I'd say the FIRST thing we must "degrow" is the war machine. This webinar (link below) really drives the point home. The US military is the 4th largest polluter on the planet. War causes more ecological damage than individuals. Degrow the military, save us from nuking ourselves, and then we all have a chance at helping clean up the messes we've made.
I find it impressive how coherently you argue here, without falling into the obvious trap. To blame overpopulation for our problems has long been the domain of ecofascistm. But the relevant questions you raise here show how the line has started to shift. Fascists have now verged towards birtherism, longtermism or whateverism, however else they call their cooky, speculative theories. Which has resulted in men like Musk approaching women at parties with the "pick up"-line "do you want me to inseminate you?" or that russian telegram dude bragging that he has fathered over 100 children. Longtermism is a perverted form of doomsday cult, that screams apres nous le deluge, but also dressing it as a somehow noble philosophical stance. In reality the purpose it serves is nothing else than to relieve these rich assholes from the actual responsibilities they would have, to address the existing social and economic problems that they are to blame for. But instead they take the "long view", settling mars etc pp., in order to justify it to themselves how filthy rich they have become.
You're correct about the "labor capital" attitude of the 1%. Also your claims of what I call de growth is an absolute or 100% correct. We must reduce the earth human population to know more than 1.5 billion people. In a long-term scenario. I'm sure would think just to eliminate them using a eugenic model would be a bit Hitler but they're going to be eliminated one way or another so we should just do it and have a chance to save ourselves.
Perhaps 2 to 3 billion would be OK per David Pimentel's calculations. But the point still remains the same. We need to SHRINK. Fortunately the two best and most ethical ways to do it are 1) female empowerment, and 2) poverty reduction. No coercion needed.
FYI if you click on a person's profile you can Block them to improve your substack experience. I'm all for opposing views, but save the psycho babble for Arkham Asylum.
What makes you think our selves are worth saving? We're merely the ninth species in the genus Homo and all eight previous species of Homo have gone extinct. What makes us self-proclaimed sapiens so special that we deserve to survive?
I really didn't say that or even insinuate it. I was just stating a paradigm that could have existed. Who really deserves to survive or a few of the multicellular organisms. That is the main point, an obvious one, of my statement. I'm gonna stick to what I just said in my earlier reply. Seriously I know this entire topic inside and out I'm not gonna waste my time in an exchange with a morally bankrupt,
I just found your Substack via The Childfree Are Ungovernable and let me say, it's excellent. This is my flavor of intelligent "radicalism" if I must say. I agree, we have a system that requires an ever-growing population on a finite planet, a recipe for disaster even a four-year-old can figure out. This whole push to get people to have babies is tied up in racism (xenophobia, technically), anti-immigration stances, pro-capitalist stances (the desire to have an army of underpaid laborers at the helm to keep wages low and profits high), and other unsavory traits.
You might find this interesting as well—the decline in "birth rates" is misleading right-wing propaganda (predictably), stuff that I've thoroughly debunked here (and I just removed the paywall so it's free for everyone):
It's misleading because infant mortality (deaths before reaching age one) has fallen faster than birth rates. So, while we are having significantly fewer births, more children are surviving into adulthood. But, the wealthy realize that if the population level declines or stops growing, they’ll have to raise wages (supply/demand). For most of America’s history, there was an excess of work to be done and not enough workers to do it (labor shortage), which is how wages have often stayed high (a massive continent to harvest and not enough people to harvest it). Historically, we've turned to immigration here on this side of the pond, but now, they want the labor without the immigration, so they want to pressure everyone to have babies instead.
Declining birth rates are a direct result of declining returns on our declining oil reserves. As is declining everything else. Yes, it's a very good thing, and it is here to stay, and to escalate.
Indeed, economic degrowth without population degrowth to match is really just a repackaged form of austerity, and will only get us permanently stuck in a bad place and still end up destroying the Earth (albeit more slowly and it somewhat good taste). And the only thing that will truly kill capitalism for good is the one thing it cannot survive: ABUNDANCE.
Amen to that! The Big Lie that "everybody must procreate" is just as outdated, outmoded, and specious as that other pernicious Big Lie that "everybody (and their mother) must work for a living".
Let me clue you onto a little real world situation that's often confused and intentionally disingenuous. I see you've done the latter here. There's no "capitalism" in the United States whatsoever. None. ZERO
For you see, capitalism requires two things. A free and unfettered market and thoughtfully in placed, strictly enforced consumer protections. We have neither.
Our current macro economic model is "rape and pillage" which is known around the world in MacroEcon 101 classrooms as IMPERIALISM.
I'm sorry I'm really strict about definitions. A true capitalist would manage his capital such that he never runs out. An imperialist or a colonialist or are the ones that are the rape and pillage crowd. That's part of why we're a shit hole society is people don't use the right words concerning the very most important paradigms going on in that society
According to who?? You? The entire world uses the word to describe the dominant economic system for the past couple hundred years, and you're saying that it's wrong?
