaf of flax and a handful of powdered colorful rocks. The natural resources in a bottle of the finest wine are half a handful of sand, and the sunlight and rainfall needed to grow a bunch of grapes. The natural resources in an anti-malaria bed net are what is needed to grow a single cotton plant. A Rolls-Royce contained the same natural resources as a large Yugo.

Poverty comes from lack of opportunity (usually due to centralization of control), perverse incentives (often due to lack of centralization of control), ignorance, delusion, and other kinds of mental problems, not from limited natural resources or from "a small group of people consuming vastly more."

[rustmachine]

The natural ressources to maintain the cost of living in a rich country like mine (denmark) is so high, that it is impossible to imagine all the people in the world maintaining a similar living standard. Im talking not only the glass in my windows, but my energyconsumption, my use of fridges, phones, tvs and so on, all of which costs not only the ressources it costs to manufacture them, but also the entire system built up around it to maintain it. From shipping and transport to cheap labor in a 3rd world country.

If all the people of india and china were to maintain a similar way of life as mine, the eco system would collapse right away.

[hohloma]

I bet 100 years ago rich people in developed countries thought the same. The answer was technology (more energy extraction and more efficient use of resources and energy) and now a better standard of living is achieved by several orders of magnitude more people even while the whole population has increased dramatically. Everyone in the world can live by same or better standards if technological progress continues. Ofcourse it will never be perfectly distributed, so there will always be "poor" and "rich".

[rustmachine]

100 years ago the west were in the middle of a very powerful industrial upswing which relied completely and explicitly on the exploitation of less developed countries. They maintained political and economic power through military force, which was ensured by their dominance of fossil fuels.

I dont think the people in power 100-150 years ago were thinking very much about how to ensure the living standard of the countries they were exploiting. Because they knew that their own wealth was directly dependent on the exploitation of these very same people, and spent considerable military and colonial power to ensure that modernity, development and industrialization was something happened in the colonial powers - not in the colonies.

[kragen]

Nowhere was dominance of fossil fuels or the very powerful industrial upswing stronger in 01922 than in the United States. But the US did not then have the huge international network of overseas military deployment and occupied territories it developed later that century. It did have some overseas territories: the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Cuba, Guam, Alaska, Samoa, the Virgin Islands, Wake Island, the Panama Canal, and arguably Honduras; but these were primarily naval bases and tourist resorts, not pools of cheap labor or troves of resources to exploit.

To be sure, sugar from Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Hawaii, pineapples from Hawaii, and bananas from Honduras were obtained by exploitation of the residents of those unfortunate lands, enriching the US colonists, and gold was mined by the colonists in Alaska; but these resources were peripheral to the projects of US industrialization and energy supplies. 50 years earlier the US had none of them, just huge tracts of land taken by force from Native Americans.

In Britain, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, and Germany, the story was of course quite different. But it is perhaps not coincidental that the industrial power least addicted to plundering resources from colonies abroad became the land most prosperous in the epoch when industry and invention reshaped the world.

[kragen]

This is a common set of misconceptions, so I'll try to explain why they're wrong.

The people of India and China can absolutely maintain a lifestyle with your energy consumption and use of manufactured luxury goods without causing ecological damage.

80% of electricity produced in Denmark is renewables, mostly wind. Historically, renewable energy other than hydroelectric and low-efficiency wind had a poor EROEI, so it wasn't really a viable alternative to fossil fuels, more like an extremely compact battery that had to be "charged" with fossil fuels and then required sunlight or wind to "discharge". That hasn't been true for 20 years, though, and EROEI keeps getting better as PERC gets adopted, PV cells get thinner, tracking gets cheaper, windmill rotors get bigger, etc.

But only a small minority of the energy used in Denmark is electric, about 15%, which is lower than in many other countries. About 10% of the rest is waste heat, and the other three quarters is currently fossil fuels. Replacing those fossil fuels will require not only increasing renewable energy production by a factor of 6 but also converting a substantial fraction of that energy into easily transportable fuels such as ammonia, biodiesel, propane, or aluminum, in order to power things which cannot practically run off the power grid like ships, airplanes, and long-distance trucks. That fuel does not need to be produced locally in Denmark; it can be produced, for example, in China, Australia, or Tunisia, and exported to Denmark.

