Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

A

A

A

A

A

A

A

A

[Sergarr]

stop growing in the West so developing countries have enough room to grow by pumping carbon

That's a bad idea, since the growth in the West has the potential to develop more ecologically friendly technologies, which then can get implemented in the developing countries directly without going through the "pump carbon" phase at all.

[mainiac]

Reducing the growth of your trade partners is not a good thing for growth, unless 200 years of economists have completely missed the boat.

The US in particular has perfectly reasonable plans to sharply reduce emissions even as continuing to grow.  If anything these plans are pessimistic (because the CBO errs on the side of caution in long term forecasts).

[ChairmanPoo]

ChairmanPoo, zero growth just mean we keep going with the current living standards. I'm not sure why you keep arguing against some kind of primitivist straw man.

Two reasons:

- Because I don't think that sticking with the current living standards is viable without the rest of the structure. Meaning: I don't think you can stop the system without it coming crashing down into a primitivist hellhole. This is the Red Queen race; you have to move very fast just to stand still.

- Because the current living standard is just unacceptable for many things, even if the stop didn't compromise it (and it would, oh, sure it would). I'm not happy sitting to watch people die from conditions that might have been curable if at some point it hadn't been decided that the world was going too fast.

I'm all for optimizing the system, making it fairer, more rational energy policies, whatnot. But stopping it? Hell no.

[Ukrainian Ranger]

I think after the third world war carbon emissions will stop being an issue

[GreatJustice]

Carbon emissions will tend to go down anyway as energy efficiency improves, as it already is (both from environmental awareness and simple cost conservation leading to development of alternatives), and perhaps in the future there will be very cheap, straightforward way of dealing with past pollution. At the very least, it seems likely that this generation (and future generations) will have an easier time dealing with (non-excessive) pollution in the future than the current one can at the moment.

I'm reminded of the late 1800s predictions that, with the growth of cities on the American Eastern Seaboard and NYC in particular, horses would create so much manure that cities would specifically require redesign to handle "manure fills" or "manure streams" running throughout the cities and into the ocean. Yet a few decades later, the automobile was invented, making the issue completely irrelevant.

[smjjames]

Yes carbon emissions will tend to go down, but carbon emissions aren't going down fast enough at this rate.

[10ebbor10]

Still, that doesn't require a zero-growth policy. The policy is a means to an and, not a goal in itself.

[Sheb]

Yeah, actually I don't support zero-growth policy, because it seems kinda weird to have that as an policy objective. Growth in itself ain't bad. It would make more sense to cap the amount of resources we use and let the economy do as much as it can with this.

However, I also think that, should we implement the kind of measure we actually need to stop the climate from going to shit, the economy would tank and results in a few decades of stagnant living standards as so much resources are spent in building the energy infrastructure, transport infrastructure etc etc, followed by much slower growth as we cannot simply grow by consuming more resources anymore.

[Antsan]

So, the UK's Green party has released its manifesto for the upcoming general election. It makes for... interesting reading.

The url I found this at is http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/green-party/11356354/Drugs-brothels-al-Qaeda-and-the-Beyonce-tax-the-Green-Party-plan-for-Britain.html

I don't want to shorten it, as it kind of tells its own story.

Make drugs and brothels legal? I'm all for that, it opens doors for making both more safe for everyone involved.
Making "being member of a terrorist organization" legal probably means "getting rid of the term 'terrorist organization'", which seems sensible to me.
Where I am unsure is the whole "zero growth" thing, because how growth is measured is a very fuzzy thing itself. I mean, stuff like advertizing revenue are probably calculated into economical growth when basically advertizing is only a drain on energy (any effect it has on the rest of the economy should show up elsewhere, right?) and work force.
I am all for dialing back all kinds of luxuries, but development in areas of importance to basic human well-being should be pursued.

The "citizens income" thing has another benefit that is often overlooked: It is administratively simple and administration is very costly.

Independent schools will lose their charitable status and pay corporation tax, while church schools will be stripped of taxpayer funding. Religious instruction will be banned in school hours.

In Germany the equivalent of "charitable status" would probably be "non-profit", which menas that any surplus made needs to be either spent or paid to the government. Whether an organization is a school or not doesn't factor into this. This makes most sense to me.

Everything under "Beyonce Tax" (except the tax itself) seems strange.

“Alternative” medicine will be promoted.

Stupid buzzwords.

In order to prevent “overpopulation”

It's funny that they put "overpopulation" in scare quotes.

VEGETARIANISM FOR ALL

A Green party would impose “research, education and economic measures” to drive a “transition from diets dominated by meat”. Factory farming would be abolished, and the sale of fur criminalised and shooting banned. Whips and jumps would be banned from horse racing.

First off: Eating less meat doesn't mean eating no meat at all. "Dieats dominated by meat" are unhealthy, so moving away from them might be desirable, I think.
Criminalizing the sale of fur is abominable which would mean that when someone butchers animals for living they would have to throw away the fur instead of utilizing it. Seems backwards to me - if we kill animals we should use as much of them as possible.
"Ban shooting"? I'm not sure what that even means.
Banning whips? That's stupid. Banning hitting horses with them seems more reasonable (although I hope they don't ban hitting cows with sticks - they hardly notice). Banning jumps... I don't know, might be a reasonable idea.

