Will Bunch expresses what I’ve been thinking since Trump was elected. American democracy is under attack from within. The fascists who yearn for an authoritarian government in the media are promoting it, and the media who supposedly don’t support it fail to recognize it. They are busy trying to follow the political playbook of the 20th century.
Then China will collapse too. You have to get out of binary thinking. Us versus them. Any society based on growth will fail. Produce resources for survivability. That is all. Our way of doing things is gone. It can’t continue. Adapt or die.
While you’re getting out of binary thinking, consider that perhaps fully capitalist and fully planned economies are both bad, and a compromise between the two, attempting to harness the best features of each, is necessary.
Just like over-eating and under-eating are both bad. A healthy balance is better.
Social Democracies would be adequate for humans, but not the planet. It still requires growth, which is no bueno for ecosystems. Selfishly, I would love for mixed economies to attempt sustainability, but the math and timelines don’t make that possible. Massive degrowth will either be implemented by us, or will be forced on us.
Oh, from that perspective things remain to be seen. For global warming to actually result in apocalypse, economical, large-scale carbon capture has to be impossible. We just don’t know yet, it’s a busy field.
I think your certainty is misplaced though.
I hope so. I hope I’m wrong. But the logistics involved do not seem promising. The technology isn’t ready for large scale carbon capture. And the production and materials needed to build it will still use carbon. It’s a carbon conundrum. Geoengineering might buy us time, but growth economies must be dismantled or the problems will persist into the future. This article explains the situation we’re in.
We certainly have challenging times ahead, regardless of how things go. No question about that one.
Even rolling out some ideal, sci fi solution today, we have still done some damage that will take time to repair. Heat absorbed by the ocean has built up for years and can only leave so quickly.
I do think a mixed economy can control its growth in a sustainable way, though. Not all economic value needs to be derived heavily from carbon-producing industries. Service economies can create value at a much reduced environmental cost, though their increasing wealth does often come with its own, new threats to the environment.
It’s threading a needle, no question about it. But I do think it’s within the realm of actual possibility. Where I’m not sure a fully planned and actually well-functioning economy really is. For political reasons, if not practical.
How about a steady-state economy?
I love it in theory, particularly as our data-processing continues to advance. In practice I think it’d be impossible to implement in my country (US) any time this century without a whole lot of blood in the streets, and a very high likelihood of the attempt failing due to corruption and sabotage, and resulting in a dramatic, reactionary shift in the country’s direction to the far right.
In the future though, as our tools improve and attitudes toward tech change, something like this could become feasible. You’d have to deal with modern population decline via immigration, which is naturally unsustainable, but that bridge can be crossed in the future.