Episode 295 – Degrowth Through Social Movements with Erin Remblance

[00:00:44] Steve Grumbine: All right, folks, this is Steve with Macro and Cheese. My guest today is Erin Remblance. She’s a Sydney-based [Australia] researcher, activist, co-founder of (re)biz and Project Tipping Point, and founder of the Healthy Habits Challenge. You can check out her Substack, which I’ll let her tell you more about here in a little bit.

But what we’re going to talk to you all about is degrowth. We’ve had Jason Hickelⁱ on, we’ve had Lorenz Keyszer on, uh, we’ve had a number of people – Colleen Schneider, Christopher Olk. Folks, we’re talking to people that are purpose-driven that are providing some direction to all this wonderful econ that we have. But we’ve got to have a planet to live on and we’ve got to have peaceful world to live in.

And we’ve got to have the basics covered. And so this is kind of the intent of this podcast is to revisit some of the basics of degrowth. And I think that people, when they understand it better, they will let the jarring title of “degrowth” go. And they will focus on the substantive analysis and the substantive directions and critique of capitalism. The critique of the way that we’re blowing past the Earth’s boundaries. Our planetary boundaries are being overshot wildly.

And there are answers, right? It’s just not like the wild, wild West, we truly have some answers. And degrowth, I believe, is a well-considered strategy when leveraged with Modern Monetary Theory, we might just be able to get out of this thing. We might be able to mitigate it if we take good swift action. And so I want you all to be as armed as possible with information.

And that’s why I’ve brought on my guest. Erin, welcome to the show.

[00:02:28] Erin Remblance: Thanks so much for having me.

[00:02:30] Steve Grumbine: Absolutely. So, I stumbled on to your Twitter feed, interestingly enough, and your Substack. And I’ve been really enjoying this presentation. Your pinned post, I know you’ve recently updated it, but it, was so well put together. And so just kind of concise and it kind of leaves a breadcrumb trail for people to really get a feel for what degrowth is all about.

Why don’t we have you introduce yourself a little bit about what you do and why this matters to you. And then we’ll dive into your presentation and kind of lay it out for everyone so that they can have it at their fingertips.

[00:03:07] Erin Remblance: Yeah, cool. Thank you. As you said in your introduction, I’m Sydney based, I’m married, I have three medium-sized children, not so small anymore. And I think everyone’s got that moment. I think most people probably have that moment when they realized things were much worse than they initially thought.

And that was for me not quite six years ago when the IPCC released their special report into 1. 5 degrees of warming. I was reading an article by David Wallace Wells, who’s also written The Uninhabitable Earthⁱⁱ. And the title of that article was, the UN Says Climate Genocide Is Coming.

Actually, it’s worse than that. And I was reading and I was going, it’s so bad. I sort of knew things were bad. I I’d been watching stuff I’d been learning, I knew things weren’t great, but I sort of had this sense that it was being taken care of. Maybe that governments had signed the Paris agreement, that things were going to go in the right direction.

And that was just such a huge wake-up call for me. In that moment, I decided not to ignore it anymore and not to turn a blind eye. And pretty much every day since then, I’ve been trying to do something. And it always feels inadequate. It never feels enough. But, then I sort of think if we’re all trying to do something, that’s when we get momentum in the right direction.

So I try not to let that feeling of not being enough stop me from doing what I think is probably, is the right thing to do. and so the last six years have been mostly, it started out as climate activism. And then you realize that actually it’s more than just climate. And the biodiversity crisis is no less urgent.

And they’re all related. They all have the same root cause. And it was maybe, I think three years ago now, I read Jason Hickel’s Less Is Moreⁱⁱⁱ. And then I read everything I could get my hands on, on the topic of degrowth. Which is, um, Tim Jackson’s Prosperity Without Growth^iv and Post Growth^v. And Anitra Nelson, she’s an Australian academic, she’s got a couple of books on the topic. And I was just reading and reading and reading. I was following Timothée Parrique, Giorgos Kallis, and Julia Steinberger.

All of these academics. Anyone I could just learn from. I was trying to absorb it all. I was reposting their work. I was writing about the things that I could connect in my head about their work. So that’s where my Substack comes in, which is mostly on the topic of degrowth.

And then we launched a course last January of 2023. It’s not solely about degrowth, but degrowth is definitely plays a role in the four week online course we’ve got called, Reconnecting Business with Earth. So that’s where these introduction to degrowth slides sort of came from. Because I was talking on the topic a lot, I was getting asked to give a presentation on the topic. So That’s where my interest in degrowth came from.

I don’t know if this sort of applies to you, but I find that my different areas of focus change a little bit over time. So, I was posting about degrowth, I’m mostly active on LinkedIn. And it was getting a lot of traction. It was making sense to people. So mostly people were like, well, it makes sense, but how do we make it happen? And so I started exploring social tipping points, which I think is for me, the most viable option to seeing this happen in time, I guess. And so we created Project Tipping Point, which is about how to accelerate and engineer social tipping points.

And then through that, I’m really interested in that side of things. I was like, well, you know, that’s all good and well, but what am I doing to accelerate social tipping points? And so I’ve recently created the Healthy Habits Challenge. Cause I still see agriculture and diet and consumption of animal products as being nowhere near a social tipping point that we need to reach if we’re to implement policies aligned with degrowth.

So, that’s a summary of my six years of doing this sort of work.

[00:06:33] Steve Grumbine: Well, one of the things that I’ve really struggled with, there’s a bit of a good liberal, neoliberal kind of atomization. They try to place the blame and the solutions at the individual level. And one of the things that I got from Jason Hickel, which I found to be really important was, while it’s certainly fine and well for us to modify our own personal behaviors to align with our values,

the real issues are at a much higher level. I mean, the entire concept of capitalism is creating this like, bullet train towards destruction with bad metrics that people are constantly trying to grow their business and destroy the climate through a constant perpetual cycle of growth. And the military, my goodness, the military of the United States alone. We have 900 bases around the world that if we were more focused on peace would probably have much less of a carbon footprint. Much less of a destructive force in the world.

But instead we have polluted the world to the extreme. So the balance that I find with degrowth, for me anyway, at this point has been [that] individuals have been told from day one, Hey, recycle. Hey, you know, vegan living is good. We got to get away from this mass produced beef, cattle industry and so forth.

