There's an unspoken fallacy here. The case for degrowth is imperfect, but it's better than the case for infinite growth, which is effectively the current paradigm.
You can almost certainly solve climate change with degrowth, the plantet can probably handle ten billion people living stone age lifestyles, it is just a question of how much we have to give up. But the not really part is the important one, you are not going to convince people to reduce their living standards significantly. If the required amount of degrowth means going back to the living standard from a couple of decades ago or more, that is not going to happen before the surface of the Earth is a deserted wasteland and people really feel the need.
I guess the best you can do is maintaining the current living standard and put future growth into making that living standard less environmental impactful instead of further raising the living standard.
Not sure if that’s true. The claim is that wealth inequality and standards of living are not distributed evenly. A very small percentage of people on Earth emit much more carbon than the rest. Enough of a difference, perhaps, that the argument that we’d all be living in stone huts is a bit ridiculous if we were to focus on degrowth.
What I find hard to digest about all of this is that the foundations of economics is based on a lot of shady hand-waving and pontificating. How we base our society and planning for our future on such a weak discipline is tiring.
One would really have to carefully analyze what you can fit into the available footprint with current technology. Maybe you only get two plane trips during your lifetime, that is one of the first things that comes to mind that people did a lot less in the past, travelling. But the would of course cause ripple effects and it could be really hard to predict the effects.
But the vast gulf of consumption between a typical upper class North American family outputs vastly more carbon than a typical family in Pakistan or Nairobi that there is probably a lot of wiggle room to plan a more even distribution of wealth. And such redistribution may not make the 0.01% much richer but doesn’t it seem possible that it could also have the effect of slowing down our carbon emissions as well as keeping up the positive trends of reducing global poverty?
Next I guess you have to assume that everyone in the world raises its living standard to the highest living standard in the world, people will not accept to permanently have a lower living standard than others. Essentially divide the available resources by the number of all humans, that is what you have to work with, people currently below that will eventually demand their fair share.
And thinking about it some more, do we even have any footprint to divide up? There are, as far as I know, no fast natural carbon sinks, so we can not emit any carbon dioxide at all without raising atmospheric carbon levels.
We all know what the solution to that has to be. What does a world without fossil fuel use look like? How do we maintain healthy economic indicators in the current modern understanding without them?
The amount of economic advantage fossil-fuel consumption gives people over people who don't seems quite large.
I'm not certain degrowth is the answer but I don't think it's complete non-sense either. We're not dealing with a zero-sum game here but it doesn't seem likely that our current course will achieve our goals.
The proof of this is North Korea, which is broadly in the middle of major ecological collapse because it's farming doesn't work and the people have essentially stripped the land bear trying to gather enough food to survive.
From a different angle, Wikipedia says there are about 1.4 billion hectares of arable land and the best number I could quickly find is that one needs one to two hectares per person without modern fertilizers, that would imply a limit of only about a billion people.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_mammals_by_population
>Livestock make up 62% of the world’s mammal biomass; humans account for 34%; and wild mammals are just 4%.
It can't. And evidence of it is that the population only really grew once people changed their lifestyles.
But if you make extracting fossil fuel impossible, you will only have to be concerned about local pollution and ecosystem destruction. Those two will almost completely wipe out non-domestic life in a few years, but some parts of the world will probably survive until nearly all of those 10B people die.
Can we keep growing by a few percentage points a year for the next few centuries? Yeah, probably. Can we do that until the heat death of the universe and beyond? Probably not.
Stuff gets weird when you include "infinity".
2 percent a year for 200 years (the minimum rate and years that could count as a few) is a multiplier or around 52.
For population that would give about 400 billion.
> Can we do that until the heat death of the universe and beyond? Probably not.
For population and energy we hit severe physical limits long before that.
At 1% annual growth in population in 12000 years we run out room. What I mean by "run out of room" is that assuming no FTL travel then since every human right now is on Earth or in low Earth orbit no human 12000 years from now can be more than 12000 light years from Earth. The volume of a sphere 12000 light years in radius, divided by the population after 12000 years of 1% growth, is less than the volume of a human.
How about energy? 9300 years of 1% annual energy growth starting now reaches a level where our annual consumption equals the energy of the entire Milky Way galaxy. By "energy of the entire Milky Way" mean everything...electromagnetic radiation, gravitational potential energy, the E=mc^2 energy of everything that has mass.
If we can somehow actually do that, 2700 more years of 1% annual energy growth and we are annually consuming the entire energy of the observable universe.
Its similar when you look at the mass to make human bodies. Here's what 1% annual population growth looks like in terms of mass needed: 3400 years to where the mass of human bodies equals the total mass of Earth and Moon. 600 more years and we also need Jupiter's mass. 700 more and we need the mass of the whole solar system.
Then it is another 2000 before we need the mass of the entire Milky way. 100 more years and we need the Andromeda galaxy's mass too. That's 6800 years from now. Then it is 5500 years until all mass in the observable universe is needed for human bodies.
Unless we get FTL travel it seems pretty clear than sometime in the next 12000 years either growth must slow or we have to change humans to require a lot less space, mass, and energy.
What we are observing being anything other than noise is highly unlikely.
That constitutes as growth. The degrowth ideas don't differentiate what kind of growth they are fighting, neither does targeting neutral growth. You can't target a single number that accurately, we need a details-based intervention.
I think it's incredible that people have been told for 2 decades that the number of humans that exist is too many, that people should not have kids (it's so hard!, and expensive, treat yourself!), and so forth.
But on the other hand, our society is designed in a way that: if it's not growing; it's disasterous.
Which meant that our societies, thinking short-term as they do: turned to migration. Which can be quite unpopular and lead to civil unrest.
IF having children is bad for the environment, why don't we just plan to shrink our economies? I know I sound naive but it's absurd to me that we don't make plans to have a shrinking population if obstensibly that's what we have to do as humanity to survive.
Importing people is the worst kind of band-aid, it's totally unsustainable! And we still tell people not to have kids.
Why? We could all just forever keep doing what we are doing today, nothing bad would happen. With a few caveats. We are depleting non-renewable resources and the population size is changing, that would eventually cause problems if not addressed. Also living standards are very unequal, in reality you could not convince the poorer people to not try to become richer.
But yeah, "this thing is wrong, so we must do that other wrong thing instead" is a great talking point.
But perhaps the planet isn't actually what we want to save, contrary to the headline?