Comment by uv-depression | Hacker News Reader

Comment by uv-depression | Hacker News Reader

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This is a gross misunderstanding of what degrowth means.

The fantasy is that an economic system predicated on infinite growth can be made compatible with finite resources. Take, for example, the fact that renewable energy keeps growing as a percentage of total energy generation, yet total GHG emissions keep rising. That's a result of the system of incentives set up by capital. Yes, the economy can become less coupled to resources (as it has), but there is a limit, unless you seriously want to argue that iron (for example) can be an arbitrarily small portion of the economy.

An economy is a method of allocating resources. This economic system is extremely terrible at meeting base human needs (consider that we produce many times the amount of food that's needed to feed everyone's needs, but massive amounts of it used for industrial meat production and biofuels).

> we are never returning to pre industrial times

This is an absurd strawman.

> everyone needs to become poorer

This is, in fact, the industry propaganda. What degrowth advocates for is taking as our first priority meeting human needs and living sustainably (which can be made compatible with most of the technology we have today in some form), rather than the ideology of growth for growth's sake, which mainly results in massive amounts of wasted resources and funnelling wealth into the hands of a few.

> “Hey Africa, we know we colonized you and all but can you do us a favor and stay poor to help fix the problem we mostly caused?” There is not enough “fuck you” in the universe for that one.

This is misdirection. Getting water, food, shelter, and medicine for everyone on the planet is well within our means as a species. It is the ideology of free movement for goods but not people and infinite growth that makes it impossible to meet those needs, because it requires and underclass who can be used for cheap labour and contained in states built for that purpose.

It's not poor people who stand to lose from degrowth, it's the ultra rich.

> It's not poor people who stand to lose from degrowth, it's the ultra rich.

Trivially false, and I think this is the root of it. I'm lazy so I asked Claude Fable, but what it gave me is in the same ballpark as a blog post on this I saw a while back that I now can't find.

Question: "Lets say a billionaire spends 100% of their time on boards a medium sized private jet. They also own three 10,000 square foot homes, all of which are heated and cooled 24/7. How much energy do they use? What is that energy use in terms of average European households?"

I used European because Americans are notable energy pigs and can cut a lot without losing much. Europeans are closer to the reasonable baseline.

The total it comes up with for our gas-guzzling fat cat is 96-97 GWh per year. That's including three homes and a continuously operating jet aircraft. This is a totally ridiculous footprint, of course.

Claude Fable says the average European household uses about 15,000 kWh/year in electricity, heating, etc. That means our fat cat corresponds to about 6,400 average European households.

The population of Europe is around 750 million people.

There's about 3000 billionaires worldwide, and if they all lived as absurdly as my caricature they'd use 288 TWh per year.

That corresponds to around 19.2 million European households, or about 2.5% of the energy use of a middle class Europe.

The vast bulk of energy and resource use supports the middle class, and raising people out of poverty.

Inequality probably reduces energy use. If we improved equality it would mean more people with a basic middle class standard of living. A society in which almost everyone has a European middle class standard of living would consume far more energy than one in which a few fat cats live it up and everyone else is poor.

Personally I agree with the left at least a bit on this. I think we have too much inequality. If we reduce inequality, that will increase energy consumption, so we'd better build solar panels and batteries and reactors at the same time.

Their money comes from somewhere, and that somewhere is many times a source of great suffering. If they had to make that somewhere adhere to rules or abide by law or stop exploiting others - humans or nature - it would cost them a great amount of money.

If that's true it would mean fixing this injustice would just even out who gets to have what. It would not meaningfully reduce consumption, certainly not enough to make a huge difference in CO2 emissions.

(There might be one exception to that: reducing warfare. War is a gigantic waste twice over: tons of energy to fight, tons of energy to rebuild all the stuff we break. But I doubt eliminating warfare would be enough alone to cut emissions enough to matter.)

There's only two ways to reduce CO2 emissions by a large amount in a durable lasting way:

1. Replace CO2 emitting sources of power with those that don't emit CO2.

2. Destroy the middle class.

Actually I guess there's a third: kill a lot of people.

Anything less is a rounding error that won't make much of a difference.

I'll take option 1. Luckily the laws of physics say we can do it. We just need the political will. There's also precedent. Many developed countries' emissions per capita has been falling while growth has actually continued (in most cases) and standard of living hasn't moved much. We just need to do a lot more of what works.

The actual plan is option 2.

Or 3

Perhaps instead of using one of the hallucination machines that's aggravating the climate crisis, you could have done some research: https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-worlds-top-1-of-emitter...

> Globally, the top 10% of emitters were responsible for almost half of global energy-related CO2 emissions in 2021, compared with a mere 0.2% for the bottom 10%.

The top 10% is quite a bit more than billionaires, it's true. But you are also assuming that reducing emissions must come with a reduction in lifestyle, which is untrue. Think about the way that our computers are designed to be disposable and unrepairable, or how clothing is made worse and worse (because it's more profitable, which is only necessary because of the need for infinite growth). Or, as you pointed out, North Americans use a ton of energy for terrible reasons, and fixing that problem would improve their quality of life: walkability, bikability, and public transit so people can drive less (or even stop owning a car) while also getting improved health; replacing flights with more comfortable high speed trains; removing the need to maintain a lawn for every house (shockingly terrible for the environment); etc. Or how we ship things all around the world to be assembled in different phases in different countries because it's cheaper (and suppresses labour). What so many of the things we need to do to solve this problem have in common isn't a reduction in lifestyle (some will do the opposite!), but rather that they impact profits and therefore threaten infinite growth.

