Original source: Clean energy won’t save us – only a new economic system can

It’s time to pour our creative energies into imagining a new global economy. Infinite growth is a dangerous illusion.

"Clean energy, important as it is, won’t save us from this nightmare. But rethinking our economic system might. GDP growth has been sold to us as the only way to create a better world. But we now have robust evidence that it doesn’t make us any happier, it doesn’t reduce poverty, and its “externalities” produce all sorts of social ills: debt, overwork, inequality, and climate change. We need to abandon GDP growth as our primary measure of progress, and we need to do this immediately – as part and parcel of the climate agreement that will be ratified in Morocco later this year."

Not only do I agree wholeheartedly with the point being made here, but also I think we should take the opportunity to connect it to something that is happening this year. In 2017 it is the 100 anniversary of the Russian Revolution (1917). Whilst I am not a communist in any way imaginable, I do agree with its ideals (at least those imagined ones): equality for all, justice for all; the economy should be at the service of people, not for hoarding the few nor for corporations. Let's remember that revolutions are real and possible, that the 20th century has been marked by them. Let us also realize that the main problem of the world is one of IMAGINATION: we cannot imagine a world that is different. Well, let's begin this year remembering that there are, in fact, better solutions to the state of the world, that once we break away from the status quo (the "trickle down economy is the only way forward" or "we have too little power to make a difference") ideas can change.

May 2017 be a year of revolutions, a year of new ways of imagining. The world (of which sometimes forget we are part of) DESPERATELY needs it.