SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Reducing poverty can actually lower energy demand, finds research:
[...] We found that households that do have access to clean fuels, safe water, basic education and adequate food—that is, those not in extreme poverty—can use as little as half the energy of the national average in their country.
This is important, as it goes directly against the argument that more resources and energy will be needed for people in the global south to escape extreme poverty. The biggest factor is the switch from traditional cooking fuels, like firewood or charcoal, to more efficient (and less polluting) electricity and gas.
In Zambia, Nepal and Vietnam, modern energy resources are extremely unfairly distributed—more so than income, general spending, or even spending on leisure. As a consequence, poorer households use more dirty energy than richer households, with ensuing health and gender impacts. Cooking with inefficient fuels consumes a lot of energy, and even more when water needs to be boiled before drinking.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Sunday June 06 2021, @04:39AM (37 children)
Poor people tend to be a lot harder on ecosystems than wealthy ones. They use resources more inefficiently, pollute more, and have other impacts (like ignoring environmental regulations) that are harder on the local ecosystems.
It's not because of some inherent evil or laziness. Poor people just can't afford to be good to the environment.
Moving on, the article discusses the virtue of infrastructure ("clean fuels, safe water, basic education and adequate food"). It's the same story, the better and higher quality the infrastructure, the better the use of resources and the more valuable everything that uses that infrastructure becomes.
I notice that the study blames the usual suspects later on:
In other words, some cliches about how the developed world is holding these countries back, even though without the developed world, not only would they not have the infrastructure they have now, they wouldn't even know what they were missing. These are yet more narratives of failure.
My take is that the "global south" is this way because they always were, and haven't fully developed the wide range of infrastructure that makes a region developed world.
It's took us a long time to get to the point where a society can radically improve from dirt poor to developed world in a human lifetime, but we are at that stage with the necessary knowledge, resources, and infrastructure to make things vastly better worldwide. It's time to do that, rather than hew to stilted narratives that just make things worse.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @05:28AM (6 children)
Europe and the US did spend a couple of centuries extracting raw materials from large part of the "global south" and deliberately preventing any form of industrialization. Not to mention that, in Africa, at least, most of current countries owe more to whatever the colonial boundaries were than to any historical groupings. Which results in things like that genocide in Rwanda a few years back.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday June 06 2021, @12:15PM (5 children)
While there does seem to a lack of industrialization at higher levels (lasting into the 20th Century [e-ir.info]), said extracting of raw materials was heavily industrialized.
Last I checked, those people were grown ups. If current country boundaries were inadequate, they could figure out how to fix that, rather than kill the better part of a million people (and a lot more than that died in the wars in neighboring Congo).
Further, contrary to your assertion, genocide in Rwanda couldn't be fixed through better selection of boundaries. The two primary ethnic groups in conflict (Hutu and Tutsi) lived in mixed communities. There are no natural boundaries that separate the two. This conflict has also driven the largest war since the Second World War. So there's a lot of dying that can't be explained by poor choice of country borders.
Finally, once again, we're well beyond that colonial era. A number of countries have already elevated themselves out of deep poverty (China being the most notable which is on track to hit developed world status in the next two to three decades). Why does such modernization work for China and not for all these other countries? My take is that the big one is allowing people to create and run businesses with relatively little interference from the government.
(Score: 2) by jelizondo on Sunday June 06 2021, @06:10PM (2 children)
Wow! Cut your nose to spite your face! Well done!
You mean businessman have no interference from government in China? Really?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday June 06 2021, @10:50PM (1 child)
Relatively little != no. Compare to India, for example. You've heard of the saying about the one-eyed man in the land of the blind?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @05:52AM
He gets all the pussy? That's the one I heard anyway.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @08:50PM (1 child)
Well beyond? Less than a century, in some places.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday June 06 2021, @11:31PM
I rest my case.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @06:13AM (11 children)
> Poor people tend to be a lot harder on ecosystems than wealthy ones.
Such terrible bullshit.
Poor countries trash themselves to serve plastic garbage to rich countries. Then we rich countries turn around and say, BAD poor country BAD.
(Score: 0, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @01:10PM (10 children)
The default state is poverty. They weren't "put there" by anyone. They never as a society did the necessary things to come out of poverty. It's not like they were well-off, an outsider reduced them to poverty, and that's why they are poor.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @04:28PM (5 children)
What we do when we realize XYZ is harmful is stop doing it, then some smart psychopaths figure out they can outsource it to a shithole and they'll do it over there. Or we'll bring some of them over here, call them 3/5th of a human and make them do it. Wonderful solutions.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday June 06 2021, @05:28PM (4 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @06:48PM (1 child)
Khallow! A higher body-count is not a metric of success!
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Sunday June 06 2021, @10:58PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @05:59AM (1 child)
> good record
depends on the metric. the giant show-stopping events of the last 100 years are probably the creation of welfare and national health services, won out of vast international wars caused in large part by the decline of monarchs/dictators in the west. coincidentally at the same time, most of the castles and great family estates went bust. hmm....
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday June 07 2021, @12:35PM
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday June 07 2021, @04:51PM (3 children)
Other than all the folks where were chained up and literally "put there" by their owners, of course...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @05:39PM (2 children)
You mean the blacks in America who are unbelievably well-off compared to their "free" fellow blacks in Africa?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @11:02PM (1 child)
I wonder if you're confused about why people don't like you. Must be all the woke feminazis amirite???
