Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Shrinking the economy won't save the planet

vox.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 82 posts

Re: Shrinking the economy won't save the planet

#21

Post by vinyl7 »

chasd00 wrote: post #18
mxfh wrote: post #12

PV is dirt cheap, battery materials are cheap and exist in abundance. All that's limited is the ROI for fossil industries, and they will fight tooth and nail to get the most out of their investments. Most importantly degrowth is a loosing position in the popularity contest, that is democracy. Selling carbon net neutral to negative ways of hedonism are the only way out.

Does "negative hedonism" mean suffering? that's a hard sell.

I would take it as a return to community/family focus instead of selfish individualism

Re: Shrinking the economy won't save the planet

#22

Post by realce »

chasd00 wrote: post #18
mxfh wrote: post #12

PV is dirt cheap, battery materials are cheap and exist in abundance. All that's limited is the ROI for fossil industries, and they will fight tooth and nail to get the most out of their investments. Most importantly degrowth is a loosing position in the popularity contest, that is democracy. Selling carbon net neutral to negative ways of hedonism are the only way out.

Does "negative hedonism" mean suffering? that's a hard sell.

IMO a great example is that it means not building floating skyscrapers powered by diesel fuel so that people can shop at a mall in the middle of the ocean.

Re: Shrinking the economy won't save the planet

#23

Post by rybosome »

chasd00 wrote: post #18
mxfh wrote: post #12

PV is dirt cheap, battery materials are cheap and exist in abundance. All that's limited is the ROI for fossil industries, and they will fight tooth and nail to get the most out of their investments. Most importantly degrowth is a loosing position in the popularity contest, that is democracy. Selling carbon net neutral to negative ways of hedonism are the only way out.

Does "negative hedonism" mean suffering? that's a hard sell.

I take it to mean less pleasure, which I suppose is a form of suffering.

I don’t follow the logic of the comment you’re replying to that degrowth would be a hard sell to a democracy, but reducing comfort and pleasure wouldn’t.

Re: Shrinking the economy won't save the planet

#24

Post by ivann »

coreyh14444 wrote: post #5

a) Nice to see this from Vox. More left-leaning readers need to hear this message. b) Look at a country like Norway. One of the wealthiest countries in the world (due to oil!) and they invest heavily in renewable energy and have the highest percentage of electric new car sales in the world.

a) You only get this message if you stop at the title. The rest of the article is not a criticism of degrowth but a criticism of it's academic literature.

b) At 12.6 tCO2eq/cap/year [0] I would not call this a success.

[0] https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/report_2023?vis=ghgpop#emissi...

Re: Shrinking the economy won't save the planet

#25

Post by XorNot »

danbruc wrote: post #15
josefritzishere wrote: post #3

There's an unspoken fallacy here. The case for degrowth is imperfect, but it's better than the case for infinite growth, which is effectively the current paradigm.

Could we solve climate change if we just accepted being dramatically poorer, forever? As I’ve written before, the answer is 1) no, not really [...] You can almost certainly solve climate change with degrowth, the plantet can probably handle ten billion people living stone age lifestyles, it is just a question of how much we have to give up. But the not really part is the important one, you are not going to convince p…

The planet absolutely could not support 8.5 billion people engaging in subsistence level farming, or hunter-gatherer living. At all.

The proof of this is North Korea, which is broadly in the middle of major ecological collapse because it's farming doesn't work and the people have essentially stripped the land bear trying to gather enough food to survive.

Re: Shrinking the economy won't save the planet

#26

Post by hollerith »

XorNot wrote: post #25
danbruc wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could we solve climate change if we just accepted being dramatically poorer, forever? As I’ve written before, the answer is 1) no, not really [...] You can almost certainly solve climate change with degrowth, the plantet can probably handle ten billion people living stone age lifestyles, it is just a question of how much we have to give up. But the not really part is the important one, you are not going to convince p…

The planet absolutely could not support 8.5 billion people engaging in subsistence level farming, or hunter-gatherer living. At all. The proof of this is North Korea, which is broadly in the middle of major ecological collapse because it's farming doesn't work and the people have essentially stripped the land bear trying to gather enough food to survive.

