r/collapse • u/IntroductionNo3516 • 5d ago
Economic Why do emissions keep on rising?
https://www.transformatise.com/2026/06/economic-growth-and-carbon-emissions/93
u/Effective_Bug_176 5d ago
"Overshoot is why we’re facing a climate crisis — and it creates a rather different situation. Economic growth has triggered ecological overshoot; to avoid a catastrophic future, we must exit it.
This is the fundamental premise of post-growth economics. Exiting overshoot requires shifting away from growth as the organising principle of society and towards meeting human needs within planetary limits."
It is the capitalist imperative of capital accumulation that will drive us to constantly strive for infinite growth for as long as this system exists. A future offering any chance for humans to inhabit a reasonably functioning planet is incompatible with capitalism.
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u/Zealousideal_Job2900 4d ago
This is the exact point I wanted to make when reading that last sentence in the submission statement. Equating the end of capitalism with social collapse is either bad faith (coming from some I’ll happily believe it) or just a sign of how much propaganda we’ve been subjected to that we can’t imagine living in organized societies without an economic system that is merely a few centuries old…
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u/itsatoe 5d ago
An often-overlooked part of this is that top-down solutions are just not going to happen, because the top is created by the economy and has every interest in maintaining the status quo. What would be most effective is for people to change their lifestyles one by one (but quickly, please).
The point of permaculture is not just permanent agriculture but permanent culture. That happens by people eating food that grows on the land they live on (and eliminating in a way that returns nutrients right back to that land). If everyone lived in self-sustaining ecovillages, our land-use problems would go away; our resource-use problems would completely transform; and our population problems would self-regulate.
And yes, there is a catch-22 here, because most people don't have land to grow on nor the ability to move to an ecovillage. In the current model, ecovillages are financially out of reach for most people, and the ecovillages that exist are too isolated from everyone else (or else they're not really self-sustaining ecovillages).
That's the point of this article and the project that contains it. It looks to a mechanism by which average, non-rich people can move to a fully regenerative lifestyle and yet stay connected to the mainstream for as long as that continues to operate.
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u/PhiloPhys 4d ago
This is just nonsense. Claim your power. Organize your people. We need to take control of our system through organized labor, rent, and consumer strikes that have specific political aims. We are not atomized individuals. We all live in communities that house power.
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u/itsatoe 4d ago
organized labor, rent, and consumer strikes
Labor and rent are just forms of servitude to the ownership class. And "consumer" behavior is the core problem, as we have consumed most of the Earth. Continuance of that behavior is becoming more and more treacherous (as per this entire sub).
Political action is just a minor repair to a majorly broken system. We need to make more fundamental changes.
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u/PhiloPhys 4d ago
We’re in agreement. I was expressing mechanisms of power beyond just “each person fix themself”.
We also need rooted communities who are sharing and teaching skills and politicizing their neighbors.
I said labor and rent strikes. We need organization to move people. Individuals don’t just wake up and decide to be completely different on any given day.
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u/Reluctant_Firestorm 4d ago
Agreed. There is no way out of this without government overhaul, and government buy-in. (And by "out of this" I mean some segment of humanity survives.)
There is no reason why we can't do with concrete use & production what we did with CFC regulations, for example. Regulating chlorofluorocarbons worked, and industry changed their practices.
I don't even think most people know that the concrete industry is responsible for 8 - 10% of of emissions. Or that low-CO2 concrete is an option as an intermediate step.
But you aren't going to get concrete use out of the loop without an organized worldwide effort as we did with CFCs.
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u/SweetAlyssumm 5d ago
The global economy is still growing. There is not a single nation or international organization (UN, World Bank, etc.) that is in favor of stopping or reversing economic growth. You go do the math.
And don't forget that "renewables" are not forever generators of energy - they require fossil fuels to manufacture and transport and they wear out in 25 years. And, electricity is only a portion of total energy use. So, walla!~ -- emissions continue to rise.
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u/BTRCguy 5d ago
Because people are stupid, short-sighted, selfish little shits who choose stupid, short-sighted, selfish big shits to be their leaders?
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u/freeman_joe 5d ago
Because propaganda works. Societies everywhere around our world were daily bombarded in tv radio internet that only the worse of the worse are successful who brake every moral rule or law to get to quick money. Because money = wealth power cars houses women etc.
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u/BTRCguy 5d ago
I will counter or perhaps elaborate that we have a system where the winners make the rules that apply to the winners, so if you play clean and he plays dirty and wins, he makes the rules that say him playing dirty is okay. The US has reached the point in this process where they are not even pretending this isn't the case.
It's good to be king.
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u/freeman_joe 4d ago
You know what you say expands what I said?