I would argue that the "real" definition of any word is what the culture at large says it is.
And that's why we can't have anything nice. Because the constituency is almost exclusively self important, uneducated gullible sheep. Turn off MSNBC or #NewsForDumbFox, whatever you watch, and read a book or two, thousand.
Not the entire world. The MSM carefully constructed narrative certainly does. Not people in positions of for professors at esteemed Schools of Economics.
Random dude on the Internet has no credibility. Can't believe I had to say that to a supposed adult.
I'm sorry you don't agree but opinions don't matter. The two things I gave you are the model of capitalism. I don't know where you went to school but I went to very fine schools and had a lot of macro micro economic courses. I'm positive of this
It's still a variant of capitalism though. A "plunder economy" is still capitalism. The only difference between capitalism and cannibalism is the spelling. And for anyone to reflexively say that it is better than (what passes for) communism, well, that is a pitifully low bar to clear.
The problem with degrowth is that reducing industrial activity also reduces the aerosol masking effect, which leads to more rapid planetary heating. Civilization is a catch-22.
No. Holy fuck this stupid year and the industrial complex fellation is unfathomable. Two things are prerequisites to having any legitimate mitigation from the climate catastrophe. Obviously the end of fossil fuel extraction and use. Secondly we must direct air sequester carbon from the atmosphere at a scale of at least 2500,000,000,000 tons of the soon to be 4,000,000,000,000 tons we have emitted.
The dynamic you mentioned is completely irrelevant. Majorly so. Such bullshit that it's an obvious intentional disingenuous comment.
A third policy that would be of immense Benefit to multiple paradigms and negative to none other than the massive capital needed to do it but you have to look at it as an investment. There's no other way. Finely powdered glacial rock test dispersed at least to 90,000 feet over the entire planet in the amount as much as we can possibly achieve replaces your aerosol effect, reduces the amount of sunlight hitting the planet but more importantly, lessons the acidity of the ocean, replaces the important trace minerals that have been leached from both farmland and a few remaining wildlands in terrestrial ecosystems and lastly has no negative effect on the planet inhabitants.
I agree. But I do think we owe America's youth and the other complex life forms on the planet and all out World War II style effort. The crazy part about this is if we would've devoted one or 1.5% of the federal budget on the problem in the Clinton area it would be still in the likely Category of mitigating the worst possible scenario. We suck
That's just a fault hood. There are over one dozen companies with different designs doing direct air carbon sequestration. All you would have to do is simply install renewable energy capture devices near the seaQuest device. Wind, solar, battery. You're in. Stop the ridiculous electric vehiclestatistically insignificant stupidity use those resources for the aforementioned architecture and you actually have a small percentage chance to mitigate. It's all about the scale and how quickly it's implemented.
Laws of thermodynamics have nothing to do with the climate crisis other than greenhouse gases. The aerosol effect is completely negligent. It is a 10th of a percentage fraction of the greenhouse problem.
This issue was down to exactly and only what I mentioned in my previous reply. Everything else is irrelevant until we accomplish that.
Specifically fossil fuel extraction and use. That's it. What you mentioned are simply ancillary paradigm created by the fossil fuel extraction and use. A bit disingenuous on your part to be very generous on mine
There are multiple ways to do it with single digit percentages of the carbon we now use. We must switch to a completely renewable energy supply first then your question will be moot
Got some bad news for you, bud. Civilization is a heat engine regardless of what powers it. Civilization generates enough waste heat alone to boil the oceans dry in under 400 years, and that's not even including the extra heat from the sun trapped by greenhouse gasses. You have more work to do.
I'd say the FIRST thing we must "degrow" is the war machine. This webinar (link below) really drives the point home. The US military is the 4th largest polluter on the planet. War causes more ecological damage than individuals. Degrow the military, save us from nuking ourselves, and then we all have a chance at helping clean up the messes we've made.
.Degrowing the Military While Preserving Jobs (webinar) https://youtu.be/MHnQd_F7GRg?si=mo_zoLlUXPVTQ46Z
Really well-said points, Antonio. We need to start thinking wisely and long-term regarding our future as a species and that of the planet.
We can't afford to blindly follow what these high-profile figures/celebrities say without properly assessing their true intentions and agendas.
