stabby_cicada
Abolitionists had a similar reputation in the 1700s and early 1800s - slavery in the US couldn’t be abolished, it was crazy to call for a total ban, reasonable people could compromise, etc. And we all know how that ended.
Change starts with people who refuse to compromise their morals, no matter the social or legal consequences.
Veganism needs proud vegans.
I agree, but for more basic reasons than the creation of value.
On an economic level, sure, capitalism valorizes wealth creation. More importantly, though, capitalism doesn’t prevent wealth creation. Degrowth means choosing not to use up some of the Earth’s resources to create wealth. It means using fewer resources than we otherwise would. And under capitalism, if “we” don’t use the resources, someone else will, because they can make money off it and nobody’s stopping them. Degrowth isn’t possible under capitalism, because under capitalism there’s no way to stop people from using every available resource to maximize profit and therefore increase growth.
On a personal level, which is even more important, fear is the core of capitalism. People under capitalism learn everyone is selfish. Everyone tries to maximize their own profit at the expense of everyone else. Capitalism says you have to secure and protect the resources you need to live because no one will help you and other people will take whatever they can from you. So accumulating resources under capitalism is not merely greed - it’s the only way to protect yourself after you lose the ability to accumulate resources from sickness and unemployment and old age.
So anyone whose worldview is based on capitalism will hear degrowth = I will have fewer resources = my family and I will be less safe. And that’s the kind of barrier only re-education over generations can fix.
Here in California, utility companies are “solving” this by instituting extremely high fees for the privilege of connecting your solar power to the grid. If I recall from the last time I ran the numbers, rooftop solar panels no longer make economic sense for the vast majority of residential customers - it costs more money to install me solar panels and pay the monthly connection fees then you’ll save by producing energy over the lifetime of the solar panels.
Edit: I just googled and it looks like after public outcry the regulators pulled their really bad fee schedule to replace with a slightly less bad fee schedule. The system works!
Probably the one time in history PG&E tried to fix a problem ahead of time. 😆
Sure! As far as I know, county and city ordinances permitting, you can be off grid in CA.
However, if you’re on grid, and you connect your solar panels to your home electric system, your solar power is now connected to the grid. I don’t think you can segregate electricity by source. You could in theory have some of your home powered by your solar and some of your home powered by the grid, separate systems that don’t connect, but I think that would be both dangerous and illegal. Maybe you could have an ADU that’s totally solar powered while your house is on grid?
And googling today - it’s been a while - it looks like CA regulators withdrew their shitty fee schedule and approved a slightly less shitty fee schedule, so good news there 😆
Funny how every time somebody mentions “reducing consumption” people jump into comments to insist, no, reducing personal consumption is a scam, only political action matters, keep buying everything you want.
It’s like people making a personal choice to reduce consumption is a threat to someone. Probably someone who manufactures the stuff we consume.
Look. Corporations aren’t scared of political environmental action in the West. They’ve bought the politicians, they control the levers of power, they’re confident they’ll win the political fight. What corporations worry about is people buying less shit and reducing their profits, which will take away the money they need to buy politicians and win the political fight.
The personal is political.
Those are examples, not requirements. Do what you can. Anyone who judges you for not doing enough while you’re struggling to merely survive is a shit person.
If there are small changes you can make to live a more sustainable life, do them. If there’s nothing you can do, that’s okay too. And if you’re so weighed down by the struggle of mere existence that you don’t have the mental energy to think about ways to change - that’s okay too. We who have the privilege to act should act, and when we do, we carry the aspirations of those who wish they could act but can’t.
If I meant to criticize anyone by this post, it would be the people in wealth and privilege, who could change their lifestyle to be more sustainable - who could be an example to their friends and family and neighbors by living their values - but who choose not to, because they believe personal sustainability is irrelevant when political and corporate actions have so much more impact on the world.
In this case, each person paid for the entertainment of watching their friends eat shit.
Not to overanalyze the joke even more, but:
Eating feces is not $100 worth of entertainment by any rational standard.
No rational person would spend $100 to watch his friend eat feces.
No rational person would accept $100 to eat feces.
No rational society allows someone to either eat feces or pay others to do so, for public health reasons if nothing else.
I mean, if you went to an unhoused person and offered him $100 to eat feces, you’d get arrested. And you’d deserve it. Because even the United States isn’t quite that bad yet.
(And this is not a hypothetical. People do those kinds of things. There are unhoused people I know from Food Not Bombs who refuse food from strangers because too many of them have gotten adulterated food. And most of them have stories about people offering them money to do degrading things.)
So this $200 in GDP represents an activity that’s injurious to public health, morally bankrupt, and leaves everyone participating in it worse off.
But from the Economics 101 worldview, the economists created $200 worth of entertainment, because both of them were willing to pay $100 to see each other eat shit and that means, by definition, eating shit was worth $100 in entertainment.
Which makes the punchline an even more vicious satire of capitalism and its bullshit metrics than it originally appeared.