Há muitos motivos para desesperar: a nossa terra verdejante e aprazível está seca e acastanhada, as albufeiras estão depletadas e os incêndios florestais estão a fustigar o Reino Unido, a Europa, Canadá e os EUA. Mas há muitos mais motivos para não desesperar: o desespero alimenta-se a si próprio; o desespero desarmar-nos-á; o desespero é aquilo que os sacanas querem que sintas. Mas, acima de tudo, o desespero é irracional. Deixa-me explicar porquê.
Por mais sofisticadas que sejam as nossas ferramentas de previsão, simplesmente não temos forma de saber o que vem a seguir. Tal como o clima, tal como qualquer ecossistema, a sociedade é um sistema complexo. As suas propriedades e respostas adaptativas não podem ser previstas estudando os seus componentes de forma isolada, independentemente do brilhantismo dos cientistas sociais e dos futurólogos. Acontecem coisas — coisas inesperadas —, por vezes a uma velocidade espantosa. Dito de outro modo, a sociedade tem pontos de rutura: pode passar rapidamente de um estado de equilíbrio para outro.
Veja-se a Irlanda, para dar apenas um exemplo. Até há poucas décadas, a República da Irlanda era uma teocracia católica. Tinha sido assim desde os anos 1920. Aliás, durante a maior parte do século XX, a Igreja Católica parecia estreitar cada vez mais o seu controlo. Quebrar esse controlo era algo quase inimaginável. Mas depois uma série de acontecimentos combinou-se de formas inesperadas. Uma sucessão de escândalos terríveis veio à tona: violência sexual sistemática, o rapto de mulheres e crianças, trabalho escravo e mortalidade em massa em instituições da Igreja. As viagens e os meios de comunicação social permitiram ao povo irlandês ver como era a libertação social e sexual noutros países. A comunicação social e os fóruns internacionais permitiram que ativistas corajosos, cujas vozes tinham sido suprimidas durante muito tempo, fossem ouvidos de forma mais ampla. As muralhas caíram mais depressa do que alguém poderia ter adivinhado. Em pouco tempo, tanto o casamento igualitário como o direito ao aborto foram legalmente sancionados: uma mudança que tinha sido quase inimaginável.
O mesmo se pode dizer do colapso do comunismo de Estado e do fim de quase todos os impérios e monarquias que outrora pareciam inabaláveis. O império dos combustíveis fósseis não é exceção.
O sistema complexo a que chamamos sociedade tem dois estados de equilíbrio: o impossível e o inevitável. A mudança que queremos parece sempre impossível. Voto para as mulheres? Perdeu o juízo. Independência para a Índia? A Grã-Bretanha nunca a vai largar. Direitos civis? Ridículo! Mas com pressão sustentada, um pouco de sorte e uma mudança de circunstâncias, pumba!, o impossível acontece. Depois toda a gente diz: “Pois, era inevitável, não era?”
Acho que podemos estar a aproximar-nos de um ponto de rutura no colapso climático. Durante anos disseram-nos: “Estão a pedir a Lua. Os combustíveis fósseis vieram para ficar.” Uma parte de mim acreditou nisso. Mas agora, como a reportagem do Guardian demonstrou, subitamente os combustíveis fósseis são muito mais caros do que as energias renováveis. Subitamente, são as tecnologias verdes que estão a gerar imenso emprego e rendimento. Subitamente, barreiras tecnológicas que pareciam insuperáveis ruíram. Subitamente, os políticos financiados pelos combustíveis fósseis parecem ultrapassados, ridículos, corruptos. Subitamente, estamos a acordar para a necessidade de uma ação urgente, à medida que os choques de calor reforçam a mensagem.
O problema de um ponto de rutura, seja ele positivo ou negativo, é que nunca se sabe de antemão onde ele possa estar. Só se consegue ver em retrospetiva. Se já causámos tanto aquecimento global ao ponto de o sistema de correntes do Atlântico estar destinado a colapsar, ou de um fracasso em cascata da floresta amazónica estar assegurado, ainda não sabemos. Mas, da mesma forma, se as condições necessárias para uma grande mudança social já estiverem alinhadas, não o saberemos até o sistema mudar.
Este tipo de mudança rápida exige um público informado por fontes de comunicação independentes, jornalistas comprometidos com os factos e não com interesses corporativos. O modelo aberto e financiado pelos leitores do Guardian é um antídoto claro para outros meios de comunicação — tanto a imprensa dos bilionários como os radiodifusores de serviço público — que estão ativamente a esquivar-se a este desafio, reduzindo a sua cobertura sobre o clima numa altura em que ela nunca foi tão crítica.
Por isso, no Guardian e não só, continuamos a pressionar, continuamos a expor, continuamos a demonstrar como a mudança pode acontecer. E, por razões inteiramente racionais, continuamos a ter esperança. Por favor, considera apoiar o nosso jornalismo hoje mesmo.
A maior questão com que nos confrontamos, possivelmente a maior questão que a humanidade já enfrentou, é saber se conseguimos atingir os pontos de rutura sociais antes de atingirmos os pontos de rutura ambientais.
The poor and middle pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the very rich pay lawyers – and the ultra-rich pay politicians. It’s not an original remark, but it bears repeating until everyone has heard it. The more money billionaires accumulate, the greater their control of the political system – which means they pay less tax, which means they accumulate more, which means their control intensifies.
They reshape the world to suit their demands. One of the symptoms of the pathology known as “billionaire brain” is an inability to see beyond their own short-term gain. They would sack the planet for a few more stones on the pointless mountain of wealth. And we can see it happening. Last week delivered the biggest news of the year so far, perhaps the biggest news of the century. But partly because billionaires own most of the media, most people never heard it. We might find ourselves committed to a civilisation-ending event before we even learn that such a thing is possible.
The news is that the state of a crucial oceanic circulation system has been reassessed by scientists. Some now believe that, as a result of climate breakdown changing the temperature and salinity of seawater, it is more likely than not to collapse. This system – known as the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) – delivers heat from the tropics to the North Atlantic. Recent research suggests that if it shuts down, it could cause both a massive drop in average winter temperatures in northern Europe and drastic changes in the Amazon’s water cycles. This could help tip the rainforest into cascading collapse and trigger further disaster.
Amoc’s shutdown is likely also to cause an acceleration of sea level rise on the east coast of the US, threatening cities. It could also raise Antarctic temperatures by roughly 6C and release a vast pulse of carbon currently stored in the Southern Ocean, accelerating climate catastrophe.
