Comment by slibhb
3 hours ago
Degrowthism is one of the dominant ideologies of our time. I think it's wrong: economic growth is good, it has made our lives much better, and we should continue to prioritize it.
One important detail about % growth is that it compounds. So small differences in growth today can make a huge difference 50 years from now.
The world I want to live in is one that prioritizes protecting the environment but also aggressively pursues new technology and growth. Our descendants will thank us.
Economic growth just means "providing food, homes, and jobs to people who are alive."
The degrowthers also presume that growth requires some sort of nasty fuel source. Almost some sort of religiosity that believes that anything good must also create some effectively equal amount of bad. Anyone who cares about solar knows that a solar-battery future is effectively 99% recyclable.
Earth is limited. Resources are limited. You can't recycle to infinity. Each time you recycle something, the material recovered is worse than before. Steel is weaker, plastic has impurities and is not clear/transparent, paper isn't white and it contaminates the printers with dust, etc. To keep maintaining quality, fresh material must always be added to the recycled one. Everything we dig out of the Earth is non-renewable. (not in the next million years or so...)
The logical conclusion is that at some point we run out of resources. No more oil, no more uranium, no more iron, no more copper, no more lithium. If we don't degrow voluntarily, then we degrow involuntarily and that's usually sudden and it's called a crash. With no resources, what comes next is dark ages, very dark and loooong dark ages this time. Without steel it we'll go back stone age most probably. I won't live to see it, our children won't live to see it, but unless we all nuke each other over some oil fields or something, someone will live to see it.
Degrowth will extend our present good times. Growth will shorten it.
>You can't recycle to infinity.
The lifespan of the earth is not infinite, pretending it is is foolish. We have about 5 billion years on earth before it will be consumed by the sun. Presuming an infinite earth creates a very obvious, simple, and wrong conclusion about something that is actually very difficult problem.
>The logical conclusion is that at some point we run out of resources.
The point of renewable resources -- like solar -- is exactly that they are renewable or effectively infinite.