Degrowth

A sustainable fairer world for all

[dk-thrive]

My parents were frugal not simply because they had to be careful, but because they saw little reason for making life about money.

― Richard Flanagan, Question 7 (Knopf, September 17, 2024)

[climatecalling]

Critics of ‘degrowth’ economics say it’s unworkable – but from an ecologist's perspective, it’s inevitable

Access to fossil fuels allowed humanity to overshoot Earth’s biophysical limits. The crises we now face are all symptoms of this overshoot,

Ecology tells us that many species overshoot their environment’s carrying capacity if they have temporary access to an unusually high level of resources. Overshoot declines when those resources return to more stable levels. This often involves large-scale starvation and die-offs as populations adjust. Access to fossil fuels has allowed us to temporarily overshoot biophysical limits. This lifted our population and demands on the biosphere past the level it can safely absorb. Barring a planned reduction of those biosphere demands, we will experience the same “adjustments” as other species. One advantage humans have over other species is that we understand overshoot dynamics and can plan how we adjust. This is what the degrowth movement is attempting to do. ... Humanity exceeds its fair share of natural resources by more than 50%, and likely needs to reduce this demand by 70-80% to operate within carrying capacity. Those with greater wealth are responsible for a disproportionately large share of overshoot. ... The climate crisis is seen as a problem requiring a solution rather than a symptom of overshoot. The problem is generally formulated as looking for a way to maintain current lifestyles in the wealthy world, rather than reducing overshoot. The ecological perspective accepts that we exceed biophysical boundaries and emphasises the importance of reducing energy and material consumption – regardless of how the energy is provided.

[trixclibrarian]

‎Tech Won't Save Us: How Degrowth Will Reshape Technology w/ Jason Hickel on Apple Podcasts

‎Show Tech Won't Save Us, Ep How Degrowth Will Reshape Technology w/ Jason Hickel - Jun 27, 2024

“And so I think that the degrowth proposition here is what if we just scale down those less necessary forms of production and also scale down elite command over our productive capacities? This can make it possible for us to decarbonize a lot faster.”

“If the economy is not growing, then everything is going to get worse. And if it is growing, then that means that our society is going to get better. But as you've written about, this idea of growth is really linked to GDP, which is a particular measure that leads us to try to pursue particular economic goals.”

"Yeah, this is so interesting to me. So, yeah, we talk about growth, people assume that means progress or improvements in well-being, et cetera, et cetera. But I think we have to understand, you know, what growth actually is, because obviously there's a very specific definition to it, which is an increase in total aggregate production in an economy, right, as measured in market prices.

Now, with a metric like this, it does not differentiate between socially beneficial forms of production and destructive forms of production, right? Everything is just considered equivalent on the basis of market prices. So if you produce a million euros worth of tear gas and cruise ships, this is worth exactly the same as a million euros worth of public housing and public transit and health care, right?

But clearly when it comes to well-being and social progress and even innovation, one of these is better than the other. And so really like a more rational approach to the economy is to think about what are the forms of production we actually do want to increase and what forms of production are less necessary and destructive, and we can decrease, right?"

this is a really clear and important discussion about how possible change is... it's not at all sexy or super dynamically presented but it's so important - well worth a read/listen jc

[readingismyhustle]

Degrowth can work — here’s how science can help

Wealthy countries can create prosperity while using less materials and energy if they abandon economic growth as an objective.

[twinkubus]

Instead of improved productive efficiency being used to shorten the working week so we could enjoy growing and preparing more food for ourselves, companies profit from selling us fast food and ready-cooked meals. Deprived of the leisure and facilities to make our everyday journeys by foot or bike, we are co-opted into weekend 'health walks' (with Apps to monitor them) or persuaded to buy stationary cycling and treadmill-walking sessions in the gym. We might have longer holidays, in which we could travel more slowly and experience more genuine relaxation, but meanwhile the tourist and therapy industries provide profitable mini-breaks and stress relieving services. When products are advertised and sold on the basis of their authenticity and naturalness, the market promises to salve nostalgia for the very losses inflicted by its own advances into everyday life.

