Проекција на филм: Fairytales of growth

[Music] excellencies ladies and gentlemen nature is angry and we fool ourselves if we think we can fool nature because nature always strikes back and around the world nature is striking back with fury the situation in australia already in a state of emergency is getting more dire tonight a remarkable and alarming scene playing out in venice in recent months climate emergencies have been declared frustration is also boiling hot over a government seen as unambitious on global warming look around seas are rising and oceans are acidifying glaciers are melting and corals are bleaching droughts are spreading and wildfires are burning deserts are expanding and access to water is dwindling heat waves are scorching and natural disasters are multiplying storms everywhere are more intense more frequent more deadly i've seen it with my own wives from dominica to the sahel to the south pacific our warming earth is issuing a chilling cry stop if we don't urgently change our ways of life jeopardize life itself since i was a child i know that this was a problem that was going to affect me in the future and as a child of the first world country you live quite well you have money you have family fortunately but i know that there was a danger even though i was just eight years old i know that there was a danger coming which was the climate emergency as we're growing up we've had to think about a lot more hard things there are a lot of people already now like even myself at 16 thinking about whether or not it's even ethical to have children at this time did you have to worry of these things when you were my age all this is happening before our eyes and yet we act as if we have all the time we want and all the solutions how dare you you have stolen my dreams my childhood with your empty words and yet i'm one of the lucky ones people are suffering people are dying entire ecosystems are collapsing we are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is the money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth how dare you [Music] [Applause] [Music] is [Music] is return now in your imagination to england as it was 200 years ago the mainstream story of progress divides history into a big before and after and it considers like a big break from the past happening in the last 300 years with industrial revolution capitalism and the growth of production and consumption the coronal copy of new goods of consumer goods new technologies this amazing change began in england of the late 17th century england with their ships coal timber iron money and laborers the first sign of the revolution in industry appeared in improvements in metals steam engines and textile machines the rapid industrial development called for more transportation and more ships to bring in raw materials and carry back finished products thus in a short time england became the leading industrial nation of the world there are these big narratives which many politicians thrive on and those are the big narratives which say that what's important in this world is that we all have a high level of consumerist lifestyle and that everybody deserves that so we need to have a world that everybody can have a car have a fridge whatever narrative you want to have we must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas they're the narratives which are easy to hear for people the more difficult narratives are what happens when you do pursue that kind of life because you're actually doing it at the expense of the environment at the expense of non-human beings and also at the expense of care the way it works is you get to a place you use all the resources you have in that place you exploit the labor the land nature care all the air all in the area and you use it to make a profit growth from its beginnings was premised and based on the colonization of non-white non-european territories so if we start with cotton we see that production of cotton in england wouldn't be possible we i mean there were technological breakthroughs but it wouldn't be possible without a slave labor in in the u.s in the plantations the enormous amount of hand labor required to grow and pick the cotton was supplied by great numbers of slaves this then was the economic background of the plantation cheap slave labor producing one main crop on vast tracts of land and wouldn't be possible without destroying the subsistence and low-skill production in india to create new markets where the english would export their extra cotton so in one sense growth from the beginning rests on colonization both for extracting resources labor and resources and also for expanding its market and when that enters in crisis when the soil gets exhausted when workers revolt because they want a higher pay then you move somewhere else capital moves somewhere else and this is how it works it works through crisis and moving somewhere else the problem we see now is that capital doesn't know where to go anymore because it's expanded in so many places it's still expanding spamming in africa especially now some places in asia but it's finally increasingly difficult to get this return to get this profit that's why they also invented all these financial products all these deliverables hedge funds bonds all this is a way to increase this this profit in this alternative economy which actually because it's so volatile and it actually depends on the real economy that we're living and some that when these calculations don't work well then we are the ones that pay for for these mistakes no and this is the the sort of embodiment really of a set of values that came from colonialism genocide slavery extraction and it's just manifested in this system it's this system is the best articulation of the old values that were exported