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There’s a ton we can do before we talk about degrowth. Living in dense urban areas vs the suburbs will greatly reduce resource usage.Eating a lot less meat is a

by jshen 3y ago

There’s a ton we can do before we talk about degrowth. Living in dense urban areas vs the suburbs will greatly reduce resource usage.Eating a lot less meat is another thing that’s even easier and will greatly reduce our carbon footprint. While I’m sympathetic to the idea of degrowth, people will not go along with it. Instead I think we should advocate for living in dense areas, eating a lot less meat, reducing waste, etc.

palata 3y ago
> There’s a ton we can do before we talk about degrowth. And that's far from being enough. > While I’m sympathetic to the idea of degrowth I think it's the first step. At some point you will realize that it is just not a choice. We will degrow anyway, because fossil fuels are not unlimited, and we can't reasonably replace them. I am not in favour of degrowth because I find it romantic. I am in favour of degrowth because that's how we can control the fall. I'd rather have a hard landing than a complete crash.
- jshen 3y ago
  > And that's far from being enough. Based on what? We already have optimistic signs in developed countries where emissions per capita have declined. As others have said, no idea how you impose degrowth short of dictatorship
  - palata 3y ago
    > Based on what? Based on the consensus on how much we need to cut our CO2 emissions, and on checking orders of magnitudes on "what we can do before degrowth" (which generally implies replacing fossil fuels with something else, which generally implies extrapolating numbers or hoping for non-existing technology). > We already have optimistic signs in developed countries It's too late to be optimistic unfortunately. We don't need to slightly reduce emissions per capita, we need to drastically cut them. > As others have said, no idea how you impose degrowth short of dictatorship Oh I agree with that (especially in the US). I think we are going towards global world instability, wars and famines (even in developed countries) in our lifetime. Doesn't mean I cannot wish we got reasonable for our own sake. The only thing that can save us is controlled degrowth. Which is a very challenging problem. Yet too many are hoping for CO2 capture and miracle technology. Society will probably collapse, but that sucks.
    - jshen 3y ago
      How do you define degrowth?
      - palata 3y ago
        Essentially "doing less with less". We still want to do as much as we can, so we have to do everything smarter. We need to use less energy (because energy is CO2 emissions, and because we will have less abundant energy in the future), and therefore we need to rethink society to work without abundant cheap energy. Some parts of economy will benefit from that (e.g. building bikes should work well), and many will not (typically the airspace industry will be reduced dramatically, probably the whole modern software has to go back quite a bit and stop wasting resources all over the board, etc).
        jshen 3y ago
        When I propose living in urban areas and eating a lot less meat that sounds like "doing less with less" to me at some level. It typically means having a much smaller place and not eating what you might want to eat. Your idea of "doing less" seems to entail something more, can you give some examples.
        palata 3y ago
        > When I propose living in urban areas and eating a lot less meat Yep, that's on track with degrowth. The whole question then is: how much do we need to remove? Realistically, given how much we need to cut our CO2 emissions in the next couple of decades for hoping to keep the climate in a "bearable" state (as per our climate models which more and more appear to be optimistic themselves), we will have to remove a lot of stuff. > Your idea of "doing less" seems to entail something more, can you give some examples. Aviation has to mostly go away. Most meat, most fishing too. Individual cars in cities need to completely go away (at least in countries that can possibly do it, e.g. all of Europe) and public transportation has to be dramatically increased everywhere. In the countryside, people will probably still need small electric cars to compensate for the lack of public transportation. We need to electrify trucks (because they bring food into cities), that's much more important than cars (not that it's easy to remove cars, but if we remove trucks, cities starve). Cities should not be too big, they need to stop growing (same thing, it takes energy to bring food there). All buildings need to be properly isolated (for heat/cold). IT needs to change. We don't need 5G to watch TikTok on our brand new smartphone in the bus. We don't need clouds for everything, not everything has to always be connected/tracked/serving ads, we don't need AI for everything, we don't need every single commit to run a CI on the cloud on 50 machines, etc. To me, this all says "we need to make good IT that makes sense", and as a developer I would like that. Since I started programming, I feel like IT has become a big joke of for-profit bullshit. Because of the reduction of fossil fuels, importations will go down. We need to deal with that. Produce what's most important locally. Globally it means degrowth, GDP will go down. But that does not mean going back to Middle Age. We can find a new number to optimize other than GDP, try to teach people that ultra-consumerism is not making them happier (it's actually killing us all), and there is a lot to do (typically the bike industry should go up, there will be job there, etc).

