What if the World Stopped Shopping?
Money For the Rest of Us
J. David Stein
4.5 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 7 December 2022
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How to solve the conundrum that consumption reductions lead to economic disasters while benefiting the environment.
Topics covered include:
- Why consumption, fossil fuel usage, and carbon emissions keep growing
- How fossil fuel consumption goes well beyond heating and transportation uses but is tied to agriculture, steel, and cement production
- The four times global consumption fell and the dire economic consequences that resulted
- How the world is consuming twice as many resources as the planet can sustain
- How the economy could still grow while reducing the environmental impact
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Show Notes
How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We’re Going by Vaclav Smil
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Money for the Rest of Us. |
| 0:02.8 | This is a personal financial on money. |
| 0:05.6 | How it works, how to invest it, and how to live without worrying about it. |
| 0:10.0 | I'm your host David Stein, today's episode 413. |
| 0:13.5 | It's titled What If the World Stopped Shopping? |
| 0:17.5 | I recently finished two excellent but sobering books by two Canadians. |
| 0:23.2 | The first was by energy analyst Bhatslav Smil titled How the World Really Works. |
| 0:30.0 | It was a detailed book on the magnitude of the energy and fossil fuel consumption. |
| 0:36.8 | The sheer scale of the numbers he shares and it's very, very detailed in terms of numbers. |
| 0:42.2 | I realized in reading the book just how difficult reducing carbon emissions is going to be. |
| 0:49.4 | The second book is titled The Day the World Stop Shopping by J. B. McKinnon. |
| 0:54.9 | He's a Canadian journalist and it was really a thought experiment |
| 0:58.8 | on what would happen if the world indeed cut its consumption by 25%. |
| 1:04.9 | It would not be pretty, which brings up a huge conundrum. |
| 1:09.2 | On one side, we really do need to reduce the amount of carbon entering the atmosphere |
| 1:16.8 | in order to mitigate the impacts of climate change. |
| 1:22.2 | On the other in doing so, we could destroy the global economy |
| 1:26.6 | by reducing the amount that we consume. |
| 1:30.3 | Smil in his book points out that there's been a 60-fold increase |
| 1:34.8 | in the use of fossil fuels during the 19th century and then a 16-fold increase |
| 1:41.3 | in the 20th century. Over the past 220 years, the world has used |
| 1:46.9 | 1500 times more fossil fuels and that's been an incredible benefit |
... |
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