Notes from the edge of civilization: June 16, 2024
The 'degrowth' narrative is going mainstream; your pets have a huge carbon footprint; and the government is working hard to monetize nature to support its debt.
Last week, the Harvard Business Review published an article — ‘In Defense of Degrowth’ — written by Dr. Christopher Marquis, a professor and author of a book about communism’s contributions to China’s economic success.
In the article, Marquis argues for “a societal movement toward reducing consumption and over-production, while embracing values of care and redistribution, challenging traditional market-first ideologies.”
We must rethink our ingrained assumptions and prioritize the avoidance of harms over the promotion of efficiency, look to circular models as opposed to green innovations, and demand companies drive consumer transitions rather than energy transitions.
By using anodyne management-speak, Marquis handily obfuscates some terrifying, anti-human ideas. “Over-production” and “redistribution,” for example, clearly suggest an anti-free market agenda at work. “Consumer transitions” away from “market-first ideologies” mean that forces beyond the laws of supply and demand dictate consumption and production patterns. “Values of care” and “avoidance of harms” sound nice until you ask who we are caring for and who we are harming?
If there was any doubt, know that the entire woke agenda and the push toward soviet-style central planning and control over every facet of life are coming straight from academia. Worse, that output of academia now permeates every business and corporation across the West. Make no mistake — ‘degrowth’ is being legitimized and going mainstream. If you’re not too familiar with the idea, stay tuned as the Collapse Life team is working on a deeper dive as we speak (er, write).
As suggested above, the degrowth agenda is part a larger, more radical agenda that believes human activity is destroying the earth, therefore the only way to save the ‘Mother Earth’ is to limit our activity. To wit: this past week, the Biden administration released its plan to limit food waste as a means of reducing the environmental footprint of the food system.
The National Strategy for Reducing Food Loss and Waste and Recycling Organics aims to support businesses, NGOs, and communities in their efforts to prevent “food loss and waste and recycling organic waste (including food, yard, and tree trimmings) and other organic materials along the entire supply chain.”
To build a more circular economy for all, EPA, USDA and FDA seek to highlight opportunities to use raw materials more efficiently, recover valuable resources from discarded materials, enable those resources to be used for their highest value, and help regenerate soils.
Now to be fair, food waste is a huge problem. Americans throw away hundreds of billions of dollars worth of food every year and food makes up a quarter of the trash that ends up in landfills. So the need is clear.
What’s frightening are some of the methods by which the government hopes to achieve its objectives, including feeding insects to animals. Yes, the eco-warriors truly believe your pets are polluting the earth (hat tip to
for pointing out this scary rant on the carbon footprint of pet ownership this week).Fido and Fluffy like to eat meat. And environmentalists think that’s a problem. In 2017, researcher Gregory Okin released a paper that calculated the carbon dioxide emissions of meat consumption from the 163 million dogs and cats in the United States. That number? 64 million tons annually. His research led to calls for pets to go vegan or shift to alternate protein sources such as insects.
The US government is actively funding the insect industry, and the new food waste reduction strategy mentions insect farming numerous times.
“Insects can — and are — playing a growing role in the prevention of food waste and food loss in multiple ways,” Aaron Hobbs, executive director of the North American Coalition for Insect Agriculture (NACIA), recently said during a call with the pet food industry:
During an Ask the Pet Food Pro Zoom chat on June 4, Hobbs said the North American insect industry recently received US$30 million in grant support from the US federal government. He noted NACIA has had productive conversations with government agencies around future insect protein initiatives.
“We have dialogue open with the food loss and waste teams within both USDA and EPA discussing expanded funding for research and outreach to further highlight our role to address this issue and expand our opportunity to make an impact,” said Hobbs.
Hobbs highlighted that insect protein is a rapidly expanding pet food ingredient, with over $2 billion invested globally.
One more reason to start growing and cooking food for everyone in your household.
If dogs and cats count as a debit on the carbon accounting balance sheet, bees and other pollinators are considered a credit. And while it might seem crude to frame nature in terms of profit and loss, our government has been doing it for a while.
In January 2023, the White House released a national strategy to “develop statistics for environmental-economic decisions.” These so-called ‘natural capital accounts’ assign an economic value to natural assets and the ‘ecosystem services’ they provide. By doing so, natural assets like forests and coral reefs — and natural ‘services’ like photosynthesis and pollination — can be reflected on the nation’s balance sheet.
Essentially, the government has found a way to support its unsustainable national debt by monetizing natural processes. This week’s podcast guest, Margaret Byfield of American Stewards of Liberty, describes just how pernicious this plan is, and how Wall Street tried to do the same thing through the creation of natural asset companies.
Please take the time to watch this incredibly important conversation.
Before we go, everyone here at Collapse Life wants to wish a very happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there.
At the risk of getting shouted down: I do think that we as a species are living out of balance with the planet. Probably we do need to consume less, especially in the developed world. Probably we do need to be more efficient in the use of the resources we consume. Healthy ecosystems are vitally important to the health of the entire planet, including us, so probably we do need to do a better job of conserving forests, building soil and protecting all species, including pollinators. But the "we" I'm talking about is not you and I individually, but the few individuals who have ensconced themselves in positions of power. The frightening part of your post is the characteristically ham-handed approach the government uses to force responsibility onto the public. Carbon is a great case in point. In my opinion, climate change is not fake. However, it and CO2 are a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself. The problem is the propping up of corporations by the government and the pushing of an endless growth mindset for selected industries leading to unbalanced consumption, especially of renewable resources. The motive behind this is simply the greed of the same few people who hold most of the power. The government's solution is to tell us all the ways we individuals are creating CO2 and therefore destroying the planet: driving a combustion engine car, using incandescent light bulbs, using "too much" hot water. Their solution is to incentivize *with our own tax dollars* purchasing things they tell us will fix it: electric vehicles, solar panels, a new water heater. This does virtually nothing to reduce CO2 and hugely benefits industry. When there seems to be no improvement in the metrics, they double down on the messaging that it's your fault and mine by coming up with endless data about the carbon footprint of every aspect of our lives: meat consumption, having a child, having a pet, etc. All of this is really just a drop in the bucket. The purpose is to distract from the damage being done by large corporations subsidized by the government with our tax dollars for the profit of a select few. The correct response is to ignore this sort of nonsense and try to vote these corrupt clowns out of office. If enough of us did that and focused on taking care of those we care about and the land we live on with minimal consumption of the goods and services of large corporations, I suspect a lot of the problems we're facing would resolve themselves.
How do we reduce food waste and help create a sustainable ecosystem when so many are falling for the agri-business narrative of giant monocrop farms using pesticides, herbicides, and chemicals that lead to soil erosion and collapse. Meat is bad - the new narrative, but perhaps it's more about control again. Big money relies on our ignorance that small regenerative farms are a viable way to reverse the damage and increase productivity. Excess food can be composted with manure and yard waste to make nutritious soil to grow nutritious food without the poisons and pollution of the agri-business. So instead of lamenting all the wasted food let's teach our kids how to compost, start community gardens, and value real sustainable food. The "degrowth" should be aimed at the giant monopolies that strive to continue to grow bigger and wealthier by perpetuating false narratives that aren't healthy or sustainable.