:this-is-fine:

  • Mrtryfe [none/use name]
    ·
    edit-2
    3 years ago

    This is why it's so easy to be a doomer. There needs to be trillions of dollars worth of expenditure within the next several years. Not by fucking 2035 or 2050 or whatever the fuck. There is no market mechanism that exists that would allow anything on such a level because ROI would have to be expected on a scale of several decades, maybe even a century. Unless we start seeing rapid nationalization within the next decade, there is little cause for optimism.

    • fuckwit [none/use name]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Yeah, we can talk about the actual positive benefits of solar energy and energy storage, but there's virtually nothing that's truly 'renewable', at least not enough to stave off the impeding climate apocalypse at least under the current economic model. The economics of it all prevent wind, solar, etc from truly catching fire under capitalism and saving us to some degree.

      The prevailing theory that Oil is the single biggest driver of 'prosperity', at least as far as the first world knows it, still holds true. Fossil Fuels are a fucking powerhouse that changed the course of human history. We need de-growth more than anything because even if we were to replace FF with renewables, the benefits wouldn't outweigh the drawbacks such as transportation, material logistics, etc enough to keep up with current human development.

        • SonKyousanJoui [he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          As far as I've read they're mainly against GDP growth as the measure of prosperity. It's not like they're saying return to monke

          During the 1930s, the economists Simon Kuznets and John Maynard Keynes set out to design an economic aggregate that would help policymakers figure out how to escape the Great Depression. The goal was to calculate the total monetary value of all the goods and services produced in the economy so they could see more clearly what was going wrong and what needed to be done to fix it. Kuznets argued for a measure that would help society maximise well-being and track the progress of human welfare; he wanted GDP to exclude negative things like advertising, commuting and policing, so that if those things went up governments would not be able to say that people’s lives were getting better when in fact they were not. But when the Second World War struck, Keynes broke from this vision and insisted that we should count all money-based activities – even negative ones – so we would be able to identify every ounce of productivity that was available for the war effort. In the end Keynes won,and his version of GDP came into use. GDP was intended to be a war-time measure, which is why it is so single-minded – almost even violent.

          [...] Of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with measuring some things and not others. GDP itself doesn’t have any impact in the real world. GDP growth, however, does. As soon as we start focusing on GDP growth, we’re not only promoting the things that GDP measures, we’re promoting the indefinite increase of those things. And that’s exactly what we started to do in the 1960s. GDP came into widespread use during the Cold War for the sake of adjudicating the grand pissing match between the West and the USSR. Suddenly, politicians on both sides became feverish about promoting GDP growth. Kuznets was careful to warn that we should never use GDP as a normal measure of economic success, for it would incentivise too much destruction. And yet that is exactly what we began to do – and then it was swiftly pushed around the rest of the world by the World Bank and the IMF. Today, nearly every government in the world, rich and poor alike, is focused obsessively on the single objective of increasing GDP growth.

          [...] Despite these obvious problems, for some reason we have come to believe that GDP growth is equivalent to human progress. We assume that when GDP goes up, it makes our lives better: it raises our incomes, it creates more jobs, it means better schools and hospitals and so on. This may have been true in the past, when the world was relatively empty of people and the human footprint was small relative to the bounty of the Earth. Unfortunately, it no longer holds. In the United States GDP has risen steadily over the past half-century, yet median incomes have stagnated, the poverty rate has increased and inequality has grown. The same is true on a global scale: while global real GDP has nearly tripled since 1980, the number of people living in poverty, below $5 per day, has increased by more than 1.1 billion. Why is this? Because past a certain point, GDP growth begins to produce more negative outcomes than positive ones – more ‘illth’ than wealth. The reason is because there are no longer any frontiers where accumulation doesn’t directly harm someone else, by, say, enclosing the land, degrading the soils, polluting the water, exploiting human beings or changing the climate. We have reached the point where GDP growth is beginning to create more poverty than it eliminates.

          When the entire global political establishment puts its force behind the goal of GDP growth, human and natural systems come under enormous pressure. In India it might come in the form of land grabs. In the UK, it’s privatisation of public services. In Brazil it looks like deforestation in the Amazon basin. In the US and Canada it brings fracking and tar sands. Around the world it means longer working hours, more expensive housing, depleted soils, polluted cities, wasted oceans and – above all – climate change. All for the sake of GDP growth. People who push against these destructive trends will tell you how futile it feels. It is futile because our governments don’t care. They don’t care because according to their most important measure of progress, the destruction counts as good, and must continue at all costs. This is not because humans are inherently destructive. It is because we have created a rule that encourages us to behave in destructive ways. As Joseph Stiglitz has put it, ‘What we measure informs what we do. And if we’re measuring the wrong thing, we’re going to do the wrong thing.’

          From Jason Hickel's The Divide

        • Nagarjuna [he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          According to Marx and Engels, who were working off of Morgan's concept of a natural evolution of history from savagery to civilization, yes.

          According to the wetsuweten land defenders who are deliberately readopting non industrial Lifeways, material plenty is already here.

          There are many paths to liberation, and it's up to the oppressed to determine them through struggle.

          My tentative suggestion is to undeveloped the west (and especially America) to develop the rest on their terms.