I’ve seen Amish:
Burn chemicals and paints in a pile behind their shop
Have dumpsters full of plastic “sawdust” from a shop that makes plastic furniture
Rebrand cheap chinese electronics and batteries to sell in their communities (MillerTech)
Zip around on a one wheel
Log out relatively pristine forest to make more farms
Log land that isn’t theirs, without permission, for weeks before being discovered and confronted.
Vote down school levies repeatedly until the local schools shut down
These days the amish button isn’t nearly as great as you might think…still funny to think about how everyone would react though
100% for real. On top of the fact that the 4th panel would read:
POOF NO MORE HUMAN RIGHTS NO MORE REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH NO MORE FREEDOM OF/FROM RELIGION
Agreed, humans are terrible, no matter our political or technological beliefs.
Wait until you hear about cow farts
No more global warming, but a lot more sexual assault.
And also, continued global warming.
Seriously, why does anyone think regressive religious principles would do anything but continue the pillaging of natural resources? Amish are just cosplayers riding on the successes of an industrial civilization, most of them are capitalists who use technology to create crafts to sell to midwest white middle-class folk as their primary means of sustenance.
Amish attitudes towards technology are so contradictory and flimsy they make fantasy genres like Warhammer 40k look sensible.
And deaths from tooth aches, small cuts, the flu…
No more global warming, and i get to die? what’s the catch?
You did a horrible painful death over 5 years.
Nah sorry i think i’ll just let the world burn then
But at least we’d be “living in an Amish paradise”
Global warming would continue tho even if this happened.
Please continue your reasoning.
They use gas generators to power tools and equipment, they just don’t like relying on the grid.
You think all that Amish furniture for sale is cut by hand?
I don’t live near any Amish so I didn’t think about their furniture at all.
We are well into the “point of no return” part of the the global warming curve. From here on out things will get more and more unpredictable weather wise with previously tame regions experiencing long droughts or flash floods. Large parts of housing all over the world will become completely insufficient in maintaining livable conditions. Our current agricultural system will stop functioning. Even if humans completely disappeared the existing pollution and atmospheric gases would have massive long term effects on everything else that lives on the planet. We are already experiencing the start of this trend, but its only going to get worse from now on.
These are self-sustaining shifts in the climate system that would lock-in devastating changes, like sea-level rise, even if all emissions ended.
Basically we broke the balance and we wont be able to fix it.
For a relative comparison on how bad our warming curve is compared to those of the planets history, this recent video is a good starting point. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1bMJekCiBw
I try to keep a small glimmer of hope that we come to our sense and make dramatic changes over the next 20 years, but I doubt it.
If we were to invest our resources heavily into reversing these trends I think it’s possible, but that would have to be humanity’s collective goal. We can’t even agree to stop murdering each other though so yeah it’s bad
That’s depressing as fuck.
Yes but its still our duty to not let it get even worse. If there is large switch to renewables and lower emission industrial processes, then humans will probably somehow continue to exist in a semi normal way. If we dont lower our emissions at all in the next few decades however, then large parts of the planet are predicted to just completely stop supporting human life after like 2100.
And animal cruelty.
The Amish are the biggest users of private jets. Don’t look that up.
Are you referring to this?
Don’t look up… Why?
Because they were joking
Don’t be silly.
The Amish don’t use buttons!
Yes they do, for clothes.
Found some interesting info here - https://amishrules.com/why-dont-the-amish-use-buttons/
Apparently some New Order Amish use buttons, and some men of more traditional orders use buttons but conceal them (only using them in places that wouldn’t be visible from the outside.) Amish women (of traditional orders) can’t use buttons at all.
A massive part of it is adhering to modesty, with fancy buttons considered “showy” and “distracting” particularly for women, as well as a way to impart individual style (which goes against their beliefs.) For men, buttons are associated with military dress, and as the Amish are pacifists, they consider buttons to be inappropriate and aggressive.
It all comes down to the individual order that people follow. Some use buttons in certain outfits, but some don’t use them at all.
I stand corrected, that is an interesting read.
