Crash and Burn

[TBF]

Capitalist growth has never been green or just. The decoupling studies are poor evidence that it could become either. Why not, as British economist Ann Pettifor has argued, abandon the concept of growth entirely?

You can’t have capitalist growth without environmental destruction
by Kate Aronoff 4-22-16

If climate wonks have a Holy Grail, it’s decoupling rising greenhouse gas emissions from a rising GDP. Paths to economic growth have historically involved digging up and burning massive stores of carbon held in fossil fuels. For centuries, their fumes have produced the energy needed to build factories, plan modern cities, and increase living standards.

Calls to find new paths to prosperity are met by cries from the Right that pit growth against environmental stewardship. Take dirty energy out of the mix, they say, and the chances for a better life for billions crumble.

“We frankly don’t have an option,” United Nations climate chief Christiana Figures recently told journalist Elizabeth Kolbert about decoupling. Growth and falling emissions, she warned, “are absolutely key to being able to feed, house, and educate the two billion more family members who will be joining us.”

Dips in the steady rise of greenhouse gases, tellingly, all stem from economic retraction — from the oil crisis of the 1970s to the fall of the Soviet Union. A study released last summer in Nature found that from 2007–2013 emissions dropped by a full 11 percent. “The economic recession of 2008–9 may have hurt your bank account,” one Los Angeles Times article on the report began, “but new analysis suggests it was good for the planet.” ...

Much more here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/04/fossil-fuels-decoupling-growth-oil-climate/

[Fairgo]

1. The sad truth behind the TPP

The organising idea behind free trade assumes a model that is killing the entire planet. We are not evolved enough as a species to even understand the level of change required to survive. The titanic is sinking, quit playing with the deck chairs and grow some gills.

[Califonz]

2. Gambling with the planet

Sometimes I think they expect science to pull a rabbit out of its hat, like solar energy that's cheaper than fossil fuels, or some form of safe, cheap nuclear energy to be perfected to save capitalism.