Degrowth

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/36925397

Archived

• Brazilian and Chinese authorities — including Presidents Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Xi Jinping — recently discussed a proposed railway that would connect Brazil’s Atlantic coast to Peru’s new Pacific-facing Chancay Port, cutting through the Amazon.
• From Lucas do Rio Verde, a major agricultural hub in the state of Mato Grosso, the railway would be built from scratch, advancing into the Amazon’s Arc of Deforestation.
• Planners intend to build the Amazonian section of the railway alongside existing highways, a strategy aimed at minimizing environmental impacts and streamlining the licensing process.
• However, environmental activists warn that the Bioceanic Corridor, together with newly planned roads, waterways and ports, could accelerate deforestation and degradation in the rainforest.

[...]

For China, the Bioceanic Corridor is a promising connection to the Chancay Port, one of many projects of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, also known as the New Silk Road — a strategy aimed at expanding China’s trade capacity and global influence. In November, President Xi Jinping visited Peru to inaugurate the new port, located about 75 km (47 mi) from the capital, Lima. The $3.4 billion project is led by the Chinese state-owned company COSCO, which holds a 60% stake in the venture.

[...]

The Bioceanic Corridor does not yet have a fully defined route, but the Brazilian government’s proposal is already known. Starting from the Atlantic coast, the plan is to link the three sections of the West-East Integration Railway (FIOL) with two segments of the Central-West Integration Railway (FICO), both at different stages of construction at the moment. This route would pass through the Matopiba region, an expanding agricultural frontier for soy and cattle, which accounted for 75% of deforestation in the biodiverse Cerrado savanna in 2024.

[...]

Video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l32N-e0QPeI

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/64475908

In Limits to Growth, a '70s era tome lauded by both environmentalists and doomsday conspiracy theorists, MIT scientists made a number of predictions about population growth, food production, etc, using the data available at the time -- and were immediately lambasted by the media and politicians as being fear-mongering, since they hinted that collapse would likely come in the 2nd half of the 21st century. Recently, investment guy Joachim Klement revisited the predictions, adding data from this century. The results were... not great, with some indicating that we're living in the peak of human development like literally right this minute.

geteilt von: https://lemm.ee/post/64287441

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/64276454

Following heavy lobbying, the European Commission proposed allowing automakers to meet the targets based on their average emissions over the period 2025-2027, rather than just this year.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/34669814

Air freight capacity between China and the U.S. dropped by almost a third after a tax-free exemption for low-value items out of China was removed this month, industry data showed, denting a significant revenue stream for Asia's major airlines.

Air cargo carriers including Cathay Pacific, China Southern, Air China, and Korean Air have profited from booming volumes of e-commerce, led by fast-fashion retailers such as Shein and PDD Holdings' Temu, flowing from China to the United States.

[...]

Cargo makes up around a quarter of Cathay and Korean Air's overall revenues. Cargo yields and revenues at a number of Asia's airlines grew significantly faster than their passenger segments last year. Last year low-value e-commerce shipments - at 1.2 million tonnes - made up 55% of goods shipped from China to the United States by air, compared to just 5% in 2018, an Aevean analysis showed.

Buoyed by strong air freight demand out of Asia since the pandemic, freight majors like Hong Kong-based Cathay, Singapore Airlines, and Taiwan's China Airlines have ordered large, new freighters for the busiest trade routes.

“Trump, degrowther,” the leftist journalist Doug Henwood commented online last week. He was being facetious, of course (...) Making personal sacrifices, short-term or otherwise, is foreign to Trump’s nature. And yet, for political reasons, he has been driven to ask Americans to accept some limits on their shopaholic tendencies.

“What he is doing is fairly unprecedented: explicitly saying that he is willing to pay an economic price in terms of growth in order to protect something else that he thinks is valuable and important,” Daniel Susskind, an economics professor at King’s College London who is the author of the 2024 book “Growth: A History and a Reckoning,” told me in an e-mail. “Until now, Trump has tended to deny that tariffs come with any sort of price attached.”

What Trump thinks is important is very different from what everybody on slrpnk thinks is important, I'm sure. But just the idea of a mainstream American politician saying "we don't need to buy all that stuff" makes me feel strangely positive?

From the article:

Furthermore, this article argues against the common tendency to regard all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as the result of production for household consumption, an assumption that tends to focus blame for climate change on the moral failings of individuals. In reality, consumer choices are not the driving factor in the growth of GHG emissions, GHG emissions are not reducible to the carbon footprint of consumption goods, and proposed solutions to climate change that focus on changes to household consumption habits can have little effect on the overall growth of GHG emissions. In the end, this flawed way of thinking is merely a form of victim-blaming, in which individuals are made to feel guilty for massively destructive social forces far beyond the control of individual decision-making, all in order to take the focus away from any substantive social movement aimed at replacing the capitalist mode of production with a more sustainable and rational society.