Degrowth

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/34669814

Air freight capacity between China and the U.S. dropped by almost a third after a tax-free exemption for low-value items out of China was removed this month, industry data showed, denting a significant revenue stream for Asia's major airlines.

Air cargo carriers including Cathay Pacific, China Southern, Air China, and Korean Air have profited from booming volumes of e-commerce, led by fast-fashion retailers such as Shein and PDD Holdings' Temu, flowing from China to the United States.

[...]

Cargo makes up around a quarter of Cathay and Korean Air's overall revenues. Cargo yields and revenues at a number of Asia's airlines grew significantly faster than their passenger segments last year. Last year low-value e-commerce shipments - at 1.2 million tonnes - made up 55% of goods shipped from China to the United States by air, compared to just 5% in 2018, an Aevean analysis showed.

Buoyed by strong air freight demand out of Asia since the pandemic, freight majors like Hong Kong-based Cathay, Singapore Airlines, and Taiwan's China Airlines have ordered large, new freighters for the busiest trade routes.

“Trump, degrowther,” the leftist journalist Doug Henwood commented online last week. He was being facetious, of course (...) Making personal sacrifices, short-term or otherwise, is foreign to Trump’s nature. And yet, for political reasons, he has been driven to ask Americans to accept some limits on their shopaholic tendencies.

“What he is doing is fairly unprecedented: explicitly saying that he is willing to pay an economic price in terms of growth in order to protect something else that he thinks is valuable and important,” Daniel Susskind, an economics professor at King’s College London who is the author of the 2024 book “Growth: A History and a Reckoning,” told me in an e-mail. “Until now, Trump has tended to deny that tariffs come with any sort of price attached.”

What Trump thinks is important is very different from what everybody on slrpnk thinks is important, I'm sure. But just the idea of a mainstream American politician saying "we don't need to buy all that stuff" makes me feel strangely positive?

From the article:

Furthermore, this article argues against the common tendency to regard all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as the result of production for household consumption, an assumption that tends to focus blame for climate change on the moral failings of individuals. In reality, consumer choices are not the driving factor in the growth of GHG emissions, GHG emissions are not reducible to the carbon footprint of consumption goods, and proposed solutions to climate change that focus on changes to household consumption habits can have little effect on the overall growth of GHG emissions. In the end, this flawed way of thinking is merely a form of victim-blaming, in which individuals are made to feel guilty for massively destructive social forces far beyond the control of individual decision-making, all in order to take the focus away from any substantive social movement aimed at replacing the capitalist mode of production with a more sustainable and rational society.

Far-right authoritarian pundits and political actors, from Matt Walsh to Elon Musk, all seem to have gotten the same memo instructing them to fixate on “low” fertility and birth rates. Musk has claimed that “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming” and that it will lead to “mass extinction.”

Some liberals are flirting with this narrative, too. In a February New Yorker essay, Gideon Lewis-Kraus deploys dystopian imagery to describe the “low” birth-rate in South Korea, twice comparing the country to the collapsing, childless society in the 2006 film Children of Men.

It’s not just liberals and authoritarians engaging in this birth-rate crisis panic. Self-described leftist Elizabeth Bruenig recently equated falling fertility with humanity’s inability “to persist on this Earth.” Running through her pronatalist Atlantic opinion piece is an entirely uninterrogated presumption that fertility rates collected today are able to predict the total disappearance of the species Homo sapiens at some future time.

But is this panic about low fertility driving human population collapse supported by any evidence?

https://archive.ph/rIycs

The world has changed dramatically since the start of the second Trump administration. But how best to describe this shift? Many see it as potentially the end of American democracy, or the end of the Atlantic Alliance and the United States’ prime role in global multilateral institutions.

Here’s a less obvious take: maybe Trump’s ascent portends the end of Big Solutions. The latter have been necessitated by the eruption of Big Problems—i.e., global predicaments that are potential civilization killers, including climate change, worsening economic inequality, the spread of persistent toxins throughout the environment, and the accelerating loss of wild nature.