from western europe to the rest of the world it is all the same they come for the resources we must protect the resources nothing has changed in 500 years it is the reason why we live after so many years of cultural genocide we must stand for that they are fighting every day and their relatives are being assassinated they are being killed for just protecting their lands or their their way of living their way of sustaining their lives what kind of progress is it to produce a world which is on the edge of destroying itself where people are increasingly radically insecure about their futures what kind of progress is it that brings about the sixth mass extinction so that we're exterminating approximately one species every 15 minutes there were other ways in which we could have conceptualized progress even within the dominant progress framework but also we can also question this framework and come question what progress means if we look at the history of international environmental policy i mean since the 70s there was a debate that was triggered by the limits to growth report the program was originally devised by a scientist working from the massachusetts institute of technology jay forrester it was developed under the auspices of the club of rome by an mit research team to present a complex model of the world and what we humans are doing to it most important lesson is that we're near the end of our development of society which you know we've been going on for about 2 000 years that we've reached levels of prosperity which carry the seeds of disruption and necessitate a complete re-look at the whole world social political and other situations so the debate at the time was really radical even at the mainstream level and for instance there was a questioning of the pathways of production and consumption in wealthy countries it was very clear that the focus should be the wealthy country that we should produce and consume less and that states needed to take action what is being suggested is that the only way to ensure the future for our grandchildren is to stop getting richer only then will there be the resources and the unpolluted world that they will need to survive the classic assumption that economic growth was what society had to do is being proven wrong it is obvious that our instabilities are caused by this endless attempt to increase output call it just output now our attempts have got to be directed to looking after people who haven't got anything and to reorganize reorganizing our own society so the mainstream really got afraid of this and the i the proposal for sustainable development in the 80s is the reaction to that is from the mainstream they were wondering how do we water down that radical critique that is coming from the environmentalists to the mainstream growth and development model 20 years ago some spoke of the limits to growth and today we realize that growth is the engine of change and the friend of the environment so suddenly the response to the environmental crisis if in the 70s it was very clear that it should be produced and consumed less in rich countries in the 80s it becomes oh no in poor countries they have to consume more more because you need to be rich in order to be green oh my energy sometimes i think i'm running out of energy seems like we use an awful lot for when we discuss about climate change we are basically discussing about energy discovered that coal would do it better mine is dark and it looks like it might just last forever energy essentially for climate change because carbon emissions depend on fossil fuels and there is a very strong relationship and it's a very complex one between energy and economic growth so of course the impressive economic growth that we have experienced since the industrial revolution in industrialized countries was thanks to the fact that we had fossil fuels available which was basically photosynthesis for millions of years bottled no concentrated into certain reserves of coal gas and oil so now in 100 years we are like burning like in a party the wine that we had been or nature had been producing during millions of years so the concept of green growth has been kicking around for a long time the idea that we can continue growing the economy while at the same time reducing our impact on the ecology we can carry on growing we can carry on consuming we can carry on using energy we just need to do it better the idea that you can have green growth but you can decouple that from the consumption of energy and therefore from co2 emission is very problematic first because when you plot on a graph gdp economic growth and carbon emission the two curves grows like this so there is a very strong we would say positive correlation in statistical terms and the more you burn fossil fuels the more the economy grows and the more you grow the more energy you need the idea is that we can carry on growing we can carry on um we can carry on growing the economy but we can detach that from our energy and consumption so it is we can carry on but we consume less and how we do that we do that but what i was saying by recycling and reducing more and doing it better the problem with that is that it hasn't happened one argument that is made is that you can burn fossil fuels more efficiently so you can do more with less energy this is partially true and it is true in relative terms it means that of course for a unit of gdp gross domestic product we are using less energy now than we used to do 50 years ago it's obvious the problem with that is that um it's been proved over the years that we use this energy energy that we save or the money that we save and we actually invest it in more consumption for example we have the light bulbs we invented this more efficient light bulbs the leads now and