This is Tenpu. Earth sustainability. I'm curious. To achieve this, we need an economy where resources circulate like energy .
The disadvantage of economic growth is resource depletion
economic growth. I think this is one of the things that many people want from politics. Why do you ask for this? This may be because everyone expects to live a rich and satisfying life. However, I would like to challenge this expectation.
When thinking about economic growth, readers probably think that the higher the growth rate, the better . If this happens, more people will become wealthy, and depending on policy, fewer people may become poor. However, on the other hand, there is little talk about the disadvantages of economic growth.
One of the age-old problems in this regard is environmental pollution. Factories and other manufacturing processes emitted a lot of hazardous waste, and the negative effects of this caused hardship to nearby residents. Famous examples in Japan are Minamata disease and Itai-itai disease. In economics, this is called a negative externality . However, now that Japan has become an economic powerhouse, such blatant environmental pollution has subsided.
The next problem is global warming . The cause is CO2, or carbon dioxide, emissions. Although Japan is a relatively small country, its economic activities are large, and it emits a large amount of carbon dioxide relative to its land area. One way to solve this problem is to buy and sell emissions credits.
Buying and selling emissions credits means that the amount of carbon dioxide that a country can emit is first decided through an international initiative, and if a country wants to emit more carbon dioxide than that, it can purchase carbon dioxide from other countries that emit less carbon dioxide. This is a system in which people purchase the right to emit carbon.
Although it is not up to the author to judge whether this initiative is working well, I feel that the philosophy of reducing carbon dioxide emissions is shared.
That's why one of the disadvantages of economic growth is environmental pollution, but I would like to share one more thought. It's a waste of resources . Resources are constant. It is highly unlikely that the earth's resources will change significantly over the course of 10 years. Of course, as with the current shale revolution, the supply of oil and other substances may increase in the future, but the amount of reserves should remain constant. The increase in supply is simply due to buried resources coming to the surface.
Therefore, if we continue to waste resources in economic activities, there is a risk that the resources that can be used for economic activities on earth will eventually be exhausted. So, as I mentioned at the beginning, what can we do to maximize the benefits of economic growth, which means an increase in the number of wealthy people?
Recommendation for an energy circular economy
As one such idea, I would like to propose an energy circular economy. An energy circular economy is a recycling economy in which used resources can be used again and again . If we look back at our knowledge of biology and physics, energy circulation is a food chain and the law of conservation of energy.
The reason why the natural environment continues semi-permanently is because a cycle is completed in which energy is converted, becomes other energy, and that energy becomes yet another energy.
As you can probably already understand, when the resources used in economic activities are thrown away as garbage, this circulation mechanism becomes stagnant . As a result, a negative spiral is formed in which resources continue to decrease while garbage continues to increase.
Therefore, one of the major disadvantages of economic growth will be eliminated if used resources can be used second-hand, or ideally, if they can be returned to their original state when they came out of the soil. It is. Recycling of this resource can also be expected to be highly profitable as a business . If this goes well, the trade-off between the environment and economic growth, or the situation where we can only choose between the environment and economic growth, will be resolved.
If resource depletion continues like this, the resources will eventually become extremely expensive and beyond our reach.
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