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Comment by ZenoArrow | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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

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