Degrowth

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/31120082

A very long essay, but I think worth a read - for solarpunks especially - even if you end up disagreeing with the anti-growth and anti-renewables conclusion.

Tldr: the first blind spot is that land disturbance (such as, for example, turning forests into agricultural land) is the "other leg" of climate change: it disrupts the water cycle, making some areas drier and some areas wetter, leading to, eg, crop failures and natural disasters.

Why don't we hear more about land disturbance as the other leg of climate change? Because capitalism demands growth. Capitalism can "solve" emissions with "green growth" - replacing old fossil fuel power plants with shiny new solar panels, and making a bunch of companies and developers richer in the process. But capitalism can't make more land. It can't solve the land disturbance problem by growing - it can only solve it by not growing. And that capitalism cannot do.

And the second blind spot is the tremendous ecological, environmental, and human harm done by the capitalist growth of "renewable" energy - from the slave children digging rare earths in the Congo to the pristine deserts paved over for giant solar projects. But because we are so single-mindedly focused on cutting emissions, we think "at least renewable energy doesn't produce carbon dioxide, so that's better, right?" And we put a nice green coat of paint on the world-destroying von Neumann machines of capitalism.

So what's the solution?

That being said, personally I propose: Let’s start with the goal of no new energy infrastructure whatsoever from any source, make do with what we have now, and shut down infrastructure from there as we eliminate frivolous use. This is an attainable goal. What are examples of frivolous use? Here’s a few candidates: AI, next day shipping, cheap plastic shit from China, cut flowers imported from South America on airplanes, perishable food shipped halfway around the world, commercial air travel, weed-free mown lawns, streaming movies and music, fast fashion, video game consoles, big screen TVs, f’ing single-use coffee pods, and the list goes on and on and on.

A recent paper by Keysser, Steinberger, and Schmelzer summarized different theories about what motivates economic growth.

Video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4zjEGI7DSo

This obsession with economic growth comes, as the paper shows, from various sources. They counted 21 such plausible sources.

1 Accumulation of money.

2 Income and wealth inequality.

3 Economic class and private property.

4 Market competition.

5 Monetary economy.

6 Advantages of firm size.

7 Cheap resources and energy.

8 For-profit firms and profit maximisation.

9 Sales effort.

10 Working time / Labour-saving technological change.

11 Financial market depreciation.

12 Private interest-bearing debt and money creation.

13 Consumerist culture.

14 Growthist ideology.

15 Neoliberal ideology and policy.

16 Power and domination.

17 The state, elites and geopolitics.

18 Welfare state financing.

19 Miscellaneous, such as when human needs grow faster than productivity.

20 Population structure.

21 Technology and infrastructure

These 21 general themes have 112 mechanisms that lead to economic growth dependencies and imperatives. For example, theme 3 economic class and private property has 12 such mechanisms related to how private property forces the economy to grow just to maintain its existence. If we apply a critical view to this summary, which comes from 248 publications, we may be tempted to say that the causal chain stops right here, with this list of 112 mechanisms under 21 themes.

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/41602438

For The Gambia, the stakes of fishing are high. The river Gambia’s nutrient-rich waters, which empty into the Atlantic, have made the former British colony a prime fishing ground. But that abundance has also turned the country into one of Africa’s hotspots for illegal fishing. For years, NGOs and international agencies have called attention to the problem. But vested interests run deep, and the state has struggled to defend its marine resources against the twin pressures of foreign fleets and local corruption.

“These trawlers are a menace. Incidents happen every single day, yet the foreign vessels are never held accountable”, says Omar Gaye, of the Gambian Artisanal Fishermen’s Association. As a fisher himself, he knows the risks firsthand. He had to file a complaint after a trawler from the Majilac fleet tore through his nets one night, leaving them in shreds.

National shipping records confirm that Majilac Fishing Company, which runs the fleet, is controlled by a mix of Chinese shareholders and Gambian nationals.

...

The Sustainable Fisheries Partnership Agreement (SFPA) [in The Gambia] remains in force between the European Union and The Gambia. Under the deal, the EU pays The Gambia €550,000 a year in exchange for access by European vessels to catch-limited quotas of high-value species such as tuna and cod. Half of that sum is supposed to be earmarked by the Gambian authorities for developing the fisheries sector. It is intended to pay for monitoring, policy work, and enforcement against illegal fishing.

In practice, however, several trawlers – including the [Chinese] Majilac 3 and Majilac 7 – along with other Chinese-flagged vessels, continue to operate illegally inside the nine-nautical-mile coastal zone reserved for artisanal canoes. At times, they edge to within just three miles of the shore. Satellite data shows that these same trawlers continue to dock at Hansen Seafood’s facilities to this day.

In response to questions for this investigation, [the Spanish multinational company] Congelados Maravilla reiterated that it stopped purchasing seafood from the [Chinese] Majilac trawlers a year ago. Still, the vessels continue to unload their catches at the company’s dock under earlier agreements. The firm insists that all fish landed at their dock is now bought by other wholesalers, and that not a single octopus or cuttlefish is currently purchased by the Spanish group.

...

The scale of the problem extends far beyond The Gambia’s shores. Illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing accounts for one-fifth of global fish catches, according to the Financial Transparency Coalition. Its market value is estimated at between $10 billion and $23.5 billion annually. West Africa alone is believed to represent roughly 40 percent of this total. The result is a loss of more than $9 billion for countries in the region, in addition to shrinking biodiversity and the depletion of a vital source of protein for West Africans.