Even when the countervailing effects of generalised global heating are taken into account, a further paper proposes, the net impact in northern Europe would be periods of extreme cold – including events in which temperatures in London fall to -19C, in Edinburgh to -30C and in Oslo to -48C. Sea ice in February would extend as far as Lincolnshire. Our climate would change drastically, with the likelihood of far greater extremes, such as massive winter storms. Rain-fed arable agriculture would become impossible almost everywhere in the UK.
This shift, on any realistic human scale, would be irreversible. Its speed is likely to outrun our ability to adapt. Amoc shutdowns, driven by natural climate variability, have happened before. But not in the era of large-scale human civilisation.
The first paper proposing that Amoc might have an on-state and an off-state was published in 1961. Since then, many studies have confirmed the finding and explored potential triggers and likely implications. Until recently, Amoc collapse caused by human activity fell into the category of a “high impact, low probability” event, devastating if it happens, but unlikely to occur. Research over the past few years prompted a reassessment: it began to look more like a “high impact, high probability” event. Now, in response to last week’s paper, Prof Stefan Rahmstorf – perhaps the world’s leading authority on the subject – says the chances of a shutdown look like “more than 50%”. We could pass the tipping point, he says, “in the middle of this century”.
So why is this not all over the news? Why is it not the top priority for the governments that claim to protect us from harm? Well, in large part because oligarchic power has championed a model of climate impact that bears little relation to reality: that is, they have a hypothesis about how the world works that is completely detached from scientific findings. This model underpins official responses to the climate crisis.
It began with the work of the economist William Nordhaus, who sought to assess the economic effects of global heating. His modelling suggests that a “socially optimal” level of heating is between 3.5C and 4C. Most climate scientists see a temperature rise of this kind as catastrophic. Even 6C of heating, Nordhaus suggests, would cause a loss of just 8.5% of GDP. Climate science suggests it would look more like curtains for civilisation.
As the eminent economists Nicholas Stern, Joseph Stiglitz and Charlotte Taylor have argued, the mild effects Nordhaus forecasts are merely artefacts of the model he has used. For example, his modelling assumes that catastrophic risks do not exist and that climate impacts rise linearly with temperature. There is no climate model that proposes such a trend. Instead, climate science forecasts nonlinear impacts and greatly escalating risk. The likely impacts of high levels of heating include the inundation of major cities, the closure of the human climate niche (the conditions that sustain human life) across large parts of the globe, the collapse of the global food system and cascading regime shifts – that is, abrupt transitions in ecosystems – releasing natural carbon stores, potentially leading to a “hothouse Earth” in which very few survive. Never mind a few points off GDP: there would be no means of measurement and scarcely an economy to measure.
I agree with what Jason Hickel wrote in a recent blog, that we need a mass political party that would implement a degrowth agenda, and that currently the degrowth movement does not have a political agenda or capability. I also agree with Anitra Nelson, Vincent Liegey and Terry Leahy when they wrote that degrowth is a movement. Degrowth is a movement as much as Civil Rights, Marriage Equality, or the Sunrise Movement were or aremovements whether or not they were organized as political parties.
When we proposed last year that all degrowthers should join forces in solidarity, the very first point of our proposal was to decouple recognition from status and merit because we believed, and I still do, that comradery and understanding should be based on egalitarian principles. This proposal has been received with lackluster understanding and support.
More recently, I have advocated for a synergy of bottom-up and top-down strategy. Bottom-up is close to the horizontal anarchist position, however it follows scales from local to regional and (inter)national, rather than political hierarchies. It means that strategy would start at the local. Conversely top-down means strategy begins at the largest scale, being operationalized by respective large-aim institutions.
Here, I would like to add specificity to the idea of building mass parties which builds on the recognition of the tremendous effort that has been done by degrowth activists and practitioners, many of whom work for free, while also having to make a living. These mass parties need both bottom-up engagement, and top-down policy design. Yes, we have to take power, but we cannot do it without mass engagement. We already know that degrowth is popular and its label is a strength not a weakness as many have remarked already.
The 28% support in the US for the label “degrowth” without a description attached is as meaningful as the concept of “free buses” from Zohran Mamdani, the Mayor-elect of New York. Both concepts need to be elaborated in order to make full sense. Degrowth is not more jargony than “free buses”. It just needs unpacking and after it is unpacked it is as good as “free buses” if not better.
The upcoming degrowth-friendly parties should consider the following:
1.Governance based on qualified sortition (random selection)
Roger Halam, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, Insulate Britain recently said to Novara Media that he is a strong advocate for sortition and he is confident that people selected at random will rise up to the task. Sortition, which is basically a formation of government through various forms of selection by lottery, has been discussed by many authors. Just to name a few: Against Elections by David Van Reybrouck, Legislature by Lot: Transformative Designs for Deliberative Governance edited by John Gastil and Erik Olin Wright, The Trouble With Elections by Terry Bouricius, and George Monbiot in a Guardian article.
The qualification part would be something determined by the entire collective, from a minimum time spent in the organization or not working in executive capitalist jobs. People who meet these qualifications would be placed on sortition lists from which governance bodies would be selected at random, while observing desirable demographics.
Your Party UK has used sortition for the selection of their inaugural launch conference. Let us be super frank: representative democracy is a failure and elections are a circus. If we want to reform democracy, elections have to be abolished. Getting degrowth done would require a separation of policy writing from policy selection. People who write policy should not be the same who vote on turning policy into law.
I cannot stress this enough: a Leninist-type party ran by a camarilla of degrowth cadres and experts defeats the purpose of the political revolution. The mass party must be of the people, by the people, and for the people with governance by sortition.
2. Running popular platforms hard on limitarian policies.
Free buses, rent freezes, and freehealthcare are policies that can win elections. However, all policy ideas, no matter how good or popular they are, can be co-opted by right-wing media and capitalist elites. Degrowth itself is painted with red scare and is associated with austerity by capitalists. A mass party should lead, loud and clear with the idea that having too much is a really bad idea that carves into the liberties and wellbeing of decent citizens and into the resilience of life on Earth. A mass party must lead with anti-capitalist policy proposals and the degrowth label. Moreover, since degrowth owns such a wide canvas of policy instruments, the ones that hit the right-wing ethos hardest are those from the limitarian space: limits on wealth and rationing.
