 Obviously GDP gross domestic product growth very interconnected because net said please don't measure human There was a gentleman behind the idea of GDP said, please don't measure human progress with GDP But in this era, we obviously still live in a democratic era mass public participation one person one vote in the UK us number of other countries it Makes it very easy to understand when you say 2.5% GDP. We're growing so well You've got a sort of technocratic class who you get the economists every week and literally at the back almost at the football results You've got the GDP scores. Yeah, do you not think that? Socialists or post-capitalists, whatever you want to call them Do you not think that we similarly would need some kind of metric by which to judge the success of any potential economic system? Yes, and I just I do want to take on this point because I heard what George said about GDP GDP is If you think of of of a car and the speedometer on the car the speedometer tells you the rate at which you're traveling the speed at which you're traveling and The speedometer is not the problem. The problem is the accelerator The problem is the driver behind the wheel. The problem is the car capitalism and The measure of what's happening and the GDP is a measure GDP is a measure of the total activity as far as we can count it. We count up We can count how many people are in employment. We can count how much money is going into Green technology these things are countable and the fact that we can count them is okay In my view is not a problem. The question really is The driving force behind GDP. What is it? You know, it is that GDP must rise as you say every week the football score of it rising up up up It must never go down, you know, and in fact GDP has to go down. We have to We have to extract less from the earth. We have to exclude Fossil fuels from our counting. We've just got to block them out Didn't you say that finance shouldn't be included in GDP? I mean, this has been at the bank No, no, absolutely. I mean the thing is what it that should not be included because I mean, that's all very complicated We don't want to get into too much to buy your book for that one Yeah, but the point is that you know, these are intangibles and these are intangibles But mainly because it's all too complicated, but we've turned intangible things like trust into assets We've commodified absolutely almost everything we could possibly commodify and modify and and monetize as Capitalism and and and and that's all crazy. We we must stop doing that, too But we'll never stop counting. I hope we don't because for me that is what science does We we have to measure How much oil is coming out of the earth and how much must be must stay behind and someone's going to do that measuring? But the question we really have to address is do we extract that oil or not? Those are the big issues There's a really interesting paper just been published by Jason Hickel and George us Carlos Looking at this whole idea of green growth, you know, that can we dematerialize growth? Can we decouple growth economic growth from material resource consumption and it's it's it's a very thorough paper It's a very good one and it shows definitively. We cannot that there while there was some Partation for this for it's new. I think it's called new political economy or something It's it's it's it's a new journal actually. I think this is its very first edition Jason Hickel and George us Carlos I think the title is degrowth. Yeah, no, so it's something like is green growth possible I think that's the title. Um, so anyway, it's it's it's a very rigorous Look at this question because you know, it's intrinsic to all the models, you know If you look at UNEP if you look at OECD if you look at the World Bank They all say oh, it's fine because we'll just decouple with a decouple group. We're switching from goods to services So it's gonna happen. Anyway, we'll just dematerialize the economy. It's not happening I mean, what's so interesting is that during the 20th century there was some relative decoupling in other words Material resources was still rising, but it was rising more slowly than economic growth than GDP, right? In the 21st century, there's been a recoupling Where material resource use is rising as fast or faster than that than GDP? and and we're we're going in exactly the wrong direction if that's what you want to do as for the Absolute decoupling in other words a an overall reduction in material resources They demonstrate pretty convincingly that it is physically Impossible while an economy is growing. You just cannot do it and then they've they've done a very thorough literature survey It's terrifying, you know, and you basically come to the end of that and say you cannot Continue to have economic growth and continue to have life on earth The two things are incompatible one quickly and then I'll get your opinions opinions on this So we know for instance in the us UK most of Europe carbon emissions Have been falling since about 2000 Although GDP although quite slowly in this country since 2000 it's all gone up So there has been something of a sort of the argument is that there's basically a sort of hard limit On the amount of co2 emissions a country per capita will emit almost like, you know, there was declining birth rates increased life expectancy now They're saying that one of the sort of hallmarks of capitalist development is it is a cap on carbon emissions Do you think that's simply because all the production's being done in the global south? There's a couple of things to say here that that so while there has been No, absolute decoupling of material resources and there can't be with economic growth with carbon production That carbon dioxide production there has been an absolute decoupling even taking into account outsourced emissions elsewhere What the paper shows is that that is nowhere near enough To hit the targets which were signed up to under the Paris agreement Let alone what we actually need to do If we're going to produce No more than 1.5 degrees of global heating let alone