There are a couple of bait-and-switch moves in this post that I don’t understand:
1. Paris-targets urgency vs big-picture eco-philosophy ”We’re not on track to meet our Paris climate agreements; if we want to meet these targets we’ll need a big transition right away” creates a reasonable sense of urgency attached to the issue of climate change. But then this urgency inexplicably carries over to big-picture philosophical ideas like “we are on a finite Planet Earth… at some point [maybe centuries or millennia from now], we will run out of crucial resources and we’ll have to transition to zero resource-use growth”, when it seems like we might have plenty of time to solve problems like the eventual scarcity of certain metals (including by doing far-future stuff like space settlement & asteroid mining).
2. Exactly how much degrowth are we talking here? You don’t clarify exactly what “post-growth” or “degrowth” means. Sometimes it sounds like you are advocating a massive worldwide economic depression of similar impact to the Covid-19 lockdowns, but lasting much longer. (Yes, you say that it wouldn’t be as bad because only certain industries would be shut down, but the recession would also have to be more severe than 2020 in many ways, since the 2020 lockdown-recession didn’t actually reduce emissions by much. So, figure the impact might feel about the same overall.)
But other times, you say that actually the ultimate goal is “avoiding an ecological collapse and its associated economic collapse”, giving the impression that you favor approximately whatever mix policies lead to the best long-run outcome for human civilization—striking the right balance between economic harms from global warming and economic harms from global warming prevention. Estimates from the UN IPPC say that even 3-4 degrees of warming (aka, blowing past the Paris Agreement targets) would only penalize the economy by a few percent by 2100. So (unless you think that all these climate studies are wildly wrong), it seems like it is only worth paying a small cost to prevent global warming: stuff like subsidizing green power (as in the bill just passed by the United States—we closed half the gap between the satus quo and our Paris goals for only $300 billion!), approving more nuclear plants, implementing a carbon tax, and so forth. The couple-percent-of-GDP damages that mainstream climate science expects, don’t seem like they are worth embarking on a many-percent-of-GDP, society-wide sacrifice of human wellbeing and development. So maybe “degrowth” is just a sexy, radical-sounding word for these sensible global-warming mitigation policies like carbon taxation and the like? In that case, I don’t understand your choice of vocabulary but I am otherwise totally with you.
1. I didn’t actually mean that the urgency in the climate problem leads to urgency in the materials problem, both are urgent relatively independently. It seems you’re more optimistic about material scarcity and that by the time we run into troubles, we’ll already have tech to solve them. Would be great if that were the case. I’d love to see forecasts on that if you know some. 2. The point I tried to make is that global warming is not the only problem. If it were, I wouldn’t name it post-growth/degrowth, but I use these terms because of the bigger picture, since I also consider crossing the rest of planetary boundaries as well as resource scarcity important problems. But from #1, I think we disagree at least regarding the potential problem of resource scarcity.
There are a couple of bait-and-switch moves in this post that I don’t understand:
1. Paris-targets urgency vs big-picture eco-philosophy
”We’re not on track to meet our Paris climate agreements; if we want to meet these targets we’ll need a big transition right away” creates a reasonable sense of urgency attached to the issue of climate change. But then this urgency inexplicably carries over to big-picture philosophical ideas like “we are on a finite Planet Earth… at some point [maybe centuries or millennia from now], we will run out of crucial resources and we’ll have to transition to zero resource-use growth”, when it seems like we might have plenty of time to solve problems like the eventual scarcity of certain metals (including by doing far-future stuff like space settlement & asteroid mining).
2. Exactly how much degrowth are we talking here?
You don’t clarify exactly what “post-growth” or “degrowth” means. Sometimes it sounds like you are advocating a massive worldwide economic depression of similar impact to the Covid-19 lockdowns, but lasting much longer. (Yes, you say that it wouldn’t be as bad because only certain industries would be shut down, but the recession would also have to be more severe than 2020 in many ways, since the 2020 lockdown-recession didn’t actually reduce emissions by much. So, figure the impact might feel about the same overall.)
But other times, you say that actually the ultimate goal is “avoiding an ecological collapse and its associated economic collapse”, giving the impression that you favor approximately whatever mix policies lead to the best long-run outcome for human civilization—striking the right balance between economic harms from global warming and economic harms from global warming prevention. Estimates from the UN IPPC say that even 3-4 degrees of warming (aka, blowing past the Paris Agreement targets) would only penalize the economy by a few percent by 2100. So (unless you think that all these climate studies are wildly wrong), it seems like it is only worth paying a small cost to prevent global warming: stuff like subsidizing green power (as in the bill just passed by the United States—we closed half the gap between the satus quo and our Paris goals for only $300 billion!), approving more nuclear plants, implementing a carbon tax, and so forth. The couple-percent-of-GDP damages that mainstream climate science expects, don’t seem like they are worth embarking on a many-percent-of-GDP, society-wide sacrifice of human wellbeing and development. So maybe “degrowth” is just a sexy, radical-sounding word for these sensible global-warming mitigation policies like carbon taxation and the like? In that case, I don’t understand your choice of vocabulary but I am otherwise totally with you.
1. I didn’t actually mean that the urgency in the climate problem leads to urgency in the materials problem, both are urgent relatively independently. It seems you’re more optimistic about material scarcity and that by the time we run into troubles, we’ll already have tech to solve them. Would be great if that were the case. I’d love to see forecasts on that if you know some.
2. The point I tried to make is that global warming is not the only problem. If it were, I wouldn’t name it post-growth/degrowth, but I use these terms because of the bigger picture, since I also consider crossing the rest of planetary boundaries as well as resource scarcity important problems. But from #1, I think we disagree at least regarding the potential problem of resource scarcity.