"In #Deutschland ist der #Firmenwagenmarkt für Autobauer bedeutender als der Privatmarkt. Fast zwei Drittel (64,1 Prozent) der im vergangenen Jahr neu angemeldeten Pkw wurden auf gewerbliche Halter zugelassen. Dabei dominierten #Fahrzeuge mit #Verbrennungsmotor."
Auch heute noch werden bei Neubauplanungen an Firmengebäuden, auch bei landesweiten Groß-Institutionen im Sozialbereich überdachte Fahrradstellplätze mit Lademöglichtkeit abgelehnt, weil angeblich kein Bedarf. Es gibt auch kein #Deutschlandticket als #Jobticket wenn Land #NRW der Arbeitgeber ist. Aber #Lützerath platt machen... Ihr seit echte Profis beim #Klimaschutz, nicht.
I feel the boat that leads to the soft landing sank around the same time as the Titanic.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't do everything possible now to retain some control over the transition, otherwise we're looking at the complete catastrophic collapse of every aspect of human civilisation, like a row of dominoes balancing on a tightrope in the path of a hurricane.
Steeper, scarier, and far more dangerous than the wildest roller-coaster ride you can imagine...
Over the past 150 years, our industrial society has been on an insane spree, extracting all the fossil fuels we can find and gleefully burning them to fuel pathological growth, heedless of any environmental costs.
But we are nearing the apex of this joyride. Within the next few decades we will reach the top and then come plummeting down.
There is, however, an option: we can try for a soft landing, getting used to a different way of life now, or we can hope to survive later when cataclysmic changes are suddenly forced upon us by Gaia.
They're in favor of degrowth, it turns out. Here is some of what they have to say, in their response to the analysis from Rees and Seibert...
Most post-carbon hopes are built on replacing fossil fuels with renewable sources of “clean” electricity, a tall order because only “19% of global energy consumption is in the form of electricity. The other 81% is in the form of liquid fuel” [oil and LNG, i.e., carbon].
In the U.S. alone, that means we would need an electrical “grid construction rate 14 times that of the rate over the past half-century.” Moreover, we’d have to “quadruple annual construction of wind turbines every year for the next 15 years and triple annual construction of solar PV (photovoltaics) every year for the next 15 years,” too.
And, if we pull those miracles off, we’d need to “repeat the process indefinitely since solar panels and wind turbines have an average lifespan of 15 to 30 years.”
Neither improbability, however, accounts for one ounce of the energy required “to make solar panels, high-tech wind turbines, batteries, and all other industrial products” that we would need to transition from fossil fuels to electricity.
And even if we clear that hurdle, “An entire year of production from the world’s largest lithium-ion battery manufacturing facility — Tesla’s $5 billion Gigafactory in Nevada — could store only three minutes’ worth of annual U.S. electricity demand.”
Next, the Farm and Dairy folks tell us that climate change isn’t the problem. And they're right!
Because climate change isn’t really a problem, per se. It's a symptom of the actual problem, which is...
Ecological overshoot: too much fossil fuel use, too much carbon, too many people, and too much unsustainable growth.
The answer to this overshoot “is both stunningly simple and wretchedly complex: the world must abandon neoliberal capitalism’s material growth and face head-on that material life after fossil fuels will closely resemble life before fossil fuels.”
That doesn’t mean oil lamps and walking to town. It does mean, however, conservation and smarter use because, for instance, “62% of energy flow through the modern economy is wasted” today.
But, add the authors, the future, like the past, will be powered by more “human muscle and draft animals.”
Sure, laugh the agbiz advocates, and how will you feed 8 billion-plus people?
Here’s where the “wretchedly complex” part comes in. We won’t have to because “Failure to implement a planned, relatively painless population reduction strategy,” predict the authors, “would guarantee a traumatic population crash imposed by Nature in a climate-ravaged, fossil-energy-devoid world.”
“This is,” after all, “a finite planet with limited productive capacity.”
That also means “a renewed focus on community building and regional self-reliance; re-localization of essential production and other economic activities” with an “emphasis on economic resilience over mere efficiency.”