Do you see any buttons after the button was pressed? 😎
We may have a paradox on our hands…
Some do
I know, but couldn’t resist the joke. I have poor impulse control.
has anybody seen breaking amish? that show is amazing
Um, akshually, there would still be lots of burning things for heat and livestock. Livestock are the majority of all mammals on earth, outnumbering humans by a lot, only 6% of mammals are wild animals.
BUT it being so unsustainable and full of disease would mean it would rapidly decrease populations, which would decrease ecological impact after a couple of generations, so it’s a sound strategy longterm.
My father claims the simple life on a homestead is way closer to nature and pollutes less than living in a city.
He cuts his wood with a chainsaw that’s using a mixture of gas and oil. This gas and oil certainly doesn’t come from the trees. Its imported. But it’s apparently the traditional way.
Then in winter he burns the wood to heat the house and it creates a circle of soot in the white snow all around it. But it’s all natural. On certain days, when you go outside around his house, you can taste the wood burning in the air. All natural!
If we all go back to owning our plot of land and exploit it like settlers, surely this is going to be good for the environment.
Yes and no. Chainsaw is really marginal polluter.
What warms your house in the winter? Where is dirtier snow? In your fathers homestead or in the city? Where is more generaly more particless in the air? In the countryside or in the city.
Wood is better than coal or oil, but worse than nuclear or renevables.
In Germany the countryside often is way worse. Especially in the winter. All of those super old, shitty wood furnaces pumping out fine particles often create a worse environment than on new year’s eve. Farmers shredding their crops, pesticides everywhere, polluted ground water from all the fertilizers, etc.
The 100k Population town I used to live in is way cleaner than the shit I have to deal with just a mere 5km outside of that town.
What warms your house in the winter?
Electricity, like the vast majority of people here. About 94% of which is hydroelectricity. Other ways to heat buildings are slowly getting banned anyway.
Where is dirtier snow? In your fathers homestead or in the city?
What? The snow is dirty where there are particles in the air that ends up on the ground. It’s not a contest of city vs countryside. If you live in a place that snows and walk around a house that is heated by wood burning, you will see black particles and specks in the snow surrounding the house. It’s the same at my cabin. When I get there the snow outside is impeccable… until I light the wood stove inside, and then it slowly turns grey all around the cabin. It doesn’t matter if the snow in a city is even dirtier.
Where is more generaly more particless in the air? In the countryside or in the city.
Funny thing, in winter during smog episodes, the air quality can be worse in the countryside because of people burning wood. Anyway, it’s banned in bigger cities because of how horrible this is in dense population centers. So, ironically, the air is more polluted when I go to my parents’ place in the countryside where they are burning wood to heat their house, than around my apartment in the downtown of a major city. Again, sometimes the air quality is worse in the countryside or in suburbs during winter, in large parts because of wood burning.
Where in the world you live if 94% of energy comes from hydroelectricity? It has to be Norway that is pretty unique country in both culture and landscape. I dont think there is any other country where that is possible.
And i can admit that in Norway my points fall flat.
I dare to say that in the most of the world air quality is worse in the cities than in the countryside. Also i dare to say most of the time even where you live air quality is worse in the cities.
I dont really understand your point with the sut on the snow? If you live in the city the snow is grey and nasty meaning there is more pollution? Does that not mean there is less pollution in the countryside? Im mean per person there might be more in the rural areas, but i dont really think your lungs care.
Guess again.
And the whole point is about the pollution created by wood burning, not if cities are more polluted in the first place!
Cant find any credible source that says Canada produces even near to that percentage of electricity with hydro.
I tought we were talking pollution as a whole.
Btw. Im little intrested now why your cabin producess so much sut? What fire wood you use as a fire wood in canada? What kind ovens you use? Is the chimneys straight pipes or what?
He is referring Québec, our main (only?) power supplier is even called Hydro-Québec, but they also do wind and solar power.
The numbers are for Québec only.
In 2021, Quebec generated almost all of its electricity from renewables including hydro (94%), wind (5%), biomass (0.6%) and solar (<0.1%), showing just how much of a renewable powerhouse the province is. Today, its utility operator, Hydro-Quebec, is the largest in Canada, playing an integral role in power exports to U.S. states like New York, New England, and Maine.
