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Conservationists are desperate for a biodiversity accord that will carry the same weight as the Paris climate agreement. But so far, this subject has received  even though many scientists say it poses at least an equal threat to humanity.

The last two major biodiversity agreements – in 2002 and 2010 – have failed to stem the .

Climate change could increase species’ extinction risk as temperatures and precipitation begin to exceed species’ historically observed tolerances. Using long-term data for 66 bumble bee species across North America and Europe, we tested whether this mechanism altered likelihoods of bumble bee species’ extinction or colonization. Increasing frequency of hotter temperatures predicts species’ local extinction risk, chances of colonizing a new area, and changing species richness. Effects are independent of changing land uses. The method developed in this study permits spatially explicit predictions of climate change–related population extinction-colonization dynamics within species that explains observed patterns of geographical range loss and expansion across continents. Increasing frequencies of temperatures that exceed historically observed tolerances help explain widespread bumble bee species decline. This mechanism may also contribute to biodiversity loss more generally. Recent climate changes have accelerated range losses among many species (, ). Variation in species’ extinction risk or chances of colonizing a new area determine whether species’ ranges expand or decline as new climatic conditions emerge. Understanding how changing climatic conditions alter species’ local extinction (extirpation) or colonization probabilities has proven exceptionally challenging, particularly in the presence of other environmental changes, such as habitat loss. Furthermore, identifying which species will most likely be at risk from climate change and where those risks will be greatest is critical to the development of conservation strategies (, ).

Since the National Marine Fisheries Service's failed first attempt at permitting a brand-new offshore aquaculture industry in 2016, environmental and fishing groups' worst fears about industrial aquaculture have been realized by countries around the world. Industrial aquaculture involves cage or net pens, often made of flexible nylon or polyethylene nets, placed directly in the water, allowing for operators to directly discharge fish feed, feces, pharmaceuticals and other chemicals, and escaped fish directly into the surrounding waters. Massive fish escapes have occurred repeatedly due to weather damage to the net pens, equipment failure, and human error, wreaking havoc on ecosystems and releasing millions of farmed fish into the wild over the past few years.

The ecological hazards of industrial aquaculture have become abundantly clear. In Mowi, Scotland in January 2020, 73,600 salmon escaped from a net pen during a storm marking the third major escape in the area since October 2019. In Norway, a series of storms resulted in approximately four million escaped fish from aquaculture facilities over the past eight years. In 2018, 680,000 fish escaped from Marine Harvest Chile, and 120,000 fled from Huon Aquaculture in Tasmania in 2018. Another 109,515 fish broke out from Bakkafrost Faroe Islands in 2017. That same year, in Washington state, 260,000 farmed Atlantic salmon to escape an industrial net pen operation maintained by Cooke Aquaculture Pacific, LLC and fled into the Puget Sound and the Pacific Ocean.

Fears of fin fish farming in the Santa Barbara Channel brought a dozen community members to the front door of the local office of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) on Wednesday, April 5. Surrounded by gravestones reading “RIP humpback whales,” “RIP wild fish,” and “RIP local fisherman,” concerned individuals delivered 2,500 petition signatures calling on the Biden administration to ban fin fish farming.

“The pollution surrounding fish farm sites such as these can create dead zones where there isn’t enough oxygen in the water to support even basic marine life,” said Katie Davis, the chair of the Santa Barbara–Ventura Sierra Club. “These pens can entangle migrating marine mammals, such as humpback whales, and pose a massive risk to native fish populations. Developing fish farms off the coast of Santa Barbara is an ecological disaster just waiting to happen.”

The Arctic could be free of sea ice roughly a decade earlier than projected, scientists warn – another clear sign the climate crisis is happening faster than expected as the world continues to pump out planet-heating pollution.

A new study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications found Arctic sea ice could disappear completely during the month of September as early as the 2030s. Even if the world makes significant cuts to planet-heating pollution today, the Arctic could still see summers free of sea ice by the 2050s, scientists reported.

Late last year, one of Dr. Vance Fowler’s patients — a man in his 60s who’d returned to North Carolina from visiting his family in Nepal — died of a bacterial infection. He’d been treated at a top U.S. hospital with access to the strongest antibiotics. But the infection, a  strain of E. coli, surged on. 

“ is a real problem that, with little or no warning, can affect the lives of any of us at any time,” said Fowler, an infectious disease specialist at Duke Health. “We don’t have enough drugs.”