Kate Soper, Post-Growth Living

[arrozaurus]

One of the primary driving forces of the particular trade system designed in the 1980s and 1990s was always to allow multinationals the freedom to scour the globe in search of the cheapest and most exploitable labor force. It was a journey that passed through Mexico and Central America’s sweatshop maquiladoras and had a long stopover in South Korea. But by the end of the 1990s, virtually all roads led to China, a country where wages were extraordinarily low, trade unions were brutally suppressed, and the state was willing to spend seemingly limitless funds on massive infrastructure projects—modern ports, sprawling highway systems, endless numbers of coal-fired power plants, massive dams—all to ensure that the lights stayed on in the factories and the goods made it from the assembly lines onto the container ships on time. A free trader’s dream, in other words—and a climate nightmare.

A nightmare because there is a close correlation between low wages and high emissions, or as Malm puts it, “a causal link between the quest for cheap and disciplined labor power and rising CO2 emissions.” And why wouldn’t there be? The same logic that is willing to work laborers to the bone for pennies a day will burn mountains of dirty coal while spending next to nothing on pollution controls because it’s the cheapest way to produce. So when the factories moved to China, they also got markedly dirtier. As Malm points out, Chinese coal use was declining slightly between 1995 and 2000, only for the explosion in manufacturing to send it soaring once again. It’s not that the companies moving their production to China wanted to drive up emissions: they were after the cheap labor, but exploited workers and an exploited planet are, it turns out, a package deal.

A destabilized climate is the cost of deregulated, global capitalism, its unintended, yet unavoidable consequence.

This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein

[azspot]

Is America Ready for ‘Degrowth Communism’?

Kohei Saito’s theory of how to solve climate change is economically dubious and politically impossible. Why is it so popular?

Saito does propose a few concrete fixes: Ban private jets. Get rid of advertising for harmful goods and services, such as cosmetic surgery. Enact a four-day workweek. Encourage people to own one car, instead of two or three. Require shopping malls to close on Sundays, to cut down on the time available for excessive consumption. “These things won’t necessarily dismantle capitalism,” he said. “But it’s something we can do over the long term to transform our values and culture.”

Of course, transforming values might be the heaviest lift of all. “Changing people’s preferences is really hard,” Dietrich Vollrath, an economist at the University of Houston who studies growth, told me. “You don’t need to change people’s preferences if you just make solar really cheap.” The Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman, who wrote The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, says that people fundamentally care about raising their material living standards and always will. “Trying to reform humanity is not a project of much interest to economists,” he told me. “We talk about what to do, not how to wish for another form of human being.”

Saito admits that he might be overshooting. He isn’t expecting countries to scale down in the next decade, but maybe after that. He’s not opposed to green-energy subsidies; he just wants degrowth to be part of the conversation. He emphasized that his ideas aren’t designed with realism in mind. “I’m not an activist,” he said. “I’m a scholar.” His job is to provide the theory behind the change. Making it work is up to others.

Degrowthers like Saito seem to be caught in a double dilemma. They bristle at the suggestion that degrowth would take us back to premodern standards of living—yet in trying to dispel that notion, they narrow their vision so far that it resembles business-as-usual left-of-center politics. A typical rundown of degrowth policies looks like a wish list from the Democratic Socialists of America: health care for all, universal basic income, a smaller military, mutual aid, better public transportation, decolonization, and so on. Adherents reject the view that degrowth would require some authoritarian power to impose it, but have yet to articulate a political plan besides changing one mind at a time.

[probablyasocialecologist]

How much growth is required to achieve good lives for all while reducing environmental damage?

Ending mass human deprivation and providing good lives for the whole world's population can be accomplished while at the same time achieving

Ending mass human deprivation and providing good lives for the whole world's population can be accomplished while at the same time achieving ecological objectives. This is demonstrated by a new study by the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) and the London School of Economics and Political Science, recently published in World Development Perspectives. About 80% of humanity cannot access necessary goods and services and lives below the threshold for "decent living." Some narratives claim that addressing this problem will require massive economic growth on a global scale, multiplying existing output many times over, which would exacerbate climate change and ecological breakdown. The authors of the new study dispute this claim and argue that human development does not require such a dangerous approach. Reviewing recent empirical research, they find that ending mass deprivation and provisioning decent living standards for 8.5 billion people would require only 30% of current global resource and energy use, leaving a substantial surplus for additional consumption, public luxury, scientific advancement, and other social investments. This would ensure that everyone in the world has access to nutritious food, modern housing, high-quality health care, education, electricity, induction stoves, sanitation systems, clothing, washing machines, refrigerators, heating/cooling systems, computers, mobile phones, internet, and transport, and could also include universal access to recreational facilities, theaters, and other public goods. The authors argue that, to achieve such a future, strategies for development should not pursue capitalist growth and increased aggregate production as such but should rather increase the specific forms of production that are necessary to improve capabilities and meet human needs at a high standard, while ensuring universal access to key goods and services through public provisioning and decommodification. In the Global South, this requires using industrial policy to increase economic sovereignty, develop industrial capacity, and organize production around human well-being. At the same time, in high-income countries, less-necessary production (of things like mansions, SUVs, private jets and fast fashion) must be scaled down to enable faster decarbonization and to help bring resource use back within planetary boundaries, as degrowth scholarship holds.