Quebec’s continued leadership in providing renewable electricity to North American customers is something we can all be proud of.
Tell him the NEW homestead way is better. Solar panels, lifepo4 batteries, electric chainsaw, heatpump primary wood burn auxiliary if you live somewhere it gets well below freezing.
Before anyone says anything solar still works on a cloudy day it just makes less, that’s why you size your array to make what you need when it’s cloudy not when it’s sunny. Summer can just have an over abundance of power nothing wrong with that
Tell him the NEW
This is where he’ll lose interest.
I’m trying and doing experiments. I have a cabin off grid on their land and it’s mostly solar, but I do need to burn wood during winter even if I don’t really like it. He has a sugar shack on another corner of the land and he’s also using solar, except the stoves and boiler. I bought him an inverter and he prefers this to the noisy generator.
However he pretty much hates everything else with batteries. My mother has an electric golf cart and he whines every time the lead acid batteries need maintenance or need to be changed (because of lack of maintenance). I could swap them for lifepo4 batteries, but they’re still going to lose capacity over time and we’re getting to the same point of “but I don’t have to put a $1000 worth of batteries in my tractor every few years”! Same “issue” with an electric ATV for the kids. He hates it because it needs to be charged and the lifepo4 battery had to be changed once. But apparently the cost of gas and diesel doesn’t register.
But yeah. So far at the latitude we’re at, solar power input and consumption varies a lot depending on the seasons. The solar setup is fine for the sugar shack because it’s used during the day in the spring, when there’s no leaves. But in the cabin, it’s been more complicated. I’m not there year-round and it works well in summer, but in winter the lifepo4 batteries need to be heated for hours if not days before I can charge them via solar, and get acceptable performance. It’s a work in progress.
I can highly recommend These batteries for home level power i have 6 of them and they make my offgrid life possible. Rated for 6000 deep discharges (or 16 years of literally daily deep discharge) they have a standard charge range of 5°C to 70°C naturally if you are in a cold latitude an even mildly insulted shed would be ideal to justify stay above that 5c mark.
If your sun is limited especially in winter consider giving east/west vertical panel orientation a shot. And that same site with the batteries has great deals on palettes of solar panels if you just need more in general.
If you aren’t already using 48V for inverters make the switch, much more efficient and long term cheaper. Put your panels into as large of a series string as your inverter will allow before parallel. Higher voltage incurs less resistance losses and it can be a pretty significant loss. Had an inverter die on me and had to drop to an older inverter while waiting for the replacement. It didn’t support the higher voltage as the newer one so had to drop from 320v to 80v ( from one string of 8 to pairs of 2 in parallel) ended up losing almost a full 1kW of peak potential
Thanks for the tips. I’m kind of stuck with the choices I’ve made in the past and I don’t want to upgrade or change before it’s really needed, in order to prevent waste. One is just a cabin where I go maybe a dozen times a year. The other is a sugar shack used in the day for only a few weeks during the spring so it just has a 3000W 24V inverter. It’s enough for the lights and the water pump once in a while. We really don’t need that much power for now but I’ll certainly switch to 48v when we’ll need to upgrade.
As for the ideal temperature, I’ve pretty much given up. The average temps in January are around -10°C and it sometimes goes in the -20°C. I thought about multiple ways to insulate and heat the batteries but in the end, I don’t want to leave this unattended in the middle of a forest. So far my solution in winter for the cabin is to carry a portable power station that was sitting in a heated place.
Lifepo4 is pretty much the one type you can safely leave unattended, it’s very very hard to get them to burn and even when they do it’s mostly smoke. Lithium is the big flame/boom one. The trade off is less energy density compared with lithium but for home storage thats less of an issue. The batteries i shared even feature fire suppression systems (basically an automatically deployed fire ratardant foam internally) for additional protection.
Building a little box of insulation around the batteries using some foam board panels and a water heater blanket with some water pipe heating tape you can get at most hardware stores would be the cheap easy way and should help with the colder month temps. And is easily picked uo and set aside in warmer weather
Natural and Traditional is an axe, not a chainsaw.