Increasing renewable energy production by a factor of 6 may sound daunting, but worldwide solar and wind energy production doubles about every 3 years, so that transition will probably take about 5-10 years. The cost of PV and wind energy is now far below the cost of fossil-fuel energy in most of the world, although in Denmark in particular PV is not economically competitive with fossil fuels yet. The available solar resource is about four orders of magnitude larger than world marketed energy consumption, and I think the wind resource is about one or two orders of magnitude larger.

Cheap labor is not critical to manufacturing goods; if it were you'd be importing your fridges, phones, and TVs from Bangladesh and Malaysia, not China and South Korea. (Open up a recent cellphone or TV sometime and look at the country names printed on the chips.) Modern manufacturing is highly automated, and the non-automated part is highly skilled. As you're surely aware, Nokia made their phones in Finland until only a couple of decades ago. Moreover, cheap labor does not create ecological damage, only human failure to thrive.

You could imagine an economy in which the labor productivity of goods like fridges, phones, and TVs was so low that the people who made them would be unable to afford them. This is the case, for example, with skyscrapers: it takes hundreds or thousands of person-years of effort to build a skyscraper, so it would be impossible to pay each of the construction workers enough money to buy a skyscraper of their own. (An attempt to do so would raise the cost of skyscrapers by a factor of 100 or more, back out of their reach.) As should be obvious, this is very much not the case with fridges, phones, and TVs, whose labor cost is measured in person-days per instance, not person-centuries. Paying the workers Denmark wages instead of China wages would not render the production of fridges, phones, and TVs uneconomic; it would just make them more expensive. Even in Bangladesh, where many people live on US$3 per day, it is common already for people to own fridges, phones, and TVs, a situation that will only improve further when Bangladeshis are not denied the opportunities they are today. Whatever you have been told, your standard of living does not rest on exploiting the poor in faraway countries.

Shipping and transport are not a significant part of the resource usage of supplying you with fridges, phones, and TVs; shipping a TEU halfway around the world costs up to about US$7500 (though "return" rates, like from Los Angeles to Shanghai, can be as low as US$700, because the objective is just to get the container back to China, and the more usual cost is US$1000-US$2000 over the last ten years; see https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/rmt2021ch3...). A TEU weighs 24 tonnes, of which normally 21.6 tonnes is payload, giving a cost of US$0.35 per kg (and more realistically half that because of the return-cost thing). Part of that cost is the cost of fuel, which is the only resource cost of shipping. At the moment crude oil costs US$86/bbl, which means that if all of that US$0.35 went to fuel, and the fuel were unrefined crude rather than diesel and kerosene, it would buy 650 g of crude oil. That's 27 MJ/kg or 7.5 kilowatt hours per kg.

So if your fridge weighs 200 kg and uses 1000 kWh per year, running it for a year and a half is guaranteed to use more energy than it took to ship it to you from China. Because most of the cost of shipping is not actually fuel, a more realistic number is probably three months. But you will probably use that fridge for 10 years, and it is very likely that manufacturing it took more energy as well.

You can strongly bound the energy use of the whole manufacturing process in the same way. A new fridge costs about US$250 retail, which means it can't possibly require more than 2.9 barrels of oil to make it, and that only if the costs for things like labor, steel, and taxes were literally zero. 2.9 barrels of oil burned for energy is 18 MJ, 4900 kilowatt hours, though typically only 40% of that can be used for useful manufacturing things like turning motors and electrolyzing aluminum. In California with its 29% PV capacity factor, 2000 watts (peak) of solar panels produces 18 MJ every year, all high-quality electric energy, not low-grade heat. That's 10 square meters of solar panels costing under US$400. So, you can see why renewables are taking over.

This is also how you can know that your US$250 fridge doesn't require person-years of effort from a labor force in Bangladesh, even without going there. Bangladesh's per-capita GDP is US$2500 per person per year, nominal, and its Gini coefficient is a reasonable 0.39, so at most that fridge could be a couple of person-months of work, including all the components. (But in fact it was probably made in China, US$14000 per person per year, or South Korea, US$35000 per person per year, and with lower inequality.)

