Samuel Miller McDonald

At its most distilled, “degrowth” refers to a process of reducing the material impact of the economy on the world’s many imperiled ecologies, abandoning GDP as a measurement of well-being, and forging an equitable steady-state economy.

One of the protesters called out to the crowd gathered on Waterloo Bridge, “If you’ve ever wondered what you would have done during the Second World War, this is your answer.” Fighting evil in the 1940s was not a peaceful, niche enterprise. Doing so today must not be either.

The fact is, there is no “best thing” and there are no easy little tweaks that will amount to mitigating climate change. We each have to do a lot.

A recent debate in twitter’s climate community illuminated a schism between those arguing that mitigating climate change is impossible and those exhorting others to continue to “fight” climate change.

You and I are witnessing the twenty-first century’s great crime: a global holocaust whose first victims have already perished. Fossil energy economies are doing this. They transform the world into a deathly, suffocating hothouse sabotaging the climate and atmosphere. That’s what they do.

Despite the legitimate concerns surrounding a guaranteed income, there is at least one self-evident ethical reason a guaranteed, non-labor income of no less than equivalent to a living wage (today about $15 per hour) should pay every American: most today suffer a state of forced labor.