It’s nice to know that fairy tales are alive in the world.
There are more people (6.3 million) in the 75 mile across DC metro area than in four times bigger Costa Rica, and we are madly urban sprawling, building roads, building McMansions, buying ICE pickups and SUV’s, and otherwise cancelling many times over whatever advances are being made in Costa Rica. Fairy tales ARE fun, though.
Costa Rica has about the same population as New Zealand, just under five million, but the peak electricity usage for today was only 1.7 GW, versus 5.5 GW for New Zealand. It’s likely that their energy use will rise to the point where they can’t rely mainly on hydro, as we used to do. https://www.electricitymap.org/?wind=false&solar=false&page=country&remote=true&countryCode=CR
It helps that Costa Rica does not suffer from a Resource Curse, meaning there is no reason for supernational corporations to buy local politicians to give them extraction and pollution rights. Oil and high-demand minerals lead to the corruption that interferes with social development in many countries.
Quesada said they don’t have natural resources (with an odd emphasis on “natural”, leading into that brightsiding bullsh about people being the resource… but they do of course. Nature is their resource. Like Belize, they rely a lot on nature and ecological tourism, which makes for a completely different relationship with the land and its inhabitants. They have to keep it alive. It’s an intersubjective, or I-and-Thou relationship rather than the objectifying extractive one we form with “resources”.
They also have almost no military, a related aspect of the same phenomenon which comes from and reinforces a different relationship to themselves and their neighbors. It’s not paradise, of course, but it clearly makes a difference in their lives.
January 8, 2020 at 10:32 am
It’s nice to know that fairy tales are alive in the world.
There are more people (6.3 million) in the 75 mile across DC metro area than in four times bigger Costa Rica, and we are madly urban sprawling, building roads, building McMansions, buying ICE pickups and SUV’s, and otherwise cancelling many times over whatever advances are being made in Costa Rica. Fairy tales ARE fun, though.
January 8, 2020 at 6:24 pm
Costa Rica has about the same population as New Zealand, just under five million, but the peak electricity usage for today was only 1.7 GW, versus 5.5 GW for New Zealand. It’s likely that their energy use will rise to the point where they can’t rely mainly on hydro, as we used to do.
https://www.electricitymap.org/?wind=false&solar=false&page=country&remote=true&countryCode=CR
January 8, 2020 at 4:46 pm
It helps that Costa Rica does not suffer from a Resource Curse, meaning there is no reason for supernational corporations to buy local politicians to give them extraction and pollution rights. Oil and high-demand minerals lead to the corruption that interferes with social development in many countries.
January 9, 2020 at 11:18 am
Quesada said they don’t have natural resources (with an odd emphasis on “natural”, leading into that brightsiding bullsh about people being the resource… but they do of course. Nature is their resource. Like Belize, they rely a lot on nature and ecological tourism, which makes for a completely different relationship with the land and its inhabitants. They have to keep it alive. It’s an intersubjective, or I-and-Thou relationship rather than the objectifying extractive one we form with “resources”.
They also have almost no military, a related aspect of the same phenomenon which comes from and reinforces a different relationship to themselves and their neighbors. It’s not paradise, of course, but it clearly makes a difference in their lives.