Limits to growth are a bitch

The price of progress

So, I think this is worth pointing out. Last year, global copper production by the twenty biggest mines dropped by 20%. This happened because the northern part of Chile and Zambia face huge droughts, mostly due to climate change. Without water, the mined material just can’t be processed, or in the case of Zambia, the lack of water means a lack of electricity for the mines.

These are the sort of problems you face, when society pursues perpetual economic growth: By the time you realize you have a problem, you can no longer fix it. To achieve net zero by 2040, copper demand would increase by 50% by then compared to 2023. But they’re already running into problems keeping current production levels going, right now.

With no copper, you can’t use solar panels (the grid has to be upgraded and you need a converter), you can’t use wind, you can’t build electric vehicles, even nuclear depends on copper. This is what I mean, when I say the writing is just on the wall by now. Anyone can see where this is going.

I’m not giving you any guarantees that buying a pile of copper will make you rich. What happened in 2008 is that society could not afford the price of oil anymore, so demand just crashed. That could happen with copper too: People could just decide they don’t want solar panels and electric vehicles after all.

I’m not really telling you anything new here, it’s not hard to figure these things out. Green growth is an illusion, because growth is the problem. We’ve known this for a long time, it’s what the Club of Rome warned about, that growth would start breaking down right around now, with a sharp crash in production of material goods.

But most people don’t really want to see the bigger picture. Americans are like a drunk guy at a frat party, who is continuing to drink so he doesn’t feel his headache. South Korea and Japan are two guys sitting on the couch, staring off into blank space. The Scandinavian countries are trying to pick up pieces of broken glass off the floor and clean the vomit out of the carpet.

In a sense, right wingers consider it in poor taste when you bring up the climate problem. It’s the Achilles heel to their entire worldview, which is based on domination. The dumb ones invent stories about hurricanes being steered into red states to make Trump lose the election. The smarter ones just get angry when you dare to mention it.

From A to Z, the climate problem is just incompatible with the right wing view of the world. Property rights? Well turns out we all affect each other with our activities. Meat? Poisons the atmosphere. Cryptocurrency? Waste of energy. AI? Waste of energy. Migration? Well, we’re all going to become immigrants, just to survive. Low birth rates? Well that’s a good thing, because the world won’t be able to feed, clothe and shelter 8 billion people anymore.

What people will always defend most aggressively, more than anything else, is their perception of themselves as the good guys of the story. Billionaires will pay you a lot of money, just for you to come up with a narrative in which they’re the good guys. You can just work at a think tank like the Heritage Foundation and write articles like that, or become an e/acc dork on Twitter paid per post by Mr. Musk, it’s an easy lazy job. We’re never going to get the billionaires to take climate change seriously, because it fundamentally inverts the narrative these people tell themselves. They got the private jet, the golf course, the hot mistress, the yacht, as their reward for helping humanity so much.

The best example would be Musk, who was going to save us all from climate change (lol), but as the years progress and it becomes increasingly obvious that this is not just something that’s going to bother us in the distant future, he becomes less eager to acknowledge the problem. After all, if it’s going to strike now (hi Floridians), the only solution left is degrowth, which is not the sort of mentality through which you become a billionaire.

At its most essential, degrowth just means doing less. The world already produces more food than we need, but we feed most of it to animals that are then fed to humans. You could think of SARS2 as a way of forcing degrowth upon society: If most people become too sick to work, that will also work to shrink the economy.

40 Comments

  1. My neighbour, a man who is around 70, became very rich by building houses at the start of the property bubble. He also owns a lot of farmland.

    Despite all this wealth, he drives a twenty year old Toyota Land Cruiser and never had any interest in flying around the world for expensive vacations.

    In many instances, it’s the women who are the problem. Constantly wanting to trade in their 3 year old car(s) to upgrade to the latest model, always clothes shopping, new curtains and furniture, upgraded kitchen with the latest appliances and gadgets, constantly traveling to sunny exotic locations for those Instagram “likes”, along with weekend “getaways” to different European cities using budget airlines like Ryanair. They know about the climate crisis, but they don’t care.

    All these Western middle/upper class women are in for a massive shock over the next few years as society unravels and their standard of living plummets significantly. They have NO IDEA just how bad things are going to get. I hope that all these woke feminists enjoy their remaining hedonism while it lasts!