Well, a hand saw was also needed. But you are correct that a chainsaw wouldn’t be needed unless you’re taking about a water sawmill, which is similar in processing wood, but has no carbon footprint in that stage of wood production and usage.
Forget the chainsaw. Just burning the wood like we did in the past creates smog over a whole region. Wood burning is banned in my city and I can literally smell it when I go to the next city where it’s allowed.
Where I live winters are brutal and most people switched to electric heating over time. If everyone would go back to wood burning, we’d have really bad air quality and smog in winter, even in the countryside and over small villages.
We need a button like this but it clearly and in common language states the levels of technology and quality of life we can expect.
Humanity globally votes on a spectrum of these agreements until we find a suitable level.
My pitch is; we maintain enough electronic production to keep us all online at a basic desktop computer.
We get one new phone each decade, and one replacement phone should it break.
Other than that, what do we really need? Electricity and farming, a mild amount of houses to be constructed.
We should minimize R&D to things that lower power costs or energy usage/efficiency.
But we don’t need a space program. We don’t need excessive military spending. We don’t need Formula One races, or joy rides in helicopters. We don’t really need tourism. We only need a limited amount of mining and manufacturing. We don’t need plastic toys.
We need a global shift in culture, lifestyle and cooperation… We need to be the techno-amish-collective.
I don’t think that vote is going to come out like you’re imagining. Most people either don’t get it at all, or are just too egoistic.
I love most of it… But we definitely need a space program. That’s how we learn to be more efficient, and the cost is incredibly low
I don’t think it is, have you seen how much rocket fuel we use? That stuff is not great for the environment. Also it’s all tied up with the military industrial complex and there’s basically zero chance of us going anywhere good.
We should learn to terraform here before even thinking about mars.
We don’t get new tech without pushing boundaries. We’d forget how to make phones in a single generation if we stopped… We’ve forgotten how to get to the moon already. Space X is just continuing cancelled NASA projects, but they had to basically start over
You want to learn to terraform here? We’ve only got one shot. The only current idea that makes any sense is to just stop releasing CO2 and hope everything bounces back… But we might be past the tipping point. If you want to find out, you need satilites
You only get to keep our level of technology by growing new engineers. They need goals and toys, and they need challenging problems
You want to learn how to terraform the earth, safely? You want to maintain GPS and the Internet? You want to learn how to better clean sewage and the air?
It’s not either or. You can do everything you said while also letting the best and brightest play with rockets. You can shoot for Mars to save the earth
You just can’t do it for profit
One rocket launch expells 350+ tonnes of carbon. Just to allow some elites to play with rockets?
That’s a no from me dawg. Go suck “the best and the brightest” off somewhere else. If they’re so bright they can focus on fixing climate change in a different way. Do that and they get to “play with rockets” again later.
Yeah, I’m calling bullshit. Hydrogen-oxygen rockets cannot possibly emit that much carbon
GPS, Weather, atmospheric changes, ozone depletion, carbon and methane emissions, Continental drift, tracking chemical spills, catching climate criminals, it’s not necessarily about going somewhere. Without satellites we are blind. Not to mention all the things we only have today because they were invented in the pursuit of space exploration like memory foam, space blankets, phone cameras, infrared thermometers (I’m especially thankful for that one), scratch resistant lenses, water purification, cordless power tools, cochlear implants and TONS of other medical technologies, SSDs and Flash memory, the more I look into it the more there is.
Yeah, a lot of that sounds… Kinda bad for the environment. I feel like you’re off track on the purpose here - it’s to downsize our collective way of life to AVOID Global Warming, not inventing more synthetic crap we don’t really need in order to accelerate it.
Amish, not Elon. But yeah, I guess you’ve proved why my plan is unrealistic. There’s always gonna be people like you demanding all the latest modern conveniences and an army of lazy minded people to go along with that.
It’s that kind of convenience cost that has a labubu and nintendo switch in every kids hands and factories churning out smog and toxins. You made one big pile of here-we-go-again.
Maybe read the comic again?
