Degrowth: Solving the Climate Impasse by Magical Thinking

The main point of the article is that degrowthing is incompatible with poverty reduction. I like à lot this quote: "you can't negotiate with physics". It got quite famous after being used by G. Thunberg at Davos, while it is much older [1]. In other words, poverty might be overcome with public policies, while the issue is way more complex concerning climate change (and loss of biodiversity)

[1] https://medium.com/@billmckibben/why-the-earth-is-heating-so...

The idea that we can grow and consume ourselves out of our environmental problems seems like magical thinking as well.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13563467.2019.15...

We aren't going to solve this problem using the same tools that got us into it.

> The metric of income or GDP is strongly associated with positive outcomes, whether we compare countries to each other, or people (within a country) to each other.

Although there are some interesting exceptions, like the Hispanic Paradox: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispanic_paradox

In America, Hispanic people have lower income than non Hispanic whites, but better health and life expectancy. Possibly they just have a healthier culture - less sugary diet, stronger community ties etc - that overrides the difference in income.

People often post articles on HN criticizing Big Oil for having mislead us about climate change. I donate karma points by pointing out that Big Oil has merely been responding to consumer demand and that most people are not willing to spend a lot of money to avoid further global warming. Biden is promoting many green initiatives, but he is against raising the gasoline tax because that would directly cost most Americans money. Only indirectly costing them money with renewable mandates and bans on oil and gas exploration and pretending they won't bear the cost is considered politically viable. But most Republican and many independent voters see through that.