Will Green Growth Save the World? A Response to Kurzgesagt

I tried to be kurzgesagt, I really did...

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Capitalism & Ecology:
Steve Cutts:
Techno-Optimism:
Planet of the Humans:
Tipping Points and Feedback Loops:

----------------------------------------------------Sources------------------------------------------------------

Books:
Matthias Schmelzer, Andrea Vetter, Aaron Vansintjan, "The Future is Degrowth"
Jason Hickel, "Less Is More"
Edward Fullbrook & Jamie Morgan (eds), "Economics and the Ecosystem"
Giovanna Ricoveri, "Nature for Sale"
Ian Angus, "Facing the Anthropocene"

Videos:
Kurzgesagt, "We WILL Fix Climate Change!"
Kurzgesagt, "Is It Too Late to Stop Climate Change?"
BadEmpenada, "No, Kurzgesagt, We WON'T Fix Climate Change"
The Guardian, "Will green technology kill Chile’s deserts?"
Glocal Weirdo, "THIS BOOK CURED MY ECO-ANXIETY"
Our Changing Climate, "How to End Consumerism"

Studies on decoupling:
Hickel & Kallis, Is Green Growth Possible?
EEB, Decoupling Debunked:
Haberl et al, "A systematic review…"

Articles:
Current Affairs, "Stubborn Attachment"
Steffen et al, "The trajectory of the Anthropocene"
Our World in Data, Primary Energy Consumption by Source
World Economic Forum, "top 10 manufacturing countries in the world"
Capellan-Perez et al , "Dynamic Energy Return on Energy Investment (EROI) "
CarbonBrief, "IEA: Mineral supplies for electric cars"
IUCN, Deep-sea mining
CounterPunch, ‘We Will Coup Whoever We Want’
Timothée Parrique, Decoupling in the IPCC AR6 WGIII
Guy Harrington, Update to limits to growth
WWF, "A warning sign from our planet"
IPBES, global assessment report 2019
Wikipedia, Deforestation of the Amazon rainforest
WEF, The New Plastics Economy
DW, Pollinating by hand: Doing bees’ work
IPCC, WGII SPM
The Guardian b, Climate crisis could displace 1.2bn people by 2050
WMO "50:50 chance of 1.5°C in next five years"
Business Insider, "the myth of 'trickle-down'"
Parrique, "Degrowth in the IPCC AR6 WGII"
Parrique, "Degrowth in the IPCC AR6 WGIII"
Washington Post, "The cobalt pipeline"
The Guardian, "Life and death in Apple’s forbidden city"
Forbes, "Bangladesh Is Burning And Sweatshops Are The Fuel"
BBC, "How overwork is literally killing us"
WEF, "Cost of living crisis"
WEF, "What does ‘global debt’ mean and how high is it now?"
Gallup, "The World's Broken Workplace"
Boston Review, "Coronavirus and the Politics of Disposability"
Psychology Today, "Why Over-Consumption Is Making Us Unhappy"
MarketWatch, "The dark reasons so many rich people are miserable human beings"
PsychCentral, "Are Wealthy People More Depressed Than Others?"
EDF, This stereotype is holding back the environmental movement
The Conversation, How much do people around the world care about climate change?
Vice , How the World’s Billionaires Prepare for the Apocalypse

[enfercesttout]

It's easier to imagine the end of the world, rather than end of capitalism. Rip Mark Fisher.

[GaasubaMeskhenet]

Figure out how to lower dependency for you and your family.

- You can make flour out of acorns

- Animal horns are pliable when heated. It was what we used before plastic

- You can make lenseless glasses by poking needle sized holes in basically anything. I've been using cut up egg carton bits

- You can eat every part of a dandelion!

- Some Lichen are antibacterial and antifungal

- All you need is a jar with a lid, water, and a potato to make yeast for baking

- There's a native source of caffeine on every continent

- To make a water filter
Layer top to bottom:
Rocks
Gravel
Sand
Charcoal

Natural fiber cloth can be added beneath finer layers

[gabbyn]

The recent behaviour of kurzgesagt had me stumped, too. They had been working in conjunction with - among others - a public broadcasting service in Germany, and at that time, topics were different, and the view on things to come as well.

Now they are 'in partnership with the Open Philanthropy Project'. This non profitable project has been founded by a former Bridgewater employee and former cofounder of GiveWell, is funded by Cari Tuna, a former Wall Street Journal reporter (where did she get the money from?) and her husband Dustin Moskovitz (co-founder of Facebook, aha) and wants to provide a more optimistic view on... whatever. I can't help, to me this looks like spin doctoring.

