Hacker News Reader

> These "degrowth" strategies mean tremendous suffering. People have to die to make degrowth possible.

But nobody's saying they have to die early. A fertility rate under replacement will lead to degrowth. Yes, it's going to be difficult during the degrowth phase (less young people to support the aged), but eventually the population will stabilize at a lower level and that will be better from both a sustainability and resources standpoint.

But not a human standpoint!

Billions of old people, dying alone.

I do not want to live in that world. Let alone encourage it!

The alternative is continue killing trillions of animals a year and polluting the air, water and soil until our biosphere is no longer suitable for many species including humans. At that point we can forget about exploring the stars or whatever.

The alternative to degrowth is actually trying to transcend these problems. I'm not blind to the problems we have here. They are hard, but human beings are pretty clever. We eradicated polio. Polio! I'd be dead in a week if a biologist I've never met hadn't invented a way to use bacteria as a nano-factory to mass-produce a molecule which does not exist in nature.

What you're saying is like saying "Let's not play the World Series, let's just go home and settle for 2nd. We'll still be a playoff team!"

Degrowth is death. We must adapt or die - this rule of evolution still applies to all of us.

Less people is bad. All of us matter but only as long as humanity continues.

Degrowth is stagnation. We must survive tho - even at the expenses of the Earth if that is what it takes.

We are the highest evolutionary life this planet has produced - the only life able to exploit all other life. The entire purpose of evolution could be to create life as we are.

If it's all just random and we ended up as we are solely due to genetic mistakes over time - our existence is even more unfathomable, a seemingly infinite number of things had to occur exactly as they did so that we exist as we do now.

We are the most important thing on Earth - potentially far, far more so.

The Webb telescope has viewed into the past and didn't see so many things it would have if the universe was full of advanced intelligent life - with all the data we possess now, we cannot say that we are not the first to "wake up"and only "if" indeed the universe will ultimately create an infinite number of species with our capabilities.

That's a real big if.

We can't take that chance on something as stupid sounding as "degrowth"

Remember, adapt or die.

That's what we do

If Earth is going to heat up than it

> Degrowth is death

There are currently about 8 billion of us. At some point in the past there were 4 billion of us (Bard tells me the population reached 4Billion on April 11, 1974). We're we somehow worse off when there were 1/2 as many of us on earth? Would we somehow be worse off if we slowly (like over the course of 100 years) returned back to that number? I fail to see how it would be problematic. Somehow we survived and got what we needed to get done in 1974 with only 4B people. If we were to settle back down to that number and stabilize there why would that be a problem? Or, how about stabilizing at 6B?

You mean billions of old people, dying together!

Sounds a little too death-culty for my taste. :P

Degrowth is about shifting our focus as a society from growth at all costs to sustainability and quality of life. It's not about killing people, it's not about worse medical care, it's not about less food.

Our current growth strategy is not sustainable. Growth as a goal has failed. If we need to take a step back to reevaluate how to do it right going forward, that's fine.

The best "degrowth" argument I have seen is from a physicist [0]. His argument is based on hard limits to the amount of waste heat produced by energy consuming (i.e. all) activities of humanity. He shows that if the current rate of economic growth continued for the next 400 years then humanity would be consuming more energy than in all the sunlight reaching earth and would produce enough waste heat that the surface of the earth would boil.

So continuous growth is physically impossible, even alloting for nuclear fusion and miracle technologies.

That's just considering energy/electricity, which is optimistic because civilization has on the order of at least hundreds or thousands of necessary inputs that aren't fungible. Water, air, food, and other raw materials for our bodies and technologies will become scarce more quickly.

A huge amount of growth has been due to "free" value provided by ecosystems, fossil fuels, minerals, the sun, etc. If we get to the point where all the free stuff from nature is not enough and we have to fission and fusion our raw materials we will be living in a society of such profound scarcity that we could probably only subsist as rows of brains in vats.

So the degrowth argument is not that humans should voluntarily suffer to preserve a sentimental gaia aspect, but that suffering is inevitable due to unsustainability and that it would be better to spread it out over a longer time than suffer a major crash.

[0] https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...

The post you're referencing is great, undoubtedly true, and one that I have bookmarked and return to often.

However.

We are still very early in the curve. We are warming the planet, but not because of any energy we are producing, merely because of a chemical inbalance in the atmosphere. We are not close to any of the limits specified there.

When energy costs 0.0001 / kWh, we may re-evaluate. But we have a long way to go before we get there.

It's so early!

> People have to die to make degrowth possible.

I’ve read some statistics that say there’s more than an 80% chance that everyone alive right now will die at some point.

Is there a number between 20,000 (which seems so low as to not be a serious suggestion I have ever seen anyone make) and "growing forever"--for which there was that great analysis done by the physicist arguing with the economist, to whom they were trying to explain that even small amounts of growth forever led to us boiling our oceans with heat output to satisfy everyone's energy needs--that would work for you?

Not forever, of course. But we are so, so, so early.

How much energy is in all of the uranium that can be mined?

Do you think the world can sustain the lifestyle of the average American if the whole of Africa and China have it too? We need to change, and frankly those with privileges need to. Otherwise they would rightly claim that it is unfair.

I think what is more likely to happen is, as China and India become the worlds largest economic powers, and it will happen, it's just a matter of time, they will basically make the west poorer, that's how that issue will be solved. We just won't be able to afford the things we used to have.

Americans will mostly be jobless and replaced by automation, many goods will be exported and China will likely fair a lot better because it's already a place where "social credit" and other policies already exist which are more acceptable than what the USA will tolerate. Americans hate the idea of free healthcare and UBI for example.

I know the US media likes to pretend China is finished, but I really don't think that's the case, it will continue to grow, even if only by inertia.

A lot of Americans would actually like free healthcare and UBI was actually had been around in America for 100's of years since the beginning, it's not new as an idea. China has a whole host of problems they too can't grow forever with ghost cities, etc but they like America have a political need to always be growing.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income_in_th....

People don’t have to die for degrowth, just less people have to be born

> The "environment" has enough raw material to increase the amount of computation on our planet by many orders of magnitude. And that's if we stay here on Earth -- if you want to think on "indefinitely" timescales, Earth's constraints may not apply.

There is no indication that humanity will be colonizing other planets any time soon. The greatest scientific minds on the planet cannot even run a sustainable Antarctic outpost. Maybe we can take baby steps towards getting McMurdo station self sufficient before we try colonizing Mars.

All jesustech and techno-optimism aside... countries that are educated and have high standards of living consume a vast amount of resources. No amount of green technology and renewables has been able to reverse this trend. Check out the 2022 mineral baby for the US. https://mineralseducationcoalition.org/mining-minerals-infor...

The reality is that population decline will be needed to save the planet.

This entire comment is a complete non-sequitur. There is nothing in the parent comment advocating for suffering, and zero evidence that the voluntary individual choices about reproduction we see in free societies today would lead to that.

This is just straight-up substance-free fear-mongering.

well, we don't have a choice. when the standard of living drops so low that you can't even provide enough shelter for a couple, how are you going to have kids? all those ipads and electricity you mentioned won't help you one bit when you're out on the street.

Can you provide sources for those claims?