But, at the end of the day, we require a mass mobilization to address this. And I think that your presentation really kind of lays a lot of that out as well. I mean, starting with GDP [Gross Domestic Product] as a poor metric. And Jason Hickel came out and said, Hey, look, we need a dashboard approach. You know? And I know that folks like Steven Hail and Phil Lawn have more of a genuine prosperity index as their approach.

What are your thoughts on GDP? I know that’s like the first slide, so I’m kind of laying the breadcrumb trails out there for folks to look at your presentation. But talk to us a little bit about why GDP is such a poor metric.

[00:08:39] Erin Remblance: So yeah, just going back to what you were saying, I fully agree that this is this moment requires a political movement. Like the definition of degrowth that’s in the slides and who we talk to is degrowth is a democratic  and planned reduction in energy and material throughput.

So that element of it being democratic necessarily means that whilst this has to be systemic change, it has to originate from the people. So I guess that fine line of, we need to create these new values and behaviors so that we can see it happen through a political movement. Because, otherwise, you know, just telling people to use less, but no one actually wants to use less.

It means when it comes to making these decisions, like, you know, no one’s going to give up red meat because everyone’s eating red meat every day. So I think tying the two together is A, you don’t stop at individual actions. Like that’s woefully inadequate. But without seeding these new values and things, particularly when it comes to diet, I think energy use is a little bit different. Because I’m still going to drive my car until I can ride my bike safely. And that has to happen.

You know, that probably has to change systemically first before I’m going to, you know, put my life on the line because there’s no safe ways to ride a bike where I am. So I guess, you know, every, every aspect of those industries that are polluting probably has a slightly different strategy to get there, I think.

But yeah, in terms of GDP, like it’s just a woefully inadequate metric. Once you understand how horrible it is, it’s astounding that we’ve used it for so long. And then, I guess you realize it’s not that astounding because it serves the people who benefit from it very well. And they don’t want to change.

But yeah, the quote that’s on slide 3 of the deck^vi. It’s from Robert F. Kennedy back in 1968. Do you mind if I read it out?

[00:10:12] Steve Grumbine: Oh, please do.

[00:10:13] Erin Remblance: Okay. So he said in a speech in 1968^vii, he said the gross national product, which is the GDP before it was GDP, does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit, nor our courage, neither our wisdom, nor our learning, neither our compassion, nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short except that which makes life worthwhile.

Um, and consider that Simon Kuznets, who created the metric back in the World War II days, he said, this should not be used as a measure to infer the welfare of a nation. Like he didn’t think it was a good way to determine how welfare of a nation was doing, and yet we’ve used it for 70 years. It’s sort of crazy.

People know this, like, I don’t think that this is new information to people. You just have to look at the inequality charts and see how much inequality is growing to realize that just focusing on GDP is very short sighted. yeah.

[00:11:14] Steve Grumbine: GDP is such a weird metric too, right? It is like an indiscriminate metric of all economic activity. That means every time a private prison crops up and they, jail new people, they’re getting new money. That’s part of GDP. Each time there’s some like tornado or, or hurricane that comes through and sweeps away a city and they rebuild the city. That’s GDP. you know, oil spills, that’s GDP.

So it doesn’t really say anything. It’s just all economic output indiscriminately. So, the more it grows, it’s, it doesn’t tell you anything really, does it?

[00:11:54] Erin Remblance: Exactly… like you can take out some of those natural disasters, which I guess that you can consider anomalies or, something like that. But really the purpose of the metric is to ensure that we’re selling . . . Well, the financial transactions are growing, you know, year on year or, period on period.

So what that ultimately means is that we’re turning more of nature into dead commodities so that we can sell them. So that we can grow GDP like it’s, literally, consuming the nature on which we depend. And another way you can grow your GDP is to commodify things that weren’t previously commodified.

Like you can see that in our daily lives. Now, childcare is commodified. Whereas 50 years ago, we would have mostly looked after children within the families or, you know, the neighborhood. Healthcare becomes commodified. Everything becomes commodified because it’s good for GDP. Even though it’s not really good for the welfare of people who live under that economic system.

[00:12:44] Steve Grumbine: That’s very well said. I really liked the way you said that. I’m very interested in the material footprint tied to GDP. Help me understand that.

[00:12:54] Erin Remblance: Yeah, this is a really important one. And, um, I think it’s really important because it gets a little bit ignored in my experience. I talk about it in the slides. But if you’ve got a bit of a carbon tunnel vision and you’re just looking at carbon, carbon being the most important metric, because climate change is very, very important, I’m not trying to downplay how important it is, but, people then focus on, well, how do we decarbonize energy?

Because then we’re ticking the box on carbon, but you’ve got to acknowledge that GDP and material footprint are also highly correlated. And material footprint is essentially, you know, all the metals we dig up all the rainforest we cut down for timber, all the fish we pull up from the ocean, or the fossil fuels we bring up so that we can, grow the economy. Like it’s all the things we’re using. And you know, there’s circularity in there. We can make things more circular, but we can’t make everything circular. And while we continue to grow the economy, we’re going to continue to grow material footprint. And that’s something we can’t ignore.

[00:13:47] Steve Grumbine: You said that energy is very nearly tied to it in the same way. I could definitely see energy and I know people like Steve Keen have focused on energy and production and energy in terms of measurement of economic activity. Help me understand that from your vantage point here as it ties to GDP.

[00:14:07] Erin Remblance: Yeah. So there’s something like a ninety-nine point nine percent correlation between energy use and GDP. It’s Steven Keen, actually. Do you know his quote? It goes something along the lines of, machinery without energy Is a statue and humans without energy is a corpse. You know, have you familiar with that quote of his?

[00:14:23] Steve Grumbine: I am. I’ve had him on a bunch of times. So that’s just so funny.

[00:14:26] Erin Remblance: So true. Like we don’t acknowledge how much energy we need, even as humans, we need to consume things so we can do more and more. So when we’re growing our GDP, we’re not necessarily increasing our energy use. And yes, we can take the edge off that by renewable energy, but the people who study this day in day out, say we can’t decarbonize enough.

We can’t replace our fossil fueled energy with renewables in time to achieve the Paris targets. So, you know, like there’s just a limit to how much we can decarbonize in what is now, you know, five and a half years. And we’re not even heading in the right direction.

