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).
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.