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Jason Hickel QUOTES

Jason Hickel QUOTES

1 " If for whatever reason we don’t manage to stabilise the climate – a real possibility – nuclear sites will be vulnerable to severe storms, rising seas and other disasters that could turn them into radiation bombs. With climate breakdown bearing down on us, relying too much on nuclear could become a dangerous gamble. "

― Jason Hickel , Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

2 " When we hear the phrase ‘clean energy’ it normally calls to mind happy, innocent images of warm sunshine and fresh wind. But while sunshine and wind are obviously clean, the infrastructure we need to capture it is not. Far from it. The transition to renewables is going to require a dramatic increase in the extraction of metals and rare-earth minerals, with real ecological and social costs. "

― Jason Hickel , Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

3 " The most important area of domination [is] the mental universe of the colonised, the control, through culture, of how people perceive themselves and their relationship to the world. "

― Jason Hickel , Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

4 " In the late 1970s, growth in Western economies began to slow down and returns on capital began to decline. Governments came under pressure to do something about it – to create a ‘fix’ for capital. So they attacked unions and gutted labour laws in order to drive the cost of wages down, and they privatised public assets that had previously been off limits to capital – mines, railways, energy, water, healthcare, telecommunications and so on – creating lucrative opportunities for private investors. "

― Jason Hickel , Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

5 " The vast majority of major, collaborative infrastructure projects around the world have been guided by government policy and funded by public resources: sanitation systems, road systems, railway networks, public health systems, national power grids, the postal service. These are not the spontaneous outcomes of market forces, much less of abstract growth. Projects like these require public investment. Once we realise this, it becomes clear that we can fund the transition quite easily by directing existing public resources from, say, fossil fuel subsidies (which presently stand at $5.2 trillion, 6.5% of global GDP) and military expenditure ($1.8 trillion) into solar panels, batteries and wind turbines. "

― Jason Hickel , Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

6 " Economists have always recognised that some kind of initial accumulation was necessary for the rise of capitalism. Adam Smith called this ‘previous accumulation’, and claimed that it came about because a few people worked really hard and saved their earnings– an idyllic tale that still gets repeated in economics textbooks. But historians see it as naïve. This was no innocent process of saving. It was a process of plunder. "

― Jason Hickel , Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

7 " Rzecz w tym, że rozwój kapitalizmu i rewolucja przemysłowa w Europie nie wzięły się znikąd. Stały się one możliwe dzięki towarom produkowanym przez niewolników na terenach zagrabionych skolonizowanym ludom oraz przetwarzanym w fabrykach obsadzonych europejskimi chłopami, których siłą pozbawiono dostępu do ziemi przez grodzenia. Zwykle rozpatrujemy każdy z tych procesów osobno, tymczasem wszystkie one były elementami tego samego projektu i opierały się na tej samej logice. Grodzenia stanowiły proces kolonizacji wewnętrznej, kolonizacja zaś była w istocie procesem ogradzania. Europejscy chłopi zostali wyzuci z ziemi tak samo jak rdzenni Amerykanie (choć trzeba przyznać, że tych ostatnich spotykał o wiele gorszy los — nie przyznawano im żadnych praw, a nieraz nawet negowano ich człowieczeństwo). Handel niewolnikami zaś to nic innego jak grodzenie i kolonizacja ludzkich ciał, zawłaszczanych tak jak ziemia w celu akumulacji nadwyżki i tak jak ziemia traktowanych jako czyjaś własność. "

― Jason Hickel , Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

8 " When capital has bumped up against limits to profit-growth in the past, it has found fixes in things like colonisation, structural adjustment programmes, wars, restrictive patent laws, nefarious debt instruments, land grabs, privatisation, and enclosing commons like water and seeds. Why would it be any different this time? Indeed, a study by the ecological economist Beth Stratford finds that when capital faces resource constraints, this is exactly what happens: it turns to aggressive rent-seeking behaviour. It seeks to grab existing value wherever it can, with clever mechanisms to suck income and wealth from the public domain into private hands, and from the poor to the rich, exacerbating inequality. "

