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€.
Finally it is done: all texts from the project "Degrowth in Movement(s)" to be published in English are now available online. Representatives from different social movements share their perspective on degrowth and illustrate commonalities, differences and points of critique. In Germany, last year's publication of the respective German texts, videos and pod casts marked the kick-start for an ope...
Until recently terms like “carbon accounting,” “carbon footprint” and “carbon offsetting” would have raised some quizzical eyebrows among the general public. Today, such carbon-based metrics are everywhere, but are they helpful or unhelpful in motivating the necessary action on climate change? Although the case for metrics may seem incontrovertible, what is measured is always a political choic...
By Corinna Burkhart Humans get used to quite a lot of things and live their daily life through a set of what we can call habits. Everyday experiences are not much worth a thought as long as everything is like it always is. This can be driving by car to town, only to get stuck in the usual traffic jam, or something very simple like flushing the toilet or using knife and fork to eat a grilled pi...