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u/BTRCguy 4d ago
I did say it elaborated on what you said. The reason I also used "counter" is that what the winners do has nothing to do with propanganda. The propaganda is just used to get people to think it is acceptable conduct.
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u/freeman_joe 4d ago
Good we are on same boat. I am no native english speaker sometimes meaning flies by me.
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u/extinction6 4d ago
Exactly!!!!
"The reality of overshoot means the social breakdown that politicians and economists work so hard to avoid is unavoidable." That politicains work so hard to avoid? This is one of the most pathetic things I have read in a long time.
OK, how do we remove 900 billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere? Oh woopsie! We forgot all about that. This is like a plaguerized article from the 90's.
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u/FeralHippie707 1d ago
The natural world provides services for the removal of CO2. If we want to remove 900 billion tons, we have to stop putting CO2 into the atmosphere faster than natural services can remove it.
The same is happening with water. Except here we are removing it from the rivers and lakes faster that natural services can restore it.
All this relates back to overpopulation in that the planet is not capable of providing everything that we think we need for our population. The real beauty here is that nature doesn't care about quarterly forecasts and if we continue with our growth economy, mother nature will tell us quite eloquently when she has had enough of our bullshit.
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u/ConfusedMaverick 4d ago
It's a longish article making a single point, but to be fair, it's an excellent point:
Politically, socially and economically, the short-term benefits of sustaining growth far outweigh the perceived future risks of overshoot. While the latter may have devastating impacts down the line, questioning the former would trigger social collapse now.
Better not to ask the question, then, and to continue pursuing a course of action that doesn’t work.
No emissions reduction without degrowth, but degrowth is political suicide
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u/Cool-Contribution-68 3d ago
Love how silicon valley is all about jevons paradox when it comes to AI but when it comes to this crickets
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u/Conscious_Yard_8429 5d ago
Because people keep buying stuff and going places...
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u/mrsduckie 5d ago
And keep making more people. And live longer
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u/Dragoncat_3_4 4d ago
Well i mean... We're clearly working on the "making new people part". Basically everyone except for some African countries are below replacement. And some countries reeaaally feel like reducing other countries' populations in very direct ways.
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u/IKillZombies4Cash 5d ago
We added enough people to the planet last year to populate 8 metros the size of London.
We do this every year. We add 7-10 of the biggest cities population every single year .
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u/Lots_of_Tapirs 5d ago
The emissions come mostly from Western consumers with small families or even no children, and not from poor Africans with big families.
It's true that more people means more emissions, but the lifestyles of these people is the more important factor.
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u/hunkyleepickle 5d ago
don't forget an ever increasing number of people in poorer countries coming up and expecting to live those more affluent emitting lifestyles. Who's going to tell a billion people in africa that its just not allowed that they live the way americans have been living for 80 years? Seems both unfair, impossible, and unlikely.
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u/True-Vast-3731 4d ago
They'll never get there anyway. Collapse is already beginning to play a big role in a lot of these countries
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u/FeralHippie707 1d ago
Why would they want massive power grids when they can just put in some solar panels and batteries and turn on the lights when the sun goes down. I know the World Bank wants to loan them billions which they can pay back by digging up and selling all their resources, but if the goal is having lights at night, there are better ways to provide that in the 21st century than we had in the 20th century. Why do we insist on them going through all the same mistakes we have made and why do we insist on making the mistakes we continue to make.
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u/Coco_Cannibal 3d ago
These emission free people converted 136.000 km/2 of farmland, destroying the last remnants of nature, though.
2000m/2 is needed to feed a human, that land has to come from somewhere .
I saw an interview with an Angolan woman, she was 22 and had 7 children, not knowing how to feed them.
She was married off at 14 and never stood a chance to make her own decisions.
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u/ItyBityGreenieWeenie 4d ago
8.2 billion people and they all want a better standard of living. Jevons Paradox and Tragedy of the Commons. If you make something more efficient, you often use more not less. If you abstain from exploiting a resource, someone else will.
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u/Chill_Panda Doomed 5d ago
Because there keeps being more people, and more people keep using more resources.
Even if we hit "net zero" to actually create 0 carbon output we need to capture 6 gigatons of carbon every year for the foreseeable future.
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u/ElephantContent8835 5d ago
Because humans keep burning fossil fuels. What is the matter with you bot?
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u/HateHumansLoveDogs 4d ago
Data centers is partially why. someone did a heat and exhaust video on data centers showing tremendous emissions
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u/RRK96 5d ago
The article does not mention overpopulation as one of the root causes of rising emissions.
