Some people try to reconcile this tension by leaning on the hope that technology will save us – that innovation will make growth ‘green’. Efficiency improvements will enable us to ‘decouple’ GDP from ecological impact so we can continue growing the global economy for ever without having to change anything about capitalism. And if this doesn’t work,

The thing about growth is that it sounds so good. It’s a powerful metaphor that’s rooted deeply in our understanding of natural processes: children grow, crops grow … and so too the economy should grow. But this framing plays on a false analogy. The natural process of growth is always finite. We want our children to grow, but not to the point of

How odd. We are a culture that is enamoured of newness, obsessed with invention and innovation. We claim to celebrate creative, out-of-the-box thinking. Certainly we would never say of a smartphone or a piece of art, ‘This is the best gadget or painting that has ever been created and it will never be surpassed, and we shouldn’t even try!’ It would

The South has suffered twice over: first from the appropriation of resources and labour that fuelled the North’s industrial rise, and now from the appropriation of atmospheric commons by the North’s industrial emissions. If our analysis of the climate crisis is not attentive to these colonial dimensions, then we have missed the point.

In some cases, the transition to renewables will require a massive increase over existing levels of material extraction. For neodymium – an essential element in wind turbines – extraction will need to rise by nearly 35% over current levels. Higher-end estimates reported by the World Bank suggest it could double. The same is true of silver, which is

The Roman philosopher Seneca saw the earth as a living organism with springs and rivers flowing through her like blood through veins, with metals and minerals forming slowly in her womb, and morning dew like perspiration on her skin.30

Scientists estimate that the planet can handle a total material footprint of up to about 50 billion tons per year.14 That’s considered to be a maximum safe boundary. Today we’re exceeding that boundary twice over. And, as we will see, virtually all of this overshoot is being driven by excess consumption in high-income nations – consumption that is

We tend to think about climate change as primarily a matter of temperature. Many people are not particularly concerned about this, because our everyday experience with temperature is that a few degrees doesn’t really make that much of a difference. But temperature is just the beginning – it’s the loose thread on the sweater.

This is why we see that, despite constant improvements in efficiency, aggregate energy and resource use has been rising for the whole history of capitalism.