The problem with many so called "animal rights activists" don't know anything about animals and how to treat them. They might have some idea about cats and dogs, but they assume all kinds of things about other animals which are just wrong.
One example is the treatment of goats (my family owns a few). If you own goats they need to be marked in some way. Originally this was done via branding, now branding is banned and ear tags are to be used instead. Goats are very active, which means it is almost a given that they will rip out their ear tags over and over again. Branding definitely isn't nice but in the long term ear tags are worse for goats.
Legislation like that happens all the time, where something is done for "the benefit of the animal" and then works to make the life of animals worse. I've never seen a political party which bothered both with animal rights and working with farmers to actually learn what rights animals actually might need.

Looking at it more in details, this "manifesto" seems more to be a whole lot of independent resolutions taken during various general assemblies over the years.

I thought this was how most manifestos are written.

Qell, the thing is that there is a limit to economic growth. We cannot double our wealth every generation forever.  So zero-growth is not a choice, it's a certainty. The question become "how do we adapt to it".

Say it with me: Planned economy!

It's the only way to be sure.

I prefer decentralized economy. More decentralized than "multinational companies", of course.

Technology might not save us but it's our best bet. . I repeat, most of the things that we need to live depend on huge industrial complexes. So going with this degrowth plan is basically telling anyone with heart disease, or cancer, or organ failure or, heavens forbid, one of those orphan diseases that need a terribly expensive treatment, to go fuck themselves. Or, if that pamphlet from before is for serious, send them to some "alternative practitioner". And that's just one aspect. There's also food production, and last but not least, lifestyle; odds are this de-escalation would mean going back to the pre-industrial standard of being stuck in the city of your birth.
Going luddite is not going to lead us anywhere we want to be

Let me put it like this: Fuck lifestyle. If yur lifestyle depends on the luxuries you have access to, you are doing something wrong. I am all for personal development, food, medicine, research and that stuff, but seriously, luxury and lifestyle should come after long term survivability.

stop growing in the West so developing countries have enough room to grow by pumping carbon

That's a bad idea, since the growth in the West has the potential to develop more ecologically friendly technologies, which then can get implemented in the developing countries directly without going through the "pump carbon" phase at all.

We don't have that technology now, the third world countries need to develop now and we can do research while dialling back our emissions.

[LordSlowpoke]

the west is not dialing back emissions? surely you don't mean europe?

i mean, since you're german you have no reason to be pointing at based merkel's attempts to nuke everything in favor of coal do you

and we're actually getting there techwise, do you see any third world country doing that instead? or are you advocating people going full china because they absolutely must grow

[Antsan]

I'm not entirely sure what your point is. That second paragraph has quite a few interpretations.

I don't identify with Germany, I only live here and am subject to the laws. I also don't identify with Merkel, as you can probably imagine. I am not responsible for Merkel's or "Germany's" actions either, it's not like I have much of a say in anything and protesting only goes that far. I'll have to live with my limited agency.

No, I don't see third world countries developing technology for reducing emissions. I also don't see why we need to burn coal to run advertising when we want to develop technology reducing environmental damage. It's not like research depends on advertising, people watching reality TV, cheap meat in unhealthy masses, electronics being produced to be scrapped immediately after being packaged, prestige projects being (not) built...
Our first world society is ridiculously wasteful. I don't see why people call our economy efficient.

[Phmcw]

I'm not entirely sure what your point is. That second paragraph has quite a few interpretations.

I don't identify with Germany, I only live here and am subject to the laws. I also don't identify with Merkel, as you can probably imagine. I am not responsible for Merkel's or "Germany's" actions either, it's not like I have much of a say in anything and protesting only goes that far. I'll have to live with my limited agency.

No, I don't see third world countries developing technology for reducing emissions. I also don't see why we need to burn coal to run advertising when we want to develop technology reducing environmental damage. It's not like research depends on advertising, people watching reality TV, cheap meat in unhealthy masses, electronics being produced to be scrapped immediately after being packaged, prestige projects being (not) built...
Our first world society is ridiculously wasteful. I don't see why people call our economy efficient.

because it's better than anything else. Most third world countries TRASH their environement. Hell, we did a lot of damage to ours even before the industrial revolution.


Also I find it funny that peoples analyse with care the program of a party that obviously gained protest votes.
It's like the FN in France, voting FN, especially when Jean-Marie Le pen was in power, meant "fuck you" to the traditional parties and little else.

[Antsan]

That sounds more like a feature of our technology, not our economic system.

[Antsan]

No, I mean the efficiency of first world countries compared to third world ones.

[mainiac]

The reason we trash the environment is because the environment is a public good but the benefits accrue to a few individuals who happen to make the decisions.  Tragedy of the commons.