• absentbird@lemmy.world
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      Also it’s not a way of life that scales well to 8 billion people. Wood fires produce way more exhaust at the cost of many trees, while electric heat can be powered by the sun or a flowing river.

      Livestock produce tons of CO2, and farming takes a lot of land. We can’t all be Amish, and it certainly wouldn’t solve climate change.

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    23 hours ago

    At 4:30 in the morning I’m milkin’ cows

    Jebediah feeds the chickens and Jacob plows, fool

    And I’ve been milkin’ and plowin’ so long that

    Even Ezekiel thinks that my mind is gone!

    • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
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      22 hours ago

      We been spending most our lives
      Livin’ in an Amish paradise! Ooh Oh Ooooh!
      I churned butter once or twice
      Livin’ in an Amish paradise! Ooh Oh Ooooh!

      • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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        21 hours ago

        Hitchin’ up the buggy,
        Churnin’ lots of butter,
        Raised a barn on Monday,
        Soon I’ll raise another!
        Think you’re really righteous?
        Think you’re pure of heart?
        Well I know I’m a million times as humble as thou art!

        I’m the pious’t guy the little amish wanna be,
        Like on my knees day and night,
        Scorin’ points for the afterlife!

        So don’t be vain! And don’t be whiney!
        Or else I might have to get medieval on your hiney!

  • SomeAmateur@sh.itjust.works
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    I’ve seen Amish:

    Burn chemicals and paints in a pile behind their shop

    Have dumpsters full of plastic “sawdust” from a shop that makes plastic furniture

    Rebrand cheap chinese electronics and batteries to sell in their communities (MillerTech)

    Zip around on a one wheel

    Ride electric scooters

    Log out relatively pristine forest to make more farms

    Log land that isn’t theirs, without permission, for weeks before being discovered and confronted.

    Vote down school levies repeatedly until the local schools shut down

    Open a retail store in a mall

    These days the amish button isn’t nearly as great as you might think…still funny to think about how everyone would react though

    • GreenShimada@lemmy.world
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      11 hours ago

      100% for real. On top of the fact that the 4th panel would read:

      POOF NO MORE HUMAN RIGHTS NO MORE REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH NO MORE FREEDOM OF/FROM RELIGION

  • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
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    Humans would rapidly organize right back into cities and make up whatever rules or interpretations of Amish law/religion that allowed them to. People gonna be people and ignore or twist religion to do whatever they want.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      Humans would rapidly organize right back into cities

      The Amish already live in townships. Congregations of humans are generally better for the environment than far-flung rural enclaves with low-efficiency infrastructure.

      People seem to forget how much ecological destruction occurred at or prior to an Amish standard of living. Case in point, the deforestation of Europe

      the bulk of which was completed before the 16th century.

      “Primitive” does not mean “ecologically sustainable”. Quite a bit of our animal husbandry, agricultural, and pre-industrial economic activity were horrifyingly bad. We just weren’t operating at the scale of eight billion humans while we were living like that.

      • ryathal@sh.itjust.works
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        21 hours ago

        Yep. Coal and wood as the main energy sources are absolutely awful. Global warming would be gone because people would be dead from the pollution. There’s a reason that there were tons of maids cleaning old mansions constantly.

    • ameancow@lemmy.world
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      And also, continued global warming.

      Seriously, why does anyone think regressive religious principles would do anything but continue the pillaging of natural resources? Amish are just cosplayers riding on the successes of an industrial civilization, most of them are capitalists who use technology to create crafts to sell to midwest white middle-class folk as their primary means of sustenance.

      Amish attitudes towards technology are so contradictory and flimsy they make fantasy genres like Warhammer 40k look sensible.

        • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de
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          We are well into the “point of no return” part of the the global warming curve. From here on out things will get more and more unpredictable weather wise with previously tame regions experiencing long droughts or flash floods. Large parts of housing all over the world will become completely insufficient in maintaining livable conditions. Our current agricultural system will stop functioning. Even if humans completely disappeared the existing pollution and atmospheric gases would have massive long term effects on everything else that lives on the planet. We are already experiencing the start of this trend, but its only going to get worse from now on.

          These are self-sustaining shifts in the climate system that would lock-in devastating changes, like sea-level rise, even if all emissions ended.

          Basically we broke the balance and we wont be able to fix it.

          For a relative comparison on how bad our warming curve is compared to those of the planets history, this recent video is a good starting point. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1bMJekCiBw

            • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de
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              Yes but its still our duty to not let it get even worse. If there is large switch to renewables and lower emission industrial processes, then humans will probably somehow continue to exist in a semi normal way. If we dont lower our emissions at all in the next few decades however, then large parts of the planet are predicted to just completely stop supporting human life after like 2100.