Climate and weather tracking
Medical technology
There’s always gonna be people like you demanding all the latest modern conveniences and an army of lazy minded people to go along with that.
You don’t need big blow the fuck up rockets for that man.
To get these extremely important satellites into space? Yes, yes you do. The big blow the fuck up rockets are a stepping stone to better, more efficient technologies. I agree that billionaires using these rockets to fuck around in space is absolutely abuse of our shared resources, but your conflation of space exploration with consumerism is just plain misguided and wrong. There is nothing more important and beneficial to humanity than hard science without a profit motive.
In the future I want to be a Space Amish
Good tourism is how you avoid wars. No cruises, yes local, trained guides. It’s harder to hate what you know.
Good racing got us the TGV. Formula One is a testbed for hybrid vehicles and efficiency. I don’t know enough to say NASCAR brings no benefits at all, but pretty close to useless.
The current race for resources on the Moon is awful, but unmanned space exploration has helped us learn a lot about our own planet, including the mechanisms of climate change.
What makes you think this is about wars …the comic ends with “no more climate change”… Not “no more wars”.
But also you’re spouting Neo-Liberal propaganda. Italy no doubt hosted international races before being fought against in WW2, and Climate Change is obviously going to have more resource wars than before.
But why does no one here understand my pitch is CLEARLY UTOPIAN. It proposes global solidarity on climate change. Which is obviously a UTOPIAN pitch about climate change.
CLIMATE CHANGE.
Dude… Take a chill pill, look at the sky, and then re-read my comment under a non confrontational light.
No, it’s my utopic idea. I say we don’t need a space program in it…
What part of downsizing our reliance on technology leads everyone to comment and say we need a space program. Why you all so illiterate?
Clearly if I’m talking about downsizing to a scaled back version of society I’m NOT on team rocket.
All you confrontational assholes aren’t going to get me to choose rockets over halting climate change.
Most interesting parts of Handmaid’s Tale “Gilead” are when they’re boasting about reductions in pollution and greenhouse gas emissions their eco-christo-fascism has produced!
One of the big questions I have about our current Holocene extinction is at what point humans constrain their own polluting capacity based on their contracting biome.
Like, imagine a country like Germany or Japan or Russia or the US having a bad enough agricultural cycle that they experience a massive food shortage (or even a famine) on the scale experienced by Bangladesh or China in the 1950s (or Gaza in the modern day). What does that do to our carbon emissions?
We already saw the impact of COVID on air traffic and the sudden dramatic plunge in regional temperatures that came from not flying planes for a few weeks.
“Behold, the Amishinator!”
We’ve gone too far. We can’t stop this, we can only stop making it worse and learn to adapt to a changing world climate. The natural global processes of the planet have been altered and they are in the process and chaos of shifting into new normals. How long will it take to stabilize? No one knows. This kinda thing has happened to the planet before, but it happens to be quite catastrophic to the life living on it when it does. The jet stream is collapsing and major ocean currents are shifting. We have absolutely no control over these things and it’s already started. Everything on the planet is connected to these natural processes. It’s why things were the way they were, climate wise. Not anymore!
We have absolutely no control
We absolutely do, that’s a doomer narrative that is extremely useful for those invested in making it worse.
Science suggests we face a reversible issue.
You can control the jet stream? Dope!! I thought it had to do with ocean temperatures and how the ocean is mostly fucked in that sense and hence everything has gone haywire. We can’t control major air currents dude, they just do what they do because they do. I’m not dooming anything. We have been at idle too long, the goals are no longer reachable that would stop this, it needed to be done decades ago and not sure it was ever even possible then.
What science suggests it’s reversible? We can’t cool the ocean, we can’t take chemicals out of the ozone layer. We can slowly reverse it back to something, or allow it to stabilize by not drive the causes further into the red, but there is no going back. Sorry. Ship has sailed. That parrot is past tense!
For the last time, dude. You don’t hit the Spanish button in this house, okay?
Humans would rapidly organize right back into cities and make up whatever rules or interpretations of Amish law/religion that allowed them to. People gonna be people and ignore or twist religion to do whatever they want.
