> For instance, you can look at how many tons of stuff are being moved by trucks

Gross tonnage is a good input into "what we produce and consume." It's incomplete, however. Grossly. It excludes all services, for example. It's why we abandoned it as a measure after like the early industrial revolution.

(A better one is electricity production, which you can estimate remotely from fuel levels and thermals. It’s also woefully incomplete—the nutters trying to forecast based solely on it are influencers, not fund managers or policymakers, for good reason.)

> Do you know how they correct for inflation?

Yes.

> There is no way to "measure" inflation

This is nonsense. It must be estimated. But so must e.g. "the surface that is being constructed" depending on how one defines surface construction.

There are various measures of inflation of various utility. Some are used to deflate GDP.

Mankiw's Principles of Economics might be a good start if you're serious about your questions. Because by your metrics, decarbonistion is a folly—the measures are probably made up anyway!

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palata a day ago | parent [-]

> Because by your metrics, decarbonistion is a folly—the measures are probably made up anyway!

Not sure if you're consciously being manipulative or not.

Sure, you are more eloquent than I am. But do you understand my point about estimating inflation being a lot more random than other metrics? Making me say that "any kind of metrics is always folly" is just manipulative, I'm sure you understand that it is not what I mean.

> It excludes all services, for example. It's why we abandoned it as a measure after like the early industrial revolution.

Which I'm sure is important for economists doing economy stuff. But I am convinced that there is value in seeing that after 2007, indicators like gross tonnage have been slowing down, and that is correlated with the evolution of fossil fuels.

We cannot eat services, or use them to heat our apartments, can we? Services are a luxury for when everything below works. The risk with the end of fossil fuels is that it will disrupt everything on top of which services are built. I don't think GDP is bringing much in those discussions.

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JumpCrisscross 14 hours ago | parent [-]

> do you understand my point about estimating inflation being a lot more random than other metrics?

Yes. I’d argue inflation metrics are about as easy to fuck with as any emissions math I’ve seen. That doesn’t make either fundamentally wrong. But if one is irredeemably wrong, so is the other.

(In any case, you can deflate your own GDP. Nominal GDP contains zero deflation. There is no similar easy fix for emissions calculations, which I read with much wider error bars than any OECD inflation print.)

> Which I'm sure is important for economists doing economy stuff

Not the billions of people employed in services?

> indicators like gross tonnage have been slowing down, and that is correlated with the evolution of fossil fuels

Global gross tonnage is growing [1]. On the sea, your correlation works because that fleet runs on fossil fuels. If you were trying to measure Chinese economic activity using fossil-fuel metrics, on the other hand, you’d fail.

(Again, your instinct isn’t wrong. Energy is, more or less, the economy. That’s why we can decarbonise without lowering living standards. We can keep energy constant or even growing while reducing fossil-fuel use.)

[1] https://unctadstat.unctad.org/insights/theme/107

	▲	palata 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Global gross tonnage is growing [1] In Europe?