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Obsession with growth is destroying nature, 150 countries warn
- pfdietz 8mo agoCountries that fail to compete trying to hold back the winners.
- thawawaycold 8mo agoAsinine comments such at these is the reason why we have countries having to sound an alarm in the first place
- thewebguyd 8mo agoThat attitude is exactly what they are warning about, and is what is going to destroy us all.
- triceratops 8mo agoCompare the forest cover of Haiti and the Dominican Republic - two countries on the same island. Then compare their GDPs, life expectancy, infant mortality and any other indicator of economic and social wellness.
- streetfighter64 8mo agoDestroying the environment more efficiently is the opposite of being a winner. Are laws against scamming and dealing drugs also "holding back the winners"? I mean, scammers and drug dealers do get rich, so if that's all that matters to you I guess they're winners.
- glemmaPaul 8mo agoWho are the winners if we are going to "produce" ourselves into abyss?
- morgengold 8mo agoI do not know how policymakers should act on that if poor people want to consume like the rich ones and rich people do not want to give up even an inch of their wealth.
- philipallstar 8mo ago> European Union members have signed off on a report that warns focusing on unchecked economic growth is contributing to the destruction of global biodiversity It would be good to know which members of the EU are currently experiencing unchecked economic growth.
- boringg 8mo agoThey already destroyed all of their forest natural resources a long time ago. Maybe they are trying to warn north america of their own mistakes.
- tonyedgecombe 8mo agohttps://ourworldindata.org/grapher/tree-cover-loss https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/tree-cover-loss
- boringg 8mo agoAre you trying to argue that Europe hasn't decimated their forests?
- pfdietz 8mo agoEurope's tree cover is increasing. https://joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu/jrc-news-and-updates/how-have-european-forests-evolved-over-past-30-years-2021-01-14_en https://joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu/jrc-news-and-upda...
- pjmlp 8mo agoOf course, the MBAs pushing for growth missed on physics class that it is impossible for everyone to growth expontentially.
- canadiantim 8mo agoOr biology class to learn that resources grow linearly (arithmetically) but populations grow geometrically (exponentially). So it is possible for everyone to grow exponentially, it's just not sustainable and generally leads to mass famine, disease or war.
- gus_massa 8mo agoOr a transition form exponential to sigmoid grow, if it's slow enough. I remember cases of exponential grow of bacteria in lakes that ends in a disaster, but an unchecked garden will get a lot of plants and tree grow but I think it will stabilize softly.
- zelphirkalt 8mo agoMBA think: This is my job. All good, as long as _we_ have it good.
- AndrewKemendo 8mo agoThere are zero communities larger than a few thousand people that do not think precisely like this This is every affinity group on the planet including: Extended families Religious groups Fraternal organzations Mutual aid groups Nation states It’s also true of fungi, tree systems, bacterial colonies, insect groups…
- tehjoker 8mo agoThis is the malthusian argument, and in a vacuum it sounds right but didn’t account for decreasing family size with wealth and the ability of the economy to just barely eke out something like a percent or two of surplus. In China, the one child policy, for better or worse, was instituted to ensure that gains from industrialization were not eaten up immediately, leaving no surplus for quality of life and reinvestment. malthus had a point but it is not destiny and the real world reflects that. his was an avoidable trap now if we can gain control over capitalism we can save the earth
- malka1986 8mo agotoo late anyway. good luck to all of you.
- bluescrn 8mo agoMay not be a problem if the trend continues that wealthy/high-consumption cultures choose to stop reproducing?
- Zigurd 8mo agoIn the abstract we have to pick one crisis or the other, but the real world is messy. Global warming has momentum, and so does population despite what look like reliable projections of population decline in many places. In other words we could see negative impacts from both without them canceling each other out.
- bojan 8mo ago> In other words we could see negative impacts from both without them canceling each other out. See William Gibson's concept of Jackpot.
- pfdietz 8mo agoDemographic momentum means population continues to increase for a while after the total fertility rate drops well below replacement. Once the decline starts the momentum works in the opposite direction: decline continues for a while even if TFR is somehow increased again.
- TulliusCicero 8mo agoBirth rates are dropping across the board. It's not just the wealthy countries.
