Do you think there can be a green capitalism?
If we concieve capitalism as a system
that needs to accumulate
and therefore needs to grow,
- because for accumulating capital
you need to pay back the debt and its interest,
you have to grow,
be it a corporation, but also a country or an administration,
- then i would say no:
I don't think there is today a compatibility
between planetary limits and growth.
The economists who bet on this solution,
be they liberals or heterodox
they think that we can have a decoupling,
which means having a growing GDP,
a growing corporate income,
and at the same time reducing environment impacts,
energy use, CO2 emissions,
waste production, raw materials consumption.
Such decoupling, to me, is possible at small scale, maybe in the beginning,
but certainly not to pursue infinite growth
like some economists are assuming.
You only need to follow the 2% per year growth curve,
we're going to multiply GDP by 2,
or the energy consumption by 2, every 37 years.
We'll multiply it by 7 every century,
and by 390 million every millennium.
Who can believe, that in the year 3000
we'll have cars 390 million times more efficient,
or that we'll have multiplied the GDP by 390 million
while dividing our emissions by 2, 3, 4, or more ?
It is obviously totally utopian.
And if we look at the energy question :
if we increased the consumption by 2% per year,
which we largely did over the last decades,
in 1555 years exactly, you would need to get
the energy from the entire solar star.
Not the sun energy that hits the earth, but the whole star itself.
So even the promoters of fusion energy cannot come and tell me
that we're going to make reactors the size of the sun.
This shows the absurdity of the economic system in which we are,
based on growth.
Therefore, there will inevitably be a moment when,
I don't know what will happen between now and x390 million,
but something will certainly happen,
and so Capitalism, in the sense of accumulation,
which requires growth,
(rather than in the sense of private property)
is not sustainable.