I know very little about this subject. I had someone I know tell me a few months ago that for socialism to be sustainable, and to solve the climate crisis, U.S.ians are going to need to give up almost all A/C. They pointed out the fact that Amerikans are crybabies and even most of Western Europe does not use A/C.
However, with Greece and Spain recently having caught on fire and with heat waves devouring the nations, as well as stories regarding people in hotter regions in the U.S. dying from heat stroke in their own homes because they couldn’t afford their electricity bills, this read as sort of Maoist-lite, petty-bourgeois radicalism to me shifting blame on individuals when there are so many systemic industries contributing astronomically to the worsening climate. I was wondering, is A/C usage so detrimental as to necessitate its destruction? Should not the focus be on larger, more destructive industries and actually increasing the availability and affordability of A/C to hotter regions? Should scientific focus be moreso on creating a green A/C?
Like I said, almost no knowledge. Feel free to roast my ass (pun slightly intended).
Degrowth is probably essential, but in the sense that it is already built in to Marxist thinking. Degrowth has recently been used more and more in a liberal sense, which should be rejected.
Examples of industries that can and should be degrowthed (sic) because we derive very little benefit from their constant growth and that growth causes so many problems:
When I say degrowth, here, I mean we do not need any of these industries to be fuelled by the desire to keep introducing new products that are marginally ‘better’ than their previous iteration.
We do not need Sony, Microsoft, or Nintendo to keep bringing out next gen consoles. Nor does Apple or Google need to keep bringing out new phones with ‘better’ cameras. They only do this so they can sell us something new. If we only ever bought one device, which could be repaired and which did not become obsolete with a software update, all these tech companies would go bankrupt.
There are 7 billion people on the planet, and roughly 1 billion in the global north. Almost every person aged over 40 will already have unnecessarily bought and used between 5 and 15 mobile phones (tariffs encourage users to change every 12-24 months, and mobiles have been ubiquitous for 20 years). (I know some of those old phones were not smart phones, and I know that people in the South do have access to new technology, so these figures aren’t perfect.)
That suggests we’ve produced enough mobile phones for almost everyone on the planet to have one, but they’re improperly distributed. Managed right, the whole industry could be minimised to maintain those existing phones for everyone. That is far less resource intensive than the current model: if we do not change the current model, within the next 20 years, manufacturers will likely produce another several billion smartphones for consumers in the North, and round we go.
If we decoupled the mobile phone industry from the commodity form, we could raise the standard of living of everyone in the world and the people in the global north would barely notice. So yes, degrow, but not for the sake of reducing everyone to the same level of misery. (I’m not suggesting a smartphone is enough or even the basis of an enjoyable life.) Degrow to ensure an equitable distribution of resources and stop wasting resources by pursuing profit.
Another example. Putting half the resources that currently go into car manufacturing instead into public transport would free up so many resources and would decrease carbon emissions (even without green energy). So degrowth of the individual transport sector does not mean worse transport. In fact, it means improved transport. This also requires a decoupling of the transport sectors from the commodity form.
Agree wholeheartedly. I think where I get hung up with a lot of ostensible degrowth advocates is their focus on disincentivizing use of already existing things rather than incentivizing use of alternatives.
For instance, wrt automobiles I am 100% in favor of dismantling the car industry and creating vast public transport infrastructure. What I am not in favor of is imposing hefty gas tax on the working poor to disincentivize car use (as pseudo-socialist liberals like John Green suggest) as we need our cars in a nation where living without one is a near impossibility in most places. The rich will still use their private airplanes to get from point A to point B, the climate will still be destroyed and the only ones to suffer will be us.
Similar but not a perfect comparison with cell phones. I haven’t seen anyone suggesting that raising the prices exponentially is the solution, but the problem here is planned obsolescence and the further creation of less practical and more prone to break devices in order to generate more and more profit from new phones. We should create a use and needs based economy rather than one built on profit, for sure, and find incentives to utilize alternatives rather than disincentivize workers from using what is given to them. The same can be said of computers and gaming consoles – these companies have technology that would allow them to utterly shift the paradigm as we know it, cheaply made and affordable to the poor gaming and work rigs beyond our (those outside the industry’s) technological comprehension – it just isn’t feasible to release this tech to the public when the motive is exponential growth rather than what the public actually wants or needs, or what would be most beneficial to society writ large. As with green energy. People know how to create it to be sustainable and even more powerful than current shitty electric grids, there’s just no incentive to use it. Many degrowth advocates, I feel, would say to disincentivize workers from using their electricity in a bid to get them to individually plant solar panels on their roof or whatever. The state could very easily subsidize this shift instead without shifting any of the suffering and labor onto the working poor, it just isn’t profitable. I’m out of my depth like I said, but these are my thoughts from experience and research.