Hard truths to face. Tough solutions to implement. Difficult choices to make.
But if you look deeply enough at the problem, there's only one answer. Degrowth.
Wo jetzt die Diskussionen über Growth / Degrowth losgehen, würde ich gern einwerfen, dass das Wachstum der letzten zwanzig Jahre an der arbeitenden Bevölkerung und der Wohlfahrt der Gesellschaft (Schulen, Strassen, etc.) weitestgehend vorbeigegangen ist...
#Introduction#NeuHier Testing out Calckey and see how this affects my Fediverse experience. My main account will remain with #Mastodon.social but let's see. My main interests in being online are nerd stuff and (non-US!!!) politics - I'm German after all. Love #sciencefiction both on screen and in novel form, #starwars, #doctorwho, #theexpanse and the usual stuff. Am also still (late 40s) enjoying #videogames on my #steamdeck and #xboxseriess. Lately back in #EliteDangerous o7, madly in love with #MassEffect and, to a lesser extent, #DragonAge. My politics are #green, thus my interest in #solarpunk, but I have no illusions that without some form of drastic behavior and institution change, nothing will happen – and that includes deliberate #degrowth in the global north. Anyways, nice to be "here" 👋
@ubiquity75 Personal observation: Community and engagement with others, is what adds richness and meaning to life., not the false dreams, products, and services billionaires want to sell you. #degrowth is personal growth.
It can be argued that electric vehicles are an improvement when replacing ICE vehicles.
But that misses a much bigger point — which is that the very best car is not an electric car. The very best car is no car at all!
Building electric cars requires massive use of fossil fuels, including petrochemicals for the manufacture of plastics. In addition, mining of lithium for batteries as well as trawling for other minerals in the deep ocean is environmentally disastrous, killing biodiversity while polluting our water, soil, and air.
The kind of “Green Growth” championed by capitalists and politicians, which features more electric cars, a bit of solar, and a few wind farms — along with continued use of fossil fuels — is not a good answer. It does not solve any of our problems, and in fact only makes them worse.
Say NO to more cars, of any kind. Push instead for active transportation and for improved public transit.
Continued economic growth is unsustainable. Period. The only logical choice for us and for the biosphere is de-growth.
I recently watched Strange World, largely because the animation looked interesting. However, I was extremely pleasantly surprised by the optimistic and surprisingly radical #solarpunk and #degrowth themes.
This quote summarizes so well one of the main reasons why I've been building my own software stack(s) for the past ~20 years:
“If you don’t develop your own technology, you will need to adapt to the language and patterns of the technology someone else developed – maybe in contradiction to your cultural values”. — Gualter Barbas Babtista
The National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan constatation^1 on US loss of competitiveness self-inflicted by the neoliberal ideological bias that free market will always choose optimal path:
> The People’s Republic of #China continued to subsidize at a massive scale both traditional industrial sectors, like steel, as well as key industries of the future, like clean energy, digital infrastructure, and advanced biotechnologies. America didn’t just lose manufacturing—we eroded our competitiveness in critical technologies that would define the future.
Was there anything preventing US from " subsidize at a massive scale" these sectors, apart from ideological choice? No, just like there's no physical principles preventing UK from electrifying its trains fleet whene everyone did that 30 years ago, rather than run diesel trains (!) well into 2020's. Except for maximizing their return on investment, which hampers new investments even when they're desperately needed.
Soviet ideological obsession on criminalization of any private trade (literally, see article 154 of the criminal code of the #USSR) led to shortages of everything, including toilet paper and eventually collapse of the regime. The system wasn't flexible, because ideology is by definition rigid.^2
Free market is on the opposite end of the scale, but it doesn't guarantee immunity to ideological rigidity on its own — a truly free market also includes freedom to use subsidies when they make sense, which neoliberal ideology prevents.
Having said that, Sullivan also makes plenty of valid points, such as this one about US and EU dependency on mining and manufacturing in China:
> Or consider critical minerals—the backbone of the clean-energy future. Today, the United States produces only 4 percent of the lithium, 13 percent of the cobalt, 0 percent of the nickel, and 0 percent of the graphite required to meet current demand for electric vehicles. Meanwhile, more than 80 percent of critical minerals are processed by one country, China. Clean-energy supply chains are at risk of being weaponized in the same way as oil in the 1970s, or natural gas in Europe in 2022. So through the investments in the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, we’re taking action.
