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Comment by marssaxman | Hacker News Reader

Degrowth is simply a refusal to engage in magical thinking. You cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet: growth must therefore have an end. Would we prefer to choose a gentle mode of deceleration which keeps us comfortable along the way, or would we prefer to wait and do all the decelerating at once, when we hit the wall?

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> You cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet: growth must therefore have an end.

Per capita (real) income has over doubled in California since 1975, and yet the per capita energy use has stayed the same (see "Art Rosenfeld"):

* https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2017/01/27/art-rosenfeld-californ...

Economic growth does not (just) entail making more stuff, especially in the US, when so much is "services".

We are nowhere close to thermodynamic limits. Another 100x or even 100000x growth is entirely possible.

We aren't even using 0.01% of the solar energy that hits the Earth's surface, let alone what we could capture with possible future technologies.

There are challenges to growth, like climate change, but we can engineer solutions instead of throwing our hands up and going home.

It sounds like you agree with the premise, then, that there are planetary limits, and that growth must ultimately end: you are simply looking at different limits, and you see a lot of runway left. People who are looking at ecological limits tend to have a less optimistic view.

No one says literally infinite growth. That's a stupid strawman and if you are arguing at that level you are not engaging, you are just playing tribal in-group signaling. And we don't need to think about growth 10,000 years from now, we have no idea, not the slightest clue, what the technological, cultural, and human landscape looks like in the timeline long enough to actually start having to think about the edge of growth

There is absolutely no reason, whatsoever, to think we are nearing the end of genuinely useful growth. We still die early of cancer, spend too much time working, live in too small domiciles, don't enjoy enough hobbies, eat worse food than we'd like, etc. We are nearing catastrophe because of our carbon-producing energy sources, but that's not "growth" generally, that's a specific problem.

> No one says literally infinite growth.

The previous poster said "degrowth is such a stupid idea", which amounts to the same thing.

> We are nearing catastrophe because of our carbon-producing energy sources, but that's not "growth" generally, that's a specific problem.

That is only one of many ecological limits we are approaching, or which we have already exceeded.

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