Yeah it’s kind of strange policy. It applies only to the city, in the way a congestion charge would be set up (you can drive maybe 20 km off and get fuel), but the government is hard right wing, so they tend to pick solutions which will hurt the rich the least (they already have newer cars and tend to get newer cars as the old ones wear out), and not really mean anything to the poor (they don’t have cars at all, so this is all a moot point). The “middle class” as is the example here tend to suffer.

However, the middle class also has basically no solidarity with the poor, so like they’ll readily vote for policies which just wreck the poor, and because India is a “cheap labour” country, often the middle classes are sort of like the Petty Bourgeois in that they really hate the poor asking for more rather than punching up. Add that to the whole casteism / racism thing, and I don’t really feel bad for Kapil.

The other other thing is that India (Delhi) is somehow extremely pedestrian friendly while also being extremely hostile to pedestrians. Like imagine small walkable communities surrounded by stroads and a “might makes right” approach to driving, and a government which is committed to more roads (keeps the rich and the poors separated), and you have a place where kids might be able to walk to school on their own, or have walking mean near-certain death depending on exactly where they live in relation to the school.

I’m sorry but we have so many nukes that your answer is trivially wrong. Also don’t get technical with the “well is it really destroyed” like yes, if your house is rubble, technically all the mass is still there, a bunch of the walls are still intact, you can probably even still see the floorplan, but it’s no longer a house. You tell someone to draw you an “Earth”, and yeah humans can very much destroy the fuck out of that.

Sad thing is, if bikes were invented today, they’d be heavily regulated.

If there was a word for “genius” but for being a good person instead of smart, she would be that.

EU ETS has no offsets and is well enough run

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.

but that is not that hard.

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.

Yeah I mostly agree here, but there are two extra bits I’d want to add:

For one things like a well run cap and trade system(no offsets) for emissions

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.

The narrative should be from rich to poor no matter what

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.

Oh, and a minor argument he makes is “the GFC caused degrowth and the people don’t like it”, yeah some don’t, but a bunch of people just looked at their futures, evaluated what they actually value, then did that Ratatouille meme as they figured out their finances. They looked at how much things were costing them vs how much joy they got, and started to downsize.

These are the “millennials who will only work remotely” or “gen z who aren’t buying things”. Yeah they are still working, but they are working less, they are enjoying life, and they aren’t compromising on quality of life for work. They aren’t “hustling”, they aren’t “min-maxing” they aren’t “side gig-ing”, they aren’t even really “FIRE-ing”. They’re just slowing the pace of their lives and therefore the lives of the people around them.

OK here we go. Let’s go through the arguments.

The biggest one which pervades the article is that for degrowth to matter the politicians have to buy into it. No. The fun thing about degrowth is that a degrowther can just sit there and it works. Are you “underemployed” and happy? You’re degrowing. Are you living in a tiny house with a little garden and happy? You’re degrowing. Are you skipping out on buying expensive shit like a car? You’re degrowing. Are you not having a bunch of children? You’re degrowing. Are you using informal economies? You’re degrowing.

This causes zero problems for the degrowther but causes massive problems for the ruling class. They will say “how do I force these people to work and buy useless crap and to reproduce so I can continue to exploit them?” Good. We as degrowthers just have to figure out how to stop them. We just become a dwindling tax base and start to solve problems ourselves. Yeah losing healthcare sucks but even if we hustled we probably would have lost it anyway.

The second big argument is the implication (no suggestions are given) that if we somehow “rebranded” degrowth into something sexier and palatable, it would be taken more seriously. I doubt it. If you called it “rewilding” it would get basically immediately re-interpreted to mean “rewilding the economy” along with a bunch of deregulation to allow for clear-cutting forests or whatever.

We’re not trying to “brand” this to be friends with the political class. This is meant to be a threat. For us, it means enjoying the breeze and drinking some water. For the ruling class, it means having to jump through hoops to figure out how they can keep their private islands.

The third big argument is that the world’s poorest need to “degrow”. No. Regular growth is fine for them. The west needs to degrow far enough to make up the difference. Far from the “economic wisdom” of the nineties, it’s now extremely clear that the global south can just leapfrog the emitting technologies straight into clean technology. Clean tech which both by necessity and by technology is decentralised. Don’t have a robust power grid? You and your community can buy solar panels. Going from no electricity to intermittent electricity is still a boon. Society will adjust appropriately to the point where a “reliable” won’t be worth the cost.