- energy123 8mo agoHow does that help someone at the equator who is being cooked?
- ZenoArrow 8mo agoNot really. If economic activity with a material basis increases faster than the reproduction rate decreases, you'll still see an overall increase in resource extraction.
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- cheschire 8mo agoTrantor still managed to have imperial gardens though, so how bad could it really be? /s
- pfdietz 8mo agoTrantor was described as having, what, 40 billion people? This would allow most of the planet to still be wild, if people lived at population densities of current cities. Asimov was a city boy who famously didn't like to travel. He didn't have experience with how unoccupied most of the world is.
- everdrive 8mo ago"Bacterial obsession with growth is destroying the ecosystem in the petri dish, scientists warn."
- pfdietz 8mo agoThis sort of analogy should have died with Paul Ehrlich.
- lanfeust6 8mo agoThis ignores innovation, which drastically reduces externalities over time (as it has historically; see smog and pollution from England Industrial revolution). Granted that can benefit or even require investment from the State to expedite things. R&D spending was better in the 20th century. At any rate you cannot divorce said innovation from growth and consumption. By contrast, "degrowth" would inflict harm and make it impossible for developing countries to improve their quality of life. People aren't immigrating to the U.S. for the healthcare. We can easily qualify why it represents a "better life": houses, vehicles, abundance of food, goods and conveniences, public infrastructure and services, etc. Global population growth rate for it's part is poised to stagnate. There's no question of "infinite growth", nor is it relied upon.
- ch4s3 8mo agoThese arguments all fell like they're warning that we'll all be drowning in horse manure and running out of guano in 5 years. Likening economic growth to the growth of organisms in a petri dish is the wrong model entirely. We are all the time finding new uses for things and moving on from old ways of powering society. It on;y looks static if you're quite myopic.
- jagged-chisel 8mo ago> We are all the time finding new uses for things and moving on from old ways of powering society. Can you provide some examples? With the "all the time" phrasing, something recent would be preferred. All I see for a couple decades is new schemes to further enrich those with money at the expense of those without money.
- ch4s3 8mo agoSure, we're rapidly expanding battery technology alongside solar and wind which changes the calculus with respect to the externalities of power generation. Many industrial processes have moved from coal to LNG which is safer/cleaner to produce and creates less air pollution and emits less CO2 when burned. As I mentioned in another comment, agriculture has become incredibly efficient in the broader west and China. We grow far more on far less land and this has involved all sort of innovations. New biotech promises even more gains. We're on the cusp of cereal crops being engineered to fix nitrogen which would dramatically reduce fertilizer use. Mass timber is another cool example.
- mcs5280 8mo agoYes, but we have to think of the shareholders
- baggy_trough 8mo agoGrowth is what makes us rich enough to afford expensive environmental mitigation.
- Tepix 8mo agoIt hasn't worked with nuclear waste, has it? It's not working for corals either. The rest of them will be dead in 10 or 15 years. And they are the ecosystem for 25% of the Ocean's species. When is this expensive environmental mitigation going to turn the tide around?
- boxed 8mo ago> It hasn't worked with nuclear waste, has it? You mean the nuclear waste that we banned companies from using as nuclear fuel for modern reactors? I think you will find that regulation actually stopped us from solving this problem. > It's not working for corals either. Imagine if we had much more nuclear power so we didn't produce enormous amounts of CO2! The corals would be in a much better position. The "environmental movement" has been an anti-nuclear power movement that doesn't care about the environment since the beginning sadly. They've managed to harm the environment more than all nuclear accidents by several orders of magnitude.
- pfdietz 8mo ago> You mean the nuclear waste that we banned companies from using as nuclear fuel for modern reactors? There is no need to ban this because it (and reprocessing in general) is economically idiotic. It would be like saying government bans prevent companies from setting money on fire. Dry cask storage is a quite acceptable and economical way to deal with nuclear waste. The demand that something permanent be done immediately reflects a desire to use waste as a lever against nuclear energy. Nuclear fans would do well not to fall into this trap and think immediate reprocessing is necessary or desirable.
- boxed 8mo agoSure, it's fine, but we've ALSO effectively banned research into reactor types that use "nuclear waste" as fuel. In Sweden it's not even effectively, we had laws on the books until quite recently that banned nuclear research.