Universal Basic Income, Universal Basic Services, Job Guarantee, and Work Time Reduction continue to be the most popular policies from the degrowth toolkit. They are not exclusionary but rather should be advanced together in the agenda of a mass party. The Job Guarantee may be the easiest to promote, even if it is at $15 hourly pay as suggested for the US by L. Randall Wray in Understanding Modern Money Theory (2025). In all cases, the mass party must include caps on wealth and forms of material rationing.
3.Running candidates in jurisdictions where centrists often rotate with right-wingers.
In Canada, Mark Carney’s Liberal Party won this year not because people love them, but because center-left and left voters who usually vote for the New Democratic Party (NDP) really hated the Conservatives. Similar story in the UK. However, the NDP is not too friendly to degrowth, since they are trying to sideline an ecosocialist degrowther anti-Zionist candidate from their current leadership race.
In Canada and the UK, there is no real alternative to the centrist status quo that has won elections. If a mass party that leads with degrowth policies ran candidates in jurisdictions like these, they stand real chances at winning local and general elections. Perhaps the Green Party UK and Your Party UK are poised to fill this gap. They should be infiltrated by degrowthers and swayed onto a committed path for degrowth.
We should not have to read more books such as More and More and More by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz about the delusions of the energy transition, or books such as The Long Heat by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton about the perils of techno-optimism, to be finally convinced that owning the degrowth label and the toolkit of degrowth policy instruments requires courage and vision.
4. Joining or creating an international political alliance, such as DIEM25 or Progressive International.
We already have the International Degrowth Network (IDN) but it does not function like DIEM25 or Progressive International. It does not collect membership fees, it does not have paid staff, and it does not run political candidates. Upgrading the sociocratic aims of IDN towards a political organization could be the strategy to be considered. Alternatively, IDN members and degrowthers at large could join DIEM25, Progressive International or various ecosocialist parties and infuse these organizations with degrowth. In all cases, the degrowth label should be owned by those advocating for it, and must be qualified and unpacked as the occasion requires.
5. Leaders should not be tainted with perceptions of elitism and credentialism.
A sortition-based governance structure would weed out opportunists and status seekers. Socialist parties are not immune to corruption and special interests. Only sortition can mitigate these risks. Policy making cannot be, as a matter of principle, an affair run by the elite policy wonks. In the Bouricius sortition model, experts can still offer significant input in policy making, but they would not be elected into leadership positions.
6. Significant effort should be deployed to popularize ethics of sufficiency.
Before sortition is realized, when we accept the compromise with representative democracy based on elections, political leaders would have to recognize ethics of sufficiency that are shared by humans that have not been duped by consumerism and material status signaling. The imperial mode of living is something real, even if we choose to place responsibility on the design of capitalism instead on individual lifestyle choices. The imperial mode of living refers to a way of life in the Global North that relies heavily on the exploitation of resources and labor from the Global South, leading to ecological and social inequalities. It highlights how everyday consumption practices are intertwined with global power dynamics and the unsustainable nature of capitalism.
In this approach, degrowth can be presented as an ethic of liberation from the oppression of material status signaling, and expansion of social agency (more personal freedom in a social context). Work Time Reduction, for example, is a great public relations tool for degrowth but it must be framed in a dematerialized and decommodified economy. The same applies to UBI, UBS, and JG.
7. Nifty memes and bitesize ideas must complement storytelling and policy unpacking.
A mass party should not be afraid to embrace simple ideas that can capture the imagination of the people. Something along these lines: What if all products imported from the Global South had QR codes on them that would take you to a website where you could see the working conditions of those humans who made that thing, their names, their salaries, their living conditions, their health status, how much free time they have with their families? What if the same QR code showed you the wealth of the owners of those companies, their names, and their living conditions? Would you still buy that thing? Would you still want to keep this economic system? Moving the imagination of supporters for the mass party toward empathy and an egalitarian global ethic may be the key towards the much-needed delinking of the Global South from the Global North, as I understand them in their geographical sense.
8. Designing policy that aims at the fundamental causal structure of capitalism.
In the bottom-up vs top-down integrative approach, the bottom-up part is experiential and the top-down is structural. The mass parties must offer the experience of a new kind of politics and society, by actually showing up for local causes, listening to its members and citizens at large, and being influenced by them via crowd-sourcing policy proposal. I have suggested a tool for such purpose in the form of a crowd-sourced policy cloud.
Mass parties should be friendly and welcoming, not exclusionary and dogmatic. At the same time, they must aim at redesigning the structure of the economy by attacking and dismantling capitalist hierarchies, by decoupling power from property, and by halting the dispossession of private and common property by capital. Even if Universal Basic Income, Universal Basic Services, Job Guarantee, and Work Time Reduction were all implemented, they may remain confined within national borders. Decolonisation and delinking must also be at the center of strategy.
Where would these mass parties start
To conclude, where would these mass parties start? In which country? In Romania, my country of origin, where the far-right party leads in polls by close to 40% and where there is no party on the left, not even center-left? In Germany, France, Italy? In India or China? Once we deploy the heavy anchor of reality we are hit with terrifying apparent impossibilities. The answer is all of the above, with various caveats. Some countries have parties that may be swung further towards degrowth. Others need the invention of new parties from scratch, such as Romania and Canada. In all cases, a political strategy for a mass party must emerge from the mass of people that it is supposed to serve.
Fewer than 60,000 people – 0.001% of the world’s population – control three times as much wealth as the entire bottom half of humanity, according to a report that argues global inequality has reached such extremes that urgent action has become essential.
The authoritative World Inequality Report 2026, based on data compiled by 200 researchers, also found that the top 10% of income-earners earn more than the other 90% combined, while the poorest half captures less than 10% of total global earnings.
Wealth – the value of people’s assets – was even more concentrated than income, or earnings from work and investments, the report found, with the richest 10% of the world’s population owning 75% of wealth and the bottom half just 2%.
In almost every region, the top 1% was wealthier than the bottom 90% combined, the report found, with wealth inequality increasing rapidly around the world.
“The result is a world in which a tiny minority commands unprecedented financial power, while billions remain excluded from even basic economic stability,” the authors, led by Ricardo Gómez-Carrera of the Paris School of Economics, wrote.
The share of global wealth held by the top 0.001% has grown from almost 4% in 1995 to more than 6%, the report said, while the wealth of multimillionaires had increased by about 8% annually since the 1990s – nearly twice the rate of the bottom 50%.
The authors, one of whom is the influential French economist Thomas Piketty, said that while inequality had “long been a defining feature of the global economy”, by 2025 it had “reached levels that demand urgent attention”.
