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Shrinking the economy won't save the planet

vox.com

1–10 of 82 posts

Re: Shrinking the economy won't save the planet

#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.

Re: Shrinking the economy won't save the planet

#7

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 about a third option, where we neither grow nor shrink? False dichotomies, anyone?

Re: Shrinking the economy won't save the planet

#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.

Re: Shrinking the economy won't save the planet

#9
Just have to measure things differently.

GDP grows even if someone profits while producing sewage, cause someone else profits from clean up. If you call both Growth naturally DeGrowth doesn't make sense.

Take the Attention Economy which is HN is a micro example off. People's finite Attention is being pulled and pushed here and there, traded, captured or stolen. But the only thing that get measured is Growth in views or ycombinators net worth.

Re: Shrinking the economy won't save the planet

#10

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.

With the risk of wading into very controversial political territory.

I think it's incredible that people have been told for 2 decades that the number of humans that exist is too many, that people should not have kids (it's so hard!, and expensive, treat yourself!), and so forth.

But on the other hand, our society is designed in a way that: if it's not growing; it's disasterous.

Which meant that our societies, thinking short-term as they do: turned to migration. Which can be quite unpopular and lead to civil unrest.

IF having children is bad for the environment, why don't we just plan to shrink our economies? I know I sound naive but it's absurd to me that we don't make plans to have a shrinking population if obstensibly that's what we have to do as humanity to survive.

Importing people is the worst kind of band-aid, it's totally unsustainable! And we still tell people not to have kids.

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