MonteQuest wrote:Newfie wrote:There are areas where we can do better easily.
More economical cars.
Driving less.
Flying less.
Buying less plastic crap.
Buying from American manufacturers vs overseas shipping.
Easily? All these things involve less economic activity. Who will absorb the loss? As we are seeing from the economic chaos from the pandemic, you can't use less and you can't do less and keep the house of cards standing. Conservation and efficiency gains are not solutions for a population in overshoot. They are perpetuations of it. I thought this had been hammered home over the years on peakoil.com?
You do love to incite argument! I love you anyway.
“Easy” in this usage is a comparative, this is the low hanging fruit.
As to the rest I pretty much agree, the forces that be will resist Degrowth.
You make an interesting comment about conservation and energy being a perpetuation of a population in over shoot. It’s a great point. I think you are making an argumentative leap from first talking about a problematic economic system and then moving to a population problem. But it does bring up an interesting question I had not considered. My first cut observation follows, reserving the right to modify and improve or correct as needed.
The current situation (USA) is both a growing economy and a growing population. The population is growing artificially in order to prop up the economic growth. This indicates our first priority is economic growth.
If we were to magically get everyone to see the light and move to a static or declining economic model then the pressure would be off population growth. So the first priority is to encourage demand destruction to bring about economic Degrowth. Having made progress on that front we can then turn attention to the population if it is still a problem.
We are still missing the first step. And I suspect it is a step to far for us. The first step is to understand what we are trying to achieve as a species, the “meaning of life” if you will. Currently “He who dies with the most toys wins” seems to be our dominant model. Although there are others who seem to advocate for “Chicken Coop Earth”, the maximum possible number of humans no matter the quality of life. Very few have seriously contemplated the topic, too philosophical. I advocate something along the line of “A balance of sustaining natural systems while supporting sufficient technology to advance knowledge.”
Without some rough idea of what we want to achieve as a species we tend to simply grab for ourselves. The old “Tragedy of the Commons” dilemma. Until we can address that we are stuffed. I’m not hopeful.