 you'd navigate it through it very quickly, but I think it's very important. You said, and we have more and more consistent data to back up that green growth doesn't work. Let's just settle this debate, the growth versus green growth, and why you wrote a whole or co-authored a whole report on why decoupling doesn't work. So I can imagine that you use this argument to say why green growth doesn't work, right? Can you explain a bit what is decoupling, what is green growth, and why it doesn't work? Let's do it. Okay, so 10 years ago you would just talk about degrowth. Economists would say like, well, no need, we have green growth already, and they would put some some graph today, you know, they would pick something on our world in data and show you, look, that's GDP per capita, that's energy used, it's decoupling, we're good. It was very difficult to mingle into these numbers because there were just so many of them, but what has happened last year in June 2020 is significant. There's been the first exhaustive review of the decoupling literature. So that's 835 studies coming back to the invention of the concept of decoupling at the beginning of the 1990s. So these people, I mean, in decoupling debunked one year before, you know, we've been trying to do the same and we covered a few hundred, maybe 300 studies, empirical studies, but these people, they really have been lifting every single rock, knocking at every single village door. Do you have decoupling data? Give it to us. And they've done a proper job. There were a lot of respected scholars, and they really did a careful study. And they concluded the same thing that we didn't in decoupling debunked. And that's the argument that I'm going to make now. It's just that it's not a matter of saying that green growth is impossible. Of course, in theory, it's possible, because in theory, everything is possible, especially in mainstream theory, no classical theory. But, you know, that's not the question. The question is, facing the type of climate deadline that we have, in that situation also where we have an unfair development of the world and certain countries need to have access to natural resources more urgently than others, is green growth a viable strategy for ecological sustainability? And the answer to that question is no. And why is that? It all centers on the concept of decoupling, which is funny enough, because decoupling might be the most unappealing concept of it all. Like, you know, it sounds like a divorce, but you never hear people like psychologists and linguists being like, oh, don't talk about decoupling, you know, it refers to divorce. People will not like it. Decoupling has become, you know, one of the mantra of every single international organization, which shows that negative term sometimes works. Anyway, decoupling meaning, you know, GDP, we want to keep it rising and environmental pressure, we want to decouple and have just more GDP, less pressures. And indeed, if we have this everywhere in the world, that would be good. But most of the time, in most countries in the world, we have this, it continues. Then we have a lot of cases of relative decoupling. So GDP increase, and there are a bit of efficiency, but it still climbs up. And very rarely in a handful of countries for a handful of selected impact, often just greenhouse gases, we have absolute decoupling. But the absolute decoupling is not like this. It's more like, you know, tiny, tiny, tiny less. So here, when you look at these and the time it takes for this reduction to happen, that makes me conclude that decoupling is just not fast enough. It's not big enough. It's not encompassed enough because, you know, if we take together impact on water use, waste disposal, greenhouse gases, mineral extraction, you know, soil usage, biodiversity loss, all the different impact that our economic activity has on the environment. That's what we need to decouple, not only decarbonize the economy. That's like, that's step one. So if you decarbonize the economy, but then you just rematerialize by just, you know, using a lot of minerals to build a constantly increasing renewable infrastructure, you've just shifted the problem elsewhere. So here we are falling into a very, I think, commonsensical realization, which is that when an economy grows, it gets bigger. And so trying, well, I can also print it on t-shirts and come on demand. So, dropshipping, yeah. If we have a resource problem, climate change, for example, is an over pollution problem, too much emissions, and we want to reduce it, then, you know, shrinking the size of the economy, trying to just, you know, it seems like a commonsensical solution to do this. Then of course, if we get into the technical argument, it's not a choice between degrowth and green growth. It's just, they can be complementary. But in the current discussion, and that is slowly changing, but coming back to 10 years ago, people didn't see degrowth as a solution. It's only green growth. Now, I think I would want the discourse to shift towards recognizing that everything we can shrink today, especially high, very nature-intensive sectors through strategies of frugality, of sobriety, of sufficiency, of just cutting on, you know, all the production and consumption that, you know, leave well-being unchanged. So, another very economically important on reducing inequality, which is also as many negative effect on society. If we can do this and shrink a bit on natural resources, then it makes it easier to decouple. So, I find here that even people, there are hardcore green growth, I'm sure they would prefer to start from a smaller stack of natural resources being extracted and pollutions being emitted. So, here we have the strategy I would like to say is just let's first do degrowth at this great discussion about what part of the economy we would like to shrink, other part we would like to expand, what economic form that should take, should that be, you know, monetary production, do this and then we focus on what the economy is about, producing that efficiently, which is, you know, using as low natural resources as we can and then, you know, we fall back on on trying to find innovations to be able to do this and some solutions that have been promoted in green growth. So, last thing, then I finish on this, because very often people, they attack degrowthers for being counterproductive because they're like, if you say that. So, what do you propose? Yeah. You make the green growth people look bad and so you make ecological effort look bad and here I think we need to be a bit more subtle of just, you know, let's say green growth is not enough. Again, for ecological sustainability, then when we get into a broader criticism of economic growth as a phenomenon, you also have like, you know, social and cultural critiques. So, you realize that even in an infinite world, there will still be some advantage to have an economy that is not just growing forever, but even that. So, in that constrained world, just for ecological purposes, you can make the argument that just the economy should be smaller and then you can pick a choose after this in a wide toolbox of tools. Some part of the green growth discourse, some part of the degrowth discourse, some part of the eco-feministic, anarchist, ecosocialist, you pick it wherever you want to just make sure that the economy is just doing what it's supposed to be doing. Satisfying needs, getting us, you know, above social minima and royal remaining under ecological maxima. You know, that's the donut of Kate Rework.