Literally the most damage the “growth” crowd can do to the degrowth community is to continue the politics of envy. Try and convince the global south that they should buy an ICE car, not because it’s better, but because it shows domination and superiority. A degrowther must counter that by living a good life. A glass of water, a cool breeze, and a smile, and the other guy looks pretty silly with their Ferrari.

Overall the issue is that they’re not a “like” technology for ICE cars. The transition won’t happen without regulation. In Norway the vast majority of new car sales are EVs. China too has basically moved straight to EV infrastructure rather than ICE. It can be done but the government has got to do the job. In countries where they are unwilling to, this isn’t going to work.

The olive oil is an example.

I’d like to fix climate change instead?

Good luck to our new comrades.

Seen this in olive oil prices. It’s already happening.

Idiots don’t realise that hurricanes are controlled from Australia, from pine gap.

OK here’s my Anarchist “Hot take”. It’s not correct, but I’m building an oversimplified model to make what’s happening somewhat visible. Let’s divide people up into two groups: One group has “experts”, who are pretty alone / introverted, but doesn’t really do the work of meeting up with others. The other group has people who know how to gather a party together, through a bbq or cookout or family meals or an actual party, but aren’t too bright.

In the past, both groups were kind of homogenised together, to the extent that neither group really knew the existence of the other, but they knew how to make things “work”. Like the experts didn’t know how the cookouts happened, but they just needed to turn up, and enjoy the party. The rest was more or less magic. The other group knew the effort to bring people together, but didn’t realise that some of those people were more valuable than the others. The actual dissemination of expertise was more or less magic.

Today, we have social media. The cookouts happen in social-media spaces, but what’s happened is that the experts and the non-experts have split (sort of like the milk we’re talking about here). The experts can “meet” without the party people, and the party people “meet” with the other party people. In the past, the experts would naturally become the trusted members of society because people would know them over the years being right over and over. Today, however, the experts are effectively in a different world to the party people, who are all vying for a “trusted position”. This is valuable, because the party people are “gullible” – I don’t mean this in a negative sense, just that they must trust the expertise around them, the social proof, or the consensus. Repeating that this used to work because actual experts used to be among them.

So you have people like Alex Jones, who is a snake oil salesman. In the past, a niece or nephew might have been able to tell their family not to listen to Alex Jones, and that would have worked. However, that’s no longer effective because Jones has unadulterated, prime position straight to the party people’s brain sockets through talking for hours at end about this crazy stuff. The nephew is also not at enough of the cookouts to counteract that. This pushes the family apart (we’ve seen this narrative now, people who are so far in the alt-right pipeline they can’t back out) and allows Jones and co to completely wreck these people’s lives.

So in short, I don’t think this is a consensus reality thing. I think it’s a filter bubble thing. We’ve managed to make it easy enough to filter things we don’t want to hear, and to not work with people who don’t agree with us. Oh and don’t think the “experts” are in a better position here. They fundamentally can’t organise a party. They don’t know how.

Yeah, I think they know that basically the refugees are going to be met with a military (maybe that’s why the fear of refugees is brewing), but I think the thing they don’t really understand is that those billions actually make all the things they / we use. At some point the 1% societies get to “peak buying power” and nothing will ever cause it to go up, wages be damned.

Also, we need those wages / taxes for the military they’re counting on.

Do you get this uneasy feeling that people know? Like they know they aren’t in that 2/3 and that they are kind of racist enough that they sort of want that 2/3 gone? Like people call it “complacency” among the 1% nations but I just got this feeling sometimes.

Sure. But they still have to dock. If you tax it in half the countries, they will still have to pay half the time.

They need diesel to run. Tax the diesel. Right now fossil fuels get subsidies. Just change that.

I really think these companies should try and split the men’s and women’s preferences for taste tests. There is a strong idea of meat and cheese being tied to manhood, and I have a suspicion that while men might prefer the taste, even in a blind test, they would lie about it to avoid being thought of as a “soy boy”. I really do think the new age of fake meats is less about taste, and more about identity.

EDIT: I will say though, for cheese the gap is real. Personally very happy these companies are closing it, because I’d buy it.