“Longing for the days of pre-industrialization was always the realm of aristocracies, popes, and feudal lords, who saw their power slipping away with the rise of the bourgeoisie”
“In 1972, MIT researchers published The Limits of Growth, a report commissioned by the Club of Rome, an international think tank of bourgeois elites dedicated to discussing “humanitarian challenges.””
“Analysis like this will inevitably find its way to anti-human sentiment. Only a few years before Limits of Growth was released, Paul Ehrlich had published his 1968 bestseller, The Population Bomb”
“Ehrlich’s remedies for overpopulation included steep taxes on diapers, mass sterilization, and the addition of sterility agents to food exported to foreign populations”
“In a new book, The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism, degrowth is defined as “a proposal for the radical reorganization of society that leads to a drastic reduction in the use of energy and resources that is deemed necessary, desirable, and possible.” A core idea is a critique of “industrialism,” referring to “the overall structure of a modern industrial society based on mechanized work …this critique questions the central factor by which both capitalist and socialist societies measure or have measured their success.” It is a version of the same Malthusian ideas that were given a shellacking by Marx and Engels”
“Touted by advocates such as Noami Klein and Jason Hickel, along with NGOs such as Greenpeace and 350.org, degrowthers target the most developed places for their downgrading schemes. How exactly would this play out? Both Hickel and Klein have an ironic fascination with the 1970s”
“Depending on one’s perspective, or better still one’s class, the 1970s may be a strange time to romanticize in the US. The urban crisis was worsening, the result of capital flight, austerity, and racism. Neoliberalism was rapidly being asserted as an economic cure-all. Smog and water pollution were bigger problems than they are now. The trucking and meat industries were being deregulated with wages crashing”
“Of course degrowth proponents claim to target the wealthiest people in society and thereby empower the masses, and surely the wealthiest stand to take the biggest hit, however they somehow overlook the effect their policies will have on everyone else”
“Besides minimizing the class factor, degrowth suffers from two interconnected flaws. First, degrowth underestimates, even ignores, the extent that technology and innovation can decouple economic growth from material usage”
“Secondly, and more importantly, degrowth mistakes growth itself with markets, ironically echoing libertarians”
“Norway is the world leader in electric vehicles, reaching around 80 percent of new car sales this year. Norway is blessed with abundant hydroelectric power, which provides 96 percent of the country’s electricity (electricity prices in Norway are among the cheapest in the world), yet it was the government’s buildout of a wide network of charging stations throughout the country, not just in places where stations are most profitable, along with other steps such as free parking, that accomplished the transition”
“The largest historical drop in carbon intensity of energy of any economy was France’s nuclear energy program of the late 1970s and early 1980s, a centralized, government led effort”
“It was the 1972 Clean Water Act that dramatically cut pollution in U.S. waterways. The Clean Air Act did the same for U.S. air pollution”
“The 1987 Montreal Protocol phasing out of Hydrochlorofluorocarbons (then used in refrigerators and aerosol cans), to this day the only UN treaty ratified by every member state, reversed ozone layer depletion, once the top environmental concern”
“These were neither market nor degrowth solutions”
“By any estimate global mining will have to greatly increase to produce the lithium, cobalt, vanadium, and other materials needed to achieve an energy transition and decarbonize the economy. These minerals have to be sourced globally, which puts a dent into the degrowth vision of locality. This will take growth. In other words, what we need is not degrowth, but planned socialist growth”
“Mines can be worker controlled. Public banking can make investments for social goods. Socialist designed cities can return more land to forests”
“Despite what it claims for itself, conservatism is actually never a static force. It grows ever more reactionary. Let it be left to conservatives”
“Contrary to the tedious stream of propaganda, the point of socialism is abundance and prosperity for all. It is a time for thinking big, not growing small”