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Comment by uv-depression | Hacker News Reader

What? Some resources are renewable. There's a finite amount of solar energy, but it doesn't "run out" (on human timescales). Growing food doesn't need to remove from the biosphere, even if the way we do it now does do significant damage. So we absolutely must stop using non-renewable resources (i.e. fossil fuels), but if we find an amount of renewable ones combined with recyclable non-renewables (like metal) that are sustainable then we can reach a steady state.

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.

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You can’t reach steady state in ANY economic system because you can’t have 100% efficiency, that’s basic thermodynamics. Resources will keep decreasing no matter what you do. Hence argument about infinite growth is absurd - infinite existence without growth (or with degrowth) is also impossible.

You're right; sunlight will eventually run out. (Well, long before that the expanding Sun will boil the oceans). No, you couldn't have an economy in a closed system, but the Earth isn't a closed system (due to the aforementioned sunlight).

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.

> That's an absurd argument, though.

Yes, exactly! Talking about infinite growth or infinite existence is really stupid and that’s my point!

You're arguing against "degrowthers", favouring the current growth-based system. What you're arguing for is a system that requires the infinite growth you don't want to think about. So in essence you're saying "looking at the consequences of my beliefs is absurd", which is hardly a compelling argument.

If my system requires infinity growth then yours also does require infinite resources by the logic outlines above. If you agree that your system does not require infinite resources because we should be talking only at timescales that are relevant to humans, then my system also does not require infinite growth. You can’t have it both ways, either you are ok with infinite timeframe (and then degrowth will eventually run out of resources) or you are not (but then the growth requires to sustain current system is obviously finite).

Nonsense, but you clearly either haven't read my replies or don't understand that capitalism requires growth while some other economic systems don't. Even 1% growth per year is exponential growth and quickly will run into limits (as we are currently experiencing!).

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.

> Nonsense, but you clearly either haven't read my replies or don't understand that capitalism requires growth while some other economic systems don't. Even 1% growth per year is exponential growth and quickly will run into limits (as we are currently experiencing!).

> 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.

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