Climate change is a reality. Responsible for this change is the excessive concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, mainly due to the requirement of electricity at the residential, commercial, industrial and services level, from fossil sources emitting large amounts of carbon dioxide. Trying to reduce such consumption would affect people's well-being?
Development is a process of enhancing quality of life within a community between two points in time.
Quality of life comes from how our needs are being met.
People will use time to meet wants and needs directly, or they will use time to convert resources/ecological services into the means to meet wants and needs indirectly. There are a couple of other categories (robots building robots, and manna from heaven) but they don't play a significant role in first world settings (maybe not in any setting).
Generally, Human Development will increase how effectively people are able to use their time to meet their wants and needs; while Technological Development will increase how efficiently people use their time to convert resources into the means to meet their wants and needs.
If we look only at 'needs' and at 'resources/ecological services that are available in perpetuity', then you have the building blocks for Sustainable Development.
In all communities, there is a relationship between resources/ecolgocial services used (measured with Planetary Boundaries or Ecological Footprint) and time use to meet needs. This can be looked at as the time that is used today, and the time that would be used in a series of futures. We could ask how much time would be used if all resources and ecological services that we over-consume cease to be available? We can ask how much time would be used if all needs were being met? And we can combine those two cases.
Ultimately, to have a sustainable community, we would have to show that all of the people would be able to meet all of their needs in not more than 24h/d/ca, even after all over-consumed resources and ecological services cease to be available.
If you are envisioning a community that has significantly smaller ecological footprint, say by reducing the carbon footprint dramatically, then that will defacto increase the time used to meet needs. To balance that, one would have to find ways to increase their effectiveness, so that the time that would be required to meet needs, as if all needs were being met, is not increased.
The math I've done shows that the required human development in a first world setting would be about 7x as effective as technological development, for the same financial investment. That is, in part, because we have an abundance of infrastructure, and each additional component has a declining incremental benefit; and we haven't really kept up with our human development.
So, to answer your question, yes. Probably not 'hard', but certainly not 'easy'. By coupling human development with technological development, and not relying on imported biocapacity or exported ecological footprint.
Recently been proposed are the ten pathways for the utilization of carbon dioxide. You may read it using the link below
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1681-6
Regards,
Vaid, B. H.
Bakshi Hardeep Vaid thanks for your contribution, so interesting.
Ilan Kelman, thanks for your valuable contribution and the interesting link. Thanks a lot.
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