When you’re in a hole, stop digging. If the hole is climate breakdown, stop digging coal. Green growthers pretend to recognise this, they say we must stop digging coal, but they assume business as usual can carry on – same economic system, different sources of energy. But the digging will continue, on a massive scale.
If all fossil fuels are switched for renewables, if the world’s vehicle fleet is replaced by electric alternatives, then the planet’s lithium reserves will all be mined—and the process of mining will in itself take an immense amount of energy. Much of this will reproduce relations of imperialism as well—look at Germany’s lithium-grab in Bolivia. The rich car-producing states are lining up.
The solutions that the green growthers are projecting don’t add up. Of course, they’ll respond: ‘lithium was only discovered as a chemical for batteries in the 1990s and in ten years time there’ll be a new one discovered’. Maybe. But we can’t bet the future of the planet on this kind of speculation.
It does seem increasingly hard to ignore the necessity of degrowth until and whether technosocialism ever becomes viable.
hits bong but unironically what if we like, make an stock index, but for degrowth, like shorting the entire market itself by selling futures on the world economy or w/e, but the fund is kept afloat by speculative investing that degrowth is inevitable (like how Elon Musk is richest man in the world based on speculative investing in Tesla)? And we make the biggest buyers of the index world governments, that way it can from the start be like, the biggest market, and their initial investment boosts legitimacy to undeniable levels from day 1.
*hitting the bong until my brain explodes into full social democracy*
I do agree tho lmao, it’d be very “socialism with American characteristics” which is gonna be somewhat cursed by nature
False dichotomy
pretty much, I think it’s all about strategic and planned use of developing absolutely essential aspects of production, especially in areas of the world that haven’t been allowed to do so, while cutting out so much of our unecessary production and waste. My hunch is this will result in a net “de-growth,” but there is definitely a lot of shifting within that. At this point, the name of the game is really just survival with some amount of industrial capacity to create socialism.
the whole needing fuck loads of batteries and so needing fuckloads of lithium thing ( from our cars to our new wireless everything ) is why the whole Nuclear vs Cheap Solar debate isn’t going to go away anytime soon imo. I mean just cause other renewable are cheaper to build and install doesn’t mean they’re better what are you a cost-minded capitalist or something.