So at that point you start to go, well, how do we start to use less energy and still have good lives? Like, what does that look like? And they’re the really interesting conversations we should be having rather than just indiscriminately trying to grow the economy in every sector all of the time.

[00:15:13] Steve Grumbine: And one of the things that I think is underplayed and you do go into this, but I want to paint part of this into that the global North has predated upon the global South. And when you look at GDP, even though GDP is a microcosm at a national level, when you look at GDP growth, you say it’s very unevenly distributed. Well, I could easily show you, I think anybody could easily show you if they actually looked at the data, that the global North is snatching up the real resources and the productive capacity of the global South and growing their economies exponentially. While the global south is, literally, struggling just to survive and to make the very things they need to sustain life.

And so they end up going with the cheaper route. A lot of times it’s dirty energy because instead of us transferring technology to them, instead of us transferring medicines and vaccines and food and, other support to make the world a more even place, a place where everyone’s thriving. Instead, it really truly is, we got ours and you’re going to keep giving us yours.

And I think that, at a microcosm, you can look at that at the state level, at the national level on some states and nations are more equal than others. Okay? But there is vast inequality throughout the world and you can see it locally and you can see it globally.

Talk to me a little bit about how GDP is such an unequal metric and how it’s unevenly distributed.

[00:16:48] Erin Remblance: Yeah, it’s crazy. there is some data that runs from 1995 to 2021, so 26 years of data. And it looks at where GDP growth went. And the bottom 50 of the world’s population captured just 2 of global wealth growth, like, effectively, over that 26 year period. Like none of it, really. And then, the top 1 captured captured 38 of global wealth growth.

And it’s just crazy. Like, and the wealthier you are, you know, the bigger share per capita that you get. And that is really, when you think it through, not very surprising. Like, under the model of capitalism, the people who have the capital then receive a return on their investment.

So now they have the capital plus, whatever term we use to describe that. Skimmed unpaid wages Yeah, pretty much. And now they reinvest that capital plus some, and they get more and more back. And so, it’s just a model built to grow capital. So if you have capital, you’ll do well. If you don’t have capital, you won’t do well. And this is the system working as designed. It’s not a fault in the system.

[00:17:57] Steve Grumbine: You know what? Thank you. Can we stay there for just a minute? I think there’s some very well meaning people that think that we’re just misguided. That, you know, if we only just changed a little bit. And they don’t understand it’s a feature, not a mistake. It’s, it’s intended to work that way.

[00:18:15] Erin Remblance: A hundred percent.

[00:18:17] Steve Grumbine: Can you talk a little bit about . . . I mean, I have a lot to say but I . . . You’re my guest. I want you to say it.

[00:18:21] Erin Remblance: Yeah, I mean, so it goes back a long way. But it probably really . . . All of this where we find ourselves now stems back to the 1980s, perhaps? Where after a period of what was fairly, more like equality than what we see today, then Thatcher and Reagan decided that that wasn’t where we wanted to be. And they implemented a lot of neoliberal policies and a lot of privatization of what were public goods. A lot of commodification of things that were previously available to everyone.

And, and that’s been a bit of a steam train that is continuing today. And that infects a lot of people’s minds and they can’t see how things could be done differently. And I know you’re a proponent, obviously, of Modern Monetary Theory, but even like this notion around austerity, we can’t fund it; we don’t have the money, like, we can fund all of these things. We can house people, we can provide people with food, we can provide high quality public education.

None of these things are beyond the realms of possibility, when you understand how Modern Monetary Theory works. So, yeah, absolutely. This is the system working as designed and it’s got a lot to do with state capture. Like corporate capture of politicians in the U S in the UK, in Australia, in New Zealand, like they’re getting what they want out of the political system and the citizens who live in those countries are missing out, broadly.

[00:19:36] Steve Grumbine: So, it’s no secret to anybody that listens to this podcast that there’s very few people I fanboy over anymore. But one guy I still fanboy over, I can’t help it, is Jason Hickel. And he’s somebody who if I could model myself, and I, can’t hold a candle to him, I can maybe, you know, dust off his sandals, but he is just really consistently in the right place in my mind.

His affect. His whole worldview is just, it seems he’s always on the right side of an issue. And I know that he could fail, he’s human. But I’ve never seen him be on the wrong side of an issue. And when he has been sort of on the wrong side, like when he didn’t understand stuff about the monetary system, as soon as he learned, he pivoted. He didn’t say, well, I used to say this, so I’m staying stuck. With new information, he changed.

And I have a tremendous amount of respect for him. And it just, so happens that you have a quote from Jason in here, which I think is specific to this concept that growth can’t eradicate poverty. Go ahead and read that one.

[00:20:39] Erin Remblance: Yeah. So the quote goes: To eradicate poverty at five dollars a day, global GDP would have to increase to one hundred and seventy times its present size. In other words, we need to extract, produce and consume one hundred and seventy-five times more commodities than we presently do. Even if such outlandish growth were possible, the consequences would be disastrous.

We would quickly chew through our planet’s ecosystems, destroying the forests, the soils, and most importantly, the climate. There is simply no way this can be achieved without triggering truly catastrophic climate change, which, apart from anything else, would obliterate any potential gains from poverty reduction.

That’s a paragraph from Jason Hickel’s, The Divide^viii, and that book, The Divide and his second book, Less is More, I highly recommend to everyone. They’ve changed the way I see the world. And I’m a bit like you. When I host a call with people who’ve signed up to our courses, they’re like, can you get through one call without mentioning Jason Hickel? Sometimes I get close, but it’ll be like the last minute. I was like, please go and read this paper from Jason Hickel. So, um, yeah, I get it.

[00:21:38] Steve Grumbine: For real, like, I’m just a lay person, you know, that has taken this and tried to make it important enough for people to listen to these podcasts. But when I listened to him, you know, he changed me. You talked about how we sometimes change with new information. You were about social tipping points.

Jason really took me from being a basic Berniecrat. You know, looking out, for sure for, the basic things that people need. That’s great. But he changed that. He shifted that. He made me understand the role of the Global North and the Global South. I had no meaningful understanding of geopolitical situations.