Agreed: tractors and other farm machines are a tremendous productivity multiplier. Nitrogen fertilizer, which the world currently makes from natural gas and would require advanced industrial infrastructure no matter how it is made, is another.

Re: Shrinking the economy won't save the planet

#27

Post by samvher »

What a terrible title for the content of the article. Only the first few paragraphs provide some support of it, but not directly but rather through linking out.

Of course setting "shrinking the economy" as a goal isn't going to do much good. But "shrinking parts of the economy" might be necessary for a safe and healthy future. And whether the parts that don't need to be shrunk will still provide enough growth to end up with overall economic growth is hard to say (i.e. a safe and healthy future might require some sacrifices compared to the status quo).

Oversimplifying, growth can come from increasing the resources you use or the efficiency with which you use them. The former might not be something that we can keep doing at the current rate (and we might need to reduce some resource usage). The latter is pretty much a pure win.

Similarly, aggregate growth can come from hypergrowth in a small part of an otherwise stagnant population. And aggregate degrowth can come from modest growth in part of the population and shrinkage in another part. So just setting "aggregate growth" as your target is just as naive as setting "shrinking the economy" as a goal as it might not have the results we collectively want.

Re: Shrinking the economy won't save the planet

#28

Post by hedora »

Usually, growth comes from increased efficiency, and increased efficiency usually results in lower environmental impact.

I don’t get how the degrowth movement can seriously argue that blocking that sort of progress would help the planet.

Instead, we should price in environmental externalities whenever possible.

E.g., want to manufacture plastic? Great. Recycle at least as much post consumer waste into feedstock equivalent to what you shipped, and also use atmospheric carbon capture to bring your net co2 emissions to zero, pay to clean up the air pollution, etc.

Of course, doing that would create GDP growth, and also require a growth in our energy supply.

Re: Shrinking the economy won't save the planet

#29

Post by dukeyukey »

josefritzishere wrote: post #3

There's an unspoken fallacy here. The case for degrowth is imperfect, but it's better than the case for infinite growth, which is effectively the current paradigm.

What do you mean by "infinite"?

Can we keep growing by a few percentage points a year for the next few centuries? Yeah, probably. Can we do that until the heat death of the universe and beyond? Probably not.

Stuff gets weird when you include "infinity".

Re: Shrinking the economy won't save the planet

#30

Post by danbruc »

agentultra wrote: post #20
danbruc wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could we solve climate change if we just accepted being dramatically poorer, forever? As I’ve written before, the answer is 1) no, not really [...] You can almost certainly solve climate change with degrowth, the plantet can probably handle ten billion people living stone age lifestyles, it is just a question of how much we have to give up. But the not really part is the important one, you are not going to convince p…

I’ve heard one claim that we could bring all 8.5 billion of us to the living standard of a middle class American in the 1960’s and still reduce the size of our economic footprint to fit within sustainable boundaries for a healthy planet. Not sure if that’s true. The claim is that wealth inequality and standards of living are not distributed evenly. A very small percentage of people on Earth emit much more carbon than…

You are not going to convince people to go back to the 1960s. But I think that is also the wrong way of looking at it, just going back in time would be stupid. We have made advancements, for example houses and cars consuming less energy, it would make no sense to go back to the old technology. So you could probably have a larger house than you had in the 1960s while still having the same environmental footprint. Or did they already factor that in, you need 1950s energy consumption and with current technology that buys you 1960s stuff?

One would really have to carefully analyze what you can fit into the available footprint with current technology. Maybe you only get two plane trips during your lifetime, that is one of the first things that comes to mind that people did a lot less in the past, travelling. But the would of course cause ripple effects and it could be really hard to predict the effects.

Post reply on HN