- Arubis 8mo agoFolks, "Limits to Growth" was published _over fifty years ago_ (https://www.clubofrome.org/ltg50/ https://www.clubofrome.org/ltg50/) and revisited repeatedly since, each time in so doing effectively confirming their worst-case hypotheses. Yes, their website is...unconvincing. Which is poetic in its own way. Wikipedia's take on the original report at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth is probably a better read. But we've been able to take a highly systems thinking-inflected, as quantitative as possible approach to looking over how human's current perspective of what "growth" means and applying it over time to the resources of the planet we live on, and conclude with decent confidence and error bars that it's not just unsustainable, but that we're past the point of overconsumption and will have a very uncomfortable "correction", and we've been able to indicate that for decades.
- pfdietz 8mo agoBack when LtG came out, there was a study of the limits imposed by resource availability. The conclusion was that, to first approximation, the only resource that we had to worry about was energy. Fossil fuels would have to go, but everything else was either available in effectively unlimited amounts or could be substituted with things that were. An example of the latter was mercury -- effectively all previous uses have been replaced with better substitutes (because of toxicity issues, not shortage of the element.) Pollution also has to be worried about, but there's nothing in a non-fossil fuel powered world that would prevent the current world population from enjoying prosperity indefinitely. There are ultimate limits to energy use on Earth from direct thermal pollution but the world could enjoy US levels of wealth without great trouble. The exponential process one should be most concerned about today is exponential decline in population.
- nine_zeros 8mo ago[dead]
- abeppu 8mo agoI don't have any deep background in econ, but do we not need to switch from talking about GDP to talking about a version of Net Domestic Product where "net" includes: - changes to the value of natural and ecosystem resources (e.g. if I clear a forest to sell timber, we must acknowledge some lost value for the forest) - amount of economic transactions in service of mitigating problems created by externalities from other activity (e.g. if my pollution gets into your groundwater, you paying to remediate the pollution isn't "value created") I.e. growth of _actual net value_ still sounds like a good thing to pursue but we let our politicians run around doing anything to maximize GDP without talking about what the "gross" is hiding.
- ixxie 8mo agoIt's just very hard to measure. On the corporate scale, see the whole carbon / ESG / impact measure ent industry. Lifecycle Analysis, supply chain extrapolation, Bill of Materials analysis. You only get some relatively crude estimate and a lot of missing data points, whereas economic growth can conveniently assign a dollar value on everything. I think it only gets worse as you scale up.
- abeppu 8mo agoBut we have a lot of sources of information already available that do not seem to be incorporated into any kind of top-level number that we grade ourselves on. - when we have an estimate of how many hundreds of billions it costs to rebuild after a hurricane that would not have happened but for climate change, existing economic processes generate that number - when insurers raise rates throughout a region, this reflects an expectation on the cost of damage, and the change over time reflects the increase in risk we've created - when a heatwave kills a bunch of people, we already have a range of ways of estimating a monetary value for those lives from insurance, healthcare and liability litigation. Further ... suppose your elderly relative left you a bunch of jewelry. You don't know how much it's worth and getting it appraised can actually be a bit complicated and doesn't give you complete certainty over value. But it would be _bonkers_ to continually take unappraised jewelry out into the marketplace, liquidate it, and pretend that the whole sales price was _earnings_. After the transaction, you don't have a thing you had before. You didn't know what it was worth initially but that doesn't mean that it was worthless, and you probably got scammed. Yes, measuring the full environmental impact of all our industries is hard, but pretending it's 0 is silly.
- Geee 8mo agoIs this a joke? Growth is caused by consumer demand, and answering to it in the best way possible. It's not an 'obsession' of the capitalist businesses or countries. Capitalism is simply an algorithm which tries to allocate resources such that a growing demand can be answered, and that everyone has their needs satisfied. There are plenty of people who don't have enough food, enough housing, or other basic needs. The only way to solve this is growth. People in developing countries upgrading their lifestyle to modern standards is a huge source of growth. Are you saying that all these people should stop their obsession with growth? Edit: I've got to add that it's true that economic policies of countries are 'obsessed' with GDP growth. It's a problem of central planning, not markets. Inflationary monetary policies are specifically designed to accelerate consumption, and as a consequence a lot of economic activity is allocated serving this fake demand, resulting in cancerous growth, i.e. consumption for the sake of consumption, while in real terms people are poorer than before.
