The study - Is green growth happening? An empirical analysis of achieved versus Paris-compliant CO2–GDP decoupling in high-income countries - identified 11 high-income countries that achieved “absolute decoupling” between 2013 and 2019: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

The analysis showed that the emission reductions achieved in these countries fell dramatically short of the rates required to comply with the Paris Agreement.

At the achieved rates, the 11 countries would on average take over 200 years to get their emissions close to zero, and would overall emit more than 27 times their fair-shares of the global carbon budget for 1.5 °C.

Jefim Vogel, from the Sustainability Research Institute at Leeds and the lead author, said: “There is nothing green about this. It is a recipe for climate breakdown and further climate injustice. Calling such insufficient emission reductions green growth is highly misleading, it is greenwashing.

[...] Professor Jason Hickel, from the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and co-author of the study, added: “The pursuit of aggregate economic growth in high-income countries makes it virtually impossible to achieve the required emission reductions.

“If high-income countries are to meet their Paris obligations, they should pursue post-growth strategies: scale down energy-intensive and less-necessary forms of production, reduce the consumption of the rich, shift from private cars to public transit. This reduces energy demand and enables us to decarbonise much faster.

“We also need to accelerate renewable energy deployment and efficiency improvements with public financing. Post-growth can help by liberating productive capacities – factories, labour, materials – that can be remobilized to achieve urgent social and ecological goals.

“Policies like a green job guarantee can be used for this, ending unemployment and ensuring adequate livelihoods for all. We should focus the economy on what is required for wellbeing, fairness, and ecological sustainability.”

https://www.leeds.ac.uk/news-environment/news/article/5393/green-growth-not-happening-in-high-income-countries

If you want to show that growth is genuinely green, you must bring evidence that GDP has decoupled from all environmental pressures. After five years actively searching for this particular proof, I have never seen anyone managing to do tha

[...] In the largest systematic review of the decoupling literature (835 articles), Haberl et al. (2020) synthesise all the studies looking at decoupling rates of PIB from greenhouse gases in high-income countries during the last decade. Using production-based indicators, there is indeed absolute decoupling: with 1 additional point of GDP comes -0.04 points of emissions. Minuscule but absolute. But if one uses consumption-based indicators instead, the absolute decoupling disappears: 1 additional point of GDP brings +0.22 points of emissions.

One final observation. Footprints are difficult to calculate as they require sophisticated global models. I can speak for France because that’s a country I know fairly well. Based on the Global Carbon Project data (the data used by Our world in data), France reduced its consumption-based emissions by 25% from 1995 (500 million tons, 8.7 ton per person) to 2021 (375 million tons, 5.8 tons per person). But this is far-away from reality. Looking at more refined and recent data from the French government, we get a slightly different picture. The carbon footprint in 1995 was 11 tons per person, 26% higher than the Our World in Data / Global Carbon Project estimation, and the one in 2021 was 8.9 tons, 53% higher. The difference is substantial. The -25% reduction announced by Our World in Data is actually only a -9% reduction, so 2,7 times smaller

[...] When it comes to the decoupling we need to effectively address the multiple biocrises of today, all scientific evidence confirm that it hasn’t happened yet. Being precautious, we should not expect much more than what we already had, that is relative decoupling with rare situations of often local and temporary – and in any case meagre – absolute decoupling of a few isolated resources or impacts. I say this without a celebratory grin. I actually wish green growth existed. Of course, there are also social issues linked to economic growth, but taking ecosystems out of the picture would simplify the problem, or at least give us more time to solve it. I have no sentimental prejudice here, it just feels so irresponsibly foolish to bet the survival of humanity on a highly improbable miracle. My worry is that we’re losing precious time arguing that maybe, one day, perhaps, if-this-if-that, decoupling could happen. In the meantime, we are merely tinkering with a system that should be radically transformed.

The story of decoupling is reassuring; it’s a don’t worry, everything is fine, everything is going to be okay kind of thing to say. And this is precisely why that story is dangerous. As ecosystems are getting nightmarishly worse, the fable of green growth is acting as a kind of macroeconomic greenwashing, especially when mobilised to discredit other, more radical solutions to the ecological crisis.

https://timotheeparrique.com/a-response-to-paul-krugman-growth-is-not-as-green-as-you-might-think/

we find that the collective action requests and tattling to superiors requests generate higher levels of responsiveness from Chinese local governments than the simple denoscription of economic hardship; however, the identification as a Party loyalist, does not increase responsiveness substantially. With the baseline request, we received responses from approximately one third of counties. To put this number in context, one third is higher than responsiveness of U.S. state legislators to constituents (~20%) but lower than the responsiveness among members the U.S. congress (~40%) on certain issues. Adding the intention of collective action and tattling to superiors both increase response rates by 8-10 percentage points.

