TADEAS:

https://twitter.com/timparrique

Sufficiency means degrowth – Timothée Parrique
https://timotheeparrique.com/sufficiency-means-degrowth/

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.


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The “polluter elite” is a term coined by Dario Kenner when launching a database of rich people holding significant amounts of shares in polluting companies (see Carbon Inequality: The Role of the Richest in Climate Change). The climate problem with wealth is not only a matter of lifestyle but also of investment. Wealthy individuals only consume part of their income, the rest being invested in various projects, many of them disastrous for the planet. Shareholders tend to defend their financial returns by sidelining social and ecological concerns while organising production, which is why the most lucrative activities are often the least socially and ecologically sustainable. Driven by short-term, financial objectives, these actors have an incentive to boost sales. The more money they get in return, the more they can re-invest, giving them an even bigger control over production

Of course, lifestyle emissions matter too. The term “super-rich” comes from an article in Nature by Otto et al. (2019) which estimates the footprint of a typical super-rich household at around 129.3 tCO2e per year. Lynch et al. (2019, p.1) calls the consumption of super yachts, large homes, luxury vehicles and private jets criminal since “they disrupt the normal regeneration and reproduction of ecosystems by generating excessive ecological disorganization.” The paragraph references an 2015 Oxfam report showing that the richest 10% of people in the world are responsible for around 50% of global emissions. Because the rich emit so much more than the rest, a widening of inequality drives total emissions up, as shown by Jorgenson et al. (2017) for the case of the United States. Unless it’s not obvious already, the essential point to grasp here is that rich people must consume less.[iv]

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We live in a world where poverty remains and those with unmet needs require more resources to satisfy them. We also live in an ecologically-constrained world struggling to cut emissions as fast as possible. In that context, by reducing consumption in the global North (and more generally for all of those who are over-consuming), one could free some of these resources for the people who need it the most. Ensuring basic needs and well-being for all necessarily implies limiting consumption in high-income regions and wealthy households in order to enable resource-poor countries and households to reach decent standards of living. In other words, degrowth in the global North is a prerequisite for sustainable development in the global South.

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the chapter is conceptually shy. It calls for a radical reduction in demand but falls short in exploring its system-wide implications. From a degrowth perspective, renewable electricity is more desirable in the form of low-tech and community-owned infrastructure. Electric cars can be useful in replacing un-avoidable private vehicles like delivery trucks, taxis, and ambulances, but should not be treated as a way to sustain a car-based transport system. The refurbishment and renovation of housing is an urgent task, and so it should be entrusted to partly state-financed, not-for-profit businesses. Public transport should be treated a social right and organised following the logic of Universal Basic Services.

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Instead of bickering about decoupling, passively waiting for a quasi-magical greening of GDP, we can finally switch to Plan B. Let’s forget about income and talk about needs; let’s ditch average per capita aggregates, and address inequality head on; let’s stop taking demand as granted and let’s reinvent the ways we satisfy our needs. The task is huge but now at least we know: we need to invent ourselves a new economic system.

TADEAS: trochu ma tam matie ta skupina Bavarians, to su skutocne obyvatelia Bavorska alebo je to nejake kodove oznacenie pre nejaku globalnu kliku? ako su tam dole takze je ich few, ale aj to mi stale pride moc v globalnom kontexte

Citizens’ Climate Report - Recommendations for German climate policy

A report developed over 12 sessions by 160 randomly drawn people from across Germany
Advised by experts from science, politics, and civil society

https://buergerrat-klima.de/content/pdfs/BK_211213_Gutachten_Digital_English.pdf

2021

Climate change is becoming less a battle of nations than rich vs poor
https://www.ft.com/content/4788beae-9035-4449-b5cd-200dc7b6ea9d

Personal consumption, depending on how it's measured, is about 70% of emissions. But the important thing is that it's extremely unequal, so it's a relatively small group that has to change the most.

TADEAS: odbory proti klimatické krizi? ale prosímtě! :-)

The kids are not ok. Today I went to give a climate talk at… | by Julia Steinberger | May, 2022 | Medium
https://jksteinberger.medium.com/the-kids-are-not-ok-c518fffb475

I have given climate talks at high schools before. In 2019, I was invited by the first Geneva climate strikers to go around the high schools on the morning of their first strike. I went, with a friend, racing on our bikes from school to school to school, as many as we could reach during the morning. Back then, the mood was electric, excited, engaged. The students had taken control of the agenda: they were going to put the concerns and needs of their generation front and centre. They were going to get things moving. There were lots of questions on climate science, projections, impacts, actions. Everyone was excited to take part, to learn.

Fast forward three years (and a pandemic) later, and the mood could not have been more different. I sensed it as I was speaking, a general muttering in the auditorium full of 16–17-year-olds, that sometimes ebbed a bit, but never really went away. I thought the students might be bored by the specific aspects I was talking about. Sources of emissions, trends, specific impact probabilities, types of mitigation actions … I raced through the topics, hoping to reach one they would be interested in. And at the end, during the Q&A, it finally came out.

One girl took the mic and held on to it. Her questions came fast and clear, and were widely applauded by her peers. She was clearly channelling the zeitgeist of the room. This is my recollection of some of her questions.

- “Why are you here talking to us? We can’t do anything. Only politicians, only business leaders, can make the big changes you are talking about. Why aren’t you talking to them?”
- “Why do you talk to us about optimism [Note: I had not, actually, but perhaps my presentation had been announced as such. Who knows.], about possible actions, when we all know that none of that will happen?”
- “All these people in power have known about this problem for so long. Yet the IPCC comes out with report after report explaining we have to act within just a few years — and nothing happens, nothing changes. Why do you think this talk of yours to us can do anything?”

I realised that times had shifted, and that the 16-year-olds of today were in a place far beyond where those of 2019 were. Their mood was one of deep, cold, frustration and betrayal. Pessimism, even despair, perhaps, but also disdain. I had failed them, for sure, but clearly so had the other grown-ups in their lives. I was shaken.

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I learned that the youth who brought the climate crisis to the attention of the world don’t necessarily see that attention as a victory. Back then, when there was silence and denial, inaction could be explained by climate not being enough of a topic for anyone to care or act. In great part due to the climate strikes of 2018–2019, climate skyrocketed to the top of the agenda, on the surface at least.

And as a result, inaction is now perceived as a deliberate, inevitable choice. The grown-ups (and their grown-ups) know they are hurting and harming the youth and they are still doing it. The hurt and despair are immense. No wonder the high school students were muttering while I was pontificating to them about emissions and degrees of warming and impacts. None of that is seen to matter. It’s like coming to a Victorian school and pointing out to the students that sticks are used to beat them, and that beatings hurt. Like, duh. They know already. What they need to know is how to take the stick away from the adults. They need to know how to become a counter-power who can take away our ability to harm them.

And this is why I wish I had at least had the opportunity of discussing activism, and the arc of struggle with them. Because they do have at least a sliver of a chance of being able to be that counter-power, of taking the climate stick away from grown-ups (and our grown-ups). Yes, information alone is not enough. But there is so much more to do.