Thanks for the thoughtful reply to my reply. On the question of quotes, I should have made it clearer that I was summarizing two “sides” that I thought you were addressing, not quoting you directly. But I don’t think those summaries mischaracterized your argument. Much of your article is devoted to explaining why all the momentum at this point is to continue growing. People don’t want to give up what they’ve acquired thanks to fossil fuels and economic growth. We both start from that point. On the other side, your characterization of degrowth clearly implies (IMHO) that the main problem with degrowth is that it would deprive everyone of the gains we have all achieved thanks to economic growth and fossil fuels. If I misread you, I apologize, but this is what your argument said to me. I thought your characterization of degrowth was misleading, which is what prompted me to write my reply.
Your description, in this reply to my reply, of degrowth as “an excuse to keep burning fossil fuels--just less of them” continues this mischaracterization. All excuses to keep burning fossil fuels—whether via carbon capture or some other form scrubbing emissions—are driven by the oil industry, certainly not the degrowth movement. But this way of framing degrowth is not surprising, because there is a ton of anti-degrowth content out there to draw upon. I think when you read the degrowthers directly, including their direct responses to this kind of criticism, you can see how they are not saying what their critics accuse them of saying (e.g., here, here, here, here, here).
As I said in this post, degrowth ideas are still in the new-idea “ridicule” stage. Critics, usually with ulterior motives that I know you do not share, mischaracterize degrowth as a romantic utopian pipe dream. I’m afraid your post does nothing to counter that caricature.
You say in this reply, “People don't want to freeze life. To go back to the consumption levels of the 1950s, you would need to pull half the population out of employment, remove mobility by making people into one car families, eliminate all computing of any kind, and so on.” I think this nicely captures the difference between our two perspectives. I’m saying that returning to lower consumption levels will not be a choice. It will not be imposed by some draconian leader taking away our Big Macs (most degrowthers would acknowledge that such a strategy would most likely backfire given public attitudes today). It will happen because climate change and resource depletion will shrink the flow of supplies (food and products) that currently meets those demands. Degrowthers (and most climate scientists) have determined that our energy descent from the heights of fossil fuel abundance is baked in. It cannot be avoided.
Degrowth is not a description, or even worse, a celebration of that descent. It is a series of policies and interventions serious scholars have developed to make that descent less disastrous for populations that are going to be facing an inevitable end to economic growth. Not by choice, but by necessity. Degrowth is misunderstood, mischaracterized, and ridiculed today, but there will come a time when its proposals will be seen as the only practical response governments can take, once it becomes clear that the current world economy is no longer sustainable. Will that realization come too late to make a difference? That’s definitely a possibility. But as long as the world resists voluntarily embracing radical change to address our polycrisis, degrowth/ecosocialist policies may turn out to be our last best hope.
