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€.
Day after day the media, at least the German ones, reveal new allegations against Volkswagen. Now that the scandal around the manipulated testing software for diesel emissions is widening, many fear that the current crisis will hit the company and the German automotive industry so badly that it will affect the whole German economy. This is no wonder, considering the widespread belief - also rei...
by Almuth Ernsting (Biofuelwatch) Living in Scotland, I should be proud of our government’s energy and climate change commitments. Not of those by the UK government, whose climate credentials consist mainly of slashing support for onshore wind and solar power, handing some €400 million in subsidies to energy companies for keeping old coal power stations open and riding roughshod over mass oppo...
By Matthias Schmelzer The following article is a translation from the forthcoming “Atlas der Globalisierung”, that will be edited by Le Monde diplomatique and the Kolleg Postwachstumsgesellschaften (Universität Jena) under the title “Less is More. The Postgrowth-Atlas” (“Weniger wird mehr. Der Postwachstums-Atlas”. Postwachstum. Degrowth. Décroissance. These are buzzwords of a newly emergin...