  • AlexLost@lemmy.world
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    21 hours ago

    We’ve gone too far. We can’t stop this, we can only stop making it worse and learn to adapt to a changing world climate. The natural global processes of the planet have been altered and they are in the process and chaos of shifting into new normals. How long will it take to stabilize? No one knows. This kinda thing has happened to the planet before, but it happens to be quite catastrophic to the life living on it when it does. The jet stream is collapsing and major ocean currents are shifting. We have absolutely no control over these things and it’s already started. Everything on the planet is connected to these natural processes. It’s why things were the way they were, climate wise. Not anymore!

    • Allero@lemmy.today
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      21 hours ago

      We have absolutely no control

      We absolutely do, that’s a doomer narrative that is extremely useful for those invested in making it worse.

      Science suggests we face a reversible issue.

  • atthecoast@feddit.nl
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    1 day ago

    Most interesting parts of Handmaid’s Tale “Gilead” are when they’re boasting about reductions in pollution and greenhouse gas emissions their eco-christo-fascism has produced!

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      One of the big questions I have about our current Holocene extinction is at what point humans constrain their own polluting capacity based on their contracting biome.

      Like, imagine a country like Germany or Japan or Russia or the US having a bad enough agricultural cycle that they experience a massive food shortage (or even a famine) on the scale experienced by Bangladesh or China in the 1950s (or Gaza in the modern day). What does that do to our carbon emissions?

      We already saw the impact of COVID on air traffic and the sudden dramatic plunge in regional temperatures that came from not flying planes for a few weeks.

  • neidu3@sh.itjust.works
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    “Behold, the Amishinator!”

    EDIT: Downvoted by a carrier pigeon sent by the Amish

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    Um, akshually, there would still be lots of burning things for heat and livestock. Livestock are the majority of all mammals on earth, outnumbering humans by a lot, only 6% of mammals are wild animals. In addition, lack of preserved food would lead to higher consumption.

    BUT it being so unsustainable and full of disease would mean it would rapidly decrease populations, which would decrease ecological impact after a couple of generations, so it’s a sound strategy longterm.

    • pedz@lemmy.ca
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      My father claims the simple life on a homestead is way closer to nature and pollutes less than living in a city.

      He cuts his wood with a chainsaw that’s using a mixture of gas and oil. This gas and oil certainly doesn’t come from the trees. Its imported. But it’s apparently the traditional way.

      Then in winter he burns the wood to heat the house and it creates a circle of soot in the white snow all around it. But it’s all natural. On certain days, when you go outside around his house, you can taste the wood burning in the air. All natural!

      If we all go back to owning our plot of land and exploit it like settlers, surely this is going to be good for the environment.

      • LordKitsuna@lemmy.world
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        Tell him the NEW homestead way is better. Solar panels, lifepo4 batteries, electric chainsaw, heatpump primary wood burn auxiliary if you live somewhere it gets well below freezing.

        Before anyone says anything solar still works on a cloudy day it just makes less, that’s why you size your array to make what you need when it’s cloudy not when it’s sunny. Summer can just have an over abundance of power nothing wrong with that

        • pedz@lemmy.ca
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          I’m trying and doing experiments. I have a cabin off grid on their land and it’s mostly solar, but I do need to burn wood during winter even if I don’t really like it. He has a sugar shack on another corner of the land and he’s also using solar, except the stoves and boiler. I bought him an inverter and he prefers this to the noisy generator.

          However he pretty much hates everything else with batteries. My mother has an electric golf cart and he whines every time the lead acid batteries need maintenance or need to be changed (because of lack of maintenance). I could swap them for lifepo4 batteries, but they’re still going to lose capacity over time and we’re getting to the same point of “but I don’t have to put a $1000 worth of batteries in my tractor every few years”! Same “issue” with an electric ATV for the kids. He hates it because it needs to be charged and the lifepo4 battery had to be changed once. But apparently the cost of gas and diesel doesn’t register.

          But yeah. So far at the latitude we’re at, solar power input and consumption varies a lot depending on the seasons. The solar setup is fine for the sugar shack because it’s used during the day in the spring, when there’s no leaves. But in the cabin, it’s been more complicated. I’m not there year-round and it works well in summer, but in winter the lifepo4 batteries need to be heated for hours if not days before I can charge them via solar, and get acceptable performance. It’s a work in progress.

