“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 […]
Tag: IPCC
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Sufficiency means degrowth
It took me a while but I finally digested the 107 pages of Chapter 5: Demand, services and social aspects of mitigation in the last IPCC report on Mitigation of climate change. This chapter is worth the read if only because it’s the first one fully dedicated to demand-side strategies. What I find remarkable is its conceptual width, […]
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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 WGIII
Even after two days of binge reading, I still have trouble believing that the last IPCC report “Mitigation of climate change” is real. The document is packed with powerful statements with radical implications and might represent nothing short of a watershed in the history of climate politics. There is so much to talk about and […]
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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. […]