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Comment by danbruc | Hacker News Reader

Could we solve climate change if we just accepted being dramatically poorer, forever? As I’ve written before, the answer is 1) no, not really [...]

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.

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The planet absolutely could not support 8.5 billion people engaging in subsistence level farming, or hunter-gatherer living. At all.

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.

Agreed: tractors and other farm machines are a tremendous productivity multiplier. Nitrogen fertilizer, which the world currently makes from natural gas and would require advanced industrial infrastructure no matter how it is made, is another.

This neglects that Permacultural farming is beneficial for soil and feeds way more people per unit of land, but requires more labour than monoculture trowel and row farming.

Wikipedia says there are more than a hundred billion wild mammals. [1] They obviously do not all consume as much food as humans do and there are certainly a lot of small mammals like mice, but from the order of magnitude it seems at least not completely obvious that ten billion people would be too much to support without fertilizers other than dung and similar things.

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arable_land

Your argument here doesn't work:

>Livestock make up 62% of the world’s mammal biomass; humans account for 34%; and wild mammals are just 4%.

https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass

I’ve heard one claim that we could bring all 8.5 billion of us to the living standard of a middle class American in the 1960’s and still reduce the size of our economic footprint to fit within sustainable boundaries for a healthy planet.

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.

You are not going to convince people to go back to the 1960s. But I think that is also the wrong way of looking at it, just going back in time would be stupid. We have made advancements, for example houses and cars consuming less energy, it would make no sense to go back to the old technology. So you could probably have a larger house than you had in the 1960s while still having the same environmental footprint. Or did they already factor that in, you need 1950s energy consumption and with current technology that buys you 1960s stuff?

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.

True. I think the practicalities of it are hard to predict but the spirit of the idea seems reasonable; it’s not that degrowth would have us sitting in squalid huts eating grass. Such an idea doesn’t seem to have much evidence.

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?

Do the rich people really matter, are there enough of them to do so? A thousand billionaires with a one thousand times larger footprint are still only equivalent to a million people, i.e. not even one percent of the US population. I do not know and have a hard time guessing how much the rich really matter.

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.

The science doesn't seem to suggest that there is any "more" we can emit, hence we have to not only eliminate emissions but reduce them. Radically.

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 plantet can probably handle ten billion people living stone age lifestyles,

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.

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