Sufficiency and decarbonization -- how much is enough?
How much is enough for a good life without undermining the possibilities for others to live a good life? The search for pathways to low carbon futures, including my own work, has been preoccupied with the role of resource efficiency, reliance on renewable flows of energy, and technological innovation. But what about the underlying intensity of consumption? The inadequacy of GDP growth as a goal for or an indicator of sustainable social development is driving the search for post-growth or de-growth alternatives, for new narratives of prosperity that are not subverted by inherent ecological limits. I recently collaborated with Anders Hayden (author of When Green Growth is Not Enough) in a presentation to the International Sustainability Transitions Conference where we scratch the surface of the question: Sufficiency: A Missing Ingredient in Accelerating Decarbonization in Canada?
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5 年Very inspiring. About the questions on the last slide, is there a sufficiency approach to recovery of waste heat? Promoting waste heat recovery as a "renewable" resource might disencourage process efficiency improvement. And it might also improve the economics of some activities that could be seen as new, "excessive" or for which alternatives exist, such as crypto-asset mining.