we think that's great we're gonna consume a lot less energy with them but what happens that because they consume less energy people leave them on all night so at the end you consume a lot more energy the same with tb screens they're a lot more efficient now but then we produce bigger 3d screens and the same with everything that we improve in efficiency so first argument that efficiency can be improved is problematic because we don't see any absolute effects that we are reducing the consumption of fossil fuels the other argument is that we can have renewable energy substituting fossil fuels but the trick is simply that is the time frame we have we have remaining to do this in because we have to work with the carbon budget for 1.5 degrees or 2 degrees as per the paris agreement which is an extremely small and shrinking budget and so the question is can we manage to reduce our emissions to zero without blowing the carbon budget for 1.52 degrees while at the same time growing the economy now the tricky bit about this is that as we grow the economy it requires more energy right so effectively the energy system that we have to transition over to renewables grows at the same time that we're trying to make that transition what we see right now empirically in the last decades is that the the renewable energies the energy that is generated is just adding up to the fossil fuels that is consumed so there is no sign for the moment that the energy that is produced with renewable energies is actually substituting fossil fuels the point is clear and that is that you know if we continue growing the energy system while shifting over to renewables not only does that make the task of making the transition much more difficult but also is going to involve you know an ever increasing amount of materials that will have to be extracted in order to produce these solar panels and wind turbines [Music] thinking that we can transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy without reducing the energy demand i think right now is really a fallacy it's like dream land is something that cannot be done so if we want to avoid climate climate catastrophe you know the fpcc scientists realized that we needed to lower absolutely lower our energy material consumption but that was that was a very risky there was a proposal that politicians that uh lobbies that companies weren't going to accept so they needed to come up with other solutions and the one that they rely primarily on uh is one called bex bioenergy with carbon capture and storage and basically it's it's quite amazing bags will imply big big plantations of trees who knows where obviously not here in the global north plantations of trees then you cut those trees you turn them into little pieces you transport them burn it for energy and power stations capture the co2 that gets emitted from those power stations uh solidify it and store it deep under the grounds and in doing so we basically have an energy system that not only does not emit co2 but actually pulls co2 out of the air because the biofuels draw co2 down as they grow the thing is anyway this hasn't been tested the the technology hasn't been tested we don't know even if it's gonna work um and yet it was such an alluring idea uh to policymakers that they began including it in all of these ipcc models um it was the only way they could find to reconcile the steep downward emissions trajectories that we need with a continuation of economic growth as we know it right so became kind of the savior technology for the possibility of green growth to limit warming to 1.5 degrees c we would need to start taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere during the 21st century the methods for doing this include planting trees bio energy combined with carbon capture and storage change land management as well as some novel approaches that are very early stages of development however carbon dioxide removal on a large scale could have implications for food security for ecosystems and for biodiversity there's a whole range of issues there clearly in the ipcc forecast or predictions or prognosis or whatever they call them for the 1.5 degree

report there's a lot of becks lot of biology and carbon sequestration in those scenarios and and they don't play out unless you got that there's huge uncertainties about whether that is a feasible and be desirable for a number of other reasons policymakers should not assume that they can relax and wait for some mythical technology that's going to suck carbon dioxide out of the air to be technologically feasible and affordable uh that may never happen it's an incredible gamble because if we rely on that on that hope and if it doesn't materialize then we're locked into a high temperature pathway from which we cannot escape this is the time to wake up this is the moment in history we need to be wide awake and yet wherever i go i seem to be surrounded by fairy tales business leaders elected officials all across the political spectrum spending their time making up and telling bedtime stories [Music] when i discovered the growth um i think that i kind of thought that it was the future and it was the most important thing we could do right now because many people is talking about many people politicians talking about alternatives to the system that we have now to the ways of production the ways of consumption the ways of moving through places but nobody is talking about reducing we have and co2 emissions rising we need to cut them the solutions that are proposed the technical solutions are not enough therefore we need to come up with ways to reduce in energy and consumption and this relates connects directly with the growth ideas the growth is hypothesis that we can live well in common in solidarity in conviviality and we