Over the cliff

Yesterday evening I took part in a climate debate organized by the Left party of Sweden. As always, I had been nervous for days leading up to this event, to an extent that I again came to question my rationale for accepting these kinds of invitations.

After a talk by Deniz Butros who is number three on their list for the European Parliament elections and a few great songs by Magda Andersson, it was time to jump over the cliff. The moderator started off with a classic question, “if everyone would live like an American, we would have four years to save the climate”, to which I got a chance to point out that in a world where everyone lived like an American we would also presumably have the innovation capacity and the economic resources that would come with four billion people having a university education etc. Over the course of the evening, I got to deliver some of the key arguments that I advance in my new book chapter on ecomodernism and rewilding, while also returning to the basic problems of global scalability and climate nationalism that I have worked on for the last decade. All in all, I think I am happy with the result. Now, off to work!