by jshen 3y ago

palata 3y ago

> There’s a ton we can do before we talk about degrowth. And that's far from being enough. > While I’m sympathetic to the idea of degrowth I think it's the first step. At some point you will realize that it is just not a choice. We will degrow anyway, because fossil fuels are not unlimited, and we can't reasonably replace them. I am not in favour of degrowth because I find it romantic. I am in favour of degrowth because that's how we can control the fall. I'd rather have a hard landing than a complete crash.

jshen 3y ago
> And that's far from being enough. Based on what? We already have optimistic signs in developed countries where emissions per capita have declined. As others have said, no idea how you impose degrowth short of dictatorship
- palata 3y ago
  > Based on what? Based on the consensus on how much we need to cut our CO2 emissions, and on checking orders of magnitudes on "what we can do before degrowth" (which generally implies replacing fossil fuels with something else, which generally implies extrapolating numbers or hoping for non-existing technology). > We already have optimistic signs in developed countries It's too late to be optimistic unfortunately. We don't need to slightly reduce emissions per capita, we need to drastically cut them. > As others have said, no idea how you impose degrowth short of dictatorship Oh I agree with that (especially in the US). I think we are going towards global world instability, wars and famines (even in developed countries) in our lifetime. Doesn't mean I cannot wish we got reasonable for our own sake. The only thing that can save us is controlled degrowth. Which is a very challenging problem. Yet too many are hoping for CO2 capture and miracle technology. Society will probably collapse, but that sucks.
  - jshen 3y ago
    How do you define degrowth?
    - palata 3y ago
      Essentially "doing less with less". We still want to do as much as we can, so we have to do everything smarter. We need to use less energy (because energy is CO2 emissions, and because we will have less abundant energy in the future), and therefore we need to rethink society to work without abundant cheap energy. Some parts of economy will benefit from that (e.g. building bikes should work well), and many will not (typically the airspace industry will be reduced dramatically, probably the whole modern software has to go back quite a bit and stop wasting resources all over the board, etc).
      - jshen 3y ago
        When I propose living in urban areas and eating a lot less meat that sounds like "doing less with less" to me at some level. It typically means having a much smaller place and not eating what you might want to eat. Your idea of "doing less" seems to entail something more, can you give some examples.
        palata 3y ago
        > When I propose living in urban areas and eating a lot less meat Yep, that's on track with degrowth. The whole question then is: how much do we need to remove? Realistically, given how much we need to cut our CO2 emissions in the next couple of decades for hoping to keep the climate in a "bearable" state (as per our climate models which more and more appear to be optimistic themselves), we will have to remove a lot of stuff. > Your idea of "doing less" seems to entail something more, can you give some examples. Aviation has to mostly go away. Most meat, most fishing too. Individual cars in cities need to completely go away (at least in countries that can possibly do it, e.g. all of Europe) and public transportation has to be dramatically increased everywhere. In the countryside, people will probably still need small electric cars to compensate for the lack of public transportation. We need to electrify trucks (because they bring food into cities), that's much more important than cars (not that it's easy to remove cars, but if we remove trucks, cities starve). Cities should not be too big, they need to stop growing (same thing, it takes energy to bring food there). All buildings need to be properly isolated (for heat/cold). IT needs to change. We don't need 5G to watch TikTok on our brand new smartphone in the bus. We don't need clouds for everything, not everything has to always be connected/tracked/serving ads, we don't need AI for everything, we don't need every single commit to run a CI on the cloud on 50 machines, etc. To me, this all says "we need to make good IT that makes sense", and as a developer I would like that. Since I started programming, I feel like IT has become a big joke of for-profit bullshit. Because of the reduction of fossil fuels, importations will go down. We need to deal with that. Produce what's most important locally. Globally it means degrowth, GDP will go down. But that does not mean going back to Middle Age. We can find a new number to optimize other than GDP, try to teach people that ultra-consumerism is not making them happier (it's actually killing us all), and there is a lot to do (typically the bike industry should go up, there will be job there, etc).