It turns out that jamming this mechanism completely is not only infeasible but undesirable.12 It is infeasible because of the blurriness of the line between inherent and external utility.13 Take the luxury watch mentioned above. Wearing it could be a consumerist act, entailing a status claim, but it could also be an act of love and respect, making use of an inheritance from a much-missed grandfather. In that case, it carries value that is inherent, producing satisfaction quite independent of other people. The difficulty lies in the fact that value is in the eye of the beholder (and, in aggregate, in the eyes of society), not inherent in the object. Drawing a line between inherent and external utility would force us to divine the purpose behind individuals’ purchases at each moment in time, and lead to very cumbersome, if not arbitrary, bans. Banning conspicuous consumption would, however, also be undesirable because it is an important part of how new and better products spread through society, with the process of innovation driving the diffusion.14 Typically, upper-class buyers favor expensive and scarce goods. But another class of products also serves their desire to signal status, and that is new and better solutions. The first automobiles, the first electric lightbulbs, the first phones, the first television sets, and the first smart devices were initially expensive to make and priced for the rich. As manufacturers attract enough early adopters among the wealthy—and the wider group attempting to emulate them—they can gain the scale advantages to make products faster and cheaper. This can set off a cycle by which production costs continue to drop, the innovative product continues to spread, and, progressively, it loses its nonfunctional, status-signaling value. At the end of the process, a new or better product is available to the wider society at an affordable cost. Meanwhile, the upper class has moved on to yet newer and better products, getting other cycles started.15 It is this “innovation treadmill” that powers the rapid spread of technology across capitalist economies. The key is the corrective mechanism: over the long run, democratization of consumption erases the external utility of the shiny, new object, leaving only its inherent utility and function. The power of this mechanism is that it harnesses and channels some deep human tendencies—starting with the desire to stand out, but also to fit in. Both relate to the process of identity-building, and while they are psychological rather than material needs they are very real ones.16 Regarding status-signaling, neurological studies of both animal and human subjects show that it produces serotonin, neuron firing, and blood oxygenation in the brain. The emulation of success and prestige is likewise deeply wired within our species. In The Secret of Our Success, evolutionary biologist and anthropologist Joseph Henrich combines a host of multidisciplinary evidence, from lab experiments to ethnographic studies across the world, to argue that imitation based on certain cues is a cultural evolutionary trait. Emulating the behavior of those most successful within the community accelerated the accumulation of human collective knowledge. This, in his view, is the secret behind human success vis-à-vis other species on the planet. The effect of the innovation treadmill is that yesterday’s crazy consumerism chasing “unnecessary things” yields today’s basic needs.17 This can be seen in the poverty indicators typically used by rich countries. In the European Union, for example, a household is classified as severely materially deprived if it lacks a color television, telephone, washing machine, or car, or if the family cannot afford a week-long holiday away from home. Seventy years ago, all of these would have been out of reach to all but the very upper class. More broadly, needs come and go: a television set to my grandparents was not a need but a want. It became a need to my parents’ generation— only to become, within two generations, something no longer important in an era of Internet access and large monitors. This logic could be extended to all sorts of goods. Is having a toilet in a house a need? What about running water? What about warm water? Or a shower or bathtub? Or an oven? For the majority of human history these were not available except to the extremely wealthy, but in any advanced economy today it would be impossible if not illegal to rent out an apartment without all these features. The skeptical reader might object that the items above are still desiderata, given that they are not matters of life or death. The innovation treadmill applies to medical treatment, too. In 1836, Nathan Mayer Rothschild, arguably the richest man in the world at the time, died at fifty-eight for want of an antibiotic to treat an infection. In 1928, Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, which made it to the market following medical trials in 1942. In the entire United States, there was enough to treat fewer than a hundred patients. By September 1943, there was enough to satisfy the demand of the Allied Armed Forces during the Second World War, at today’s equivalent of $300 per dose. By 1950, production had increased to a point that it was available to the American population at four cents a dose: one-sixteenth the price of a gallon of milk.18 By now, lacking access to antibiotics would constitute severe material deprivation, violating basic needs. Note that the mechanics of the innovation treadmill extend beyond the gizmos of modern technology. An interesting botanical example is the lemon, an iconic symbol of the Mediterranean landscape and its bounty. Recent research carried out at the University of Tel Aviv, based on a detailed analysis of ancient texts, art, artifacts, and archaeobotanical remains, shows that lemon fruits originated in Southeast Asia.19 Even during the Roman era, they were considered a luxury product due to their supposed healing qualities, symbolic use, pleasant odor, and rarity. But they were of scant culinary use due to their thick rind and dry, tasteless flesh. It was only after their spread was powered by their initial representation as a high-status, elite product of limited functional use that they started to be cultivated through ancient technology and know-how. Thanks to hybridization, varieties displaying fewer seeds, thinner skin, and more juice were produced. Now, a pound of them can be bought for less than two dollars in some US markets. Over two centuries ago, Adam Smith was already describing the dynamics of the process by which technologies and products democratize, desires of the upper classes become basic needs of society, and lack of access to them comes to imply poverty. In his words: A linen shirt, for example, is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-laborer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into without extreme bad conduct. Custom, in the same manner, had rendered leather shoes a necessary of life in England. The poorest creditable person of either sex would be ashamed to appear in public without them.20 Smith was much more sophisticated in his thinking than many know, given his frequent association with simplistic “wealth maximization.” He understood well the social nature of the relationships among commodities, affluence, and the achievement of basic living conditions. This view aligns with more recent work by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, who in the 1980s revolutionized the field of economic development. In Development as Freedom, Sen argued for moving away from standard emphases on earnings, opulence, utility, and ownership of specific commodities, to focus instead on capabilities to do or be what you’d like (the concept of self-realization).21 This perspective turns the fight against poverty into a fight for (positive) freedoms, including freedom from hunger and short life, freedom to take part in the life of the community, and, building on Smith’s observation above, freedom from shame or disgrace. While this might sound very philosophical, note what it implies. The same capabilities require more expensive goods and services in a society that is richer, and in which most people have means of transport, affluent clothing, radios, and televisions. Sen notes that richer societies progressively revise upward the capabilities accepted as “minimum.”22 It becomes clear that there is no set of needs that can be called absolute or universal across time and geography—and thus there can be no quantitative threshold established beyond which further income or economic growth is no longer needed because it would only be funneled into unnecessary wants. Once we get rid of the artificial dichotomy between needs and wants, we see that need is, and always has been, relative and that it evolves as the benefits of growth and innovation spread through a society.23 It is true that citizens in rich countries have much that others lack, but to the extent that these represent new solutions to old problems they open space for new needs.24 We may live much longer and healthier lives than our ancestors, but we continue to have problems. Cancer and cardiovascular diseases are now the top causes of death in most advanced economies.25 The fact that we live longer means that more people are afflicted by dementia. There is plenty of suffering still, from eyesight that cannot be restored to injuries that put victims in wheelchairs for life. What is possible determines what is needed. The fact that needs are relative applies not only to health but to virtually every dimension of life, including leisure. Today, expressing a wish to visit another continent would not strike anyone as an eccentric or unreasonable desire. Five hundred years ago, it would have been received in the same way as someone today wishing to go to the moon. And even that is losing its capacity to surprise, given that 2021 saw the first “space tourists” in human history. It is not unimaginable that, across a few decades, space tourism will move from being impossible, to being unaffordable to nearly all, to becoming available to many.

We are meeting at a critical time when our ability to achieve the 2030 Agenda [for Sustainable Development] hangs in the balance.  The world is facing cascading crises in food, energy and finance, compounding the already devastating impacts of climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Across the Arab region, the socioeconomic outlook remains turbulent.  High levels of debt are draining funds away from the Sustainable Development Goals and towards debt servicing costs.  Conflicts and protracted economic crises add further layers of complexity.  Progress on the [Goals] has stalled in some areas, and even reversed in others.

} - ("Analysis," Washington Post, published 7-10-2023, accessed 7-15-2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/07/10/un-s-sustainable-development-goals-are-mission-impossible/9b63d0ea-1f1d-11ee-8994-4b2d0b694a34_story.html)//penelope/

Newsflash: We are not on track to achieve “sustainable development.”

