Offsetting is no solution: if we wanted to offset all our CO2 emissions by planting trees, for example, we would have to plant forest on almost all of the world’s current farmland. Source: Jean-Marc Jancovici.

Another example: this op-ed signed by 1,000 scientists, “Facing the ecological crisis, rebellion is necessary”, published on 20/02/20 in Le Monde.

The rebound effect, more broadly, is when the energy savings a new technology was supposed to deliver are cancelled out by people consuming more. And it’s far from the only perverse effect of sustainable development.

An investment fund is a company that pools investors’ money and invests it by buying shares in companies. The “three quarters” figure comes from the white paper published by the Association Nationale des Sociétés par Actions in 2016.

To dig deeper, read “Successful Non-Growing Companies”, published in 2015 by Liesen, Dietsche and Gebauer. For more on diseconomies of scale, see the Wikipedia page.

Stock options: a form of variable pay tied to the share price, which has exploded since the 70s. Thanks to them, the pay of top American bosses has risen more than 10-fold in 40 years, while the average employee’s has gone up by just 12%.

Find the original article here.

Illustrations by Rachel Suming.

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