'Green growth' doesn't exist - less of everything is the only way to avert catastrophe

[CousinIT]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/29/green-growth-economic-activity-environment

George Monbiot
It is simply not possible to carry on at the current level of economic activity without destroying the environment

There is a box labelled “climate”, in which politicians discuss the climate crisis. There is a box named “biodiversity”, in which they discuss the biodiversity crisis. There are other boxes, such as pollution, deforestation, overfishing and soil loss, gathering dust in our planet’s lost property department. But they all contain aspects of one crisis that we have divided up to make it comprehensible. The categories the human brain creates to make sense of its surroundings are not, as Immanuel Kant observed, the “thing-in-itself”. They describe artefacts of our perceptions rather than the world.

Nature recognises no such divisions. As Earth systems are assaulted by everything at once, each source of stress compounds the others.

. . .

Combined impacts are laying waste to entire living systems. When coral reefs are weakened by the fishing industry, pollution and the bleaching caused by global heating, they are less able to withstand the extreme climate events, such as tropical cyclones, which our fossil fuel emissions have also intensified. When rainforests are fragmented by timber cutting and cattle ranching, and ravaged by imported tree diseases, they become more vulnerable to the droughts and fires caused by climate breakdown.

What would we see if we broke down our conceptual barriers? We would see a full-spectrum assault on the living world. Scarcely anywhere is now safe from this sustained assault. A recent scientific paper estimates that only 3% of the Earth’s land surface should now be considered “ecologically intact”.

The various impacts have a common cause: the sheer volume of economic activity. We are doing too much of almost everything, and the world’s living systems cannot bear it. But our failure to see the whole ensures that we fail to address this crisis systemically and effectively.

[lagomorph777]

1. Pandemics are nature's way of telling us to come home.

The only solution is fewer people.

[marie999]

2. The planet will continue getting worse until there a far fewer people.

Eventually, this will happen and the planet will regenerate itself. The people that are left will forget all about climate change and pollution and the population will repopulate the planet to overcrowding again and again and again until the sun makes the planet a barren rock.

[SamKnause]

8. In your scenario who will keep the 440+ nuclear power plants from over heating after a mass die off?

[Sympthsical]

9. People will turn them off as needed.

Depopulation isn’t the Rapture.

[marie999]

10. SCRAM and others like it are protocols which can shut down the reactors completely.

They would keep them running until all the fuel is spent. They do not need humans to shut them down. The big problem would be a natural disaster like Fukushima. So I guess if most reactors are shut down most of the damage would be localized.

[hunter]

3. We should be paying people to experiment with lifestyles having very small environmental footprints.

We'd measure the success of these experiments in terms of happiness, not any sort of economic productivity.

Economic productivity as we now define it is a direct measure of the damage we are doing to earth's natural environment and our own human spirit.

[markie]

5. oh the irony...

"We should be paying people t...." I understand what you say but no matter, it all still boils down to the insatiable quest for money we are such a flawed species

[marie999]

11. Probably only about 75-80% are flawed enough to not care about the planet.

[llmart]

12. +1

I, for one, do not want to get lumped into the conspicuous consumer class because I live very simply. I have everything I need and I am truly content.

I'm just hoping that the younger generations eschew recreational shopping. It seems that a lot of them have. That gives me hope. Many of them are also not interested in owning a car.

[hunter]

13. The invention of money probably doomed the human race to a quick extinction.

It's complete madness to reduce the "value" of nearly everything down to a single metric.

[markie]

4. "Live Simply, That Others May Simply Live"

^ sign on my refrigerator... I once taught an informal class "Alternatives to Consumption" we need to make it cool again...

[Hugh_Lebowski]

6. So much this ...

People who think we can 'renewable' our way into saving the planet while at the same time retaining our 'standard of living' and 'perpetual growth economy' are dreamers.

Fossil fuels are what make what we think of as the modern lifestyle physically possible.

To cut them out, there must be way less people, living much simpler, more localized lives.

[2naSalit]

7. +1

[hunter]

14. There are multiple pathways to "way less people."

Most of them are extremely unpleasant.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

15. Honestly, barring a tech miracle, we waited too long, and extremely unpleasant outcomes are a given

at this stage.

Fact is, we humans utterly and miserably failed to act when we were 'free to do so', despite ample warning.

Decisions are going to be made for all of us in the not too distant future that most of us won't like. Whether it's by other humans, or Mother Nature.