I had some, but I had a very Americanized, CIA-driven narrative propagandized to the hilt. And listening to him and listen to people like Fadhel Kaboub and Ndongo Samba Sylla, Thomas Fazi and others. I’ve really grown to understand a lot more than I ever did And now I’ve branched out into other people that focus on that geopolitical side because so much of the economics we think are just local, just domestic, stem from predating upon the global South.

And stemmed from this concept, these, fake concepts that we can green growth. That capitalism can green growth. And I watched Jason Hickel – yes, we should do a drinking game every time we say “Jason Hickel” we have to have to take a drink, you know? But the truth is he fought tooth and nail against a green growther. And it was amazing how he demonstrated the feature that we talked about a few minutes ago. It’s not a bug. Capitalism and growth are two things that go hand in glove. And the kinds of dominance, the domination of one class over another, of one region over another, the dominated classes versus the dominant class.

And, he really laid out and showed that you’re asking a dog not to bite . . . I don’t know if that’s the right analogy. But you’re asking electricity not to shock you. You’re asking, you know, water not to be wet. And when I think of that, you know, it’s like, there’s a lot of well-meaning people out there trying to create this green capitalism. And they are like oil and water. They’re mutually exclusive.

Intermission 

[00:24:02] Steve Grumbine: The concept of growth can’t be greened, and you say that in your presentation, as well. Can you take us through that from your vantage point?

[00:24:36] Erin Remblance: Yeah. So I think the presentation you’re, or the debate you’re referring to, it was the one hosted by Kate Raworth. It’s that one?

[00:24:41] Steve Grumbine: Yes. Yes

[00:24:42] Erin Remblance: So yeah, spot on. Like, it’s just, this is how the system works. And there is this unwillingness to face into the depths of the problem, I think, within the environmental and climate movement. And Jason says that in his work. He says, like, there’s a lack of radical analysis within the environmental movement about how structurally the cause of these environmental crises are. So there’s a lot of people, you know, out there pushing electric vehicles, as if that’s the solution. Or solar panels, not realizing that, actually, so much more has to change than just the form of technology that we’re using.

And as you say, like in terms of like, Jason sees new information and pivots. Like, he will acknowledge that he used to be a green growther and then he looked into why we need growth. And, you know, he’s written a full book on degrowth. So that willingness to change, I think, is really important in all of us as we learn more to be able to adopt new things that are supported by the science and supported by facts. The one we were talking about, what was it?

[00:25:38] Steve Grumbine: Yeah. Vandana Shiva.

[00:25:40] Erin Remblance: Oh yeah, Okay. She just says, nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates. And it like, it’s so true. Like there’s a lot of people saying you can dematerialize GDP and that will allow you to continue to grow GDP without using so many rare Earth minerals and chop down so many rainforests. But there’s no proof it can be done. And the things that we’re relying on to solve this, if we get it wrong, don’t even exist, either. So there’s all of these wanting to implement strategies that haven’t been proven to work, relying on technology that doesn’t yet exist, or doesn’t exist at the scale required. And no backup plan if it goes wrong.

I just feel like that’s an awful big bet to place when so much is at stake. When we have other things we could be doing that are grounded in science. Are grounded in reality. Can help us reduce our energy and material throughput. But we just, we’re not willing to take on, I guess, the power structures that are trying to protect the status quo.

So that’s stopping the real political movements that we need to see from forming to protect us from what is a mass extinction event. Like it brings me no joy to say that, but we can’t pretend that that’s not what we are facing.

[00:26:50] Steve Grumbine: You know, I think this comes back to something you said in the beginning. And I think this is maybe a little bit of me having a moment where I’m getting new information. Or maybe it’s old information that I didn’t process right. But I think this moment that you just described is why some of the atomization, some of the personal, I hate to say personal responsibility because that skews in a different direction than I want to go. But there is an element here that if you want to be the change, you’ve got to take steps to get comfortable being uncomfortable. You got to take steps to change yourself because what do we got? A lot of people stand in the way of change because they have something to lose. And that stems from them not understanding the options and not understanding what the real decision set is.

I mean, you’re looking at a Venn diagram. Do I want to live? Yes or no. Okay. If these things over here are things that will allow me to live. If I keep doing these things over here, I’m going to die. And more importantly, you know, you and I talked offline, we’re, we’re both parents. I want my kids to have a wonderful life. I want them to thrive. And they’re a priority for both of us.

So the concept of change at home will enable us to, you know, migrate ourselves, if you will, into a more environmentally friendly degrowth lifestyle that will allow us to not be shocked and awed when these kinds of decisions have to be made. And then we won’t be protecting a lifestyle that is full of growth mindedness, and we’ll be able to live in that new world so that we can sustain it.

I think that, God, man, its got my brain hurting right now, but yes, I, you know,

[00:28:38] Erin Remblance: Yeah, and I don’t think there’s many people in the degrowth field that I’ve come across who think that degrowth should be implemented autocratically. So , ideally, we’re doing this democratically. Which means that, you know, the majority of people embody these values already.

And so if we don’t start to embody them and what I would really need to emphasize is I don’t want us to embody them and then just stop there. There’s almost no point to doing it if you’re just going to stop there. But it’s embodying them and then sharing those values and helping influence other people to embody those values too.

So it’s such that we create like a ripple effect where those values then spread out. And there’s a lot of research that talks about social tipping points and how, you know, you can give a movement credibility when you see ten different people in different professions or different aspects of your life, adopting a new value that really gives credibility to the movement.

And so it’s about lots of people being the change you want to see. And sharing that so that other people can see that now, I don’t know, now you’re vegan. Or now you’ve got a no-flight policy. Or, you know, now you’ve bought an e-bike, or a regular bike, or anything that’s aligned with that. Or now you’re not voting for the political party that supports growth. So now you’re volunteering for the Greens.

Any of these things that are aligned with degrowth, or all of them, is how you then start to influence the people around you. And that’s really where we want to go if we want this to be democratically implemented. Do you follow Kevin Anderson? Professor Kevin Anderson. He’s a climate scientist.

[00:30:00] Steve Grumbine: I do not know him, but I’m eager to hear about him.

[00:30:02] Erin Remblance: Yeah, you’ll love his work. Look him up. He’s mostly on Twitter, I think. And so he’s really, aligned with Jason. He thinks that a lot of people who don’t want to face into the changes we need to see, are protecting their status quo and their privilege within this system. So he, you know, he’ll be critical of his own peers, saying that they benefit. They’re well paid. They probably are part of the group of people who create the most emissions.