Reducing inequality was “not only about fairness, but essential for the resilience of economies, the stability of democracies, and the viability of our planet”. They said such extreme divides are no longer sustainable for societies or ecosystems.
Produced every four years in conjunction with the United Nations Development Programme, the report draws on the biggest open-access database on global economic inequality and is widely considered to shape international public debate on the issue.
In a preface, the Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz repeated a call for an international panel comparable to the UN’s IPCC on climate change, to “track inequality worldwide and provide objective, evidence-based recommendations”.
Looking beyond strict economic inequality, it found that inequality of opportunity fuels inequality of outcomes, with education spending per child in Europe and North America, for example, more than 40 times that in sub-Saharan Africa – a gap roughly three times greater than GDP per capita.
Such disparities “entrench a geography of opportunity”, it said, adding that a 3% global tax on fewer than 100,000 centimillionaires and billionaires would raise $750bn a year – the education budget of low and middle-income countries.
Inequality was also fuelled by the global financial system, which is rigged in favour of rich countries, the report said, with advanced economies able to borrow cheaply and invest abroad at higher returns, allowing them to act as “financial rentiers”.
About 1% of global GDP flows from poorer to richer countries each year through net income transfers associated with high yields and low interest payments on rich-country liabilities, it said – almost three times the amount of global development aid.
On gender inequality, the report said a gender pay gap “persists across all regions”. Excluding unpaid work, women earn on average only 61% of what men earn per working hour. Including unpaid labour, that figure falls to just 32%, it added.
The report also highlighted the critical role played by capital ownership in the inequality of climate-changing carbon emissions. “Wealthy individuals fuel the climate crisis through their investments even more than their consumption and lifestyles,” it said.
Global data shows the poorest half of the global population accounts for only 3% of carbon emissions associated with private capital ownership, the report calculated, while the wealthiest 10% account for about 77% of emissions.
“This disparity is about vulnerability,” it said. “Those who emit the least, largely populations in low-income countries, are also those most exposed to climate shocks. Those who emit the most are more insulated against the impacts of climate change.”
The evidence shows that inequalities can be reduced, particularly by public investment in education and health and by effective taxation and redistribution programmes. It notes that in many countries, the ultra-rich escape taxation.
“Effective income tax rates climb steadily for most of the population, but then fall sharply for billionaires and centimillionaires,” the report said. Proportionately, “these elites pay less than most of the households that earn much lower incomes”.
Reducing inequality is a political choice made more difficult by “fragmented electorates, under-representation of workers, and the outsized influence of wealth”, it concluded. “The tools exist. The challenge is political will.”
I knew that a revolution in our understanding of soil could change the world. Then came a eureka moment – and the birth of the Earth Rover Program
It felt like walking up a mountain during a temperature inversion. You struggle through fog so dense you can scarcely see where you’re going. Suddenly, you break through the top of the cloud, and the world is laid out before you. It was that rare and remarkable thing: a eureka moment.
For the past three years, I’d been struggling with a big and frustrating problem. In researching my book Regenesis, I’d been working closely with Iain Tolhurst (Tolly), a pioneering farmer who had pulled off something extraordinary. Almost everywhere, high-yield farming means major environmental harm, due to the amount of fertiliser, pesticides and (sometimes) irrigation water and deep ploughing required. Most farms with apparently small environmental impacts produce low yields. This, in reality, means high impacts, as more land is needed to produce a given amount of food. But Tolly has found the holy grail of agriculture: high and rising yields with minimal environmental harm.
He uses no fertiliser, no animal manure and no pesticides. His techniques, the result of decades of experiment and observation, appear to enrich the crucial relationships between crops and microbes in the soil, through which soil nutrients must pass. It seems that Tolly has, in effect, “trained” his soil bacteria to release nutrients when his crops require them (a process called mineralisation), and lock them up when his crops aren’t growing (immobilisation), ensuring they don’t leach from the soil.
So why the frustration? Well, Tolly has inspired many other growers to attempt the same techniques. Some have succeeded, with excellent results. Others have not. And no one can work out why. It’s likely to have something to do with soil properties. But what?
Not for the first time, I had stumbled into a knowledge gap so wide that humanity could fall through it. Soil is a fantastically complex biological structure, like a coral reef, built and sustained by the creatures that inhabit it. It supplies 99% of our calories. Yet we know less about it than any other identified ecosystem. It’s almost a black box.
Many brilliant scientists have devoted their lives to its study. But there are major barriers. Most soil properties cannot be seen without digging, and if you dig a hole, you damage the structures you’re trying to investigate. As a result, studying even basic properties is cumbersome, time-consuming and either very expensive or simply impossible at scale. To measure the volume of soil in a field, for example, you need to take hundreds of core samples. But as soil depths can vary greatly from one metre to the next, your figure relies on extrapolation. This makes it very hard to tell whether you’re losing soil or gaining it. Measuring bulk density (the amount of soil in a given volume, which shows how compacted it might be), or connected porosity (the tiny catacombs created by lifeforms, a crucial measure of soil health), or soil carbon – at scale – is even harder.
So farmers must guess. Partly because they cannot see exactly what the soil needs, many of their inputs – fertilisers, irrigation, deep ploughing – are wasted. Roughly two-thirds of the nitrogen fertiliser they apply, and between 50% and 80% of their phosphorus, is lost. These lost minerals cause algal blooms in rivers, dead zones at sea, costs for water users and global heating. Huge amounts of irrigation water are also wasted. Farmers sometimes “subsoil” their fields – ploughing that is deep and damaging – because they suspect compaction. The suspicion is often wrong.
Our lack of knowledge also inhibits the development of a new agriculture, which may, as Tolly has done, allow farmers to replace chemical augmentation with biological enhancement.
So when I came to write the book, I made a statement so vague that it reads like an admission of defeat: we needed to spend heavily on “an advanced science of the soil”, and use it to deliver a “greener revolution”. While we know almost nothing about the surface of our own planet, billions are spent on the Mars Rover programme, exploring the barren regolith there. What we needed, I argued, is an Earth Rover programme, mapping the world’s agricultural soils at much finer resolution.
I might as well have written “something must be done!” The necessary technologies simply did not exist. I sank into a stygian gloom.
At the same time, Tarje Nissen-Meyer, then a professor of geophysics at the University of Oxford, was grappling with a different challenge. Seismology is the study of waves passing through a solid medium. Thanks to billions from the oil and gas industry, it has become highly sophisticated. Tarje wanted to use this powerful tool for the opposite purpose – ecological improvement. Already, with colleagues, he had deployed seismology to study elephant behaviour in Kenya. Not only was it highly effective, but his team also discovered it could identify animal species walking through the savannah by their signature footfall.
