These "degrowth" strategies mean tremendous suffering. People have to die to make degrowth possible. Those who stick around have to suffer of curable medical complications. They have to live hard lives without the comforts of modern life.
Why do we need to descend? It's not strictly necessary: the "environment" has enough fissionable material for nearly limitless electrical power. The "environment" has enough raw material to increase the amount of computation on our planet by many orders of magnitude. And that's if we stay here on Earth -- if you want to think on "indefinitely" timescales, Earth's constraints may not apply.
It's profoundly cynical. I don't actually understand it. All of this technology, this art, this incredible organization that the modern world provides, and think "we need to turn back, tail between our legs, and give up."
How much energy is in all of the uranium that can be mined?
But nobody's saying they have to die early. A fertility rate under replacement will lead to degrowth. Yes, it's going to be difficult during the degrowth phase (less young people to support the aged), but eventually the population will stabilize at a lower level and that will be better from both a sustainability and resources standpoint.
What you're saying is like saying "Let's not play the World Series, let's just go home and settle for 2nd. We'll still be a playoff team!"
Less people is bad. All of us matter but only as long as humanity continues.
Degrowth is stagnation. We must survive tho - even at the expenses of the Earth if that is what it takes.
We are the highest evolutionary life this planet has produced - the only life able to exploit all other life. The entire purpose of evolution could be to create life as we are.
If it's all just random and we ended up as we are solely due to genetic mistakes over time - our existence is even more unfathomable, a seemingly infinite number of things had to occur exactly as they did so that we exist as we do now.
We are the most important thing on Earth - potentially far, far more so.
The Webb telescope has viewed into the past and didn't see so many things it would have if the universe was full of advanced intelligent life - with all the data we possess now, we cannot say that we are not the first to "wake up"and only "if" indeed the universe will ultimately create an infinite number of species with our capabilities.
That's a real big if.
We can't take that chance on something as stupid sounding as "degrowth"
Remember, adapt or die.
That's what we do
If Earth is going to heat up than it
There are currently about 8 billion of us. At some point in the past there were 4 billion of us (Bard tells me the population reached 4Billion on April 11, 1974). We're we somehow worse off when there were 1/2 as many of us on earth? Would we somehow be worse off if we slowly (like over the course of 100 years) returned back to that number? I fail to see how it would be problematic. Somehow we survived and got what we needed to get done in 1974 with only 4B people. If we were to settle back down to that number and stabilize there why would that be a problem? Or, how about stabilizing at 6B?
I’ve read some statistics that say there’s more than an 80% chance that everyone alive right now will die at some point.
Our current growth strategy is not sustainable. Growth as a goal has failed. If we need to take a step back to reevaluate how to do it right going forward, that's fine.
Americans will mostly be jobless and replaced by automation, many goods will be exported and China will likely fair a lot better because it's already a place where "social credit" and other policies already exist which are more acceptable than what the USA will tolerate. Americans hate the idea of free healthcare and UBI for example.
I know the US media likes to pretend China is finished, but I really don't think that's the case, it will continue to grow, even if only by inertia.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income_in_th....
There is no indication that humanity will be colonizing other planets any time soon. The greatest scientific minds on the planet cannot even run a sustainable Antarctic outpost. Maybe we can take baby steps towards getting McMurdo station self sufficient before we try colonizing Mars.
All jesustech and techno-optimism aside... countries that are educated and have high standards of living consume a vast amount of resources. No amount of green technology and renewables has been able to reverse this trend. Check out the 2022 mineral baby for the US. https://mineralseducationcoalition.org/mining-minerals-infor...
The reality is that population decline will be needed to save the planet.
So continuous growth is physically impossible, even alloting for nuclear fusion and miracle technologies.
That's just considering energy/electricity, which is optimistic because civilization has on the order of at least hundreds or thousands of necessary inputs that aren't fungible. Water, air, food, and other raw materials for our bodies and technologies will become scarce more quickly.
