There is no such thing as green growth, the newspaper headlined above an interview with Jason Hickel, an economist who has been drawing attention for some time to his statement that both-and cannot be done. It’s, he says, either keep buying and making and wishing for things, or avoid ecological collapse.
There’s probably something in that. If you think through the statement, it is not just about purchasing a BMW Z4 or a plane trip to Isla Margarita, but also about the development and implantation of artificial hearts and all kinds of other high-tech care.
A ban on the former can perhaps count on some sympathy (a Z4 fulfills the bourgeois desires of the fallen mask millionaire), but I doubt whether you will get people warm for the latter (more sober care). Because if you ask around, many people are very fond of the polar bears, but they also want to be 100. Becoming poorer at all – curbing the logical consequence of economic growth, or even stopping it altogether, as Hickel advocates – is considered unacceptable. Just listen to the begging for ‘compensation’, as soon as the prices rise a bit faster than normal.
That is why we have always been told that everything is possible, that there is win-win. That you can save the world while driving, a matter of buying a Nissan Leaf. That you don’t have to make painful fundamental choices, because the pain can always be organized away. Lies, of course, but without deceit life is unbearable. Marketing is based on this kind of bottle-dragging: losing weight without exercise, lottery without stapling, free without consequences!
So we will continue to hear it after the new IPCC report, which vividly illustrates the ecological collapse that Hickel refers to: that both-and can. A question of clean and efficient growing. The movement that calls itself the ‘green right’ firmly believes in this.
In many issues it has been maintained for far too long that making fundamental choices is not necessary. That you can do one and not have to do the other.
That you can both hang on to the Russian gas infusion, and punitively address Putin about polonium tea or murdered journalists.
That you can both let the filthy, corruption-smoked and blood-soaked money flow from the dirtiest caves in the world through your letterboxes and along your shiny Zuidas, and make a big mouth about human rights or ‘corporate social responsibility’.
That you can both cry at Olympic gold, and say wringing your hands that it can’t be like this, with those poor Uyghurs.
That you, as an ‘involved idealist’, can organize mouth caps ‘free of charge’ together, and can earn 9 million.
That you can be both a measly dickpic sender and be the great leader and visionary.
That you can sit on Facebook for free, demand free access to all the information in the world, and keep all your private data out of the clutches of the devil.
That you can accommodate South American drug money, snort coke, be a proud ‘distribution country’ and a sacred ‘hub’ for everything that can be traded, with your Schiphol and your Port of Rotterdam, and that you can light candles for Peter R. de freeze.
That you can both build the greatest yachts for Russian oligarchs, let them run their course unhindered, and now walk with tears in your eyes praising the ‘brave, honourable’ men of Ukraine.
You can keep it up for a while in such a split, but one day you will come for coffee.