"In the degrowth literature, a caricature of the typical economist is presented as believing in unlimited economic growth, and that growth should be pursued regardless of its environmental impact. This is a straw man. It would be a naïve economist who did not recognise that constraints exist. And economists usually limit their projections to a few decades to come, rather than to the infinite future, in which they supposedly believe in unlimited exponential economic growth. Certainly, there are theoretical economic growth models which portray the possibility of exponential growth into the infinite future, but economists have had enough common sense not to assume stylised theoretical models are the be-all-and-end-all when it comes to public policy."
Then why, Mr. Tunny, is it so hard to find an economist who can tell us when the economy should stop growing?
Geoffrey Deihl, aka Sane Thinker (@gdeihl), carefully analyzes various economic plans to combat climate change, including the Green New Deal, and contrasts them with his preferred option: Degrowth.
This is a fully researched and superbly reasoned article. I'll post a few excerpts below, but I hope you'll read the whole thing.
Capitalism, particularly neoliberal capitalism and its resulting increased consumption, have pushed the planet to the brink. Nibbling at the edges of the problem is woefully inadequate.
Climate scientists are stunned by the melting Arctic ice sheet, for instance, which is decades ahead of original models. The Antarctic ice sheet is now melting as well. The oceans are currently experiencing an unexpected and shocking temperature rise in a matter of months, not years. Scientists are unsure if this is related to the return of El Niño, or if it could be an entirely new tipping point they were unaware of.
The truth is that without significant, perhaps profound changes to how we live in so-called advanced industrial nations, we’re going to fail to halt global warming at an adequate pace with current efforts, and failure will lead to a crash that none of our sadly popular apocalyptic movies can prepare us for.
We’re in a climate emergency now, the word crisis is no longer appropriate. The strongest possible actions need to be taken as quickly as possible. Delay is death.
We need to dismantle billionaires and accept that we commoners also need to be prepared for changes, as we adjust to living in a gentler way on the planet. We can sacrifice again, as we did during WWII, for an ultimately a better future. We will not save the planet merely by driving electric versions of SUVs that look like the solution in slick advertising spots.
Degrowth recognizes a simple truth. The planet is finite. Infinite growth is an impossibility on a finite world.
Reducing our consumption and ever-growing energy demands is key, if we are to have a future. This is one of the fundamentals the Green New Deal, Build Back Better, and IRA miss. All the batteries in the world will be insufficient if we don’t bring our consumption under control. In addition to building out renewables, we must reduce our energy use. Degrowth recognizes that economic growth without destruction of nature is impossible, and the destruction of nature guarantees our own destruction.
It can be argued that electric vehicles are an improvement when replacing ICE vehicles.
But that misses a much bigger point — which is that the very best car is not an electric car. The very best car is no car at all!
Building electric cars requires massive use of fossil fuels, including petrochemicals for the manufacture of plastics. In addition, mining of lithium for batteries as well as trawling for other minerals in the deep ocean is environmentally disastrous, killing biodiversity while polluting our water, soil, and air.
The kind of “Green Growth” championed by capitalists and politicians, which features more electric cars, a bit of solar, and a few wind farms — along with continued use of fossil fuels — is not a good answer. It does not solve any of our problems, and in fact only makes them worse.
Say NO to more cars, of any kind. Push instead for active transportation and for improved public transit.
Continued economic growth is unsustainable. Period. The only logical choice for us and for the biosphere is de-growth.
"If you want to absolutely destroy a website that is all about building communities and meeting new people, then aim for the site and all communities to always be growing as much as possible. Make that a design goal of the site. Pump those subscriber numbers up."
Humble request: do you know of any real life experience of post-capitalist economies, even partial ones? Local currencies? Cooperative models? Community land trusts? Priority given to resilience over efficiency? #solarpunk economies? There are a few usual suspects (Mondragon, Cooperativa Integral Catalana, Transition Network...), but I struggle to find long lists of cases. Boost appreciated @g_kallis@jks@jasonhickel#postcapitalism#economics#degrowth#postgrowth
Damnit, why is Matt Huber being given airtime on #degrowth again? He’s repeating the same mistakes and straw man arguments that he’s been corrected on repeatedly for years now. I respect his takes on capital and labour but he’s so obviously ignorant of ecology, and remains so despite some earnest efforts to educate him otherwise.
Preparing for my #SummerVacation#train trip: saying goodbye to my cat & my room; locked&loaded for 3 weeks in Croatia: the #beach & #DeGrowth conf in Zagreb & #LikaLodge after that… & hoping that #flooding has spared the train tracks in Germany, Austria, Slovenia…
"... people who cannot meet their most basic needs; that is where you want to see the growth of their incomes, and the growth of public services that serve them, right? ... That's where - if anywhere in the world - we want to see 'economic growth' ... and it's got to be distributive, so it's actually shared, and it's got to be regenerative, so it doesn't destroy the planet as it happens."
"...earlier this month we passed Earth overshoot day...
Access to fossil fuels has allowed us to temporarily overshoot biophysical limits. This lifted our population and demands on the biosphere past the level it can safely absorb. Barring a planned reduction of those biosphere demands, we will experience the same “adjustments” as other species.
...This often involves large-scale starvation and die-offs as populations adjust"
Before anyone claims that by posting criticisms of green growth, I am in effect supporting the fossil fuel industry’s agenda of Business As Usual, let me say out loud and very plain, I am against ALL new growth in the privileged world.
I’m against “green growth” and I’m certainly against additional fossil fuel growth. We’ve had more than enough already. We’ve done enough. We’ve taken too much and destroyed too much.
Those of us in the privileged Western world must be prepared to take a big step back, to lower our expectations and accept a standard of living closer to the way our grandparents lived. That wasn’t so bad, really, and it did FAR less damage to the environment.