The paradox of modern European environmentalism is that on one hand it postulates exponential growth in installed capacity of low-density energy sources, while actively preventing growth of mining and manufacturing in EU, as if the former literally appeared out of thin air.
Of course they don't: in addition to what's said above, #China already concentrated 70% of PV manufacturing, and these don't grow on trees but rely on millions of tons of minerals mined from the ground in Asia and Africa in high-energy industrial processes.
The result is not only yet another strategic supply dependence which ultimately will be leveraged against EU, just as the oil and gas dependence was, but leaves the mining and manufacturing out of the EU environmental control, making this a rare exercise in hypocrisy and magic thinking.
For generations, those of us in the Global North have benefited from lives of great privilege. Some of this was inherited by chance. Much of it was taken by force.
We, the lucky few, have hoarded and exploited Earth’s natural resources, taken cruel advantage of cheap labor from the Global South, gleefully wallowed in excess and luxury while believing our privilege was the blessing of a just God.
Now is the time to reverse this wrong. Not only is it, by any measure, the right and moral thing to do — it also is required to have any hope of avoiding the most dreadful outcomes imaginable.
If the Global North does not radically and rapidly scale down, ending our destructive imperialist and consumerist ways while also supporting the Global South in both decarbonizing and reducing poverty, then in time, likely within a few decades, our entire modern civilization will collapse.
Suffering, death, calamity after calamity — possibly even nuclear war — this is the horrifying future our children and grandchildren face. No wonder suicide is on the rise among the young.
The only way to prevent such an awful tomorrow is to change our ways today.
Feeling like Deutsche Bhan single handedly holds the responsibility to make an ecological transition to travel in EU possible. Germany is central to EU international #rail travel. If DB does not get its shit together on #train connections and delays, cars and planes will always be a strong user preference. Will be for me for sure. #travel#europe#germany#sustainability#sustainabletransport
@securescientist Transport Minister #Wissing had announced there'll be major repair and apparently also expansion projects to the railway system throughout the country from 2024 onwards.
Major delays are to be expected. Sueddeutsche Zeitung had a short-ish article about it a few months back.
What's necessary until CO2zero: fix mobility rations. Not rationing per price as it is now in the utterly misguided and inadequate socioeconomic system – but per capita.
Without exceptions.
People need to learn what it means to live on a finite planet with finite resources – and people in Global North had all the fun up to now, splurging currently on more than 4 times too much resource use.
You can read here which rations – mobility rations as well – fit into planetary boundaries in Global North and Global South, in rural and urban areas, land and air transport: https://www.boell.de/en/2020/12/09/societal-transformation-scenario-staying-below-15degc
It used to be a model scenario for near 1.5°C but isn't anymore. The Carbon Clock is ticking. ..So while reading this highly recommended paper, adjust their figures for kilometres, heated living space etc. downward in your mind.
The neoliberal #Bertelsmannstiftung has a brand new paper out this month in which they suggest a climate credit card that also covers kilometre rations. IIRC their figure is 5000km/per capita/year. Which is roughly what the paper by #Boellstiftung suggests for rural population.
But being of the neoliberal church, Bertelsmannstiftung disregards planetary boundaries and a fix CO2 budget, and they say that more kilometres can "of course" be purchased but at a higher price...🤦♀️ When will they ever learn...
Blind ignorants – or deliberate disregard due to sociopathy? I'm always unsure with neoliberals. #Degrowth#rationing#ration#Neoliberal
The simultaneous crisis of inequality and climate is no fluke. Both are the result of decades of deliberate choices made, and policies enacted, by ultra-wealthy and powerful corporations. We can address both crises by doing these four things. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuXURo0FUjM
Steve Genco has just posted the final (depressing) installment of his superbly written three-part series on "the existential problem of degrowth in a world that still believes in perpetual economic growth."
It's a long article, and I hope you'll read the whole thing, indeed the whole series. But for now, here is an excerpt...
