Posts Tagged ‘consumerism’
Emissions Accounting: Cooking the Books
Ready for a quick climate change quiz? See if you can identify the climate hero in the scenario below: Jared and Annette arrive at a potluck, each bringing a mixed salad with the same ingredients. By a strange coincidence they’re also wearing identical Christmas sweaters. They compare notes, and it turns out that Annette’s salad…
Read MoreRethinking Technology and the Good Society
Despite suffering from debilitating headaches and generally poor health, Weil completed her work during a remarkable burst of activity. She died later that year at the age of 34. The report was published in 1949. The first English translation appeared in 1952 as The Need for Roots: prelude towards a declaration of duties towards mankind.…
Read MoreFrom ‘Progress’ to an Economics of Happiness
If there’s one thing I’d love world leaders to think about in connection with the UN’s International Day of Happiness, it’s that their measure of progress actually goes up with unhappiness and unrest. GDP, or Gross Domestic Product, which is still used as the principal indicator for development and progress, simply measures the exchange of…
Read MoreChak Chok: a campaign against junk food
Transnational corporations have been spectacularly successful in their profit-driven quest to hook the world on junk food. The global sale of packaged foods swelled to US$2.8 trillion by 2020, and is estimated to balloon to $3.4 trillion by 2027. Soda (soft drink) sales have exploded globally, reaching $995 billion by 2002, and are predicted to…
Read MoreRepairing broken economies
Sepp Eisenriegler loves giving second chances: to the defunct electrical appliances awaiting repair or refurbishment, the hundreds of unemployed people he’s trained as skilled repairers over the decades and even the two rescue dogs that follow him devotedly around Reparatur-und Service-Zentrum (R.U.S.Z.), the repair and service center he founded in Vienna in 1998. It wasn’t…
Read MoreAs we consider our future…
Ask not for energy or goods that depend on international supply chains. Ask not for solar power, wind power or battery electric storage (BESS). Ask not for e-vehicles (EVs) or smartphones. These can’t be manufactured without fossil fuels, extractions, deforestation, greenhouse gases, toxic waste and international supply chains. They can’t operate without backup from…
Read MoreAppropriate Technology, Traditional Cultures and Degrowth
The industrial-capitalist-technological system is characterized by perpetual growth through excessive production, relentless marketing and public relations to expand markets and demand through consumerism.[1] In the process, novel ‘needs’ are manufactured and the boundaries and norms of comfort and convenience are continually reshaped.[2] In this system relatively few technologies are socially necessary, and their manufacture and…
Read MoreIs Alternative Energy the Best Solution to Climate Catastrophe?
Environmentalists have known for decades that the “greenest” form of energy available is reduction of useless and harmful energy. Over 50 years ago, the first Earth Day embodied this with “Reduce; Reuse; Recycle.” Today, that seems to have been replaced with the slogan “Recycle; Occasionally Reuse; and, Never Utter ‘Reduce.’” Even mentioning the word “reduce”…
Read MoreCo-creating urban, regenerative futures
“Regenerative Futures” The phrase had been rolling around my head for a while. I felt that it pretty neatly summed up the direction I wanted to be heading with my work and life. ‘Regenerative’ – I reasoned – is the next stage after sustainability: Degeneration –> Sustainability –> Regeneration And ‘futures’ is, well, the future.…
Read MoreCities and Green Orthodoxy
As the world has urbanized rapidly since 1950, per capita carbon footprint has declined, and so has carbon intensity in economic output, defined as the amount of energy used to produce a unit of economic growth. But gross material throughputs and greenhouse gas production during this same period skyrocketed. Global natural capital – fisheries, topsoil, freshwater supply,…
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