[samatman]

> If you use a hand-made cloth bag made from cotton that was hand-grown in a garden using only renewable energy, it's expensive because you have a higher number of man-hours spent on it - and those man-hours are actually generating orders of magnitude more negative externalities for the simple fact of keeping those workers alive.

This style of energy accounting makes no sense to me. Humans are going to use up resources and create pollution, regardless of what their specific source of income happens to be. More artisanal cotton bags means less of something else, in some broad sense, but that says nothing about the environmental accounting of the other side of the margin. The ratio of workers making luxury goods vs. mass producing cheaper substitutes for those goods will have little to no bearing on how many humans happen to exist, birth rates are clearly dominated by other factors.