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Comment by philipallstar | Hacker News Reader

> European Union members have signed off on a report that warns focusing on unchecked economic growth is contributing to the destruction of global biodiversity

It would be good to know which members of the EU are currently experiencing unchecked economic growth.

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> It would be good to know which members of the EU are currently experiencing unchecked economic growth.

All of them.

You can see recent stats (from 2025) on GDP growth here, all the handful of countries with negative growth are outside the EU:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_real_GDP_...

You may be confusing fast growth with unchecked growth. If you see sustained YoY growth of a couple of percent this can quickly accelerate over many years. For example, 2% growth means doubling the size in 35 years. This has a notable impact on the natural world, as the economic system is linked to our material reality.

If you're going to quibble about OP's implied definition of "unchecked economic growth", then you should at least provide a better one that isn't just "economic growth".

The "unchecked" in unchecked economic growth just refers to the fact that no one is applying the brakes to this growth, i.e. it's being allowed to continue uninterrupted. This is only a problem when you understand the downsides of continuing with business as usual (mainly linked to the damage to the natural world).

growth especially in the EU pretty much decoupled from environmental load

That's not true. I'm sure you're referring to outsourcing manufacturing to other countries, but that's not enough to decouple from environmental load. For example, growth in tourism is not decoupled from environmental load.

it's not 100%, but the strong correlation of economic activity with energy used (and that with CO2 emitted) is definitely getting less and less relevant.

and the EU CBAM (carbon border adjustment mechanism) is finally in force since start of 2026 for 6 sectors, and all sectors by 2030 (and by 2034 there should be no sectoral free quotas)

"Many countries have decoupled economic growth from CO₂ emissions, even if we take offshored production into account" from 2021 https://ourworldindata.org/co2-gdp-decoupling

and environmental load is not just CO2, but this is the main factor (because energy abundance is a prerequisite for a sustainable - actually green - economy)

According to your link the EU's growth rate is just 0.7% so only 25% growth in 35 years, and some of that will come from things that have little or no impact on nature, or reduce the impact on nature. For example, replacing a coal power plant with solar adds to GDP but reduces pollution.

> reduce the impact on nature

Less bad is not the same as good. For example, electricity from solar panels is less bad than electricity from fossil fuels but there's considerable disruption to the natural world to produce them, not least of which involves mining for raw materials. In the same vein, we're nowhere near reducing pollution to safe levels or even reducing our overall pollution, all we've managed so far is a reduction in the rate of growth of fossil fuel use, it's still going up YoY.

while all true the population will shrink in less than a hundred years, consumption patterns are changing as economic surplus gets used to increase efficiency (from electric cars to simply having good insulation and a FIR camera to check, and so on), and hopefully land use patterns will also change (as lab-grown meat and other alternative proteins help to transition to a less cruel way to get meat, and that will require a lot less land to grow feed for animals)

sure, no guarantee that we cannot (and won't) fuck it up, but it's not hopeless

It's not so much about which countries actually grow that much right now, but which mindset underpins the political and medial discourse, trying to get those countries "back on track for continuous growth" or whether there's some realization, that infinite growth as fundamental principle just isn't what we all should be aiming for anymore.

GDP or net trade won't tell the important part of the story here. Does the EU import any soy, sugar, coffee, cacao, beef, minerals, etc? Then it is at least contributing to the development pressure on sensitive ecosystems.

To be fair, the EUDR is at least an attempt to begin addressing this problem, though it was poorly executed and has been delayed.

They already destroyed all of their forest natural resources a long time ago. Maybe they are trying to warn north america of their own mistakes.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/tree-cover-loss

Are you trying to argue that Europe hasn't decimated their forests?

Europe's tree cover is increasing.

https://joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu/jrc-news-and-upda...

Tree cover != forests. That is movement in the right direction though!

Ah, the No True Scotch Pine argument.

We stopped deforesting the US in 1920. We have more forest here than we did 100 years ago.

We do in terms of acreage. A lot of that is reclaimed farmland. Old-growth hardwoods are still down overall, and will remain so; that can take multiple hundreds of years to recover, since cleared forests regrow in phases.

Right. And tree coverage is not the be-all-end-all. My family visited the plantation where a few of our ancestors were enslaved; it had been turned into a state-run forest preserve (partly as a bid for the prior owners to hide the extent of the operation). Unfortunately, the farming practices employed back then have scarred the land; near where one of the slave cabins had stood, we were shown a large anthropogenic ravine that had been created by farming-related soil erosion. These places aren't quite the same forests as they were before European settling.

There's also the case of the near-loss of the American Chestnut.

Actual facts on the ground do not fit neatly into a one-liner, especially stable forests; this sentence is meant as a one-liner to win bar arguments.

source: current graduate research papers in forestry

Could you maybe give us the 4-5 liner version then?

This breaks my heart about Ireland. I concede it's not possible to reforest the entire Ireland and have a competitive dairy and beef industry but restoring some of our wetlands and forests should be a goal that's taken seriously. We're at the point of getting 'cheap' talk from politicians.

Ireland has the climate to support the entire island covered in Atlantic rain-forests. People already agree Ireland is a pretty country, can you imagine how glorious it would be to have rolling hills covered in trees.

Certainly that's not how the Europeans started out interacting with north America's natural resource. Mostly they treated it like the US does oil deposits now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broad_Arrow_Policy

Didn't that already happen in the middle ages?

Northern Europe has been completely reforested, and has a forest cover which is larger than ever before. Because of the switch from wood heating to electric heating. Forest products remain one of the largest exports.

As for central Europe, yes they need to reforest their own countries before they go flying all around the world screaming about the Amazon, while drinking the finest champagne.

Sparing no expense to slam the EU for 'lagging behind' whenever possible, right?

The quoted phrase does not say Europe or parts of it are experiencing unchecked economic growth, it "warns [that] [a focus on] unchecked economic growth" is problematic, wherever it is the case.

The lie of Europe is that they get to launder their environmental and humanitarian responsibility through other countries. If not for their amazing growth then for the maintenance of their current lifestyles.

Sometimes just through simply getting raw materials and finished goods from the third world or china in the open market, then still claim to be "green".

Or also directly from neighbors; Looking the other way when buying Russian natural gas, or Germany buying nuclear energy from France, etc.

Or the worst, paying Libya to sweep their refugee problems under the rug.

You forgot to mention the part where EU model is to export demographic deficit which is "purchased" by the young generations of other countries stiffling their growth and displacing the dwindling younger european generations.

"Dont buy cheap tshirts from bangladesh just bring its youth in" is apparently morally superior model

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