Library

By: Miriam Lang

Climate coloniality manifests in the violent appropriation of territories in the Global South, including the extraction of strategic minerals such as copper and molybdenum to service energy transition and green growth for the major world powers. Peasant communities in the Intag river valley in Ecuador have been resisting large-scale mining for decades and, thus, have built up a local solidary e...

Community energy has a longstanding history in Europe, dating back to the 1970s. Today, millions of citizens, Municipalities and SMEs are pooling together their resources to co-invest and co-benefit from renewable energy projects through energy communities. As the energy crisis unfolds, millions of Europeans are facing energy poverty and are unable to access even basic goods, while oil compan...

By: Giorgos Kallis, Daniel W. O’Neill, Aljoša Slameršak

Achieving the Paris Agreement will require massive deployment of low-carbon energy. However, constructing, operating, and maintaining a low-carbon energy system will itself require energy, with much of it derived from fossil fuels. This raises the concern that the transition may consume much of the energy available to society, and be a source of considerable emissions. Here we calculate the ene...

By: Denis de Bernardy

By: Lukas Hardt, Peter G. Taylor, Timothy J. Foxon, John Barret

In order to avoid environmental catastrophe we need to move to a post-growth economy that can deliver rapid reductions in environmental impacts and improve well-being, independent of GDP growth. Such a move will entail considerable structural change in the economy, implying different goals and strategies for different economic sectors. So far there are no systematic approaches for identif...

By: Brototi Roy, Anke Schaffartzik

Coal is on the rise in India: despite the devasting impacts of the climate crisis, the awareness for land and forest rights, and political talk of a coal phase-out. In this article, we demonstrate that despite the renewables-led rhetoric, India is in the midst of a transition to (not away from) greater use of coal in its fossil energy system and in the electricity system in particular. We inv...

By: Giorgos Kallis, Riccardo Mastini, Jason Hickel

The IPCC warns that in order to keep global warming under 1.5°, global emissions must be cut to zero by 2050. Policymakers and scholars debate how best to decarbonise the energy system, and what socio-economic changes might be necessary. Here we review the strengths, weaknesses, and synergies of two prominent climate change mitigation narratives: the Green New Deal and degrowth. Green New Dea...

By: Ida Day, Jefim Vogel, Don Blair

Standard session (discussion following 3 presentations) The Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition – Strategies for Social-Ecological Transformation My presentation focuses on strategies toward social-ecological transformation, undertaken by The Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition (OVEC) in West Virginia, to protect the mountain ecosystems and culture of Central Appalachia. OVEC has successf...

By: François Briens, Fabrice Flipo, Camille Besombes, Maura Benegiamo, Madina Querre, Paul Lacoste, Simon Grudet, Aude Lapprand, Maëlle Frétigné

Workshop We offer a workshop focused on our needs in terms of knowledge production in a society turned towards degrowth. We will highlight the work of fifty researchers, activists and students on the production of an alternative research scenario, called Horizon Earth. The workshop will revolve around four phases of presentation and discussion : The research scenario’s development and object...

By: Joel Millward-Hopkins, Julia K. Steinberger, Narasimha D. Rao, Yannick Oswald

It is increasingly clear that averting ecological breakdown will require drastic changes to contemporary human society and the global economy embedded within it. On the other hand, the basic material needs of billions of people across the planet remain unmet. Here, we develop a simple, bottom-up model to estimate a practical minimal threshold for the final energy consumption required to provi...

By: Sam Bliss

"Men in power have rationalized all those forms of domination by claiming that they facilitate economic development, which is purportedly great for people and nature. Sound familiar?"

By: Bernard Marszalek

The most popular poster for the Green New Deals reveals startling assumptions...

By: Alexandre Milovanoff, Daniel I. Posen, Heather L. MacLean

Climate change mitigation strategies are often technology-oriented, and electric vehicles (EVs) are a good example of something believed to be a silver bullet. Here we show that current US policies are insufficient to remain within a sectoral CO2 emission budget for light-duty vehicles, consistent with preventing more than 2 °C global warming, creating a mitigation gap of up to 19 GtCO2 (28...

By: Andy Stirling, Benjamin K. Sovacool, Patrick Schmid, Goetz Walter, Gordon MacKerron

Two of the most widely emphasized contenders for carbon emissions reduction in the electricity sector are nuclear power and renewable energy. While scenarios regularly question the potential impacts of adoption of various technology mixes in the future, it is less clear which technology has been associated with greater historical emission reductions. Here, we use multiple regression analyse...

By: Iñigo Capellán-Pérez, Margarita Mediavilla, Ignacio de Blas, Carmen Duce

Achieving ambitious reductions in greenhouse gases (GHG) is particularly challenging for transportation due to the technical limitations of replacing oil-based fuels. We apply the integrated assessment model MEDEAS-World to study four global transportation decarbonization strategies for 2050. The results show that a massive replacement of oil-fueled individual vehicles to electric ones alone ...

By: Duygu Kaşdoğan

In the midst of a global food crisis, the late 2000s saw tensions between rising food prices and demands for biofuels coalesce into a “food versus fuel” debate. In response to ensuing public outcries, governmental agencies, and researchers across the globe began mobilizing around alternative biofuel feedstock. Among these materials, algae emerged as the most “hopeful” sustainable alternativ...

By: Zoe W. Brent, Mads Barbesgaard, Castren Pedersen

This article explores the politics behind the promise of ‘blue growth’. Reframing it as a ‘blue fix’, we argue that the blue growth discourse facilitates new opportunities for capital accumulation, while claiming that this accumulation is compatible with social and ecological aims as well. The blue fix is made up of three underlying sub-fixes. First of all, the conservation fix quenches the...

By: Tim Crownshaw

"In place of the GND, we might be better served by scaling back our ambition and embracing a Green New Direction. This alternative could preserve many of the same essential goals, but would need to forgo the use of enticing promises to motivate action and instead do the hard work of building solidarity and commitment to collectively face an energy future which will be more complex, more unpredi...

By: Lukas Hardt, John Barrett, Peter G. Taylor, Timothy J. Foxon

Post-growth economists propose structural changes towards labour-intensive services, such as care or education, to make our economy more sustainable by providing meaningful work and reducing the environmentally damaging production of material goods. Our study investigates the assumption underlying such proposals. Using a multi-regional input-output model we compare the embodied energy intensi...