NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #20/NN_1992_20.iso/spool/sci/environm/11262

Internet Message Format | 1992-09-11 | 1.8 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!gatech!psuvax1!rutgers!rochester!dietz
From: [e-mail] (Paul Dietz)
Newsgroups: sci.environment
Subject: Re: --Warming Threat to Economy
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 11 Sep 92 14:18:29 GMT
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
Organization: Computer Science Department University of Rochester
Lines: 27

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Dean Alaska) writes:

> taken to limit CO2 and equivalents.  The growth that some
> environmentalists (ala Club of Rome) complain about is not GNP
> (money) growth, it is the growth in _physical_ throughput,

A correction here: the Club of Rome said no such thing.  Indeed, the
Club of Rome is (was?) not an environmental group at all, but rather a
group of business types in Europe who commissioned a number of
studies, including the one that was described in "Limits To Growth".
That was a report *to* the CoR, not *by* the CoR.  Moreover, I don't
believe the CoR ever formally endorsed the conclusions of Meadows et.
al.

BTW, there is no obvious reason why physical throughput cannot be
greatly increased, as long as the fraction of that throughput that
ends up as pollution is decreased.  Efforts to reduce pollution by
process changes and other means have often been very effective, with
orders-of-magnitude changes in pollutant levels (examples: scrubbing
of gasified coal shown able to reduce SOx emissions [vs. no pollution
control at all] by a factor of 300, and replacement of tetraethyl lead
by other octane boosters effectively eliminating automotive lead
emissions).  There is no fundamental law saying that a certain amount
of pollution must be created per kilogram of industrial output.

    Paul F. Dietz
    [e-mail]