Here's another opinion piece supporting the concept of degrowth and describing a renewed enthusiasm for system change...
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There has been an upsurge of interest in degrowth — a long-discussed strategic alternative to climate chaos — and not just from the radical left. It is experiencing a renaissance at the moment, driven by the relentless rise in global temperatures and the resulting climate chaos.

It was the theme of a three-day conference in May entitled ‘Beyond Growth 2023', which filled the main hall of the European Parliament with mostly young and enthusiastic people. According to the Economist report, the young audience ‘whooped and cheered’ when it was proposed that some form of de-growth would be necessary to avoid societal collapse.

In July, Bill McKibben, the veteran environmental campaigner, founder of 350.org, and prolific author, had a major article in the New Yorker strongly advocating degrowth from a historical perspective.

Growth is the driving force behind the environmental crisis. Over the past 60 years, the global economy has grown at an average rate of 3% a year, which is completely unsustainable. Over the same period, the global human population has risen from 3.6 billion in 1970 to 8 billion in 2022. John Bellamy Foster has pointed out that a 3% annual growth rate would grow the world economy by a factor of 250 over the course of this century and the next.

Such growth rates are incompatible with the natural limits of the planet and will ultimately defeat any attempts to resolve the environmental crisis that fail to deal with it.

What degrowth offers is a planned reduction of economic activity within a different economic paradigm, first and foremost in the rich countries of the Global North. Giorgos Kallis puts it this way in The Case for Degrowth: "The goal of degrowth is to purposefully slow things down in order to minimise harm to human beings and earth systems."

Jason Hickel in Less in More tells us that degrowth is “a planned reduction of excess energy and resource use in order to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a safe and equitable way”.

Such an approach must be the cornerstone of ecosocialism and an ecosocialist strategy designed to save the planet from ecological destruction and create a post-capitalist, ecologically sustainable society for the future.
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FULL ESSAY -- https://mronline.org/2023/09/23/degrowth/

#Capitalism #Inequality #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateJustice #Degrowth