The capitalist dream of endless “green growth” and a sustainable high-tech civilization will never come to pass. It is, according to the author of the article below, a literal impossibility — because the concept violates the laws of physics!
@breadandcircuses This is a good quote from that article:
A policy mandating manufacturers to design for repairability, durability and simplicity would thus go much further than platitudes about recycled material content and reduced CO2 footprints…
Waste will always exist, especially in human systems where you must balance efficiency against human needs/freedom.
So in a human first situation, you are trying to maximize the ability of the system to meet human needs. You need to do this assuming the lowest base energy profile possible.
So what is the minimum amount of energy we need to meet human needs on a day to day basis and what is the burden of harvesting that energy, converting it to human first uses.
Literally anything that isn't healing, sheltering or feeding people right now is killing us as whole.
The idea that somehow technology will save us that we will be able to invent a way out of this that lets the line keep going up. It is a nice myth. I would love the decedents of the people I care about to live in a scarcity free society, but we aren't even going to have a chance to solve that problem unless we put the breaks on the problem we have, which is that we have added so much energy to the collective complex systems, systems that were designed mostly to harvest energy from the sun.
We have to reduce the energy cycling through the system. We need to stop making useless shit. We need to stop trying to raise everyone to the consumer standard and start trying to explore more ways of living outside of the consumer cycle.
Yeah, that will probably be painful, but what happens if we don't is gonna be so much worse.
Does it meet a human need?
Does it relieve human suffering?
Needs first, food, shelter medicine. All energies of production should be organized for these things first.
Markets fail because they allow individuals with better means to dictate the suffering of others. It becomes a self-reinforcing system where participation in the system is the only way to even reasonably prevent your own suffering.
For instance, we have had the ability to end world hunger now for some time. (for less money than a modern US weapons program). Why hasn't it happened? its hard to justify the continuance of a system that incentivizes the suffering of some for the enrichment of others.
So, people will decide, just like they do now. Only the decision must be compassion based and not profit based.
First, studies show that nearly everyone, including the very poor, spends maybe 10% of their income on "luxuries", i.e. things that are not strictly necessary for survival but make life worth living. The poor are criticized for this and it's used as a reason to cut what little help they get, even when their poverty is a direct result of the wider system.
So I don't think total puritanism is a good idea. In historical crises some "luxury" has often survived, and not just for the rich. People had radios in WWII for public announcements, but they still broadcast music. But at the same time, food was rationed to ensure that the poor weren't priced out of the market.
However, there's a difference between low impact leisure for everyone and the ridiculously polluting luxuries of the rich.
Fixing inequality is important. Billionaires are a policy failure. They have too much impact on our politics, and way too much impact on our emissions.
As @Glamazon pointed out, we need to provide first and foremost for everyone's needs. Not turn them into a market failure to punish the poor.
I agree that we need to reduce total energy used. For instance we can severely restrict flights, ban cruises, reduce the number of cars. However we cannot abandon technology entirely, and arguably many things are technology that you might not think of as technology. Medicine is a need, not a greed, and it requires some sort of technological civilisation.
And in some cases, cutting demand requires solving a bunch of related problems and a certain amount of building, e.g. housing, harassment, new cycle lanes, new train lines, more dense housing, making cities more accessible without a car, etc.
Another example of appropriate technology: we can greatly increase the efficiency of heating (with heat pumps) and of transport (with electric buses, more bicycles etc). But this will result in an increase in total electricity use in the short to medium term. It's worth it because the systems it replaces directly use fossil fuels and are incredibly inefficient. But it does mean we need to build renewables, storage, interconnectors etc.
The point isn't to abolish all luxuries, potentially as a trojan horse argument to justify doing nothing since the rich's right to fly is somehow the same as the poor's right to an occasional supermarket beer or movie.
The point is to prioritise everyone's needs over the greeds of the few (and that will mean some amount of lifestyle change for most of us), live within the physical boundaries, and minimise the material cost of the transition to a more sustainable society.
I have caught heat for saying this before but until we stabilize the world population there is no stabilizing supply and demand issues. Can individuals reducing their demand offset increasing number of people demanding basic resources? (I know less affluent countries have much lower CO2 footprints but they still need stuff)
I guess it was inevitable that someone would come back with the CO2 argument.
We are faced with a decision. Do we as a species make a conscious decision to control our population or make nature do it. Nature is pretty harsh at this having billions of years of experience and not particularly caring about any one species.
I don't think that will solve the problem though. What concerns me is some individuals taking many thousands of times more of every resource than others. They then use that resource wealth to gain even more. If we don't fix that then eventually the planet will seem crowded with even a million people.
I carefully avoid suggesting ways to achieve ZPG. It is a charged topic but to me population is necessary to include in any #degrowth strategy. More people consume more stuff.
Even though I get accused of it I do not want to kill people from poorer countries.
@jamesgbradbury thank you for your thoughtful response. Would the planet seem crowded with only 1M people? That's over 8000x less people.
