Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to Economic Degrowth proponents, we need to give up guns, S.U.V.s, eating beef, private transportation, advertising and consumer goods, to achieve a life which is more in harmony with nature. But we have to ditch democracy and embrace a green dictatorship, before we can achieve this happy state of communal living.
Do We Need to Shrink the Economy to Stop Climate Change?
By Spencer Bokat-Lindell
Mr. Bokat-Lindell is a staff editor.This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
If there is a dominant paradigm for how politicians and economists today think about solving climate change, it is called green growth. According to green growth orthodoxy — whose adherents populate European governments, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the World Bank and the White House — the global economy can both continue growing and defuse the threat of a warming planet through rapid, market-led environmental action and technological innovation.
But in recent years, a rival paradigm has been gaining ground: degrowth. In the view of degrowthers, humanity simply does not have the capacity to phase out fossil fuels and meet the ever-growing demand of rich economies. At this late hour, consumption itself has to be curtailed.
…
The case for degrowth
Perhaps the most prominent proponent of the degrowth movement is Jason Hickel, an economic anthropologist and the author of “Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World.” Degrowth, as he defines it, “is a planned reduction of energy and resource use designed to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a way that reduces inequality and improves human well-being.”
…
Degrowth, by contrast, calls for a different kind of economy altogether, one that could improve people’s livelihoods despite a reduction in aggregate activity: It seeks to scale down “ecologically destructive and socially less necessary production” (such as S.U.V.s, weapons, beef, private transportation, advertising and consumer technologies that are designed to obsolesce) while expanding “socially important sectors” like health care and education.
…
New York magazine’s Eric Levitz agrees that “Americans might well find themselves happier and more secure in an ultra-low-carbon communal economy in which individual car ownership is heavily restricted, and housing, health care, and myriad low-carbon leisure activities are social rights.” But, he adds, “nothing short of an absolute dictatorship could affect such a transformation at the necessary speed. And the specter of eco-Bolshevism does not haunt the Global North. Humanity is going to find a way to get rich sustainably, or die trying.”
…
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/16/opinion/degrowth-cllimate-change.html/
The idea of giving up all that our ancestors fought and strived for might seem too ridiculous to consider, but concepts like Degrowth have a shocking level of support from our academics and politicians. And journalists, if the NYT article is any guide.
Proponents of Economic Degrowth might have good reason to be confident, because it already happened once, in 1975, in Cambodia, when a charismatic madman convinced academics and community leaders to support his attempt to return their society to the middle ages. His plan was to restore traditional values, by restructuring society to facilitate the rise of a perfect communist state, where everyone could live in small village communal bliss, in total harmony with nature. Or so he promised.
The reality was not what Pol Pot promised. The horrific legacy of Cambodia’s Year Zero project is vast piles of bones and skulls, like the picture at the top of this page.
… Pol Pot transformed Cambodia into a one-party state called Democratic Kampuchea. Seeking to create an agrarian socialist society that he believed would evolve into a communist society, Pol Pot’s government forcibly relocated the urban population to the countryside to work on collective farms. Pursuing complete egalitarianism, money was abolished and all citizens were made to wear the same black clothing. Pol Pot was a driving force behind the Cambodian genocide, the systematic persecution and killing of Cambodians that the Khmer Rouge regarded as enemies. The genocide, coupled with malnutrition and poor medical care, killed between 1.5 and 2 million people, approximately a quarter of Cambodia’s population. Repeated purges of the CPK generated growing discontent; by 1978 Cambodian soldiers were mounting a rebellion in the east. After several years of border clashes, the newly unified Vietnam invaded Cambodia in December 1978, toppling Pol Pot and installing a rival Marxist–Leninist government in 1979. The Khmer Rouge retreated to the jungles near the Thai border, from where they continued to fight. In declining health, Pol Pot stepped back from many of his roles in the movement. In 1998 the Khmer Rouge commander Ta Mok placed Pol Pot under house arrest, shortly after which he died. …
Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pol_Pot
The Climate Economic Degrowth plan described by NYT includes more money for the education sector. Some of the money saved by heavily restricting the production of goods Degrowth proponents don’t like will be channeled to the academics who created this idea. Limited production of goods will be permitted, which will presumably include rough road vehicles, and guns and ammo for the bodyguards of the academic elite.
i mean, someone needs to oversee the new restricted living communal villages. Regular inspections would be required to enforce living in harmony with nature, to ensure that any political unreliables with engineering skills who somehow survive the purges don’t covertly attempt to break the mandatory harmony by building forbidden machines.
My point is, what happened in Cambodia in 1975 could happen again. The strength of the deep green back to nature movement is the measure of our peril.
Only vigilance and prompt public challenge can prevent Climate Economic Degrowth proponents from tapping into ordinary people’s understandable angst about technology and our fast paced changing society, just as Pol Pot once did in Cambodia.