By luck we were both attached, in different ways, to Wolfson College, Oxford, where we met in February 2022. I saw immediately that he was a thoughtful man – a visionary. I suggested a pint in The Magdalen Arms.
I explained my problem, and we talked about the limits of existing technologies. Was seismology being used to study soil, I asked. He’d never heard of it. “I guess it’s not a suitable technology then?” No, he told me, “soil should be a good medium for seismology. In fact, we need to filter out the soil noise when we look at the rocks.” “So if it’s noise, it could be signal?” “Definitely.”
We stared at each other. Time seemed to stall. Could this really be true?
Over the next three days, Tarje conducted a literature search. Nothing came up. I wrote to Prof Simon Jeffery, an eminent soil scientist at Harper Adams University, whose advice I’d found invaluable when researching the book. I set up a Zoom call. He would surely explain that we were barking up the wrong tree.
Simon is usually a reserved man. But when he had finished questioning Tarje, he became quite animated. “All my life I’ve wanted to ‘see’ into the soil,” he said. “Maybe now we can.” I was introduced to a brilliant operations specialist, Katie Bradford, who helped us build an organisation. We set up a non-profit called the Earth Rover Program, to develop what we call “soilsmology”; to build open-source hardware and software cheap enough to be of use to farmers everywhere; and to create, with farmers, a global, self-improving database. This, we hope, might one day incorporate every soil ecosystem: a kind of Human Genome Project for the soil.
We later found that some scientists had in fact sought to apply seismology to soil, but it had not been developed into a programme, partly because the approaches used were not easily scalable.
My role was mostly fixer, finding money and other help. We received $4m (£3m) in start-up money from the Bezos Earth Fund. This may cause some discomfort, but our experience has been entirely positive: the fund has helped us do exactly what we want. We also got a lot of pro-bono help from the law firm Hogan Lovells.
Tarje, now at the University of Exeter, and Simon began assembling their teams. They would need to develop an ultra-high-frequency variant of seismology. A big obstacle was cost. In 2022, suitable sensors cost $10,000 (£7,500) apiece. They managed to repurpose other kit: Tarje found that a geophone developed by a Slovakian experimental music outfit worked just as well, and cost only $100. Now one of our scientists, Jiayao Meng, is developing a sensor for about $10. In time, we should be able to use the accelerometers in mobile phones, reducing the cost to zero. As for generating seismic waves, we get all the signal we need by hitting a small metal plate with a welder’s hammer.
On its first deployment, our team measured the volume of a peat bog that had been studied by scientists for 50 years. After 45 minutes in the field, they produced a preliminary estimate suggesting that previous measurements were out by 20%. Instead of extrapolating the peat depth from point samples, they could see the wavy line where the peat met the subsoil. The implications for estimating carbon stocks are enormous.
We’ve also been able to measure bulk density at a very fine scale; to track soil moisture (as part of a wider team); to start building the AI and machine learning tools we need; and to see the varying impacts of different agricultural crops and treatments. Next we’ll work on measuring connected porosity, soil texture and soil carbon; scaling up to the hectare level and beyond; and on testing the use of phones as seismometers. We now have further funding, from the UBS Optimus Foundation, hubs on three continents and a big international team.
Eventually, we hope, any farmer anywhere, rich or poor, will be able to get an almost instant readout from their soil. As more people use the tools, building the global database, we hope these readouts will translate into immediate useful advice. The tools should also revolutionise soil protection: the EU has issued a soil-monitoring law, but how can it be implemented? Farmers are paid for their contributions “to improve soil health and soil resilience”, but what this means in practice is ticking a box on a subsidy form: there’s no sensible way of checking.
We’re not replacing the great work of other soil scientists but, developing our methods alongside theirs, we believe we can fill part of the massive knowledge gap. As one of the farmers we’re working with, Roddy Hall, remarks, the Earth Rover Program could “take the guesswork out of farming”. One day it might help everyone arrive at that happy point: high yields with low impacts. Seismology promises to shake things up.
O neoliberalismo (eu sugeria anarco-capitalismo) instalou-se nas nossas vidas como se fosse algo natural. Geralmente temos dificuldade em defini-lo e em perceber o mal que nos pode trazer. Este livro vem mudar isso.
Que somos nós? Éramos cidadãos, mas, hoje, parece que fomos reduzidos a consumidores. Da década de 1930 para cá, a ideia de que é a competição que nos define como espécie foi sendo adoptada e alimentada por elites, determinadas em preservar as suas fortunas e o seu poder. Think tanks, corporações, os media, as universidades e os políticos tornaram-se a força motriz para difundir e cristalizar uma ideologia que nos esvazia enquanto pessoas, que exclui direitos e promove o neoliberalismo como doutrina que regula, secreta e silenciosamente, a nossa existência. Mas o que é o neoliberalismo? Por que razão estamos subjugados a ele?
George Monbiot e Peter Hutchison traçam a história do nascimento e da ascensão do neoliberalismo. Os autores argumentam que o neoliberalismo está por trás de crises como as alterações climáticas, a precariedade dos serviços públicos, as catástrofes financeiras e a pobreza infantil, tudo isso enquanto enfraquece a democracia em favor do poder económico.
O livro também conecta o neoliberalismo ao ressurgimento de formas autoritárias de governo e propõe uma alternativa de democracia participativa baseada no conceito de "suficiência privada, luxo público".
Na sua instigante exploração, o renomado pensador George Monbiot mergulha na ideologia oculta que molda nossa vida cotidiana. Ele revela como uma filosofia marginal da década de 1930 foi apropriada pelas elites abastadas para salvaguardar suas fortunas e proteger seu poder. Essa ideologia influenciou significativamente setores vitais como educação, saúde e nosso bem-estar mental. Monbiot destaca o profundo impacto que essa filosofia tem em nossos relacionamentos e no próprio planeta em que vivemos.
Muitas vezes não reconhecida, essa força omnipresente parece uma parte inescapável de nossa realidade. Conhecida como neoliberalismo, pode parecer omnipresente, mas Monbiot afirma que não é inevitável nem imutável. Ao iluminar a sua história e examinar suas repercussões, ele nos capacita a compreender suas origens e implicações. Junte-se a nós nesta discussão esclarecedora para descobrir como compreender o neoliberalismo pode nos capacitar a defender um futuro mais justo e equitativo.
