5 ms·

How do you define degrowth?

by jshen 3y ago

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).
    - jshen 3y ago
      "Aviation has to mostly go away. Most meat, most fishing too. Individual cars in cities need to completely go away" First, I don't think we need to go that far. Second, I don't see how you will ever achieve this without a brutal dictatorship on a global level. It's a complete non starter as far as I can tell unless you have a new idea for how to achieve it.
      - palata 3y ago
        > First, I don't think we need to go that far. You don't think we need to, or you hope we don't need to? And based on what? On my end it's pretty simple: fossil fuels have to pretty much disappear (and if we don't do it on purpose, they will anyway because they are not unlimited) and we don't have anything that remotely replaces them. Look around: all the ideas to replace them right now are wishful thinking. Given the timeline, we are almost certainly too late. > Second, I don't see how you will ever achieve this without a brutal dictatorship on a global level. Yeah that's a completely different problem. I personally think we're doomed. We won't manage to save what remains to be saved, so we will suffer the consequences (which will most likely destroy democracy globally, because we are talking mass immigration and famines at a level never seen before). Still the only chance we have now is to start accepting that we should do that. Then we could start trying to do it.
        jshen 3y ago
        > You don't think we need to, or you hope we don't need to? I'm researching this to have some concrete data, but I doubt I'll have it together soon enough to share in this thread. Will definitely share on HN when this topic comes back around with what I find. > Look around: all the ideas to replace them right now are wishful thinking. I don't think this is true at all. Solar is improving at a rapid pace and is already cheaper. We need a large scale rollout, but that's a will issue, not a tech issue. Nuclear is always an option as well. You can see this in many places, here's a graph of solar production in the US, that rise looks amazing! https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/browser/index.php?tbl=T10.01#/?f=M https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/browser/index.php?tbl=T...

How do you define degrowth?

by jshen 3y ago

How do you define degrowth?

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).
  - jshen 3y ago
    "Aviation has to mostly go away. Most meat, most fishing too. Individual cars in cities need to completely go away" First, I don't think we need to go that far. Second, I don't see how you will ever achieve this without a brutal dictatorship on a global level. It's a complete non starter as far as I can tell unless you have a new idea for how to achieve it.
    - palata 3y ago
      > First, I don't think we need to go that far. You don't think we need to, or you hope we don't need to? And based on what? On my end it's pretty simple: fossil fuels have to pretty much disappear (and if we don't do it on purpose, they will anyway because they are not unlimited) and we don't have anything that remotely replaces them. Look around: all the ideas to replace them right now are wishful thinking. Given the timeline, we are almost certainly too late. > Second, I don't see how you will ever achieve this without a brutal dictatorship on a global level. Yeah that's a completely different problem. I personally think we're doomed. We won't manage to save what remains to be saved, so we will suffer the consequences (which will most likely destroy democracy globally, because we are talking mass immigration and famines at a level never seen before). Still the only chance we have now is to start accepting that we should do that. Then we could start trying to do it.
      - jshen 3y ago
        > You don't think we need to, or you hope we don't need to? I'm researching this to have some concrete data, but I doubt I'll have it together soon enough to share in this thread. Will definitely share on HN when this topic comes back around with what I find. > Look around: all the ideas to replace them right now are wishful thinking. I don't think this is true at all. Solar is improving at a rapid pace and is already cheaper. We need a large scale rollout, but that's a will issue, not a tech issue. Nuclear is always an option as well. You can see this in many places, here's a graph of solar production in the US, that rise looks amazing! https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/browser/index.php?tbl=T10.01#/?f=M https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/browser/index.php?tbl=T...