- gnarlouse 8mo agoI think the intention here is to capture and spend more time respecting the negative externalities that are associated with growth.
- Geee 8mo agoSure, externalities should be priced somehow, and this is the core problem, but demanding or forcing people to limit consumption is wrong.
- gnarlouse 8mo agoI mean, doesn't that fall out of pricing externalities sort of naturally? What's the difference if you're told all new cars cost $500k, vs being told not to buy a new car? You can't reasonably afford it either way.
- Geee 8mo agoYes, prices would limit consumption of stuff that has externalities priced in, but also push producers to reduce their externalities, if they're littering the world with poisons etc. It's not $500K, but something reasonable like $5K (for cars) which reduces demand.
- kruffalon 8mo agoIt would be nice if this meant anything. My old cynic, grumpy mind can't see this as anything but virtue signaling. I would be overjoyed to be wrong. One corner stone of the EU is the 4 freedoms[0] that among other things denies public institutions the ability to look at anything besides the monetary cost when deciding who to contract for anything. And as JIT[1] no longer only applies to goods but also to people noone has people working for them anymore, but contract everything out. Obviously I haven't read the report/document so maybe there are some political steps that the signees are binding themselves to take towards a non-growth-at-all-cost system but I really doubt it. ----- [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Single_Market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Single_Market [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_manufacturing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_manufacturing
- yoyohello13 8mo agoYou know? These days I actually prefer virtue signalling to the trend of not having any virtues at all and being proud of it.
- JoelMcCracken 8mo agoI do think there are absolutely instances of people virtue signaling. But, after observing society over the last few years, I've come to think that people who _whine_ about virtue signaling are so full of vice that they cannot possibly believe someone _else_ isn't also as base as they are. Its all such a shame. It seems like society has no ability to have reasonable, sensible conversation. I really wonder how the enlightenment even _happened_.
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 8mo agoDo you know that about everyone who is virtue signalling, or are you just assuming that to be a blanket truth about everyone? I don’t think you can ever know the extent to which someone is actually trying, even if imperfect because some things just aren’t within individual control.
- awongh 8mo agoI think the main quote from the article is important but the headline misses the point: >> Markets are failing to adequately price or value biodiversity, such as filtration of pollutants, climate regulation and pollination. It doesn't seem immediately obvious to me that growth rate of GDP is a direct proxy for this fact. How is GDP growth rate is a consequence of this or vice versa, rather than a second or third order effect? I think plenty of people agree that an open and fair market also tries to price in externalities, especially ones that could end all life on the planet.
- delegate 8mo agoWhen I was a child, I was spending my summers at my grandparents. They had a cozy house in the village. They worked the land, they had a few animals. They grew their food. They sold some wine and fruit at the market. They had a big house, land, clean air, clean water and they were healthy. They celebrated the holidays, had many friends, went to church, weddings, funerals, etc. Villagers always greeted them and stopped for a quick chat when they met on the street. Now compare with life in a big modern city. I design complicated distributed systems using AI in order to provide shelter and food for myself. Those are tools which other people use to achieve their goal of providing shelter and food for themselves. Tons of cars, the air is polluted, constant noise, fake bling, restaurants selling food at 20x price, stressed, depressed, lonely people. Each in their own digital rabbit hole on their phones all the time. Smiles for money only. I'm really struggling to understand what we've grown into and why this rat race is considered 'better' than what people have had for millennia without destroying nature in the process.
- therealwhytry 8mo agosimple, boomer brain rot subsidized for the last 50 years via currency debasement that leads our "leaders" to feel it is the only path forward. that is probably an easy path forward in their mind, as they are on death's door holding the ladder they pulled up behind them.
- trgn 8mo agoboomers didnt want to let go of the welfare state their parents and grandparents had introduced, at the same time they live longer, work less, not nearly had as many kids, and did not effectuate the required productivity growth to offset that. they will go down in history as the worst generation in modern history, 100% certain of that.
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- alexfromapex 8mo agoI would argue that actually political corruption is destroying nature because there would not be an obsession with growth if executives did not have so much leverage to make workers desperate for jobs because they're so underpaid.
