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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

We’re not going to “degrowth.” Repeat that to yourself as a mantra until it sinks in. There’s billions of people out there whose standard of living is inadequate, and they’re going to try to keep on the development curve.

Okay, so what does climate response look like in that world? I suspect it looks like investing massive amounts of money in nuclear and carbon capture. Developed countries have spent trillions on COVID response to keep some 65+ people alive. That mk eh would have been far better spent on climate technology.

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We are going to 'degrowth' and those on the 'bottom' are going to suffer the most.

If not voluntary, then forced. The ecosystem that carries all the growth is rapidly falling apart (relatively, with speed measured in decennia, generations or centuries). We cannot stay on the exponential paths we've taken the last 250 years for another 250 years, that is impossible. Let alone for another 2500 years

Developed economies are already not on an exponential path (as is made clear in the linked post if you would bother to read it). You are reasoning from a false premise.

This seems not to address the arguments made in the article - for example, that economic growth, beyond a certain point, is mostly about "doing more with less". Maybe those arguments are wrong, but they need responding to.

The article adresses all these points on a small timescale.

Just population growth alone, using the current curve (1.1%), will hit 118 billion people in 250 years and 5,812,724,005,588 billion (not a typo) people in 2500 years. Compounding exponential growth is quite literally unimanigable.

We cannot continue on current curves. No matter how efficient you make houses, produce iPads or food: exponential growth is unsustainable. Literally and figuratively.

That's not what the current curve actually looks like though. The rate of increase is declining every year. There are a number of developed economies that already have shrinking populations.

There are a couple of different population projections out there and, of course, predictions about the future are hard. But all of them show a population peak around 2100 of maybe 10-12 billion people.

It's hard to see why "economic growth involves doing more with less" would work on a small timescale but not a big one. Indeed the main point of the article is that if you wait long enough, this will kick in, but that in the short run we have a problem.

The same holds for population growth. As countries get richer the birth rate reduces. So there's very little chance that we'll stay on the current 1.1% curve, any more than we stayed on the analogous curve defined in 1950.

>It's hard to see why "economic growth involves doing more with less" would work on a small timescale but not a big one.

I would guess that the marginal value of cleverness or technology decreases over time

So one thing was addressed in the article that is a fundamental axiom of your argument, which is that historical curves are not laws of nature. You have no reason to believe that this is actually exponential growth into the future.

On a note addressing your population growth numbers, I just want to say that your numbers demonstrate that you are very unfamiliar with population growth dynamics and you should research the topic more. Those numbers are impossible and not going to happen (on earth) in any scenario whatsoever.

I know they are not going to happen. That was my entire point: that there is no way our current path can be kept on a longer timescale.

> If not voluntary, then forced.

Agreed. Collapse or increasing eco-terrorism is my guess.

Yes, and what's more: We have still high population growth rates in many areas of the world. Take Sub-Saharan Africa for example. Even countries like Afghanistan, where the population grew from 20mn in 2000 to 40mn in 2020...

It’s likely large cohorts of those folks are going to starve to death from climate change related crop failures.

It's really really difficult to estimate the probability of something like that if it never happened before. Compare this to: in the next 200 years there will be a 9.0 earthquake in San Francisco with a probability of 99%. Or a pandemic...

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