    For the men, it is time to start embracing the Goggins mindset in order to mentally and physically prepare for the tough times ahead:

    https://youtu.be/6OIsdQXNC24?si=fYFjVvPFqcrkbke9

  2. I’m not sure I understand.

    It’s necessary to quickly mine millions more tons of metals such as copper, nickel, cobalt and lithium in order to manufacture and bring to market billions of electric cars, solar panels, and giant windmills in order not to make anymore of the trace gas that is plant food, but unfortunately it’s probably already too late for all this mining and manufacturing because GLOBAL WARMING is causing droughts and hurricanes that are making mining too difficult?

    Does that about sum it up?
    And this actually makes sense to you?

    • “I’m not sure I understand.”

      No, you don’t seem to understand, not yet.

      In a nutshell, we are in overshoot, which is a predicament that will have an outcome rather than a problem with a solution.

      Degrowth is coming one way or another.

      Neither the left nor the right can accept the situation – they are outmoded, in denial, and/or blinded by ideological blinkers.

      Despite irrefutable and mounting evidence of us sailing past planetary boundaries, both sides are still pro-growth/consumption, which will only make the overconsumption and consequences of same worse.

      This will come to an end when we consume less. Odds are very high that there will be an awful lot less of us consumers as well.

      Several billions less.

      • Wombat, I agree with you that we’re way into overshoot, contrary to Elon Musk. Eight billion is a ridiculous, unstainable number of humans.

        I’m just fed up with all the politics and nonsense surrounding the issue of GLOBAL WARMING. The left has gotten completely dug in and entrenched on the issue, and they insist on more and more ridiculous claims every year, just as they’re doing with race and gender and VACCINATION.

        I don’t trust them one iota and I now strongly suspect the entire premise of GLOBAL WARMING is wrong.

        You understand that inevitable degrowth will be a VERY painful process, especially for the bottom 90% on the wealth scale?

        • “You understand that inevitable degrowth will be a VERY painful process, especially for the bottom 90% on the wealth scale?”

          Yes, it seems unlikely that a gentle, relatively painless, voluntary, degrowth process will be possible at this stage. Instead, we will get “”degrowth”” which is likely be painful AND lethal for billions of people.

          Do I like the idea? Not really. Do I like the idea of mankind changing the climate? Not really. But whether I personally like these ideas has no bearing on whether they happen.

          You seem to be suffering from the (in my opinion irrational and illogical) belief that how you ‘feel’ about things can magically change them.

          Well, you are in the right place! There are plenty of people here who think that one can change reality with one’s mind. I’m not one of them, but if you do believe this, and if you can change reality with the power of your feelings alone, then would you mind changing this shitshow into something with a different outcome?

          That’d be great, thanx

          😛

          • >You seem to be suffering from the (in my opinion irrational and illogical) belief that how you ‘feel’ about things can magically change them.

            What are you talking about??

            I’m voting for Trump because it’s my civic duty to vote against the Democrats who have lost their everlasting minds and I’d like the US to thrive and succeed as much as possible for the greater good.

            Other than that, I’m not trying to alter the world. I’m not a misguided GLOBAL WARMING tard.

            I feel I’ve missed your point.
            Please be more clear.

          • I would try to be more clear, but I’m struggling to decide where to start. Once I work out which logical fallacy best represents your words/argument against man-made global warming, I’ll get back to you. At the moment, the leading contenders seem to be:
            – ad hoc fallacy (made up on the spot, but just doesn’t make sense – needs no further explanation I reckon :))
            – ad hominem “GLOBAL WARMING tard”
            – appeal to pity, or perhaps this one is best described as a ‘loaded question’? “You understand that inevitable degrowth will be a VERY painful process, especially for the bottom 90% on the wealth scale?”
            – red herring fallacy (introducing irrelevant points such as gender issues to a debate about climate)

            Etc. etc.

            There are just too many hits, and overlap, to decide between them.

          • You’re right though, I’m not myself.

            I’ve been sober for weeks now – it’s irritating, but I need to establish a new baseline for my health.

            But predating this little health kick of mine, is my belief that what humans are doing is changing the climate. That is not new. Nor is my belief that those changes to the climate will probably impact the poorest fist and worst, although I can accept that the rich will get hurt too. After all, having heaps of cash isn’t so great if there’s nothing to buy because a cyclone has flooded the whole place and people have stripped the shelves.