Recent literature argues that there is little or no evidence in terms of absolute decoupling looking into embodied energy in trade, material consumption, resource use, and emissions. Akizu-Gardoki et al. (2018) devise an alternative “Decoupling Index” that uses 126 countries’ total primary energy footprints (rather than total primary energy supplies), taking into account embodied energy imported with goods and services. Within a 14-year period of analysis (2000–2014), the authors empirically show that 93 countries7 disprove decoupling; while 27 show absolute decoupling for the analysis period, with only 6 countries (ESP, ITA, HUN, GBR, JPN, and FRA) with a Human Development Index of 0.8 above maintain absolute decoupling over time (ibid.). Regarding global material fows covering over half a century of analysis (1950–2010) Schaffartzik et al. (2014) reveal that although industrial metabolic profles stabilise over time with equal shares of biomass, fossil energy, and construction minerals; they are surpassed by other regions like Asia, replicating patterns of industrial growth engines. However, this does not translate into "per capita" affuence or material consumption and instead adds to the growing bubble of global resource use and extraction (ibid.). On a similar note, after an analysis of 40 years of resource productivity analysis Krausmann et al. (2017) summarise that although some countries may be decoupling in absolute terms, this value is cancelled out when trade is taken into account. Wood et al. (2018) confrm that impacts embodied in trade, especially regarding material goods, led by clothing and footwear, are growing tremendously, with energy and GHG emissions following in a less pronounced manner. Wu et al. (2018) highlight the differences in a decoupling index, where “developed countries” primarily continue to develop high-tech and higheffciency GDP growth drivers, whereas “developing countries” have not undergone a transformation to absolute decoupling due to a lack in energy effciency measures, disorganised industrial structures, and absence of Information Technologies (IT) in capital investment. These studies highlight a threefold causality: (1) we have lengthened commodity supply chains due to the abundance of readily available transport fuel; (2) this has been made possible by notably shifting and outsourcing more signifcant impacts to developing regions that take on primary extractive and secondary industries; (3) meanwhile, we have bought into the promise of circularity regarding the reuse of materials. Hass et al. (2015) illustrate that circularity is low mainly because most materials are not available for recycling in the frst place and that the growth of materials injection into our systems outpaces any potential recycling attempt (See Sect. 15.4 for more details). Similarly, recently conducted reviews of empirical research conclude no robust evidence regarding decoupling. (For an exhaustive literature review of decoupling literature, see Parrique et al., 2019; Koirala et al., 2011; Mardani et al., 2019 among others). The Decoupling Debunked document (Parrique et al., 2019) concludes that there is no indication of decoupling that is absolute, global, permanent, and suffciently fast and large enough both in terms of resources or impacts. Likewise, a review of 179 decoupling articles (Vadén et al., 2020) that appeared between 1990 and 2019 concluded with no evidence of economy-wide, national/international absolute resource decoupling and reckons that “the goal of decoupling rests partly on faith.” A recent exhaustive review, composed of a bibliometric mapping of 835 peer-reviewed articles (published in two parts, part I (Wiedenhofer et al., 2020) and part II (Haberl et al., 2020)) also highlight the need for substantial advances in both theoretical and empirical research required while also being complemented by alternative goals and ambitions. With unsuccessful robust and systemic evidence, reaffrming the fndings of Hickel and Kallis (2020), absolute decoupling from resource use cannot be achieved on a global scale against a global scale backdrop of continued economic growth.

This assumes that there cannot be absolute decoupling, yet we already see decoupling in many sectors thanks to efficiency gains. A bit of clarification between relative and absolute decoupling is needed here: relative decoupling is where there is a reduction in the inputs per unit of production, but there is still overall growth in inputs, while absolute decoupling is where a sector has continued to grow without an increase in inputs. We can see the latter — absolute decoupling — in US crop production, for example, which has increased even as agricultural inputs such as fertilizer, water, and crop acreage have declined or plateaued, with the decline in fertilizer use being particularly sharp. Corn acreage has been absolutely decoupled from corn production. American potato yields continue to increase, but the potato market is saturated, so potato production has plateaued, meaning that land is removed from production. US consumption of metals marched in lockstep with GDP until about the 1980s. Since then, consumption of important metals such as aluminum, nickel, copper, steel, and gold have plateaued or declined. (This takes into account imports and exports, so globalization and offshoring the problem to the developing world is not the reason for this.) Many degrowthers simply reject that absolute degrowth has happened, but this is simply denial of the facts. Some degrowthers, to their credit, accept that absolute degrowth is real but is happening too slowly and in not enough sectors. To those degrowthers, I say: “I completely agree! That’s why we need to focus on more economic planning and the policies required to speed up absolute decoupling and forget about this degrowth distraction!” If absolute decoupling is too slow to deal with climate change, what makes them think that convincing all the electorates and autocracies of the world that they need to abandon economic growth will be any faster?

