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> No serious antigrowth argument is saying China ought to stay at it's 20th low point. Nobody says that outright, but that is what would have happened if their

> No serious antigrowth argument is saying China ought to stay at it's 20th low point. Nobody says that outright, but that is what would have happened if their arguments had been translated into policy in the 1970s. And it is what would happen to poor countries today, if anti-growth arguments were adopted today.

stouset 7y ago
And yet... growth will end. It will end because we choose for it to end, or because we've over-mortgaged the resources we have available to us and experience a collapse. Bacteria in a sealed jar will continue to multiply until they've consumed all the available nutrients, at which point their population collapses. If you constantly add a trickle of nutrients to the jar, this behavior still happens, just with violent yo-yo'ing between collapse and growth until an eventual steady-state is reached. We can argue whether or not we've exceeded the replenishment rate We can argue how far it's reasonable to go past this point if effects won't be felt for thousands of years. But there is simply no argument to be made that we can continue growing endlessly and exponentially past the replenishment rate of the ecosystem we live in. Personally, I think we're well past the replenishment rate. Our ecological impact is causing systemic collapse in multiple areas: our climate is warming past dangerous thresholds, our oceans are acidifying and being depleted at an alarming rate, our oceans are rising at an accelerating rate, and we're experiencing unprecedented rates of of extinction of both animal and plant life. We're running out of sand (to make concrete with) for fuck's sake. On top of this, at current rates of energy growth, we'll literally cook the Earth within two or three hundred years[1]. And I'm not talking about greenhouse gases: just from a raw thermodynamics perspective. Put enough energy capacity on Earth and it will eventually take the form of waste heat. Even in the complete absence of carbon dioxide, the only way for that heat to escape Earth is by being radiated into space. And there's only so fast a perfect blackbody with the surface area of the Earth can get rid of that heat. Even if the Earth were a perfect radiator (it isn't), this[2] is what our future looks like. [1] https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/ [2] https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/tmp-1024x768.png https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/tmp-10...

stouset 7y ago

And yet... growth will end. It will end because we choose for it to end, or because we've over-mortgaged the resources we have available to us and experience a collapse. Bacteria in a sealed jar will continue to multiply until they've consumed all the available nutrients, at which point their population collapses. If you constantly add a trickle of nutrients to the jar, this behavior still happens, just with violent yo-yo'ing between collapse and growth until an eventual steady-state is reached. We can argue whether or not we've exceeded the replenishment rate We can argue how far it's reasonable to go past this point if effects won't be felt for thousands of years. But there is simply no argument to be made that we can continue growing endlessly and exponentially past the replenishment rate of the ecosystem we live in. Personally, I think we're well past the replenishment rate. Our ecological impact is causing systemic collapse in multiple areas: our climate is warming past dangerous thresholds, our oceans are acidifying and being depleted at an alarming rate, our oceans are rising at an accelerating rate, and we're experiencing unprecedented rates of of extinction of both animal and plant life. We're running out of sand (to make concrete with) for fuck's sake. On top of this, at current rates of energy growth, we'll literally cook the Earth within two or three hundred years[1]. And I'm not talking about greenhouse gases: just from a raw thermodynamics perspective. Put enough energy capacity on Earth and it will eventually take the form of waste heat. Even in the complete absence of carbon dioxide, the only way for that heat to escape Earth is by being radiated into space. And there's only so fast a perfect blackbody with the surface area of the Earth can get rid of that heat. Even if the Earth were a perfect radiator (it isn't), this[2] is what our future looks like. [1] https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/ [2] https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/tmp-1024x768.png https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/tmp-10...