From the text: The Manifesto has already received strong criticism from an array of commentators, but none of these assessments has yet critiqued it from the perspective of “degrowth,” which is an approach that sees the transition to sustainability occurring through less environmentally impactful economic activities and a voluntary contraction of material throughput of the economy, to reduce humanity’s aggregate resource demands on the biosphere. From a degrowth perspective, technology is not viewed as a magical savior since many technologies actually accelerate environmental decline. With these disagreements in mind, a group of over fifteen researchers from the degrowth scholarship community has written a detailed refutation of the Ecomodernist Manifesto. . .
Authors and Endorsers: Jeremy Caradonna, Iris Borowy, Tom Green, Peter A. Victor, Maurie Cohen, Andrew Gow, Anna Ignatyeva, Matthias Schmelzer, Philip Vergragt, Josefin Wangel, Jessica Dempsey, Robert Orzanna, Sylvia Lorek, Julian Axmann, Rob Duncan, Richard B. Norgaard, Halina S. Brown, Richard Heinberg > Full article
In a recent article with Stefan Drews, we discussed why degrowth might be an unfortunate name and slogan for the alternative economics movement. We listed several expressions that could possibly be better, but we were also upfront about their disadvantages. Here I propose a new term that might combine the advantages of the word degrowth with those of its more positive alternatives. For an asse...
By Tadzio Müller In the run-up to last year’s United Nations Climate Conference in Lima, Peru, a particular headline kept popping up, an attempt to once again establish a particular meme in the mind of global elites as well as wider populations: friends, the line goes, you’re right to worry about climate change, but – say the reports by, on the one hand, the International Monetary Fund, and on...
By Niko Paech The legend of green growth depends on three basic principles: (1) Increase of resource-efficiency, (2) closed material flow cycles and (3) renewable energies. However, despite a host of innovations in the field of climate protection, the ecological damages in the area of energy have been and still are on the rise. The process of ecological modernization reveals itself as a histo...