Over the last three decades, Burkett and his co-thinkers have developed metabolic rift theory and played a significant role in restoring Marx as an important ecological thinker. As part of that project Burkett has engaged in critical dialogue with the ecological economists. The ecological economists emerged in the 1970s but trace their roots back to earlier figures like the Ukrainian socialist and correspondent of Marx and Engels, Serhiy Podolynsky who attempted (unsuccessfully) to apply thermodynamics to economic questions. Burkett and his co-thinkers have written several books showing that Marx and Engels had more sophisticated understanding of thermodynamics and there is a lot of common ground between their approach and the approach later developed by the ecological economists based on the entropy law. Leading ecological economists Nicolas Georgescu-Roegen and Herman Daly argue, following the first law of thermodynamics, that human activity cannot create or destroy energy. Instead it constantly draws on material/energy resources provided by nature and dissipates waste back into the environment. Following the second law they argue that ‘matter-energy enters the economic process in a state of low entropy and comes out of it in a state of high entropy’. From a thermodynamic perspective the human economy is an “open dissipative system”. Individual cells, living organisms and communities of living organisms are also open, dissipative systems. Biological metabolisms draw low entropy matter-energy from the environment and dissipate high entropy waste back into the environment. Similarly the biosphere as a whole is also an open, dissipative system that draws on low-entropy solar energy to power life’s metabolisms and dissipates waste heat back into space. Human labour manipulates the materials of the earth to produce useful goods and services but only by drawing on more useful, ordered forms of matter-energy and dissipating out less ordered, less useful forms. This occurs both during the production process (material pollutants and heat) and following consumption by the end-user. In Georgescu-Roegen words, the “entropy law is the taproot of economic scarcity”. Eventually capitalist growth runs up against natural limits. This can cause specific, localised resource scarcity, which can impact on the smooth functioning of the capitalist economy. But such shortages are easily overcome as production expands into previously unexploited areas and the market adjusts for any additional costs involved in production. Capitalism requires an ever expanding frontier of primary industries (agriculture, mining, logging/forestry, fishing) at the expense of biodiverse wilderness. This expansion leads to a bigger problem, overlooked by bourgeois economics: absolute scarcity. Capitalist growth leads to a general ecological degradation. There is broad agreement between ecological economists and metabolic rift theorists on this framework. However, ecological economists lack an analysis of the social relations of production and so give no explanation as to why capitalist social relations cause escalating ecological crisis. Marx’s labour theory of value allows us deeper insight into the social drivers of this process. Value is a measure of socially necessary labour time. So the use-values we draw from nature, have no value and are treated as “free gifts”. Entropic value is a property of a commodities use-value, not its exchange value. It finds no expression in monetary form. Capitalist competition leads to increasing productivity as firms compete to produce more output in less labour time. Capitalism has its own efficiencies. The constant pressure to produce more for less labour hours incentivises some recycling, efficiency gains and substitutions. However, the relentless pursuit of profit means any ecological benefit tends to be offset by increases in the scale of production. By increasing the matter and energy processed per hour of labour and by maintaining or extending the working day and size of the workforce, capitalism accelerates and expands material throughput and entropic degradation. Understanding that low entropy use-values provided by nature are not valued in capitalist economy also allows us to understand one of Burkett’s important insights, “capitalist reproduction does not depend upon any particular limit to entropy level in its matter-energy requirements” and further “short of human extinction, capitalist reproduction in no way hinges on the maintenance of natural wealth of any given entropy level. In other words, capitalistically-induced crises in the conditions of human development do not necessarily mean crises of capitalist reproduction.” To halt this escalating ecological crisis, Herman Daly proposes placing quotas on material inputs from nature. Georgescu-Roegen describes two forms of low entropy matter-energy—stocks and flows. The stocks are mostly products of past metabolic processes: forests, mineral reserves (coal, limestone, many metal ores etc), crops, domesticated animals, the fisheries etc. The flow is the constant flow of solar energy. Nature’s own metabolic production processes operate on their own timescales and capitalist society tends to exhaust the stocks faster than they can be replenished. Marx and Engels recognised this problem. In his penultimate letter to Marx, Engels remarks on the squandering of “past solar heat”, “our energy, our coal, our ores, forests etc.”. In this way, capitalist speed-up creates an irreparable rift between the social metabolism and the natural metabolism. Marx also points to the need to limit and regulate material inputs: Instead of a conscious and rational treatment of the land as permanent communal property, as the inalienable condition for the existence and reproduction of the chain of human generations, we have the exploitation and the squandering of the powers of the earth.” (949, Capital vol 3) Capitalist speed-up creates an irreparable rift between the social metabolism and the natural metabolism. Marx also points to the need to limit and regulate material inputs: Instead of a conscious and rational treatment of the land as permanent communal property, as the inalienable condition for the existence and reproduction of the chain of human generations, we have the exploitation and the squandering of the powers of the earth. Others in the reading group were more critical. Reformulating real issues of harmful waste and of resource depletion in terms of entropy, some said, blurs rather than clarifies. Some productive activities, such as agriculture, in principle reduce entropy: when they are environmentally damaging, for example by soil degradation, the damage cannot be captured by general reasoning about entropy. Even if recycling can never be 100%, as the ecological economists insist, it can get near that. Some said that Burkett, in fact, has misunderstood the basic physics of entropy.

Recently, several academic articles have questioned the circular economy (CE) concept on the grounds that it will not be able to decisively reduce environmental impacts as it operates in and supports economic growth. These “degrowth critiques of circular economy” argue that we need to change the way we utilise energy and materials more fundamentally to achieve necessary transformations. WHAT IS THE PROBLEM? In short: It is not possible to “circle” an economy out of growth (George et al., 2015). Both energy and material consumption are so tightly linked to economic activity (Wiedmann et al., 2015) that CE in its current form is not likely to be able to decouple this link. Efforts to increase resource efficiency have in the past not led to the desired reduction. This is because gains in efficiency tend to lead to the paradox situation that they increase consumption. This has been true for more than 150 years and is known as Jeavons’ Paradox (Bauwens, 2021). CE principally fails in preventing or mitigating this rebound effect (Corvellec et al., 2022). For example, money saved on leasing, renting, sharing, or pooling a product is likely to be spent on other, potentially more environmentally damaging activities (Hofmann, 2019). A panel data analysis of CE in 28 European countries indeed confirmed that economic growth in these countries was responsible for increasing resource extraction four times more than CE practices helped to reduce it (Bianchi and Cordella, 2023). As long as the stock of materials in buildings and infrastructure is growing, the extraction of primary resources will remain necessary, as the supply of recycled material will not be sufficient (Bianchi and Cordella, 2023). And even if an equilibrium could be achieved, i.e. a zero net-addition to stock situation where all new construction material demand is satisfied with secondary materials, non-recyclable materials such as fossil fuels and some biomass will still need to be extracted. This holds true for replacing fossil with renewable energy, since this requires an increased amount of metals and other materials, all of which will need to be extracted first. Due to the laws of thermodynamics, completely closed material loops will never be possible, i.e. virgin raw materials will always be needed, even to just keep the status quo, let alone grow economies (Corvellec et al., 2022). A complete substitution of conventional linear products is not only unlikely, it is impossible in principle. Hence what is needed is a deliberate downscaling of the linear economy and a redesigning of the circular economy to focus on the prevention of material use in the first place.

In fact, an increasingly robust body of scientific literature shows that green growth cannot be sustainable—but also, that a different form of organizing society is possible. To achieve sustainability, so-called developed countries need to abandon the objective of GDP growth and scale down less necessary and destructive forms of production to reduce energy and material use. We need a planned and selective contraction of economic activity aimed at increasing well-being and equality. Or, as recently argued in this journal, we need “ecosocialist degrowth.” Degrowth is founded on and justified by a solid critique of market instruments, the optimistic reliance on price mechanisms and private-sector solutions, which are central to so-called “green economy” approaches. Indeed, the lack of social-ecological planning and the reliance on socially unjust and often ineffective market instruments is precisely what has led us into this mess in the first place.

