Say, who’s getting the feeling that this whole thing has little to nothing to do with actual science?
Climate Crisis: Is It Time to Ditch Economic Growth?
It was only in the mid-20th century, in the wake of the shattering impact of World Wars and when capitalism and communism were competing for global dominance, that we began to measure the success of an economy in terms of gross national product, or GDP.
The faster GDP was rising, the better an economy could be said to be performing. But something happens as all that economic activity expands. The amount of energy and resources we use also increase.
Ever since the industrial revolution, fossil fuels have set us on a course of furiously expanding production, which has also meant more waste and more pollution. Historically, greenhouse gas emissions have risen alongside GDP. As economies have grown richer, nature has paid the price.
And as the climate crisis has become ever-harder to ignore, more people are questioning whether infinite economic growth is possible on a planet of finite resources.
Who wants to bet that Eco Watch is continuously attempting to grow their brand and earn more capital?
“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in their Fifth Assessment, have 116 mitigation scenarios with a chance of staying below the 2 degree Celsius threshold. All of those scenarios assume 2-3% GDP growth rates,” says Jon Erickson, an ecological economist at the Gund Institute for Environment in Vermont, adding that this implies doubling the global economy by somewhere around 2050.
These scenarios rely not just on switching to renewables, but also on the large-scale extraction of massive volumes of carbon from the atmosphere using as-yet unproven technology, which Erickson describes as “wildly unrealistic.”
“None of those models and the IPCC community even bother simulating a scenario where the global economy contracts, stabilizes and maybe even degrows,” Erickson says. “Yet that’s probably the one realistic scenario that would significantly affect greenhouse gas emissions.”
In other words, they know that economies need to be destroyed to achieve the Cult’s mission. They rarely mention the devastation this would cause people’s lives. Anyhow, lots of excuses are made as to why we need degrowth, ending with
But degrowthers argue that we do have to tighten our belts — and it doesn’t have to be painful. If we could reverse the central logic of economic systems that prioritize growth over human and ecological wellbeing, they don’t believe we would miss the furious activity that’s keeping a minority of the human population in must-have products and ever-more material wealth.
Yet, most of these same people refuse to give up their own modern lives and money. Weird, eh? Seriously, why can’t they just be honest and say they want governmental control over economies and full Modern Socialism?
