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."
The arrival of smartphones, self-driving cars and the Cloud are all symptomatic of a profound shift that is re-writing modern society from within: the Fourth Industrial Revolution. New technologies claim to provide answers to a host of problems, but is technology unbound always a force for good? In the first of a three-part series on the Fourth Industrial Revolution, EcoPolítica’s Paz Serra...
The workshop “How to sell degrowth: Business models II” was a short paper session following the scientific paper session “How to sell degrowth: Business models I”. Gabriel Trettel Silva as the first presenter rose the question of whether or not profit-making is compatible with the principles of a steady-state economy. His own conclusion was that it [...]
By Jasmin Wiefek and Bernd Sommer “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly”: This famous dictum by Theodor W. Adorno1 highlights the difficulty of finding a way to individually pursue a good life in a world that is characterised by inequality, exploitation and various forms of domination. However, this question has so far mainly been dealt with [...]