13.3 Three Aspects of the Impossibility of a Sustainable Capitalism

The logic of the impossibility of a sustainable capitalism is concretely proven in numerous aspects of its modus operandi. Let us isolate three aspects of this impossibility. But before that, it is best to start by giving voice not to pure and staunch liberals like Milton Friedman, but to those who believe that capitalism has nothing to fear from environmental regulation. Many of them reject a defensive stance and put themselves on the offensive, claiming that environmental sustainability and increased profits are not only compatible but reciprocally strengthen each other in a virtuous circle. If I am not mistaken, the advocates of this thesis prefer the following argument: adopting innovative solutions to increase the efficiency of the input/product or product/waste ratio and improve environmental safety in the production process increases the company’s competitiveness (as opposed to reducing it) because it is a valuegenerating process, be it in terms of risk management, brand image, and, finally, effective financial results. If this is true, then taking the lead and being at the forefront of economic processes with lower environmental impact and risk will ensure a better profitability than the average profit rate. I hope to not underestimate the literature on the business and sustainability binomial by saying that it limits itself to elaborating variations on this theme while offering several case studies on the direct relationship between sustainability and profitability. There are a growing number of economists and NGOs committed to encouraging companies to embrace this belief. They naturally render a tremendous service to society and to the companies themselves through their work. However, their success is limited by the three aspects that render an environmentally sustainable capitalism impossible, as stated in the title of this section. (1) Decoupling and Circular Economy Decoupling is the hope that eco-efficient technologies and production processes in industrialized countries with mature economies will enable the miracle of increased production and consumption with less pressure (or at least no corresponding increase in pressure) on ecosystems (Jöstrom and Östblom 2010). It is true that a greater efficiency in the production process may allow for relative decoupling, meaning that it enables a reduction in pressure per product or per unit of GDP. But it does not decrease this pressure in absolute terms, since the number of products does not cease to increase on a global scale. The mechanism known as the “Jevons paradox” or rebound effect describes how increasing demand for energy or natural resources always tends to offset the eco-efficiency gain of technological innovation. Thus, although energy efficiency per product has doubled or even tripled since 1950, this gain is offset by the expansion of production at a greater rate than the eco-efficiency gain. The actions of institutions and business foundations that advocate for an ecoefficient and circular economy based on reverse engineering, recycling, reuse, and remanufacturing are certainly positive. We know, however, that there is no circular economy. No economy, let alone a global economy trapped in the paradigm of expansion, can evade the second law of thermodynamics, whose relationship with economics has been analyzed by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen since the 1970s (1971, 1975 and 1995). Here we must state the obvious: even though the surplus energy supplied by oil and other fossil fuels in relation to the energy invested to obtain them is declining (for this declining EROI, see Chap. 5, Sect. 5.5), low-carbon renewable energies are not yet, and may never be, as efficient as oil. This means that the energy transition, while urgent and imperative, will further distance us from a circular economy. According to calculations by Dominique Guyonnet, “to provide one Kw/h of electricity through land-based wind energy requires about 10 times more reinforced concrete and steel and 20 times more copper and aluminum than a coal-fired thermal power plant” (Madeline 2016). The only way, therefore, to lessen the environmental impact of capitalism is to reduce, in absolute terms, the consumption of energy and goods by the richest 10% or 20% of the planet. This is incompatible with capitalism’s basic mechanism of expansive functioning and with the worldview that it sells to society. (2) The Law of Resources Pyramid The increasing scarcity of certain inputs and the need to secure their large-scale and low-cost supply nullify the potential benefits of various green initiatives taken on by companies. These cannot, in fact, evade the law of the resources pyramid, described by Richard Heinberg (2007): The capstone [of the pyramid] represents the easily and cheaply extracted portion of the resource; the next layer is the portion of the resource base that can be extracted with more difficulty and expense, and with worse environmental impacts; while the remaining bulk of the pyramid represents resources unlikely to be extracted under any realistic pricing scenario This law of the resources pyramid can be stated in an even simpler form: in capitalism, the logic of capital accumulation and surplus, together with the growing scarcity of finite natural resources, necessarily exacerbates the negative environmental impact of economic activity. (3) The Impossibility of Internalizing the Environmental Cost What makes it specifically impossible for corporations to submit themselves to the environmental imperative is the impossibility of “internalizing” the costs of increasing environmental damage that they bring about. Methodologies to “price” nature are now multiplying. But whatever the methodology (always based on the assumption that the value of nature is reducible to a market price), the result is the same: it is impossible for corporations to internalize their environmental cost because the total value generated by their activity is often less than the monetary expression of the value of the natural heritage that was destroyed by that activity.4 A report was prepared for The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB), titled Natural Capital at Risk. The top 100 externalities of business (2013) show that: The estimated cost of land use, water consumption, GHG emissions, air pollution, land and water pollution and waste for the world’s primary sectors amounts to almost US$7.3 trillion. The analysis takes account of impacts under standard operating practices, but excludes the cost of, and risk from, low-probability, high-impact catastrophic events. (…) This equates to 13% of global economic output in 2009. Risk to business overall would be higher if all upstream sector impacts were included.

Hickel identifies the four major problems with green growth. Firstly, despite huge and admirable progress with renewable energy we can never keep up with a growing economy, meaning we will continue to depend on fossil fuels. Secondly, solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, and electric cars depend on metals and rare earths, and mining on the scale required to feed a growing economy will create massive and growing environmental damage. Nuclear power from either fission or fusion cannot develop fast enough to meet the energy requirements of economies that continue to grow. Similarly, carbon capture technologies are not maturing fast enough, and ironically depend on energy to work; plus they are a response to only one of our environmental problems. Thirdly, geoengineering projects like injecting the upper atmosphere with particles to create a veil to reflect sunlight, which the European Union is already considering, are extraordinarily risky. Fourthly, our problem is not confronted simply with rising temperatures but with a damaged planet, and if we had 100% clean energy we would “raze more forests, trawl more fish, mine more mountains, build more roads, expand industrial farming, and send more waste to landfill—all of which have ecological consequences our planet can no longer sustain.” Economists have long identified a paradox that innovations that create more efficient ways of using energy and resources briefly reduce consumption but then increase it. As Hickel explains it’s not really a paradox but what would be expected—because companies use the savings to reinvest in more production and the growth swamps the efficiency improvements.

