How to live a more sustainable life? This question generates a lot of debate that is focused on what individuals can do in order to address problems like climate change. For example, people are encouraged to shop locally, to buy organic food, to install home insulation, or to cycle more often. But how effective is individual action when it is systemic social change that is needed? Individuals do make choices, but these are facilitated and constrained by the society in which they live. … [Read more...]
Dammed Good Questions about the Green New Deal
Hydroelectric power from dams might be the thorniest issue that proponents of the Green New Deal (GND) have to grapple with. Providing more energy than solar and wind combined, dams could well become the key backup “renewable” if it otherwise proves impossible to get off of fossil fuels fast enough. Rivers and lakes are an integral part of human existence, with virtually all major inland cities being located next to one of them. They provide water for drinking, bathing, food, and medicine. … [Read more...]
Step Aside Agribusiness: It’s Time for Real Solutions to the Climate Crisis
The recent UN Climate Action Summit was tricky for agribusiness CEOs. With forest fires raging in the Amazon, a damning new report about the food system by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and millions of young people out in streets clamoring to shut down fossil fuels and factory farming, it wasn’t easy for the world's largest food and agribusiness companies to get away with another round of voluntary pledges to reduce their gigantic emissions. At the last UN summit on … [Read more...]
Land Without Bread: the Green New Deal forsakes America’s countryside
Days after the heart-stopping Notre-Dame Cathedral fire in April, Swedish schoolgirl Greta Thunberg trained her eyes on the United Kingdom’s parliament and chastised its meager response to climate change. “I want you to panic,” the baby-faced sixteen-year-old quietly instructed the adults in the room. “Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking. We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling.” For those who don’t get the reference, Notre-Dame’s … [Read more...]
Local is Our Future
[The following is an excerpt from the first chapter of Local is Our Future: Steps to an Economics of Happiness, a new book by Helena Norberg-Hodge, published by Local Futures in July 2019.] For our species to have a future, it must be local. The good news is that the path to such a future is already being forged. Away from the screens of the mainstream media, the crude ‘bigger is better’ narrative that has dominated economic thinking for centuries is being challenged by a much gentler, … [Read more...]
Economics 101 and Ecological Collapse
"The collapse of our civilisations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon." – David Attenborough Today’s economics, especially Economics 101, is a major source of humankind’s denial of the possibility of the calamity of all calamities, which our economy is engineering. Annually, millions of students around the world are forced to study textbooks that indoctrinate them into thinking that there is no significant causal connection between our economy and the ecosphere. … [Read more...]
Growthism: its ecological, economic and ethical limits
We have many problems – poverty, unemployment, environmental destruction, climate change, financial instability, etc. – but only one solution for everything, namely economic growth. We believe that growth is the costless, win-win solution to all problems, or at least the necessary precondition for any solution. This is growthism. It now creates more problems than it solves. A journey of no return, not a circular economy The economic process is not a mechanical analog that can be run … [Read more...]
How bad is global inequality, really?
Most everyone who’s interested in global inequality has come across the famous elephant graph, originally developed by Branko Milanovic and Christoph Lakner using World Bank data (see below). The graph charts the change in income that the world’s population have experienced over time, from the very poorest to the richest 1%. We can update the elephant graph using the latest data from the World Inequality Database, which covers the whole period from 1980 to 2016 using a method … [Read more...]
Why the “Anthropocene” is not “Climate Change”
“Anthropocene” is a widely proposed name for the geological epoch that covers human impact on our planet. But it is not synonymous with “climate change,” nor can it covered by “environmental problems.” Bigger and more shocking, the Anthropocene encapsulates the evidence that human pressures became so profound around the middle of the 20th century that we blew a planetary gasket. Hello, new Earth System. Hello, Anthropocene. The phrase “Earth System” refers to the entirety of our planet’s … [Read more...]
Groomed to Consume
With Christmas coming up, household consumption will soon hit its yearly peak in many countries. Despite homely pictures of tranquility on mass-produced greeting cards, Christmas is more about frenzied shopping and overspending than peace on earth or quality time with family and friends. As with so much of our lives, the holidays have been hijacked by the idea that satisfaction, even happiness, is only one more purchase away. Two generations ago, my Norwegian grandmother was overjoyed as a … [Read more...]