And so that’s why they’re not taking the actions that we need to take. And he’ll say, I’ve been a vegetarian since 1985, or something. I haven’t flown since 2004. And it’s not because I think that’s enough. It’s because we know through research that when we adopt these, we’re more effective at creating systemic change broadly. Because we, um, have had the courage and we can show people that it’s possible, to implement in our own lives, the broader systemic changes we’re trying to see.

[00:30:51] Steve Grumbine: I appreciate that. It’s one of those things where you don’t want to just do performative stuff, but at the same time, any motion towards acknowledging that and continuing to build on that mindset, I think, is critical. And you know what? I’m going to really take some time internally here and, absorb some of that too.

I mean, I do try, you know what I mean? But I can do more. I know I can. And, uh, I think it’s worth looking at.

[00:31:16] Erin Remblance: Yeah. And I, like, it’s not about, you know, personal purity. Like we’re not trying to be someone who uses no plastic because trying to eliminate plastic out of your life, it’s very, very hard. But I think it’s important, to like, I try not to buy any brand new clothing, for example.

And I’m not always very good at it. But like, if I can go to a second hand store and, and get something from the charity shop, that is my preference. And, like just these little things where we can just be like, Oh, where’d you get that top from? Well, actually I just got it from the charity shop down in Manley or near where I live or whatever.

Like these things can be quite powerful and destigmatize things that can sometimes have a bit of a negative connotation to them. So there’s lots of different things we can do in our lives. But again, like, it’s such a fine line. Because if it doesn’t happen systemically, it’s not going to happen at all.

So, you know, these individual changes have to be part of creating bigger ripples that lean towards a social tipping point.

[00:32:06] Steve Grumbine: I agree with that 100 percent and, I was going to touch on the, great acceleration, but I think we’ve kind of gone through that a little bit here already. I want to talk to you about the planetary boundaries. This is something that people hear, and I think they remember back in the Seventies people saying, and they rolled their eyes because the things they predicted then were not spot on, not, you know . . . Hey, wait a minute. Well, I thought you were going to have climate crisis. What happened? It didn’t happen, but what’s going on here, right?

But in reality though, science has gotten better. We have gotten smarter. We have seen things happening. And quite frankly, if you open your eyes, you can see it now. Looking at the ice shelves. Looking at various aspects. I know weather is not climate, but you can see shifts and patterns that are truly different now.

And some of the things that I think make for a challenging sell, if you will, is that some of these things are not quite in your face. It’s not right here right now. And so people have to defer. They have to fight for something that they can’t necessarily see. It’s not right there in their face.

But these planetary boundaries are things that people need to be aware of. You go on to say we’re transgressing six of nine planetary boundaries. Let’s talk about what the nine are, and then let’s talk about the six which we’re transgressing.

So the six are Novel Entities, which is essentially plastic pollution; Climate Change; Biosphere Integrity, so that would be a biodiversity loss; Land-System Change. – so that’s us, turning rainforests into agricultural lands, essentially; freshwater use, green water use, that’s Freshwater Change; and then Biogeochemical flows, which is phosphorus and nitrogen runoff, mostly from agriculture.

So those are the six that we’re transgressing. There’s three more, which is Ocean Acidification, Atmospheric Aerosol Loading, and Stratospheric Ozone Depletion. And those three are in the green, thankfully. But when you see this chart, it does really bring home the fact that we’re not just faced with climate change. There are really significant issues across a broad spectrum of areas that need focus.

And if we just have carbon tunnel vision . . . Imagine avoiding catastrophic climate change and then something like still entering a mass extinction event because we’ve affected biodiversity so much that the food chains just come tumbling down or we have no pollinators to create food or whatever. The idea that we can just focus on one and not all of these would seem a little bit short-sighted, perhaps?

[00:34:54] Steve Grumbine: Yeah, you know, it’s funny when you make a pizza, you need sauce, you need cheese, you need pepperoni, or whatever it is. Excuse me, we’re trying to get rid of red meat. But you get my point. You need all these different ingredients. Otherwise, you just ate sauce. Or you just ate bread. In this case, we’re talking about a recipe for survival.

And these nine categories are really important. I don’t know to what degree individuals can take part in all nine, but that would be interesting. Is there any work out there that might point towards those kind of individual actions?

[00:35:25] Erin Remblance: Not that I’ve come across. Like a lot of them would be either energy use related or food related. So I guess if you’re able to source (A), reduce your energy use and then source what little that you’re still using from not renewable, but what we call renewable energy sources, that would be, you know, helpful.

So when you adopt a plant-based diet, you’re using seventy-five percent less agriculture than we would otherwise be using. Which if the whole world went vegan, we could then rewild, you know, three quarters of our agricultural lands. Which would draw down enormous amounts of carbon. It would restore biodiversity. It’d be super helpful.

So, you know, Land Systems Change. Geobiochemical flows, I don’t know how much of that would influence freshwater change, but like these are all, they’re all related. There’s probably a certain few things we can do that would have a huge impact if they’re adopted more broadly.

[00:36:16] Steve Grumbine: This is, I’m going to tell you right now. I, I’ve read this in other places and I don’t think it smacked me as hard as it did just trying to prepare for our talk

[00:36:25] Erin Remblance: Yeah.

[00:36:26] Steve Grumbine: We are living as if we have one point seven planet Earths? I mean, is that the infinite growth model right there or what? I mean, how do you even process that?

[00:36:37] Erin Remblance: I know, and it’s all really, I mean, I’m, I’m not fifty, but I’m not miles off fifty. Its essentially all happened in our lifetimes. Like, if you go back to 1970, Earth Overshoot Day was the 31st of December. And then now Earth Overshoot Day, I think it was the 1st of August this year. So it’s come back four months, you know, one third of the year is now in overshoot, globally. And what that masks is that most of the global North countries, all of the global North countries, have an Earth overshoot day in the first half of the year. And if you’re in the U S and Australia, like you and I are, it’s in the first quarter of the year. So Australia’s Earth overshoot days, like the 24th of March or something.