          • LordKitsuna@lemmy.world
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            1 day ago

            I can highly recommend These batteries for home level power i have 6 of them and they make my offgrid life possible. Rated for 6000 deep discharges (or 16 years of literally daily deep discharge) they have a standard charge range of 5°C to 70°C naturally if you are in a cold latitude an even mildly insulted shed would be ideal to justify stay above that 5c mark.

            If your sun is limited especially in winter consider giving east/west vertical panel orientation a shot. And that same site with the batteries has great deals on palettes of solar panels if you just need more in general.

            If you aren’t already using 48V for inverters make the switch, much more efficient and long term cheaper. Put your panels into as large of a series string as your inverter will allow before parallel. Higher voltage incurs less resistance losses and it can be a pretty significant loss. Had an inverter die on me and had to drop to an older inverter while waiting for the replacement. It didn’t support the higher voltage as the newer one so had to drop from 320v to 80v ( from one string of 8 to pairs of 2 in parallel) ended up losing almost a full 1kW of peak potential

            • pedz@lemmy.ca
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              Thanks for the tips. I’m kind of stuck with the choices I’ve made in the past and I don’t want to upgrade or change before it’s really needed, in order to prevent waste. One is just a cabin where I go maybe a dozen times a year. The other is a sugar shack used in the day for only a few weeks during the spring so it just has a 3000W 24V inverter. It’s enough for the lights and the water pump once in a while. We really don’t need that much power for now but I’ll certainly switch to 48v when we’ll need to upgrade.

              As for the ideal temperature, I’ve pretty much given up. The average temps in January are around -10°C and it sometimes goes in the -20°C. I thought about multiple ways to insulate and heat the batteries but in the end, I don’t want to leave this unattended in the middle of a forest. So far my solution in winter for the cabin is to carry a portable power station that was sitting in a heated place.

              • LordKitsuna@lemmy.world
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                Lifepo4 is pretty much the one type you can safely leave unattended, it’s very very hard to get them to burn and even when they do it’s mostly smoke. Lithium is the big flame/boom one. The trade off is less energy density compared with lithium but for home storage thats less of an issue. The batteries i shared even feature fire suppression systems (basically an automatically deployed fire ratardant foam internally) for additional protection.

                Building a little box of insulation around the batteries using some foam board panels and a water heater blanket with some water pipe heating tape you can get at most hardware stores would be the cheap easy way and should help with the colder month temps. And is easily picked uo and set aside in warmer weather

        • pedz@lemmy.ca
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          Forget the chainsaw. Just burning the wood like we did in the past creates smog over a whole region. Wood burning is banned in my city and I can literally smell it when I go to the next city where it’s allowed.

          Where I live winters are brutal and most people switched to electric heating over time. If everyone would go back to wood burning, we’d have really bad air quality and smog in winter, even in the countryside and over small villages.

        • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
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          Well, a hand saw was also needed. But you are correct that a chainsaw wouldn’t be needed unless you’re taking about a water sawmill, which is similar in processing wood, but has no carbon footprint in that stage of wood production and usage.

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        Yes and no. Chainsaw is really marginal polluter.

        What warms your house in the winter? Where is dirtier snow? In your fathers homestead or in the city? Where is more generaly more particless in the air? In the countryside or in the city.

        Wood is better than coal or oil, but worse than nuclear or renevables.

        • Ibuthyr@lemmy.wtf
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          In Germany the countryside often is way worse. Especially in the winter. All of those super old, shitty wood furnaces pumping out fine particles often create a worse environment than on new year’s eve. Farmers shredding their crops, pesticides everywhere, polluted ground water from all the fertilizers, etc.

          The 100k Population town I used to live in is way cleaner than the shit I have to deal with just a mere 5km outside of that town.

        • pedz@lemmy.ca
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          1 day ago

          What warms your house in the winter?

          Electricity, like the vast majority of people here. About 94% of which is hydroelectricity. Other ways to heat buildings are slowly getting banned anyway.

          Where is dirtier snow? In your fathers homestead or in the city?

          What? The snow is dirty where there are particles in the air that ends up on the ground. It’s not a contest of city vs countryside. If you live in a place that snows and walk around a house that is heated by wood burning, you will see black particles and specks in the snow surrounding the house. It’s the same at my cabin. When I get there the snow outside is impeccable… until I light the wood stove inside, and then it slowly turns grey all around the cabin. It doesn’t matter if the snow in a city is even dirtier.

          Where is more generaly more particless in the air? In the countryside or in the city.