Humans would rapidly organize right back into cities
The Amish already live in townships. Congregations of humans are generally better for the environment than far-flung rural enclaves with low-efficiency infrastructure.
People seem to forget how much ecological destruction occurred at or prior to an Amish standard of living. Case in point, the deforestation of Europe
the bulk of which was completed before the 16th century.
“Primitive” does not mean “ecologically sustainable”. Quite a bit of our animal husbandry, agricultural, and pre-industrial economic activity were horrifyingly bad. We just weren’t operating at the scale of eight billion humans while we were living like that.
Yep. Coal and wood as the main energy sources are absolutely awful. Global warming would be gone because people would be dead from the pollution. There’s a reason that there were tons of maids cleaning old mansions constantly.
maybe inspired by this comment? https://lemmy.ca/comment/18397539
I’ve seen so much degrowth spam/trolling yesterday. This is organized hopelessness in favour of a hopeless failure of a solution. The only degrowth that will ever occur is through mass war/murder. It is a massive resource/diesel investment to conduct the mass destruction/murder. It takes a very dark soul to support degrowth, because it simply has no implementation path based on everyone voluntarily internalizing BP’s carbon footprint presonal responsibility.
A degrowth can be in consumption rather than population. We could use less plastic, less gas,…a lot less
Clean energy can replace oligarchist climate terrorist energy without degrowth. Plastic is not a climate problem, and much of it recyclable. Ocean pollution is primarily fishing nets, which seems easily solvable with cotton or other biodegradable materials.
Degrowth, other than voluntarily choosing veganism or carbon footprint responsibility, as global or national policy, means intentional permanent recession, strengthening oligarchist supremacist opposition to degrowth. It gives an appealing side benefit to genocide.
There won’t be enough voluntary uptake to make a dent, even if degrowth becomes a political coalition to pander to. Clean growth with carbon/GHG taxes partially funding freedom dividends globally, is a recipe for utopian global harmony and happiness. Degrowth, a divisive recipe for supporting genocidal warmonging, that contributes to coalition inclusive of degrowth not gaining power due to the economic stupidity of including their platform. Portraying leftist ideology as fascist bureacratic economic destruction and warmongering is an oligarchist supremacist ploy.
Deindustrialization of the US has resulted in political scapegoating straw grasping, that won last election: Immigration, and bipartisan war on China path. Global or national degrowth will fuel more hatred, and passion for war, because we are well below the democratic capacity of Idiocracy, already.
My fight with degrowth trolls yesterday was in response to milestone in clean H2 achievement out of China. Because the US has climate terrorist oligarch energy protections, it ensures it loses AI race with China. Oligarchist media would rather you promote Amishness degrowth (btw needs more acres per people than current), than adopt Chinese clean energy to permit technology and manufacturing growth. ie. If we lost at solar dominance, and will lose at AI dominance, pretend we never should have tried.
I think you have a point. Although i dont have the knowledge to see for sure that there really is a viable path alternative to economic degrowth.
i agree that directly supporting degrowth would be unpopular, lead to conflict and maybe would benefit a movement towards genocide. Correct me if thats not what you meant.
The crack i see in this argument is that it seems to assume that economic growth and quality of life are correlated and that people see it this way. A movement towards improving quality of life in general would entail, i assume, a reduction of our working hours, a reduction in industrial production (as we produce a lot of useless objects just as an excuse to redistribute means of survival without changing the dynamic of the economic system). So a move towards better quality of life would naturally lead to a healthy economic degrowth (in some areas) that could be well seen by people. Maybe im fantasizing too much, but i hope not.
economic growth and quality of life are correlated and that people see it this way.
They are, before corruption factors. Economic growth = wealth = more options to improve quality of life.
Financial insecurity corrupts the mind towards hate. Greed from powerful will manipulate populist insecurity towards either direct support of oligarchist/zionist supremacism platform, or towards hateful stupidity that sabotages democratic process towards oligarchism. Technological progress keeps enabling an alternative to slavery from increases in total prosperity. Oligarchist supremacist rule can choose increased oppression instead, followed by “lets genocide the uppity slave class instead of subsidizing their demand”. Degrowth stupidity as an anti-Oligarchist political platform, strengthens oligarchist genocide solution arguments.
