Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
On this episode, Nate is joined by Joslin Faith Kehdy, a changemaker and citizen of Lebanon. Joslin is an environmentalist currently living ‘The Great Simplification’ – she offers a valuable perspective on what ‘sustainable’ living really means and insights for what may come to the rest of the world.
China’s slowdown is a welcome opportunity for global leaders and policymakers to get our priorities straight and set ourselves on a path of sustainable happiness and well-being.
We must contract the global economy, restructure technological society and restore what’s left of natural ecosystems if we want to live and breathe.
Unless and until we accept that we must live within ecological limits, then climate change will not be adequately tackled. Energy and resource consumption must be addressed through controlled economic contraction.
In this episode Asher, Rob, and Jason wonder if individualism (not to mention all those other “-isms”… capitalism, socialism, communism) is simply the product of a relatively short period of expansionism, and what of our values must be kept or discarded as we enter a new era of contraction and bureaucratic breakdown.
The renewable energy industry, which until recently was projected to enjoy rapid growth, has run into stiff headwinds as a result of three era-defining events: the COVID-19 pandemic, the resulting global financial contraction and a collapse in oil prices. These are interrelated, mutually reinforcing events.
While most Canadians have been worrying about the COVID-19 pandemic, the drama of collapsing oil prices has upended markets and shaken the budgets of Canada’s petro-dependent provinces: Newfoundland, Saskatchewan, Alberta and B.C.
When an economy contracts involuntarily, that is called a recession or, if it lasts long enough, a depression. Nobody advocates for such unplanned economic contraction because that has all sorts of negative social effects, including rising unemployment, stress, and poverty. So we must never confuse degrowth with recession.
In our view, at some point scientists and policy makers must begin discussing the one scenario that world leaders seem to want to avoid at all costs, i.e., managed economic contraction. The irony is that this scenario could reliably cut greenhouse gas emissions and is achievable without appeal to magic (CCS or decoupling).
The central premise of this informative, stimulating and flawed book is that the European Union made a terrible mistake by launching the euro without simultaneously taking political action to balance trade within the Eurozone.
The trigger for all this change may have been what happened in Paris but could not stay in Paris.
It now appears that the grand yearly addition to total human wealth, the global GNP, is no longer growing.
