By Christine Corlet Walker, The Conversation
At COP24 environmental movements have an opportunity to use their platform to highlight the relationship between economic growth and environmental impact, and even to discuss radical alternative futures that are not dependent on a growth-based economy.
By Brian Davey, Feasta
Although the effects of climate change seem to be near to apocalyptic over the long term, over the short term taking signficant action to cut emissions also appears to be a tremendous challenge.
By Tim Jackson, Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity
It’s probably fitting that Michael Liebreich’s The Secret of Eternal Growth was published so close to Halloween. It’s so full of outlandish bogeymen, it sits perfectly alongside the ghouls and the ghosts of the trick-or-treat season.
By Rob Dietz, Resilience.org
We desperately need an economy that can meet humanity’s needs without risking environmental meltdown and undermining the basis for civilization. It’s a smaller economy, but one concerned with meaning and purpose rather than growth.
By Mia Gray, Betsy Donald, London School of Economics and Social Policy
Our society needs a real conversation about the meaning and nature of economic growth. In a time of populist politics and rising regional discontent, it is more important than ever to examine new models and approaches of sustainable, equitable and just development.
By George Monbiot, The Guardian blog
There may be more electric vehicles on the world’s roads, but there are also more internal combustion engines. There be more bicycles, but there are also more planes. It doesn’t matter how many good things we do: preventing climate breakdown means ceasing to do bad things.
By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future
Economists do like to weigh in on normative issues of this kind nonetheless – and here is where, for me, they cease being potentially useful mechanics and start to become priests, magicians or quacks.
By Tim Koechlin, Common Dreams
Those who benefit most from the status quo spend a lot of money to persuade the rest of us that this – an economy that serves the top 1% — is good for us and, in fact, the best we can do.
By Tim Jackson, APPG on Limits to Growth
This first in our series of briefing papers on building An Economy That Works explores the underlying phenomenon of ‘secular stagnation’ – a long-term decline in the rate of growth of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
By Erik Lindberg, Resilience.org
Growth is the social glue that has held liberal industrial societies together, which is one of several connected reasons why we won’t address our relationship to our natural ecology by becoming “more liberal” or “more progressive.” Sustainability, then, is neither liberal nor progressive.