🗨️ we must abandon growth to truly thrive
selected quotes from “Vaclav Smil: We Must Leave Growth Behind”:
In his new book, Growth – a dense, 500-page treatise that covers everything from “microorganisms to megacities,” whose afterword we’re excerpting here – Smil makes perhaps an even-more-off-putting proposition: that in order to “ensure the habitability of the biosphere,” we must at the very least move away from prioritizing growth and perhaps abandon it entirely.
…
The American way is to have the whole pie and eat it at the same time: we are going to have SUVs everywhere and raspberries from Nicaragua in Europe in January. And transport it by airplane even, and do all these things as we have been doing. In fact, we do even more because now Chinese will copy us.
I’m reminded here of common retirement saving advice: if you cut your expenses, you save 2x the money. First, you spend less. Second, you don’t have to save as much in order to retire because your future expenses are also smaller. …
As you know, people aren’t crazy about beef right now. Beef is killing the planet and whatever. “Let’s get totally out of beef.” People don’t even realize how beef is penetrating the U.S. economy. We are talking about millions of jobs. Not just the farmers themselves, but shipping it, cutting it, retailing it, exporting it. Millions of jobs hang on beef. So you become virtuous, you decrease your methane footprint, you get rid of beef, millions of jobs on the plate right now.
…
This is what I’m telling you. It cannot be simply done without wrenchingly, massively centering our economy. It cannot be done on the margin only. It has to be done on a very large scale to have a large-scale global effect. And it has to be done in China, and in India, eventually, not only among the rich countries.
Info:
- Source: [[Smil, Vaclav]] [[Vaclav Smil on the Need to Abandon Growth]]
- Related to:
- 🗨️ the limitless destructiveness of this economy is because a corporation is not a person
- [[❔ How much of our response to climate change comes from the American belief that we can do anything if we put our minds to it]]
- [[🗨️the consumer suffers in an absence of criticism]]
- [[🌰 the math on a wealth tax checks out]]
Every post on this blog is a work in progress. Phrasing may be less than ideal, ideas may not yet be fully thought through. Thank you for watching me grow.
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