          Funny thing, in winter during smog episodes, the air quality can be worse in the countryside because of people burning wood. Anyway, it’s banned in bigger cities because of how horrible this is in dense population centers. So, ironically, the air is more polluted when I go to my parents’ place in the countryside where they are burning wood to heat their house, than around my apartment in the downtown of a major city. Again, sometimes the air quality is worse in the countryside or in suburbs during winter, in large parts because of wood burning.

          • MrFinnbean@lemmy.world
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            Where in the world you live if 94% of energy comes from hydroelectricity? It has to be Norway that is pretty unique country in both culture and landscape. I dont think there is any other country where that is possible.

            And i can admit that in Norway my points fall flat.

            I dare to say that in the most of the world air quality is worse in the cities than in the countryside. Also i dare to say most of the time even where you live air quality is worse in the cities.

            I dont really understand your point with the sut on the snow? If you live in the city the snow is grey and nasty meaning there is more pollution? Does that not mean there is less pollution in the countryside? Im mean per person there might be more in the rural areas, but i dont really think your lungs care.

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                Cant find any credible source that says Canada produces even near to that percentage of electricity with hydro.

                I tought we were talking pollution as a whole.

                Btw. Im little intrested now why your cabin producess so much sut? What fire wood you use as a fire wood in canada? What kind ovens you use? Is the chimneys straight pipes or what?

                • RadicalYogi@piefed.social
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                  He is referring Québec, our main (only?) power supplier is even called Hydro-Québec, but they also do wind and solar power.

                • pedz@lemmy.ca
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                  The numbers are for Québec only.

                  In 2021, Quebec generated almost all of its electricity from renewables including hydro (94%), wind (5%), biomass (0.6%) and solar (<0.1%), showing just how much of a renewable powerhouse the province is. Today, its utility operator, Hydro-Quebec, is the largest in Canada, playing an integral role in power exports to U.S. states like New York, New England, and Maine.

                  Quebec’s continued leadership in providing renewable electricity to North American customers is something we can all be proud of.

                • Bo7a@lemmy.ca
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                  24 hours ago

                  I heat primarily with wood and no you don’t get gray fucking snow around the house. This person is exaggerating for effect.

            • rumschlumpel@feddit.org
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              Im mean per person there might be more in the rural areas, but i dont really think your lungs care.

              I really don’t think it’s possible to transplant every city’s population into low-density countryside locations. Without the majority of people dying, anyway.

      • Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.world
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        Found some interesting info here - https://amishrules.com/why-dont-the-amish-use-buttons/

        Apparently some New Order Amish use buttons, and some men of more traditional orders use buttons but conceal them (only using them in places that wouldn’t be visible from the outside.) Amish women (of traditional orders) can’t use buttons at all.

        A massive part of it is adhering to modesty, with fancy buttons considered “showy” and “distracting” particularly for women, as well as a way to impart individual style (which goes against their beliefs.) For men, buttons are associated with military dress, and as the Amish are pacifists, they consider buttons to be inappropriate and aggressive.

        It all comes down to the individual order that people follow. Some use buttons in certain outfits, but some don’t use them at all.

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    It won’t take the CO2 out of the air, and as they produce just enough food for their own use, a few billion people will starve. Never mind.

  • humanspiral@lemmy.ca
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    maybe inspired by this comment? https://lemmy.ca/comment/18397539

    I’ve seen so much degrowth spam/trolling yesterday. This is organized hopelessness in favour of a hopeless failure of a solution. The only degrowth that will ever occur is through mass war/murder. It is a massive resource/diesel investment to conduct the mass destruction/murder. It takes a very dark soul to support degrowth, because it simply has no implementation path based on everyone voluntarily internalizing BP’s carbon footprint personal responsibility.

    • zeca@lemmy.ml
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      A degrowth can be in consumption rather than population. We could use less plastic, less gas,…a lot less

      • humanspiral@lemmy.ca
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        21 hours ago

        Clean energy can replace oligarchist climate terrorist energy without degrowth. Plastic is not a climate problem, and much of it recyclable. Ocean pollution is primarily fishing nets, which seems easily solvable with cotton or other biodegradable materials.

        Degrowth, other than voluntarily choosing veganism or carbon footprint responsibility, as global or national policy, means intentional permanent recession, strengthening oligarchist supremacist opposition to degrowth. It gives an appealing side benefit to genocide.

        There won’t be enough voluntary uptake to make a dent, even if degrowth becomes a political coalition to pander to. Clean growth with carbon/GHG taxes partially funding freedom dividends globally, is a recipe for utopian global harmony and happiness. Degrowth, a divisive recipe for supporting genocidal warmonging, that contributes to coalition inclusive of degrowth not gaining power due to the economic stupidity of including their platform. Portraying leftist ideology as fascist bureacratic economic destruction and warmongering is an oligarchist supremacist ploy.