didn't don't need so many materials and energy in other ways the growth is two things on one end it is a critique of the germany of growth of the idea that our society are centered around growth and we need growth to survive but it's also a proposal for something different and this would be in wealthy industrialized countries we would need to reduce production and consumption this would need to be democratically decided and we would not do this for the sake of doing it for the sake of reduction or anything we would notice keeping in mind that the horizon the objectives are well being ecological sustainability and social equity and so the whole field of de-growth scholarship is is organized around around thinking about what that looks like and at this point there's uh you know there's robust proposals for what for what a de-growth economy could look like that in fact um that we argue could deliver even higher levels of human weal of human well-being uh than people presently enjoy um in terms of what really matters you know to people in terms of health care and education and uh you know time with their families and relationships and leisure and so on overall consumer spending grew at a pace of 2.9 last quarter the best showing since 2007. but with 70 of all economic activity dependent on the consumer the holiday shopping season is seen as key for growth in the months ahead i just bought the things i wanted i just consumed what i wanted but i never thought if i was happy living like this you buy something in the shop it's calculated buying something in a shop it gives you 15 minutes happiness 15 minutes and at the end what gives you happiness is not those you know buying things we have high level of income we have another car we have a third house we have a kind of battery act we have a kind of and most importantly income increase we have a kind of higher profile job and within a couple of months we get used to that so our initial increase in happiness is actually lost and drops back to normal so one of the reasons is that we adopted all the material improvements in our lives but the other reason is that what matters for our well-being is not so much the absolute level of income that we gain but the relative level of income that we get in the sense of how much we have in comparison with the others we need to kind of constantly then go into the rat race of earning for more so that we can temporarily get another increase in happiness and then have to earn for more and have to run for more so that we can constantly get this kind of temporary increase in happiness so what happens is that our materialistic achievements don't really contribute to our well-being well this does not mean that income and material standards and material needs are not important for happiness of course they keep a happier this is why actually entering employment is extremely important happiness this means actually that once we cover our basic needs once we reach a certain level of threshold level of income all type of income increases afterwards just don't contribute to our satisfaction of life unless we are above everyone else but only few of us could be above everyone else and only for temporary amount of time ultimately if you ask people at maybe you could say at the end of their life or in moments of reflection what is important to you they're not going to say oh i have five cars and 20 houses it's i have the love of my children or the love of my nearest or my dog or whatever so those things are very important to us we're just not we're not valuing them in this profoundly deep way that i think we should be i guess there's a few core policies that would have to be at the heart of any d growth agenda and i think the very first and most obvious one is to shift away from gdp as a measure of economic progress um it was never intended uh to be a measure of progress uh it's relatively you know new in its use as a measure of progress and it's fundamentally destructive because it basically allows us to um to count significantly bad things as good things we have to change how we produce and circulate money one important intervention would be to control the lending of money from banks the way money is created right now it is created as loans and debt and there are interesting proposals under the banner of positive money or about the public money by mary mellor on how the state can take control of the supply of money directed in social and environmentally useful projects and not introduce money into society as that which then creates an imperative of growth in order to repay this debt money especially u.s based fiat currency is is the only thing that grows in perpetuity it makes no sense for that to be the case because then your requirement if you have a debt-based growth economy is for your growth rate to exceed your interest rate in order for that money to be valuable in order for that debt to be paid back and then you're in this perpetual cycle we're in three percent growth a year as we're told is the requirement means uh doubling of the global economy every 20 years want to sell 600 250 for sale so normally when when we have a kind of contraction scenario then uh then unemployment rises and this is a social catastrophe for people and so the easiest way to solve that problem is by shifting to a shorter working week by shortening the working week and that way you're able to make sure that the necessary labor in the economy is shared equally so that everybody is shared more equally so that everybody has access to uh you know to a job which is the main conduit for livelihood through wages right so as you shorten the working week make sure everybody has access to meaningful employment then at the same time you'd have to increase uh you know hourly wages to make sure