"O que é Regeneração?" é uma curta-metragem de 5 minutos e um chamativo apelo à ação para se juntar a um movimento global de Regeneradores que estão a trabalhar para curar nossos ecossistemas.
O filme apresenta líderes de ação climática como Jeff Bridges, Paul Hawken, Christiana Figueres, Kate Raworth, Damon Gameau, Juma Xipaia e outros Regeneradores de todo o mundo.
Com Jeff Bridges, Damon Gameau, Christiana Figueres, Paul Hawken, Kate Raworth, George Monbiot, Aliya Flores, Joseph Sikulu, Tishiko King, Hannah Diviney, Yasmin Honeychurch, Juma Xipaia, Isaias Hernandez, Kristy Drutman, Arshak Makichyan, Daniel Appiah, Adenike Oladosu, Anna Kernahan, Hannah Dines, Chhaya Bhanti, Pattie Gonia, AY Young, Clover Hogan, Anjali Sharma, Eli Bramborova, Tomas Brambora, Neel Tamhane, Eriel Tchekwie Deranger, Kevin Ossah e Isabella Villanueva-García.
Documentário:2040 (legendas em Japonês) Preocupado com o futuro da filha, o cineasta Damon Gameau viaja o mundo em busca de novas abordagens e soluções para as mudanças climáticas. Ele se reúne com inovadores e agentes de mudança em muitos campos para criar uma visão de como essas medidas poderiam regenerar o mundo para as gerações futuras.
In every conflict over the living world, something is being protected. And most of the time, it’s the wrong thing.
The world’s most destructive industries are fiercely protected by governments. The three sectors that appear to be most responsible for the collapse of ecosystems and erasure of wildlife are fossil fuels, fisheries and farming. In 2021, governments directly subsidised oil and gas production to the tune of $64bn (£53bn), and spent a further $531bn (£443bn) on keeping fossil fuel prices low. The latest figures for fisheries, from 2018, suggest that global subsidies for the sector amount to $35bn a year, over 80% of which go to large-scale industrial fishing. Most are paid to “enhance capacity”: in other words to help the industry, as marine ecosystems collapse, catch more fish.
Every year, governments spend $500bn on farm subsidies, the great majority of which pay no regard to environmental protection. Even the payments that claim to do so often inflict more harm than good. For example, many of the European Union’s pillar two “green” subsidies sustain livestock farming on land that would be better used for ecological restoration. Over half the European farm budget is spent on propping up animal farming, which is arguably the world’s most ecologically destructive industry.
Pasture-fed meat production destroys five times as much forest as palm oil does. It now threatens some of the richest habitats on Earth, among which are forests in Madagascar, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, Australia and Myanmar. Meat production could swallow 3m square kilometres of the world’s most biodiverse places in 35 years. That’s almost the size of India. In Australia, 94% of the deforestation in the catchment area of the Great Barrier Reef – a major cause of coral loss – is associated with beef production. Yet most of these catastrophes are delivered with the help of public money.
The more destructive the business, the more likely it is to enjoy political protection. A study published this month claims that chicken factories being built in Herefordshire and Shropshire are likely to destroy far more jobs than they create, wrecking tourism through the river pollution, air pollution, smell and scenic blight they cause. But none of the planning applications for these factories has been obliged to provide an economic impact analysis. Planning officers, the paper found, are highly dismissive of the hospitality industry, treating it as “non-serious and trivial”. By comparison, the paper found, “attitudes to farming were very different; described as serious, ‘proper’ (male) work”. The “tough”, “masculine” industries driving Earth systems towards collapse are pampered and protected by governments, while less destructive sectors must fend for themselves.
While there is no shortage of public money for the destruction of life on Earth, budgets for its protection always fall short. According to the UN, $536bn a year will be needed to protect the living world – far less than the amount being paid to destroy it – yet almost all this funding is missing. Some has been promised, scarcely any has materialised. So much for public money for public goods.
The political protection of destructive industries is woven into the fabric of politics, not least because of the pollution paradox (“the more damaging the commercial enterprise, the more money it must spend on politics to ensure it’s not regulated out of existence. As a result, politics comes to be dominated by the most damaging commercial enterprises.”) Earth systems, by contrast, are treated as an afterthought, an ornament: nice to have, but dispensable when their protection conflicts with the necessity of extraction. In reality, the irreducible essential is a habitable planet.
In 2010, at a biodiversity summit in Nagoya, Japan, governments set themselves 20 goals, to be met by 2020. None has been achieved. As they prepare for the biodiversity Cop15 summit in Montreal next week, governments are investing not in the defence of the living world but in greenwash.
The headline objective is to protect 30% of the world’s land and oceans by 2030. But what governments mean by protection often bears little resemblance to what ecologists mean.
Take the UK, for example. On paper, it has one of the highest proportions of protected land in the rich world, at 28%. It could easily raise this proportion to 30% and claim to have fulfilled its obligations. But it is also one of the most nature-depleted countries on Earth. How can this be? Because most of our “protected” areas are nothing of the kind.
One analysis suggests that only 5% of our land meets the international definition of a protected area. Even these scraps are at risk, as scarcely anyone is left to enforce the law: the regulators have been stripped to the bone and beyond. At sea, most of our marine protected areas are nothing but lines on the map: trawlers still rip them apart.
All this is likely to become much worse. If the retained EU law bill goes ahead, the entire basis of legal protection in the UK could be torn down. Even by the standards of this government, the mindless vandalism involved is gobsmacking. To prove that Brexit means Brexit, 570 environmental laws must be deleted or replaced by the end of next year. There will be no public consultation, no scope for presenting evidence and, in all likelihood, no opportunity for parliamentary debate. It is logistically impossible to replace so much legislation in such a short period, so the most likely outcome is deletion. If so, it’s game over for rivers, soil, air quality, groundwater, wildlife and habitats in the UK, and game on for cheats and con artists. The whole country will, in effect, become a freeport.
Never underestimate the destructive instincts of the Conservative party, prepared to ruin everything for the sake of an idea. Never underestimate its appetite for chaos and dysfunction.
The protected industries driving us towards destruction will take everything if they are not checked. We face a brutal contest for control over land and sea: between those who seek to convert our life support systems into profit, and those who seek to defend, restore and, where possible, return them to the indigenous people dispossessed by capitalism’s fire front. These are never just technical or scientific issues. They cannot be resolved by management alone. They are deeply political. We can protect the living world or we can protect the companies destroying it. We cannot do both.
