We’ve always said that environmentalism needs to understand class if it wants to protect the world from climate catastrophe. Degrowth has been accused by some on the Left as green austerity, or just a terrible political message.
To debunk degrowth myths and to discuss why class is at the heart of any just transition and a degrowth economy, we are join by Jason Hickel. Jason is the author of “Less is More: How Degrowth with Save the World” and is a world leading scientist and scholar on degrowth.
We discuss how class politics and environmentalism should work in tandem, why capitalism can’t stop the climate crisis, why Universal Basic Services (UBS) are at the heart of a degrowth economy, how trade unions need to remember their radical past and how the EU conference on Beyond Growth is opening the doors for more radical policy in Europe.
Jason Hickel is an author and Professor at the Institute for Environmental Science & Technology (ICTA-UAB) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He is also a Visiting Professor at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He serves on the Climate and Macroeconomics Roundtable of the US National Academy of Sciences, the advisory board of the Green New Deal for Europe, the Rodney Commission on Reparations and Redistributive Justice, and the Lancet Commission on Sustainable Health. Jason's research focuses on political economy, inequality, and ecological economics, which are the subjects of his two most recent books: The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions (Penguin, 2017), and Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (Penguin, 2020), which was listed by the Financial Times and New Scientist as a book of the year.
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