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Degrowth has an image problem it desperately needs to overcome | Larry Elliott
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2024
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Degrowth
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There are absolutly policies, which are in effect enabling degrowth. For one things like a well run cap and trade system(no offsets) for emissions, working hour limits and other worker protections, public health care to take out risks of working less, earlier retirment for workers, enabling sharing of resources with liberaries, public transport and so forth, and quite a few more. Sitting back and relaxing is certainly a viable path, but it is not like politics can not pay its part.
Also for the last point, the key metric is per capita income. An Indian billionaire is just way worse for the climate then an English bus driver. The narrative should be from rich to poor no matter what and the middle just transitions to green energy. You get a lot of problems, when using the West vs rest of the world. For example China and the EU have pretty similar per capita emissions today.
Yeah I mostly agree here, but there are two extra bits I'd want to add:
See how you had to add a bunch of clarifying comments, so if I point at a bunch of existing cap-and-trade systems you'd have to sigh and say "no, this one also sucks"? That's what I mean when I say that any idea we can create will immediately get re-interpreted into something completely toothless. I'm not saying we don't need to fight here, I'm saying that Degrowth doesn't have a marketing problem. Even the places with a carbon tax charge way too little. The fangs are a feature.
I agree here but also, the poorer countries have vastly superior sustainability options because waste is simply much harder to deal with there. You can't throw a plastic bottle away because there's no rubbish bin to put it into. There's no garbage trucks, everything is more or less recycled because the government doesn't do that job. The places are also more dense and walkable by necessity, because people can't afford cars. The "rich" countries need to rebuild back what the poor countries already have. Someone from a richer country ipso facto must emit more, so it's all about re-aligning society to be more sustainable.
EU ETS has no offsets and is well enough run, to bring the price to 62€/t. For some sectors such as the electricity sector that is a significant price. For electricity that roguhly doubles the price for coal and about a 50% increase for gas. It is also enough to make large steel manufacturers invest a lot into hydrogen steel manufacturing.
Rich countries have cleaner electricity grids, thanks to massive investments into renewables(for the most part), large rail systems with high speed rail, rail based urban transport systems even in smaller cities and so forth. The challenge is lowering consumption and well change some infrastructure, but that is not that hard.
Yeah fair cop I'll take that. The only critique I'd have is that the price is a bit low, maybe suspiciously so, and it has had the side-effect of "exporting" emissions & emissions reduction to other countries.
I dunno man it's super hard to convince my wife to take the train. Almost all of the "problems" to climate change have ready solutions. The social issues are what limit us now. People get annoyed if you tell them they can't have or can no longer afford a thing.