― Jason Hickel , Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

9 " If your economy requires people to consume things they don't need or even want, and to do more of it each year than the year before, just in order to keep the whole edifice from collapsing, then you need a different economy "

― Jason Hickel

10 " As ecological breakdown triggers tipping points, as agricultural output declines, as mass displacement undermines political stability, and as cities are ruined by rising seas, the environmental, social and material infrastructure that underpins the possibility of growth – and indeed the possibility of organised civilisation – will fall apart. "

― Jason Hickel , Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

11 " We know exactly what we need to do in order to avert climate breakdown. We need to mobilise a rapid rollout of renewable energy – a global Green New Deal – to cut world emissions in half within a decade and get to zero before 2050. Keep in mind that this is a global average target. High-income nations, given their greater responsibility for historical emissions, need to do it much more quickly, reaching zero by 2030. It is impossible to overstate how dramatic this is; it is the single most challenging task that humanity has ever faced. The good news is that it is absolutely possible to achieve. But there’s a problem: scientists are clear that it cannot be done quickly enough to keep temperatures under 1.5°C, or even 2°C, if we keep growing the economy at the same time. Why? Because more growth means more energy demand, and more energy demand makes it all the more difficult – impossible, in fact – to roll out enough renewables to cover it in the short time we have left. "

― Jason Hickel , Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

12 " Our economic system is structurally dependent on growth, it serves the interests of the most powerful factions of our society, and it is rooted in a deep-seated world view of dominion and dualism that goes back some 500 years. This edifice will not yield easily. Not even to science. "

― Jason Hickel , Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

13 " Ecosystems are complex networks. They can be remarkably resilient under stress, but when certain key nodes begin to fail, knock-on effects reverberate through the web of life. This is how mass extinction events unfolded in the past. It’s not the external shock that does it – the meteor or the volcano: it’s the cascade of internal failures that follows. It can be difficult to predict how this kind of thing plays out. Things like tipping points and feedback loops make everything much riskier than it otherwise might be. This is what makes climate breakdown so concerning. "

― Jason Hickel , Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

14 " Clean energy might help deal with emissions, but it does nothing to reverse deforestation, overfishing, soil depletion and mass extinction. A growth-obsessed economy powered by clean energy will still tip us into ecological disaster. "

― Jason Hickel , Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

15 " Under capital’s growth imperative, there is no horizon – no future point at which economists and politicians say we will have enough money or enough stuff. There is no end, in the double sense of the term: no maturity and no purpose. The unquestioned assumption is that growth can and should carry on for ever, for its own sake. It is astonishing, when you think about it, that the dominant belief in economics holds that no matter how rich a country has become, their GDP should keep rising, year after year, with no identifiable end point. "

― Jason Hickel , Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

16 " As societies become more egalitarian, people feel less pressure to pursue ever-higher incomes and more glamorous status goods. This liberates people from the treadmill of perpetual consumerism. "

― Jason Hickel , Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

17 " Today, nearly every government in the world, rich and poor alike, is focused single-mindedly on GDP growth. This is no longer a matter of choice. In a globalised world where capital can move freely across borders at the click of a mouse, nations are forced to compete with one another to attract foreign investment. Governments find themselves under pressure to cut workers’ rights, slash environmental protections, open up public land to developers, privatise public services – whatever it takes to please the barons of international capital in what has become a global rush towards self-imposed structural adjustment. All of this is done in the name of growth. "

― Jason Hickel , Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

18 " [For the past forty years], guided by the dogmas of neoliberalism, governments have privatised public services, slashed social spending, cut wages and labour protections, handed tax cuts to the richest and sent inequality soaring. In an age of climate breakdown, we need to be doing exactly the opposite. "

― Jason Hickel , Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

19 " Atmospheric carbon concentration should not breach 350ppm if the climate is to remain stable (we crossed that boundary in 1990, and hit 415ppm in 2020). "

― Jason Hickel , Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

20 " It is politically easier to rev up GDP and hope some of it trickles down to the poor than it is to distribute existing income more fairly. "

― Jason Hickel , Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World