As one former Supreme Court Justice once said: “The essence of democracy is that if the majority is determined to go to hell in a hand-basket you’ve got to stand back and let em.” Anybody ever
heard of better public education? Don’t you people here trust the products of your own system? O Ye
of little faith.

But the fears in the 1970s were that fossil fuels were going to run out soon. Now the fear is that they won’t run out and, as a result, we’ll keep pumping CO2 into the atmosphere.

And it is not the case that people in our countries invest in the energy-saving technologies you suggest, and drive efficient vehicles – this is a large part of our concern here, isn’t it?

But they will—when the price gets high enough, they will. Actually, it’s already happening. Investments in alternative energy technologies are booming. And higher gas prices are having a very noticeable effect in the U.S. already—SUV and pickup truck sales have dropped while sales of fuel-efficient cars are growing:

http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showArticleHomePage&art_aid=79733

Meanwhile, GM’s highest highest priority project is the Volt:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23982378/

Something needs to intervene to make us.

Yes—higher prices.

(I would suspect too that the reason Japanese people have the longest commute times is that their public transport system enables them to live far from work. I know a guy who lives in Matsue and commutes to Hiroshima to give seminars; and a woman who lives in Kyoto with her parents and commutes to Osaka every day to work. Travel really is easy here, unbelievably compared to Australia).

Which would be an indication that gas prices are a less powerful determinant than population density. If Australian gas prices have historically been on par with those in Europe and Japan, but city density is on par with the U.S., then that suggests that the most important factor is available land. Perhaps it’s the case that where people could spread out, they did—where they couldn’t, they didn’t and that gas prices weren’t high enough anywhere to change that much.

Earlier you argued that American cities were built in many cases in the era of the automobile, and so have high energy use. But this applies for Australian and Japanese cities too.

But Japanese cities were constrained by land scarcity whereas U.S. and Australian ones were not. So U.S. and Australian cities are sprawling and energy intensive (at present, anyway).

While your comments about the cost of adjustment may be partially true, the idea that the current situation in the US was historically unavoidable is giving a free pass to stupid decisions.

For the most part, there were no high-level ‘decisions’ (smart or stupid) that determined the course of development in the countries we’ve been discussing—the characteristics of the built environment emerged from local conditions (land costs, fuel and vehicle costs, affluence, congestion, etc). And to the extent that top-down planning decisions were involved, they certainly were not motivated by concerns of greenhouse gas emissions, but by minimizing oil imports or preserving farms (as in the U.K. and Japan). There was no top-down decision in the U.S. to have sprawl—people voted with their feet and wallets. It’s not even accurate to say that the U.S. had a ‘cheap gas’ policy; the U.S. has had a neutral policy—neither subsidized (as in many oil-producing countries) nor taxed (except for the purposes of building and maintaining highways).

It was the visionary decision of the Japanese to invest in the Shinkansen in the 70s which made travel here so easy, and I think it’s time Australia and the US started thinking the same way.

Travel is easy in Japan? Don’t the Japanese have the longest commute times in the industrialized world?

http://www.japan-guide.com/topic/0011.html

In any case, what is appropriate for a small, densely populated nation like Japan is not going to work equally well in sparse countries the size of the U.S., Australia, and Canada. If people would prefer to keep living in detached suburban houses, but want to invest in insulation, high-efficiency heating, and drive to work in vehicles like this:

http://www.aptera.com/

Why not? Going exactly where you want to go, when you want to go in privacy and comfort is a great thing (and mass-transit has it’s own energy inefficiencies—e.g. mostly empty buses during non-peak hours, for example).

All major Japanese cities had to be rebuilt after the war, and in at least 3 cases “rebuilt” means “built”. So they could have made different decisions. In fact, one of the worst cities to move around in Japan is Kyoto, one of the few unbombed ones. Earlier you argued that American cities were built in many cases in the era of the automobile, and so have high energy use. But this applies for Australian and Japanese cities too, and probably for a lot of rebuilt German cities. While your comments about the cost of adjustment may be partially true, the idea that the current situation in the US was historically unavoidable is giving a free pass to stupid decisions.

It’s worth bearing in mind that there are other benefits to the type of cities the Japanese and Europeans live in. Japanese apartments are much cheaper to rent than Australian apartments for example, it is much more feasible to live alone in Japan, and there is no competition for apartments for ordinary people like me. Also commuting is much more pleasant here than in Australia, and Japanese people experience the ultimate “democractic” means of travel – they can go almost anywhere in their own cities by bicycle. The shift to high-density housing is not necessarily a reduction in the standard of living, and in the long term it is well worth a large expense. It was the visionary decision of the Japanese to invest in the Shinkansen in the 70s which made travel here so easy, and I think it’s time Australia and the US started thinking the same way.

The Japanese and Europeans chose high fuel taxes because they have to import all of their oil—and they’ve had dense, compact cities since long before the automobile. Compact cities did not result from high fuel taxes, nor were high fuel taxes a choice based on farsighted thinking about housing patterns or the environment.

