Less is More - Jason Hickel
urgent reading, share abundantly
https://www.are.na/block/11125640
climate change, disposable people
"Remember, this is happening at 1°C. Two degrees will be a death sentence for much of the global South. The only reason that people have come to accept 2°C as a reasonable target is because climate negotiators from the United States and other powerful countries have pushed for it, over the loud objections of their colleagues from the South – and particularly from Africa."
climate change, disposable people
" When the 2°C target was announced at the Copenhagen summit in 2009, Lumumba Di-Aping, the Sudanese chief negotiator for the G77, said: ‘We have been asked to sign a suicide pact.’ ‘It is unfortunate,’ he went on, ‘that after 500 years-plus of interaction with the West we are still considered “disposables”. "
on the Paris Agreement and IPCC scenarios being based largely on BECCS
"Over and over again, the empirical evidence shows that it is possible to achieve high levels of human development without high levels of GDP. According to data from the UN, it is possible for nations to reach the very highest category on the life expectancy index with as little as $8,000 per capita, and very high levels on the education index with as little as $9,000 per capita."
"In fact, nations can succeed on a wide range of key social indicators – not just health and education, but also employment, nutrition, social support, democracy and life satisfaction –with as little as $10,000 per capita, while staying within or near planetary boundaries."
"What’s remarkable about these figures is that they are less than world average GDP per capita ($11,300). In other words, in theory we could achieve all of these social goals, for every person in the world, without any additional GDP growth at all, simply by investing in public goods, and distributing income and opportunity more fairly."
"It is damage without gain. This means that the US economy could in theory be scaled down by a staggering 65% from its present size while at the same time improving the lives of ordinary Americans, if income was distributed more fairly and invested in public goods."
"Justice is the antidote to the growth imperative – and key to solving the climate crisis.This means fundamentally reversing the economic policies that have dominated for the past forty years. Guided by the dogmas of neoliberalism, governments have privatised public services, slashed social spending, cut wages and labour protections, handed tax cuts to the richest and sent inequality soaring. In an age of climate breakdown, we need to be doing exactly the opposite."
"[Debt cancellation] would be salutary not just because it would relieve so much genuine human suffering, but also because it would be our way of reminding ourselves that money is not ineffable, that paying one’s debts is not the essence of morality, that all these things are human arrangements and that if democracy is going to mean anything, it is the ability to all agree to arrange things in a different way."
David Graeber
"We have long been told that capitalism and democracy are part of the same package. But in reality the two may well be incompatible. Capital’s obsession with perpetual growth at the expense of the living world runs against the values of sustainability that most of us hold."
"When people are given a say in the matter, they end up choosing to manage the economy according to steady-state principles that run counter to the growth imperative. In other words, capitalism has a tendency to be anti-democratic, and democracy has a tendency to be anti-capitalist."
"degrowth is, ultimately, a process of decolonisation"
"any process of decolonisation must therefore begin with a process of de-thingification. This is what Indigenous philosophers teach us: that we must learn to see ourselves once again as part of a broader community of living beings. If our approach to degrowth does not have this ethic at its heart,then we have missed the point."
"80% of the planet’s biodiversity is to be found on territories stewarded by Indigenous peoples"
People’s Agreement of Cochabamba (2010)
https://pwccc.wordpress.com/2010/04/24/peoples-agreement/
@unsuspicious das klingt exakt nach dem, was ich gestern mit gemeinschaftsbasiertem Leben meinte.
@sifr There is quite a good section in Energy and Civilization by V Smil making that same argument. Not just for the U.S. but for many western countries.
"Consider this thought experiment: if Portugal has higher levels of human welfare than the United States with $38000 less GDP per capita, then we can conclude that $38000 of America’s per capita income is effectively ‘wasted’. That adds up to $13 trillion per year for the US economy as a whole. That’s $13 trillion worth of extraction and production and consumption each year, and $13 trillion worth of ecological pressure, that adds nothing, in and of itself, to the fundamentals of human welfare."