Kees van der Leun  Profile picture
Aug 6, 2021 22 tweets 5 min read Read on X
Materials extracted and used globally, now two times the sustainable threshold. "Virtually all of this overshoot is being driven by excess consumption in high-income nations."
@jasonhickel in Less is More Image
That's 12 tonnes of material per year per person, and no doubt very unevenly distributed. A tonne of stuff on your doorstep for each person in your household, every month. More if you live in a rich country. Whoa.
Ah wait, there's the distribution already! Make that 28 tonnes of materials per person per year, for a high-income country... Image
So somewhat more than 60 tonnes of materials per year for the average 2.2-2.4 person household in a high-income country.
That's 5 tonnes per month, 170 kilos per day.
"Growth sounds good. Children grow, crops grow ... and so too the economy should grow. But this is a false analogy. The natural process of growth is always finite. We want our children to grow, but not to the point of becoming obese, or 9 feet tall."
"We want our children to grow to a point of maturity, and then maintain a healthy balance. We want our crops to grow, but only until they are ripe, when we harvest them and plant afresh. This is how growth works in the living world. It levels off."
[@jasonhickel, Less is More]
(I sometimes hear we have to keep growing our global resource use because people in developing countries want everything we have too. Seems to be more popular than the thought of sharing the resources in an equitable way. And at odds with us still taking a share of the growth.)
"It is astonishing that the dominant belief in economics holds that no matter how rich a country has become, their GDP should keep rising, year after year, with no identifiable end point."
"The problem with the Limits to Growth report, groundbreaking in 1972, is that it focused only on the finite nature of the resources that we need to keep the economy running. This way of thinking about limits is vulnerable to ..
.. those who point out that if we can find new reserves, or substitute new resources for old, and if we develop methods of improving the yields of renewable resources, then we don't have to worry about those limits."
"But this isn't how ecology actually works. The problem with economic growth isn't just that we might run out of resources at some point. The problem is that it progressively degrades the integrity of ecosystems."
"Trying to predict when we might bump into the limits to growth is exactly the wrong way to think about it. We will find ourselves plunging into ecological collapse well before we run into the limits to growth."
"If we want to have any chance of surviving the Anthropocene, we can't just wait and sit around and wait for growth to crash into some kind of external limit."
"We must choose to limit growth ourselves. We need to reorganise the economy so that it operates within planetary boundaries, to maintain the Earth's life-supporting systems which we depend on for our existence."
[Quoting @g_kallis' book Limits]
(The section on the Paris Agreement is a weak part of the book. Strange caricature, in which countries only commit to 3.3⁰C because they've been tricked into believing in BECCS at scale. Doesn't even mention the Agreement's ratcheting up mechanism, now starting to work. A pity.)
On decoupling resource use from GDP growth: "The much-celebrated shift to services has delivered no improvements at all when it comes to the resource intensity of rich nations."
"Services represent 74% of GDP in high-income nations, having grown rapidly since the 1990s, and yet the material use of these nations is outpacing GDP growth. They have the highest share of services in GDP and also the highest per capita material footprints."
"What explains this strange result?
1) Income earned in services is used to buy material goods.
2) Services turn out to be resource-intensive in their own right. Take tourism: that takes an enormous material infrastructure to keep it going: airports, planes, hotels, etc."
"Also, it becomes more and more difficult to extract the same amount of materials from the earth.
For oil, companies have to use fracking and deep sea drilling now, using up more energy and materials to get the same amount of fuel."
"Same for mining. According to @UNEP, today three times more material has to be extracted per unit of metal than a century ago."
"And there's something else: The technological innovations that have contributed most to growth have done so not because they enable us to use *less* nature, but because they enable us to use *more*."
"Take the chainsaw: a remarkable invention that enables loggers to fell trees, say, ten times faster than they are able to do by hand. But logging companies don't tell their workers to finish the job early and go home. They get them to cut down 10 times more trees."

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More from @Sustainable2050

Jun 8
Nasty climate tipping point in sight, especially for NW-Europe! "Nothing drastic will happen at the moment we cross it - which might be soon - but after that the collapse of the current will be unstoppable." And could lead to rapid regional cooling, not so far away from us.
This is a simplified map of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), bringing heat from the South Atlantic, via the Caribbean to the European side of the North Atlantic. On cooling there, the water sinks to 2-3 km depth and takes the cold to the South. Image
Without the AMOC, the North of Europe - especially Iceland, Scandinavia, and Britain - would be much colder than it now is. Image
Read 43 tweets
May 16
Agreement between right-far-right Dutch coalition parties published now. Thread with some points on climate and energy. These are the plans, but execution will of course be key. Wilders and his PVV are in full climate denial, like much of the EU's far right.
1/
- Stick to existing agreements, no higher ambitions than EU policy
- No rules for improving energy efficiency of owner-occupied homes. Obligation (from 2026) to install heat pump on replacing gas-fired heating boiler canceled.
- End of EV subsidies in 2025.
2/
- Study how zero-emission zones in cities kan be delayed to create exceptions for entrepreneurs, but creating such zones remains decision of municipality.
- An end to subsidies for Bio-energy with CCS (for negative emissions) as soon as possible.
3/
Read 9 tweets
Mar 16
Starting a week-long business & pleasure trip to Spain, by train!
Hope to be in Barcelona this evening :)
I'll keep you posted in this🧵 Image
The plan for today: Utrecht - Rotterdam - Paris - Barcelona. The tricky part is changing trains in Paris. Theoretically 2 hours should be more than enough to get from Paris-Nord to Gare de Lyon (the rail planner irresponsibly proposed 1 hour), but @Eurostar is often delayed (2/n) Image
Made it to Rotterdam, at least ;)
Bit very early, but hey, why hurry on a Saturday morning? (3/n)
Image
Image
Read 69 tweets
Jan 28
Reading the Dutch "Action agenda congestion low-voltage grids".
The accelating energy transition already brings grid issues here. In the low-voltage distribution grid, the growing number of solar panels (PV), electric cars (EV) and (hybrid) heat pumps ((h)WP) is the challenge. Image
Without measures, a large and growing number of households would experience periods with too high or too low voltage (over- resp. onderspanning) or risk of grid failure. Image
Measures are categorized in:
1) accelerating grid expansion
2) more efficient use of the grid capacity
3) saving energy as much as possible.

1) already gets a lot of attention, and each of the three main DSOs plans to spend around €1 billion/year. Many hurdles though.
Read 16 tweets
Nov 14, 2023
"Transition doesn't make energy cheaper, but to the contrary, significantly more expensive"
Headline in Dutch @Volkskrant yesterday, 9 days before the elections here. "Consumers and companies will pay 92% more for electricity and natural gas by 2030".
Hmm, let's look into that. Image
Firstly, as others have already pointed out too, it's a comparison between 2020 and 2030. In 2020, energy was cheap: Covid reduced demand, and Russia hadn't started its energy war and attack on Ukraine yet.
Compared with 2023, not a lot would remain of the "+92%". Image
Looking into the forecasted price increase 2020-2030 it has three components:
1. Tax (Belasting) +€5 billion. That'd be a political choice, which has little to do with the energy transition.
2. Grid (Netbeheer) +€5 billion. Increase to be expected indeed.
But ... Image
Read 17 tweets

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