Yes, there are some things that people won't like doing, like significantly reducing the amount of meat they eat (>15% of global emissions are from meat production, and it is the primary driver of deforestation in the Amazon). But pretending nothing will ever change doesn't solve the problem (and we'll be catastrophically forced to change later if we don't voluntarily do it sooner).

I'm not saying nothing will ever change. That's a misreading. I'm saying asking people to sacrifice will both be rejected and will not do enough, and that the only answer is changing where we get energy.

Environmentalists have been making the "abstinence first" guilt trip argument for decades and it's done absolutely nothing and it will never do anything. That approach is a total failure. I use the abstinence framing because it's like abstinence-based sex ed. Instead of having sex, teenagers have guilty sex.

Let's say Claude's wrong. The argument still stands if it's off by 10X. Soaking the rich won't help by more than a rounding error, and redistribution might actually increase resource use. It's also a one-time thing.

Speaking of AI: turning off all the AI data centers won't help either. They're a few percent of electricity use. A few percent won't matter and it's another one-time thing. It's not an ongoing solution to anything if the economy is still powered by burning stuff.

Then you have the developing world. Let's say we can cut energy requirements to live a middle class life style to 1/4 the current level, which might be possible.

There are about 1.4 billion people in Africa who mostly live below that level. We have no right to tell them they can't have what we have. There's also probably a billion more in Asia who are still climbing to middle class.

If Africa modernizes on coal like China did, that'll add another China worth of emissions, which would be catastrophic. The only way out is for Africa to industrialize and modernize on sources of power that don't emit CO2.

Luckily that's possible, but telling them to stay poor isn't how you make that happen. It's how you get them to say "fuck you" and ignore you.

> I'm saying asking people to sacrifice will both be rejected and will not do enough, and that the only answer is changing where we get energy.

But energy source isn't the only problem. The problem is partially that energy use is high in and of itself. Solar panels (which only generate electricity; energy use is much bigger than just electricity) require materials like cobalt, which is mined (partially using child slavery) in Africa (DRC) in ecologically devastating ways (since you clearly care so deeply, I'm sure you knew that already). The ideology of infinite growth requires ever more cobalt, and so it depends on that oppression and ecological damage. Reduce, reuse, recycle are in that order for a reason, but we are never able to do the first because of infinite growth.

I think your framing of "abstinence" is nonsense. What are we abstaining from? Economic 'growth'? Energy usage? Consumerism? If so, all we're "abstaining" from is the thing that benefits rich people to our own detriment. We must distinguish economic growth from improvements to lifestyle, which as I stated are frequently at odds.

> They're a few percent of electricity use.

Continually growing, using far more resources than just electricity, for mostly downsides to humanity, and causing significant local pollution.

> Let's say we can cut energy requirements to live a middle class life style to 1/4 the current level, which might be possible.

Sure, let's just make up numbers. Sorry, I meant let's burn methane to have 'Claude' make up numbers.

> There are about 1.4 billion people in Africa who mostly live below that level. We have no right to tell them they can't have what we have. There's also probably a billion more in Asia who are still climbing to middle class.

But you haven't dealt with the fact that the reason they're deprived is because of the very system you're supporting. I agree that all people ought to have the same access to technology and standards of living, and doing so requires that we reshape how technology works and is distributed. That will never happen under the current system, because doing so would impact profits. Infinite growth is the thing preventing us from fundamentally improving our technology and societies to be sustainable.

> telling them to stay poor isn't how you make that happen

I am arguing for the opposite, but you seem not to have read what I wrote.

> Solar panels (which only generate electricity; energy use is much bigger than just electricity) require materials like cobalt, which is mined (partially using child slavery) in Africa (DRC) in ecologically devastating ways (since you clearly care so deeply, I'm sure you knew that already).

Cobalt isn't used in solar panels.

I wonder where they get that kind of nonsense? Do they not check, or they do they just not care?

All I can say is, I'm sorry Cassandra.

Here in Washington State, a decade ago we had an initiative (I-732) to do a carbon tax and lower regressive taxes (we have one of the most-regressive tax structure in the USA). The environmental groups opposed it because it wasn't handing out money to them and it lost narrowly.

Eventually the legislature passed a complicated cap-and-trade scheme and they spend the money on bullshit and lie about it: "The projects the department touted amounted to just under 4% of their original estimates." https://phys.org/news/2026-01-washington-state-overestimates...

> The top 10% is quite a bit more than billionaires

The top 10% is overwhelmingly not billionaires, or even millionaires. The top 10% is basically all of the US except the poorest. And some upper middle classes elsewhere.

> The fantasy is that an economic system predicated on infinite growth can be made compatible with finite resources.

Good thing that's just degrowth propaganda.

> This economic system is extremely terrible at meeting base human needs.

Except in comparison to all others. Crop failures and famines were common in feudalisms. Planned socialism is known for food insecurity. The system today might not be best possible, but it's, by no means, terrible.

> This is an absurd strawman.

Need to read more degrowth fiction then.

> What degrowth advocates for is taking as our first priority meeting human needs and living sustainably (which can be made compatible with most of the technology we have today in some form)

The problem here is the "human needs" part, which are famously infinite.

> ...than the ideology of growth for growth's sake, which mainly results in massive amounts of wasted resources and funnelling wealth into the hands of a few.

Also degrowth propaganda. No one "grows" for the sake of "growing", lest they have a need for it. All choosing actors act towards fulfilling their needs, regardless of whether anyone find them "fundamental" or not.

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