"Green growth scenarios play loose with science, assume incredibly unjust arrangements, and gamble with the future of humanity—and all of life on Earth—simply to maintain ever-increasing levels of aggregate output in high-income countries." -- Jason Hickel

https://monthlyreview.org/2023/07/01/on-technology-and-degrowth/

#GreenGrowth #capitalism #socialism #degrowth #JasonHickel

For anyone in Naarm/Melbourne:
I did this weekend workshop last year and now it's back!
https://events.humanitix.com/rethinking-capitalism-weekend-intensive-melbourne
I learned so much, met some incredibly interesting and insightful people, and loved it so much that I'm now studying with the organisers who also run a post-graduate program through Torrens University.

I'll be there again for this one so come along and say hello!
#Capitalism #Organising #Workshop #Economics #Socialism #DoughnutEconomics #KateRaworth #JasonHickel #Imperialism #Colonialism #GlobalSouth

👀

“Clean energy might help deal with emissions, but it does nothing to reverse deforestation, overfishing, soil depletion and mass extinction. A growth-obsessed economy powered by clean energy will still tip us into ecological disaster.”

#JasonHickel

Reversing the Freight Train: The Case for Degrowth

... Walt Rostow, who was, along with Kuznets, one of the field’s most influential early thinkers, understood growth as the foundation of the postwar world order. His Stages of Economic Growth, published in 1960, was unsubtly subtitled ‘A Non-Communist Manifesto’. According to what is now called the ‘Rostovian’ account, growth wasn’t just the solution to domestic instability in advanced industrial economies and the remedy for the backwardness of ‘traditional’ (non-industrial) societies; it was also the antidote to socialism. There was no need for revolution: the managed markets of postwar capitalism would eventually, peacefully, deliver the fruits of modernisation – a non-violent, self-reinforcing alternative to expropriation and collectivisation. It wasn’t clear, however, how traditional societies would respond to the inevitable disruption associated with integration into the global economy. ‘How,’ Rostow asked, ‘should the traditional society react to the intrusion of a more advanced power: with cohesion, promptness and vigour, like the Japanese; by making a virtue of fecklessness, like the oppressed Irish of the 18th century; by slowly and reluctantly altering the traditional society, like the Chinese?’ ...

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n16/geoff-mann/reversing-the-freight-train

This reviews three recent books:

• Tomorrow’s Economy: A Guide to Creating Healthy Green Growth
  by Per Espen Stoknes.
  MIT, 360 pp., £15.99, April, 978 0 262 54385 9

• Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
  by Jason Hickel.
  Windmill, 318 pp., £10.99, February 2021, 978 1 78609 121 5

• Post Growth: Life after Capitalism
  by Tim Jackson.
  Polity, 228 pp., £14.99, March 2021, 978 1 5095 4252 9

• The Case for Degrowth
  by Giorgos Kallis, Susan Paulson, Giacomo D’Alisa and Federico Demaria.
  Polity, 140 pp., £9.99, September 2020, 978 1 5095 3563 7

Archive / Paywall: https://archive.ph/2022.08.10-151410/https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n16/geoff-mann/reversing-the-freight-train

HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32416815

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n16/geoff-mann/reversing-the-freight-train

#Growth #Degrowth #LimitsToGrowth #SimonKuznets #WaltRostow #PerEspenStoknes #TimJackson #JasonHickel #GiorgosKallis #SusanPaulson #GiacomoDAlisa #FedericoDemaria #Books #BookReview #LRB #LondonReview

'We know the way out of this crisis: Ramp up the infrastructure for renewables, power homes with wind and solar, electrify our transportation systems. And because all energy sources carry ecological costs, we must also reduce demand for energy overall, through greater efficiency, more mass transit, and less wasteful overconsumption...' #NaomiKlein 's response to #War in the #Ukraine sounds a bit like #JasonHickel on #DeGrowth

' #OWID would have us believe that #Asia , home to the world’s most advanced historical civilizations, has always been extremely #poor, unable to meet even the most basic food needs, until they were rescued by #ImperialIntervention and #CapitalistGlobalization. Is it true? Or is the 60% rate in fact a modern phenomenon? .. is this level of poverty “a recent development in world history?” '
https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2021/3/28/extreme-poverty-isnt-natural-it-is-created
#OurWorldInData #Myth of #Oligarchy : #Oligarchs to the Rescue! #JasonHickel

' The objective.. is to scale down the material throughput of the economy. From an ecological standpoint, that’s what matters.. some orthodox economists might.. agree. Where we differ is that while they persist in believing (against the evidence) that this can be done while continuing to grow GDP, I[t].. is likely to result in a reduction of GDP..'
https://www.jasonhickel.org/s/Hickel-Degrowth-A-Theory-of-Radical-Abundance.pdf
#JasonHickel on #Degrowth comes to mind while thinking of the #EVehicle and #RenewableEnergy #transformation

'.. colonizers had immense difficulty getting people to work on their mines and plantations. .. people tended to prefer their subsistence lifestyles, and wages were not high enough to induce them to leave. Colonizers had to coerce people into the #LaborMarket: imposing taxes, enclosing #commons and constraining access to food, or just outright forcing people off their land. '
https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/2/3/pinker-and-global-poverty
#JasonHickel #Debunks #StevenPinker who is fun read about #cursing and #langauge