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 08 2021, @03:44PM
Two words: "cowardice" and "ignorance". Sure, it might conflict harshly with the narrative to note that blacks in the US are freer and more wealthy than blacks in Africa (despite some need for more such on the US side), but at least it's truth.
(Score: 2) by MIRV888 on Sunday June 06 2021, @09:28AM (8 children)
I can't hear you over boston dynamics laughing.
What do you do with billions of people who are no longer needed to produce, assemble, and distribute goods?
You haven't even begun to see your 'narrative of failure'.
It's coming for the 1st world too.
Soon humans will no longer have to earn their right to exist.
There will be machines that do it for us.
What then?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday June 06 2021, @12:22PM (1 child)
It has to happen first before it's worth answering that question! When centuries of such automation have resulted in wealthier, more productive people, maybe it's time to see what is wrong with that narrative? The big one is that automation makes human labor more productive - resulting in an application of Jevons paradox [wikipedia.org].
Then go for a higher quality of work - assuming we're allowed to do so. I don't see the point of worrying about it when employers throughout the developed world are punished for employing people. Society clearly doesn't see it as a problem worth addressing. Fix the regulatory environment, then we'll be able to see what the effects of AI and other advanced automation are.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @04:32PM
It always ends up with more managers.
I work in science and there's barely a single actual scientist. It's mostly managers, rules, rule-enforcement managers and leadership committees. Then a thin, thin layer of science (down to 1 person here) and an assortment of the cheapest foreign, barely English speaking interns / students.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @08:13PM (5 children)
If the machines earn my right to exist for me, I'm going to start handing out wrenches and promoting responsible maintenance habits. If $elites try to take over the world with their drone army? I'll be laughing when they get murdered by all the peons they depend on to live.
The Russians managed to make the "west" look like clowns with just a bit of luck and lot of willingness to sacrifice for the greater good... What do you think happens when the 1% goes against the 99%?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday June 06 2021, @11:02PM (4 children)
Only if you don't pay attention to the many things that got sacrificed for the greater good like tens of millions of people lives, the freedom of a billion people, and incredible environmental damage like draining the Aral Sea.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @01:48AM (3 children)
I was referring to the infiltrations of western intelligence agencies and the other subversive tactics of the ComIntern, not praising any of the Russian governments. Many people in western countries put themselves into considerable risk in an attempt to subvert their governments for what they believed to be the greater good. No amount of robot weaponry will overturn the human math in the hypothetical situation above.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday June 07 2021, @03:19AM (2 children)
So not much, eh? Democracies don't get their strength from operational security.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 08 2021, @02:19PM (1 child)
But you have to admit they made the western intelligence agencies into laughingstocks... The entire structure was compromised, years of planning and effort all wasted because some idealists thought they could make a better future.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 08 2021, @03:40PM
Of course. But why are we treating intelligence agencies as a good measure of a country?
Or rather because you can't maintain the same level of secrecy in a democracy that you can maintain in a totalitarian government. There were plenty of idealists on the Soviet side. They caused problems too, but they didn't compromise USSR intelligence agencies.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Sunday June 06 2021, @02:00PM (5 children)
All infrastructure problems and shortage are directly caused by human corruption, but not just at the very top. There are no technical reasons for any of it. Just pure greed
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2, Funny) by khallow on Sunday June 06 2021, @05:15PM (4 children)
(Score: 2, Interesting) by fustakrakich on Sunday June 06 2021, @05:55PM (3 children)
:-) Very funny... Without corruption there will be no poverty or any other shortage. We can deliver anything anywhere on the planet in 24 hours or less. Permission takes months. All our problems are just mobsters that want to wet their beaks. The poorest countries are the most corrupt, by default.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday June 06 2021, @11:25PM (2 children)
What does "without corruption" mean here? It sounds a lot like the biggest excuse for why communism fails - that it's never been tried. So if we try to completely eliminate corruption and fail (through some unavoidable combination of imperfections in the world and its people), does that mean you'll always have a permanent excuse for why your scheme never works?
My take is a corrupt, wealthy society is going to fare better than the most incorruptible tribal society of pre-civilization days. Technology and infrastructure compensates for a lot of corruption. But you need the technology and the infrastructure. Lack of corruption doesn't give you that automatically.
Next, you ignore that even in the absence of corruption, resources are finite, the universe is risky, and hence, shortage can still happen.
My take is that your corruption talk is the law of triviality [wikipedia.org], often known as the Bike Shed effect. We tend to give increased importance to matters we think we understand than matters we don't, even when the former is utterly trivial.
You don't know much about how to make lots of people less poor, or running a society, but you know that corruption is bad. So that's what you focus on even when it's not that significant to the operation of so many societies.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @06:04AM (1 child)
> most incorruptible tribal society
You mean the ones with hereditary leaders and caste systems? Gotcha.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday June 07 2021, @12:31PM
Leading questions will get you nowhere.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @06:38PM
The latter half of that is the important part. The global south is not poor relative to its own barbarous, savage past: it is poor relative to the developed world that developed the modern concept of wealth. Nobody in Brazil or Nigeria is worse off today than a Brazilian or Nigerian was in the fifteenth century, but he might be worse off than an American or a German. He is poor only inasmuch as his people failed to live up to the new standards set by peoples who worked hard to invent new standards.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @08:00AM (1 child)
That's a poor observation. I'll fix that for you.
Poorest tend to harder on the ecosystem than less poor since they are in survival mode and don't care about things like proper garbage collection or raw sewage. The wealthy, on the other hand, have massive environmental footprints but are sheltered from seeing how horrid their actions (consumerism) are.....
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday June 07 2021, @12:45PM