This is old news but I was reminded of it by the story immediately below combined with the wrap-up of the Davos get-together.
From Reuters, August 2, 2022:
A World Economic Forum (WEF) article that commends car sharing platforms as being efficient does not advocate for the total abolishment of private car ownership, despite what multiple articles and social media posts claim, often misquoting the article.
One early article entitled “World Economic Forum Calls to End ‘Wasteful’ Private Car Ownership” was published on July 22, though other articles have since been posted with variations of the headline (here), (here).
Screenshots and links of these article have been shared more than a thousand times on Facebook (here), (here), (here), (here), (here), (here), and many thousand times on Twitter (here), as well as being liked tens of thousands of times on Instagram (here), (here), (here), (here).
However, the WEF article that it cites as the source of this claim does not call for an end to private car ownership, nor does the word “wasteful” — which most of the articles put in quotation marks — appear in the article, including archives of the article taken on the day it was published, July 18 (here).
Instead, the article, entitled “3 circular economy approaches to reduce demand for critical metals”, discusses three potential solutions to increase the quantity of valuable metals in circulation, including improving the longevity of products; finding secondary uses for old products, such batteries and wind turbines; and enabling the sharing of products such as mobile phones, laptops and cars....
....MUCH MORE
The WEF are big, big proponents of circular economy, often using the term in place of what they actually mean. The first of the "3 circular economy approaches..." doesn't have much to do with circular as it is commonly thought of:
...A fully circular economy is much more than recycling; it is keeping materials at their highest value. It is time to look beyond circular materials. These three mindset changes can help reduce demand for critical metals....
....1. Go from owning to using
Be honest, you likely have at least one old mobile phone tucked in the bottom of a drawer. Possibly an unused hard drive taking up space too. You aren’t alone. The average car or van in England is driven just 4% of the time. While most already have a personal phone, 39% of workers globally have employer-provided laptops and mobile phones.
This is not at all resource efficient. More sharing can reduce ownership of idle equipment and thus material usage. Car sharing platforms such as Getaround and BlueSG have already seized that opportunity to offer vehicles where you pay per hour used....
Some previous posts on the subject:
The concept of a steady-state or no-growth or circular economy is the basis for all the U.N.'s and the WEF's year 2030 plans....
July 2022's "Sri Lanka As A Testing Ground For Some Of The WEF's Ideas":
Here's an interesting paragraph:
"....Sri Lanka’s situation exposes the true cost of living and the cost of ownership. In aperformance economy, which encompasses one of the economic principles of a circulareconomy, a smaller number of asset owners will take custodianship of assets to keepthem in use and provide services to many users based on consumption....."That's from "How a circular economy could help tackle Sri Lanka's economic crisis", World Economic Forum, July 5, 2022.
July 2022
From The World Economic Forum.....
There is a lot going on here and for now I will leave it to interested reader to do the higher level analysis.
3 circular economy approaches to reduce demand for critical metals
Possibly also of interest:
"Complexity and Armageddon, or… the Story of the Hemp Microphone"
The
scale of change being contemplated for energy use simply will not allow
for the lifestyles people enjoy today. Period. That is the whole point
of the post immediately below: "Green economic growth is an article of ‘faith’ devoid of scientific evidence" and anyone telling you different is either a liar or a fool.
And if they deceitfully don't mention the scale of change individuals will face, they are possibly a varlet. And a scoundrel. More than likely a charlatan as well.
The most concise statement of the reality is the abstract of one of the papers cited in the below essay:
Decoupling environmental ‘bads’ from economic ‘goods’ is a key part of policies such as green growth and circular economy that see economic growth as desirable or necessary, and also see that current use of natural resources and its environmental impacts is unsustainable. We estimate what a ‘successful decoupling’ (2% annual GDP growth and a decline in resource use by 2050 to a level that could be sustainable and compatible with a maximum 2°C global warming) would mean in terms of its type, timeline and size. Compared to 2017, ‘successful’ decoupling has to result in 2.6 times more GDP out of every ton of material use, including in-use material stocks. There are no realistic scenarios for such an increase in resource productivity.
Can't cut back and maintain current ways of being. Not going to happen. The math doesn't work. And it doesn't matter if you understand the math, or not.
To paraphrase an old Russian line: In reality, you don't do math, math do you.
We've also looked at:
And many, many more.