July 25 2024

[probablyasocialecologist]

Degrowth basics

"The word degrowth stands for a family of political-economic approaches that, in the face of today’s accelerating planetary ecological crisis, reject unlimited, exponential economic growth as the definition of human progress."

What is Degrowth? | Caracol DSA

Why degrowth is the only responsible way forward | OpenDemocracy

Degrowth and MMT: A thought experiment

We Need A Fair Way To End Infinite Growth | Current Affairs

Degrowth: A Call for Radical Abundance | Common Dreams

Can degrowth save us and the planet? | Nottingham Trent

Defending limits is not Malthusian | Undisciplined Environments

Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth? | New Yorker

The Urgent Case for Shrinking the Economy | The New Republic

Giving Up on Economic Growth Could Make Us Cooler and Happier | The New Republic

A guide to degrowth: The movement prioritizing wellbeing in a bid to avoid climate cataclysm | CNBC

What is ‘degrowth’ and how can it fight climate change? | Popular Science

Enough for Everyone | Yes! Magazine

Toward a Post-Capitalist Future: On the Growth of “Degrowth” | Lit Hub

All we are saying is give degrowth a chance | The RSA

A pathway out of environmental collapse | newsroom

On Technology and Degrowth | Monthly Review

What is degrowth (and more importantly, what is it not)? | META

Green growth

"There is no empirical evidence that absolute decoupling from resource use can be achieved on a global scale against a background of continued economic growth."

Is Green Growth Possible? | Jason Hickel & Giorgos Kallis

The Myth of America’s Green Growth | Foreign Policy

The decoupling delusion: rethinking growth and sustainability | The Conversation

Is green growth happening? | Uneven Earth

Green Growth | Uneven Earth

The Delusion of Infinite Economic Growth | Scientific American

Degrowth is not austerity – it is actually just the opposite | Al Jazeera

A response to Paul Krugman: Growth is not as green as you might think | Timothée Parrique

Deceitful Decoupling: Misconceptions of a Persistent Myth | Alevgul H. Sorman

Degrowth isn’t the same as a recession – it’s an alternative to growing the economy forever | The Conversation

Degrowth and the left

"In the middle of an ecological emergency, should we be producing sport utility vehicles and mansions? Should we be diverting energy to support the obscene consumption and accumulation of the ruling class?"

The Left should embrace degrowth | New Internationalist

Ecosocialism is the Horizon, Degrowth is the Way | The Trouble

Degrowth: Socialism without Growth | Brave New Europe

Toward an Ecosocialist Degrowth: From the Materially Inevitable to the Socially Desirable | Monthly Review

For an Ecosocialist Degrowth | Monthly Review

Degrowth and Revolutionary Organizing | Rosa Luxemburg NYC

The necessity of ecosocialist degrowth | Rupture

Degrowth is Anti-Capitalist | Protean Mag

Degrowth Communism | PPPR (Part one | Part two | Part three)

Economic Planning and Degrowth: How Socialism Survives the 21st Century | New Socialist

Degrowth and the South

"Southern countries should be free to organize their resources and labor around meeting human needs rather than around servicing Northern growth."

Who is afraid of degrowth? A Global South economic perspective | IBON Foundation

The anti-colonial politics of degrowth | Jason Hickel

Unlearning: From Degrowth to Decolonization | Rosa Luxemburg NYC

Degrowth requires the Global South to default on its foreign debts | Resilience

Journals/Reports

Degrowth: a theory of radical abundance | Jason Hickel

A systematic review of the evidence on decoupling of GDP, resource use and GHG emissions, part II: synthesizing the insights

What does degrowth mean? A few points of clarification | Jason Hickel

Providing decent living with minimum energy: A global scenario | Global Environmental Change

Urgent need for post-growth climate mitigation scenarios | Nature Energy

Degrowth and critical agrarian studies | Julien-François Gerber

Decoupling debunked – Evidence and arguments against green growth as a sole strategy for sustainability | European Environmental Bureau

