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Can degrowth save us and the planet?

https://phys.org/news/2023-07-degrowth-planet.html

In response to climate change and environmental breakdown, degrowth has become one of the key concepts in political ecology and related disciplines. Degrowth provides a critique of the ideology of growth measured as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a core objective for capitalist economies. It argues that degrowth is possible, desirable and necessary to halt further ecological destruction and to build socially just and ecologically sustainable societies.

19 comments

interolivary

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I'm not entirely convinced that anything we do at this point can save us – or rather, save modern industrial society.

The human race will likely be fine in almost any scenario except some sort of Venus-like hellscape (which probably isn't as unlikely as we'd like to think…), but we've set in motion such enormous changes that the damage is already done even if we went carbon negative right at this very second, so personally I think it's unlikely that current mass-scale industrial society will survive a 100 years or that we'll be able to avert billions of deaths.

vent

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Even if you're right, I think its important to not get into a defeatist attitude. There are levels of global catastrophe and having a philosophy of "its already too late" could lead to an even worse outcome.

Dislodge3233

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Personally, I think we should plan for hot world and try to reduce emissions. I have very little faith in decarbonization efforts.

I have connections to inner energy company circles that work in renewables. When they get drunk, they openly admit to green washing. Unless governments seriously address this with sanctions and legal actions, it will never happen.

It's like clogging your toilet. Unclogging it sucks, but it's your fault. I don't see this being fixed without serious uncomfortable painful corrective action. Governments don't seem interested in that.

interolivary

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That's more or less how I think about this. We need to face the fact that we're some amount of fucked regardless, and start planning for how we're going to survive that without society turning into a reenactment of Cormac McCarthy's The Road

Dislodge3233

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A while ago, I did a rough calculation that we could create floating islands from tying plastic bottles together. My calculation accounted for enough dirt for trees (several meters of dirt) and enough land to grow vegetables and such.

Accounting for food and housing needs, it was like 10k people from Europe's plastic bottle waste for a year.

Personally, I think something like Netherlands dikes would work in many places.

Not sure how to deal with the heat though. Unfortunately heat is thermodynamically useless without a sink. Space is a bad sink. Deep ocean maybe.

hglman

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Realism isn't defeatist. We are, in fact, losing badly. That's just the objective reality. The issue now is much more than people want to think their current ways of life can continue; that is the real risk now. It's also true that everyone can take meaningful actions today and tomorrow to improve the situation in the future. To your point, the "well will just live even more lavish now bc there is no hope" mindset is very dangerous. But so is thinking we do not have to change. Anyone in anything like the industrialized world will have to shift how they live in the very near term.

interolivary

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I don't know if it's defeatist. We should really start coming to terms with the fact that things are most likely going to get extremely bad regardless of what we do, and instead of putting most of our effort into trying to stop things, we should increase focus on how we're going to deal with what's coming.

Not that trying to eg. get global CO^2^ production down or whatever wouldn't be worth it, but unless this economic system is more or less torn down completely or someone comes up with an actually viable fusion reactor, we can't pin too much of our hopes on the people in power suddenly starting to act selflessly.

OurTragicUniverse

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We're over 8 billion people now and going to be well out of fresh water by the end of the century (if we even make it that far) and arable land soon after (if plants even survive that long what with the heat and unpredictable weather).

If all capitalism, war, and industry completely shut down right now, the resulting genocidal famine still wouldn't be enough to stop the feedback loops already in place.

The blue ocean event is imminent (likely now in 2027) and once our ice caps melt, all the solar radiation the earth's been reflecting gets trapped by the ocean and huge amounts of methane will be released from the seabed.

And even if that new fancy reflective white paint scientists just came up with gets the go ahead and starts being produced on a massive scale for global roll out, the manufacture and supply chains will add colossal amounts of carbon and other pollutants to the atmosphere.

So the future is looking pretty bleak guys. But yeah sure, let's all recycle and keep eating meat and having kids because surely the world can't end like that. High five for the human race!

bedrooms

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The sea level rise alone is hell-scape enough to most of the humanity. I mean, you literally can't live in a sea.

jarfil

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Sea levels won't rise all that fast.

Developed countries can rebuild their coastal cities every 50 years just a bit further from the shore every time, most already rebuild every 50 years or little more. Except for the ones that are already or almost underwater, but those are goners anyway.

Infrastructures like ports and associated transport, can also be rebuilt every fever than 100 years, they often aren't even built with that long of a lifespan in mind, but can take much larger sea level increases.

As for developing countries... Bangladesh is toast, others will vary.

Overall, a 20m sea level increase is easily sustainable at a rate of 2m per 100 years or so.

Pistcow

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Maybe? Those first few months of Covid lock down I've never seen a bluer sky. Can we stop capitalism cold turkey?

stevetauber

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There's a great book that covers this: https://www.goodreads.com/es/book/show/54870131

Pistcow

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I mean we had a tangible e experiment. We just need a few plagues

Kiki

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If you want to know more, Timothée Parrique's website is a great source of information, with many references, academic and non academic, and many topics around degrowth! https://timotheeparrique.com/academic-articles/