Now, one more excerpt from TruthDig's excellent piece on "The Green Growth Delusion," this time focusing on the direction our society must take if we have any hope of providing a somewhat livable world to our children and grandchildren.
Jason Hickel, professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology in Barcelona and author of “Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World,” says that empirical evidence “does not support the theory of green growth,” because staying within planetary boundaries is likely to require something completely different: a massive reduction of less-necessary forms of economic activity in high-income countries; a “de-growth” of industries that are organized mostly around capital accumulation and elite consumption and have little or nothing to do with human well-being.
Hickel and other degrowthists point out that the only way we can feasibly decarbonize fast enough to meet the Paris Agreement goals and reduce other ecological pressures is to scale down industries and activities that we obviously do not need: SUVs, private jets, yachts, fast fashion, industrial beef, commercial air travel, arms, advertising, etc. We should not be devoting energy and materials to producing these things in the middle of a climate and ecological emergency.
Instead, we should focus the economy on what is really necessary to support good lives for all, within planetary boundaries. This requires dramatically reducing the purchasing power of the rich, and ensuring universal access to livelihoods, affordable housing and necessary public services.
Degrowthists entertain the heretical idea that a more hopeful future requires more than the hyper-development of green technology to displace fossil fuels. This alternative hopeful future does not maintain GDP growth or strive to constantly increase economic complexity.
If we are to avoid ecological collapse, we must take the opposite path, one of contraction and simplification, a downsizing of the economy and population, so that Homo sapiens can prosper within the regenerative and assimilative capacity of the biosphere. In other words, we must live within our planet’s biophysical limits.
Green New Dealers who promote a growthist future, meanwhile, appear to have little understanding of basic ecological and biophysical reality. For these true believers the only approaches to sustainability — the approaches that happily align with the objectives of governments in bed with corporations — are those that attempt to arrest carbon emissions with technological innovation and economic expansion, both persisting forever, mutually reinforcing.
That's the battle we're engaged in now, facing the formidable alliance of Big Oil, Big Green, and Big Government, with both Democrats and Republicans adamantly opposing what is so desperately needed.
Can the fight for degrowth and a healthy planetary ecosystem succeed? Probably not, but the only hope is to give it all we've got.
Survival game where you learn to be a part of an ecosystem and slowly abandon your unsustainable "tech tree" replacing it with sustainable, local solutions.
A lot of games are trying to replicate very expansionist core loops, be it Minecraft's, Factorio's and so on, which see the player as a force acting on the environment / ecosystem, not working together with it.
We really dig up oil and natural gas at enormous expense, guard it, ship it, fight wars over it, process it, turn it into plastic, and then dump that plastic into the oceans. Something like 8 million metric tons of it each year. A hundred and fifty million metric tons so far.
But also #degrowth is somehow primitivist anti-civ idealism.
Prof. Julia Steinberger reports
that for 3 full days the EU parliament hosted thousands of scientists, activists and policy-makers charting a future beyond growth, but says every single journalist there she spoke to said, "my editor refuses to print any story critical of economic growth."
She is asking people to spread the word about this. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1659429887751405569.html #degrowth#beyondgrowth
If you'd like to learn more about #degrowth, especially the theoretical underpinnings of the idea and its relation to #anarchism, I recommend reading the in-depth blog article linked below.
Here is a brief bit from the beginning...
The concept of degrowth is really quite simple. It is, at its core, just the reduction of society’s overall metabolism to a level consistent with biospheric boundaries through pathways that prioritize societal well-being. That’s really it.
It is not austerity, recession, or eco-fascist population reduction. In fact, it’s a shift away from the current orthodox socio-economic worldview to one where those descriptors don’t even really make sense because the evaluation of societal well-being has fundamentally changed.
Climate optimists like to claim that as soon as we reach “net zero” — the point when we are (theoretically) emitting less CO2 than the amount being absorbed by oceans, rocks, or plants, and taken out of the atmosphere through carbon capture — then global warming will stop almost immediately.
It’s a nice message, one intended to make us feel better, reassured that our leaders know what they’re doing. Don’t worry, we are told, everything is under control. By 2050, if not sooner, they’ll have the situation turned around.
In the meantime, we can all relax and go ahead with Business As Usual. 😃 Keep shopping, keep buying, keep driving, keep flying. And don’t forget to do your part: buy those paper straws and recycle that water bottle!
BUT — there are big problems with this phony net zero claim, and the way countries report their emissions is one of them. Investigators have found huge discrepancies accruing through the use of spurious carbon offsets, outsourcing, and other UN-approved loopholes. Also, CO2 emissions from the military are not required to be included, nor are emissions from international trade.
Some estimates suggest that actual emissions could be at least twice as high as what’s being shown in the official reports. No wonder global temperatures keep rising even though we’re constantly assured that great progress is being made.
In addition, there’s a risk that climate change itself will trigger “natural” emissions of greenhouse gases as peat bogs dry out, as drought-weakened forests burn, as permafrost melts, and as the sea floor warms, releasing previously frozen methane clathrates. So it’s not just the emissions of human industry we need to worry about.
The point is, net zero is NOT zero. Don’t fall for their lies. It’s time for real change, for system change. We must demand the end of #capitalism and a pivot toward #degrowth.
Technology alone won't save us, but we can change our social and political relations to it, and fundamentally think about how, when, and why we use technology in a post capitalist, post growth future. It's not just low and high tech, but appropriate technology. https://anarchosolarpunk.substack.com/p/postgrowthtech
i want to write an article: the self-inflicted irrelevance of the #degrowth movement. bc we ruin it for ourselves right now. most people will have no idea what the hell i am on about. the people who have always been in this movement know what i am saying. or let's better say what is left of us?