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A less constructed example showing this even more strongly: I used to buy distilled water from my grocery store. The water had to be shipped to the store, that took gas. Not green, not efficient compared to: Now the same store has a reverse osmosis machine, available because of new technology, that uses regular city water and filters it. It's half the price. No gas is used to transport the water to the store, it flows through a pipe to get to the store. This increases GDP, the same amount of water (at least) is bought, but lots of peole have some extra money left over. GDP increased, pollution decreased substantially. BUT. The discussion does go on from there.
The people with extra dollars might spend that on something polluting - maybe even as polluting as trucking water around - but they might well not. Even so, as with the original example, only better, this is an example of economic growth that actually decreases consumption, taken by itself. (Now comes the argument about knock-on effects such as what the freed bucks get spent on, and the named law (word) saying that when you make a good more efficiently, demand for it increases.) If you're a Marxist you can substitute "freed labor is spent doing" for "freed bucks is spent on" above, I suppose. |