In regards to China, I don't know if this is a point that this is the only way to do things or if it's just following a previously defined template, similar to the way most economies transition from agrarian, to industrial, to service economies.
I also think it's erroneous to frame it as an either/or state when there's opportunity for both improving standards of living without an additional impact on the environment through increases in efficiency on how we put those resources to work. There's lots of sectors (healthcare, energy, etc.) that affect quality of life that can improve without the assumption that we throw more resources at them, just that we be smarter about how we use those resources.
I suppose this shows how old and out of touch I am, but who are the 'thought-leaders' you refer towards? I'm not being snarky, I legitimately don't know who would be considered a millennial thought-leader and would like to find out.
That was the interpretation I was going for. It is conspicuous - the only way we know how to rapidly increase living standards involves using fossil fuels. Solar and wind are only cost competitive at the moment after easily 30 years of pressure and research. They weren't an option to set the millenials up for success.
The alternatives are very tentatively proven at this stage, and not at the same scale as China from backwater to superpower in 60 years. They didn't do that with wind energy - they burned a lot of coal. We still don't have compelling evidence that a society can flourish without the internal combustion engine. Maybe it is about to hit, we can all hope.
> I suppose this shows how old and out of touch I am, but who are the 'thought-leaders' you refer towards? I'm not being snarky, I legitimately don't know who would be considered a millennial thought-leader and would like to find out.
I don't actually know who would be considered a thought leader for the millenials. Wouldn't even know where to start figuring that out, or even what the term means.
But there are a lot of very vocal individuals on the subject of environmentalism who clearly want people to think like them (the sort of people who lead protests and make up the activist core of the environmental movement). They were the ones I'm referring to.
But similar to your point on the infancy of renewables, this is largely because ICE and other fossil fuel technology has been improved on for the last 150 years. It's unfair to compare renewables to this standard as they are still very much the new kid on the block.
What I think will be very disappointing is if we, as a society, decide to blindly continue focused on fossil fuels because we're optimizing in the short term, rather than the long term. In my opinion, we should be leveraging the last 150 years of fossil fuel technology as a stepping stone to something more sustainable.
I think there's a tendency to treat it as an overly simplified optimization problem, as in we need to maximize output at all costs. It's probably better to set it up as an optimization problem with the proper constraints. These constraints may be externalities that the government is involved in regulating. Yes, we may sacrifice some short term benefit for long-term success. But we (hopefully) won't have squandered an amazing resource like fossil fuels for an ill-advised myopic gain.
It strikes me as a false dichotomy to think we have to choose between higher wages / quality of life and the environment.
As mentioned earlier, a lot of investment went into fossil fuels in the past. Now, we could put a lot of investment into technologies that won’t hurt the environment as much. There will be an initial cost to doing that (we’ll still use fossil fuels to get much of the electricity to make solar/wind/etc), but eventually things will even out and we can start having environmentally-friendly sources be much more affordable.
The methods the boomers & prior generations used for that were a combination of investing in fossil fuel extraction infrastructure and sometimes waging war/extracting resources from other countries.
Look at China - massive generational improvement in living standards, massive increase in pollution (to the point where it goes well beyond the theoretical concerns of global warming).
As a body the wannabe thought-leaders of the millennials are inconsistent on this point. Do they care more about wages and living standards, or more about the environment? There is no longer the enthusiastic consensus on living standards that existed in the previous generations.