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Directed technology and the environment

The subject of the previous post was Daniel Susskind’s book Growth : A Reckoning . Its author outlined measures that he believed could enable continued economic growth that did far less harm to society and the environment than has previously been the case. An important factor in this kind of growth would be steering technological progress in desirable directions through measures such as economic incentives. Susskind treats this idea broadly, but a more detailed exploration is found in the paper Environmental Policies and directed technological change by Gugler, Szücs and Wiedenhofer (2024). The authors examine how different environmental policies “can steer innovation towards eco-friendly technologies”, and produce numerical estimates of their effectiveness. The policies evaluated are those “designed to address environmental market failures”. Economists have seen climate change as a type of free market failure: a failure to maximise society’s welfare, since greenhouse gas emissions ar...
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Growth and its Tradeoffs

Daniel Susskind’s 2024 book Growth: A Reckoning has received some enthusiastic reviews. Kate Barker described it as “an excellent book, developing a clear argument and not afraid to look really big questions squarely in the eye” (Barker 2024).  Susskind is a professor at King’s College, London, and Robert Bellafiore Jn. wrote that his book “considers the debates over growth’s causes, its recent elevation as a priority for governments, policies for promoting it, and rising concerns about its downsides” describing the work as “a concise and informative study of the idea, its past, and its potential future” (Bellafiore, 2024).  Alexander Bishop wrote at greater length in his article “Why not degrowth?” He noted that for Susskind growth “is a recent development. For most of the world’s history, from when humans started farming until roughly 1800, there was no meaningful growth. This is the period that Susskind calls “the great stagnation”. It is only since the industrial revoluti...
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Climate, Positivism and the Free Market

An unnamed historian living in the Second People's Republic of China in 2399 seeks to understand why the advanced industrial societies failed to prevent catastrophic climate change, despite having both adequate scientific knowledge and the technical means to avert the crisis. The historian draws on records from the time of the Industrial Revolution onwards, and describes the growing awareness of climate change in the late twentieth century, the extreme weather events of the early twenty-first century, the subsequent disintegration of the Western Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets and the following events which came to be called the Great Collapse. Two ideologies had gripped the western world and stopped it from taking the action needed to prevent its downfall. The historian is the fictitious narrator of The Collapse of Western Civilisation (Oreskes and Conway, 2014) and the inhibiting ideologies are positivism and market fundamentalism. For the benefit of readers unfamiliar with...
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Politics, Economics and Climate Action

In January the House of Commons Library published an update on the UK economy which noted its recent slow growth and that the government “has repeatedly said that  growth is its number one, or defining, mission ”. It went on to describe some of the plans proposed by Chancellor Rachel Reeves to achieve growth. These included plans to improve infrastructure; deregulation and simplification of environmental protection rules to remove barriers to growth; and measures intended to boost investment from UK businesses and from abroad (Harari, 2025). In February an online article from Politico reported on the attitude of the Conservative opposition led by Kemi Badenoch to the UK’s net zero target, which was signed into law by former Prime Minister Theresa May in June 2019. While “Badenoch insists she wants to tackle climate change” she and her team “say the target damages the country” and want to abandon it. The Shadow Energy Secretary Andrew Bowie is reported to have said that the 2050 t...
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Selling our future

Jens Beckert is director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany, and his book How We Sold Our Future: The Failure to Fight Climate Change was published in German in 2024, followed by an English translation (Beckert, 2025). A review on Earth.Org described the book as “a sober, rational assessment of what influences have impacted the world’s failure to address climate change, and what this means for our shared future”. Beckert asks “what are the social, political, and economic drivers and structures that brought us to this point?” and “examines each of the social and political structures responsible for and affected by the situation” (Lee, 2025). Beckert’s book is of modest length, with nine chapters: Knowledge without change, Capitalist modernity, Big Oil, The hesitant state, Global prosperity, Consumption without limits, Green growth, Planetary boundaries, and What next? The book provides extensive notes and references. The chapter titles give an...
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Climate action and emotion

The role of emotions in climate action has been the subject of a number of studies. Stanley et al. (2021) focussed on eco-anxiety, eco-depression, and eco-anger, and how they affect the well-being of the individuals who experience them and their engagement with climate change solutions. The authors found that those “who felt more intense anger about climate change were more likely to take part in climate protests and switch to climate-friendly behaviours” and that they reported less stress, depression and anxiety. A later publication was more specifically concerned with anger, one of the more motivating emotions (Stanley et al. 2024). This study identified thirteen kinds of climate anger in Australian subjects, which were related to different targets. These targets ranged from inaction and lack of concern by leaders and other actors (the most common form) through climate denial and the slowness of climate action to the unfairness of expecting individual action in the face of corporat...
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Climate Storytelling

Climate scientists have great difficulty in making known the risks brought about by climate change. They face denial, scepticism and distrust in science in a world of misinformation and divisive politics (Woodley et al., 2022). Some of the difficulty comes from the scientific community itself, which tends to assume that providing scientific information “will necessarily lead to desired behavioural changes” and is constrained by its own standards of “strict objectivity and political separation”. The authors of the paper argue that conventional communication methods put distance between scientists and their intended audiences and may “fail to generate inspiration and connectivity”. They believe that scientists should be willing to “radically adapt their communication strategies” and they discuss three relevant factors. First, they examine the problems of communicating climate change risks arising from the inherent difficulties of the subject, the activities of vested interests and lobb...
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