By Nate Hagens, The Great Simplification
This week's Frankly adds a third perspective to the 'growth critical' conversation - that modern society has a metabolism and momentum and will grow - in non-green ways - until we can't.
By Michael Joy, The Conversation
As countries explore ways of decarbonising their economies, the mantra of “green growth” risks trapping us in a spiral of failures. Green growth is an oxymoron.
By Timothée Parrique, Uneven Earth
So, is green growth happening? The answer is no, not really. As of today, economic growth is still a vector of resource use and environmental degradation.
By Beth Stratford, Open Democracy
So, let us reach a truce and build a mass movement to take on the real enemies of environmental justice. The stakes are too high to do anything else.
By Louison Cahen-Fourot, Degrowth.de
No one would deny that it is possible to make capitalism greener, nor that it should be urgently done. Yet the proposal of eco-productivism remains short-sighted.
By Jason Hickel, Jason Hickel blog
My appeal to McAfee: let’s try to get beyond this sort of thing and engage more honestly with the empirical and theoretical work that has been done, so we can have more meaningful conversations. If we are going to realise our shared goals, we can and must do better.
By Gunnar Rundgren, Garden Earth
Neither empirical evidence not the application of green technologies or practices discussed in this article support that economic growth can be combined with reduced resource demands.
By Richard Heinberg, Common Dreams
You see, the real downside of the green-profit narrative has been that it created the assumption in many people’s minds that the solution to climate change and other environmental dilemmas is technical, and that policy makers and industrialists will implement it for us, so that the way we live doesn’t need to change in any fundamental way.
By Craig Collins, Resilience.org
So, was the film "Planet of the Humans" a hit job on the environmental movement disguised by the filmmakers' phony claim to care about Mother Earth? Or was it an honest, get real, exposé of its assertion that, "The takeover of the environmental movement by capitalism is now complete"?
By Dougald Hine, Bella Caledonia
The need for economic growth is a social construct, not a law of nature, but this construct is the tablecloth on which our current society has been arranged. The question we face, as the 2020s come around, is whether we can pull the tablecloth out fast enough without smashing all the plates and glasses?
By Rufus Jordana, Open Democracy
The Green New Deal pivots on a central lie of continued growth, promising this growth and employment whilst pretending it can magic away the environmental and humanitarian consequences. The result of this is that on all three counts – infinite growth, reliance on fossil fuels, and colonial resource extraction – the Green New Deal is unable to challenge the prevailing order.
By Timothée Parrique, Degrowth.de
The validity of the green growth discourse relies on the assumption of an absolute, permanent, global, large and fast enough decoupling of Gross Domestic Product from all critical environmental pressures. Problem is: there is no empirical evidence for such a decoupling having ever happened.