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You're so wrong that you could hardly be any more wrong.

Economic growth is possible without consuming more resources. That's literally what technology is - producing more output with less input.

Rich countries have grown over the past 20 years without increasing CO2 emissions. Most developing countries have also grown faster than their CO2 emissions.

https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-relationship-between-gr...

Degrowth is murder, anyone promoting it is evil.




Degrowth is murder is not an argument.

Is that the best we can do in this day and age? Is this really the level of argumentation that we are at?

OP posted a comment and even provided evidence for his argument in one of his/her other comment. You did not.

You cherry picked 1 fact about CO2 emissions that is not even related to what OP was talking about which was resource scarcity and decrease in biodiversity.

Finally, even if your argument is correct regarding the fact that CO2 emissions are declining in the developed countries, it is only valid if you don't take into account the fact that developed countries have outsourced most of their manufacturing to developing countries.

That means that this CO2 was if fact emitted, just not counted in the stats of the developed countries anymore.

We can hardly call that a victory.


For some people growth is more like a religion, than something one can rationally examine that has tradeoffs.

And the religion even comes with miracles, where for any given problem caused by growth throwing more growth into it will fix it, usually by handwaving about non existing technologies that will "surely" arrive, or existing technologies that never proved themselves beyond toy scale.

And, as we can see from the "degrowth is murder" the religion comes with ethical deadly sins and fire-and-brimstone too.


Is this really the level of argumentation that we are at?

I believe that’s where we at for most topics, we just tend to avoid places where exclamations get more attention than reason.


read the article I linked to

> The fall in CO2 emissions in advanced economies is also seen while considering consumption-based metrics, meaning that the fall in emissions in these regions is not merely a result of offshoring of manufacturing.


From you own quote: not merely. So it is in part responsible.

And I can also point to many dozens of article that agree with my statement.

But for the sake of argument, let's assume that you are completely correct, that doesn't change anything about deforestation, soil depletion, over-fishing and many other issues that have not been addressed.

All of these issues have nothing to do with CO2. So my original point stands. You are focusing on the CO2 part when OP was talking about resource depletion in the first place.

You can choose to bury your head in the sand and think that everything is fine, but that doesn't make it true.

On that note, considering that you did not address the point in my original comment, I can honestly say that you are arguing in bad faith and I don't have time for that so feel free to not respond.


Yeah I also find it hard to argue with such dishonesty, inability/unwillingness to look at statistics, and intellectual retardation.

Deforestation isn't an issue in advanced economies, e.g. in Europe. See OurWorldInData

Soil depletion? What's that? Plants don't need soil to grow, plants need nutrients (and can easily grow in water or even air!). We've been supplying nutrients artificially for more than a century now (see Haber-Bosch process). I'm sure we can continue doing so, just better with newer technology.

Netherlands is a tiny country, one of the worlds top food producers and exporters, and one quarter of its land is reclaimed (used to be the sea). It's not a problem.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/holland-...

> Each acre in the greenhouse yields as much lettuce as 10 outdoor acres and cuts the need for chemicals by 97 percent.

Over-fishing might be a problem, but we're solving it rapidly with aquaculture (farming of aquatic organisms). China is the other problem, e.g. they're fishing illegally in international waters off Argentina, probably will need to be reined in by international armed forces.

https://ourworldindata.org/fish-and-overfishing

Resources aren't a problem, peak oil is getting further and further away (because of fracking, new technologies, and new oil fields), and we're finding more and more other useful resources. With the advent of "too cheap to meter during daytime" solar power, we'll have more energy to extract/refine/recycle resources from other places as well (desalination, uranium from seawater, CO2-free steel, artificial (non-fossil) hydrogen and methane etc.).

Biodiversity might be a problem, but as with the above, I'm certain we'll be able to solve it.

Bottom line is, degrowth "green" propagandists are wrong, have always been wrong ("glaciers will be gone by 2020" LOL), and will continue to be wrong. Believe in our high-tech post-scarcity increasingly-moral free-market-capitalist civilization.


>("glaciers will be gone by 2020" LOL)

They're largely gone already.

And speaking of LOLing at failed predictions, do you know how many decades ago "too cheap to meter" electricity you've mentioned has been promised?

>Biodiversity might be a problem, but as with the above, I'm certain we'll be able to solve it.

Of course. With wishful thinking, anything is possible.

To sum up, technology will magically fix all the mess that growth and technology has created. Anything as long as we can have our cake and eat it too, and never make any sacrifice.

Even Alcubierre engines, so we can go and fetch resources from the Galaxy!


> Degrowth is murder, anyone promoting it is evil.

That's some emotive rhetoric there. I'm thinking that you're pretty passionate about the subject, and therefore not remotely objective.


I have used objective reasoning to conclude that degrowth is murder. Now I'm passionately opposing it. Same with Nazism, Communism, Decolonization, Hamas, etc.


How do you define murder ?


children dying because you don't produce enough food to feed them. people dying because your economy cannot support high technology required to make advanced drugs. old people freezing to death because you don't produce enough energy to heat their homes

this isn't a hypothetical. Look at any communist regime!


Yeah, right, but gppp’s degrowth means “not producing more humans than needed followed by food reduction”, not “starving the excess to death”. You’re seeing what isn’t there (and are all over the place in general, which makes it hard to reason).


Again, these emotive arguments: Children dying, sick people dying, old people dying.

None of that is actually murder. I don't think it's great, but it's not murder. However, I do wonder on your position on abortion? And preventative and responsible birth control? Would you count any of that as murder?

(There are plenty of fascist dictatorships and corrupt regiemes you could go for, but you pick "communism"?)


Pretty sure it's a logical fallacy to group the current argument with widely agreed and totally unrelated bads.


How is degrowth murder? Is it murder if the entire planets worth of women aren't constantly pregnant because not embracing any and all potential for human life is murder?

Are you trying to say that saying only a % of people can have children is murder in regards to those that don't get to? Aren't we already doing this by imposing financial circumstances/classes on people rather than evenly distributing wealth as much as possible?




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