that people you know at the same time as working less can still acquire the money they need to live good lives we might even consider them a sort of basic income or household income to support everyone to have enough time and resources available to take care of themselves and and their dependents without having to to depend on the vagaries of the market could you imagine seven or eight billion human beings freed from the toil of work and having the resources to do what they actually want to do we would have new media companies we'd have a revolution in regenerative agriculture we would have all sorts of solutions alternatives to the capitalist extractive way of living and then another one i really like about the growth is limiting publicity limiting and actually regulating all the obsolescence program obsolescence of products this is something it wouldn't be that difficult to do you could do that simply by having mandatory long-term lifespans for products with extended warranties a kind of right to repair so that instead of having to buy new products you can get them easily repaired it's quite feasible to have washing machines and refrigerators that lasts not five or ten years but 20 or 30 years and have iphones that are modular and repairable so that the same body you know lasts for 20 or 30 years and can be updated regularly without any additional material purchase [Music] the poor of the world look to economic growth for a way out of their poverty and their starvation and for us in the west it gives us the increasing standard of living we've grown to expect [Music] the crucial thing here is to recognize that there's a distinction between rich countries and poor nations and poor countries when it comes to the question of de-growth so so most advocates of d growth don't call for de-growth in in the global south or in poorer nations recognizing that in some nations you know an increase in aggregate gdp even might be necessary in order to generate the resources required for investing in healthcare and education and so on that's disputable by some people but what we do know for sure is that the growth has to happen in rich nations where you know extremely high levels of aggregate gdp and excess consumption are the primary drivers of ecological breakdown around the world so the growth implies acknowledgement and repayment of the ecological depths recognizing that ecological depth would imply huge redistribution of resources from the north to the south and by doing so by shifting income from the richest to uh to the poor into ordinary people then we're able to ensure that without any additional aggregate growth we can improve people's lives and uh people's existing needs okay so we already know for example that globally we can eradicate poverty at a high poverty line of say seven or eight dollars per day i'm ensuring that everybody has you know uh access to health care and education and good nutrition uh and shelter and so on simply by shifting extremely small fraction of global income from the richest it's about seven percent of the income of the top ten percent uh of the richest ten percent would be needed to end global poverty uh in a single stroke forever right this kind of redistribution approach is quite different from the dominant existing development approach which is grow the world economy and hope that some trickles down to the poor which of course is an ecologically insane approach to ending human misery the mantra of degrowth is that equality can be an antidote to the growth imperative if our goal is to um is to achieve certain social objectives of human well-being we can do that right now without any growth at all so the growth brings us to the basics but at the same time having a very emancipatory way of seeing the world because it also talks about social issues it also talks about care taking care of the land of the earth taking care of the people that surround you so it's like going to the basics so as to stop and say let's rethink the way in which humanity is progressing if we are progressing [Music] the biggest challenge is that the way our institutional systems are structured right now a lot of power rests with people who have money and the people who have money have a whole life structured about the fact that they do have money and their culture and their own sense of self appreciation or self valorization is linked around the function they have money and power i'm not going to lose that wealth i'm not going to lose it on on dreams on windmills which frankly aren't working too well obviously the one at the top now don't want that change because this will require some of them to lower lower the status this power status and this is going to be difficult we need to act now it's not too late to act but really we need to get moving 11 000 scientists from 153 countries are bolstering that claim governments of the world will also need to shift economic goals away from gdp growth to contain the massive consumption our modern lifestyle embraces we need to give up but do we need to give up on economic growth is that what's needed in order to achieve what you say is absolutely vital my own view is that it is but all these questions would be put to the citizens assembly that's the beauty of our proposal right all we're saying is look here's where we've got to get to you cannot negotiate with the atmosphere let's have a citizens assembly let's have the people to decide how we do it green growth is what we want we want to do it uh just like jess's uh car manufacturers looking at ways of bringing uh electricity it might be too late i'm not sure that they are really aware of the climate crisis and that and i i think that they are not aware of the solutions that we need because if you are realistic or if you listen to science