A huge amount of growth has been due to "free" value provided by ecosystems, fossil fuels, minerals, the sun, etc. If we get to the point where all the free stuff from nature is not enough and we have to fission and fusion our raw materials we will be living in a society of such profound scarcity that we could probably only subsist as rows of brains in vats.
So the degrowth argument is not that humans should voluntarily suffer to preserve a sentimental gaia aspect, but that suffering is inevitable due to unsustainability and that it would be better to spread it out over a longer time than suffer a major crash.
[0] https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...
However.
We are still very early in the curve. We are warming the planet, but not because of any energy we are producing, merely because of a chemical inbalance in the atmosphere. We are not close to any of the limits specified there.
When energy costs 0.0001 / kWh, we may re-evaluate. But we have a long way to go before we get there.
It's so early!
This is just straight-up substance-free fear-mongering.
It's not and you know this. It's at best correlated. The resources have to be used effectively, and right now they're definitely not. My quality of life does not go up because using up more resources instead of living sustainably.
Unless you're living in a far distant village or in the middle of the woods producing everything you use, you're using an immense amount of resources in your everyday life.
Recycling, not buying the latest tech and curbing your diet don't make any significant dent into the amount of resources you're indirectly consuming by simply living and being active in a well-off, first-word or even "second-world" society.
Imagine armies of robots working 24/7 strip mining everything, logging everything, way faster and way smarter than people ever could. This is what we're making, this is what capitalism will absolutely love. There is no sign of any regulation here from governments, they will want it even more, "GDP! GDP! GDP!".
I was really hopefully we'd actually get to a nice place, it would be rough with climate change, but there would be less people and we'd look back on the 21st century with disdain and try live more simple lives, slower lives, it looks like we're going to try 100x everything instead.
If we get to the stage where people do live much longer, this will be the next issue, people never dying and the Earth basically filling up. It will be the next drama we can obsess over :)
I might be wrong, maybe we'll start mining asteroids or maybe the economy will collapse quick enough the singularity will be cancelled due to lack of demand (funny I know).
It's very hard to say, but I hope I'm wrong and you're right!
I hear this a lot, but it seems more like a slogan.
Ecologists have disproven dialectical materialism? Or Hegelian idealism? I doubt that very much.
Population growth will continue whether you're having children or not. Western economies are Ponzi schemes and the ones needing your votes know it. You may not have any kids, but there are millions of Africans, Indians, and Chinese ready and willing to flood your country, and there are politicians only too eager to see them pouring across undefended borders. Some of these countries are seeing 9+ births per woman; there will be no shortage of new people to replace your non-existent grandchildren.
The solution would require some degree of ethnonationalism, else how do you argue against this policy? From a "we are all the same" viewpoint, it is unremarkable if Canada is 100% ethnically Indian and Chinese in 200 years; if Britain and Australia are African colonies; if America is... American. The very thought of racial discrimination in immigration, however, is totally unpalatable and unconscionable to most Westerners, and thus there is still no solution.
Your descendants' positions will be filled. There is no depopulation fantasy in the West's future. There can only be replacement.
I love the optimism but it's difficult to see this as a positive.
Lets consider china. For decades they had a 1 child policy and according to their own numbers even worse problem killing their daughters. "sex selective abortions" then most believe.
China has a huge proportion of incel men who probably at no fault of their own cannot find a wife. They blame themselves and they become violent. Stemming from loneliness, and feeling of failure.
Nothing is new here. History has tons of these examples and 100% of the time the host country of the incels can't keep them at home. So they are sent abroad. Who is planning to take millions of incel men from china? Yikes... so it 100% of the time has led into an invasion. Imagine having 100 million men who want to be violent and you can invade a neighbour? That's what you do. Will it be different this time for the first time? I doubt it.
Part of the challenge to conventional logic of what I wrote above is that the economy, in standard neoclassical economic thought, is separate from the ecosystem. The two interact, but are entirely distinct. Sometimes human society is another distinct third bubble. Instead, ecologists have long known that the ecosystem of today (and likely for the decades of concern here) contains human society which contains the human economy. So, we're better off planning a graceful descent -- one that will have less competition for resources and less harm to the global ecosystem.