In other words, you don't have a clue. You don't know where you want the world to go except "down". You have no idea how to get there. You've no concern for the misery you would inflict on the world. You have no idea what the post-apocalypse world would look like.
You're just blowing smoke.
It's easy, safe and comfortable to talk from a known situation and criticize people who propose stepping into the unknown. That's one of the two main reasons people won't even consider stepping away from BAU, the other reason being decades of consumption culture conditioning and the belief that progress will always find a fix.
A lot of Roman senators probably said the same things in the 4th and 5th century AD.
BAU seems to me a deficient term for this discussion - it has changed massively in my lifetime, for the worse, in that resource consumption and wastes dumping have been and still are increasing, and that sense of 'Usual' is understood only by an elite of specialists who focus on the issue. Business-as-Despoiler would be nearer the mark.
Plainly to propose the alternative of a steady state economy at a time where we are on track to crash the ecological system - with the proximate threat being of the onset of serial global crop failures during the 2020s - would demonstrate a detatchment from present reality in favour of some future idyll.
The present goal clearly needs to be of declining resource consumption and the terminantion of dumping. Given the elemental forces our misconduct has empowered, such as the acceleration of Albedo Loss, beside that goal we plainly also have to cleanse the system of our wastes and to treat the symptoms they generate - most particularly the warming - during the decades that cleansing will inevitably require.
That immense new economic activity cannot rationally be called
'degrowth', not least because it includes such changes as the growth of a new global forest industry in "Carbon Recovery for Food Security" across around 1,600 million hectares of non-farmland, employing up to 100 million people.
"Global Re-orientation" might be a more apt term for the changes needed.
'Degrowth' appears to be used as a euphemism for the decline of a technologically advanced society with an accompanying population crash, which it is wrongly assumed would resolve not only the climate threat but also other issues of declining resources.
There are various flaws in that assumption:
- that the desperation of those up against the wall would not lead to conflict and the permanent widespread loss of soil fertility - through nuclear and other contamination such as chem/bio-weapons;
- that the Major Interactive Feedbacks would not continue their acceleration pushing climate destabilization and ocean acidification far beyond the possibility of reliable food suppies;
- that a crash would not lead to a marginally reduced population under a high tech dictatorship that applies unchecked power to operate a society where the remaining resources are consumed in succession supporting a steadily declining global population under worsening conditions.
In arguing for a crash, and so scorning global efforts for a soft landing, a proponent appears to seek an abdication of responsibility for the outcome - without local, provincial, regional and global coherence being maintained and raised, that coherence is declining into an increasingly chaotic flux where the bully/bandit/warlord is increasingly irresistable, and concerns for resources, future generations, etc are off the table. (Note that 'coherence' is used here in the sense of formal fully accountable co-operation, not the rigidity of a coersive hierarchy's control).
OTOH if that coherence is being raised to improve society's chances of a soft landing with minimal resource consumption and an end to dumping, then the goal is definitely not of achieving a crash.
I've yet to see any case presented where a crash can be proposed as part of raising the coherence of popular interactions - apart from occasional death-cults people generally have no interest in discussing the voluntary intentional collapse of all they hold dear. It is a doomer ideology that serves no one but the organizers of denial of the need for radical change who want to see the status quo maintained.
Here's to the softest landing that consensual politics allows !
Regards,
Lewis