So, globally we’re living as if we have one point seven planet Earths. But you and I and our fellow citizens are living as if we have like five planet Earths. Like something crazy, like that we just don’t have. And so to get an average of one point seven, that’s something crazy, like a hundred countries that don’t have an Earth overshoot day. They’re not using more resources than the planet can replenish in a year.

and so, thanks to our overuse, we’re dragging that average down to one point seven. yeah,

[00:37:40] Steve Grumbine: You know, it’s funny. This is, a really important thing here. You know, when you’re looking at MMT, MMT is not microeconomics, it’s macroeconomics. So that means it looks at aggregates. And aggregates without stratification can give a false positive, like one point seven Earths. When in reality, the U. S. is saying, you know, screw, if it’s just one point seven, we can drop it down points. So, well, dude. You’re, you’re actually at five planet Earths, baby. You’re not just at one point seven, you just used aggregates to hide your transgressions. I mean, if anything I just said right there, spurs anything, let me know, because that just blew me away.

[00:38:19] Erin Remblance: Yeah, it’s just so irresponsible. And then you go to . . . I think it’s maybe two slides over on this deck that we’re sort of working our way through . . . Either a country is meeting the needs of all its people, and if it’s doing that, it’s normally in like material and energy overshoot. Or it’s not meeting the needs of all its people.

There’s no country that’s meeting the needs of all of its people. So it’s achieving social thresholds without transgressing all the planetary boundaries. So that tells me there’s something systematically wrong with how we’re trying to achieve social wellbeing.

So, you know, like things like, all got a car, or two cars now. Whereas when I was growing up, you know, a family normally had one and they made do with one. Now we’ve got two. Instead of having high quality public transport everywhere, which would have been far fewer materials and energy to be using, we’ve gone for this personal ownership.

And just to stay on this example of a car, like most cars are in a driveway or a parking lot for 23 hours a day. And they drive one person around. It’s such an inefficient use of resources. So no wonder we’re transgressing all these planetary boundaries when we are actively choosing, and it makes complete sense to me, because it’s the most profitable means of transport really for people.

So the car industry has done really well out of growing it. And probably had government support for policies everywhere to build roads and to build suburbs that require roads. Like it’s really the intricacies are very deep on how some of these corporations and industries have ensured that they have longevity.

[00:39:48] Steve Grumbine: You know, the United States has just been absolutely bludgeoned and infiltrated by Ayn Rand logic. Everyone is still thinking they’re John Galt. Everyone is wrapped around this even if they don’t think they are, everyone’s lifestyle represents the whole, Let me maximize my personal, whatever. And we all have, I have an SUV, but I do live in the mountains, so when it snows, I wouldn’t be able to get anywhere without it. It’s just very, very remote living. But regardless, if we have mass transit, it would fundamentally change how people live. It’d fundamentally alter that. But you’d have to be able to recalibrate how business is seen as being successful. You would have to recalibrate how we evaluate the economy.

And, one of the things that I’ve struggled with, you know, is a lot of my MMT friends, they’re perfectly fine being capitalists. They’re perfectly fine being stock market people. They’re perfectly fine with this growth mindedness. And, you know, some of them are like, well, this word degrowth is bad news, it doesn’t go with MMT. How could you possibly tie MMT to degrowth? And it’s like, whoa. You know, I want to live you know, it’s a pretty simple thing. Yeah.

And I talked to [MMT founder] Bill Mitchell about it, who’s down in your neck of the woods. And Bill Mitchell made a great point. What he said was, MMT is a lens. MMT is the underlying operational guidebook to how you mobilize resources through economic activity at the state. However, degrowth is a great value system that you overlay with the lens. And when you take the lens of MMT and the value system of degrowth, you’ve got a highly sophisticated way of bringing about prosperity, shared prosperity through sustainable living.

Most of the people would live a rich life. In many ways, a better life than what they’re living now with all this growthism. It’s just, there are some people that are very, very wealthy that would experience a material change in their living. And I could see why that select group of people would really resist this.

But honestly, if you think about it, we have got to find a way to get beyond just ledgers and really overlay the values. Until we understand the ledgers though, people are thinking we can’t afford to do the things we need to do. They’re thinking we can’t mobilize the resources we need to take care of the problems. To use technology in, in a way that serves humanity and serves our planet and serves biodiversity through things exactly like what we’re talking about. Mass transit. You know, providing good healthy food to all and not all this mass produced, incredibly grotesque, barely food, food that we put into our bodies. Real food, natural food, food from the Earth.

That’s going to be a really tall order. It’s going to be a really challenging paradigm. MMT is hard to get people to understand. Degrowth? You talk about two things that I think are very, very challenging because a lot of the degrowth people do not understand the economics of MMT. And I think that there’s a really interesting struggle going on there.

And the flip side is, is that these wonderful, brilliant people understand degrowth are hopefully infecting the MMT community. Where the, you know, this kind of like a cross pollination, if you will. I think that’s the only way we survive this thing, quite honestly.

[00:43:28] Erin Remblance: Look, I fully agree. I think, that it is an overlay of values. And when you were talking, you mentioned something like, you know, changing how business is measured and obviously then changing how the economy is measured and those sorts of things.

But I was reminded of when I lived in England, which was just over a decade ago, and I lived in a little village. It’s called Teddington. And I lived 80 meters from the high street, so I didn’t own a car, and I could get to everything that I needed on this little high street. I could get to the train, I could get to the bus. And it was such a beautiful way of living that I really resented having to move to the suburbs when I came back to Sydney, because we don’t really have those sorts of little villages.

And that really just probably, predates cars. So that’s why it exists like that. And so, all of these little things that create community. And it means you’re seeing people in the street that you’re familiar with, and you’ve got this sort of social interaction just by going to the supermarket.

It’s harder to find that in these places that are being created because they aren’t profitable, I guess. And so for me, changing some of those business structures, you can really go deep into it. Like I, genuinely, don’t know why we allow corporations to exist. Like, that sort of business model created to protect risk for the capitalists, but make sure they profited from the returns.

And, you know, why don’t we have other, business models like cooperatives or, you know, social enterprises and those sorts of things. And if they run like that, all of the community benefits from it. And there’s a lot more democracy in the operations of those organizations. We can have a role in deciding what gets made and why. And if it benefits the community and if it’s good for the environment, if it stands the test of time, for future generations.

Whereas the corporation, I think, is really like, as part of the class conflict, there’s only a subset of people who do well out of corporations. And that’s something I think we should be challenging.