The second finding is that the collective action requests, compared with other types of requests, made the local government respond in a more public manner. This could be because local official are really concerned about social instability or because they believe responding publicly is a low-cost strategy to resolve similar problems among many citizens.

Third, we also find that local officials are more likely to provide pertinent and concrete information to citizens when receiving the collective action requests.

https://chinadatalab.ucsd.edu/viz-blog/sources-of-responsiveness/

However, the analysis, published on Wednesday, shows that centre-left parties promising, for example, to be tough on immigration or public spending are unlikely to attract potential voters on the right, and risk alienating existing progressive supporters.

“Voters tend to prefer the original to the copy,” said Tarik Abou-Chadi, an associate professor of European politics at the University of Oxford and the co-founder of the Progressive Politics Research Network (PPRNet), which launched on Wednesday.

[...] Björn Bremer of the Central European University in Vienna said a survey in Spain, Italy, the UK and Germany and larger datasets from 12 EU countries showed that since the financial crisis of 2008, “fiscal orthodoxy” had been a vote loser for the centre left.

“Social democratic parties that have backed austerity fail to win the support of voters worried about public debt, and lose the backing of those who oppose austerity,” Bremer said. “Centre-left parties that actually impose austerity lose votes.”

[...] Fiscal orthodoxy – cutting taxes, capping spending, limiting public debt – worked for social democratic parties such as Tony Blair’s New Labour and Gerhard Schröder’s SPD in Germany, but that was “a period of relative stability and growth”, he said.

“We’re now in a different era. The data strongly suggests centre-left parties can build a coalition of voters who believe a strong welfare state, effective public services and real investment, for example in the green transition, are essential,” Bremer said.

[...] Similarly, said Matthias Enggist of the University of Lausanne, analysis of data from eight European countries showed no evidence that welfare chauvinism – broadly, restricting immigrants’ access to welfare – was a successful strategy for the left.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/jan/10/adopting-rightwing-policies-does-not-help-centre-left-win-votes

BRUSSELS — European Union negotiators reached an agreement Friday on the European Media Freedom Act, the bloc's new set of rules aimed at safeguarding the independence of newsrooms and fostering media pluralism.

The new law will introduce requirements for media to provide transparency over ownership and funding and it will force national governments to set up an oversight system that guarantees editorial freedom, including for public media. It also requires checks on mergers and sets up a new European watchdog to oversee it all.

[...] The media freedom proposal was presented by the Commission in September 2022 in a bid to counter media concentration and limits on editorial independence in parts of the EU. It has met a lot of resistance from national governments that feared the law would hurt their powers to oversee the media sector.

https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-negotiators-reach-agreement-on-media-law-to-curb-spying-on-reporters/

"Students will learn none of this from a 1619 Project that has botched the history of the slave economy, misconstrued the origins of Northern economic development, erased the history of antislavery, and rendered emancipation irrelevant. And, having failed in all these ways, the 1619 Project leaves its readers ignorant of one of the great problems in the history of the United States, indeed of the modern world. The problem can be stated succinctly: capitalism gave rise to both slavery and antislavery. Put differently, slavery became a problem within the history of capitalism. [...] The problem of slavery is not that it was a forerunner of modern capitalism. It wasn’t. The problem is not that slavery “fueled” the economic growth of the North. It didn’t. The problem, all along, was capitalism itself. And once the problem of slavery was resolved by the Civil War and emancipation, there remained, and still remains, the problem of capitalism."

https://jacobin.com/2023/12/1619-project-jake-silverstein-history-distorted-slavery-race/

With our co-authors, Dr. Patrick Holder and Dr. Haris Tabakovic, today we published a working paper that estimates the amount of money that Meta and Google should pay US news publishers for the value of the journalism and information they produce. Based on our analysis, we estimate that fair compensation by the platforms to US publishers would amount to as much as $13.9 billion a year.

https://www.techpolicy.press/google-and-meta-owe-us-publishers-14-billion-a-year/