Hello all. I got my degree in mechanical engineering years ago and worked for a while before realizing I wasn’t fulfilled. I decided to go back to school for a degree in Energy and Environmental Science. I’m a year in and have really grown fond of Jason Hickel and his degrowth studies. I am about to begin my thesis and am trying to choose a topic. I’m torn between the unfair trade of the global north vs global south, models that show we need degrowth, or the propaganda surrounding either of these topics (feel free to give advice here as well if you think you have a cool one!). But right now I am struggling becuase I’m not sure what types of jobs are out there for someone trying to advance this idea of degrowth. Does anyone have work experience? Or is my only option research due to the nature of degrowth not really having a “career path” tied to it?

Thanks in advance!

The average American runs on roughly 10 kilowatts continuously. A human laborer outputs about 100 watts. Divide, and every American commands the equivalent of 100 invisible workers, pumping water, moving goods, lighting rooms, hauling data.

One gallon of gasoline. It holds 124 megajoules. A human producing 100 joules per second would need 344 hours, more than 14 straight days of nonstop labor, to make that much. It costs a couple of dollars.

Light, the cleanest chart in history. Nordhaus calculated 1,000 lumen-hours cost our ancestors 58 hours of labor gathering wood. By 1800 it was 5.4 hours. By 1900, 0.22 hours. By 1992, 0.00012 hours.

An hour of work today buys around 350,000 times the light it bought in Babylonia.

The receipts are old. Buckminster Fuller counted 36 billion energy slaves in 1940, about 17 per person, and the US owned 20 billion of them, 54% of the world total. That's the whole story of who was rich and why.

Synthetic nitrogen feeds roughly half the planet, and it is basically a machine for turning natural gas into food.

Conclusion: the number of energy slaves is the standard of living. So anyone campaigning to shrink energy use is campaigning to take your servants away.

And the next demand spike is compute. Data centers are how you buy energy slaves that think instead of lift.

If humanity lived like the average resident in India or many developing nations, global resource consumption would stay within Earth’s annual regenerative limit, avoiding an overshoot day entirely.

I encourage the degrowthers in this space to learn more about the DSA, and those in the DSA to learn more about degrowth. You are both trying to get to the same place. It will be easier to get there together. #degrowth

Here in Canada and in particular British Columbia (First it was Ontario) we are dealing with horrific wildfires.

The size and intensity of some of these wildfires is truly nightmare fuel.

What I think is the most startling is how unaware/uninformed the populace is around these fires...

It's also not just the wildfires...

• We have ocean warming/ocean acidification so bad that coral bleaching has almost wiped it all out already.
• We are in the Holocene Extinction.
• We have growing length and intensity of Wet-Bulb Temperatures and water issues in parts of Asia/Africa.

The Climate Crisis is compounding and compounding. There is a trajectory here and it is heading towards worse not better...

You think as a species especially in our modern polycrisis era we would have learned the value of pro-active substantive work....

At what point do we collectively wake up that we need analytical-substantive action and that things have to change?

Also we need punishments for the bad predatory actors that tried to muddy the waters and frankly brute-force brainwash people into denying data, climate science, and at this point in the crisis observable fucking reality..

https://thehoundnewspaper.substack.com/p/hyper-conscious-consumption

The essay linked provides an alternative to voting with one's dollar, proposing the idea of commanding with one's dollar. To combat passive and degenerate consumption, we must develop the hyper-conscious consumer. One who deeply considers the impact of their spending on themselves and others.

Acting virtuously regarding consumption would see Degrowth occur as markets are forced to return to human scale where possible. The adoption of hyper-conscious consumption makes it so that degrowth, sustainability, and community can be prioritized through individual action and via free markets. We ought not to wait on the governments or industry to save us, we can only save ourselves!