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 […]
Tag: post-growth
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 […]
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Book review: The future is degrowth
The best the degrowth literature has to offer served on a silver platter. That’s how I would describe The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to a World beyond Capitalism (June 2022) by Matthias Schmelzer, Andrea Vetter, and Aaron Vansintjan.[1] Reading it, I felt like Neo in The Matrix learning everything there is to know about Kung Fu all at once […]
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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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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 […]
I miss critiques of degrowth. A few years back, a single online search for the term would unleash a stream of fury. But no more. In fact, I cannot remember the last time I stumbled upon a well-argued critique. Why degrowth is wrong by Adam Lee is definitely not one of them – not even close (I […]
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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. […]