There’s lots of talk recently about the wealth of Jeff Bezos. There are maps comparing his wealth to entire countries, a “You are Jeff Bezos” game where you can spend his money on different things - like paying their fair-share of taxes, and a graphic that puts his wealth in perspective. A recurring point is that most people simply cannot fathom the amount of money he has. The number is $150 billion. My favorite attempt to bring the number into human terms is Quartz’s article, “The average US worker would need 10 times the length of all human history to earn as much as Jeff Bezos”. This beautifully captures the point that someone does not simply earn or work for such an amount of money, but rather captures it. We, at degrowth.info, thought a similar calculation would be interesting. We wanted to know how many humble (but hopefully useful) projects like ours Jeff Bezos’ wealth could pay for. In case you haven’t heard already, degrowth.info is improving its site to better support the degrowth community and improve the usability of the platform – this will cost 7,500€.
By Giorgos Kallis The ecomodernist manifesto is the latest and most visionary document under the auspices of the ‘post-environmentalist’ think-tank the Breakthrough Institute. I first heard the Institute’s founders Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger speak at Berkeley some eight years ago, presenting their case for the “death of environmentalism” (hence the ‘post’ prefix). For half of the p...
By Tadzio Müller In the run-up to last year’s United Nations Climate Conference in Lima, Peru, a particular headline kept popping up, an attempt to once again establish a particular meme in the mind of global elites as well as wider populations: friends, the line goes, you’re right to worry about climate change, but – say the reports by, on the one hand, the International Monetary Fund, and on...
Rob Hopkins is the founder of the Transition Movement. We interviewed him for the Stream towards Degrowth during the launch of his new Book “The Power of just doing Stuff - How local Action can change the World” in Bielefeld. Watch the video to hear more about the connections and differences between the Degrowth and the Transition Movement.