Meanwhile, can small solutions work? Many environmentalists have been promoting them all along. There is a rich literature on localization, degrowth, community resilience, and Indigenous attitudes and practices, and small environmental orgs have sprung up to further these strategies. Proponents of small solutions don’t claim that these actions will enable humanity to continue its current growth trajectory while canceling growth’s negative impacts on people and the planet. Rather, Small Is Beautiful promoters say we should preserve and repair as much as we humanly can of nature and durable human culture, and do this individually and in our households and communities, where we have the most agency. Small-scale, localized approaches can also build adaptive capacity and resilience as Big Solutions fail.

First, it’s important to understand that climate change is a symptom of a larger issue: ecological overshoot, or the fact that humans are consuming resources faster than they can regenerate and producing more waste and pollution than nature can absorb, said William Rees, a human and ecological economist and professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia. The most effective solutions, then, address not just greenhouse gas emissions but overall consumption and pollution.

One of the most effective ways to avoid consumption in the first place, Dr. Rees said, is to have a smaller family. But that might not be a realistic option for many people, for all kinds of personal, cultural and other reasons.

“Take a moment to reflect on what a good life within planetary limits look like,” said Diana Ivanova, an environmental social scientist at the University of Leeds in England. “What does ‘enoughness’ look and feel like?”

https://archive.ph/U3G0C

Update: Mindless downvotes will be taken as evidence that degrowthers (of which I am one) are not capable of defending their ideas. What's the point of a community where one only sees things that confirm one's biases? I don't get it. Maybe this lazy tribal attitude helps explain why degrowth is so deeply unpopular.

This seems as good a presentation as we'll get of the case against degrowth. Namely that it's a political loser, the environment be damned. People in this community probably want to read things they already agree with (update - they sure do). I'd say we'd do better by first taking seriously the arguments of the other side. Which appear quite solid, to the point that it's hard to know how to go about countering them.

Some choice excerpts:

Most Americans care deeply about building wealth: Roughly 79 percent describe their money as “extremely” or “very” important to them. Eighty-four percent say there’s “nothing wrong” with trying to make as much money as possible [...]

In 2024 [...] Trump made major gains in large, immigrant-rich urban counties, where service-sector employment is dominant. [...] Why did these previously stalwart Democrats break for Trump? Because they are all upwardly mobile groups, for whom pocket-book issues are central. More than progressive pandering, they want the opportunity to participate in the American dream—and Trump seemed to promise that. [...]

To their credit, some liberals have tried to fill the void created by this anti-capitalist conservatism. The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson and his co-author, Ezra Klein, have pushed for an “abundance” liberalism in their new book [...] [W]e now have two major parties infected by the gospel of no-wealth. Both parties embrace, in Klein and Thompson’s phrasing, a “scarcity” mindset rather than an “abundance” mindset.

A team of international researchers published a new U.N. report Wednesday that adds to the rising scientific call for transformative societal and economic changes to staunch critical environmental threats like global warming, plastic pollution and biodiversity loss.

“The science is clear on what needs to change,” said lead author Caitlyn Eberle. “Stop using fossil fuels, respect and protect nature, use resources sustainably. So if we know what we need to do to change things, why aren’t we doing it?”

The research in the report shows that many of today’s sustainability projects are superficial because they focus on small changes within the system without changing the system itself, she said. A good example is recycling, which is valuable, but doesn’t get to the core issue of why so much waste is produced in the first place, she added. “We cannot expect real change unless we examine the reasons behind our actions and question why we’re doing what we’re doing.”

The process may lead to some “uncomfortable” territory, said UNU-EHS deputy director Zita Sebesvari, another lead author of the report. Crises in Earth’s ecosystems, including the climate and human systems, require rethinking many basic assumptions and values, for example about consumption and waste. “If we bring this to our own life,” she said, “the question is, why do we think that convenience is more important than other values like nature and a pollution-free environment?”

https://archive.ph/QmXcB

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/35963783

To date, 5,282 hens have been distributed to residents, and not only have the residents received a plentiful supply of free eggs, but food waste has also been averted from landfill as chickens are fed kitchen scraps which would otherwise be thrown away.