Thread by @jasonhickel

I'm excited to announce that we have a new article in Nature Energy today. This is an important piece, and we agonized over every sentence. It's behind a paywall, but you can get a free PDF here, and a short thread follows: static1.squarespace.com/static/59bc0e6… nature.com/articles/s4156…

1. Existing climate mitigation scenarios *start* with the assumption that all countries must grow, indefinitely, regardless of how rich they already are. The problem is that growth makes climate mitigation *much* more difficult to achieve... and this creates a real conundrum.

2. To square growth with the Paris goals, existing scenarios are forced to rely heavily on spectacular assumptions about technological change, including massive negative emissions schemes and unprecedented rates of GDP/energy decoupling.

3. But scientists have raised serious concerns about these assumptions in the empirical literature. They may not be feasible to achieve, and if that happens we'll be locked into a hothouse trajectory from which it will be impossible to escape. The risks are huge.

4. There's an alternative approach. High-income nations can adopt post-growth policies, allowing them to achieve strong social outcomes without growth. This creates space to scale down excess production, thus reducing energy demand and enabling a rapid transition to renewables.

5. Post-growth approaches are key to keeping global warming under 1.5 or 2 degrees. And they allow us to reduce other forms of ecological damage, too - not just emissions. We lay out a series of policies that could help get us there.

6. The upshot: We urgently need climate modelers to explore post-growth scenarios, so that we can expand the public debate and consider a broader range of feasible pathways to a climate-safe future.

I want to thank my brilliant colleagues for bringing this piece together: @exergy_paul at Leeds, @g_kallis at ICTA, @LorenzClimate at ETH Zurich, Manfred Lenzen at Sydney, @AljosaSlamersak at ICTA, @JKSteinberger at Lausanne, and @DianaUrge at CEU. They're amazing, all of them.

Tagging @KevinClimate, @AliceClimate, @GeorgeMonbiot, @Peters_Glen, @MichaelEMann, @KateAronoff, @ClimateHuman, @EricHolthaus - curious to hear what you all think.

Here's a press release from LSE. "We’re gambling the future of humanity and the rest of life on earth because of the assumption that GDP must continue to grow in rich countries." lse.ac.uk/News/Latest-ne…

And here's a write-up in Cosmos magazine, with a nice quote from Manfred: "We cannot keep temperature rises below 1.5 degrees using technology alone – this will require lifestyle changes in wealthy countries." cosmosmagazine.com/technology/ene…