They might have to eat less beef, pork, tuna, herring, and mackerel, and burn less biofuels than you do, though. Those may be renewable but environmentally they are catastrophic.

[rustmachine]

Thank you for a very thorough reply. Interesting read. We very obviously read different things. Basically what I hear you saying is: we have the technology, we can do it. Please correct me if im reading you wrong. And sure, that is the hope, and I'm not saying that we wont be able to find solutions - simply that our current solutions wouldnt work if scaled to the world. My argument is simply that we're on a massive ecological clock, and I dont see our current political systems or power structures being able to support the necessary change.

What I think your calculations miss is two things: 1) producing a fridge is harmful to the climate not just because it takes ressources to produce and ship and maintain, but because it uses limited ressources and pollutes after it is thrown away [1] and prices doesnt currently reflect the real cost on the environment. And 2) Technology is worth very little if politics and infrastructure doesnt support it. We could avoid a large part of the pollution of fridges if we recycle, but we need recycling plants, a government that mandates it, a culture of recycling, not to mention we need to share technology across borders.

My argument is not that its physically impossible, but that it isnt realistic in any way to imagine we could scale our way of living to the entire world with our current political, tehcnological and cultural infrastructure. Right beside everything you describe, there is an on-going climate-crisis of extreme proportions going on. The way we live in the west is built historically on fossil-fuels and direct exploitation of other parts of the world, and it has led us to the brink of ecological ruin. Even if technology might be able to ensure that the rest of the world wont need to rely on fossil fuels in the same way we've done historically and still do, there is not the political will or the infrastructrure to do so. There will be, maybe, in 10 years - we'll see.

So yes, my standard of living rests explicitly on poorer countries not living like me. Because we dont have the technology or infrastructure in place to support such a massive increase in living standard without it impacting the climate. It doesnt matter if we have the technology in ten years if its impossible to implement at scale.

[1] The cooling industry play a huge part in glomal warming: "Part of the problem with refrigerants, however, is that much of the harm they cause is after we as consumers have finished using them. It occurs out of sight, and so largely out of mind." https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201204-climate-change-h...

[kragen]

Oh, well, I do agree that if we just tried to scale up the current fossil-fuel-based economy to the world, that would be ecologically catastrophic. But the infrastructure to do that doesn't exist either! And we're already on the path to switching over to renewable energy, not because of political will but because it's cheaper than fossil fuels in most of the world now. It's definitely possible to implement at scale—as demonstrated by the fact that even in your own country 80% of electrical generation is already solar and wind. That won't solve overfishing or feedlot-induced aquifer eutrophication, but I think we can eliminate those with relatively minor lifestyle changes, changes that will require political will.

I think the case of refrigerators is particularly interesting. Other than energy, they don't consume limited resources; they just contain limited resources until they're thrown away. Some of those resources are scarce, like copper, aluminum, and the refrigerant itself, and because it's profitable, those tend to get recycled already, even without government mandates (though sometimes government mandates can prevent it, like the "steps to stop illegal trade in HFCs" mentioned in the article you link). Others are not scarce, like iron, fiberglass, and polyurethane, so it isn't a problem if they are locked up in a landfill. At some point mining landfills will be profitable when the mineral resources they contain are depleted in their original mine deposits.

The problem of leaks of fluorinated refrigerant is real, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change#Greenhouse_gase... says that total fluorinated gas (including refrigerants from air conditioners and refrigerators, propellants, sulfur hexafluoride, and others) is only about 3% of the total greenhouse forcing, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas_emissions#/medi... gives 2.1%. Plausibly this is the largest climatic effect of buying a refrigerator, even if it's manufactured with 100% coal energy, but in absolute terms it's not that significant. And I don't think the number of refrigerators is going to more than double; according to https://globaldatalab.org/areadata/fridge/?levels=1%2B2%2B3%... even in Bangladesh 40% of households have one, and 35% in India and 99.9% in China; and https://bigee.net/media/filer_public/2012/12/04/bigee_doc_2_... gives the number as 1.4 billion domestic refrigerators ten years ago. So we might see that 3% grow to 5% or something, but not a high enough level to make a real difference. I don't think it's accurate to describe 3%, or even the 10% in the article, as "a huge part in global warming".

