Less is More? A review of Jason Hickel’s argument for degrowth.

In his book Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (Penguin Random House, 2020), Jason Hickel provides a fascinating account of what is wrong with capitalism and how a shift to degrowth will allow us to move towards a post-capitalist world. There are a number of critical assessments of climate change and environmental destruction. Hickel stands out, however, by the way he clearly locates the roots of our problems in capitalism and acknowledges that overcoming these problems requires nothing else than transforming capitalism. In this blog post, I will draw out Hickel’s major contributions as well as provide a couple of critical reflections.

Global Climate Emergency: Preventing fatal “future facts” from becoming reality

Photo by Friends of the Earth Europe

Just after millions of people had protested across the world demanding urgent action on the ecological emergency of climate change on 20 and 27 September (The Guardian, 27 September 2019), the IPCC released yet another devastating report. According to this report on oceans and the cryosphere (the frozen parts of the planet), the average global sea level rose by 15 cm during the 20^th century. Nevertheless, if carbon emissions do not reduce sufficiently to achieve the COP21 Paris goal of 1.5⁰C then sea level rises could exceed 1 metre by the end of the century, and 5.4 metres by 2300 under “high emissions scenarios”. Not only would this threaten coastal populations (and many of our megacities are coastal), the change to oxygen levels and acidity of the oceans would have dire consequences for ecosystems. In this guest post, Barry Gills and Jamie Morgan reflect on the climate crisis drawing on their recently published Globalizations “Global Climate Emergency” special editorial essay.