How about we do two things
Like how about we work less and we immediately and totally nationalize energy and agriculture haha just a thought haha (fireflies are going extinct haha)
Way ahead of you, energy has already been nationalized here for a long time.
That's cool. Do they ignore climate change in their energy calculations? Because if they are nationalized and choose to burn Shale Oil for energy, then they are kind of missing the point.
The Canadian state is just 3 oligarchs a trenchcoat. It's no different than if it was privatized.
nationalize ... agriculture
🚨LAND REFORM ALERT🚨
🚨LAND REFORM ALERT🚨
🚨LAND REFORM ALERT🚨
Do not worry, the CIA is contracting death squads to secure democracy in your country as we speak.
cronyism
This is like saying feudalism would be fine if you could get rid of the nepotism.
The article is, in my opinion, purposely mischaracterizing the degrowth movement. I would say degrowth is more a natural reaction to the excesses of capitalism than movement about addressing climate change.
This will go the same way the "Green New Deal" did. It will scare the ruling class, the ruling class will send its media minions to demonize it, and nothing will change.
no actually, you forgot the final step of "loudly and blindly double down"
You mean like destroying new light bulbs and rolling coal to trigger the wokes?
But the phone is 5% lighter this time!
... and will be replaced in a year
If the phone were 5% lighter that would be an actual improvement. Instead phones get heavier and thinner and bigger. So overall the experience diminishes as they try to be tablets.
Even if it was 5% lighter throwing the damn thing away every year is so much e-waste.
No disagreement there. But a problem with modern consumer electronics is that they AREN'T ACTUALLY BETTER then last year's model. Sure you can talk about pixel density etc, but that was actually a solved problem almost 10 years ago. Apple called it a "retna" display. They idea is that at a certain pixel density and screen size, there is no benefit to adding more . But capitalism always requires more, so since you can't add pixels, you have to add screen space. But the iphone was already designed to be used one handed. People's hands haven't grown in the past 10 years, so why are they making the phones bigger which makes it a worse user experience?
Anyway, I dont' want to derail into phone chat. but I'll say that if they did actually start making lighter phones with the same battery life, I wouldn't consider that an actual improvement to that space, but that isn't what is happening :/
Degrowth is such a fucking stupid idea. What we need is socialism. The demonic oligarchs that run the world are never going to prioritize reducing climate change. They've made that clear over the last century. There's too much profit to be made.
Worker owned means of production is the only solution. Only then can we direct the productive forces toward solving the most immediate problems that humanity faces. We've created so much productivity, but we need to guide it in the direction of sustainability instead of the profit motive.
Degrowth could definitely only be accomplished under a socialist model where we aren't price gouged for food and housing. A life with less work and less disposable crap sounds really fucking good though.
Degrowth in absense of socialism is nonsense but it is necessary. Lazy socialism is the way.
I agree. Once we have socialism, we can have degrowth. But none of these articles that come out about it are advocating for that. They're advocating that the working class take the hit for climate change via increased unemployment, poverty, and ultimately death.
Protip: if you want your movement to gain any political traction, don't call it the degrowth movement
What would you call it? Its kinda like the "defund police" thing. If they called it "reallocate police resources" opposition to the movement would just use the stronger "defund police" language as a cudgel to smear it. It's best to own it and educate
Pro tip: any one telling you the problem with your movement is the optics, doesn't actually care about the objectives of thst movement
I care very much for this objective, I just think you'll never convince the dumber people with a name they'd immediately perceive as very negative
This has extremely strong "defund the police is not a good slogan" energy.
Also i don't view people who share my position yet are not yet aware or educated yet on why they should stand in solidarity with the rest of their class as "the dumber people."
That kind of language and outlook isn't something i view favorably. Its ar best borderline ableist, and conveys a sense that you veiw yourself as superior to those you should be in solidarity with.
If you do care about these issues then i suggest a little self crit on this
I'm sorry I'm hurting feelings all over the fediverse. I just care so much that I'm not afraid to say out loud that it's a dumb slogan and those that picked it are dumb because of it
It's not my feelings you're hurting. You're hurting yourself if you're viewing other people as inferior.
My point about the slogan thing is more about the disingenuous statements from liberal pundits and specifically Obama's comments on "defund the police", as opposed to a criticism of you, so sorry if my critique came off as too harsh toward you on that.
If you think its a bad slogan that's fair, but that line has been used by disingenuous people to try and derail things and thats what got me aggro.
I'd figure you'd convince people by.. I dunno... talking to them about it instead of worrying about what they might think about a particular word.
In order to slow the economy down and not wreak havoc, he said, we have to reconfigure our ideas about the entire economic system.
This is how degrowthers envision the process: After a reduction in material and energy consumption, which will constrict the economy, there should also be a redistribution of existing wealth, and a transition from a materialistic society to one in which the values are based on simpler lifestyles and unpaid work and activities.
