The economist Branko Milanovic recently wrote a blog post titled “The illusion of degrowth in a poor and unequal world.”  He penned it, he says, following a conversation he had with a proponent of degrowth.

As it turns out, that proponent was me.

"If we want to have any hope of averting catastrophe, we’re going to have to do something about our addiction to growth."

Earlier this summer, a paper published in the journal Nature captured headlines with a rather bleak forecast. Our chances of keeping global warming below the 2C danger threshold are very, very small: only about 5%. The reason, according to the paper’s authors, is that the cuts we’re making to greenhouse gas emissions are being cancelled out by economic growth.