My “attitude” in no way excuses the very offensive remarks on your part, but I guess that’s what happens when you try to defend undefendable claims. You jump from claim to claim, when you are proven wrong, like how you edited out the part where you claim the European trend can be extrapolated to the entire world and you personally attack me with the excuse that I was taken aback by the ignorance on a straightforward Google search.
From what you remember (from where? That’s a good question I guess no one will ever answer us apparently)that does not make up for the overall downwards trend of consumption and emissions. Ok let’s deconstruct that quickly. Consumption has not been decreasing, it has been increasing, proven by the ever rising GDP, which measures exactly that, the total output of goods and services and considering the imports and exports are roughly equal for Europe and that material consumption is coupled to gdp, that’s the consumption.
When I say that Europe has outsourced its heavy industry to third world countries, I wasn’t talking just about “importing goods”. I was talking about their entire production. And the fact that fossil fuel consumption is still ever growing in Europe as well as in the entire West, coupled to the GDP growth is proven in Hickel(2019) “Is green growth possible”, where the domestic material consumption index is proven not to be accounting for the outsourced fossil fuels and materials consumed in third world countries to produce the goods imported, vital for Europe. The actual material footprint(which is the fossil fuel consumption and materials combined) is growing along with the GDP. And when you understand this, you realize it is all an illusion of accounting.
These are your two tragically false claims. For the third paragraph I don’t have much to say besides that third world countries need to increase their GDP to be living comfortably since they are destitute and the first world countries need to degrow like we said. Scientists have been saying this for so many years. There is a space between planetary boundaries and the decent living conditions that all people can and should be living in. The west exceeds the planetary limits(per capita), the economic south is below decent living conditions. That’s what degrowth preaches. It refers to the west, not the world in general.
