zlacker

As you've seen "degrowth" is a counter-productive argument and you are your own worst enemy and this gives ammunition to the side which claims that climate change is only possible via severe personal sacrifice -- which again reinforces the notion that climate change is an individual problem and failing and the whole "just recycle harder" idea.

We need to decarbonize the fucking electrical grid. Just get it done and that addresses the majority of the problem.

You'd also probably be better off if you focused on just changing the incentives and regulations which promote disposable culture. The CAFE standards need an overhaul and the Chicken tax needs to go away, that would do wonders towards getting us smaller, cheaper vehicles. Right to repair laws and EU regulations around replaceable batteries that are being imposed now on companies like Apple will help a lot. Better public transportation, sure, but that means building it (which means more economic output and jobs, but differently). But we're not going to manage to forcefully stop a lot of people from consuming, so we need to focus on making that impact less, particularly when it comes to GHGs, because that is more or less an emergency right now. We can have scalable carbon-neutral energy which still powers a lot of economic growth for the future up until we're all dead. And if you argue against that you will lose the broader war for the sake of trying to be a perfectionist (#include <leftists_being_their_own_worst_enemy.h>)

>>lamont+(OP)
Hard disagree.

Degrowth is the only reasonable future if you understand the big picture: it's all about energy. Climate change and biodiversity loss are consequences of what humans do with abundant energy. Again: biodiversity loss is not due to CO2 at all, yet we are currently living a mass extinction. Replace fossils with nuclear fusion, you may solve climate change, but you will still be in a mass extinction.

Now let's be honest, we don't know a technology today that can replace fossil fuels. And fossil fuels are not unlimited (we still have enough to finish messing up the climate, unfortunately, but we are around the peak of production globally right now). So anyway, the days of a world with abundant energy are soon over, you've got to deal with it. That's called degrowth.

Either we go into a controlled degrowth, or we go into uncontrolled degrowth (that's poverty, global instability, wars, famines, ...).

>>palata+Nu
That's pretty much it. And that's the elephant in the room, or 'an uncomfortable truth'. The problem is that very few people want to admit it, and even fewer people want to act on it and even fewer people than that are acting on it (and those are not usually near the seats of power).

Uncontrolled degrowth it is, for now. You forgot pandemics by the way, those are one way in which the loss of biodiversity and the ever increasing way in which humans force their way into animal territory is manifesting. This isn't exactly news either but I have to say to see it so vividly displayed still took me by surprise.