In two statements, internationally renowned climate-activists Naomi Klein and Bill McKibben have raised their voices to support the mass-action against coal-mining in the Rhineland that will take place right after our summer school.
Naomi Klein, author of "This changes everything. Capitalism vs the Climate" emphasizes the importance of the German anti-coal struggle for the global climate: "Germany's rapid energy transition has been driven by the people, a victory that now serves as a model to the rest of the world. But as long as the German political class insists on using massive machinery to tear up the earth, producing the continent's single largest source of carbon emissions, that transition will remain woefully incomplete. These coalfields pose an existential threat to humanity, which is why our movements need to step in once again and shut them down. This August, there is no more important place to be."
Bill McKibben, co-founder of the climate-campaigning organization 350.org writes: "I'm so glad to see people drawing a firm line in the coalfields, and stopping the planet's largest coal-digging machines. We're driven not by ideology but by physics: there's simply no way to burn all this lignite and keep the climate intact. These protesters are lifeguards for an endangered planet."This article is part of a series on degrowth.info discussing strategy in the degrowth movement. The introduction to the series and an ongoing list of contributions can be found here. In a previous piece in this blog series, Joe Herbert and colleagues pointed out the “how to move towards a degrowth society” gap in degrowth discourse. As I have also come across this “how to get there” question...
By Chris Ward In the scientific paper session on technological solutions for a degrowth society, it was refreshing to hear someone (unsurprisingly an engineer) mention that the degrowth movement could do with more practical projects and methodologies to run alongside the theoretical discussions. The OAE Project: Open Data and Open Source software for a sustainable economy The OAE project a...
In order to facilitate the transition towards a postgrowth or even degrowth economy, further research on alternative ecoomic and social models is utterly important, as we have no working models of non-growing economies at the moment. However, despite the urgency of this matter, progress in this direction is slow. Large amounts of research-funding are directed towards "green growth" and other...