...

The depletion of West Africa’s fish stocks is pushing the region’s coastal dwellers to seek livelihoods elsewhere. It is fueling migration toward the European Union, most notably the perilous route to the Canary Islands.

...

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/45182444

The linked original article is in German. This is a paraphrased English summary.

Ultra Fast Fashion by Temu and Shein endangers health, environment and climate. New test results from Global 2000/Friends of the Earth Austria show massive exceedances of hazardous chemicals in clothing. Read in the report, which chemicals we have found and why fast fashion is so dangerous.

In order for clothing to be offered for a few euros per piece, others bear the true costs, according to Global2000 in a study:

People along the supply chain work in exploitative conditions, harmful chemicals are used and Huge amounts of textile waste end up in landfills or in the environment.

[...]

In seven out of 20 articles, several limits were exceeded. Five samples are from Temu, two from Shein. Some examples are:

• Women’s wind jacket from Temu: Limit for PFCA-like substances (C9–C14) exceeded by 4,000 times. (PFOA and PFCA: Per- and polyfluorinated alkyl compounds (PFAS) accumulate in the body and are associated with health risks such as cancer and thyroid disorders.)

• Hand warmer gloves from Temu and rainpants from Shein: exceeding the PFCA-like substances by 350 and 250 times respectively.

• Women’s boots from Shein: Outsole contained 360,000 mg/kg of DBP – 360 times the allowed value. (Phthalates: Plasticizers such as DEHP, DBP, BBP, DINP, DIDP and DNOP may not be sold in concentrations above 0.1% since July 2020). DNOP has been shown to be harmful to reproduction and some can be hormonal.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/37613672

Degrowth, a leading paradigm addressing our socio-ecological crisis, criticizes the highly destructive animal factory-farming industry. However, it does not challenge the commodification of sentient beings and the underlying system that perpetuates the oppression of the “less-than-human”. Animals-as-food, reduced to “flesh machines,” are exploited with institutional legitimacy rooted in societal belief systems. Drawing upon posthumanist and ecofeminist perspectives, this article argues that to achieve a just transformation, the degrowth proposal must gain ethical congruence and dismantle anthropocentric worldviews. Adopting an anti-speciesist framework becomes crucial to overcoming socio-ecological collapse, fundamentally reshaping our interactions with cohabiting individualities within the biosphere.

PDF link

...are about the Doughnut/Donut Economy with local and online events. Tomorrow is the last day, but there are past webinars on YT (https://www.youtube.com/@doughnuteconomicsactionlab8750/videos).

Here's an introduction to the concept by Kate Raworth herself (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=talXb1wiEFY).

Maybe we can discuss the potential of that approach (and the various localizations).

In 1930, Trinidad and Tobago produced more than 40% of the British empire’s oil. By the 1970s, the newly independent republic was producing 278,000 barrels of crude oil a day. For a country of just 1 million people, after the collapse of its sugar and cocoa industries, oil proved to be transformative.

Today, with a population of 1.5 million and oil production down to less than 54,000 barrels a day, Trinidad and Tobago is at a crossroads.

“We have fallen victim to ‘Dutch disease’ – a dependence on one single sector – which has defined who we are from an economic and social perspective,” says Indera Sagewan, an economist and director of the Caribbean Centre for Competitiveness.

“Non-energy economic diversification is imperative as the way forward for Trinidad and Tobago. We are living a defining moment.”

Unlike other oil-dependent states, such as Norway, the UAE and Qatar, Trinidad and Tobago has failed to maximise the benefits of the Heritage and Stabilisation Fund, which was established in 2007 to invest surplus revenues as a means of consolidating the legacy of oil wealth.

Now, the country faces the prospect of chronic low growth, according to an OECD report published in December. Last year, GDP grew by an estimated 1.7%, up from 1.4% in 2023. The government also faces rising unemployment rates and fiscal pressures, with public debt reaching 64.5% of GDP in 2024 – higher than the average of 51.9% in Central America and the Caribbean, according to the OECD.

To escape the low-growth trap, experts such as Sagewan have long argued that Trinidad and Tobago should diversify its economy, a challenge for a commodity-exporting country reliant on oil and gas.

https://archive.is/i3vqW

Infrastructure reveals what we really mean by abundance. Do we believe that prosperity is engineered from the top down (cities as a complicated machine)? Or do we recognize that it must be cultivated from the bottom up, one place at a time (cities as a complex, adaptive system)?

Abundance without humility is a dangerous fantasy, especially when it comes to infrastructure. We’ve tried the grand solutions before, and we’re still living with the fragility they created. The true abundance worth striving for is the kind that comes from co-creation: from neighbors working together, from feedback loops that keep us honest, from the dedicated effort of building prosperity in place.

That’s not abundance as a one-time breakthrough. It’s abundance as compound interest: a steady accumulation of small, thoughtful choices, year after year, generation after generation. It’s not always flashy, but it lasts.

This article doesn't use the word "degrowth" anywhere, but its vision for a sustainable, abundant community is the ideal of a degrowth community - a community that doesn't need to obsessively expand in order to survive, that meets the needs of its people not through massive projects and government grants but through the small, humble, incremental work of its people's own hands.

Text version: https://vladbunea.substack.com/p/128-undoing-capitalism-part-4-growth