Comment by philwelch
10 hours ago
> If you're an ecologist, it's a bad investment because it takes us in the wrong direction (more energy consumption) instead of going the way of degrowth.
What a horrible, nihilistic philosophy. Disgusting that anybody takes it seriously.
Taken to it's logical end it's quite literally just anti-human. Their ideal outcome is a suicide pact.
No, it's not a suicide pact. If it was just a suicide pact, they'd get it over with and leave the rest of us alone. It's a homicide pact, a genocide pact for the entire human race.
And we have tried it too! There have been energy shocks before, where the price of energy spikes and causes corresponding drop in energy consumption, leading to degrowth.
They only talk about the benefits in the abstract, but not what an energy shock actually means. It means people can’t afford to pay for heating and freeze to death. It means factories close down because the inputs are too expensive. Construction stops because the raw materials (steel, concrete) are too expensive to manufacture, and people don’t have money to pay for new homes.
We have done all these things just in the last 4 years! So why should we do more of it instead of just building more renewable energy?
degrowth is compatible with increasing standards of living for 99.5% of people all the while being able to then actually preserve these standards up in the future.
our current model produces growth without proportionally increasing standards of living, and accepts that livelihoods will collapse all over Europe and Africa as it becomes increasingly hostile to agriculture due to climate change.
think of the viability of degrowth as a policy within the prisoners dilemma of global capitalism as you want, but please come up with a more serious critique that doesn't equally indigte the staus quo
None of that is true.