The fundamental criticism against green growth that emerges from the preceding discussion is that green growth has not yet, and also does not seem able in future to achieve absolute decoupling between GDP growth and material inputs (resource uses) and carbon emissions (growth impacts). It will therefore not able to prevent, or roll back, the overshooting of planetary systems. Relative decoupling is possible, can extend the availability of resources, and reduce the impact of emissions by a small magnitude, but even these efficiency gains may end up increase total energy use due to rebound (Jevons Paradox) effects. In addition to this devastating criticism, there are also other criticisms of green growth. These will be briefly introduced. One further criticism is that green growth is economically costly, and may make poverty reduction more difficult (Resnick et al., 2012; Dercon, 2014). This has raised the issue of climate justice as a ancillary to global green growth initiatives, reflecting concerns that developing countries who may suffer the worse impacts of climate change, have contributed the least to the current stocks of human emitted CO2 in the atmosphere. In exchange for subscribing to green growth, developing countries are therefore demanding substantial financial24 and know-how transfers from advanced economies - who have pledged US$ 100 billion in financial resources for developing countries to fight climate change, but has failed to live up to this commitment (Diffenbaugh and Burke, 2019; Ehresman and Okereke, 2015; Robinson and Shine, 2018; Timperley, 2021). Another criticism of green growth is that green growth places undue hope in the energy transition, i.e. the phasing out of fossil fuels, and replacing these with renewable energy sources. The first problem is that replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy is not feasible: all renewable energy technologies need fossil fuel energy to be manufactured and renewable energy systems need back-up from fossil fuel or nuclear energy (Hagens, 2020; Rees, 2021). And second problem is that promotion of renewable energy will stimulate the re-materialization of world production - due to the need for various mineral resources as inputs for renewable energy systems. Bleischwitz (2010) and Zeihan (2022) lists some of the critical mineral resources needed for renewable energies, which include copper, lithium, gallium, aluminium, tantalum, nickel, cobalt, silicon, chromium, graphite, zinc, manganese, molybdenum, gold, silver and platinum. In addition to the re-materialization of the world economy that this would stimulate, many of these minerals are found in countries with poor institutional development, meaning that the exploitation of these resources could lead to significant human rights abuses.25 Kara (2023) documents such human rights abuses, which he calls a human rights and environmental catastrophe, in cobalt26 mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo. A final and also devastating criticism of the hope that green economic growth is possible, and could moreover be sustained indefinitely, is provided by the laws of physics. This suggest that even if in a science fiction world full absolute decoupling from physical inputs could be obtained, then there would still be the waste heat, an outcome of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, that will eventually stop growth. For instance, If the world GDP continues to expand at its current rate of around 2% per annum, it will double every 35 years in size. By 2037 the world GDP would be US$500 trillion after which it “explodes” to $30.7 quadrillion in 2046 and to $1.9 quintillion a year later (Roodman, 2020). In just over 8,000 years it would be 3 × 1070 its current size, which would be a physical impossibility(Karnofsky, 2021c). Even if growth slowed and the world economy doubled in size only every 100 years, then after a million years (a very brief period on cosmic timescale) the economy would be 103010 times larger, which implies that if there are around 1080 atoms in the galaxy27, that “each atom would have to support an average of around 102950 people” (Hanson, 2009). One particular constraint which would limit growth long before these time scales is that even if the global economy would be able to increase energy efficiency and be able to decouple much growth from physical resources, it would still need significant amounts of energy to run its soft-and-hardware. The share of the economy that can be non-physical (and that can thus be de-materialized) is ultimately bounded. The economic growth implied in Figure 1 has been due to an annual average growth in energy consumption of around 2,3% per annum (Murphy, 2022b). If one assumes that a Cornucopian economy would eventually be able to generate economic growth which doubles the world economy every month as discussed in the section 2.2 (see also Hanson (2018)) but with such energy efficiency that energy use continues to grow at only 2,3% then energy use on the planet will grow from its current (2019) level of 18 Terawatt (TW) to 100 TW in 2100 and 1,000 TW in 2200. Murphy (2022b) calculates that at such a rate the economy would use up all the solar power that reaches the earth in 400 years and in 1700 years all of the energy of the sun. The use of so much energy would generate tremendous waste heat independent of any future smart green-energy technology. It would be so hot as to boil the surface of the Earth in about 400 years (Murphy, 2022b). The upshot is that even if the optimistic Cornucopian green economy scenarios could be realised, any acceleration in economic growth will ultimately be a transient event - if it ever happens. As Murphy (2022b, p.847) has warned, “we would be wise to plan for a post-growth world.”

In 1987, the UN World Commission on Development and the Environment presented the report Our Common Future, better known as the Brundtland report, coining the concept of ‘sustainable development‘, then launching it at the Rio Summit on Environment and Development in 1992 – Principle 12 of the Declaration. Within such a framing, the push towards growth and economic liberalization was taken further at subsequent global events relating to sustainable development, though partially concealed behind the rhetoric of environmental sustainability. Compared to the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Stockholm 1972, the later conferences involved reframing both the diagnosis and prognosis in relation to the ecological crisis. The focus supposedly became poverty in developing countries, instead of affuence in developed countries, along the lines of the post-materialist thesis of Inglehart. This idea that ‘you frst need to be rich, in order to be an environmentalist’ has been critiqued by Martinez-Alier with his famous concept of environmentalism of the poor (Inglehart, 1990). Economic growth was freed of stigma and redefned as a necessary step towards the solution of environmental problems. (Gómez-Baggethun & Naredo, 2015) This watering down of the initial debates of the 1970s infuenced by the Limits to Growth report (Meadows et al., 1972) constitutes the core of the ‘green economy’, a kind of Green Keynesianism with reformist new millennium proposals, such as a Green New Deal, and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. At the UN Conference for Sustainable Development in 2012, the so-called Rio + 20 Summit, the ‘green economy’ concept played a key role as the guiding framework of the multilateral discussions, although resistance from many southern nations meant it was not as central as its proponents may have wished. In preparation for the summit, The United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) published a report on ‘green economy’, defning it ‘as one that results in improved human well-being and social equity, while signifcantly reducing environmental risks and ecological scarcities’ (UNEP, 2011). In consonance with the pro-growth approach of sustainable development, the report bypassed any trade-off between economic growth and environmental conservation and conceptualized ‘nature‘as natural capital, a ‘critical economic asset’ opening the doors for commodifcation. In fact, it clearly stated that ‘the key aim for a transition to a green economy is to enable economic growth and investment while increasing environmental quality and social inclusiveness (UNEP, 2011).’ 6 Post-development: From the Critique of Development to a Pluriverse of Alternatives 64 This environmental economics approach is based on neoclassical economic theory and a belief that economic growth will de-link or decouple itself from its environmental base through dematerialization and de-pollution because of the improvement in eco-effciency, viz. increased resource productivity and decreased pollution. In this conceptual framework, market prices are considered the appropriate means for solving environmental issues and exogenous rates of technological progress are expected to counterbalance the effects of resource exhaustion. However, the confict between a growth-dominated economy and environmental protection cannot be solved with appeals to ‘sustainable development‘, ‘eco-effciency’, ‘ecological modernisation’, ‘geo-engineering’, ‘smart agricultures’ or ‘cities’, ‘circular’ or ‘green economy’. These are false solutions. The sustainable development approach remains fundamentally fawed on a number of counts. For instance, the fnal objective for a New Green Deal is the creation of ‘resilient low carbon economies, rich in jobs and based on independent sources of energy supply’ (UNEP, 2011; NEF, 2008). While on this end there might general agreement, the controversy remains on the means. Among the faws or weaknesses of the sustainable development approach as articulated thus far in various UN-sponsored documents, including the declaration Transforming our world: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, (UNEP, 2011; United Nations, 2013; SDSN, 2013; United Nations, 2015; United Nations Secretary-General’s High-level Panel on Global Sustainability, 2012) are the following (Kothari, 2013): 1. ‘Absence of an analysis of the historical and structural roots of poverty, hunger, unsustainability and inequities, which include centralization of state power and capitalist monopolies; 2. Inadequate focus on direct democratic governance (decision-making by citizens and communities in face-to-face settings), beyond the stress on accountability and transparency; 3. Inability to recognize the biophysical limits to economic growth; 4. Continued subservience to private capital, and inability or unwillingness to democratise the economy; 5. Modern science and technology held up as panacea, ignoring their limits and marginalising other forms of knowledge; 6. Culture, ethics and spirituality side-lined; 7. Unbridled consumerism not tackled head-on; 8. Global relations built on localization and self-reliance missing; and, 9. No new architecture of global governance, with a continued reliance on the centrality of nation-states, denying true democratisation’.