science says that the technological solution is not possible in in the actual system so why do they insist that much in this solution if it's it's it's not possible a crucial part of what's happening right now is that the youth are rising up it's terrible that it has to be this way it's terrible that our children feel the need to go out of school and miss some of their learning to try to stand up to say look we want a future save our world it's terrible that our children are reduced in this way to begging for our lives but that's where we are one of the biggest things that anybody can learn from this youth climate movement right now um being built on in the work of indigenous black and brown communities is the fact that it is an issue of priorities the climate crisis because when we want to talk about economic growth over people having clean water and the right to a livable future and planet that is a sign that something is wrong [Music] you have this media apparatus and sort of the filter bubbles of the internet and all the algorithms of social media et cetera that make us feel like these are disparate uprisings that are based on individuals who wanted to stand up for their local community and of course it's much bigger than that what's happening with extinction rebellion and fridays for the future and occupy the african awakenings and the zapatista movement and java and kurdistan is these are the white blood cells of humanity responding to an immune system crisis and they're all connected by the same desires for a post-capitalist world a post-patriarchal world the post-colonialist world and yet we're told that these are separate one-off initiatives it's uh a process walk your talk if you want to change systems you have to start by changing self yeah any change any change will involve both cultural change and political change so you cannot have one without having the other so you cannot have a different politics without having people who are willing to support this politics and struggle for these politics to come true and also willing to to accept the changes that this politics bring the central issue is that it's a different value than than growth and that actually if you thought about care as a value as something that you actually could understand as why you're involved or engaged or relating to others then that would really shift our understanding of how economies operate because capitalism has been exploiting nature and it has been exploiting women as much as it has been exploiting workers so we need to realize this and we need to put this priority at the center of the picture which is gender equality and which is climate justice it's a mindset switch that we all have to make if we want to be able to create actual change because if we because we can talk about lowering carbon emissions all we want but if we're not prioritizing people if we're not prioritizing their problems and their lifestyles we're not creating sustainable solutions the prime minister of iceland catherine jacobs dottie has teamed up with scotland's nicola sturgeon and new zealand's jacinda arden to promote what they've done the well-being agenda it's meant to put social measurements like health and happiness ahead of traditional gdp figures we're fundamentally changing the way that we do policy making to make sure that we deliver on on wellbeing not just our economic success we tend to think about growth in in its natural surroundings as something very positive but we need to think about how is it achieved and what does it cost it is more important than ever that we ask and find the answers to those questions and promote a vision of society that has well-being not just wealth at its very heart i can see change when it's no longer native and non-native it's no longer the colonizer and the one to colonize it's no longer the christian and the anti-christian it is no longer the muslim in the anti-muslim it is just people and so i can start to see a vision a system change each in their own way in their own culture in their own sovereignty without interfering at anybody else's but being able to work together we are fighting the same fight no matter if you are school striking for the climate if you are protecting a forest from being cut down or if you are protesting protesting a pipeline it is the same fight across the world we are at a point in time where we are questioning the very things that have built up our daily lives what are the things right now that are causing this crisis like we are fighting here against against climate change or against inaction but we are seeing like the last part of the problem which is the global warming like the catastrophes that it is creating but they are seeing the cause which is extractivism exploitation of nature capitalism there is a sustainable solution if we do not criticize capitalism um [Music] [Applause] really the exploitation in the green that comes along with capitalism um is what we need to tackle and it's a personal decision to look that in the eye when we are talking about what matters to us it shouldn't be a question it should always it should always be my children the environment around me and the future and capitalism doesn't save your own friend like that it only saves money for economic growth it doesn't make sense [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] that you would like [Music] satisfy your deepest dreams [Music] and if you are the righteous [Music] see the [Music] [Music] we cannot drink the water the seven generations are the sons and daughters together all your this is [Music] rise up from the earth [Music] stand up like a mountain [Music] is [Music] [Music] rise up if you up are [Music] [Music] too [Music] you

2021-01-06 14:55

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