Is decoupling happening, yes, or no? And if not, could it ever happen? Over the course of a few weeks, The Guardian published several pieces on the topic that may appear contradictory, arguing both that “economic growth [is] no longer linked to carbon emissions” and that “economic growth is still heating up the planet.”[1] This is perfect timing because […]
Tag: green growth
Good news, the Financial Times ran a piece on degrowth. It’s a 3-min video titled “Could the degrowth movement save our planet?” starring economics columnist Soumaya Keynes. Perfect opportunity to prolong the discussion by mobilising some of the academic literature on the topic.[1] Since this is not a direct critique of degrowth, I shall not write my usual response. […]
On February 23rd, 2024, the New York-based socialist magazine Jacobin published “4 problems for the degrowth movement,” a short piece written by Daniel Driscoll, a social science researcher at Brown University. Like all the previous Jacobin articles touching on the topic[1], this one is firmly against degrowth. On social media, the article has been intensely bashed. “Pure ideological blinkers” (Julia […]
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 […]
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How to Blow Up an Economy
This is the transcript of a speech I gave at The Conference in Malmo (Sweden) on August 29th, 2023. The video can be found here. Demolition is an essential part of construction. That which is true in the world of material infrastructures is also valid for immaterial institutions. To construct a new, alternative economy – we’ll first […]
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 […]
Who is still actively defending green growth? There is the boastful – yet scientifically frail – More from less (2019) by Andrew McAfee (rebuttal here); Per Espen Stoknes (Tomorrow’s economy, 2022) and his attempt to make growth “healthy green.” There is Sam Fankhauser engaging in mouth-to-mouth combat with Jason Hickel, the eco-modernists from the Breakthrough Institute, a small gang of promethean […]
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”). […]
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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 […]
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Degrowth in the IPCC AR6 WGII
This is historical. For the first time since its original report in 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has talked about degrowth. The term is mentioned 15 times (plus 12 mentions in the bibliography) in the 3,675-page report of the second working group “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability,” which was released on February 28th, 2022. […]