by
Jason Hickel
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[...] there is a strong case to be made that the most essential technologies--like public health medicines--should be exempt from the patent system altogether. [...]
the standard pro-free-market response to this: this is bad bcus firms will stop investing in R&D etc etc
but this is just reification of the highest order, in all its absurdity. surely the fact that firms would penalise countries who do this very sensible thing means that these firms are being driven by the wrong factors? and thus perhaps we should reorganise our economic system to prevent it? pro-free-market ideology feels like a matter of limiting the imagination to the most dire point, when it would be so easy to just go a little beyond
[...] As Joseph Stiglitz put it, 'What we measure informs what we do. And if we're measuring the wrong thing, we're going to do the wrong thing.'
on GDP and how it is a pretty awful measurement. Hickel goes into the history of it a bit earlier: apparently Kuznets wanted a more social-first approach that would exclude areas like advertising, commuting and policing from the stats but alas Keynes' more "rational" approach won. funny cus i'd always had this image of Keynes as the more progressive of the two but I guess not
doesn't call it by name but that's essentially what he's referring to
So the problem isn't just the type of energy we're using, it's what we're doing with it. What would we do with 100 per cent clean energy? Exactly what we're doing with fossil fuels: raze more forests, build more meat farms, expand industrial agriculture, produce more cement and heap up more landfills with waste from the additional stuff we would produce and consume, all of which will pump deadly amounts of greenhouse gas into the air. We will do these things because our economic system demands endless economic growth. Switching to clean energy will do nothing to slow this down.