The effects of climate change on the world’s economy will be felt first and most devastatingly in the Global South, where heatwaves, floods, droughts, coral reef die-offs, sea level rise, disease, and inadequate infrastructure in large parts of Africa, Asia, and South America are likely to put the lives of billions of people at risk, rendering those regions at first unproductive and eventually, depending on how hot it gets, uninhabitable.
If citizens of the Global North think these effects can be confined to the Global South, they are sadly mistaken. A recent study quantified the extent to which consumption in the North is dependent on the resources, land, and labor of the South. According to this analysis, the North’s dependence on cheap products and labor from the Global South adds up to an appropriation of approximately 12 billion tons of “free” raw material equivalents every year, making up 43% of the North’s total annual material consumption. In other words, nearly half of the North’s annual material consumption is net appropriated from the South.
Should this source of cheap products and labor dry up (literally), the effects on consumption in the North will be devastating, far greater than any shortages experienced in the past. As the impacts of extreme weather in the South accumulate, consumers in the North will begin to see a wide range of products disappearing from their store shelves. From fresh foods to household goods to building materials to automobiles to spare parts, things will become more scarce and more expensive.
Then, as the climate heats up, as agriculture and manufacturing collapse in the Global South, and as governments in the Global North become more and more preoccupied with climate damage and economic shocks within their own borders, nations may become less committed to coordinated global action and more inclined to “go it alone” by abandoning mitigation solutions (ways to avoid the worst effects of climate change) in favor of adaptation solutions (ways to cope with the worst effects of climate change). This drift toward adaptation over mitigation is likely to be a luxury only the most wealthy nations can afford.
As nations turn inward, as civil unrest grows, and as climate disasters multiply, politically-acceptable “solutions” to climate breakdown and resource depletion are likely to become more interventionist externally and more repressive internally. Externally, we are more likely to see the powerful take what their populations demand from the less powerful, whether “strategic” minerals, fresh water, or arable land. Internally, it will be hard for democracies to survive, as deconsumption and escalating natural disasters cause populations to lose trust and confidence in their governments, creating conditions ripe for the rise of repressive authoritarian regimes.
Clearly, decades of increasingly strident warnings from the scientific community have not changed our trajectory. Persuasion has not worked. Exhortations to “heed our better angels” have not worked. Painting visions of future hellscapes has not worked.
I believe we will only abandon our mental model of economic growth and capitalist accumulation involuntarily, kicking and screaming, deflecting, denying, and resisting. Powerful political and economic forces will continue to support the model and defend it until long after its expiration date. This failure to embrace inevitable change will add incalculable damage and suffering to our transition out of the Age of Oil. It may, indeed, end us before we have a chance to come to terms with our situation and begin rebuilding our civilization along more sustainable lines.
I really hope he's wrong, but I'm afraid the signs right now are not very encouraging.
Before anyone claims that by posting criticisms of green growth, I am in effect supporting the fossil fuel industry’s agenda of Business As Usual, let me say out loud and very plain, I am against ALL new growth in the privileged world.
I’m against “green growth” and I’m certainly against additional fossil fuel growth. We’ve had more than enough already. We’ve done enough. We’ve taken too much and destroyed too much.
Those of us in the privileged Western world must be prepared to take a big step back, to lower our expectations and accept a standard of living closer to the way our grandparents lived. That wasn’t so bad, really, and it did FAR less damage to the environment.
Now, one more excerpt from TruthDig's excellent piece on "The Green Growth Delusion," this time focusing on the direction our society must take if we have any hope of providing a somewhat livable world to our children and grandchildren.
Jason Hickel, professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology in Barcelona and author of “Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World,” says that empirical evidence “does not support the theory of green growth,” because staying within planetary boundaries is likely to require something completely different: a massive reduction of less-necessary forms of economic activity in high-income countries; a “de-growth” of industries that are organized mostly around capital accumulation and elite consumption and have little or nothing to do with human well-being.
