this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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If you want degrowth, you want to see billions dead, because that is what degrowth means.
Degrowth means job loss. Job loss means no income. No income means no food. No food means starvation.
And how, exactly, do you expect to institute this proposal over the objections of the rich? Every previous attempt to do something like this, like the communist revolutions in Russia and China, ended up killing millions of people and accomplishing nothing of virtue, because the rich retained power and forcibly twisted the new post-revolution economy into something even worse than capitalism.
So, you propose that I live in a state of perpetual nausea from eating nothing but horrid-tasting, questionably-nutritious, plant-based “food” instead of actual food, and then die in the apocalypse anyway? No thanks. Civilization is done for, living in it is miserable enough already, and I am not interested in sacrificing what few shreds of happiness remain in order to accomplish basically nothing.
The only way to avert the coming disaster is decisive, mandatory action from the top of society on down, and that obviously isn't going to happen, so the best I can realistically hope for is to live it up and be dead before it gets really ugly.
Not as much as you could. You still live in shelter, use electricity, exhale carbon, eat carbon-absorbing plants, and excrete methane. Humanity's very existence is driving global warming. There is no escape.
None of these things are going to happen. The rich will string you up by the toenails before they let you derail their gravy train, and your fellow proles will cheer as they do it. That's why we're doomed: powerful people are enforcing our doom, and everyone else worships them.
Degrowth is a dangerous ideology. For those living in rich countries, degrowth might just mean austerity, for those living in middle and lower income countries, degrowth is going to mean destitution and certain death for x percentage of the population.