Energy Revolution: Want to Save the Planet? Re-Industrialize - Bloomberg

A $3.5 billion science experiment in Kurnool, a remote, hilly district in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. Hitting the brakes on growth isn’t fair to poor nations when a low-carbon economy is possible around what are now heavy, dirty industries. Andy Mukherjee Just as the machine-smashing Luddites of the 19th century were wrong about the consequences of technical progress for jobs, so may be the champions of the more recent theory of “degrowth.” Sold as our best chance against global warming, it threatens to trap 80% of the world’s population at living standards the developed world would never tolerate. In the 1970s, the Romanian mathematician Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen posited a thermodynamic rule for when humankind exhausts its supply of fossil fuel. Economic activity, he said, would inevitably slow to a level supportable by solar flows. A corollary of that idea is that since in most places the sun shines for only half a day, billions of people in Asia, Latin America and A

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• Vincent Song