Produce Less – Exploring Degrowth

Climate change is a huge, complicated problem. Therefore, many people have an understandable tendency to mentally simplify it by focusing on just one cause (carbon emissions) and just one solution (alternative energy). Sustainability scholar Jan Konietzko has called this “carbon tunnel vision.” Oversimplifying the problem this way leads to techno-fixes that actually fix nothing. Despite trillions of dollars already spent on low-carbon technologies, carbon emissions are still increasing, and the climate is being destabilized faster than ever.

It’s not entirely your fault that the intended final handful of chips was not, indeed, your last for that snacking session. Many common snack foods have been expertly engineered to keep us addicted and almost constantly craving more of whatever falsely satisfying manufactured treat is in front of us.

The year 1991 was significant as the new Government in India brought a series of policy reforms that liberalized the economy, moving away from self-reliance to market and consumption oriented. Neo colonialism is one of the basic causes of grotesque inequality. Countries of the Global South that are encouraged to imitate the development of the Global North. Economic growth is not a solution for the Global South and this model produces inequality, pollutes cities and makes self-sufficient rural communities dependent. I would propose a decolonising degrowth agenda which is not to stop at degrowth but to start from there.

In one of the most twisted forms of logic ever to appear in politics, liberals believe that screaming “Trump is a fascist” somehow proves that Biden is not. If what Biden is helping the Zionists do in Gaza is not a fascist war crime, it is difficult to know what is.

A friend recently told me of a new study showing that the “life cycle” of electric vehicles (EVs) causes fewer CO2 emissions than gas-powered cars. This is important since research comparing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions per mile have left out the enormous emissions associated with the complex mining, manufacturing and disposal phases of EVs. Is this recent announcement just more corporate bunk? Or, could it mean that EVs are truly a step toward a greener world? And, is there a transportation alternative that avoids the pitfalls of both EVs and gas cars?

The ongoing US war against Russia has elevated American-allied Nazis to the international stage as ‘freedom fighters,’ resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians, raised the risk of nuclear war, ended any effective international cooperation on environmental issues through rekindling energy geopolitics, assured Europe of one or more Great Depression type winters with limited heating fuel, and more probably than not will soon produce the total annihilation of Ukraine as a modern state by the Russians… In recent history, the US could have abided by the 1991 promise made by the George H.W. Bush administration to […]

Almost anyone would agree that war is horrifying and peaceful countries should do their best to help its victims. The widespread eagerness to welcome fleeing Ukrainians after Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded their country last February is a heartening example of such aid. But behind that altruism lies an ugly truth: most of the countries embracing Ukrainians are simultaneously persecuting equally desperate refugees from elsewhere.  Such unequal mercy would be no surprise from nations like Ukraine’s neighbors Hungary and Poland, controlled by nationalist parties that have rarely welcomed anyone not white and Christian. However, the same thing is happening in […]

Many environmentalists are thrilled with the IRA; others less so. Those in the more critical camp have pointed disapprovingly to the bill’s promotion of nuclear, and note that, in order to gain Senator Joe Manchin’s vote, Democrats agreed to streamline oil and gas pipeline approvals in a separate bill. In effect, the government will be encouraging the increasing use of fossil fuels… in order to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. It will take a tremendous amount of energy to mine materials; transport and transform them through industrial processes like smelting; turn them into solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, vehicles, […]