This piece is not going to be my usual point-by-point debunking. First, I’ve been doing plenty of that already (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13) and there is nothing special in Hannah Ritchie’s Not the End of the World (2024) that would warrant a specific response. After listening to her interview with Rachel Donald on the Mongabay podcast, it is evident that the […]
Tag: decoupling
On May 18th, 2023, The Economist ran a piece titled “Meet the lefty Europeans who want to deliberately shrink the economy,” commenting on the Beyond Growth conference organised in the European Parliament on 15-17th May. There is nothing remarkable about this article. It’s one of these superficial anti-degrowth boohoos one (too) often finds in dominant media.[i] The fact that the author (Stanley […]
Periodically, American economist Paul Krugman cherry-picks a few numbers to argue that economic growth is more sustainable than we think. While these short outbursts of optimism usually stay within social media (see, for example, these tweets from last Summer), it somehow made it to The New York Times last week (“Wonking Out: Why growth Can Be Green”). […]
“The answer isn’t degrowth. The answer is abundance,” writes William Rinehart, senior research fellow at The Center for Growth and Opportunity of Utah State University. On its webpage, the organisation advertises itself as “world-class research” providing “real-world solutions,” which is tragically ironic since it published one of the most scientifically ungrounded, starry-eyed pieces I’ve read in […]
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Decoupling in the IPCC AR6 WGIII
It’s the Galileo affair of the 21st century: Has economic growth in developed countries decoupled from environmental pressures? For the last decade, the prevailing (yet unproven) answer was: yes, it has – high-income nations have greened their growth which means that they can now increase their GDP while reducing their emissions. This illusion of a scientific […]
It takes time to build a card castle but less to destroy it. While the first part is quite dull, the razing is always a thrill. This is perhaps why people enjoyed Bryan Walsh’s 3-pager How stalling growth hurts the planet. The text is tiny but ambitious since it claims to debunk the degrowth argument. Having […]