This is a powerful new intervention: a climate mitigation scenario for staying under 1.5C that does not rely on speculative negative emissions technologies. Check it out: boell.de/en/2020/12/09/…
How does it work? By scaling down excess resource and energy use in global North countries. In other words, it's a degrowth scenario. Less energy use enables a rapid transition to renewable energy. It also proposes a shift to regenerative farming to restore lands and soils.
The scenario shows that this can be accomplished while improving human well-being and providing a good life for all, in both the North and South, by reorganizing the economy around human needs rather than around capital accumulation.
Limiting global warming to 1.5C is feasible and we must demand it of our governments.
And @ChiefExecCCC, I'd love to hear what you think of this, and whether there's scope for building a scenario along these lines for the UK.

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More from @jasonhickel

11 Dec
Here's more on the new mitigation scenario for 1.5C. How does it work? What would society look like? Are we willing to do what's required to stop climate breakdown? See thread.
1. Most models assume we need to keep growing the economy indefinitely. The problem is this makes it impossible to transition to zero emissions quickly enough; so they speculate on geoengineering and negative-emissions technologies to save us. Scientists reject this as too risky.
2. By contrast, this scenario proposes that high-income countries don't *need* more growth, and can scale down unnecessary production and consumption. This reduces energy demand (from 140 EJ in 2020 to 40 EJ in 2050), and enables a rapid transition to renewable energy.
Read 9 tweets
3 Dec
People mistakenly assume that the World Bank's poverty line ($1.90 PPP per day) represents what an American might be able to buy with $1.90 in poor countries abroad. But in fact the opposite is true: it represents what $1.90 can buy in the US. In other words, virtually nothing.
To put this in perspective, $1.90 can just about buy a loaf of bread in the US, or a can of tuna. To say nothing of actual nutrition, much less shelter, clothing, energy and transportation.
A minimum wage job in the US earns you about $60 per day. So living on $1.90 would be like 30 people trying to survive on a single minimum wage... with no begging, scavenging, or welfare systems to draw on, since all of these are counted as "income" by the World Bank.
Read 5 tweets
2 Dec
Last year I wrote an open letter to Steven Pinker, questioning his triumphalist narrative about global poverty reduction. I never received an answer. But I've worked on this issue a bit more since then... jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/2/3/…
Here, elaborating the argument further and connecting it to the problem of inequality: newint.org/features/2019/…
Here, which I think in some respects gets to the real nub of the issue: aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/…
Read 7 tweets
30 Nov
The Managua Declaration is a radical statement against climate breakdown that recognizes and addresses the structural drivers of this crisis. It was drafted by La Via Campesina, representing 200 million peasant families and Indigenous people worldwide. viacampesina.org/en/managua-dec…
"We are conscious that it is the capitalist system that causes predatory actions against the environment, causing severe damage to our planet. It destroys our lands, forests and seas, pillages our territories and criminalizes our struggles – all for the benefit of the few."
"The planet cannot be saved if we do not commit ourselves to leaving capitalism behind. Our struggle is for the life and the survival of Mother Earth, which is the sum of all of our lives."
Read 4 tweets
29 Nov
The Red Deal, drafted by Indigenous revolutionaries, insists that our response to climate breakdown must be attentive to the colonial roots of this crisis, or it misses the point. Follow them at @The_Red_Nation and read the document here: therednation.org/wp-content/upl…
"We will build a new world from the ashes of empire, a world where many worlds fit."
"There is no hope for restoring the planet’s fragile and dying ecosystems without Indigenous liberation. This isn’t an exaggeration; it’s simply the truth. Indigenous people understand the choice that confronts us: decolonization or
extinction."
Read 4 tweets
12 Nov
Here's the Biden-Harris climate plan, with my thoughts in the thread below: buildbackbetter.com/priorities/cli…
First, there's lots to like: Paris commitment; zero-carbon public transportation in all cities; sustainable housing; retrofit buildings; union jobs; renewable energy; transition to EVs; environmental justice (although this is *extremely* vague). But there are also big problems:
1. Why does this plan need to be framed in the language of "growth"? The US economy does not need more GDP. And in any case, "sustainable growth" is not a thing.
Read 8 tweets

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