two degrees of or even two degrees of global heating I mean, they're saying, you know, if economic growth continues You're talking about seven eight, maybe 11 12 cuts per year In order to to meet those targets and you know, that is Three four five times what any economy has managed to achieve so again Well, you know, you might you can look at this and say, oh, you know We've got the lowest emissions per capita we've had since 1888 or something like that in this country Isn't that an amazing achievement? And you say actually by comparison to where we need to be it's nothing It's nowhere near So the more we've already stocked the atmosphere with full of carbon anyway Thanks to past activities, but you see the thing is I mean, I'm I think I'm going to Diverge here from you George on this point because for me A green and a sustainable economy will be a high employment economy for me labor will have to substitute for carbon We're going to have to grow our own green beans. We're not going to be able to import them by plane We're going to have to walk You know, we're going to have to do we only have to become much more nationally self-sufficient And that's going to be labor intensive And I have been on platforms with green MEPs and so on who've argued that actually no We have to have high levels of unemployment So when I when we talk about growth and I don't want us to talk about that because it's such a neoliberal concept I want us to talk about what level of economic activity would be sustainable And how much of that should we devote towards labor and how much of labor must be labor for example In activities that don't use material resources, you know education the arts creativity Care all of those things. There's an awful lot to be done in my view that doesn't need To be fueled by carbon And and how much of that, you know, how are we going to organize a society to make it sustainable? And whenever I talk about this, I think of Egypt and I think of the millions of young unemployed people in Egypt And I think of the ecological devastation That is the result of a society living on high levels of unemployment So I don't want to ever talk about growth, but I do want to talk about what what kind of economic activity would we require to maintain our solidarity our civilization our ability to live in community And for me, we've got to be talking about national self-sufficiency far more. We've got to be self-sufficient. We've got to, you know, feed ourselves We've got to be able to make our own clothes We've got to be able to walk around and cycle around These are all things we're going to have to think about a new and envisage a new world But it's going to have some economic activity in it and we've just got to address that Can I respond to both of you here because we've talked a bit about GDP growth But you've talked about something important there, which is the nation-state And the importance of returning sort of nationally oriented economies. I agree with you I don't think I don't see how else you're going to be able to do this And often the sort of the cliche amongst the left is because Marx made this observation correctly, you know Overtime production becomes ever more socialized ever more globalized. Well, actually when it comes to agriculture We probably need to de-globalize quite significantly. Absolutely, but but the left would say that's you know, oh Well, that's actually That's almost foreshadowing the possibility of returning national socialism. And do you think do you think that's a sort of A bit of a lacuna for the left where they don't really engage with the national question Not the nationalism an identitarian issue, but the nation-state as that locus of economic production Yeah, I mean I I have a problem with it and I think there is a worry there about nationalism And I'm deeply against nationalism having grown up in a nationalist state Um What I think is really important is the is the idea of self-sufficiency of not being having to extract assets from other parts of the world for our own Survival purposes, but there will be countries and they are in Africa Which cannot be self-sufficient on their own because they're too small They wouldn't want to have regional alliances and they want to work together with their neighbors You know who'll have more water or more land or be able to grow things. They can't grow or whatever So, you know, I don't think it's What I I think the important concept is self-sufficiency is the idea that you cannot live By just exploiting other parts of the world and by you know importing exporting all this stuff This is not not going to be sustained. I say that because Rio Earth Summit is 1992 and since then Sort of common sense, which has percolated all the way down to your everyday sort of liberal left activist is We can only have global solutions to this No, that's rubbish In a sense, it's true. I mean, Britain's only like 2% of world's co2 emissions But at the same time it seems to me, I mean, let's see what you think about this, george That's almost provided a license for sort of political inertia and even even worse than not doing anything It's given almost the outward appearance of doing something and being invested and actually Transitioning the economy where in fact that was never really on the table Can I just say this quickly that when we were running the jubilee 2000 campaign the world bank and the big The big charities in the united states wanted us to play a part in growing a global civil society to match global capitalism You know a global civil society was going to hold capitalism to account And I said no, we're not playing that game, right? Because A global civil society is accountable to whom, you know, doesn't exist, right? And and you know the idea all you're asking us to do is to reinforce global capitalism. No, thank you Having said that we want international cooperation and coordination We want to be able to work with our neighbours and you know, we want international alliances But we don't want a sort of globalised state, which is what globalization is and wants basically in my view