        Deindustrialization of the US has resulted in political scapegoating straw grasping, that won last election: Immigration, and bipartisan war on China path. Global or national degrowth will fuel more hatred, and passion for war, because we are well below the democratic capacity of Idiocracy, already.

        My fight with degrowth trolls yesterday was in response to milestone in clean H2 achievement out of China. Because the US has climate terrorist oligarch energy protections, it ensures it loses AI race with China. Oligarchist media would rather you promote Amishness degrowth (btw needs more acres per people than currently available acres), than adopt Chinese clean energy to permit technology and manufacturing growth. ie. If we lost at solar dominance/relevance, and will lose at AI relevance, pretend we never should have tried.

        • zeca@lemmy.ml
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          I think you have a point. Although i dont have the knowledge to see for sure that there really is a viable path alternative to economic degrowth.

          i agree that directly supporting degrowth would be unpopular, lead to conflict and maybe would benefit a movement towards genocide. Correct me if thats not what you meant.

          The crack i see in this argument is that it seems to assume that economic growth and quality of life are correlated and that people see it this way. A movement towards improving quality of life in general would entail, i assume, a reduction of our working hours, a reduction in industrial production (as we produce a lot of useless objects just as an excuse to redistribute means of survival without changing the dynamic of the economic system). So a move towards better quality of life would naturally lead to a healthy economic degrowth (in some areas) that could be well seen by people. Maybe im fantasizing too much, but i hope not.

          • humanspiral@lemmy.ca
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            economic growth and quality of life are correlated and that people see it this way.

            They are, before corruption factors. Economic growth = wealth = more options to improve quality of life.

            Financial insecurity corrupts the mind towards hate. Greed from powerful will manipulate populist insecurity towards either direct support of oligarchist/zionist supremacism platform, or towards hateful stupidity that sabotages democratic process towards oligarchism. Technological progress keeps enabling an alternative to slavery from increases in total prosperity. Oligarchist supremacist rule can choose increased oppression instead, followed by “lets genocide the uppity slave class instead of subsidizing their demand”. Degrowth stupidity as an anti-Oligarchist political platform, strengthens oligarchist genocide solution arguments.

            UBI/freedom dividends is a solution to everything. Opposing UBI is only rational if you need oppression and oppressive power hierarchy to enjoy life. UBI redistributes power away from political discretion, it makes labour markets fair, it makes everyone who wants to work much richer, while increasing overall consumption. Disruption, including clean energy transition, is net job creating in addition to enhancing current and future standard of living. Oligarchist campaigns to protect their evil can be told to shut their climate terrorist fuckfaces, or their fuckfaces will be shut for them. $300/ton co2 carbon tax ($3/gallon gasoline) can contribute $4000-$7000 in UBI funding for Americans. It provides market driven clean growth transition.

            The demonic evil of degrowth advocacy is that it is rooted in derailing clean growth policy. I’ve seen it accompanying the most vile and absurd US empire propaganda points, that cannot possibly come from an organically gullible but an honest idiocracy. It is with 100% certainty that the push for degrowth comes from CIA/Oligarchist sources in order to divide and disinform those concerned with climate and human sustainability. “See how all of those climate alarmists hate your job and want to destroy the economy!!!”

            • zeca@lemmy.ml
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              43 minutes ago

              By economic growth i mean more production. This production can be marketable but not represent an actual wealth gain. If i produce a shitty headphone that breaks in a week of use, the world would be better off without it, but it did contribute to the growth of the economy when i sold it to some unfortunate soul. In this sense, a reduction in production may not really represent a reduction in wealth globally. A better production can have a way smaller volume than the current global production while still giving us more actual wealth to live with. Thats why i say economic growth is not quality of life. Of course theres a correlation in the actual data today, but my point is that this correlation is not necessary, its an empirical correlation, not a logical one, and it is something that may change in the future.

              If we cant dissociate economic growth from well being, then i take your point and agree with it.

              Regarding UBI, if it is done in a way that emancipates people, instead of just enabling and maintaining conditions for enslaving people, great. And from my perspective this would probably also entail a spontaneous degrowth.

              I think our views are compatible. Im not defending a forced degrowth nor hope that people do it voluntarily out of nowhere. But political measures to redistribute wealth and improve living standards, like what you envision with UBI, could lead to a natural and widely accepted degrowth, which would be positive.