The mindset that pushes this “Green dictatorship” stuff is one of mentally illness. It is a psychosis that begets more psychosis, that spreads like a idea virus that leads other mentally ill, like a parent, convinced that Climate Change scam claims are the equivalent of Armageddon, to k1ll her children to keep them from having to endure the climate alarmist bunk claims about a world doomed with 3ºC of warming.
The people who push climate alarmism bunk, people like Seth Borenstein of AP, an alarmism that then encourages the mentally unstable into psychotic outcomes, should be put in jail… and the key thrown away.
As Edgar Poe found to his surprise the inmates actually run the institution!
<a href=”https://xroads.virginia.edu/~Hyper/POE/system.html“>THE SYSTEM OF DR. TARR AND PROF. FETHER</a>
Fitting that Frantz Fanon, the Pol Pot ideologue was a psychiatrist!
With the truths revealed by dissidents like Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov, the horrors leaking out of China, and the fall of the USSR and the Berlin Wall; Western true believers in Marxism found themselves at a crossroads. They could acknowledge that communism was an abject failure, or they could try to find a path to their Utopia by hiding all the flaws inherent in a system that is contrary to human nature!
Academics in the US, Germany and France chose to pursue the latter course; and decades later their neo-Marxist dogma (more a religion than an economic or political system) is close to toppling the West once again as generations of brainwashed and indoctrinated children now believe that socialism is “nicer” than capitalism and free markets! Without ever having experienced the loss of freedom and prosperity that comes with state controlled economies; these children have no idea that they are the willing dupes, or useful idiots, of a cynical elite that doesn’t believe in anything they espouse!
GangGreen, or Climastrology, is just one of the pillars of this doomsday cult religion; with other parts of the tabernacle being built from communist agitprop like BurnLootMurder, Critical Racist Theory, and the sexualization of children that is so de rigueur in our schools today! None of this passes the sniff test; with every part of the Progressive or neo-Marxist catechism falling apart when looked at scientifically! But if you can dumb down enough people by teaching them WHAT to think, rather than HOW to think; you can reach a point where the masses will accept masks and vaccines that don’t work without complaint!
There appears to be some stirring of rebellion against this de facto state religion; as many parents discovered with horror what their kids were being taught during the lockdowns. But if we do not recognize the religious aspects of Progressivism, and demand that it not be taught in public schools, we will lose the battle for civilization and enter a new and darker age!
A low carbon society is devolving back to preindustrial society. Goodbye moden society in the main. Hello mzlnutrition, disease, ….
Harsh, brutish, and short are the correct descriptor terms of 99% of the average human’s existence before fossil fuels powered the Industrial Revolution.
This is exactly why I have been buying the reproductions of Very Olde Cookbookes. Anything prior to 1910, when more modern kitchen equipment was in the early engineering stages, is worth having on your bookshelf. That’s not a joke, not any more.
Not so fast with the nixing–I could get behind a ban on advertising. I can’t think of a single instance where it has helped me, and I wouldn’t mind extending Lady Bird Johnson’s push to eliminate billboards. (I almost wrote ‘bullboards’ because that’s what I think they are.) I already have Ad Blocker in my browser, let’s hear it for Ad Blocker everywhere!
MODS.
What have I done wrong ???
Every post I make now goes to ‘Awaiting for approval’ & then is never seen again.!!
Please take me off the naughty step (& tell me why I was put there … you have my email ) thanks.
(Have no idea, your account looks clean to me, approved the other comments) SUNMOD
I don’t see any reason to shrink the economy to make it green/renewable… there are plenty of jobs, plenty of investment needed in changing the world economy.
Germany has reached 50% renewable electricity: lifestyle much better than most of the US.
For once, griff, I will agree with you that shrinking the economy of any country for any reason is a bad idea.
And that 50% works for hours at a time, when the sun is out and the wind blows. Followed by times like now, when the winds aren’t blowing, the price of electricity has gone sky high, and the grid itself is in danger of imploding. Which is only going to get much worse as more and more FF power plants are slated to be closed down. Funny that you didn’t mention that part.
And the myth that Germans and Scandinavians and the like live “much better than us” is pure bunk.
The anarchists, aka climate alarmists have now reached a level of control they believe they can advance deconstruction of stable society with confidence and impunity.
We live in dangerous times, sadly too few people realise it.
The world-wide, COVID-induced, economic slump reduced calculated CO2 (billion metric ton), but the atmospheric CO2 continued upward trends (CO2 molecules/million molecules)
Also, the Roman Warm Period, which gave rise to the Roman Empire (warmer than at present), the Medieval Warm Period, and the Little Ice Age occurred while atmospheric CO2 remained about the same.
What could have caused these worldwide changes, if CO2 was not a factor?
I keep asking, because no one has provided a plausible answer.
The hyper-political IPCC actually denied the LIA existed, some years ago.
It claimed “Oh, that was just a European issue”, until word came from all over the world that they experienced the LIA as well.
If the IPCC could lie regarding that issue, what other lies does it lie/obfuscate, and who are its facilitators?
Adage: No lie travels without facilitators, aka gossip
neither the Roman wp, the MWP, nor the LIA were global synchronized warm periods. They were merely local.