            Can we change it?

            I hate to say it, but no, that doesn’t seem likely. Instead, it looks like the electricity that gets generated by renewables just adds to the mountain of energy that gets produced by burning fossil fuels; the turbines are built on the last wild spaces and kill eagles; emissions haven’t fallen at all, and have in fact grown, etc. And that just damn well pisses me off.

            And capitalism man, as long as that demonic system is there driving the growth, there’s no chance at all – if it weren’t already too late, which with billions and billions of humans, it almost certainly already is (You detect the little bit of equivocation there? Even a committed doomer like me struggles with denial).

            However, I can believe that the ‘green energy solutions’ are crap and still believe that mankind is changing the climate. Those beliefs are not mutually exclusive.

            Seeing as you connected the climate and “vaccine” issues, I’ll give you my own observations on that: what I saw in common between those issues was the way that politics, economics, and unbridled corporate greed overwhelmed scientific objectivity, reason and logic.

            For example, there was no way that ‘green growth’ was EVER going to work, and everyone with any objective rational person could see that, but it sure got a lot of folks rich!

            Etc.

          • Those damnable capitalists man! The upper, dominant classes! The corporate whores, fat-cats, and aristocrats!

            THAT is who the right represents to me. Those scumbags. The center sucks too: damn them for the bloodless, prissy, fence-sitters that they are.

            But I didn’t just wake up one day and invent that stinking herd of high-status swine with their entrenched hierarchy, privileges and power.

            Those bastards are real Tryptie.

            Damn the left for selling out the working class to them. Any truly revolutionary tendency of the left died right then and there – and boy couldn’t the human race have done with some of that spirit in the decades that followed.

            Instead, now, there are just two rights more than anything else: those who lean heavily to the right, and those who just lean right, with maybe some fence sitters in between.

            No wonder you don’t understand the difference between left and right Tryptie – there probably hasn’t been one of note since before you were born.

        • I think most humans think and act as though they were insects in a hive. They talk about ”resources” and ”consuming”, about productivity, rationalizing and quantifying everything, turning everything into an algorithm or a formula so that it can be utilized as a resource by the hive, so that it can be farmed and made into something repeatable and routinary for the service of its expansion – and their thoughts are preoccupied with issues relating to how to structure and organize their hives, a topic which they call politics – basically ignoring the wellbeing of anything outside of them. It makes most people extremely difficult to relate to, once you step outside of it a little and begin to see it for what it really is. Pretty much, you all just think along the lines of whatever buzzwords and corresponding associations you’ve been taught. Would you mind explaining to me what in the ever-living fuck a ‘left’ or a ‘right’ even is? Is it perhaps a pile of brainworms and social programming that you people collectively all MADE THE FUCK UP, and now insist on colonizing the entire conceptual space of human thought with? Most people appear to be unaware of the fact that almost none of what they care about matters in the grand scheme of things, at all, and the things that DO matter – they are barely even on the radar of most people at all.

          • So here you are, complaining about ‘rationalizing’ and ‘quantifying everything’, and you want me to define the left and the right for you?

            Do what to you want, a list?

            C’mon man.

    • A few decades ago there was a copper shortage and people were hoarding pennies to melt them down for a profit. That turned out to be temporary. This will too.

      I think this author is good at reading medical journals and understanding immune systems and vacines. On the subject of climate change he’s just another mediocre guy who forms opinions based on emotion. He said he wasn’t going to write any more. That went out the window because he’s a lonely guy who needs attention. These articles are just sad.

  3. Hey what if I dunno we just achieved global Nazi revolution and exterminated all pocs worldwide, decreasing the population of hominids by around 7.5 billion, and then there would still be plenty of lebensraum to be a normal healthy aryan?

    Wouldn’t that hypothetically solve every single one of these problems? If not, why?

    • I for one support the WW3 apocalypse method of population control. I hope to see us all breathing in nerve agents and getting turned to red mist by shells by next year. I hope I get to fight the Chinese, their dog eating ways offend me.

    • If you really think brownoids are inferior, why would you want to kill them all?

      Seems strangely egalitarian.

      If you think you’re a low IQ low status white male now, imagine a world without people of brown.

