Pofit Motive means ‘Green Growth’ can never achieve climate sustainability

The entirety of humanity is against degrowth, for the simple reason that degrowth means no economic profit, despite the fact that degrowth would, for the first time in millions of years, begin to replenish the BOE’s (Bank Of Earth) balance sheet of natural resource capacity. By today’s toxic economic paradigm, degrowth is as close to a utopia as Never Never Land is to an adult human. We are lacking both the stakeholders and champions, because there is no immediate profit to be made. This means that solution number four, renewable technologies, is also not a solution, given that it is based on growth. Renewable technologies are not a degrowth solution as they have so far only catered to meeting an increasing demand for energy, rather than addressing the problem of escalating demand itself. Moreover, they are profit-motivated, and this is why they do in fact have plenty of stakeholders and champions, who belong in the list of usual suspects and criminals mentioned earlier. These stakeholders are in it for the money, and they do not represent Earth’s biome, or future humans. The renewables industry is necrocapitalism all over again, and this is why these oligarchs are trying to sell it to us, along with the promise of jobs and a life of luxury, as these are the only messages the public wants to hear. Imagine what would happen if one morning suddenly people woke up realised that the Green New Deal they had been sold was an investor fairy tale, and that Earth was in fact doomed unless we scaled down literally everything, starting with our own use of resources. It wouldn’t go down very well. But our only choice is to have this honest conversation, finally. It is clear from this that any solution that relies on profit, and on stakeholders who are only interested in profit, is not a solution. Yet at the same time, it is evident that there is no immediate money in degrowth, and it will never be implemented by an economic and political system which only puts forward ideas which exclusively aim in boosting GDP and the pockets of oligarchs. The problem therefore is profit itself, the very notion of money, and an economic system which keeps humanity hostage to its own incoming Armageddon. We are addicted to profit. At every turn, this civilization consciously opts for meaningless short-term lifestyle benefits, at the expense of existentially disastrous future consequences. These are the exact same priorities as those of a drug addict. Our system of necrocapitalism is indeed the thief, the oligarch who still operates at large, and who never got caught. It has been running a negative balance for centuries, living on credit from the BOE. Humanity aggressively took over the formerly sustainable company called Earth, ascending into CEO with the sole purpose of devouring capital, ripping off stakeholders, and liquidating what’s left. The Leadership Board, composed entirely of humans, is a criminal organization. Technologies that can help us do exist, and our problem is not their implementation, but who implements them, and how. There are many truly renewable and sustainable solutions, such as trees, including some which are human-invented technologies. They all immediately become un-sustainable and un-renewable however, when implemented with growth, profit and investment in mind, by people who have absolutely zero interest in saving this planet. At the same time there is an incredible amount of naivety in the business world regarding sustainability. Most feel it is a case of ticking a few boxes, rather than a massive sacrifice and transformation, which no growth-driven business today is prepared to sustain. Rather than emulating the sustainable ebb and flow of “profit” witnessed in the natural world, global corporate cultures are pretending to be sustainable while still delusionally fixating on the futility of growth, and unrealistically hyper-performing employees. If this civilization had any chance of continuing, it would need to stop laying foundations for a new, bigger empire, and start learning the lessons from mourning the one which is currently already collapsing. The first such lesson is that profit is toxic, and we cannot grow ourselves out of problems. As tragic and unlikely as civilizational collapse may sound, it has happened before to every single human civilization. It is the most natural, predictable and most probable outcome for an exponentially overgrown economic system simply being brought back down to size by its own physics. But scaling back our presence on the planet is an action contrarian to everything our civilization has stood for, during the entirety of our history. Unless we realize the immensity of this challenge, degrowth will become another greenwashing term adopted and weaponized by the renewable energy industrial complex to mask all the greed underneath. The huge problem with degrowth is that it is a principle, not a technology. Humans are great with technologies, not so much with principles. The latter become distorted and corrupted. However complex and sophisticated our civilisation becomes, it cannot escape the parasite of corruption dwelling in its flesh. The second lesson is that true degrowth means reducing all aspects of our presence on Earth. This includes the most important one of all, and the most carbon-heavy, which is our population. The idea of 8 billion planet-eating humanoids continuing in a world of diminishing resources is yet another ludicrous religious and economic fantasy. True environmentalists and economists should talk about the monster of overpopulation. Earth’s system did not evolve to cater for a single species at this size. Scaling back our impact on this planet goes against everything this civilization was founded upon: scaling up greed, scaling up population, scaling up natural destruction. Degrowth is only possible if we de-criminalize contraction, simplification and ecological restoration. For an ecologist, scaling down our consumption, energy use and population growth means finally living in balance with the planet and the climate. For most politicians as well as the public who vote for them, these critical steps will be labelled as a gross infringement on human rights. Those who support these steps simply won’t get the votes. Today’s politicians after all mirror today’s humans: they lack all of the qualities that our economic system has successfully exterminated: empathy, critical thinking, and above all, a conscience. How can degrowth be implemented under these circumstances? It would require everyone having to “wake up” simultaneously. Contrary to much of the activism, the world is not only being led astray by “elites”, “corporations” or a handful of “bad guys”. The world is enslaved to a system of unsustainable greed in which each of us is an essential participant, whether we benefit from it or not. What will likely never be communicated to us by politicians is that true degrowth involves no investors, job creation, green new deals or fancy EVs. It is a sacrifice, which cannot be and should not be sugar-coated to the voters. But we will never hear the truth. In the 80s the food industry lied to us, replacing fat with sugar rather than advising us to eat less overall. In the 2020s, the renewables industry lied to us, replacing fossil fuels with Tesla cars, rather than telling us to drive less overall. I laugh at economists and politicians who still think they can plan, who think they will have access to budgets in the midst of natural disasters, massive global migration, social unrest, hunger and nuclear war. They will be lucky to simply have a job, if governments still exist. They have already become peons of the renewable energy industrial complex: rather than coming clean to voters about the gravity of the situation, they are trying to sell the beautiful golden sunsets of a Green New Deal, sponsored by the same oligarchs and psychopaths that have been running the world for the last few hundred years. Meanwhile there are authors and academics so desperate to justify humanity’s parasitic existence, all they can come up with is that our purpose on Earth is to become wisdom keepers and stewards. This is a typical hallucinating narcissist trying to save face, and refusing to concede failure. But none of this should be a surprise. It should be deeply worrying that the very species responsible for the decimation of Earth has also arrogantly put itself in charge of rescuing it. If I was the planet, humans would be the last species I would trust to bring me back to health. Degrowth is not a series of boxes to untick. It requires a fundamental change in how we define happiness. It requires the burying and mourning of a lifestyle and colorful vision of our civilization that we all falsely thought was normal, and sustainable. A controlled dismantling of the most wasteful and destructive pieces of our civilization is the bare minimum we ought to do to slow down the climate crisis and ecological overshoot. The alternative is to suffer the most cataclysmic apocalypse that all four traditional solutions presented here would result in, and which would surely erase everything we hold dear. Mitigating the climate crisis is not a technology fix. There are 8 billion humans living parasitic lifestyles. We would need to bravely accept upfront an immense amount of pain, and voluntarily demolish the ecocidal system this entire civilisation is based upon. Or it crashes down on us. Will the media and politicians treat the public as adults, and tell them the truth? And upon hearing the truth, will the public react as adults? We may never find out. Human civilization is like a brilliant firework. It may take a lot of science, patience, love, technology, cooperation and hard work to set it up, but this doesn’t mean it can’t immediately go off in one, split second.