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- cross-posted to:
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I remember an urban planner and climate scientist/communicator discussing the changes that need to be made. He pointed out in his research and the book he published based on it, that it’s cheaper for governments to do climate friendly change than it is to maintain the status quo regardless of climate disasters. He says that yea it’s degrowth, but it needs to be framed as efficiency to get interest
Do you remember the name of the book?
It was called Project Drawdown. The statements about degrowth are just author comments about the research, and didn’t get discussed in the study
Just one thing I believe to be really important in selling it:
less consumption -> less production -> less work
That means degrowth is earlier pensions, shorter work weeks, more vacation time and so forth. For many people chilling on the beach is saving the planet.
Good thing we didn’t spend the last 50 years attaching everything to the stock market because that would have been a real pain to untangle
Yeah, everything is expressed in monetary value. But health, clean air, clean water, health nature do not have monetary value, so they don’t matter.
GDP is the total of wealth generated. So a housing shortage, pushes up housing prices, which looks good on the books… look at all that economic growth.
I was going to comment “Solarpunk”, and then I noticed the instance. heh
A word of caution: there is not a constant relationship between carbon emissions (or energy use, for that matter) and GDP. Some economies are far more efficient than others. Some of the most efficient countries are among the wealthiest. So at very least, it is not inevitable that improvements in energy efficiency will mean reductions in GDP, and it certainly doesn’t make sense to assume that a reduction in growth will lead to a corresponding reduction in energy use or greenhouse gas emissions.
