A new Left has to be an ecological Left, or it won’t be left at all. Environmental change ‘changes everything’ for the Left too, Naomi Klein argued. Capitalism requires constant expansion, an expansion predicated on exploitation of humans and non-humans, that irreversibly damages the climate. A non-capitalist economy will have to sustain itself while contracting. But how can we redistribute or secure meaningful work without growth? There is not yet a concrete ‘economics of degrowth’. Lamentably, Keynesianism is the most powerful tool the Left, even the Marxist Left, has for dealing with issues of policy. But this is an economics of the 1930s when unlimited expansion was still possible and desirable.
Read the whole article in the New InternationalistAs policy makers return from Marrakesh puzzling over what a Trump presidency means for the Paris agreement, it is fascinating and wonderful to watch, from a desk in one of the biggest anti-poverty and development organisations, the increased energy, depth, and passion of the degrowth movement. But this movement is unfortunately peripheral to many development conversations. Perhaps that is be...
By Mark Burton It can be difficult to form a view of what’s really going on in our atmosphere, given the amount of information and of contradictory claims. This piece concerns recent reports on global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and levels. On 16th March, a Guardian headline over an article by John Vidal said: Surge in renewable energy stalls world greenhouse gas emissions That sounds good...
By Ashish Kothari, Federico Demaria and Alberto Acosta André Reichel’s very thoughtful piece ‘Retaking sustainable development for degrowth’ raises several very important issues. We start by acknowledging that we and Reichel are clearly on the same page in criticizing current models of ‘growth’ including in its ‘green’ and ‘eco-modernist’ forms. We concur also on the need for the world to move...