I used to have a refrigerator that didn't use greenhouse-gas refrigerants. It was an ammonia-absorption refrigerator, using ammonia, water, and hydrogen. These are unfortunately not available in my country (illegal, I think), and it is not safe to have them inside a house, but it's perfectly reasonable to keep them out on the patio. One big plus is that they can run on stored fuel, whether natural or synthetic, which would be really nice with the frequent power outages where I live now.

Sort of by coincidence, I've been trying to figure out this month how far desiccant-enhanced evaporative cooling can replace conventional vapor-compression air conditioning. I think I've found ways to reduce the system cost low enough that multistage cascades are economical, which ought to make it possible to do not only air conditioning but even domestic food refrigeration with desiccants, though freezing will require a different approach. I found some really interesting research from NREL on this, mostly over the last decade. Desiccant-based systems have the potential to provide not only cooling but also humidity control, heating, food preservation, and household solid waste treatment, and they can run on stored energy for days, which is important both during power outages and to ameliorate the intermittency of solar and wind energy.

[avgcorrection]

> Poverty comes from lack of opportunity (usually due to centralization of control), perverse incentives (often due to lack of centralization of control), ignorance, delusion, and other kinds of mental problems, not from limited natural resources or from "a small group of people consuming vastly more."

“Mental problems”—did people fail to Think and Grow Rich or something?

[kragen]

Listen, I don't know if you have anyone in your family with mental problems, but it's very common for them to result in poverty, despite having what would appear to be opportunity, well-aligned incentives, knowledge, and correct beliefs. And I really don't think this is a thing you should be making fun of.

[avgcorrection]

I was making fun of the apparent idea that some people are poor because they have the wrong attitude. So that was not what you meant. You are still wrong however, and your opinion is harmful in my opnion.

Mental issues may only cause poverty if there is a lack of safety net. Homeless people with Schizophrenia is ultimately caused by policy decisions. Schizophrenic people are more likely to be homeless in certain developed countries compared to others.

[kragen]

This comment is not up to the standards of this site, or indeed of decent human discourse, and I suggest that you delete it immediately. Specifically, you are lying about what I have said in order to smear me, while contributing no insight of your own, and all of this on a sensitive emotional issue.

[avgcorrection]

I cleaned it up for you.

> Specifically, you are lying about what I have said in order to smear me

I did not.

[Guvante]

Oil isn't renewable and the rich tend to be the ones in control...

[inimino]

> huge levels of inequality necessarily means that a small group of people are consuming vastly more of the available resources than everyone else.

Why would you think so? Inequality means wealth inequality, it does not measure consumption. There are still people starving in the world; that is because they cannot afford to buy food, not because Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are eating 1000000x more food than the average person.

[refurb]

huge levels of inequality necessarily means that a small group of people are consuming vastly more of the available resources than everyone else.

Are Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk consuming vastly more available resources?

I mean most of their wealth is invested, in companies, that provide a livelihood for tens of thousands of individuals.

Let’s say we stopped Elon and Jeff from accumulating such wealth (i.e. stopped their companies from growing and/or forced them to divest their investments and captured it via taxes).

I think we can all agree that both companies would likely be much smaller. So how many jobs not created? How many consumers paying higher prices? How much was technology advances delayed?

I don’t have answers but they are questions worth asking.

[BurningFrog]

The world has limited resources, but that doesn't mean wealth is limited.

People create wealth by work and trade.

[Kbelicius]

How does it not mean that wealth is limited? I mean, how can you have more wealth than the value of world resources?

[BurningFrog]

Here is an example:

Oil was an annoying sticky substance until the liquid-fuelled internal combustion engine was invented in 1876. This invention turned it into the most valuable resource in the world for the next 150 years.

That invention turned useless goo into gazillions of wealth.