Is economic development a false promise for developing countries?

Universal growth to rich-country living standards runs into ecological limits

Question: Is economic development a false promise for developing countries?
Position1 of 2›: Yes, economic development is a false promise for developing countries
Argument‹2 of 2: Universal growth to rich-country living standards runs into ecological limits

The argument

A second case for the false-promise position sets aside trade and finance and looks at physical limits. The development on offer, proponents argue, is defined by the consumption of the countries that industrialised first: their energy use, materials throughput, diets, housing and mobility. If every country reached those levels by the same means, the demands on land, water, minerals and the atmosphere would far exceed what the planet supplies. The promise is therefore not merely hard to keep; on this reading it cannot be kept for everyone at once, which is what makes it misleading to offer to everyone. Proponents add that the resulting constraints fall on the countries that have not yet developed. The atmosphere's capacity to absorb emissions has largely been used by the early industrialisers, so poorer countries are now asked to grow without the cheap fossil energy their predecessors relied on, and to do it while absorbing the harvest failures, heat and storms that earlier growth helped cause. Being told to develop differently, using technologies they must buy from the countries that already developed, strikes proponents as the same promise offered on worse terms. The position is not that poverty should be accepted. It is that the specific model being promised, convergence on rich-country consumption through export-led growth, is unavailable, and that continuing to promise it crowds out the alternatives worth arguing about: provision of health, schooling, housing and energy at far lower material cost, and claims on the wealth already accumulated elsewhere. Proponents argue that honesty about the limit is a precondition for taking those alternatives seriously rather than a counsel of despair.

Premises

[P1]The development being promised is defined by the energy use, materials throughput and consumption levels of the countries that industrialised first. [P2] Extending those levels to every country by the same means would demand more land, water, minerals and atmospheric capacity than the planet supplies. [P3] Much of that capacity has already been used by the early industrialisers, so later developers are asked to grow without the cheap energy their predecessors used and while bearing the resulting climatic harms. [C] Therefore economic development, as it is promised, is a false promise for developing countries.

Counter-arguments

Critics reply that this treats one historical pathway as the only one available. Poorer countries are now industrialising with generating technologies that did not exist when the early industrialisers built their economies, and the material cost of delivering light, heat, mobility and communication has fallen steeply. On this account the ecological ceiling constrains how development happens rather than whether it can happen, and the countries using the least energy today have the most to gain from building new capacity. Treating the limit as a refutation of development, they argue, asks the poorest people to forgo gains in health and schooling for a problem the rich world created.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Development need not be defined by the consumption of the countries that industrialised first, and what people in poorer countries are mostly seeking is electricity, schooling and healthcare rather than that pattern of consumption. [Rejecting P2] The physical ceiling applies to one technological route: the material and energy cost of delivering the same services has fallen sharply, so the extrapolation holds the technology fixed while varying only the number of people. [Rejecting P3] That the early industrialisers used most of the atmospheric capacity is an argument for transfers, finance and faster deployment of new capacity, not for telling later developers that development was never available. [Rejecting C] The conclusion slides from a limit on one pathway to the falsity of the promise as such, which the premises do not support.