[00:45:13] Steve Grumbine: I couldn’t agree more. I, you’re right up my alley there. I love that. You know, obviously one of the things that we talk about within MMT, but also Jason Hickel has pulled in, is a Job Guarantee. The ability to provide people good work locally to pitch in and help. And by having it local, you’re also not creating more carbon output. I know we don’t want to overly focus on carbon, but it is a thing. And the ability to provide people with good food and everything else locally grown, and becoming part of their communities again. The electronic era has created friends across the world, but you can’t walk out your front door and know anyone anymore.

And I think that that’s a real opportunity waiting to happen. To becoming the mushroom fruit while the mycelium underneath our feet connects us, you know, because we’re actually grounded, we’re grounding, we’re out there together in the real world. I think the pandemic really, really showed us that we can survive without going all over.

But it also showed us that we need each other because we’ve become cavemen again to some degree, even though I’m sure people are starting to get out a little bit more. I do believe that people have isolated in a lot of ways. And I know myself, my family, we adopted certain activities and behaviors and lifestyles during the years of the lockdown if you will, um that we haven’t quite shed yet. We still aren’t back to fully integrated lifestyle.

I want to move on to this John Kerry quote because John Kerry, he is a capitalist extraordinaire make no mistake about it, but he does make a good point. The idea that we’re going to save the world with thorium reactors and we’re going to have all these like fake metal trees that suck all the carbon out. We’re going to do all these grandiose things with technology. And yet at the same time, it doesn’t even exist yet.

And it’s not going to exist in a capitalist world until it’s profitable for someone. So it has to be done by the state. It has to be a public utility. And even then it’s still not done because they’re not willing to put the R and D, the research, the money backing it, or the ability to mass produce it, to take it on.

So all the technological solutions are, are really, I hate to say, pie-in-the-sky right now. They don’t have any pathway there.

[00:47:33] Erin Remblance: Yeah, look, I agree. So the quote that you’re mentioning from John Kerry, he said this back in April [actually May], 2021, I think.

You don’t have to give up a quality of life to achieve some of the things that we know we have to achieve. That’s the brilliance of some of the things that we know how to do. I’m told by scientists that fifty percent of the reductions that we have to make to get to net zero are going to come from technologies that we don’t yet have. That’s just a reality.

And I put this quote in the deck and I love this quote because it’s such a brilliant example of politicians kicking the can down the road for someone else to deal with. I don’t think for a second that the world’s leaders don’t understand how dire this situation is. I just think that they have access to all the knowledge, they’ve got scientists, people begging to share with them the latest information. I think they get it. But they’re not prepared to show any leadership on the topic at a time where we really need leadership.

And so this is him just going, no, like, you know, I don’t want to lose any votes the next election. You can keep eating your meat, you can keep driving in massive cars that are going to get massive, the next reiteration of the model. Like it’s him not wanting to focus on the fact that actually the lifestyle that we’re living is part of the problem.

And I don’t mean that in a way that it’s an individual problem. Like I think the lifestyle that we are living has been imposed on us in many ways by the corporations who profit from these lifestyles. And yeah , like some of the technologies that they don’t exist or they’re, you know, horribly unjust, like that requires something like two times the land size of India for, uh, biofuels.

Jason says this really well. He says like, as if that’s going to take up space in a global North country. Like it’s not, they’re going to try and grow these biofuels somewhere in the global South. And, it’s just such a neocolonialist perspective that just implement some of these policies and everything will be fine. We can keep living as if we’ve always been living.

[00:49:20] Steve Grumbine: I want to jump ahead a little bit, because I think that we’ve covered the capitalist angle to a large degree here. And I think it really is important because it creates external conditions that we have to respond to that aren’t in our best interest. We have no choice, it’s been imposed upon us.

And, we have to resist that. That is part of the class conflict, the class struggle that we have to contend with. And it is tied hand in glove with living within the planetary boundaries. Because I think regular people, average Jane and Joe six pack, the family down the street, you name it, we’re not living in an endless growth cycle. It’s corporations that are doing that. And through advertising and through basically click bait and using all forms of social engineering through the Internet and you know, artificial intelligence, they tap into our nervous system to make us want things.

It’s science. I mean, there’s billions, billions of dollars, maybe even trillions of dollars put into how do we make people do something that we maybe they wouldn’t do otherwise. But how do we make them feel like they gotta do it?

And I think that that’s just something that should be illegal. It should be considered, a violence. And we should be attacking it. Anyway, you you go into describing degrowth definitions.

[00:50:38] Erin Remblance: Can I just want to interrupt there? Yeah, like, so I was talking about, you know, six years ago, I learned about all of this and I went on a journey and started to realize that capitalism was the root cause of several of our ecological crises. And so I was very focused on the effect, effect of capitalism on the environment and the planet and all of these things.

And someone had said something to me that stayed with me and I still think about, and she said, um, This system is bad for people too. And I’d really neglected that side of how capitalism is bad for us and I have tried not to continue to do that.

And it’s, it’s obviously bad for the 85 percent of the world’s population who live on less than five dollars a day. And that’s, you know, five US dollars, not five US dollars in their currency. It’s what you could buy in the U S with five dollars a day. Like it’s a phenomenally small amount of money to live off every day, and I may have that metric wrong. Sorry, it is, it’s fifty percent of the world’s population and eighty-five percent live on less than $30 a day, which is what we consider the poverty line in Australia, the UK, US effectively.

So eighty-five percent of the world’s population live in poverty, as we would describe in the global North. A, that’s bad for all of those people, but then in the global North, even if you’re managing to, you know, live well, you’re one of those people in the top twenty percent, or whatever, who has some spare change at the end of their pay period. You’re probably working more hours than you’d like to work. You’re probably feeling micromanaged. You’re probably feeling like you can’t ever put your phone down. You’re probably reaching for unhealthy foods because it’s convenient.

Like I think that the erosion of our free time, you know, some of these things we neglect to allocate to the true source. Which is this increasing drive for productivity. Was it John Maynard Keynes who said that we should be working 15 hours a week by now because of technology and increasing productivity, we can start to work fewer hours.

And none of that has actually transpired because we just keep working people harder and harder. And that’s one of the degrowth policies they talk about is a three to four day work week.

