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Shrinking the economy won't save the planet

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Re: Shrinking the economy won't save the planet

#71

Post by spwa4 »

carapace wrote: post #62
antisthenes wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Total energy dissipation is at best a crude proxy for progress, because efficiency. The relationship is still positive, because of Jevons Paradox. No matter how you see it, even if there are bad diminishing returns to using additional energy, we can find additional useful things to do with it (new ways of recycling, terraforming, high-energy synthesis, etc.) > In order to measure "progress" you have to determine wh…

Jevons Paradox isn't a law of nature. > we can find additional useful things to do with it Useful for what purpose? > Reducing suffering Yes and no. Existence is suffering (you are already in the Torment Nexus), Gurdjieff spoke of the importance of "conscious suffering" but that's not something I want to get into here, today. In any event, the best way to reduce suffering is to touch Ice Nine to your tongue, but wher…

> Useful for what purpose?

Replacing other processes. If something can be done for very cheap, we find new uses for it. Any economic activity can be done 100 different ways. If something becomes absurdly cheap, we start using that for a LOT of things it wasn't used for before.

For example, construction used to have great problems securing suitable building materials, but had great quantities of labor available. Hence, everything was custom. The name of the game was to use every piece of wood, every stone, every last bit of building material that was available in construction.

An extreme example is that in order to keep medieval staircases clean and maintained, they were taken apart twice yearly, the individual pieces of wood cleaned, and the stairs reassembled after cleaning. Labor was worthless, so why not?

Today, building materials are very cheap compared to labor. So we have extremes like prefab homes, but generally we use large amounts of building materials just to avoid even small amounts of labor.

Today, we replace stairs entirely to avoid maintaining the wood they're made of. Especially if it doesn't have to look good. Just buy a premade stair and throw the old one out.

Re: Shrinking the economy won't save the planet

#72

Post by sumuyuda »

cholantesh wrote: post #63
sumuyuda wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the degrowth discussion is not anti-growth at all costs, but reducing damaging and wasteful production and instead focusing on production that provides social good for humans. See this podcast: https://techwontsave.us/episode/226_how_degrowth_will_reshap...

There's also an episode on effective altruism, which the author is a proponent of, which is pretty important in casting light on this frame of analysis.

Do you have a link to the episode?

Re: Shrinking the economy won't save the planet

#73

Post by NeutralCrane »

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.

They don’t mean “negative hedonism”, they mean “carbon-neutral or carbon-negative hedonism”. In other words, people are going to chose hedonism, comfort, fun, and consumption no matter what, so the only way to achieve these goals is to make hedonism carbon-neutral/negative.

Re: Shrinking the economy won't save the planet

#74

Post by [deleted] »

marcosdumay wrote: post #42
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 plantet can probably handle ten billion people living stone age lifestyles, It can't. And evidence of it is that the population only really grew once people changed their lifestyles. But if you make extracting fossil fuel impossible, you will only have to be concerned about local pollution and ecosystem destruction. Those two will almost completely wipe out non-domestic life in a few years, but some parts of th…

[deleted]

Re: Shrinking the economy won't save the planet

#75

Post by cholantesh »

sumuyuda wrote: post #72
cholantesh wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also an episode on effective altruism, which the author is a proponent of, which is pretty important in casting light on this frame of analysis.

Do you have a link to the episode?

To clarify it's actually been talked about a few times, but with specific focus on substrands/topics in EA.

Here are two that I'm aware of: https://techwontsave.us/episode/198_how_effective_accelerati... https://techwontsave.us/episode/138_dont_fall_for_the_longte...

Re: Shrinking the economy won't save the planet

#76

Post by ASalazarMX »

samvher wrote: post #27

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…

Modern economy has become too complex and stupid at the same time. There are layers upon layers that contribute nothing to it, yet somehow inflate the valuation, and burst from time to time, while a few take full advantage of it.

I think it should be possible to radically simplify taxation and law, with the goal of maximizing productivity and minimizing parasitism. The economy would shrink in numbers, but quality of life should generally improve.

Bonus points if population growth is not encouraged, but is allowed to find a lower equilibrium. The global economy shouldn't work like a Ponzi scheme.

Re: Shrinking the economy won't save the planet

#77

Post by carapace »

spwa4 wrote: post #71
carapace wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jevons Paradox isn't a law of nature. > we can find additional useful things to do with it Useful for what purpose? > Reducing suffering Yes and no. Existence is suffering (you are already in the Torment Nexus), Gurdjieff spoke of the importance of "conscious suffering" but that's not something I want to get into here, today. In any event, the best way to reduce suffering is to touch Ice Nine to your tongue, but wher…

> Useful for what purpose? Replacing other processes. If something can be done for very cheap, we find new uses for it. Any economic activity can be done 100 different ways. If something becomes absurdly cheap, we start using that for a LOT of things it wasn't used for before. For example, construction used to have great problems securing suitable building materials, but had great quantities of labor available. Hence…

You're missing the point. Economic activity isn't the meaning of life.

Re: Shrinking the economy won't save the planet

#78

Post by spwa4 »

carapace wrote: post #77
spwa4 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Useful for what purpose? Replacing other processes. If something can be done for very cheap, we find new uses for it. Any economic activity can be done 100 different ways. If something becomes absurdly cheap, we start using that for a LOT of things it wasn't used for before. For example, construction used to have great problems securing suitable building materials, but had great quantities of labor available. Hence…

You're missing the point. Economic activity isn't the meaning of life.

Perhaps sadly, it kind of is. Or perhaps we should put it like this: nobody likes a lack of economic activity.

Re: Shrinking the economy won't save the planet

#79

Post by carapace »

kragen wrote: post #70
carapace wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 can't speak for others who advocate for degrowth, but that seems about right to me, with the caveat that I believe ecologically…

i mostly agree with you, especially that 'the challenge is to return to harmony with nature while still enjoying the benefits of science and technology' vaclav's 10% goal is obviously not enough. we need to be able to capture more like 150% of current co₂ emissions, not 10%. his argument is very weak, though, so weak that he can't possibly be expecting to convince anyone who doesn't already agree with him; his argume…

Even if Smil is a goober telling just-so stories for fun, it still makes sense to try to reduce pollution, and we can also spin up a new global industry to clean the sky.

Re: Shrinking the economy won't save the planet

#80

Post by carapace »

spwa4 wrote: post #78
carapace wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the point. Economic activity isn't the meaning of life.

Perhaps sadly, it kind of is. Or perhaps we should put it like this: nobody likes a lack of economic activity.

Tell that to the folks living in the Amazon? They had their lives going for who knows how many thousands of years and then someone comes along and cuts down all the trees to make money.

Science and capitalism have delivered technology and wealth, not evenly distributed, yes, but considered as a species we have won history.

The goal is not to rearrange atoms until the Earth glows like a lightbulb from our waste heat. Take the long view (and "long" here means a handful of centuries[1]) and lift your sights.

[1] https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...

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