Interview with Francesco Sarracino by Raymond Wagener – Climate change is creating a whole range of problems, jeopardising our planet’s biodiversity and causing social injustices. It is in this context that the Plaidons Responsable team of Caritas Luxembourg organized a cycle of 4 lunch debates with Francesco Sarracino in October and November 2022. Francesco is a Senior Researcher at STATEC Research and expert on well-being and quality of life.
1. Our life is based on a linear consumer vision: I produce, I buy, I consume, I throw away. As a consequence, our society is built on an economic model that is not sustainable and that creates social and environmental problems. Two ways out of this unsustainable model are being proposed by some people: “green growth” and “degrowth”. Why is the current economic model unsustainable? To what extent can sustainable development growth be achieved through “green growth” and “degrowth”?
The current economic model is too demanding on resources. Over the past 70 years, economic growth has been associated with the production of negative environmental externalities, such as pollution, increasing extraction of raw materials, CO2 emissions or loss of biodiversity, despite technological changes. Consider that the growth of the world’s GDP per capita has been strongly associated with the annual evolution of CO2 emissions since the 1970s. Only during global recessions have CO2 emissions temporarily decreased. The green growth strategy maintains that technological innovation will decouple economic growth from its negative externalities. Investments in green technologies will allow economic expansion while protecting natural resources for future generations. Supporters of degrowth, on the contrary, claim that halting the production and consumption of goods and services – and thus negative economic growth – is necessary to preserve resources for future generations. Unfortunately, efforts to date to limit production and consumption have proven insufficient, as confirmed by the United Nations in 2021.