[VitriolicVermillion]

I've heard of degrowth and just assumed it was only as much as the name itself implies, that we'd just reduce industrial output, without addressing how people will survive that. I very much appreciate now having heard that degrowth includes addressing issues of equality and bringing a better standard of living to those who have been most denied it. Now I can hear people talking about degrowth and, hopefully, not have such anxious fear that they're talking about cutting me loose to die.

[simonabunker]

I subscribed because of the Eyeball Zone endorsement. This is really well researched. Love the dig at Planet of the Humans!

[xsnozskwg]

Can't believe I missed this when it came out. You video on de-growth filled me with optimism and I'm glad I wasn't the only one who felt really off about the Kurzgesagt video.

[Titleknown]

...I will say, aside from that... unhinged email I sent to you (Apologies for that), I think my main objection to degrowth is the philosophical side of it rather than a lot of the actual material stuff you've cited. Cause, yeah, I agree with the leftist idea that "degrowth until we can get the solarpunk tech running" is A Thing We Need to Do, and the way GDP measures "growth" is absolutely a terrible way to run a society and an economy, and a lot of those policies by Hickel are ones I broadly agree with.

But, it's the fetishization of "limits" and the idea that we need to love what I would call the resource crunch that degrowth will likely bring that disturbs me, because as an artist, a person who believes in the ability of science and technology to improve wellbeing, and a person who believes in the diversity of creative experience, I am painfully aware of the resource denial under capitalism that keeps so much of those technologies and arts from achieving their potential, on both a personal and infrastructural level.

The thing that terrifies me about degrowth-based socialism is how likely it is to replicate that resource denial but even worse, betraying the promise of leftism for the arts and sciences in my eyes, and how little its proponents care.

Because, I keep hearing how much of a resource crunch those of us in the Global North need to undergo for a just world, and those resource crunches always hit the arts and the sciences first, because they are send as the least necessary. Even when not directly cut, the infrastructure needed to make them work and bloom is just... left to rot.

And a lot of degrowth people I have seen, such as the Transition Town people or Giorgios Kallis themselves, see that resource crunch and forced-simplification as a feature not a bug, with how much they pooh-pooh the "luxuries" of the working class (Even things as simple as, say, action figures and video games) in the Global North and how much they mock any technological means of getting past that resource crunch (even with the anti-GDP/anti-capitalist considerations I agree are vital) as "techno-fixes".

And there's the fact that, unlike Marie Kondo, they refuse to take "yes" as an answer when one asks "Does it spark joy?" Like, I've heard someone say that video games are just an insufficient substitute for what capitalism took from us which like... that's a terrible way to refer to a whole artistic medium. But that's the perspective I keep seeing, they act like what would be lost under their resource-crunch would be totally replaceable even when it's not.

They talk so much about how vague; undefined "stuff" is bad, but they treat it all as fungible because "Oh, look at the free time you'll have". But free time is difficult to use if; say; the computing devices you use for internet communication and artistic distribution are shut down for being too wasteful, or if the devices you use for experiencing art can't get power, or if you can't buy art supplies or tools for your art.

And on the sciences, new technological tools can't get very far if distribution of them is choked by a supply bottleneck. And all those new ways of creating and being as humans die with them.


With one philosophical individual in particular, I loathe Giorgios Kallis so much that the things I despise about his book "Limits" would double the length of this already bloated post, but the long and short of it is he underestimates the repressive, coersive elements his societal vision would require, and his view that we need to lower our standards and embrace his ahistorical Athenian aeceticism is a soul-crushing destruction of imagination, an ambition towards a stagnant society. His words along with what I've seen from the Transition Town movement embody the exact reasons I am afraid of degrowth replicating capitalism's resource-choke on human creativity.

I also think you should check out Leigh Phillips' book Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-porn Addicts. While Phillips has... problems with both his material evidence and the whole dirtbag-left stank he has on it (I think Cory Doctorow is a much better source on that sort of "promethean leftism" due to lacking Phillips' callous selfishness), I think the philosophical case for prometheanism in our society and the devastation of its loss in both neoliberalism and certain strains of degrowth that are more tinged by it than they'd like to admit is something every sane person advocating degrowth needs to wrangle with.

And like, hey, Cody Johnston of Some More News made a case for the nitche when he briefly touched on degrowth (Albeit without saying the word directly), in that he said that maybe we should use our technological wealth to allow for the proliferation of the nitche and weird instead of supporting these bloated megacorp monoliths that work us all into the grave.

