{"id":27058,"date":"2017-10-20T07:42:36","date_gmt":"2017-10-20T12:42:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=27058"},"modified":"2017-10-20T07:42:55","modified_gmt":"2017-10-20T12:42:55","slug":"theres-only-one-way-to-avoid-climate-catastrophe-de-growing-our-economy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=27058","title":{"rendered":"There\u2019s only one way to avoid climate catastrophe: \u2018de-growing\u2019 our economy"},"content":{"rendered":"
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There\u2019s only one way to avoid climate catastrophe: \u2018de-growing\u2019 our economy<\/a><\/h3>\n
Jason Hickel:\u00a0<\/strong>You can almost feel the planet writhing. This summer brought some of the biggest, most destructive storms in recorded history: Harvey laid waste to huge swathes of Texas; Irma left Barbuda virtually uninhabitable; Maria ravaged Dominica and plunged Puerto Rico into darkness. The images we see in the media are almost too violent to comprehend. And these are the storms that made the news; many others did not. Monsoon flooding in India, Bangladesh and Nepal killed 1,200 people and left millions homeless, but Western media paid little attention: it\u2019s too much suffering to take in at once.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n<\/div>\n
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What\u2019s most disturbing about this litany of pain is that it\u2019s only going to get worse.\u00a0A recent paper in the journal Nature<\/a>\u00a0estimates that our chances of keeping global warming below the danger threshold of 2 degrees is now vanishingly small: only about 5 per cent. It\u2019s more likely that we\u2019re headed for around 3.2 degrees of warming, and possibly as much as 4.9 degrees. If scientists are clear about anything, it\u2019s that this level of climate change will be nothing short of catastrophic. Indeed, there\u2019s a good chance that it would render large-scale civilization impossible.<\/p>\n

If scientists are clear about anything, it\u2019s that this level of climate change will be nothing short of catastrophic<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Why are our prospects so bleak? According to the paper\u2019s authors, it\u2019s because the cuts we\u2019re making to greenhouse gas emissions are being more than cancelled out by economic growth. In the coming decades, we\u2019ll be able to reduce the carbon intensity (CO2 per unit of GDP) of the global economy by about 1.9 per cent per year, they say, if we make heavy investments in clean energy and efficient technology. That\u2019s a lot. But as long as the economy keeps growing by more than that, total emissions are still going to rise.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s only one way to avoid climate catastrophe: \u2018de-growing\u2019 our economy Jason Hickel:\u00a0You can almost feel the planet writhing. This summer brought some of the biggest, most destructive storms in recorded history: Harvey laid waste to huge swathes of Texas; Irma left Barbuda virtually uninhabitable; Maria ravaged Dominica and plunged Puerto Rico into darkness. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[14,141,16600,152,16601,16602,16603,16604,15670,16605,16606,809],"class_list":["post-27058","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-activism","tag-climate-change","tag-collective-intelligence","tag-commons","tag-ethical-economy","tag-p2p-cultures-and-politics","tag-p2p-ecology","tag-p2p-energy","tag-p2p-foundation","tag-p2p-lifestyles","tag-p2p-solidarity","tag-transition"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27058","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27058"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27058\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27060,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27058\/revisions\/27060"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}