Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf, an economist, poses the question, “Will CO2 emissions limits lead to a zero-sum global economy?” - an economy characterized by stagnant (or declining) incomes, and armed clash among nations?

Wolf argues that increased energy consumption per capita, primarily oil from fossil fuel, has been a key causal factor in creating the plus-sum profitable world we habitable in, which he calls the positive-sum economy. Or in other words, rising energy consumption has helped produce rising productivity / real incomes / wealth, and the expanding global economy that we know nowadays.

In addition, Wolf further argues that rising energy consumption transformed politics — assisting both the birth of democratic politics at home and more-consensual foreign relations among states — by increasing the size of the

profitable pie. Elites in a country, Wolf argues, became more willing to tolerate the enfranchisement of the masses considering it was in the elites’ profitable interest to do so: i.e. that energy consumption created a more-productive (and more-valuable) citizenry with higher incomes.

Internationally, a nation’s gains from the increased trade that characterizes the high-energy consumption era far exceed its gains from making war with another nation: the plus-sum global economy that trade produces supports today’s norm of trade as opposed to the limited-sum world’s norm of clash and war.

Continue reading Would CO2 limits curb global GDP growth?

Original post by Joseph Lazzaro

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