@HikerGeek@matthewtoad43@Glamazon@breadandcircuses I only said a million as a vague number to make a point. What I'm saying is that the carrying capacity of the Earth varies dramatically depending on the consumption of the people living on it. That consumption varies a lot.
If the top ten percent (which includes me) were to head off the Mars, everyone else should have plenty of resources, again being vague.
@HikerGeek@jamesgbradbury@Glamazon@breadandcircuses The "current growth path" (for population) leads to a peak even without serious growth constraints. There's a long history of fertility falling with urbanisation. Once children become a financial liability rather than an extra hand on the farm, and soon after infant mortality falls, people tend to have fewer of them.
However, what level it stabilizes at, and whether that's sustainable with a given per-capita consumption of carbon, food, materials, etc is another question.
Non-coercive population control policies are sensible, just and necessary. Empowering women, ensuring everyone has access to education and safe contraception, and so on. And there is ample evidence that this helps.
However, population measures are slow. There's a significant time lag built in. We need to reduce carbon emissions, biodiversity loss and other impacts fast.
And at the same time, we need global justice, which requires reducing poverty both within rich nations and globally. Poorer nations have contributed least to the climate crisis, are often victims of various forms of imperialism (arguably including population narratives), and are most vulnerable to climate impacts.
So fairness, and therefore degrowth, require economic growth in some places, but in rich countries it can't be a goal.
That means more equal per-capita emissions and resource use, which means we need to go even faster in the west, while meeting our obligations to the rest of the world.
But it doesn't follow that we have to take drastic steps to prevent e.g. Africa reaching a billion people, as forecast. That's arguably an imperialist narrative. In terms of numbers, we need to get the per-capita carbon emissions down to more or less zero, and fast. Technology for that is mostly ready already. We'll get there faster if we also make changes to infrastructure and behavior, i.e. demand curbs in the west. A lot of the resistance to technical measures is down to politics, the disproportionate impact of fossil fuel corporations, countries etc. Wider behavior and infrastructure changes will have to come from the state, but the details depend on local factors. For instance, China's rate of building high speed rail has been quite astonishing, and they're rapidly realizing that the pollution levels in their cities are unsustainable. We need to do our bit, that's the most important thing.
And stricter, coercive curbs on population, while technically possible, will only reduce the peak population slightly; the trend is for population growth to slow down anyway. Whereas other measures to reduce our impact can act much more quickly and achieve close to 100% reduction in fossil fuel use.
The other problem with coercive measures is that China recently abandoned them. If China can't make a one child policy work, it is unlikely that western democracies can.
Of course they blamed an ageing population. Which is certainly a problem in the west too; as I said, fertility is well down in most of Europe, ultimately for economic reasons. But a lot of that is structural ageism, mishandling of Covid, health consequences of inequality, health consequences of right wing governments, etc.
Ideally you want a stable rather than declining population. Well, eventually. But for the next century or two, a slow decline might be desirable. However much of the west has fairly rapidly declining population - the average fertility across the EU is 1.53 children per woman. Gaps tend to be filled by immigration, except where (usually far right, usually misogynistic) parties promote expensive pro-birth policies.
Of course, those immigrants use roughly western levels of carbon emissions.
If you follow that argument to its logical conclusion, you reach eco-fascism: e.g. the claim that you have to keep out the immigrants to keep emissions down, while failing to reduce yours and letting the rest be hit hardest first. Lifeboat thinking, as with zombie movies.
There is a better way: reduce everyone's emissions and reduce poverty everywhere.
Of course the number of children people have isn't a free choice. It depends on economics, lifestyle and many other factors. Ultimately the state can influence most of these. But given how slowly that affects overall consumption and resource use, I don't see a strong case for the harsher measures used by e.g. China.
And in any case we do not have the right to impose such limits on the developing world. Certainly not after all that we've done to them.
I wish more ppl would understand this reality, and stop participating in it. 👇
"Mining, the topic I addressed last week, serves as a perfect example here. In order to make a golden ring weighing 5 grams, the mine producing the precious metal has to dig up and haul 5,000,000 grams (or 5 tons!) of ore to the surface. (For reference: imagine a pile of stones the size of a pick-up truck.) Then these rocks must be crushed into a fine dust, and mixed with a similar amount of water and aggressive chemicals to leach out all the 5 grams of gold. So in order to get that little piece of low entropy material on your finger, the industry had to produce and leave behind a tailing the size of a garden pool full of toxic chemicals, finely ground rocks and muddy water… Not to mention the plumes of diesel smoke and CO2 mixed into the atmosphere during the process, or the energy needed to deliver that gold to a smelter, getting it melted and shaped into a ring."
"The same goes to mining and enriching Uranium, making solar panels or drilling for oil. All technologies, be them extractive or manufacturing in nature, increase entropy on a scale many orders of magnitude greater than the product they make represent. In fact, as rich resources deplete with time we are forced to tap into ever lower grade ores and reservoirs, leaving ever higher entropy behind for the same amount of products produced."