Incrementum ad Absurdum: Global Growth, Inequality and Poverty Eradication in a Carbon-Constrained World | David Woodward

Degrowth can work — here’s how science can help | Nature

A New Political Economy for a Healthy Planet | Jason Hickel

Planning beyond growth. The case for economic democracy within limits

Millionaire spending incompatible with 1.5 °C ambitions | Cleaner Production Letters

Is green growth happening? An empirical analysis of achieved versus Paris-compliant CO2–GDP decoupling in high-income countries | The Lancet

Books

Exploring Degrowth: A Critical Guide | Pluto Press

A People's Green New Deal | Max Ajl

Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World | Jason Hickel

Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job | Verso Books

The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism | Verso Books

The Imperial Mode of Living: Everyday Life and the Ecological Crisis of Capitalism | Verso Books

Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism | Kohei Saito

Degrowth & Strategy: how to bring about social-ecological transformation

27 Essays and Thoughts on Degrowth | Giorgos Kallis

Videos

Yes To Limits To Growth! | The Other School

How Degrowth Can Save the World | Andrewism

How We End Consumerism | Our Changing Climate

Demystifying Degrowth | Rosa Luxemburg NYC

Degrowth is not Austerity | John the Duncan

Degrowth and Ecosocialism | Planet: Critical

Degrowth in 7 minutes: Fighting for climate by living better | Think That Through

The Future is Degrowth (w/ Aaron Vansintjan) || SRSLY WRONG

"Degrowth means power to the working class!"with Jason Hickel | GND Media

Others

degrowth.info

Degrowth Journal

Doughnut Economics

[southernsolarpunk-deactivated20]

Hey what the fuck is this news story?

The fertility crisis is here and it will permanently alter the economy | CNN Business

The world isn’t having enough babies and that demographic shock will reshape the largest economies in the next decade.

“ But the world’s largest economies are already there: The total fertility rate among the OECD’s 38 member countries dropped to just 1.5 children per woman in 2022 from 3.3 children in 1960. That’s well below the “replacement level” of 2.1 children per woman needed to keep populations constant.

That means the supply of workers in many countries is quickly diminishing.

In the 1960s, there were six people of working age for every retired person, according to the World Economic Forum. Today, the ratio is closer to three-to-one. By 2035, it’s expected to be two-to-one.

Top executives at publicly traded US companies mentioned labor shortages nearly 7,000 times in earnings calls over the last decade, according to an analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis last week.

“A reduction in the share of workers can lead to labor shortages, which may raise the bargaining power of employees and lift wages — all of which is ultimately inflationary,” Simona Paravani-Mellinghoff, managing director at BlackRock, wrote in an analysis last year. “

Is this seriously how normal people think? Improving the bargaining power of workers and increased wages are bad?

“ And while net immigration has helped offset demographic problems facing rich countries in the past, the shrinking population is now a global phenomenon. “This is critical because it implies advanced economies may start to struggle to ‘import’ labour from such places either via migration or sourcing goods,” wrote Paravani-Mellinghoff.

By 2100, only six countries are expected to be having enough children to keep their populations stable: Africa’s Chad, Niger and Somalia, the Pacific islands of Samoa and Tonga, and Tajikistan, according to research published by the Lancet, a medical journal.

BlackRock’s expert advises her clients to invest in inflation-linked bonds, as well as inflation-hedging commodities like energy, industrial metals and agriculture and livestock.

Import labor via migration or sourcing goods? My brother in Christ they are modern day slaves!! I feel like I’m in backwards town reading this what the fuck?!

“ Elon Musk, father of 12 children, has remarked that falling birthrates will lead to “a civilization that ends not with a bang but a whimper, in adult diapers.”

While his words are incendiary, they’re not entirely wrong

P&G and Kimberly-Clark, which together make up more than half of the US diaper market, have seen baby diaper sales decline over the past few years. But adult diapers sales, they say, are a bright spot in their portfolios. “

Oh now the guy with a breeding kink is going to lecture us. Great. /s

“ The AI solution: Some business leaders and technologists see the boom in productivity through artificial intelligence as a potential solution.

“Here are the facts. We are not having enough children, and we have not been having enough children for long enough that there is a demographic crisis, former Google CEO and executive chairman Eric Schmidt said at the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Summit in London last year.

