[it_does_follow]

> They point to evidence, notably from the Nordic nations, that economies can continue to grow even as carbon emissions start to come down.

This a pretty laughable piece of "evidence" given that the most important export from the Nordic countries is petroleum.

But even if this wasn't the case, you can't talk about global systems on a local scale. There are countries that have continued to reduce fossil fuel growth and continued to increase economic growth, but at the end of the day these are just accounting tricks. The US has seen a bit of this, but we also exported a lot of our energy intensive manufacturing to other countries.

I'm sure someone will point out that some studies have tried to correct for this by measuring the carbon foot print of imports. But these studies are also flawed for several reasons. First the reduced cost of good is China is not only the lower labor cost but all of the other industrial services nearby that allow those goods to be created efficiently. It's very difficult to determine how far up the chain of production you need to go.

The other is that there's never an attempt to account for how much energy/fossil fuels go into the dollars that flood into an economy. If your finance sector is making a lot of money of foreign energy consumption, that counts.

The bottom line is that global consumption of energy has never decreased for any source[0]. We even burn more wood to produce energy than we did when that was one of of the major source of home energy!

We are already hitting the limits to growth, but the reality of that is too terrifying for most people to accept so we end up convincing ourselves that its not happening... while we're watching a war over fossil fuels develop in Europe.

0.https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption

[tonyedgecombe]

>There are countries that have continued to reduce fossil fuel growth and continued to increase economic growth, but at the end of the day these are just accounting tricks.

The UK did this by switching from coal to gas powered electricity generation. It wasn't an accounting trick, it really did have an impact. The economy continued to grow.