Hickel and other degrowthists point out that the only way we can feasibly decarbonize fast enough to meet the Paris Agreement goals and reduce other ecological pressures is to scale down industries and activities that we obviously do not need: SUVs, private jets, yachts, fast fashion, industrial beef, commercial air travel, arms, advertising, etc. We should not be devoting energy and materials to producing these things in the middle of a climate and ecological emergency.
Instead, we should focus the economy on what is really necessary to support good lives for all, within planetary boundaries. This requires dramatically reducing the purchasing power of the rich, and ensuring universal access to livelihoods, affordable housing and necessary public services.
Degrowthists entertain the heretical idea that a more hopeful future requires more than the hyper-development of green technology to displace fossil fuels. This alternative hopeful future does not maintain GDP growth or strive to constantly increase economic complexity.
If we are to avoid ecological collapse, we must take the opposite path, one of contraction and simplification, a downsizing of the economy and population, so that Homo sapiens can prosper within the regenerative and assimilative capacity of the biosphere. In other words, we must live within our planet’s biophysical limits.
Green New Dealers who promote a growthist future, meanwhile, appear to have little understanding of basic ecological and biophysical reality. For these true believers the only approaches to sustainability — the approaches that happily align with the objectives of governments in bed with corporations — are those that attempt to arrest carbon emissions with technological innovation and economic expansion, both persisting forever, mutually reinforcing.
That's the battle we're engaged in now, facing the formidable alliance of Big Oil, Big Green, and Big Government, with both Democrats and Republicans adamantly opposing what is so desperately needed.
Can the fight for degrowth and a healthy planetary ecosystem succeed? Probably not, but the only hope is to give it all we've got.
It's a fight now, truly a fight for survival not only of the human race but of countless plant and animal species we will drag with us into extinction unless we, the planetary overlords, immediately change our ways.
This David and Goliath battle is between a tiny minority arguing for de-growth, on one side, and an army of giants on the other side, business-as-usual fossil fuel interests combined with proponents of "green growth" and the Green New Deal.
That unholy alliance of Big Oil with Big Green, which may seem jarring to some, is fully explained in a brilliant piece recently posted at TruthDig.
It's a long read, but absolutely essential to gain a full understanding of what we're up against in this life-or-death struggle.
THE GREEN GROWTH DELUSION
Advocates of “Green Growth” promise a painless transition to a post-carbon future. But what if the limits of renewable energy require sacrificing consumption as a way of life?
Survival game where you learn to be a part of an ecosystem and slowly abandon your unsustainable "tech tree" replacing it with sustainable, local solutions.
A lot of games are trying to replicate very expansionist core loops, be it Minecraft's, Factorio's and so on, which see the player as a force acting on the environment / ecosystem, not working together with it.
You are still an agent, you can decide your fate, you have a knowledge base and tools, but you learn you can adapt and not just destroy or forcefully change.
You slowly carve a niche for yourself.
It's a #game of understanding, it's a game of a #sustainable#solarpunk#degrowth , where you shed the parts which are not useful in the new environment.
Imagine giving the players a feeling similar to the last loop in #outerWilds : it's the same as the first one, and yet everything is different, because of your knowledge, of the context you have. You don't see enemies, you see animals you can coexist with, you don't see impossible obstacles, you see nature you can be a part of, give and take.
Scientists at the DOE/Argonne National Laboratory say they've developed a new method for recycling high-density polyethylene (HDPE) into a fully recyclable and potentially biodegradable material that can be recycled repeatedly without loss of quality.
Humans only know two kinds of 'degrowth'. One is where one group kills another and burns their city to the ground, and the other is the one that mother nature deals out equally to all #systems, called '#collapse'.
IMO, the label of #degrowth is a poor choice. Nonetheless, the local strategies espoused are sound, as they provide the conditions needed for the #evolution of #sustainable models in the post-collapse #environment.
We are well into #overshoot, and more basic survival will soon be the only thing many will worry about. We will not see a single strategy consensus here, we'll see a chaotic blend of mostly ineffective measures, followed by the a return to many of the the old ways, which will unfortunately include a lot of violence, mass migration, etc.
A personal focus on making the necessary changes in life to become less dependent on extended connections, and more self-sufficient seems to be the best mindset.