In 1987, the UN World Commission on Development and the Environment presented the report Our Common Future, better known as the Brundtland report, coining the concept of ‘sustainable development‘, then launching it at the Rio Summit on Environment and Development in 1992 – Principle 12 of the Declaration. Within such a framing, the push towards growth and economic liberalization was taken further at subsequent global events relating to sustainable development, though partially concealed behind the rhetoric of environmental sustainability. Compared to the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Stockholm 1972, the later conferences involved reframing both the diagnosis and prognosis in relation to the ecological crisis. The focus supposedly became poverty in developing countries, instead of affuence in developed countries, along the lines of the post-materialist thesis of Inglehart. This idea that ‘you frst need to be rich, in order to be an environmentalist’ has been critiqued by Martinez-Alier with his famous concept of environmentalism of the poor (Inglehart, 1990). Economic growth was freed of stigma and redefned as a necessary step towards the solution of environmental problems. (Gómez-Baggethun & Naredo, 2015) This watering down of the initial debates of the 1970s infuenced by the Limits to Growth report (Meadows et al., 1972) constitutes the core of the ‘green economy’, a kind of Green Keynesianism with reformist new millennium proposals, such as a Green New Deal, and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. At the UN Conference for Sustainable Development in 2012, the so-called Rio + 20 Summit, the ‘green economy’ concept played a key role as the guiding framework of the multilateral discussions, although resistance from many southern nations meant it was not as central as its proponents may have wished. In preparation for the summit, The United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) published a report on ‘green economy’, defning it ‘as one that results in improved human well-being and social equity, while signifcantly reducing environmental risks and ecological scarcities’ (UNEP, 2011). In consonance with the pro-growth approach of sustainable development, the report bypassed any trade-off between economic growth and environmental conservation and conceptualized ‘nature‘as natural capital, a ‘critical economic asset’ opening the doors for commodifcation. In fact, it clearly stated that ‘the key aim for a transition to a green economy is to enable economic growth and investment while increasing environmental quality and social inclusiveness (UNEP, 2011).’ 6 Post-development: From the Critique of Development to a Pluriverse of Alternatives 64 This environmental economics approach is based on neoclassical economic theory and a belief that economic growth will de-link or decouple itself from its environmental base through dematerialization and de-pollution because of the improvement in eco-effciency, viz. increased resource productivity and decreased pollution. In this conceptual framework, market prices are considered the appropriate means for solving environmental issues and exogenous rates of technological progress are expected to counterbalance the effects of resource exhaustion. However, the confict between a growth-dominated economy and environmental protection cannot be solved with appeals to ‘sustainable development‘, ‘eco-effciency’, ‘ecological modernisation’, ‘geo-engineering’, ‘smart agricultures’ or ‘cities’, ‘circular’ or ‘green economy’. These are false solutions. The sustainable development approach remains fundamentally fawed on a number of counts. For instance, the fnal objective for a New Green Deal is the creation of ‘resilient low carbon economies, rich in jobs and based on independent sources of energy supply’ (UNEP, 2011; NEF, 2008). While on this end there might general agreement, the controversy remains on the means. Among the flaws or weaknesses of the sustainable development approach as articulated thus far in various UN-sponsored documents, including the declaration Transforming our world: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, (UNEP, 2011; United Nations, 2013; SDSN, 2013; United Nations, 2015; United Nations Secretary-General’s High-level Panel on Global Sustainability, 2012) are the following (Kothari, 2013): 1. ‘Absence of an analysis of the historical and structural roots of poverty, hunger, unsustainability and inequities, which include centralization of state power and capitalist monopolies; 2. Inadequate focus on direct democratic governance (decision-making by citizens and communities in face-to-face settings), beyond the stress on accountability and transparency; 3. Inability to recognize the biophysical limits to economic growth; 4. Continued subservience to private capital, and inability or unwillingness to democratise the economy; 5. Modern science and technology held up as panacea, ignoring their limits and marginalising other forms of knowledge; 6. Culture, ethics and spirituality side-lined; 7. Unbridled consumerism not tackled head-on; 8. Global relations built on localization and self-reliance missing; and, 9. No new architecture of global governance, with a continued reliance on the centrality of nation-states, denying true democratisation’.

