Climate Solutions: The Degrowth Path
I’ve change my mind: The degrowth path is the only way
Oh lord, I am being just so whishy-washy! First, I preached the techno-optimist path to resolving our climate catastrophe. Then I endorsed the business-as-usual path. But mega-excellent responses to the previous article opened my eyes, and I am now positive that the degrowth path is the only sensible approach.
We cannot just do nothing. If we let things take care of themselves, the death and destruction is going to be just too much. We simply cannot expect our current way of life to continue more or less the same, no matter how good our technologies are. Because there are just too damn many people on the damn planet!
No, the only path to a reasonably sane and prosperous, sustainable society requires that we pull back. We’ve gone too far. Let’s unwind some of it.
Let’s start by not having babies. Better to winnow the herd by attrition than to wait for Mother Nature to do it ugly. We don’t need to go as far as the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT) urges, which is total extinction of the species. But let’s get it down from six billion to one or two billion, what do you say?
I’m not advocating euthanasia, pograms, genocide, or anything nasty like that. We should simply stop having babies, “voluntarily”, same as VHEMT preaches. But I put “voluntarily” in scare quotes because techniques to influence human behaviour are so advanced these days these days, is anything we do truly voluntary anymore?
We’ve got great technologies to prevent pregnancies, with condoms, birth-control pills, Plan-B, and abortion. We just need to persuade everybody to use them.
Start with making the technologies and services for pregnancy planning and birth control free to the end user.
Then put together an ongoing series of stupendous advertising and social media campaigns to change social norms from expecting couples to have babies, to expecting them to have no babies—or, at most, one baby.
Promote adoption: Let’s make sure all the babies out there have good homes. Let’s have universal, free healthcare so the babies as well as the parents and non-parents alike can lead happy, healthy lives. No houseful of kids necessary. No houseful of kids wanted.
Wind back the financial system. Return to a time when banks were banks and not casinos. Tax the hell out of capital gains and great personal and corporate wealth.
Bust up the monopolies and give advantages to small businesses and mom-and-pop operations. Have a universal basic income so people aren’t so economically desperate that they need have to have the lowest possible prices. (I once heard of a great plan to eliminate hunger in the United States: Simply have the government provide red beans and rice to everyone for free.)
Reward businesses for stability instead of growth. In fact, penalise growth after a corporation reaches a certain size, by instituting steeply progressive taxes on large business.
Defund the police. Fund social services instead.
As the population drops, re-wild large swaths of land. Let the animals come back, and let Mother Nature combat climate change for us.
These are all things we can do beginning right now to degrow our populations, economies, and societies. We know how to do this. No new technologies or concepts needed.
With programs like these, we can degrow ourselves to a manageable, sustainable civilisation within a generation or three. Perhaps no longer a single, global civilisation, but independent, self-sustaining countries once again.
Then we will live in a much more humane world and in societies that are a lot more pleasant to be a part of.
By the way, that article I cited in my business-as-usual column, There is No Climate Emergency by Schalk Cloete, is complete hogwash, as you can see by perusing its comments section. As I responded: The article is a master class in what Mark Twain called the third class of lies: Lies, damn lies, and statistics.
— Lannie Rose, April 2023
preferred pronouns: she/her/hers
Written with NO HELP from ChatGTP or other AI resource (except for the graphic)