Imagine if we had some more of that free time again. Imagine what we could be doing. What we could be doing from scratch that we currently buy, or, uh, outsource because it’s more convenient time-wise. Um, so sorry to interrupt. I just want to sort of

[00:52:46] Steve Grumbine: highlight…

No, it was well placed. I absolutely agree with everything you said. But it brings me to your slide where you describe what would life in a degrowth economy be like? And that kind of plays off of what you were just saying. What would it be like?

[00:53:03] Erin Remblance: Yeah. So, um, on this slide, I’ve got a chart from Jennifer Wilkins, who’s very active on the topic of degrowth on LinkedIn. And she just has one chart that is decreasing over time and that’s throughput. So by that, she means energy and material throughput. Then she’s got three charts that are increasing over time, which is wellbeing, equity, and nature.

And so a lot of people get worried about the term degrowth because no one wants to degrow. But actually what we’re talking about is degrowing the material and energy throughput of an economy and everything else around it is therefore free to grow again.

And what we don’t, maybe, acknowledge when we talk about economic growth is that it’s shrinking other aspects of our lives in pursuit of that growth. And I think, you know, this is a beautiful chart to just sum up how much we can free up, if we stop focusing on endless economic growth.

[00:53:50] Steve Grumbine: Yes. And, you know, and we’ve already touched on how difficult change will be to begin with. I mean, it starts at the individual. I’m all about trying to provide a democratic way of getting there, but there is huge forces against us. Propaganda, advertising, politicians on the take, legal, on and on and on and on and on.

We are facing a mountain of things to keep us from making these changes. But I think I want to get to your final slide, the one that I think captures it well. You say, the only question that we have a right to ask is what’s the right thing to do. What does this Earth require of us if we want to continue to live on it, by Wendell Berry.

That’s a great way of summarizing, or bringing to a decision point, an action call right there. I mean, wonderful.

[00:54:43] Erin Remblance: I just really love the clarity of this quote, and actually I came across it in Jason Hickels’ book, Less is More,

[00:54:49] Steve Grumbine: Drink.

[00:54:51] Erin Remblance: I just think I, this is maybe not a popular way to look at things, but I like to decenter our own feelings when it comes to some of these things that need to be done. So I don’t like to talk in terms of hope or no hope. I don’t want my action today to be determined by whether I’m feeling hopeful or I’m not feeling hopeful. Like it’s not about me, it’s about what needs to be done and what can I do to move things in that direction. And I really liked this quote because I think it puts Earth back at the center of where, and that’s where it should be.

So, yeah. That’s why I included it in the deck.

[00:55:19] Steve Grumbine: What you just said, I think is really important. I mean, we’re all on this planet. Right, wrong, or indifferent. We didn’t ask to be born, whatever, we’re here. And at the end of the day, we have to do what we have to do, even if we don’t necessarily feel like doing it. And and the things that have to be done have to be done or we cease to exist. It’s that simple

[00:55:46] Erin Remblance: Yeah.

[00:55:47] Steve Grumbine: It really is that simple.

[00:55:48] Erin Remblance: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s just how it is. And we can’t be changed. It just is what it is. So let’s, let’s do what we can.

[00:55:55] Steve Grumbine: I love it. Listen, I don’t love it actually, but I love that you said it and it makes me think. And I think it’s worth everybody taking a moment internally and saying, Hey, you know, maybe I had some bad fish last night or maybe my spaghetti didn’t settle right, but it doesn’t matter. I still got to do the next right thing.

And I think that that’s a real clarion call. I mean, it gives a purpose to moving ahead, even when things are gloomy and dim. I’d like to give you a chance to close us out and kind of give a parting word on degrowth and what we didn’t capture tonight that maybe you feel would have been great for people to hear and also let us know we can find more of your work.

[00:56:32] Erin Remblance: As part of what you were talking about, before we mentioned the last slide. There are big forces that are in our way. There is propaganda. There is billionaire controlled media. There is corporate run governments. And part of the work that we need to do is to point this out to people to help them understand that we don’t really live in democracies anymore.

And not that we can’t get there, but until we realize that this is how it is, nothing’s going to change. And I feel like this is the work of social tipping points as well. Like until people realize that really they’re voting red or blue, but the policies they get at the same, regardless. You know, your, your vote means very little until we start to have actual proper representation that’s not just representing corporations and the industrial military complex.

I don’t know if we touched on that point enough so I just wanted to reiterate that, like, the work that we do is changing values, but also opening people up to understanding how the world works now. And, you know, maybe it’s changed over our lifetimes. Maybe it wasn’t like this when we first became adults, but it is how it is now.

And I’m mostly active on Twitter and LinkedIn. And I run a couple of courses, (re)biz and Project Tipping Point. And I have this new exciting project called the Healthy Habits Challenge, which I just have been doing this challenge myself and I found it really beneficial and I want to share those benefits with more people. And it’s just about eating a whole foods, plant based diet, exercising and avoiding alcohol for 28 days, and just seeing how we do in adopting those new healthy habits.

[00:57:56] Steve Grumbine: That is fantastic. And I’m going to plug, you know, Erin’s coffee shop here, uh, buymeacoffee.com forward slash Erin Remblance – drop her a coin or two, okay. I mean, she’s doing great work.

And, just so you all know, Real Progressives, which is the sponsor of this program, is a 501c3 not for profit organization. All donations that we receive are tax deductible. So please consider sustaining us, donating to this cause. If you feel that this podcast and other work that we have done has been useful to you, you feel like we’re doing good work, we certainly uh, could use your help. Those links will be in the show notes of the actual podcast when it comes out.

Erin, we will be putting all the links to all your good stuff in there. We have an extras page that we put out with each of our podcasts along with a curated, edited transcript. So be looking forward to that when this one comes out. I’d like to thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate your flexibility. We had to reschedule a couple of times and I really appreciate the time, I really do.

[00:59:02] Erin Remblance: Thank you having me, Steve. I really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you.

[00:59:06] Steve Grumbine: Absolutely. All right. So this is Steve on behalf of my guest, Erin Remblance. This is Macro N Cheese. We are out of here.

Books:

Wallace-Wells, David, The Uninhabitable Earth 

Hickel, Jason, Less is More

Jackson, Tim, Prosperity Without Growth

________, Post Growth.