4 Problems for the Degrowth Movement
jacobin.com
Though increasingly influential in activist circles and policy discussions, the degrowth perspective on addressing climate change suffers from serious analytical and political flaws. We need a program of green growth to decarbonize the planet.
    • wildcherry
      31·
      4 months ago
      1. Degrowth often confuses correlation for causation and overextrapolates from the past.
      2. Degrowth doesn’t acknowledge that redistribution can drive growth.
      3. Degrowth adopts unjustified assumptions from orthodox economics.

      This approach has not gone well historically. The French government imposed carbon taxes without offering adequate substitutes for citizens (such as affordable electric vehicless or sufficient public transportation options); as a result, living costs increased for lower-income households who spent larger shares of their budgets on energy, and eventually widespread social unrest resulted.

      The truth is that a narrow emphasis on reducing consumption is deeply rooted in orthodox economics. An orthodox economics perspective would claim that we must decrease consumption to decrease emissions. This outlook tries to predict the future by holding variables in the present constant. It assumes that resources and worker productivity are always being maximized and also that energy unit costs will not decrease.

      Those are false assumptions: resource utilization, productivity, and energy costs change a great deal.

      1. Degrowth doesn’t have an adequate theory of political transformation.

      Sounds libs.

  • MrMakabarM
    1·
    4 months ago
    1. The limits to growth is very early argued to be a gdp limit, but emissions, soil, and other natural limits.
    2. Most degrowthers are fully aware, that redidtributing wealth will make the poor richer and that that means increased consumption of the poor.
    3. We have to decrease consumption of carbon.That means we have to destroy tue fossil fuel industry. That is going to hurt some people. Obviously France did a bad job at implementing it. Also again, tue limit is not gdp.
    4. Degrowthers do not have a general problem with investing. In fact most argue for more investment into renewables, public transport and so fort. However it has to stay within planetary limits and that means a full stopp to bad investment. No more fossil fuel cars, no more coal power plants, no more highways and other waste of resources.