      You’d have an entire hierarchy of elizabeth warrens and Pete buttigiegs ruling over you and nobody left for you to feel superior to.

      It’s exactly what Lacan said: The worst thing that can happen to a man is to have your wish fulfilled.

      • Radagast, you should have let Wombat and me continue our fascinating discussion instead of rudely and abruptly CUTTING ME OFF and not allowing me to reply.

        It’s not right that you leave the impression that I stopped.

        My suggestion is that you clearly state that you take such offense over something that you’re silencing somebody.

        Maybe insert a referee emoji.
        Anybody have a suggestion on this?

        • I’m not silencing anybody. There’s just a standard limit to how deep comment trees go built into wordpress.

          You have to reply elsewhere in a comment tree to continue your conversation.

          • That’s kind of funny… a debate about limited physical resources being ended by limitations in virtual resources.

  4. Don’t worry about those. Japan is releasing the self-amplifying RNA vaccines. We’ll all extinct, Net Zero achieved…
    (by the way, can you educate me: does the saRNA vaccine really replicate INDEFINITELY?)

  5. Hiep Tran, did you notice how when Wombat says “There was no way that ‘green growth’ was EVER going to work, and everyone with any objective rational [sic] person could see that,” it completely contradicts Rintrah?

    • RR wrote “Green growth is an illusion”, and Wombat said “There was no way that ‘green growth’ was EVER going to work”
      So what is contradicted??

      • You are right.
        I guess RR is blackpilled to the extent that he believes nothing can save us now because mining is becoming impossible.
        My point is that all that green industry was a bad idea in the first place. I don’t want stupid electric cars or giant windmills.

        • So, it looks like we all pretty much agree on the ‘green growth’ crapola. It was never going to work. Cliches like these come to mind:

          “You can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet”

          “There’s no such thing as a free lunch”

          “You can’t eat your cake and have it too”

          “There’s no such place as ‘away'”

          “Spaceship Earth”

          But, we didn’t want to accept any of that. Instead, we wanted to party on.

          And in the meantime, the over consumption itself and all the consequences it causes just ges worse despite all the talk and faux efforts (smokescreens?) that get pumped out to hide the truth.

          Something gets done, but it won’t work. It could never work. Because the only thing that would work to reduce our overconsumption problems is to just consume less. But that would entail reducing population and/or reducing per capita consumption, which would in turn reduce economic growth, which is ‘inconvenient’ for modern economics, politics, unbridled greed etc. So, in the end, nothing really got/gets done except for pretending to be doing something.

          Where we seem to differ is that I don’t believe that one of those overconsumption problems (climate change) isn’t real.

          Instead, and I accept that not everyone is going to agree with me, I think it’s real, and if it’s real in the way I think it’s real, then it doesn’t matter how I feel about it.

          Personally, I just don’t believe that how I feel about something like this will change it anymore that how I feel about gravity will change that. So, wrapping a case against it up in emotions, or whatever, isn’t going to make it more persuasive to me.

          I just believe it’s real, no matter how I feel about it.

          That said, I also believe we are in ecological overshoot, which will probably be lethal for us in the same kind of way that it was lethal for the population of reindeer on St. Mathew Island:
          https://www.resilience.org/stories/2003-11-22/st-matthew-island-overshoot-collapse/.

          Climate change is one of the problems caused by overshoot, but even climate change wasn’t real, there are enough other problems for us to end up eating and/or polluting ourselves to death. There are other planetary boundaries that we are crossing.

          And with respect to resource scarcity other than copper, I heard recently, for example, that the process for obtaining transport fuels may be taking more energy now than the transport fuels deliver – i.e. we are subsidizing obtaining transport fuels with other forms of energy.

          Which, I guess means that the global economy is entering some sort of ‘snake eating its own tail’ kind of phase – it is hard for me to imagine we have a lot of time left if that is true.

          2030 seems like a likely candidate for when “”degrowth”” in scare quotes (as opposed to hippy, cargo bicycle, living/farming locally, etc. degrowth) starts to kick off. And if that turns out to be real, then it won’t matter how I feel about it either.

          That is all I am trying to say in a long-winded, preaching, etc. kind of way.

          Sorry if I gave offence.

          • The moment consumption is no longer tied to status it will all come down in a safe and healthy manner.
            If not, and young women have a giant deal of force in upholding status quo, then it will come down unsafe and deadly. And nowhere to go.