Sounds good to me. It is a fair point that the basic operation of our society depends on continual growth, but redistribution seems like it would be an effective way of mitigating those problems degrowth might cause. We have more than enough resources to keep everyone alive, we just have to use them.
I'd rather just do the full communism now path, where once every man, woman and child has all their needs and many of their wants met, there isn't a desire to chase the next fashion craze, or buy the next iphone or "keep up with the jones'" as it were because the Jones' have the same stuff you do, but maybe they spend their ample leisure time exercising, you spend your time gardening.
there should also be a redistribution of existing wealth
there should also be unicorns farting rainbows.
Yes, we'll save ourselves by resetting the clock and never undoing the conditions that led to where we are
Look around you. Are there things to be done? Parks to be cleaned? Old houses to be renovated? Run down areas of town? Are there any hungry children in nearby schools? If you answered yes to any of those, then there is work to be done.
Why, if there is work to be done, is it not getting done? What type of society undervalues such critical work such that you would look at the state of the work and think that there is not enough work for everyone to contribute.
There are plenty of jobs, there is infinite work, but the current value system doesn't incentivise this work that would improve everyone's life.
So two questions.
- Why doesn't the current system value this work?
- What would the world look like of that type of work was valued?
That in mind, given that you assume mass unemployment, which is questionable at best, reconsider why that would be. Who, or what, would be the cause?
That's actually a good thing, assuming that employment wasn't tied to surviving nor thriving.
degrowth would only be necessary in 1st world countries, under socialist models. Giving back to the exploited.
Eh, humans are hardwired to acquire stuff. This will never catch on. It'd be cool if it did. But it won't.
naturalistic fallacy intensifies
Even if people were "hard wired" to do bad things, a system that encourages those bad things is a worse system.
Humans are hard wired to take care of each other. You're mistaking human nature with materialism.
But hey, do you doomer.
It won’t happen because the ones interested in keeping us convinced we’re hardwired to acquire stuff would not want it, and they’re the ones in control.
Ascetics exist. Minimalists exist. Fuck, Marie Kondo exists. The desire for stuff is not some immutable force like gravity. It’s just what we’ve been taught by the ones selling the stuff.
Human nature is sculpted and shaped by the material conditions around you, it's not something immutable and forever the same.
If a society is built around endless accumulation then of course it would be considered only natural to most.
After all, if you were born and lived your whole life in a coal mine, you'd say it's human nature to cough.
How would business work? Currently a business's purpose by law is to make money. How would you enforce a different goal without going full centralized economy?
And how is trying to add less value more effective than internalizing externalized costs? For example, co2 is an externalized cost, one companies don't need to pay for right now, it's external to them. If we made them pay for it to fund carbon capture at 1 ton removed for every 1 ton emitted, they would decrease their emissions and the rest would be removed. You could do something similar for other ecological issues as well. What's the benefit of degroth over internalizing costs?
Please think of the companies! Won't anyone think of the poor profit motive?!
Is degroth individual or government driven? If it's individual, I'm all for it. If it's government, I think there are more effective ways of helping the environment than telling businesses to not make money.
Yes individual actions are the best and most effective way to deal with collective problems.
Obviously companies making money has no impact on the environment either
Any cost that you try to internalize will just be passed on to the consumer.
Remember, you said it in your comment, "... a business's purpose by law is to make money." The business doesn't pay the cost, the worker pays the cost.
Your example of carbon capture is great, a "business" starts up doing carbon capture. They make their money by selling carbon credits to other businesses, NOT to clean up their act and stop polluting but to "offset" their carbon emissions. If my business produces more pollution, I just buy more credits and pass on the cost to the consumers or freeze employee raises or fire chunks of the workforce to cover the increase in business costs without to reduce the chance that it will hurt profits.
Like, if I poop in your kitchen sink every day, but I buy "poop free kitchen sink credits" to offset that I poop in your kitchen sink every day that says "somewhere else there is a kitchen sink free of poop that will cancel out that I've pooped in this sink today," ... I'm still pooping in your kitchen sink.
Any cost that you try to internalize will just be passed on to the consumer.
That's fine. The government can give subsidies for low income people or subsidize some products directly.
The poop in the sink example isn't applicable to carbon emissions. Co2 dilutes very quickly, so it's all essentially going into one big reservoir. The equivalent then is for everyone to be pooping in one big pile. I don't care in that case whether you don't poop in the pile or you pay someone else to take one poop's worth of poop out of the pile somewhere else. The pile stays the same size. The overall quantity is what matters for co2.
