Imagine a world where you work three or four days a week. In your free time, you play sports, spend time with loved ones, garden, and engage with local politics. Overnight shipping, advertising, private jets, billionaires and SUVs no longer exist, but health care, education, and clean electricity are free and available to all.
We must massively reduce our energy and material consumption to have any hope of saving our environment.
"Extraction of raw materials could rise 60 per cent by 2060"
The promoters of "Green" Growth and "Green" Tech and the "Green" Transition tell us that to save our environment, we must keep mining. Not just that, we must massively increase mining.
Soon, we will be causing a Mt. Everest worth of mining waste every year. We simply cannot survive that sort of destruction and poisoning.
It's not the Green Transition
It's the Greed Transition.
Economists love to say "there is no such thing as a free lunch."
Well, there's also no such thing as "green" consumption (or energy or growth).
It's a message that we don't want to believe because it means we will have to make sacrifices. This article (as with much of what you share) helps paint the picture of the ecoligical nightmare waiting for us if we continue to pursue the pleasant, though impossible, dream of "green" growth.
@504DR@ljohn44@gerrymcgovern The best case scenario is still very bad: the wholesale conversion of forests into fuelwood copses. That will then lead to deforestation, fire intensification and crop failures further inland because it'll reduce the level of precip inland.
They say that degrowth is utopian and delusional. But what could be more utopian and delusional than believing you can infinitely grow, consume, waste and pollute on a finite planet?
@gerrymcgovern I want to see degrowth supporters set out visions for how we will support the most vulnerable in our society. This piece is pitched to the middle classes (and I do understand the need to appease the middle classes) but I need to see how we will support disabled people, homeless people, poor people, refugees (economic, climate, and otherwise).
@elmyra@gerrymcgovern This is an important point because there’s a certain faction of degrowthers who will, when you press them on this issue, act like disability and chronic illness are symptoms of capitalism (instead of things that happen regardless of capitalism) and get real cagey about how we ensure that mobility-limited people will get around in a car-free society and diabetics will get insulin, etc.
@MisuseCase@elmyra@gerrymcgovern You misunderstand. All they have to do is withold my anticonvulsant meds, and now poof, no need to worry about how we can afford degrowth: just force disabled people to take up a larger share of the workforce through force.
One ultimate problem with "degrowth" is that it presumes that each person needs only the resources one person is capable of producing. Remove that extra cushion of productivity, and we all know who suffers first.
I'm genuinely confused where you are getting the that 'every person consumes just what they produce' is an assumption of degrowth. It's not one I've seen anywhere in the discussions and literature I've read.
I agree with others in the thread there is a long way to go to ensure degrowth is equitable to all, but it is very doable and seems far easier to acheive in the degrowth paradigm than our current growth-at-all-cost capitalism.