  6. I’m glad you made this post. This topic came across my mind in the past few days too. I believe we cannot talk about solutions to environmental problems without talking about the monetary system that governs all countries around the world. If you want to stay relevant and connected, you have to choice but to participate.

    My eyes really opened around 10 years ago when I discovered that today’s money is backed by nothing but trust and that we use a debt based monetary system where every dollar is loaned nto existence. I watched Money As Debt and The Money Masters on YT and was shocked by this.

    When money is loaned, money is created and when it is repaid, it is destroyed. Banks are just book keepers and don’t have tangible assets to back up the money. The problem is there is interest on the loan. If $100 is created with the interest being $1 and $101 is destroyed when it is repaid. That extra dollar also had to be loaned into existence with an intetest as well. That means if all debt is repaid, there would be no money left and this leads to deflation and a sysyem crash. So for the system to survive, loans must be made all the time. Inflation is a good thing and baked into the system. That’s why we need people to keep spending and buying more stuff. It’s disingenuous to talk about solving climate change without a complete overhaul of the monetary system. This is hardly talked about. I agree, degrowth is what we need. We can spend our way out of a problem that requires thrift.

    • It’ll be interesting to see what happens once involuntary degrowth gets forced onto us somewhere around 2030.

      Maybe a new movement will spring up and bring with it some new ideas for money? Maybe do away with money altogether?

    • OT:

      A cherished film I saw as a child was “Explorers” (1985)

      Underrated. Ethan Hawke’s and River Phoenix’s first film. A “buddy movie”, a trio of young boys involving an intuitive visionary, a geeky science nerd, and a street-smart kid from a “bad family”

      This would probably be considered “gay” in today’s world.

      (I suspect my continued presence on Radagast’s blog is motivated by some long-forgotten need to recapture such magic)

      The intuitive kid dreams of a circuit board, so he shows the geeky kid his drawing. The geeky kid maps it out, puts it in his computer and creates a controllable floating orb. So the two go to the blue-collar kid who knows how to weld and build stuff, and the trio end up constructing a makeshift spacecraft made out of carnival ride parts and Apple IIe’s.

      They thus begin their adventures into outer space. It was exciting for me at the time. (The last quarter of the film gets stupid and silly however).

      These days, I suspect if any sort of similar collaboration were to occur, it would not be outer space, but inner space.

      https://youtu.be/al75vXD6koc?si=IDfMD6HXyf-ykQSR

      • @Mehen

        That was a childhood favorite of mine as well. I’m Gen X, but closer to the Millennials than the Boomers. Another one would be The Goonies, Stand by Me, the Mosquito Coast, and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Looking back at my childhood friends at the time, I was the intuitive one, but also the soldier, and yes I am a female, but most of my childhood friends were boys.

  7. I get a kick from doomerism. It makes me happy to think that the industrialized world is about to go to shit.

    However, the drop in copper production was only for the largest mines. Overall, world copper production still increased YoY:

    https://www.mining-technology.com/analyst-comment/global-copper-production-grow-2024-key-expansions/

    That does not mean that the trajectory is forever growth: eventually, copper mining will peak, and lack of water will be a contributing factor. And of course there will never be enough metals do the hopey-dopey Energy Transition nonsense.

    But it is not collapse time, yet.

  8. Paul Erlich postulated this precious metal depletion a long time ago to which Julian L Simon made an infamous wager with him that proved Erlich wrong. Simon says that the carrying capacity of this realm is 25 billion people. We’ll never get there of course as the degrowth plan has already been in the works for decades through the promotion of degeneracy, the break up of family units, showing all the mgtow men the harlotry of the nymphs leading to nihilistic antinatalism in which we see in our humble narrator RintRad is ubiquitous.

    Anyway, fight the doom and realise where we are that we’re not corkscrewing through space on some ???? bullshit, that the final frontier was never outer space, it was our inner space we have to protect from the wizards broadcasting words SPELLed and written in cursive. As Wittgenstein once said “The limits of language are the limits of my world.”

    Emancipate yourself from the ball lies, as Shakespeare said “All the world’s a stage” proclaimed from his Globe theatre ????

    Start with Ewaranons “What on Earth Happened” it will soon become your favourite documentary ????

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