I find it impressive how coherently you argue here, without falling into the obvious trap. To blame overpopulation for our problems has long been the domain of ecofascistm. But the relevant questions you raise here show how the line has started to shift. Fascists have now verged towards birtherism, longtermism or whateverism, however else they call their cooky, speculative theories. Which has resulted in men like Musk approaching women at parties with the "pick up"-line "do you want me to inseminate you?" or that russian telegram dude bragging that he has fathered over 100 children. Longtermism is a perverted form of doomsday cult, that screams apres nous le deluge, but also dressing it as a somehow noble philosophical stance. In reality the purpose it serves is nothing else than to relieve these rich assholes from the actual responsibilities they would have, to address the existing social and economic problems that they are to blame for. But instead they take the "long view", settling mars etc pp., in order to justify it to themselves how filthy rich they have become.
So true
You're correct about the "labor capital" attitude of the 1%. Also your claims of what I call de growth is an absolute or 100% correct. We must reduce the earth human population to know more than 1.5 billion people. In a long-term scenario. I'm sure would think just to eliminate them using a eugenic model would be a bit Hitler but they're going to be eliminated one way or another so we should just do it and have a chance to save ourselves.
Perhaps 2 to 3 billion would be OK per David Pimentel's calculations. But the point still remains the same. We need to SHRINK. Fortunately the two best and most ethical ways to do it are 1) female empowerment, and 2) poverty reduction. No coercion needed.
I don't know who mentioned coercion. I think it would be smart to incentivize it through different federal government policies
FYI if you click on a person's profile you can Block them to improve your substack experience. I'm all for opposing views, but save the psycho babble for Arkham Asylum.
What makes you think our selves are worth saving? We're merely the ninth species in the genus Homo and all eight previous species of Homo have gone extinct. What makes us self-proclaimed sapiens so special that we deserve to survive?
I really didn't say that or even insinuate it. I was just stating a paradigm that could have existed. Who really deserves to survive or a few of the multicellular organisms. That is the main point, an obvious one, of my statement. I'm gonna stick to what I just said in my earlier reply. Seriously I know this entire topic inside and out I'm not gonna waste my time in an exchange with a morally bankrupt,
Intentionally disingenuous fossil fuel Botboi. 🖕
Baseless accusations? OK boomer. 👍
O for 2 They're not baseless and they're not allegations😂
I just found your Substack via The Childfree Are Ungovernable and let me say, it's excellent. This is my flavor of intelligent "radicalism" if I must say. I agree, we have a system that requires an ever-growing population on a finite planet, a recipe for disaster even a four-year-old can figure out. This whole push to get people to have babies is tied up in racism (xenophobia, technically), anti-immigration stances, pro-capitalist stances (the desire to have an army of underpaid laborers at the helm to keep wages low and profits high), and other unsavory traits.
You might find this interesting as well—the decline in "birth rates" is misleading right-wing propaganda (predictably), stuff that I've thoroughly debunked here (and I just removed the paywall so it's free for everyone):
https://thescienceofsex.substack.com/publish/post/148692782
It's misleading because infant mortality (deaths before reaching age one) has fallen faster than birth rates. So, while we are having significantly fewer births, more children are surviving into adulthood. But, the wealthy realize that if the population level declines or stops growing, they’ll have to raise wages (supply/demand). For most of America’s history, there was an excess of work to be done and not enough workers to do it (labor shortage), which is how wages have often stayed high (a massive continent to harvest and not enough people to harvest it). Historically, we've turned to immigration here on this side of the pond, but now, they want the labor without the immigration, so they want to pressure everyone to have babies instead.
It's tyrannical and twisted.
Declining birth rates are a direct result of declining returns on our declining oil reserves. As is declining everything else. Yes, it's a very good thing, and it is here to stay, and to escalate.
Indeed, economic degrowth without population degrowth to match is really just a repackaged form of austerity, and will only get us permanently stuck in a bad place and still end up destroying the Earth (albeit more slowly and it somewhat good taste). And the only thing that will truly kill capitalism for good is the one thing it cannot survive: ABUNDANCE.
Amen to that! The Big Lie that "everybody must procreate" is just as outdated, outmoded, and specious as that other pernicious Big Lie that "everybody (and their mother) must work for a living".
https://thechaliceandtheflame.blogspot.com/2024/02/mother-nature-knows-exactly-what-she-is.html
As Edward Abbey famously said, growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. Which eventually kills its host, by the way.
(Mic drop)
What’s your stance on overshoot and civilisational collapse? This summary by William Rees is excellent https://www.whp-journals.co.uk/JPS/article/view/855/522
Let me clue you onto a little real world situation that's often confused and intentionally disingenuous. I see you've done the latter here. There's no "capitalism" in the United States whatsoever. None. ZERO
For you see, capitalism requires two things. A free and unfettered market and thoughtfully in placed, strictly enforced consumer protections. We have neither.
Our current macro economic model is "rape and pillage" which is known around the world in MacroEcon 101 classrooms as IMPERIALISM.
Capitalism has literally never been what you describe.
