"There is no point in being first if you're going in the wrong direction"
“I think future historians will be puzzled when they reflect on the kind of debates we’re having right now.” And indeed. Ecosystems are burning and we worry about the size of our GDP. This is the very opposite of a survival instinct. We’re playing Monopoly during a fire, and we give more attention to the bills than to the flames. Every year, a new generation of politicians come to parrot the same dubious claims about how economic growth is necessary for wellbeing (it is not) and how economic growth is disconnected from environmental pressures (it isn't). These two political discourses are both scientifically incorrect and there is now plenty of evidence to show it is. Planetary boundaries are overshot, this we have known for a while. What we’re starting to uncover is how unequal the responsibility is. According to a recent study, 51-91 % of that breaching can be attributed to the global top 20 % of consumers and the whole production system that serve their material interests. It’s not a predicament; it’s not even a humankind problem. It’s a minority-of-rich-people-feasting-through-the-end-of-the-world problem. I’m tired of the science-blind politics that treat a global survival issue with the lens of short-term electoral self-interested. I’m tired of the meaningless political jargon: competitiveness, productivity, growth, stability, decarbonisation, innovation, etc. So much semantic hocus-pocus that drown us into a false impression of complexity when the actual problem we’re facing is not that complicated. The Earth offers limited ecological budgets. Natural resources are necessary for wellbeing. Everyone deserves to live a decent life. A minority of people currently overuse their fair share of resources, which jeopardises the livelihood of a majority of others. To live well within planetary boundaries, we need to better share the resources we have. This means consuming less for the richest (degrowth) and consuming more for the poorest (development). Easy. Clear. Simple. And yet, we’re stuck on this riddle since the 1970s. Back then, each of these affirmations was scientifically uncertain. But this is not the case anymore. What we need is a science-based politics that takes this survival problem seriously. Once we solve that, we’ll have all the time in the world to worry about who has the biggest GDP.