Obviously the U.S. can move to higher fuel taxes (and will, I expect), but the built environment takes a long time (decades) and a lot of money to change. And there’s obviously nothing that can be done to reduce the distances between New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Seattle.

Higher fuel taxes will probably stop and reverse the trend toward greater sprawl, but I expect that a lot of the adjustments won’t actually involve packing back into apartments in the city and riding the bus. Switch from an Explorer to a Prius and cut the fuel cost of commuting by 60%. Car pool with just one other person and cut it in half again. Or telecommute and cut it to zero. These kinds of adjustments are far more feasible and likely than a wholesale switchover to European or Japanese housing patterns.

Hmm not arguing that increasing equality automatically decreases GDP - in fact I agree that on its own it is likely to increase it. (Though that is a net effect. if you transfer wealth from someone with their own fleet of private jets to someone who does not get enough to eat, there may well be some decreases going on.) The point is that if you want to decrease GDP and increase human welfare, increase economic equality has to be a big part of it. You can have a deliberate policy, (handwaving away political feasibility for the sake of discussion) that would increase equality and decrease GDP and increase human welfare. Increasing leisure, trading less stuff for more time, and then making sure there was enough equality so nobody had too little stuff to live on or be in a really awful positional position via neighbors would be part of that. Incidentally shifting some consumption from individual to social consumption would tend to both save resources and increase human welfare. In terms of the former: Amway product use up a lot more resource per dollar of GDP than education. In terms of the latter: My view here is very USAcentric, and just about every survey shows that USAians want more spent on education and healthcare – even if it required increases in their own taxes. That is really good proxy for intensity of support . If people favor raising their own taxes to provide something, they strongly support.

Yeah, I was guilty of excessive conciseness – not my usual vice. OK, under what circumstances can a rich nation decrease GDP and increase social welfare? I’d argue greatly increased economic equality, a shift of some individual consumption to social consumption, and increased leisure.

I don’t think anyone would argue that these things alone would decrease resource use to a sustainable level. But there would be some significant benefits in that direction, and the political context in which such a change was possible would also be the political context in which other actions to reduce externalities would be greater.

But if you do all that, decrease inequality, shift some individual consumption to social consumption, increase leisure, then start decreasing externalities as well via increased water and energy efficiency, and substitution of clean energy for fossil fuels, then you have a situation where increased consumption may really increase welfare. (And it is really unfortunate that typo in the post you are responding to left out the word “may”.)

In such a case where increasing GDP really has a good shot of increasing social welfare, it is really important to be able to disconnect increases in GDP from increases in use of natural sources and sinks, to generally be able to disconnect GDP increases from negative impacts on the fragile ecosystems upon which we all depend.

For starters, Japan has a very high level of population density (a bit lower than the Netherlands, but higher than the U.K.)—11 times higher than the U.S. Japan may have recently constructed transport infrastructure, but it is infrastructure designed for a densely populated country. Also, like Europe, Japan lacks petroleum reserves (you may recall this being a particularly sticky problem a few decades back) and, as a result, has European-level fuel taxes. I wasn’t able to google-up anything for Japanese heating and cooling costs.

I don’t see a good reason for average journeys to be (much)longer in the US than in Europe.

Density affects local travel as a well as inter-city travel. Because population densities are much lower, land is plentiful and cheap. Those factors, combined with low gas taxes have made it possible for people to spread out, and that is what has happened.

This looks pretty interesting on the topic of city area and energy use—sounds like there are a few unresolved questions:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3927/is_200406/ai_n9436743

Most forms renewable sources are more expensive than fossil fuel sources – if you don’t count externalities. So on the face of them a switch to renewables would tend to decrease GDP slightly.

I wonder if people really understand what “more expensive” actually means here. Investment is included in GNP but intermediate goods aren’t. Moving from using fossil fuels (an intermediate good) to investing in machinery to utilise some form of renewal energy resource will actually increase measured GNP. One man’s cost is another man’s income. Looking at cost as an input to one single production process can be misleading as to the total impact. (And remember we are assuming here that an increase in cost of providing energy will have an opportunity cost somewhere else in the system, because we start by assuming full employment.) As others have pointed out, GNP is not a good welfare measure – removing negative externalities is actually a welfare plus.

The public-good nature of information explains how economic progress can continue without additional resources.

If information is a public good, why do we seem to be so keen to use it as a basis for distributing rents?

I’m not so convinced, by the way, that information is not subject to diminishing returns. The ability of humans to handle the information is limited.

I think the apparently exponential growth we have seen (and the rate does always eventually decline) is a sum of hysteresis curves and can be maintained only by expanding new markets on the up slope (pre-saturation). Eventually everything will look flat at best.

As for the distance accounts for the high energy use argument, I want to see somebody prove it (especially for the US which is fairly populous – unlike say Canada and Australia). Most journeys are local, and there is plenty of international travel within Europe (even if more of it is pleasure rather than business). I don’t see a good reason for average journeys to be (much)longer in the US than in Europe. Keeping houses at a reasonable tempature is of course another issue, but here surely the technical possibilities for improvement in the US (through better housing) are enormous.