The entirety of humanity is against degrowth, for the simple reason that degrowth means no economic profit, despite the fact that degrowth would, for the first time in millions of years, begin to replenish the BOE’s (Bank Of Earth) balance sheet of natural resource capacity. By today’s toxic economic paradigm, degrowth is as close to a utopia as Never Never Land is to an adult human. We are lacking both the stakeholders and champions, because there is no immediate profit to be made. This means that solution number four, renewable technologies, is also not a solution, given that it is based on growth. Renewable technologies are not a degrowth solution as they have so far only catered to meeting an increasing demand for energy, rather than addressing the problem of escalating demand itself. Moreover, they are profit-motivated, and this is why they do in fact have plenty of stakeholders and champions, who belong in the list of usual suspects and criminals mentioned earlier. These stakeholders are in it for the money, and they do not represent Earth’s biome, or future humans. The renewables industry is necrocapitalism all over again, and this is why these oligarchs are trying to sell it to us, along with the promise of jobs and a life of luxury, as these are the only messages the public wants to hear. Imagine what would happen if one morning suddenly people woke up realised that the Green New Deal they had been sold was an investor fairy tale, and that Earth was in fact doomed unless we scaled down literally everything, starting with our own use of resources. It wouldn’t go down very well. But our only choice is to have this honest conversation, finally. It is clear from this that any solution that relies on profit, and on stakeholders who are only interested in profit, is not a solution. Yet at the same time, it is evident that there is no immediate money in degrowth, and it will never be implemented by an economic and political system which only puts forward ideas which exclusively aim in boosting GDP and the pockets of oligarchs. The problem therefore is profit itself, the very notion of money, and an economic system which keeps humanity hostage to its own incoming Armageddon. We are addicted to profit. At every turn, this civilization consciously opts for meaningless short-term lifestyle benefits, at the expense of existentially disastrous future consequences. These are the exact same priorities as those of a drug addict. Our system of necrocapitalism is indeed the thief, the oligarch who still operates at large, and who never got caught. It has been running a negative balance for centuries, living on credit from the BOE. Humanity aggressively took over the formerly sustainable company called Earth, ascending into CEO with the sole purpose of devouring capital, ripping off stakeholders, and liquidating what’s left. The Leadership Board, composed entirely of humans, is a criminal organization. Technologies that can help us do exist, and our problem is not their implementation, but who implements them, and how. There are many truly renewable and sustainable solutions, such as trees, including some which are human-invented technologies. They all immediately become un-sustainable and un-renewable however, when implemented with growth, profit and investment in mind, by people who have absolutely zero interest in saving this planet. At the same time there is an incredible amount of naivety in the business world regarding sustainability. Most feel it is a case of ticking a few boxes, rather than a massive sacrifice and transformation, which no growth-driven business today is prepared to sustain. Rather than emulating the sustainable ebb and flow of “profit” witnessed in the natural world, global corporate cultures are pretending to be sustainable while still delusionally fixating on the futility of growth, and unrealistically hyper-performing employees. If this civilization had any chance of continuing, it would need to stop laying foundations for a new, bigger empire, and start learning the lessons from mourning the one which is currently already collapsing. The first such lesson is that profit is toxic, and we cannot grow ourselves out of problems. As tragic and unlikely as civilizational collapse may sound, it has happened before to every single human civilization. It is the most natural, predictable and most probable outcome for an exponentially overgrown economic system simply being brought back down to size by its own physics. But scaling back our presence on the planet is an action contrarian to everything our civilization has stood for, during the entirety of our history. Unless we realize the immensity of this challenge, degrowth will become another greenwashing term adopted and weaponized by the renewable energy industrial complex to mask all the greed underneath. The huge problem with degrowth is that it is a principle, not a technology. Humans are great with technologies, not so much with principles. The latter become distorted and corrupted. However complex and sophisticated our civilisation becomes, it cannot escape the parasite of corruption dwelling in its flesh. The second lesson is that true degrowth means reducing all aspects of our presence on Earth. This includes the most important one of all, and the most carbon-heavy, which is our population. The idea of 8 billion planet-eating humanoids continuing in a world of diminishing resources is yet another ludicrous religious and economic fantasy. True environmentalists and economists should talk about the monster of overpopulation. Earth’s system did not evolve to cater for a single species at this size. Scaling back our impact on this planet goes against everything this civilization was founded upon: scaling up greed, scaling up population, scaling up natural destruction. Degrowth is only possible if we de-criminalize contraction, simplification and ecological restoration. For an ecologist, scaling down our consumption, energy use and population growth means finally living in balance with the planet and the climate. For most politicians as well as the public who vote for them, these critical steps will be labelled as a gross infringement on human rights. Those who support these steps simply won’t get the votes. Today’s politicians after all mirror today’s humans: they lack all of the qualities that our economic system has successfully exterminated: empathy, critical thinking, and above all, a conscience. How can degrowth be implemented under these circumstances? It would require everyone having to “wake up” simultaneously. Contrary to much of the activism, the world is not only being led astray by “elites”, “corporations” or a handful of “bad guys”. The world is enslaved to a system of unsustainable greed in which each of us is an essential participant, whether we benefit from it or not. What will likely never be communicated to us by politicians is that true degrowth involves no investors, job creation, green new deals or fancy EVs. It is a sacrifice, which cannot be and should not be sugar-coated to the voters. But we will never hear the truth. In the 80s the food industry lied to us, replacing fat with sugar rather than advising us to eat less overall. In the 2020s, the renewables industry lied to us, replacing fossil fuels with Tesla cars, rather than telling us to drive less overall. I laugh at economists and politicians who still think they can plan, who think they will have access to budgets in the midst of natural disasters, massive global migration, social unrest, hunger and nuclear war. They will be lucky to simply have a job, if governments still exist. They have already become peons of the renewable energy industrial complex: rather than coming clean to voters about the gravity of the situation, they are trying to sell the beautiful golden sunsets of a Green New Deal, sponsored by the same oligarchs and psychopaths that have been running the world for the last few hundred years. Meanwhile there are authors and academics so desperate to justify humanity’s parasitic existence, all they can come up with is that our purpose on Earth is to become wisdom keepers and stewards. This is a typical hallucinating narcissist trying to save face, and refusing to concede failure. But none of this should be a surprise. It should be deeply worrying that the very species responsible for the decimation of Earth has also arrogantly put itself in charge of rescuing it. If I was the planet, humans would be the last species I would trust to bring me back to health. Degrowth is not a series of boxes to untick. It requires a fundamental change in how we define happiness. It requires the burying and mourning of a lifestyle and colorful vision of our civilization that we all falsely thought was normal, and sustainable. A controlled dismantling of the most wasteful and destructive pieces of our civilization is the bare minimum we ought to do to slow down the climate crisis and ecological overshoot. The alternative is to suffer the most cataclysmic apocalypse that all four traditional solutions presented here would result in, and which would surely erase everything we hold dear. Mitigating the climate crisis is not a technology fix. There are 8 billion humans living parasitic lifestyles. We would need to bravely accept upfront an immense amount of pain, and voluntarily demolish the ecocidal system this entire civilisation is based upon. Or it crashes down on us. Will the media and politicians treat the public as adults, and tell them the truth? And upon hearing the truth, will the public react as adults? We may never find out. Human civilization is like a brilliant firework. It may take a lot of science, patience, love, technology, cooperation and hard work to set it up, but this doesn’t mean it can’t immediately go off in one, split second.