If by degrowth…
I'm going to hold both sides of the degrowth debate simultaneously and incorrectly because I've McFuckin' lost it by Luna NovaPersonal opinion, hyperbole, generally lacking sanity. Not speaking for any org, project, friend, employer or associates.
Friends keep asking where I stand on degrowth. Some call me a doomer, others assume I've bet everything on the exponential.
Allow me to take a stand:
If when you say degrowth you mean that blessed liberator from the treadmill, that breaker of Goodhart's tyranny, who sees the all-mighty needle of Gross Domestic Profit climbing while the suicide rates follow;
if by degrowth you mean the great unshackler of human potential, who frees us to pursue meaning instead of metrics, who lets us build a world where we can be more than just efficient nodes in a vast machine, who understands that the only way to improve is to let some things die;
if by degrowth you mean that we stop speedrunning the 35°C wet-bulb death zone, cease burning the great forests that sequester our CO₂;
if when you say degrowth you mean that we close down the coal mines, halt the endless hunt for new places to frack;
if you mean a ministry for the future that puts human well being at its core by applying an immediate forcing function against externalities that would otherwise race to destroy the peoples of the future;
then certainly I am for that.
Yet, if when you say degrowth you mean that great Malthusian specter, that cold arithmetic of enforced poverty;
if by degrowth you would condemn billions to freeze in the dark while their children starve;
if when you say degrowth you mean that grim reaper of progress, that jealous god who would chain Prometheus again, who would tell the child dying of malaria that her suffering is necessary for Gaia's balance;
if by degrowth you would deny us our Dyson spheres and O'Neill cylinders and our glorious diaspora across the stars;
if by degrowth you mean preferring to sit around idly while millions die rather than contemplate the great geoengineering works that could save us all;
then certainly I am against it.
This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromisethis-is-a-lie.
What?§
I mangled a classic speechwhiskey because the brain worms won. Read too much of people who broadly agree with each other talking past each other - someone self describing as a yimby degrowther, and someone with similar politics thinking that was an incoherent contradiction - and had to vent. Sadly, that came out in the form of... the above. Oh well. Being part way in to a seemingly interminable and somewhat crazy-making write-up on the state of AMD's GPU compute ecosystem did not help matters.
It's upsetting how proponents and detractors of a term can so easily lose sight of what the other side means by it. It almost feels like the social environment optimizes for short, insufficiently constraining terms where the semantic gap can be maximized. Do disagreements propagate discussion of a less specific term and popularize it?
Okay, but what do you actually think about decarbonizing?§
So. I need to actually get down what I feel somewhat because leaving the above vent-as-crazy-take-on-speech up without context is a bad idea unless my readers are psychics.
The first part's critique of GDP-as-Goodhart target in the form of our overall economy (rich get richer, climate suffers the consequences because it's not the metric being optimized for) and preventing destruction of our limited natural resources is straightforwardly correct.
I would ban coal extraction immediately if given the power to do so. Outright ban. It's '25, there's no excuse, we don't need fancy economic offsetting and credit schemes to handle that. In less straightforward cases, we should be properly taxing externalities.
Enforced poverty as covered in the second part would be monstrous if anyone were proposing it, but they aren't. The Malthusian specter in the second half of this post is a strawman; an extreme extrapolation of what detractors fear, not a description of any mainstream position. If you read that and thought "yes, that's what those people want", oh no.
We can ignore that one anprim who doesn't want people to have fridges, the occasional troll pushing for a return to subsistence farming.
More importantly, any supposed tradeoff between ease of extraction of fossil fuels and solar adoption has evaporated. Adopting renewables doesn't make people poorer, it makes their lives better!
Solar is now cheap enough that Pakistan achieved the fastest renewable adoption ever recorded in 2025, without any subsidies.
The remaining constraint on solar deployment is political: do we let fossil fuel interests block deployment to protect their overvalued balance sheets? Signs point to yes. T_T
Developed nations caused this mess. We owe something to clean things up, probably weighted by per-capita carbon intensity. If we're too late for preparedness, we owe cleanup. The UN climate change talks (COP29 most recently) have been getting somewhere with pledges. It's a start I guess?
I think geoengineering and other climate change mitigation engineering works should be on the table. Being against geoengineering is a position that people really hold and not a strawman, I'll definitely lose some people here. Mass reforestation, afforestation, ocean fertilization, large-scale resilience infrastructure like Tokyo G-Cans (not centrally geoengineering), even solar radiation modification like stratospheric intervention. Are we actually going to stay on track to avoid heat waves and floods that could kill millions and displace more? If we aren't, gotta do some mitigation.
If we can achieve those goals and skip the weirder geoengineering that may be for the best. Prove me wrong, world!
I'm a hopeless space nerd. Probably no surprise on this space themed site. We have to survive long enough on the rock we call our home to get there.
We'll return to our irregularly scheduled technical posting shortly. Be well, everyone.
I probably will but it doesn't fit the speech format, this post has been updated after a bluesky discussion.
The if-by-whiskey speech is a textbook example of equivocation in political rhetoric; perhaps equivocation is a reasonable response when semantic balkanization goes far. Picking a single definition to argue for or against isn't necessarily better if large parts of your audience will find any specific choice to be misrepresentation. One more realistic approach to handle this disconnect is "tabooing" a word - and its synonyms - to force reifying the debate in terms of specifics.
Cite as BibTeX
@misc{if-by-degrowth,
author = {Luna Nova},
title = {If by degrowth…},
year = {2025},
url = {https://lunnova.dev/articles/if-by-degrowth/},
urldate = {2025-11-22}
}