I'm sorry I'm really strict about definitions. A true capitalist would manage his capital such that he never runs out. An imperialist or a colonialist or are the ones that are the rape and pillage crowd. That's part of why we're a shit hole society is people don't use the right words concerning the very most important paradigms going on in that society
Then you've been raising the wrong fucking word the whole time
According to who?? You? The entire world uses the word to describe the dominant economic system for the past couple hundred years, and you're saying that it's wrong?
I would argue that the "real" definition of any word is what the culture at large says it is.
Your argument holds no sway.
And that's why we can't have anything nice. Because the constituency is almost exclusively self important, uneducated gullible sheep. Turn off MSNBC or #NewsForDumbFox, whatever you watch, and read a book or two, thousand.
Please, STOP eating the pages.
Not the entire world. The MSM carefully constructed narrative certainly does. Not people in positions of for professors at esteemed Schools of Economics.
Random dude on the Internet has no credibility. Can't believe I had to say that to a supposed adult.
I'm sorry you don't agree but opinions don't matter. The two things I gave you are the model of capitalism. I don't know where you went to school but I went to very fine schools and had a lot of macro micro economic courses. I'm positive of this
It's still a variant of capitalism though. A "plunder economy" is still capitalism. The only difference between capitalism and cannibalism is the spelling. And for anyone to reflexively say that it is better than (what passes for) communism, well, that is a pitifully low bar to clear.
Everything in that word salad is gibberish.
Nope. Completely unrelated sorry.
The problem with degrowth is that reducing industrial activity also reduces the aerosol masking effect, which leads to more rapid planetary heating. Civilization is a catch-22.
No. Holy fuck this stupid year and the industrial complex fellation is unfathomable. Two things are prerequisites to having any legitimate mitigation from the climate catastrophe. Obviously the end of fossil fuel extraction and use. Secondly we must direct air sequester carbon from the atmosphere at a scale of at least 2500,000,000,000 tons of the soon to be 4,000,000,000,000 tons we have emitted.
The dynamic you mentioned is completely irrelevant. Majorly so. Such bullshit that it's an obvious intentional disingenuous comment.
A third policy that would be of immense Benefit to multiple paradigms and negative to none other than the massive capital needed to do it but you have to look at it as an investment. There's no other way. Finely powdered glacial rock test dispersed at least to 90,000 feet over the entire planet in the amount as much as we can possibly achieve replaces your aerosol effect, reduces the amount of sunlight hitting the planet but more importantly, lessons the acidity of the ocean, replaces the important trace minerals that have been leached from both farmland and a few remaining wildlands in terrestrial ecosystems and lastly has no negative effect on the planet inhabitants.
Yeah? And how are you doing that without emitting more carbon? 🤔
Like I said, civilization is a catch-22. You can't stop entropy, let alone reverse it. Unless the laws of thermodynamics don't apply in your world?
Like it or not, humans are destined for extinction. You can't stop what's coming. It ain't all waiting on you. That's vanity.
I agree. But I do think we owe America's youth and the other complex life forms on the planet and all out World War II style effort. The crazy part about this is if we would've devoted one or 1.5% of the federal budget on the problem in the Clinton area it would be still in the likely Category of mitigating the worst possible scenario. We suck
That's just a fault hood. There are over one dozen companies with different designs doing direct air carbon sequestration. All you would have to do is simply install renewable energy capture devices near the seaQuest device. Wind, solar, battery. You're in. Stop the ridiculous electric vehiclestatistically insignificant stupidity use those resources for the aforementioned architecture and you actually have a small percentage chance to mitigate. It's all about the scale and how quickly it's implemented.
Have you ever heard of entropy?
I know the process. It has nothing to do with the topic at hand . Were through here.
Laws of thermodynamics have nothing to do with the climate crisis other than greenhouse gases. The aerosol effect is completely negligent. It is a 10th of a percentage fraction of the greenhouse problem.
This issue was down to exactly and only what I mentioned in my previous reply. Everything else is irrelevant until we accomplish that.
The climate crisis is just a symptom of industrial civilization in ecological overshoot. One of many, in fact.
Specifically fossil fuel extraction and use. That's it. What you mentioned are simply ancillary paradigm created by the fossil fuel extraction and use. A bit disingenuous on your part to be very generous on mine
Seven of nine planetary boundaries have been breached. See you at the bottom of the evolutionary bell curve! 📈📉
There are multiple ways to do it with single digit percentages of the carbon we now use. We must switch to a completely renewable energy supply first then your question will be moot
Got some bad news for you, bud. Civilization is a heat engine regardless of what powers it. Civilization generates enough waste heat alone to boil the oceans dry in under 400 years, and that's not even including the extra heat from the sun trapped by greenhouse gasses. You have more work to do.
Citation needed, buddy. Or I call BS.
Citation: Tim Garrett, et al
Seriously Bruh, you're not qualified to have a discussion on the topic with me. We're done here.
Classic projection.