Grandes produtores de alimentos detêm muito poder – e os reguladores mal entendem o que está acontecendo. Soa familiar?
Nos últimos anos, os cientistas vêm soando desesperadamente um alarme que os governos se recusam a ouvir: o sistema alimentar global está começando a se parecer com o sistema financeiro global no período que antecedeu 2008.
Embora o colapso financeiro tenha sido devastador para o bem-estar humano, o colapso do sistema alimentar não dá nem para imaginar. No entanto, a evidência de que algo está dando muito errado está aumentando rapidamente. O atual aumento nos preços dos alimentos parece o mais recente sinal de instabilidade sistêmica.
Muitas pessoas assumem que a crise alimentar foi causada por uma combinação da pandemia e da invasão da Ucrânia. Embora estes sejam fatores importantes, eles agravam um problema subjacente. Durante anos, parecia que a fome caminhava para a extinção. O número de pessoas subnutridascaiu de 811 milhões em 2005 para 607 milhões em 2014. Mas em 2015, a tendência começou a mudar. A fome tem aumentado desde então: para 650 milhões em 2019 e de volta para 811 milhões em 2020. Este ano provavelmente será muito pior.
Agora prepare-se para as notícias realmente ruins: isso aconteceu em um momento de grande abundância. A produção global de alimentos vem aumentando de forma constante há mais de meio século, superando confortavelmente o crescimento populacional. No ano passado, a colheita global de trigo foi maior do que nunca. Surpreendentemente, o número de pessoas subnutridas começou a aumentar assim que os preços mundiais dos alimentos começaram a cair. Em 2014, quando menos pessoas passaram fome do que em qualquer outro momento, o índice global de preços dos alimentos ficou em 115 pontos. Em 2015, caiu para 93 e permaneceu abaixo de 100 até 2021.
Só nos últimos dois anos expandiu-se. O aumento dos preços dos alimentos é agora um dos principais impulsionadores da inflação, que atingiu 9% no Reino Unido no mês passado. A comida está se tornando inacessível até para muitas pessoas nas nações ricas. O impacto nos países mais pobres é muito pior.
Então o que está ocorrendo? Bem, a alimentação global, como as finanças globais, é um sistema complexo, que se desenvolve espontaneamente a partir de biliões de interações. Sistemas complexos têm propriedades contra-intuitivas. Eles são resilientes sob certas condições, pois suas propriedades de auto-organização os estabilizam. Mas à medida que o estresse aumenta, essas mesmas propriedades começam a transmitir choques através da rede. Além de um certo ponto, uma pequena perturbação pode derrubar todo o sistema quando superado seu limite crítico, então ele colapsa, repentinamente e imparável.
Agora sabemos o suficiente sobre sistemas para prever se eles podem ser resilientes ou frágeis. Os cientistas representam sistemas complexos como uma malha de nós e links. Os nós são como os nós de uma rede antiga; os links são as cordas que os conectam. No sistema alimentar, os nós incluem as corporações que comercializam grãos, sementes e produtos químicos agrícolas, os principais exportadores e importadores e os portos pelos quais os alimentos passam. Os links são suas relações comerciais e institucionais.
Se os nós se comportarem de várias maneiras e seus links entre si forem fracos, o sistema provavelmente será resiliente. Se certos nós se tornarem dominantes, começarem a se comportar de maneira semelhante e estiverem fortemente conectados, o sistema provavelmente será frágil. Na abordagem da crise de 2008, os grandes bancos desenvolveram estratégias e formas semelhantes de gestão de risco, pois buscavam as mesmas fontes de lucro. Eles se tornaram fortemente ligados uns aos outros de maneiras que os reguladores mal entendiam. Quando o Lehman Brothers faliu, ameaçou derrubar todos.
Então, aqui está o que causa calafrios naqueles que estudam o sistema alimentar global. Nos últimos anos, assim como nas finanças durante os anos 2000, os principais nós do sistema alimentar incharam, seus links se tornaram mais fortes, as estratégias de negócios convergiram e sincronizaram e os recursos que podem impedir o colapso sistémico (“redundância”, “modularidade” , “disjuntores” e “sistemas de backup”) foram removidos, expondo o sistema a choques “globalmente contagiosos”.
Numa estimativa, apenas quatro corporações controlam 90% do comércio global de grãos. As mesmas corporações têm comprado sementes, produtos químicos, processamento, embalagem, distribuição e varejo. Ao longo de 18 anos, o número de conexões comerciais entre exportadores e importadores de trigo e arroz dobrou. As nações estão agora se polarizando em superimportadores e superexportadores. Grande parte desse comércio passa por pontos de estrangulamento vulneráveis, como os estreitos turcos (agora obstruídos pela invasão da Ucrânia pela Rússia), os canais de Suez e Panamá e os estreitos de Ormuz, Bab-el-Mandeb e Malaca.
Uma das mudanças culturais mais rápidas da história humana é a convergência para uma “dieta padrão global”. Enquanto nossa comida se tornou localmente mais diversificada, globalmente ela se tornou menos diversificada. Apenas quatro culturas – trigo, arroz, milho e soja – respondem por quase 60% das calorias cultivadas pelos agricultores. Sua produção agora está altamente concentrada em um punhado de nações, incluindo Rússia e Ucrânia. A Dieta Padrão Global é cultivada pela Padrão Global Agrícola, fornecida pelas mesmas corporações com os mesmos pacotes de sementes, produtos químicos e maquinário, e vulnerável aos mesmos choques ambientais.
A indústria de alimentos está se tornando fortemente acoplada ao setor financeiro, aumentando o que os cientistas chamam de “densidade de rede” do sistema, tornando-o mais suscetível a falhas em cascata. Em todo o mundo, as barreiras comerciais foram reduzidas e estradas e portos atualizados, simplificando a rede global. Você poderia imaginar que esse sistema suavemente organizado aumentaria a segurança alimentar. Mas permitiu que as empresas reduzissem os custos de armazenamento e estoques, mudando de estoques para fluxos. Principalmente, essa estratégia just-in-time funciona. Mas se as entregas forem interrompidas ou houver um rápido aumento na demanda, as prateleiras podem esvaziar repentinamente.
Um artigo da Nature Sustainability relata que, no sistema alimentar, “a frequência de choques aumentou ao longo do tempo em terra e mar em escala global”. Ao pesquisar meu livro Regenesis, percebi que é essa série crescente de choques contagiosos, exacerbados pela especulação financeira, que tem impulsionado a fome global.
