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by palata 267 days ago
> Nothing forces the rebound effect to dominate.

Not sure what to say to that. Yeah, it would be great if we didn't put so much resources into destroying our own world. I agree.

The fact is that rebound effect very much dominates everything we do. I'm not saying it should, I'm saying it does. It's an observation.

1 comments

I think you're telling me that graphs like these always point upwards, right?

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use?tab...

My own impression is that sometimes the aggregate total grows and sometimes it doesn't. And when it grows, sometimes that's because the rebound effect dominates.

Read the part in your link that says "Here, energy refers to primary energy".

Primary energy in the US ignores the primary energy used in China for goods that end up being imported in the US.

I googled briefly now, and found https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/imports/china. Looking at that (note that the X axis is not zero) it's clear that Chinese imports cannot account for any significant part of the changes to the the USA graph on https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use?tab...