if you think about how much of the economy in the imperial core is bullshit degrowth becomes much easier to imagine.

We don’t really know what level of consumer goods and their availability is sustainable because we’ve never attempted to make it sustainable. Denser living will help immensely though, and building things to last and be repairable should go a long way. I suspect humanity can easily do it, just not when those making the decisions are incentivized to protect their own destructive monopolies.

how do we repair the immense damage that’s already been done?

As far as carbon capture goes, I think we’re going to end up planting a ton of trees, maybe some kind of ocean CO2 scrubbing algae or something as well, then cutting them down, and sealing the decaying wood underground. Basically the reverse process that we’ve been doing at breakneck speed for a century… And probably stratospheric atmospheric injection to slow cooling, which hopefully won’t affect anything else as drastically as the greenhouse effect.

The biggest degrowth guy is Kohei Saito. Check out his book, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism

Regardless of whether the future economy is Marxist (owned by the workers) or capitalist (owned by moneyed interests), we need to consume less.

We need economic growth. Great, let’s develop the productive forces, I’m on board. But by the DPSIR model, economic growth will put pressures on natural systems. Now the quantity of pressure depends on population, amount of consumption, and the nature of technology used to feedclothhouse people. My point is, aside from the communism-capitalism debate, we need to have the high-impact-tech-vs-low-impact-tech debate.

i’d really appreciate some book recommendations on this topic as well as everyone’s thoughts

Jason Hickel’s stuff is good. I was surprisingly disappointed with ER Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful, which was highly recommended.

The book Half-Earth Socialism covers this very extensively as a global resource constraint problem. The sort of “default settings” would be:

• 100% mandatory veganism
• Essentially zero jet travel
• 100% electrification of all personal heating/cooling/transportation needs
• Very little gas-powered public utility transportation/manufacturing, and only from biofuels
• 1500-2000 watts/person averaged primary energy usage; USA is currently at 12,000, see 2000 watt society

The main limiting factor is land usage. If we want to preserve half the earth’s landmass for the biosphere to do whatever the fuck it does to keep us all alive, and keep 85% of existing wild species from going extinct, we don’t have a lot of land to work with. Land reserved for human use will be split into:

• Agricultural food production. Pretty obvious. Plants are much, much more efficient in terms of calorie/acre than any animal products.
• Solar farms. These use a lot of land, but are needed to produce power for a fully electrified society.
• Biofuel production with BeCCS. This uses a lot of land relative to how much fuel is produced, but it also sequesters carbon.
• Actual human living/working/manufacturing space.

Needless to say the societal changes necessary to reach this state would make the cultural revolution look like child’s play.

Your average CO2-Footprint-Calculator is spitting out half the national average if you forego (most) car useage, eat vegan and then don’t consume so much “bullshit” like fashion or other trends or whatever. Kind of depressing to think about how easy it would be.

Mass public transit

No crypto

No bullshit jobs

No leaving the heat on in your summer home

No summer home anyway

No more planned obsolesence

No private jets

No yatchs

More vegan

No more useless plastic crap

More touching grass

No fast fashion

More democratic decision making how to allocate energy resources

Etc

Jason Hickel has written about degrowth

An end to trying to invent new markets for shit people don’t want or need. Also an end to making 3+ different tiers of commodity. No more planned obsolescence, built-in defects to get people to buy replacements, or otherwise making what should be durable goods disposable.

The elimination of finance, insurance, marketing, rentierism, and other such vampiric market sectors. Obviously, the absence of capitalism and the profit motive would do away with these things, anyway.

Depopulating and rewilding the suburbs will be important for preventing complete biosphere collapse.

I think the growth vs. degrowth framing is really poorly defined, there’s not a clear distinction between capitalist growth (basically GDP) and development of the productive forces and any discussion of the topic easily devolves into people talking past each other because they’re using different definitions for the same terms.

A lot of GDP growth today is in things that manipulate the market and can be gotten rid of entirely like advertising, which is nearly 20% of US GDP by itself. This makes it relatively easy to get rid of but is a double edged sword. This focus on financial growth over the ‘actual’ economy over the past ~50 years has left it neglected and so the (re)development of the productive forces of North America (not just the US since the economy is already quite integrated) will require massive investment and thus ‘growth’. It will obviously be a different sort of growth than has been done before (yes, even than the Soviets) so it is hard to say how exactly it will look but it won’t happen unless the economy is under the control of the mass of people who make it up.

Fossil fuel extraction will continue probably for a very long time (we use it for nearly everything) but at a greatly reduced scale as alternatives are developed. Modern agriculture is actually fairly space (and thus calorie per hectare) inefficient because it’s easier to automate and thus reduce labor costs. Likely there will be many more people who work in agriculture but still on the order of single digit percentages of the population (just more than the ~2% it is now). Enhanced weathering has the potential to be a sort of Hail Mary for CO2 sequestration, it can also be used on cropfields as fertilizer though it probably can’t replace all nitrogen fertilizer but I don’t know enough about it to really say either way. I think other forms of CO2 sequestration are mostly in the realm of fantasy so hopefully enhanced weathering doesn’t have too many detrimental side-effects.

As for resource extraction more generally, it will also have to continue for a long time in all likelihood. Perhaps deep sea mining of those naturally occurring polymetallic nodules will be less impactful than traditional mining, perhaps not. Asteroid mining could genuinely be revolutionary in this aspect but the investment involved to get it a necessary scale would probably take too long for it to be a viable short-term solution even if there was a revolution tomorrow. Things can be done to make traditional mining less impactful that aren’t currently because they aren’t profitable, but it will likely be the worst thing that continues in any transition. Rewilding other areas to compensate will ease the damage.

It will be a difficult transition. Go too slow and you risk the environment degrading to the point of the collapse of production entirely. Go too fast and you risk the same by not having the inputs necessary to sustain it. The market is too slow and passive to handle the situation and so it will only be overcome if the (real) economy can be steered by society as a whole.

it looks like all capitalists simultaneously shrinking degrowing into corn cobs while screaming “I’m not (degr)owned I’m not (degr)owned”

Veganism?