Debunking Green Growth | Tim Parrique
Debunking Green Growth | Tim Parrique
Exposing all the tricks of the trade to maintain business as usual
Appears in this episode
Degrowth is making waves in academic and climate circles. Not only does the research field provide genuine hope for a more equitable and environmental future, but its advocates are hellbent on revealing the incorrect math, manipulated data and idiotic assumptions propping up capitalism’s regime. They’re debunking the myth of green growth.
Ecological Economist, Tim Parrique, the lead author of ‘Decoupling Debunked’ joins me this week to explain how neoliberal ideologies have co-opted the climate movement by promoting “green growth”.
He exposes the language and mechanisms economists and politicians use to lull the public into a false sense of security, gives a damning analysis of decoupling (believe me, you need to know this), drops a bombshell about the IPCC report, and puts to bed the argument that growth on a finite planet could be a good thing.
This is a brilliant episode building on Jason Hickel’s Introduction to Degrowth a few weeks ago. Listen to the full interview here, catch it on on Apple or Spotify or watch on Youtube. You’ll find the bonus episode on Youtube tomorrow, and this week everyone has access to the interview transcript.
Debunking Green Growth | Tim Parrique
Great talk, so nicely authoritative on both the counter-culture view and the environmental facts. Still, as I'm apt, I found it very disappointing that how to change the nature of the world system as a whole, which from its birth has been driven by a growth maximizing design around which world society was and still is organized. From my view systems are systems because they hold together and can't be changed except by evolution of the whole. So, fiddling with the parts and symptoms won't have much effect, but perpetuate the endless race to disaster that model naturally becomes. Every system starts with growth, power multiplying power, just to get going in the first place. Then in nature, growth systems change strategy from a maximizing power principle (MPP) to a maximizing resilience principle (MRP) by changing what kinds of development their resources are used for. All the evidence shows that that transition can and most often does occur quite smoothly, at the mid-point of the growth S curve. So, we really need to have discussion of what is getting in our way, keeping the people managing world investment from investing in resilience rather than multiplying power?
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