“In aggregate, all the demographics say there’s going to be shortage of humans for jobs. Literally too many jobs and not enough people for at least the next 30 years,” Schmidt said.

Oh god not the AI tech bros coming into this shit too. Wasn’t the purpose of improving tech to give people more free time? So they can relax and spend time with family more and actually enjoy life? Isn’t our economy already bloated with useless pencil-pushing number-crunching desk jobs that ultimately don’t serve a purpose?

I’m not going to post the entire article but give it a read. It’s… certainly something. Anyway degrowth is the way of the future.

[whereserpentswalk]

People are so propagandized under capitalism that they'll reinvent leftist ideas without knowing it. I've seen a "right libertarian" describe what he wanted for his economic system, and it was degrowth.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Can Slowing Down Save the Planet?

In a best-selling manifesto, the Marxist philosopher Kohei Saito calls us to reject the logic of economic growth and embrace a different kin

Saito has made a career of teasing out an eco-theory from the late, unpublished writings of Karl Marx. He earned his doctorate at Humboldt University, in Berlin, and now teaches philosophy at the University of Tokyo. His first book was an English version of his dissertation, titled “Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism” (2017), which tracked Marx’s study of the physical world and communal agricultural practices. (Saito is fluent in Japanese, German, and English.) In a second academic book, “Marx in the Anthropocene” (2022), Saito drew on an expanded repertoire of Marx’s unpublished notebooks to argue for a theory of “degrowth communism.” He gained a following, not only in philosophical circles but among a Japanese public facing the contradictions of tsunamis, billionaires, and same-day shipping. “Slow Down” has sold more than half a million copies in Japan and launched Saito into a rare academic celebrity. He appears regularly on Japanese television and aspires to the public-intellectual status of Thomas Piketty, the French economist who had a surprise hit in his 2013 doorstop, “Capital in the Twenty-first Century.”

The key insight, or provocation, of “Slow Down” is to give the lie to we-can-have-it-all green capitalism. Saito highlights the Netherlands Fallacy, named for that country’s illusory attainment of both high living standards and low levels of pollution—a reality achieved by displacing externalities. It’s foolish to believe that “the Global North has solved its environmental problems simply through technological advancements and economic growth,” Saito writes. What the North actually did was off-load the “negative by-products of economic development—resource extraction, waste disposal, and the like” onto the Global South.

If we’re serious about surviving our planetary crisis, Saito argues, then we must abandon capitalism, with its insatiable appetites. We must reject the ever-upward logic of gross domestic product, or G.D.P. (a combination of government spending, imports and exports, investments, and personal consumption). We will not be saved by a “green” economy of electric cars or geo-engineered skies. Slowing down—to a carbon footprint on the level of Europe and the U.S. in the nineteen-seventies—would mean less work and less clutter, he writes. Our kids may not make it, otherwise.

[butyoutoldmeiwasfunny]

[mindblowingscience]

Hermit crabs are 'wearing' our plastic rubbish

Hermit crabs all over the world are using our discarded plastic and other waste in place of their natural shells.

Hermit crabs all over the world, which scavenge shells as armour for their bodies, are turning increasingly to plastic waste instead. The conclusion is based on analysis of photos, taken by wildlife enthusiasts, and published online. Scientists said they were "heartbroken" to see the extent to which the animals were living in our rubbish. They said two-thirds of hermit crabs species were pictured in "artificial shells" - items that humans discarded. The discovery is published in the journal Science of the Total Environment.

Continue Reading.

[bwwhitney]

Steam Engine

[utwo]

Mountain Cabin

© Sveti Stefan-Montenegro

[postpunkindustrial]

Download 30-gigs of lost cassettes from the 80s underground

Archive.org unleash a windfall of lost music

Archive.org deliver a windfall of lost music.

If you’re looking for a good way to spend the rest of your week, Archive.org have unearthed a gigantic collection of cassettes from the mid-eighties into the mid-nineties. According to their notes, the collection was saved from the archives of noise-arch.net and donated by former CKLN-FM radio host Myke Dyer in August of 2009. Due to the size and obscurity, the collection hasn’t been properly notated but is said to include cassettes ranging from “tape experimentation, industrial, avant-garde, indie, rock, DIY, subvertainment and auto-hypnotic materials”. Head to Archive now to download the free collection.

[gothiccharmschool]

I know that some of you will lose your minds over this. 

[blueandbluer]

Holy shit

@colorschanging ! @stuft !