You might have a point though for externalities like resource extraction or habitat destruction. That's harder to quantity if the degradation of one area can be offset by the improvement of another. That's a much more variable exchange, so it'd be more difficult to work trades on those. But governments have been able to mostly figure it out for things like national forests, logging, and hydraulic fluid spills. So I don't think it's impossible.
pass on the cost to the consumers or freeze employee raises or fire chunks of the workforce to cover the increase in business costs without to reduce the chance that it will hurt profits.
Exec's don't have that much headroom left to squeeze out of customers and workers. If they raise prices or lower wages too much, their product or jobs will be uncompetitive with companies that emit less co2 and thus need to pay less to offset it. It will be cheaper in most cases to decrease emissions instead of paying for offsets.
Exec's don't have that much headroom left to squeeze out of customers and workers. If they raise prices or lower wages too much, their product or jobs will be uncompetitive with companies that emit less co2 and thus need to pay less to offset it.
How many different gas stations do you see during your daily travels? Are the prices all over the place or are they the same? What are the price differences between different manufacturers of the same type of TV? They're all pretty much the same with one or two very high end or very low end models being the exception. There won't be much price competition because that hurts businesses, if one of your business peers raises their prices you are now under pressure to RAISE your prices so that you're not loosing potential profits.
I'm pretty sure that manufacturing any particular type of thing or extracting any particular type of resource will produce the same amount of environmental degradation regardless of which company's name is on the paperwork. Exxon doesn't have some special way to extract oil that is better for the envrioment than the one ConocoPhillips uses. So there won't be any competition that way.
It will be cheaper in most cases to decrease emissions instead of paying for offsets.
If the emissions are directly correlated to the thing they are selling, then no. Decreasing emissions means a company is pumping less oil or making less iPhones or selling less gasoline. This gives a company's competitors who aren't decreasing their production a way to capture its market share because somebody else will still have product to sell to meet the demand. So it there would be no net positive change so long as competition in the free market is allowed in this type of situation.
If the emissions are directly correlated to the thing they are selling, then no.
It's never directly correlated. You can always transport by ship instead of plane or use more local resources or use less material. There's always efficiency that can be squeezed out of a system, and a company that doesn't pursue cost efficiency in that area will fall behind. But right now there's no reason to do so.
Are the prices all over the place or are they the same?
Gas or the food things?
Often the prices are all the same because the higher cost ones have gone out of business or adapted to the lower cost method. Price fixing (which is what you're describing) is hard to do when there is a lot of competition, since any one company can disrupt the whole thing and make more money because of it. But it is more likely were competition is scarce. In duopolies or similarly few players, they can price fix more easily. That's why I am in favor of nationalizing industries like that, or at least they need more oversight.
That's fine. The government can give subsidies for low income people or subsidize some products directly.
Why should we give money to rich parasites that contribute nothing when we could just nationalize their "business" and run it at a loss? Why must everything have a profit motive?
Because a profit motive does much better for efficiency. Government run things are not known for their efficiency and innovation.
Plus the government is very inefficient deciding how to delegate resources. Democracy isn't able to get a lot of information from everyone about their exact priorities and desires without extreme expenditure. But people can show how much they value some services over others by how much they're willing to pay, doing prioritisation automatically.
I would be in favor of nationalizing some industries where free market forces don't work, for example healthcare or Internet. But free markets with profit motives are very efficient.
And I claim that they can be moral if the external costs of immorality are internalized. Make a business pay exorbitantly for being bad, and they'll stop being bad.
Do you have any actual proof that the profit motive has any positive links to innovation, or are you just taking it for granted? The first cell phone was invented in the USSR, and Frederick Banting sold the patent for insulin for $1, to name two counter-examples. What innovations have come from the profit motive?
Likewise, I doubt the claims of market efficiency. 10% of Americans were food insecure in 2021. Hundreds of thousands are homeless. To me, this is a drastic failing of resource allocation in the richest country on earth. When push came to shove during WWII, even the US ran their war industry as a command economy because corporate graft could not be tolerated in an existential crisis. Socialist countries consistently outperform similar capitalist nations; compare Cuba to any other Caribbean nation (or even China to India; while I assume we would disagree about what China's doing, I think we would agree that it's more government-directed than US-style "free-market capitalism").
I'm curious what would justify whether something should be nationalized to you. Surely it's not just to do with profitability, as you give healthcare as an example. Is it to do with how essential something is? If it's the latter, then surely that would justify the nationalization of food, decommodification of housing, etc.
To your point of "regulate businesses to ensure good behavior", surely you must realize the reason we don't already have those regulations are that private businesses bribe politicians to prevent such regulations.
I'm curious what would justify whether something should be nationalized to you.
It would be whether there can be sufficient competition to prevent anti competitive behavior. Healthcare inherently has less competition since you shouldn't be deciding what treatments you get, the doctors should. But you can also get less competition due to extreme barriers to entry, such as trains, mobile networks or internet.
