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Shrinking the economy won't save the planet

vox.com

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Re: Shrinking the economy won't save the planet

#31

Post by mxfh »

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.

Hehe, yeah clarified that. Meant more things like lifting speed limits on Autobahns and other highways for EVs during excess energy renewable energy windows. Or effectively from May until October in Europe.

Re: Shrinking the economy won't save the planet

#32

Post by monkaiju »

hedora wrote: post #28

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 equiv…

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

This is in fact very commonly not the case, to the point that its a standalone concept in Economics called Jevons Paradox

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Re: Shrinking the economy won't save the planet

#33

Post by dopylitty »

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.

Vox is not “left leaning”. It’s funded by right wing businesses like comcast[0] and constantly puts out right wing concern trolling like this piece and the other examples cited here.[1]

0: https://fair.org/home/comcast-owned-vox-explains-the-great-d...

1: https://www.google.com/search?q=citations+needed+vox+site%3A...

Re: Shrinking the economy won't save the planet

#34

Post by rob74 »

hedora wrote: post #28

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 equiv…

Well, the same "political poison" argument that the article advances against "degrowth" can also be applied to your proposal (or any other proposal that benefits the environment): if they are followed, plastic gets more expensive, and all opposition parties will blame you for making people poorer because they now have to pay more for every single product packaged in plastic (conveniently ignoring of course that there are other ways to package products). The sad truth is that the environment doesn't vote in elections, people do, and people are generally selfish...

Re: Shrinking the economy won't save the planet

#35

Post by agentultra »

danbruc wrote: post #30
agentultra wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

True. I think the practicalities of it are hard to predict but the spirit of the idea seems reasonable; it’s not that degrowth would have us sitting in squalid huts eating grass. Such an idea doesn’t seem to have much evidence.

But the vast gulf of consumption between a typical upper class North American family outputs vastly more carbon than a typical family in Pakistan or Nairobi that there is probably a lot of wiggle room to plan a more even distribution of wealth. And such redistribution may not make the 0.01% much richer but doesn’t it seem possible that it could also have the effect of slowing down our carbon emissions as well as keeping up the positive trends of reducing global poverty?

Re: Shrinking the economy won't save the planet

#36

Post by nicoburns »

hedora wrote: post #28

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 equiv…

I don't think many people are arguing against increased efficiency. They're arguing against growth-without-caveats-or-nuance as a goal. Which might seem like something one shouldn't have to argue against, but it has been a key part of the mainstream political ideology for the last few decades.

Re: Shrinking the economy won't save the planet

#37

Post by marcosdumay »

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.

As far as "doesn't solve any of the problems, stops any of the solutions people are implanting right now from working, and makes sure nobody will try to solve the problem on the foreseeable future" qualifies as an "imperfect" solution.

But yeah, "this thing is wrong, so we must do that other wrong thing instead" is a great talking point.

Re: Shrinking the economy won't save the planet

#38

Post by itishappy »

> Is degrowth just the uncontroversial claim that what really matters is people leading good lives, or is it the wildly controversial claim that people would lead equally good lives even if we were to systematically shrink GDP in rich countries to focus on sustainability?

That's a great question. In my mind the great question. I have not encountered much degrowth sentiment online, it seems largely to be anti-growth-at-all-costs sentiment (the former of the two questions). The article appears to assume and argue against the latter.

Re: Shrinking the economy won't save the planet

#39

Post by boxed »

niek_pas wrote: post #8

The caption to this article states, “561 research papers in, the case for degrowth is still weak”, but the rest of the article seems to be not so much a criticism of degrowth, but rather a criticism of academic degrowth literature —- based on a single literature review.

I would argue that academic degrowth literature is the best of degrowth thinking.
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