All of Goran Haden's Comments + Replies

Here's my brand new EA music playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5TyxPYMTFv8rhdY2NoQVM4

Economic growth is also linked to climate change and other environmental problems, and that is already affecting mental health as IPCC clarifies.

Thanks for a great post! I think it's very reasonable to focus on what is growing, instead of thinking that more equals better, no matter what. I find that best cases might be more interesting than averages, so I've written a post about how individuals can use a surplus of money to actually increase happiness: https://medium.com/@goranhaden/ten-ways-to-buy-happiness-395cea718440 

Yes, the first one "environment" seems to be expressed in the same way as other tags. 

Ok, I was not searching for biodiversity, so I was not aware of that tag. I guess more people are searching for environment. I do not think there would be too many tags if we also have one for environmental problems, and I do not think we need more environmental tags than these three: climate, biodiversity and the environment.

The combination of environmental problems can be a global catastrophic risk, even the combination of exceeded planetary boundaries and other huge problems.

How about a tag for environmental problems? Now it's only climate change. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_boundaries

How about a tag for environmental problems? Now it's only climate change. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_boundaries

Thanks for re-reading and considering arguments. 

1-2: In the study I mentioned it’s within 50 years. Will it stay there? Earlier studies estimated this would take around 200 years, according to 
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/27/science/intolerable-heat-may-hit-the-middle-east-by-the-end-of-the-century.html  (I can’t access these studies)

Of course I do hope and believe that we can avoid the business as usual scenario, but at the same time we have all these feedback loops and combination of effects that IPCC doesn’t count. On the other hand w... (read more)

Yes, degrowth now might mean more growth in the future than otherwise. It's better to let some air out of the growth balloon than to inflate it so hard that it bursts.

If we done the "right" things historically, we could have done so much more space exploration and other valuable choices before we caused the environmental crisis of today. But now we have wasted Earth's resources in so many useless and destructive ways in a global consumption society that now even challenges our mental health.

What we need now globally is not more overconsumption, but enough ... (read more)

Thanks for your points. 

1. How much suffering different environmental problems will cause is, as you know, difficult to put numbers on, especially in combination. But I fully agree with Toby Ord's conclusion that it is very unlikely that humanity would become extinct this century as a result of climate change. However, I think most people will have worse lives due to environmental degradation, compared to if we stopped prioritizing growth now, which is not so dramatic as it may seem.

The pretty unknown direct climate effect that worries me the most is ... (read more)

When I wrote "We can still have a lot of growth in important areas, but not overall.", then "areas" refers to both geographical areas like countries, and also areas like  solar thermal energy, or something else you need more of. 

We will most likely continue to see growth in poor countries, but even in poor countries, it matters what kind of growth we see. 

Interesting. We had a similar discussion in Sweden 2016, when the government decided to sell coal mines in Germany that were owned by the Swedish state-owned company Vattenfall. It was a lot of pressure from the environmental movement to keep the coal mines in order to keep the coal in the ground. As you mentioned, Greenpeace were not allowed to buy it. 

But instead "the Swedish proposal" won to rise the price of emissions trading in the EU (EU ETS) and soon the price of burning coal increased a lot and the value of these coal mines plummeted. So in this case, Sweden got the billions from selling AND a way larger emission reduction that still today have an important effect.

Is green growth or degrowth the best near-term future? 

I have followed this debate for many years, and my summary and my conclusion is different from this post. It's hard to analyze growth overall without more analysis about the effect on climate and other planetary boundaries, when we already exceed 6 of these 9 boundaries. In 2015, it was 4 out of 9. Updated study to be published later this year. This source is not yet available in English, but all links below are in English. https://landetsfria.nu/2021/nummer-282/fler-hallbara-granser-kan-ha-passer... (read more)

There is a lot of important new research about degrowth, so I will try to summarize:  

Most humans try to solve problems by adding, but we should more often reduce. More complexity increases risks: https://podbay.fm/p/sean-carrolls-mindscape-science-society-philosophy-culture-arts-and-ideas/e/1630327697 

Degrowth researchers I talked to say that we have convincing findings that green growth is not likely. We might see decoupling, but not rapid enough. So we have to choose between economic growth or reaching our environmental goals in time. Met... (read more)

I would really appreciate a serious and respectful conversation between experts in the field. I have followed this debate for many years, but people are always talking ABOUT the other side. So I asked experts in favour of not aiming for growth and they say that they only get three kind of responses: Either none, or that others agree, or a response that is not convincing at all for a researcher, often straw man arguments. 

And i tend to hear the same story from the other side, so i think EA might be the organization to arrange a high level conversation between experts about degrowth? 

This may be a good idea, but a key problem with newspapers as I see it, is that the idea of news in itself leads to not focusing on the most important information. Instead it's like the edge of the leafs on the tree of knowledge. Here and now instead of long-term global focus. Can we call it a newspaper and still avoid that?