références en Anglais

What's the relationship between our energy consumption, our material footprint and our economies? This is the "holy trinity" as Tim Garrett and I refer to these three components in our conversation. Tim is a Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Utah, and over two years ago, he joined me to discuss the thermodynamics of collapse, where he explained his research into the behaviour of snowflakes and how you could extrapolate the behaviour of economies and civilization using the laws of thermodynamics. He's back on the show to explain how we use our energy, the necessity of a surplus of energy and how all of this relates to a society's growth and health. In this conversation we discuss questions like: Will renewables facilitate an increased consumption of fossil fuels? Can we reduce inequality by reducing energy consumption? How can we organise a wave-like civilisation, which grows and decays within safe boundaries? Can we decline in order to recover before crashing completely?

Literature reviews are usually quite uncontroversial. But this is not the case of “Reviewing studies of degrowth: Are claims matched by data, methods and policy analysis?”, a recent paper by Ivan Savin and Jeroen van den Bergh, two economists at the Autonomous University of Barcelona....

We’re sharing the open letter published to accompany the start of the “Beyond Growth” conference at the European Parliament, and signed by members of the Zagreb Degrowth Conference team.

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An open-access academic journal on degrowth

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Letters: I risked prison to stand up against an system that will lead to ecological and societal collapse – we must look for alternative economic models, writes Zoe Cohen

Degrowth offers perspectives that should be integrated into the Green New Deal, argue the authors of a new book, The Future Is Degrowth.

We need to break free from the capitalist economy. Degrowth gives us the tools to bend its bars.

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On degrowth in general

It took me a while but I finally digested the 107 pages of Chapter 5: Demand, services and social aspects of mitigation in the last IPCC report on Mitigation of climate change. This chapter is worth the read if only because it’s the first one fully dedicated to demand-side strategies. What I find remarkable is its conceptual width, including a few ideas that are usually considered too radical in these kind of venues. But just like the rest of the report, it is long and – as academic writing too often is – full of abstract jargon and somnolent prose. What I want to do in this article is to explain why Chapter 5 is more radical (in the good sense of the term) that you may think.

The fundamental assumption underlying these beliefs is that economic growth can be “decoupled” from resource and ecological demands and impacts. That is, it is claimed that the rate of production and consumption can continue to increase while the resources needed to do this can be reduced to sustainable levels, along with the environmental damage it causes. It is disturbing that this tech-fix faith persists despite the mountain of evidence that it is wrong.

Some economists have long argued that to really save the planet – and ourselves – from the climate crisis, we need a fundamental overhaul of the way our economies work. In this episode of The Conversation Weekly, we explore the ideas of the degrowth movement and their calls for a contraction in the world’s consumption of energy and resources. We also compare degrowth to other post-growth proposals for governments to reduce their fixation with economic growth.

Almost five decades after the Meadows report ( Club of Rome ) , the incredible accuracy of the forecasts of the World3 model – a computer simulation programme – are an unparalleled milestone in terms of scientific anticipation.

Don't you stumble, sometimes, into something that seems to make a lot of sense, but you can't say exactly why? For a long time, I had in mind the idea that when things start going bad, they tend to go bad fast. We might call this tendency the "Seneca effect" or the "Seneca cliff," from Lucius Annaeus Seneca who wrote that "increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid."

The “degrowth” movement to fight the climate crisis offers a romantic, utopian vision. But it’s not a policy agenda.

New research suggests social transformations that prompt “degrowth” could cut humanity’s climate footprint in time to meet the Paris climate agreement target.

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