I don’t believe this is true of either period. From the various records I’ve seen these were both more than local periods. Do you have any way to back these statements up?
““Americans might well find themselves happier and more secure in an ultra-low-carbon communal economy”
No, they won’t be happy living in an impoverished world without hope and where everyone is only one falsely uttered word away from imprisonment. Only the elite ruling class will be happy, living a life of luxury off the backs of the peasant slaves.
What we need is for the establishment of a new breakaway state where conservative western values are guaranteed and Marxism is banned for eternity.
Awesome! No more advertising = no more Google! I can’t think of a Greener tomorrow!
Got no problem with degrowth, we start with the people who are calling for it. Put them in “reservations”, for their own protection of course, where they can sit down and starve. This removes them from the climate thus saving the planet. The rest of us can just move on with our lives. Problems all solved.
See Frantz Fanon – ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ for the roots of Pol Pot.The same pessimism as Sartre, Nietzsche, Heidegger. Fanon was actually CIA, hailed from the Sorbonne.
In other words this pessimism, actually taught in the Uni’s, is what gave us WWII, Pol Pot, Kabila, and now the left.
As Heinrich Heine well documented these Romantic Movements are all traced to Kant, that hero of Academia. See Religion and philosophy in Germany :
https://archive.org/details/religionandphilo00heinuoft
Kant, as Heine notes, the omnipulveriser, took it upon himself to kill God, long before Nietzsche… Look at the result!
Surely, Spencer can find a few hundred million AGW enthusiasts,to join his cause. They could hardly refuse. They could live the blob life.The rest of us can remain living the life we have now.
In time,Spencer,hopefully may be able to garner more support,possibly up to a couple of billion.Their sacrifice would save the planet and we in turn would give our undying gratitude.
Jason Hickle, I sentence you to watch “Soylent Green” until you have a cognition.
Why do they ignore the hard evidence that the more developed countries have negative population growth?
Do what it takes to facilitate undeveloped countries ability to reach a sustainable economy and the problem goes away.
The truth is that they can do both – grow the so-called “green” economy while also “de-growthing” the economy. The trick is, while spurring the “green” economy, as with the “Green New Deal”, (or whatever feel-good phrase they have for it now) to pretend to be growing the economy, and providing “millions of jobs”. It is a huge scam, that’s all.
US should rapidly increase growth and have a lot more legal immigration.
Fix all global problems by taking away people who oppressed by all shithole countries.
How could US do this without causing too much domestic problems?
Make a lot of low income housing in the ocean.
Some people have claimed that ocean settlements would cheaper or better than settlements
on Mars. This is wrong. But it’s likely if we get human settlements on Mars, we will also get
ocean settlements on Earth.
Or to handle the traffic to Mars, we would have launch rockets to Mars, from the Earth’s oceans. Elon Musk wants to launch 3 rockets per launch pad per day. If one was launching 1 rocket from earth surface per day, you should be launching from the ocean.
If you only one rocket launch from anywhere on the ocean per day, one will probably start Ocean settlements. And this could start within 10 years.
What suggest is ocean settlements within coastal regions, and one focus is to make low cost
residential housing. So idea is NOT to have a million people living in the ocean within say 10 years, rather idea is to go in that direction so than 1 million people living in the ocean within
50 years. And possible that within 50 years one will have 1 million people living in the ocean whether whether begin now or don’t. Or would good to be “world leaders” in ocean settlements, in same way we want to be world leaders in regards using the space environment. Or there no sense being flat footed about it.
Not that I am big fan of low carbon footprints, but I think ocean settlements could have a much lower carbon footprint.
And it’s beach living which is better than current beach living.
Guardian wanna be writing at the NYT
The article by Worrall is one long straw man. Good policy doesn’t do anything like he suggests: https://citizensclimatelobby.org/price-on-carbon/
The article says:
“Even in the United States, which has embraced no such policy, G.D.P. growth has slowed in the past two decades, largely because of falling birthrates and a switch in spending patterns from goods to services.”
My dem (a donkey term often used)…
The reason our GDP dropped over the past 2 decades is because we gave China PNTR (permanent normalized trade relations) at the end of 2000.
Clinton was initially against it but he and the DNC ended up receiving illegal contributions from the communist Chinese government. He later changed his mind and was for it. IMO, this change of mind was political payback for those contributions.
After we gave China PNTR, we lost over a 3rd of our mfg jobs (the largest ever drop in US mfg jobs in recored history). THIS is why our GDP slowed.
(see MANEMP graph at the st louis federal reserve site).
In addition, most graphs of China’s CO2 emissions show them turning sharply upward right after we gave them PNTR. They increased because our jobs were moving there and because they were building new factories and infrastructure for the jobs coming their way.
Clinton SCREWED this country by what appears to be payback to the communists illegal donations with PNTR.
In addition, the majority Republican congress approved PNTR so it was a bipartisan cluster-eff. Why the Republicans signed it is beyond me, I have never read of them receiving illegal contributions from the communist Chinese.