Agora, o sistema alimentar global deve sobreviver não apenas às suas fragilidades internas, mas também às rupturas ambientais e políticas que podem interagir umas com as outras. Para dar um exemplo atual, em meados de abril, o governo indiano sugeriu que poderia compensar o déficit nas exportações globais de alimentos causado pela invasão da Ucrânia pela Rússia. Apenas um mês depois, proibiu as exportações de trigo, depois que as colheitas encolheram em uma onda de calor devastadora.
Precisamos urgentemente diversificar a produção global de alimentos, tanto geograficamente quanto em termos de culturas e técnicas agrícolas. Precisamos quebrar o controle de grandes corporações e especuladores financeiros. Precisamos criar sistemas de backup, produzindo alimentos por meios totalmente diferentes. Precisamos introduzir capacidade ociosa em um sistema ameaçado por suas próprias eficiências.
Se tantos podem passar fome em um momento de abundância sem precedentes, as consequências da grande quebra de safra que o colapso ambiental podem causar desafiam a imaginação. O sistema tem que mudar.
There is a box labelled “climate”, in which politicians discuss the climate crisis. There is a box named “biodiversity”, in which they discuss the biodiversity crisis. There are other boxes, such as pollution, deforestation, overfishing and soil loss, gathering dust in our planet’s lost property department. But they all contain aspects of one crisis that we have divided up to make it comprehensible. The categories the human brain creates to make sense of its surroundings are not, as Immanuel Kant observed, the “thing-in-itself”. They describe artefacts of our perceptions rather than the world.
Nature recognises no such divisions. As Earth systems are assaulted by everything at once, each source of stress compounds the others.
Take the situation of the North Atlantic right whale, whose population recovered a little when whaling ceased, but is now slumping again: fewer than 95 females of breeding age remain. The immediate reasons for this decline are mostly deaths and injuries caused when whales are hit by ships or tangled in fishing gear. But they’ve become more vulnerable to these impacts because they’ve had to shift along the eastern seaboard of North America into busy waters.
Their main prey, a small swimming crustacean called Calanus finmarchicus, is moving north at a rate of 8km a year, because the sea is heating. At the same time, a commercial fishing industry has developed, exploiting Calanus for the fish oil supplements falsely believed to be beneficial to our health. There’s been no attempt to assess the likely impacts of fishing Calanus. We also have no idea what the impact of ocean acidification – also caused by rising carbon dioxide levels – might be on this and many other crucial species.
As the death rate of North Atlantic right whales rises, their birthrate falls. Why? Perhaps because of the pollutants accumulating in their bodies, some of which are likely to reduce fertility. Or because of ocean noise from boat engines, sonar, and oil and gas exploration, which may stress them and disrupt their communication. So you could call the decline of the North Atlantic right whale a shipping crisis, or a fishing crisis, or a climate crisis, or an acidification crisis, or a pollution crisis, or a noise crisis. But it is in fact all of these things: a general crisis caused by human activity.
Or look at moths in the UK. We know they are being harmed by pesticides. But the impact of these toxins on moths has been researched, as far as I can discover, only individually. Studies of bees show that when pesticides are combined, their effects are synergistic: in other words, the damage they each cause isn’t added, but multiplied. When pesticides are combined with fungicides and herbicides, the effects are multiplied again.
Simultaneously, moth caterpillars are losing their food plants, thanks to fertilisers and habitat destruction. Climate chaos has also knocked their reproductive cycle out of sync with the opening of the flowers on which the adults depend. Now we discover that light pollution has devastating effects on their breeding success. The switch from orange sodium streetlights to white LEDs saves energy, but their wider colour spectrum turns out to be disastrous for insects. Light pollution is spreading rapidly, even around protected areas, affecting animals almost everywhere.
Combined impacts are laying waste to entire living systems. When coral reefs are weakened by the fishing industry, pollution and the bleaching caused by global heating, they are less able to withstand the extreme climate events, such as tropical cyclones, which our fossil fuel emissions have also intensified. When rainforests are fragmented by timber cutting and cattle ranching, and ravaged by imported tree diseases, they become more vulnerable to the droughts and fires caused by climate breakdown.
What would we see if we broke down our conceptual barriers? We would see a full-spectrum assault on the living world. Scarcely anywhere is now safe from this sustained assault. A recent scientific paper estimates that only 3% of the Earth’s land surface should now be considered “ecologically intact”.
The various impacts have a common cause: the sheer volume of economic activity. We are doing too much of almost everything, and the world’s living systems cannot bear it. But our failure to see the whole ensures that we fail to address this crisis systemically and effectively.
When we box up this predicament, our efforts to solve one aspect of the crisis exacerbate another. For example, if we were to build sufficient direct air capture machines to make a major difference to atmospheric carbon concentrations, this would demand a massive new wave of mining and processing for the steel and concrete. The impact of such construction pulses travels around the world. To take just one component, the mining of sand to make concrete is trashing hundreds of precious habitats. It’s especially devastating to rivers, whose sand is highly sought in construction. Rivers are already being hit by drought, the disappearance of mountain ice and snow, our extraction of water, and pollution from farming, sewage and industry. Sand dredging, on top of these assaults, could be a final, fatal blow.
Or look at the materials required for the electronics revolution that will, apparently, save us from climate breakdown. Already, mining and processing the minerals required for magnets and batteries is laying waste to habitats and causing new pollution crises. Now, as Jonathan Watts’s terrifying article in the Guardian this week shows, companies are using the climate crisis as justification for extracting minerals from the deep ocean floor, long before we have any idea of what the impacts might be.
This isn’t, in itself, an argument against direct air capture machines or other “green” technologies. But if they have to keep pace with an ever-growing volume of economic activity, and if the growth of this activity is justified by the existence of those machines, the net result will be ever greater harm to the living world.
Everywhere, governments seek to ramp up the economic load, talking of “unleashing our potential” and “supercharging our economy”. Boris Johnson insists that “a global recovery from the pandemic must be rooted in green growth”. But there is no such thing as green growth. Growth is wiping the green from the Earth.
We have no hope of emerging from this full-spectrum crisis unless we dramatically reduce economic activity. Wealth must be distributed – a constrained world cannot afford the rich – but it must also be reduced. Sustaining our life-support systems means doing less of almost everything. But this notion – that should be central to a new, environmental ethics – is secular blasphemy.
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