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8 Oct, 5 tweets, 1 min read
Something big happened this morning. David Attenborough, speaking on BBC radio, pointed to capitalism as the main driver of ecological breakdown. The debate is beginning to shift. bbc.co.uk/news/science-e…
"The excesses the capitalist system has brought us, have got to be curbed somehow." "We are going to have to live more economically than we do. And we can do that more happily, not less happily."
Crucially, he recognizes that inequality is at the core of the ecological crisis. Our planet will begin to recover, he says, when "those that have a great deal, perhaps, have a little less." We need to rebuild "a working ecosystem in which everybody has a share".
I've been critical of Attenborough in the past for his refusal to confront these realities. This represents a real shift in his discourse and, I hope, an opening for a broader public conversation.
Remembering, of course, as George has put it: it's not the adjective that's the problem, it's the noun.

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More from @jasonhickel

Jason Hickel Profile picture
1 Oct
This is exciting. New research by @JKSteinberger's team, hot off the press, finds that we could scale down global energy consumption by 60% and still provide good living standards for 10 billion people by 2050, with universal healthcare and education. sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
This would make it much easier for us to achieve a rapid transition to 100% renewable energy, meeting our climate goals in a matter of years, not decades. In fact, we already produce half of the renewable energy that this scenario would require.
Continuing to grow total energy use while trying at the same time to transition to renewables is a strategy that is guaranteed to continue failing. We need to be smarter than that.
Read 4 tweets
Jason Hickel Profile picture
21 Sep
A Job Guarantee is one of the single most powerful climate policies a government could implement. Why? Because once the question of employment is off the table, we can have an open conversation about scaling down destructive industries.
Let's clear up a few things about the JG:

1. The JG is about public use-value (not private profit), organized around actual community needs, and is paid a living wage.
2. It is the *opposite* of bullshit jobs. There is a tremendous amount of actually important work to do: care work, local food, essential services, energy transition, and ecological regeneration.
Read 5 tweets
Jason Hickel Profile picture
15 Sep
I want to take a minute to clarify something important about the degrowth position on climate change and emissions reductions. Here's a short thread that I hope will be helpful:
1. Degrowth *does not* argue that we cannot decouple GDP from emissions. We know this is possible to achieve, and some nations are already doing it to some extent. You can have rising GDP with declining emissions, simply by switching to renewable energy.
2. But that's not the question. The question is much more specific: can high-income nations reduce emissions to zero fast enough to stay in line with the carbon budget for 1.5C or 2C, while pursuing GDP growth at the same time?
Read 8 tweets
Jason Hickel Profile picture
10 Sep
The language of the Anthropocene has it wrong: not all people are equally responsible for climate breakdown. The global North has contributed 92% of emissions in excess of the planetary boundary. The global South has contributed 8%. Image
The above graph is from page 118 of Less is More, where I discuss how rich nations have colonized global atmospheric commons, with devastating consequences for the global South. Here is the underlying paper, published today in The Lancet Planetary Health: thelancet.com/journals/lanpl…
Here is a short thread explaining the method and results:
Read 4 tweets
Jason Hickel Profile picture
10 Sep
I have a new paper that's out today in The Lancet Planetary Health, quantifying national responsibility for climate breakdown. I'll discuss the method and results in the thread below. sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
1. I start from the position that the atmosphere is a commons, and that all have equal rights to it within the planetary boundary of 350ppm (which we crossed in 1990). This allows us to determine which nations have exceeded their share, and thus contributed to climate breakdown.
2. Results:

-The USA is responsible for 40% of excess global CO2 emissions.

-The European Union (EU-28) is responsible for 29%.

-The Global North as a group is responsible for 92%.
Read 11 tweets
Jason Hickel Profile picture
9 Sep
For most of the 20th century, a large majority of Americans embraced public goods. How did this change? Randolph Hohle argues that many white people turned against public goods and sought to undermine them after desegregation, unwilling to share with people of colour.
Neoliberalism in the US rose as an alliance of an elite business class and local segregationists that sought to preserve white privilege in the civil rights era. I can't help but think something similar was going on in the UK during the 2019 election.
Corbyn's policies on public goods were resoundingly popular in and of themselves, but when paired with a man who was resolutely race-inclusive, who wanted public goods *for all*, a significant faction of people found this impossible to accept.
Read 4 tweets

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