De-growth means lowering humanity's total energy output. Lowering our total energy output means lowering humanity's average life expectancy, quality of life, and the size of our overall economic pie. These are all negative side-effects with comparable potential for societal destabilization as the effects of rising sea levels or increasing global temperatures.
There are solutions to climate change that avoid de-growth and its many negative consequences, such as increasing our investment in nuclear energy. Some states already see things this way, such as China, where the government has announced plans to build 150 new reactors by 2050:
De-growth shouldn't significantly lower average life expectancy - after all in developed nations a high percentage of deaths are due to lifestyle decisions that are only possible because of our high use of technology and exogenous energy sources. As long as we still retain the knowledge on how to treat most diseases, and the physical infrastructure of our health-care systems, there's good reason to suppose average human health/life expectancy might well improve with the right sort and amount of de-growth.
"Quality of life" is much harder to judge. It would definitely feel like a step down for many people used to just having everything and anything they want delivered to their door at the click of a mouse button. And it's true there's no good example that I know of a large population smoothly transitioning into a lifestyle with a significantly lower material standard of living. But I'm not convinced it couldn't be achieved in such a way that most people would come to accept that we've gained more than we've lost.
Our ability to transform matter at always bigger scales and rates, which is proportional to the energy we master, is what has driven the current environmental crisis (were not all the imminent existential threats are climate change, although climate change is the most obvious one).
If we keep the same consumerist and expansionist culture and add more energy to the mix (even if it’s climate-friendly energy), i.e. more capacity to extract resources deeper and deeper, become more dependent on them and disperse them in our constructions, devices, ground, water and atmosphere, what do you think will happen?
Energy will be key in amortizing the pains of de-growth, but de-growth will happen on a planet with finite resources, whether we want it or not.
We have no issue with finite resources. We have plenty of energy and raw materials for everything we want for a long time.
The challenge is working out how to access those resources in ways that don’t harm our lives. That is a technically possible challenge, but the problem is that it is much more efficient in the short term to harvest resources in a destructive manner. Without some sort of collective action, the destructive manner simply outcompetes the sustainable methods.
Agreed about the fact that collective action will be the solution.
But about resources it is true that we can harvest them in a less destructive manner, will that be enough? Or do we also need to harvest less of them?
The gap we need to bridge is to harvest in such a less destructive manner that 1) they can regenerate themselves at the same rate as we harvest them, making our civilisation actually sustainable 2) they don't harm us directly indeed.
Can we bridge that gap by harvesting in a less destructive manner?
1) How is the phosphorus - vital for our current food system - that we harvest in mines concentrated for us during billions of years going to regenerate? Same for oil, gas, rare metals, all the silicon and metal that we disperse in our devices etc etc going to regenerate themselves? Should we bet on our ability to figure that out in the next 30-50 years?
2) so far the rate at which we harm ourselves due to the amount of garbage we throw at nature (i.e. everything we make, build and reject) has only increased with progress. Should we bet we are going to reverse that just with technology in the next 30-50 years?
If we lose the bet, the consequences are never seen in history.... I'd rather bet on more reliable methods to survive...
Which resource is really limited? Raw materials are rarely destroyed, only converted to other things... if you have enough energy, you can reuse them... so energy is the limiting factor, and there is PLENTY of energy to harvest.
1) Energy is the limiting factor IF we decide to do different things than we have done so far. So far what we have done with energy is mainly deplete and destroy things. In other words: we are very clumsy in the way we control matter, we cause tremendous side effects with our actions that are going to end up swallowing us back into the abyss if we don't change.
2) Energy being the limiting factor is in itself a huge problem, given the amount of energy your problem requires: the amount of energy required to get the original quality raw materials back from an iPhone is orders of magnitude bigger than the one that was needed to extract them from nature in the first place. It seems irrational to bet on this as a means for getting to a sustainable model in the short term (30-50 years).
This is an unscientific viewpoint. The current climate crisis has been driven by man-made carbon emissions. Our ability to transform matter at always-bigger scales, or merely at the scale of our current rate of consumption (see declining global fertility), does not rely solely on carbon-emitting forms of energy production.
> Lowering our total energy output means lowering humanity's average life expectancy
This is totally illogical -> oversized cars and consumption of meat are the biggest consumers of energy, and they only cause death. They serve no practical purpose society wide.
Rather, what we need is lowering humanity's total energy input. That same approach has been preached by MBA business types for decades, under the moniker "efficiency". I don't see why we can't do for energy efficiency what we've been doing for labour efficiency for decades, but it does require a more comprehensive management focus.
I don't see a-priori how "de-growth" should lead to lowering living standards, other than by implication of the (IMHO ill-chosen) word.
I'm pretty sure the average person in my country consume at least half the average american does, and we still have a better life expectancy. And i'm not sure, even not accounting for the hapiness treadmill, that the QOL is higher for the average american. Depends on your hobbies i guess?
Your reasoning is flawed, technically if we make things last longer, be repairable, skip vacations on the other side of the planet and stop buying so much cheap plastic crap we would most definitely "degrow" but the quality of life would at least remain unchanged.
Capitalism is a beast that needs constant feeding, it doesn't do much good in many cases, it's just growth for the sake of it.
The vast bulk of global energy production does not go towards "cheap plastic crap" or vacationing. It goes towards transportation (which affects the base cost of practically all economic activity), industrial uses that are essential to healthcare, construction, and agriculture, and the heating and cooling of our living spaces and places of work. These expenditures will only increase as the world's human population increases to a projected ceiling of around 10 billion. In addition, replacements for "cheap plastic crap" may consume more energy to produce, even if their production emits less carbon.
There are certainly efficiency gains to be had. They will not be made overnight. America's housing stock alone can't be replaced in a week, or a year, or a decade with hyper-insulating, low-emission construction materials. Changing from one mode of construction, consumption, or production to another has an energy cost, too.
Kate Soper makes the case that quality of life would improve significantly if we took these steps. The carbon-intensive "good life" leaves us time poor and stressed.
You can argue how much a change in quality of life it is, but not being able to travel or buy cheap plastic things is certainly a reduction in quality of life.
About transport - we can always switch to greener alternatives. Forbid oil-based flying, and the need to travel will bring new solutions.
Plastic is a crap and poison from the time of manufacture, not enhancement of quality of life. There is nothing (except medical equipment maybe) positive about it.
There are solutions to climate change that avoid de-growth and its many negative consequences, such as increasing our investment in nuclear energy. Some states already see things this way, such as China, where the government has announced plans to build 150 new reactors by 2050:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli...