Dennis

After Ciara, it was now time for Dennis to make its way from the North Atlantic to Umeå, bringing gusty winds and another rain-on-snow event. As I have a certain fascination for this kind of Falkland Islandsesque weather, I of course had to go for a late morning run in my Icebugs, bringing my total weekly running distance to 85 km.

On the run, I was thinking more about yesterday’s topic of Bernie Sanders and how few people in the wider middle-class of Sweden (let alone the United States) who would actually support the kind of radical degrowth policies needed to stop climate change, including strict limits on reproduction. The associated rematerialization and relocalization of the economy would also mean an end to all retirement savings, something that I think would not go down that well with the large cohorts who are now entering retirement across the OECD. Moreover, dramatically downscaling the economy will increase vulnerability to the effects of climate change and make rebuilding, for instance after extreme weather events such as storms, more difficult. To put it in the words of Fareed Zakaria, “that makes me wonder: Is the real problem that Sanders will lose – or that he might win?”