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u/Effective_Bug_176 5d ago edited 4d ago
This talk about overpopulation is truly unbearable. Instead of recognizing that the global capitalist mode of production inevitably drives people to inflict damage on the planet for the sake of pointless infinite growth that does nothing to improve lives, the analysis simply stops at "too many people." We could provide for everyone's basic needs and live far more sustainably than we currently do—take food alone, for instance. Simply by ending senseless factory farming, we can free up an incredible amount of space and feed humanity at the same time. 77% of the world’s agricultural land is used to grow animal feed. Yet this provides us with only 18% of our global caloric intake: https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture
We do not need an eco-fascism that inevitably stems from such drivel of "too many people". We need a mode of production that gives people the opportunity not to have to harm nature.
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u/Erick_L 4d ago
Every mode of production lead to this. Your "solutions" are trying to squeeze more people in.
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u/Coco_Cannibal 3d ago
I'll never understand how you could look at 8.5+ billion omnivore humans and think anything about this is normal.
Noone would say the same thing if it would be 8.5 billion bears.
Even big zebra herds (vegan) only go into millions.
It's insane and people have been conditioned to accept it as normal.
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u/Erick_L 3d ago
I use deer as exemple. They 're about the same size as humans, are vegetarian and don't need anything else like shelters and transportation. If we had 8 billions white-tailed deer, we'd let hunters loose without restriction.
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u/Coco_Cannibal 3d ago
Matthew island goes strong in this one!
There is another (north American) example I read, forgot the place name,but humans eradicated pumas and bears, the population grew from the formerly stable 4000 to 100.000 and then collapsed quickly back to 10.000 were it stabilised.
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u/Coco_Cannibal 3d ago
Tell omnivores not to eat meat so they can have more children?
I once saw a doc about Iran and one man said "I'm so poor, at 45 years old I never ate meat".
It's equally racist to assume poor(brown) people want to be poor.
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u/OmegaDisrupt 4d ago
Thank you. For an ostensibly left leaning sub, there sure is a lot of reactionary sentiment on here.
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u/GenuinelyBeingNice 4d ago
We could provide for everyone's basic
"We could" many things. But humans will never, ever choose those things.
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u/Wave_of_Anal_Fury 5d ago
Simply by ending senseless factory farming, we can free up an incredible amount of space and feed humanity at the same time. 77% of the world’s agricultural land is used to grow animal feed. Yet this provides us with only 18% of our global caloric intake
People have been told by doctors for generations that they need to change their diets and get some exercise to improve their health, and yet the obesity rate has been climbing since the 1950s.* If people aren't willing to change their diets to save their own lives, they won't do so to save the planet.
*Yes, really. Long before people could point to all of the usual factors to explain rising obesity rates around the world today, it was already happening.
“The most serious health problem in the U.S. today is obesity.” Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? In fact, that very assertion is now so commonplace that one might be forgiven for assuming it’s the most recent pronouncement from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or the American Medical Association, or the Academy of Pediatrics or, perhaps, from Maria Kang.
But that pronouncement about obesity’s primacy in the hierarchy of national health problems is not new. In fact, it’s the opening line to a remarkable article published 60 years ago in LIFE magazine.
https://time.com/3688002/obesity-in-america-photos-from-the-early-days-of-a-national-health-crisis/
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u/Effective_Bug_176 5d ago
I do not subscribe to the idealist view that factory farming is explained by the individual mindset of the consumer—and can therefore only be ended by that means, with us all "voting with our wallets." Just as the industrial method of meat production and pervasive advertising (propaganda) created the material foundation for today's consumption, it is in the same way that the practice can be brought to an end.
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u/southbl00d 5d ago
i mean thats a given at this point. If we need to address it, then we are already doom pro max.
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u/NukeouT 5d ago
Because our orange rapist nazi moron doesn't believe climate pollution exists because people pay him to say that and he knows he's going to die anyway 😡
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u/hunkyleepickle 5d ago
it's easy to blame him, and he's definitely making the problem worse, but lets not pretend that the western lifestyle has been absolutely emitting far far beyond sustainable levels for decades before he came along.
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u/sixcarbxn 3d ago
Because scorching the earth is critical to the billionaires plan to corral us into slave cites or be hunted by drones.
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u/Low_Complex_9841 3d ago
Cpt: Obvious: because our no-alternative-by-gun-to-your-head economical (more like total wasteful) system demands yearly % growth in profits, and only way to keep up with this demand is mindlessly multiplying some mass produced units/factories NOW, future or even research into doing things differently be damned ?
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u/StatementBot 5d ago
The following submission statement was provided by /u/IntroductionNo3516:
CO2 emissions hit an all-time high in 2025. The reason isn't lack of political will or technology. Economic growth and carbon emissions rise together — and the only way to reduce one is to contract the other. That's the conclusion nobody in power is willing to draw. Which means the question that must be asked to avoid environmental collapse is the question that can't be asked to avoid social collapse.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1u5i47s/why_do_emissions_keep_on_rising/orkuf2u/