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- theturtle 8mo ago[dead]
- ericmcer 8mo agoWhat are we trying to achieve as a species? If we can't answer that question then we can't really judge our actions effectively. If we view humanity as the most intelligent life form not just on the planet, but in the entire universe, then we are the only source of order in an infinite chaos. All of reality is just entropy and mindless cruelty except for humanity. Viewed in that lens we almost have a duty to expand before some cosmic event obliterates us. Granted we are expanding in a moronic way and our goal seems to be to make plastic trash for people to mindlessly run through, but still, It would be nice if politicians occasionally stepped back from the narrow view and thought about what was at stake.
- jstanley 8mo ago> What are we trying to achieve as a species? How often can a group of even 3 people come up with one thing that they're trying to achieve? You're not going to get consensus on what the goal is for humanity. > If we view humanity as the most intelligent life form not just on the planet, but in the entire universe, then we are the only source of order in an infinite chaos. That doesn't follow at all! And even if it did, why stop at the species level? If humanity being the most intelligent species makes humanity the only source of order, does Terence Tao being the most intelligent human make Terence Tao the only source of order?
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 8mo agoWell, any group of 3 people would easily agree on one thing: that they are all just trying to survive. Now, if only what we’re doing to nature is actually killing us…
- akramachamarei 8mo ago> why stop at the species level? The stop isn't made at the species level, but at the intelligence gap. The gap between Tao and a random uneducated, malnourished human is nothing compared to that between the latter and any other animal known to science, or of course to the stones and flame occupying the rest of space.
- rapht 8mo ago
- analog8374 8mo agoTo be fair, nature has an obsession with growth too. One solution to our social maladies is a kind totalitarian dictator with total surveillance.
- slibhb 8mo agoDegrowthism is one of the dominant ideologies of our time. I think it's wrong: economic growth is good, it has made our lives much better, and we should continue to prioritize it. One important detail about % growth is that it compounds. So small differences in growth today can make a huge difference 50 years from now. The world I want to live in is one that prioritizes protecting the environment but also aggressively pursues new technology and growth. Our descendants will thank us.
- scoofy 8mo agoEconomic growth just means "providing food, homes, and jobs to people who are alive." The degrowthers also presume that growth requires some sort of nasty fuel source. Almost some sort of religiosity that believes that anything good must also create some effectively equal amount of bad. Anyone who cares about solar knows that a solar-battery future is effectively 99% recyclable.
- M95D 8mo agoEarth is limited. Resources are limited. You can't recycle to infinity. Each time you recycle something, the material recovered is worse than before. Steel is weaker, plastic has impurities and is not clear/transparent, paper isn't white and it contaminates the printers with dust, etc. To keep maintaining quality, fresh material must always be added to the recycled one. Everything we dig out of the Earth is non-renewable. (not in the next million years or so...) The logical conclusion is that at some point we run out of resources. No more oil, no more uranium, no more iron, no more copper, no more lithium. If we don't degrow voluntarily, then we degrow involuntarily and that's usually sudden and it's called a crash. With no resources, what comes next is dark ages, very dark and loooong dark ages this time. Without steel it we'll go back stone age most probably. I won't live to see it, our children won't live to see it, but unless we all nuke each other over some oil fields or something, someone will live to see it. Degrowth will extend our present good times. Growth will shorten it.
- scoofy 8mo ago>You can't recycle to infinity. The lifespan of the earth is not infinite, pretending it is is foolish. We have about 5 billion years on earth before it will be consumed by the sun. Presuming an infinite earth creates a very obvious, simple, and wrong conclusion about something that is actually very difficult problem. >The logical conclusion is that at some point we run out of resources. The point of renewable resources -- like solar -- is exactly that they are renewable or effectively infinite.
- tsoukase 8mo agoThis ship has sailed. The environment is destined to be destroyed sooner or later. It's just not at this generation so hardly anybody in charge is worried. Except the growth problem that cannot be solved, inequality is another fact. Sure I pollute with my yearly 10MWh of home heating + 10 for my car, but someone pollutes in multiple times that with his yacht and jet. Let's start by converting him before we all revert back to middle ages.