UBI/freedom dividends is a solution to everything. Opposing UBI is only rational if you need oppression and oppressive power hierarchy to enjoy life. UBI redistributes power away from political discretion, it makes labour markets fair, it makes everyone who wants to work much richer, while increasing overall consumption. Disruption, including clean energy transition, is net job creating in addition to enhancing current and future standard of living. Oligarchist campaigns to protect their evil can be told to shut their climate terrorist fuckfaces, or their fuckfaces will be shut for them. $300/ton co2 carbon tax ($3/gallon gasoline) can contribute $4000-$7000 in UBI funding for Americans. It provides market driven clean growth transition.
The demonic evil of degrowth advocacy is that it is rooted in derailing clean growth policy. I’ve seen it accompanying the most vile and absurd US empire propaganda points, that cannot possibly come from an organically gullible but an honest idiocracy. It is with 100% certainty that the push for degrowth comes from CIA/Oligarchist sources in order to divide and disinform those concerned with climate and human sustainability. “See how all of those climate alarmists hate your job and want to destroy the economy!!!”
By economic growth i mean more production. This production can be marketable but not represent an actual wealth gain. If i produce a shitty headphone that breaks in a week of use, the world would be better off without it, but it did contribute to the growth of the economy when i sold it to some unfortunate soul. In this sense, a reduction in production may not really represent a reduction in wealth globally. A better production can have a way smaller volume than the current global production while still giving us more actual wealth to live with. Thats why i say economic growth is not quality of life. Of course theres a correlation in the actual data today, but my point is that this correlation is not necessary, its an empirical correlation, not a logical one, and it is something that may change in the future.
If we cant dissociate economic growth from well being, then i take your point and agree with it.
Regarding UBI, if it is done in a way that emancipates people, instead of just enabling and maintaining conditions for enslaving people, great. And from my perspective this would probably also entail a spontaneous degrowth.
I think our views are compatible. Im not defending a forced degrowth nor hope that people do it voluntarily out of nowhere. But political measures to redistribute wealth and improve living standards, like what you envision with UBI, could lead to a natural and widely accepted degrowth, which would be positive.
If i produce a shitty headphone that breaks in a week of use, the world would be better off without it, but it did contribute to the growth of the economy when i sold it to some unfortunate soul.
The bad product possibility example is not a good argument against abundance. Abundance economics permits pluralist sharing in wealth. Scarcity, Oligarchist monopoly protectionist, economics is inherently economic oppression for power concentration that will further influence rulership to economically disenfranchise the slave class. Carbon taxes does make distant imports, especially of bad products, more expensive unless shipping options are decarbonized.
Regarding UBI, if it is done in a way that emancipates people, instead of just enabling and maintaining conditions for enslaving people, great. And from my perspective this would probably also entail a spontaneous degrowth.
Carbon taxes funding a significant portion of UBI leads to massive economic growth. Massive employment, without taxpayer funding, in much faster energy transition capital investments is a lot of jobs. UBI itself leads to massive economic growth as well. more people can afford all necessities. Better paying jobs to afford even more consumption. The rich get richer even with higher taxes as they profit from selling more stuff. The combination means clean growth. Clean growth makes everyone happier and pro peace. Legitimizing degrowth exterminates those unable to afford resistance to oligarchy.
I think you’re missing my point now. Maybe the headphone example is weak, but it illustrates the point. Abundance is not necessarily abundance of wealth. Im arguing that reducing general production and increasing wealth are compatible. Making the distribution of wealth depend on abundant production, independently of quality, only overworks people and pollute the world.
Legitimizing degrowth exterminates those unable to afford resistance to oligarchy.
This seems too general. Defending degrowth may do that if its done in the specific way you have described before, but not generally. Resistance to oligarchy and general improvements to quality of life could have degrowth as a consequence, not the other way around. What you seem to be criticizing is that “other way around” thesis.
Removed by mod
And there’s also the incest part.
But that part comes with extra fingers!
But no guarantee of arms…
