[epistasis]

What do you think a just transition will look like? One person's "consumption" and growth is another's "I finally have electricity in my village, powered by solar and batteries," or "EV purchasing grew so much that the oil refinery a mile away shut down and my family no longer gets sick like they used to." What exactly does a Green New Deal look like? Massive consumption is a huge component of it.

And this is why white environmentalists are not trusted by the environmental justice community. Too much vague moralizing, not enough understanding of the plight of people who are being oppressed by the current system, or even what the current system actually is.

[allworknoplay]

I'm not sure where you get the idea that I'm vaguely moralizing -- elsewhere in this thread I recommend a 2020 book called Less is More (https://www.jasonhickel.org/less-is-more) that contains analysis of these problems and very specific strategies for addressing them.

It's well understood that wealthy countries, and especially the US, generate far more junk than poorer ones. We don't need to, and there's a big difference between sustainable strategies for getting people what they need and hoping (because, without planning, that's all we're doing) that capitalism will solve this problem through even greater amounts of consumption.

[epistasis]

This is quite the coincidence, I was just reading this essay about MMT and degrowth by that author:

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-09-23/degrowth-and-m...

And while I agree with his numbered policy prescriptions (perhaps quibbling about a jobs guarantee versus universal income), the rhetoric and diction is so objectionable and wrong that it's like we are speaking different language. What he calls degrowth is actually massive growth and consumption in my view. Public services for all? FANTASTIC and exactly what we need. But that's not "degrowth," that's massive growth. Switch to renewables? That requires absolutely huge economic growth and change.

In practice, on the ground in communities using words like "degrowth" in their politics, degrowth is rich people continuing with what they have and nobody else getting access to it. "Degrowth" is the word and philosophy used to block projects that help working people because the wealthy are doing A-OK. The "degrowth" language allows the wealthy capitalists to hold onto everything, and will never enable the correction of wealth inequality and distribution problems of capitalism. I see it in my own small town, that is an outlier in the US. ~30% residents label themselves anti-capitalist, ~30% are working class non-landwoners without much political ideology except populism, ~30% are landlords trying to extract money. A significant chunk of the "anti-capitalist" segment are also landlords and influence the politics of the "degrowth" anti-capitalists to privilege the already privileged, this is really dangerous ways to think about things. The terrible language enables the reactionaries more than the revolutionaries. Make "capitalism" vague and unspecific enough to be a vague "bad" label, make "consumption" a vague and undefinable term, and it will be used by those in power as a tool to subvert any change.

For a school of thought that seems to abhor "contradictions," they seem to embrace them when it comes to using words.

[allworknoplay]

The value derived from public goods is mostly not factored into GDP growth and (when executed well) serves people both more efficiently and more equitably than the purchases GDP does account for (obvious examples, public or publicly funded healthcare, parks, libraries). The degrowth argument is that overall this increase in efficiency would reduce production/consumption while improving lives, but it does also not ignore that particularly wasteful nations/lifestyles may need to live differently.

Hickel and others who write on degrowth are mostly very clear about these definitions (and Less is More is exceedingly thorough on the matter), but obviously you have to read past the surface level to pick up some of the detail. That's not meant as a dig at you or to imply that you're not willing to do more reading, just to clarify that because oftentimes these analyses are miles apart from typical US/western thinking, a lot of digging can be necessary.

As I noted above, Hickel applies a historical materialist analysis in a lot of his work, which can take some time getting used to (and, indeed, did for me).

[mulmen]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts in this post and elsewhere in this thread, food for thought. You have introduced me to a new concept which in hindsight is obvious but I am embarrassed to admit I had not considered. I'll add resilience.org to my reading list, do you have a blog or other sources you suggest following on the topic of environmental justice?