The ones steering society choose to crash and ruin everything rather than to jeopardize their positions in power.
That obvious failure in morals and ethics, basic principles of adult responsibility really, is made possible by a lack of rational reflection in the populace.
Objective truth has to take precedence over subjective desires when it comes to existential questions. Currently it does not.
However, the constraints that most people have to contend with do not allow them to be more radical in their calls for change. You saw it in the Gilets Jaunes/Yellow Vests uprising in France, that was motivated not by the passion for IC engines but by the inability to weather the costs of taxation on older vehicles.
The real culprit is far and away corporations that benefit from activities that carry with them extreme effects on the climate, and who can influence both politics and media. The research (sorry for lack of link) that shows that political direction is largely controlled by moneyed interests is not ambiguous.
I do agree that the populace also deserves some of the blame however: regular renewals of electronic devices, and especially the continuing consumption of animal products, is a moral failure justified only by pleasure.
When you paint people as being "disallowed" from more radical actions, the same question of true importance arises? The current trajectory leads to Armageddon, plain and simple.
My point here thus is about the proper scale on which people place the topic.
It's not a "lifestyle choice" to doom humanity's children to ruin.
Placing responsibility with the irresponsible is a cop-out.
I don't have data on the West specifically, but I'd be surprised if it's not 99%. "Free range" animals are largely a fiction.
Animals being used for pasture grazing, for the benefit of the climate, could be understandable, but I think enslavement and torture of 200+ billion animals annually is a moral failure that goes far beyond its effects on CO2 ppm.
„Infinite growth is impossible on planet with finite resources” is nice buzzphrase, but upon closer inspection it makes literally zero sense. Fortunately people will never accept degrowthers’ postulates.
You again say "it's absurd" and provide no argument. I think the case is not as clear cut as you would like it to be. Solar energy is not an infinite resource.
Yes, if you actually mean infinite growth it’s true. And that’s what I find absurd - why would you care about infinite growth? If you actually care about infinity, then even if you degrowth you will run out of resources because guess what - resources are finite, so the use of resources will have to also be arbitrarily small and asymptotically approach zero!
An economic system based on perpetual growth can never reach a steady state, unless you believe that physical goods can become an arbitrarily small portion of the economy.
That's an absurd argument, though. The problem we have right here, right now, is capitalism destroying the habitability of our planet because its hunger for resources must always grow, so it's unable to handle the problem of fossil fuel use, or stop depleting soil, etc.
You're arguing against jumping out of the way of a moving train because we're not immortal.
Yes, exactly! Talking about infinite growth or infinite existence is really stupid and that’s my point!
But let's grant "both systems eventually run out of resources" for the sake of argument. The rate at which that happens then becomes clearly relevant, and if staying alive is good (I hope we can at least agree on that), using resources slower is better. Capitalism is depleting resources on a human timescale (as, again, we are currently experiencing with climate change), so instead depleting them on longer-than-human timescales is clearly the better option.
> But let's grant "both systems eventually run out of resources" for the sake of argument. The rate at which that happens then becomes clearly relevant, and if staying alive is good (I hope we can at least agree on that), using resources slower is better. Capitalism is depleting resources on a human timescale (as, again, we are currently experiencing with climate change), so instead depleting them on longer-than-human timescales is clearly the better option.
But you were talking about INFINITE growth, not exponential and those are two completely different things! Exponential growth will become infinite only if you have infinite time frame! So can we agree than "infinite growth is impossible on a planet with finite resources" is really dumb argument, because capitalism does not require infinite growth at all? Then we'll be able to move on to exponential growth.
The economic reality is perfectly compatible with finite reality, because growth is not a function of resources.
An email is more economically valuable than a paper mail despite requiring much less resources (and leading to a much less CO2 emission)
I don't. Perpetual growth is incompatible with finite resources. Fortunately, human flourishing does not depend on infinite economic growth; there is, for example, enough food for everyone on the planet. Capitalism is just bad at allocating resources by any metric other than its own. (Yes yes, it's better that feudalism was. I think we can hold ourselves to a higher bar than that.)
This is not necessary at all for economic growth to be infinite. Food prices can "inflate" and so stay at, let's say 20%, of the economy while the amount of physical food being produced remains flat year after year. That's sort of what's happening with housing, education, and healthcare already.
I think seeing prices go up like this makes people unhappy, but what really matters is what portion of a person's income this stuff occupies.
This is a bold claim: I do not believe that if all remaining fossil fuels had vanished overnight that growth would remain identical.