Shrinking the economy won't save the planet

Simply making people poor to cut down on 5% of emissions is just like banning plastic straws but allowing plastic cups.

Realizing as well that constant economic growth is impossible in the long term is required so we start figuring out a more sustainable system.

I'm pretty sure quality of life can be improved even if the GDP shrinks, but it needs to be put as a primary target. At the same time, as an EU citized, the fact that shipping a product from the Netherlands is twice as expensive as a product with free shipping from Temu means that we've got low hanging fruits that can be instantly tackled, but nobody is interested in cost/benefit analysis but only in optics of elections.

They say that degrowth ideas would do "approximately nothing," but then their own article they link to states that "a shift toward plant-rich diets would do more than any other single change" to reduce emissions. They bash on eating local, but the academic paper they cite concludes "eating locally grown fruits and vegetables may be an effective strategy to meaningfully reduce food system GHGEs from transportation."

That constitutes as growth. The degrowth ideas don't differentiate what kind of growth they are fighting, neither does targeting neutral growth. You can't target a single number that accurately, we need a details-based intervention.

I've come to the same conclusion as the Vox article. I haven't found any compelling argument for how or why degrowth specifically would work.

Sure, I think it's toxic that individuals and corporations pursue growth at all costs, but currency is fundamentally a tool created to resolve debts and for that to work effectively must come with some incentives for allocation and payback.

Capitalism has brought the entire world out of poverty and enabled massive innovation at a global scale before most modern technology as we know it. It's the most efficient way to allocate needed resources as far as I can tell.

What I do think is urgently needed are 2 things:

1. Some way to incentivize local spending over global spending, and it's probably not tariffs due to easy loopholes and negative externalities. People have started to do this of their own accord because we can sense it is right and more just.

2. Find better, more general ways to encourage competition and prevent anticompetitive behavior in markets. Everyone here knows how much more efficient small groups of people can be relative to large organizations. How can we make anticompetitive behavior and market dominance harder in the general sense?

There aren't easy answers to these two problems, but it sure as hell isn't total deregulation with laissez-faire capitalism and it sure as hell isn't centralized planned economies and communism. It's obviously somewhere in between.

as i understand it, the degrowth position is not, as she says, either 'the uncontroversial claim that what really matters is people leading good lives, or (...) 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'. rather, the degrowth position is that people are inevitably going to lead worse lives than at present, but that we can choose between things getting kind of bad, by systematically pursuing degrowth, and things getting apocalyptically bad, which is what will happen if we continue pursuing growth

i think this position is wrong, but that's my understanding of what degrowth advocates are promoting

specifically they argue that continued economic growth, or even continued economic activity at current levels, will unavoidably destroy the natural environment, and that that destruction will diminish the human standard of living in ways that no economic prosperity can replace; you can't compensate for widespread desertification and pervasive environmental endocrine disruptors with products you can buy. going for a walk in the park without needing a respirator cannot be replaced with visits to disneyland; the opportunity to have children of your own cannot be replaced with tasty vat meat

however, i have to admit that wikipedia's summary of degrowth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrowth is closer to theunitofcaring's in this article. and check out this abstract of the opening keynote at last year's degrowth conference in zagreb, by diana ürge-vorsatz, who is apparently the vice-chair of ipcc working group iii (mitigation):

> It was in 2022 when the IPCC first mentioned Degrowth and sufficiency in its reports. It is a significant move considering that most IPCC member states still struggle from meeting basic human needs. However, there are many sections in IPCC products that indicate that growth imperatives make meeting ambitious climate goals extremely challenging or risky. An important risk is that pathways towards ambitious climate goals within the growth paradigm, may in the end shift the problems to biodiversity, resource depletion of rare earth minerals and others, microplastics, man-made material exceeding living material, PFAS increase and the like. At the same time, it is questionable how much economic growth has managed to increase our well-being in developed economies in recent decades. With increasingly elaborate planned obsolescence, ever faster and more obscure fashion forcing consumption on us, and with marketing employing more psychologists to rewire our brains and make us addicted to health-damaging consumptions than we have to cure these ailments, it is a question if it is worth it. On the other hand, there are shocking inequalities in emissions, and it is a serious question if we can solve the climate crisis without reducing this inequality. Moving away from our addiction to growth could improve the quality of life for many in the overconsuming North, and can leave more carbon space for the global South to flourish. Degrowth scholarship also needs to consider that the proposed measures for redistribution do not reproduce the mistakes of our communist past as ample evidence shows that some egalitarian measures in the past resulted in even worse resource use and pollution, while others economized resource use.

https://zagreb.degrowth.net/en/9_int_dg_conf/public/events/4...

although much of this is clearly correct, it certainly sounds a lot more like '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' than my more rational reconstruction above of what degrowth advocates ought to believe. worse, it includes the red flag that the speaker, despite being a professor of environmental sciences and a vice-chair of the ipcc, believes in 'resource depletion of rare earth minerals', which is not a thing

unfortunately i dare not quote the person who comes to mind as a more rational degrowth advocate

ürge-vorsatz's keynote does not seem to have been leaked to youtube, and liveleak is dead now, so we'd probably have to guess what she actually said, but recent interviews with her include https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyNYrAOOrdA, in which she sticks to a mostly highly defensible but still very alarming overview of global warming. like kelsey's 'wildly controversial' position, though, she's advocating "to reach the same services or to supply even better services" despite lower energy consumption, rather than accepting a reduction in quality of living. so i am forced to admit that this is not a strawman kelsey made up, but the actual position of the first prominent, powerful degrowthist i looked up

still, i don't think you can reduce the whole spectrum of degrowthism to kelsey's two extremes, and i think the more plausible position i outlined above also falls within it. https://ehne.fr/en/encyclopedia/themes/material-civilization... outlines a wider spectrum of positions

my disagreement with that rational reconstruction of degrowth is severalfold. first, there are vastly more resources available than are merely on earth. second, especially with respect to energy, the accessible resources even on earth are mostly unexploited; terrestrial solar energy input is about three orders of magnitude larger than world marketed energy consumption, or two orders of magnitude larger if we include food (the iea doesn't), and, depending over what time period you propose to extract it over, geothermal energy is another three orders of magnitude larger than that. third, economic value is not measured by the resources consumed, but by the utility provided to the consumer, so there is in principle no limit to economic growth even on a fixed resource base. fourth, the most urgent environmental problem for human quality of life is global warming, and atmospheric carbon capture is necessary to solve it, a measure which will almost certainly require vast expansion of human energy exploitation and therefore economic growth (because you can have growth without increased resource exploitation, but probably not vastly increased resource exploitation without growth)