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Comment by seltzered_ | Hacker News Reader

That narrative (affiliating the collapse of Sri Lanka with ESG, Degrowth) has been getting pushed primarily by people on the other side of the planet with their own political biases (libertarians, preppers, bitcoin maximalists, etc.).

Yes it was a terrible policy to issue an immediate ban on fertilizers, and don't think organizations/ngos associated with the policy should be absolved, but there also has to be a look into where we are in terms of 'planetary boundaries' (Google it) and what it means.

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I agree that there are other issues such as huge loans from China ( belt&road is a economic catastrophe where deployed), tourism drop due to covid and a 2019 bombing etc

That said the ESG actions is clearly correlated in the data with 1/3 of farmland laying dormant in 2021, crop losses and yield issues. Many of us won’t forget Sri Lanka was touted by WEF as a ESG poster child before it went south.

This article links to supporting data

https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/green-dogma-behi...

Fair point, I'm not trying to defend ESG (there's all sorts of issues with it), but authors from abroad (like Michael Shellenberger who you link to) are seemingly caricaturizing the Sri Lanka situation (a mix of economic loan entanglement and bad policy) to argue for their narrative.

Shellenberger who you link to is "A self-described ecomodernist, Shellenberger believes that economic growth can continue without negative environmental impacts through technological research and development, usually through a combination of nuclear power and urbanization. A controversial figure, Shellenberger disagrees with most environmentalists over the impacts of environmental threats and policies for addressing them.[2][3] Shellenberger's positions and writings on climate change and environmentalism have received criticism from environmental scientists and academics, calling them "bad science" and "inaccurate"." (via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Shellenberger )

There are data points in reality supporting the outcome of ESG policies such as 1) 1/3 of Sri Lankan farmland lay dormant after fertilizer ban & forced organic farming 2) 85% of farmers have crop issues 3) yield issues causing food shortages.

Since he describes a catastrophic reality caused directly by very real government policies, this can't just be discounted as a fabricated narrative.

De-growth people will cause mass worldwide starvation in the next 6 months, and the policies are implemented in tyrannical ways so these are tyrants and will soon be murderous tyrants.

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