By Caroline Whyte, Feasta
In other words, it is impossible, within the time constraints that we are now facing, to decouple GDP growth from environmental damage strongly and deeply enough to be able to adequately repair that damage.
By Priti Gulati Cox, Stan Cox, Resilience.org
Increases in GDP and CO2 over the past three decades have had one easily identifiable cause in common: the reluctance of governments to curb the carbon emissions of the world’s largest economies for fear of slowing the growth of their own GDP.
By Mark H. Burton, Steady-State Manchester
If nothing else, the last few months have heightened awareness of the desperately parlous predicament that now faces humanity, with an accelerating climate and ecological crisis. So attempts to design assertive policy proposals are very welcome. The Green New Deal is the one that currently is getting the most attention and perhaps traction. So I want to ask some critical questions....
By Jason Hickel, Center for Economic and Policy Research
So yes, let’s dramatically increase clean stuff and reduce dirty stuff (in terms of their share of total economic activity), and let’s do this with massive public investment. Here we agree. But there’s no reason to nonetheless keep increasing aggregate economic activity forever.
By Carey W. King, Carey King blog
Thus, we should consider whether the superintelligent AI future some fear might already in action, but at perhaps a slower and more subtle pace than some pontificate might happen after “the singularity” when AI becomes more capable than humans.
By Jason Hickel, Jason Hickel blog
I reject the fetishization of GDP as an objective in the existing economy, so it would make little sense for me to focus on GDP as the objective of a degrowth economy. Wanting to cut GDP is as senseless as wanting to grow it.
By Jason Hickel, Jason Hickel blog
In an era in which we are already dramatically overshooting the planetary boundary on material footprint, this means that aggregate global economic growth cannot continue if we want to avoid chewing through the web of life on which our civilization depends.
By Jeremy Lent, Patterns of Meaning
It’s time to reclaim the mantle of “Progress” for progressives. By falsely tethering the concept of progress to free market economics and centrist values, Steven Pinker has tried to appropriate a great idea for which he has no rightful claim.
By Alex Jensen, Local Futures
A global perspective – where true costs cannot be fobbed off on the poor and colonized – is necessary for gaining a meaningful and accurate picture of the relationship between wealth, growth, development and environmental integrity and sustainability.
By Giorgos Kallis, Degrowth.de
One argument of those who defend growth is that growth is the natural and inevitable course of the economy. Liberated from governmental or other restrictions, and left to their own powers, entrepreneurs will make an economy grow, as they are endlessly inventive in growing their own incomes.
By Bart Hawkins Kreps, An Outside Chance
Continued exponential economic growth is impossible, but the S-curve of slowing growth followed by a steady state is not the only other alternative. If the goal is maintaining GDP at the highest possible level, then the S-curve is the best case scenario, but in today’s world that isn’t necessarily desirable or even possible.
By Degrowth.de Staff, Degrowth.de
In a recently published article in Nature Climate Change, Jeroen van den Bergh argues that neither degrowth nor green-growth strategies might lead to sufficient climate action and hence makes the case for a third option which he calls “agrowth”.