Green Growth looks like a 4-ton Tesla cybertruck that you buy in addition to your car.
Climate Justice looks like a new electric bus to a neglected/under-served community and highway lanes transformed back into community spaces like parks.
You can guess which one corporations love and promote.
Perhaps because conventional economics tells us that EVERYTHING must increase, ALL the time, opponents of #Degrowth keep acting as if "degrowth" means EVERYTHING must decrease, ALL of the time.
Economists and others who aren't married to endless growth should embrace degrowth; it does what they claim they already want to do.
#ClimateDiary There is no question that #COP28 will be the most important yet. The #GlobalStocktake will be the “biggest accountability moment in history”, and on its basis leaders will need to make crucial key decisions about fiscal and policy commitments. With less than two months to go, we need to all be as well informed as possible and put pressure on leaders as much as we can. I thought I would start a 🧵that I will keep going in the run up 1/n
8/n Rothkopf mentions the “On the Road to #COP28” podcast series #DeepStateRadio are doing. I haven’t listened to any of them yet but look forward to doing so. Here the latest, Episode 3, on #GreenGrowth, with Peter #Kalmus and others
Fascinating! It appears that "green growth" is going the way of "smart city": a zombie concept, debunked by the scientific community, but that keeps shuffling about, propped by industry and part of the policy community. Emphasis on "part", since apparently the governments of Scotland, New Zealand, Iceland, Wales, Finland, and Canada—have joined something called the Wellbeing Economy Governments partnership. https://phys.org/news/2023-09-idea-green-growth-traction-climate.html
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Economy Minister Robert Habeck has for months pushed for an energy subsidy scheme, arguing that German industry faces five tough years before the transition to renewable energies bears fruit. The top Green politician has warned that, without state support, "we will no longer have industry," as companies would shift operations to countries like France or the U.S., where energy prices are much lower.
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How about we move beyond the metaphors of both economic "growth" and "degrowth" and talk about economic "health"? Healthy being a state where an economy is fulfilling its core purpose; helping us get the resources we need both to survive - including a livable planet - and to thrive.
Wellbeing indicators are one way to measure that. Are there others?
#ClimateChange#GlobalWarming#GreenGrowth: "The emission reductions that high-income countries achieved through absolute decoupling fall far short of Paris-compliant rates. At the achieved rates, these countries would on average take more than 220 years to reduce their emissions by 95%, emitting 27 times their remaining 1·5°C fair-shares in the process. To meet their 1·5°C fair-shares alongside continued economic growth, decoupling rates would on average need to increase by a factor of ten by 2025.
The decoupling rates achieved in high-income countries are inadequate for meeting the climate and equity commitments of the Paris Agreement and cannot legitimately be considered green. If green is to be consistent with the Paris Agreement, then high-income countries have not achieved green growth, and are very unlikely to be able to achieve it in the future. To achieve Paris-compliant emission reductions, high-income countries will need to pursue post-growth demand-reduction strategies, reorienting the economy towards sufficiency, equity, and human wellbeing, while also accelerating technological change and efficiency improvements."
New paper out by Jefim Vogel & Jason Hickel demonstrating the absurdity of #greengrowth promises:
"[H]igh-income countries have not achieved green growth, and are very unlikely to be able to achieve it in the future"
"At the achieved rates, these countries would on average take more than 220 years to reduce their emissions by 95%, emitting 27 times their remaining 1·5°C fair-shares in the process. To meet their 1·5°C fair-shares alongside continued economic growth, decoupling rates would on average need to increase by a factor of ten by 2025." #degrowth#postgrowth
The US government is pouring billions into this concept, not because they think it will ever work — they know it won't — but because it allows them to pretend they're doing something positive about the climate crisis, while in reality they're telling their fossil fuel buddies that Business As Usual is here to stay.
And it's working. Corporate news outlets are on board promoting the plan, and everyone is happy. 😃
Especially the oil industry!
Here's a quote from Vicki Hollub, CEO of Occidental Petroleum:
“We believe that our direct capture technology is going to be the technology that helps to preserve our industry over time. This gives our industry a license to continue to operate for the 60, 70, 80 years that I think it’s going to be very much needed.”
For once, an oil executive is NOT lying. She's telling the truth, and that truth is going to kill us all.
@cowvin plants do capture carbon, but they don't really store it. Most plants have a very short lifetime and, when they die, the captured carbon is returned to the environment. Even during their lifetime, plants release some of that carbon as fallen leaves or branches. That's the short term carbon cycle.
Real carbon storage is only viable deep underground in deposits of fossilised organic matter that take millenia to form. That's the (very) long term carbon cycle.
Even if we could grow huge forests to capture some of the excess carbon we have been extracting from the long term carbon cycle, we would only be postponing the inevitable until we run out of space to grow trees and overload the short term carbon cycle.
The only sensible response to the emergency situation we are living is to completely and immediately stop extracting carbon from long term reserves.
@NatureMC it is an interesting subject, #fungi are a fascinante topic, one that may be a useful resource in our children's troubled future. Thank you for sharing.
However the video is cringy to watch as it's mostly #GreenGrowth propaganda. It even ends with the signature phrase "... it feels like the sky is the limit".
Not a single #SolarPunk or #Degrowth tie vibe, just plain old "replace the current grey shit with new green shit and keep growing the economy" mantra that #capitalism is so good at.
Great article explaining the difference between #GreenGrowth and #Degrowth. Growth for growths sake or new technologies, even if green, won’t solve the #ClimateCrisis. But new technology in unison with social changes can tackle it.
Ecomodernists, the true believers in human ingenuity and technology. They "write with the conviction that knowledge and technology, applied with wisdom, might allow for a good, or even great, Anthropocene." Is that a new type of denialism, painted green?
With the recent moves from #Twitter, #Reddit, and even #Youtube, I think it’s becoming clear that ads are not a sustainable business model in the long run (and yes, I know I run a YouTube channel funded by ads 😅)
I took a look at a few examples, at how this decline is also making the web worse for everyone, at alternative platforms, and tried to imagine what an internet without ads to fund content creation and big platforms could look like:
@thelinuxEXP
Of course the money made from the ads and views feeding the algorithm there really is an important income-factor as long as there is no better alternative (yet).
This will probably continue until the whole #degrowth and #GreenGrowth/#GreenReGrowth has been happening and our global #Economy has been "re-designed" - either voluntarily or by force of "circumstances". :mastomonocle:
So, we'll see where all this is going and as long as you can deal with it morally, I think it's 👍 ❕
@jasonhickel just published a really good piece on #degrowth and technology, which debunks some of "degrowth is against green tech". We have enough trouble facing down the fossil fuel industry, we shouldn't such false debates internally. #GreenGrowth#PlanetaryBoundaries
Greer's understanding of energy and the capabilities of renewables is spot-on, but his assessment of risk sounds off. Just because a nuclear war hasn't happened doesn't mean it never will. I'm not saying it's inevitable either, but the risk is much higher today than it was even ten or twenty years ago, and due to climate change is only bound to increase with time.
Just to restate this: I'm not against renewables. All I'm interested in is solving the #ClimateCrisis so that my children have a future. All I'm doing is looking critically at the proposed solutions and I find them lacking.
I wish the #GreenGrowth scenarios were possible, but due to everything I wrote before they all look very improbable. They're just a way to prolong our unsustainable way of living a few years longer and #collapse the system from an even higher point.