So, like... I wish there were more of that? Like, more understanding about the fears of a "resource crunch" and societal stagnation and more grappling with the reasons why a lot of people who're really into degrowth aren't helping with that fear, and more interest in how we'd avoid said resource crunch smothering out the ability to create and innovate?

IDK, I agree we need a world not enslaved by growth (thank you for addressing that and the problem of "degrowth for degrowth's sake"), but also a world with the capacity to expand human capability without being enslaved to the tunnel-visioned ideas our modern economy has about what "growth" is or the resource crunch that a lot of people's enforced vision of "small is beautiful" would create...

[JonathanMaddox]

The cited studies of decoupling refer to historical experience of efficiency improvements going straight to the bottom line of resource-intensive industries, directly and immediately improving access to those very same resources. Jevon's paradox is no paradox at all!

Decoupling of growth and resource consumption is not logically likely at all in the context of unconstrained economic growth, for all the "rebound" reasons given. All historical experience is in precisely such an economic context, or at least a context where growth has been so strongly promoted, and raw materials so abundant, that the real-world constraints on economic growth have rarely bitten particularly deeply. They certainly have bitten locally and temporarily, as in the UK peak oil moment of the 1920s, the oil exporter embargoes of the 1970s and even globally in the (temporary) peak oil moment of 2005-2008, but they have been overcome by trade, stimulus and capacity building in the very resource industries affected, funded and driven by the very same high prices that constrained consumption.

This historical context of ongoing growth must come to an end, if only for the precise reason that the resources of the planet are indeed finite. That's not going to happen soon enough all of its own accord, because the most endangered finite resource is the ability of the atmosphere and connected systems to act as a sink for greenhouse gas pollutions whilst maintaining a stable climate, and the limit of THAT resource is still not reflected in the public policies and price signals that are the constraints observed by short-term economics.

IF public policy were to strictly enforce caps on emissions, sufficient to meet whatever goal has been agreed upon, THEN of course we would see more decoupling than we have before.

The trouble is not that decoupling is unfeasible. It is that it won't happen without more explicit and vigorous political action to enable and enforce it.

What's remarkable and promising is that even with woefully inadequate top-down capital-P political action, the actions of people working outside the public eye and outside the sphere of public policy as such have, through their work in the technological sphere and grass-roots activism and consumption choices and even their investment decisions, enabled and promoted more decoupling than would have been expected from a top-down political economic analysis of the status quo and the commitments of the ruling class. Not enough decoupling to avert the climate crisis or meet the Paris targets, evidently, but enough to dismiss those who claim that decoupling is infeasible.

[tavislea]

Thank you for the book recommendations. I got into Hickel because of your eco-anxiety video and I’m glad I did.

[brianedwards]

The Kugelsox video sounded like a pep talk more than anything. Like the Sergeant in Starship Troopers on Planet K "Remember your training and you will get through this." Of course he didn't make it.

[tantebabetti]

Amazing video. Love the evidence you show and how don’t oversimplify this very complex topic/ concepts.

[bloodbond]

No idea how this ended up on my recommendations but I'm here for it

[hairyneil]

How do you think a UBI could fit into decoupling? Rutger Bregman's Utopia For Realists really helped to cement my support for that as an incredibly useful tool to survive the future (without having to weld spikes onto cars).

I think the big question is; do people want to live in a Star Wars or Star Trek future?

[lllll]

degrowth doesn't sound good enough. call it something like "growth choice, " something that intuitively sounds positive

[necrolavigne]

thank you for this, it's good stuff as always. btw the link to our changing climates video in the description is wrong, it links to your video

[Rips]

Christian: this is good stuff. Somehow it should be inserted into everyone's subconscious sleep with your earpods in nighttime feed... That said, how much of it have you sat to song with your ukulele soundtrack? I recently transposed my opera The Gods of Money from previous century paper tech into raw text. It makes a good storytelling evening. Shouldn't we construct a monthly argument embroidery club ( under the auspices of The Institute for Non-toxic Propaganda perhaps*)? We could begin with you and I presenting each other's material.... Oooops it should expand to include Galleriet 3, 14. *XR could get a mention if it expands or draw potential.. the neo-Trotskyists might even put in an appearance.

[Kathrin_yt]

such an awesome video, also loved the editing in this!!

[johnnykuprionis]

That video really jumped past the decoupling claim, great to see you giving it the actual scrutiny it needs!

[stahlbergpatreon]

Commenting for the algorithm, it's truly a shame how YT treats videos like this

[fesni]

I'm really glad you're still making videos!