PowerSwitch

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-13764242

Quite good discussion with Chandran Nair.

However, he seems to say that Asian nations won't be able to attain the same standard of living as the West. Like as if we have the pie and they won't get any of it!

I would have thought they will compete as strongly as we do, maybe even more so and so their average consumption will grow as ours is forced to decrease?

Fascinating. A sensible man. Some of the questions were typically naive but that's mass meeja for you. Still, the more stuff like this gets out the better.

Thanks goslow.

goslow wrote:I would have thought they will compete as strongly as we do, maybe even more so and so their average consumption will grow as ours is forced to decrease?

That's what people (and this interview) miss. They focus on economic growth - forgetting that we have to have negative as well as positive.

One of the things that provoked me to write the book was, and I think this goes to the heart of the question. When the financial crisis hit, you will remember that the urgings of most western economies and governments was to ask Asians to consume. At the same time, we were being told that climate change is probably the biggest challenge facing humanity. Any intelligent person knows that you cannot reconcile asking billions of Asians to consume more like Americans and at the same time deal with climate change.

This is probably what bugs me the most. You don't need a degree in economics or ecology to be able to see that the various "official" predictions about the future and recomended actions for the present "can't be reconciled." The truth is that it is completely illogical in many different ways, and that this really ought to be obvious to anybody who can be bothered to think about it. Does anybody believe that in thirty years time, several hundred million Chinese people will be driving cars and flying on aeroplanes to go on holiday somewhere nice every summer? How can they believe this???

They prefer not to think about it and that's why so many people do drugs (including intangible drugs like shopping too much and online games).

RenewableCandy wrote:They prefer not to think about it and that's why so many people do drugs (including intangible drugs like shopping too much and online games).

That was me until very recently

goslow wrote:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-13764242

Quite good discussion with Chandran Nair.

However, he seems to say that Asian nations won't be able to attain the same standard of living as the West. Like as if we have the pie and they won't get any of it!

I would have thought they will compete as strongly as we do, maybe even more so and so their average consumption will grow as ours is forced to decrease?

They can compete all they want. Even if they take everything that the West has, 4 or 5 billion Asians can't have exactly what 1 or 2 billion Westerners have. They can only have 20% to 50% of what we have, maximum. In practice, they would have considerably less because much of what we have now would be broken in the war to take it.