‘Becoming a green, sustainable society:’ Shorter work weeks is one of several strategies

A new study conducted by Autonomy, an independent, progressive think tank focusing on work, concluded that citizens throughout Europe needed to shorten their work weeks to avoid global warming, unless each country drastically reduces their carbon emissions.

Workers in the U.K., Sweden and Germany all need to reduce their work hours to somewhere around nine hours a week to avoid the planet from heating to more than 2 degrees Celsius research concluded.

“Becoming a green, sustainable society will require a number of strategies – a shorter working week being just one of them,” Will Stronge, the director of Autonomy, said. “This paper and the other nascent research in the field should give us plenty of food for thought when we consider how urgent a Green New Deal is and what it should look like.”

Read the starry from Nation of Change by Ashley Curtin - “‘Becoming a green, sustainable society:’ Shorter work weeks is one of several strategies.”

'Everything Must Go' - George Monbiot

Everyone wants everything – how is that going to work? The promise of economic growth is that the poor can live like the rich and the rich can live like the oligarchs. But already we are bursting through the physical limits of the planet that sustains us. Climate breakdown, soil loss, the collapse of habitats and species, the sea of plastic, insectageddon: all are driven by rising consumption. The promise of private luxury for everyone cannot be met: neither the physical nor the ecological space exists.

But growth must go on: this is everywhere the political imperative. And we must adjust our tastes accordingly. In the name of autonomy and choice, marketing uses the latest findings in neuroscience to break down our defences. Those who seek to resist must, like the Simple Lifers in Brave New World, be silenced – in this case by the media. With every generation, the baseline of normalised consumption shifts. Thirty years ago, it was ridiculous to buy bottled water, where tap water is clean and abundant. Today, worldwide, we use a million plastic bottles a minute.

Every Friday is a Black Friday, every Christmas a more garish festival of destruction. Among the snow saunas, portable watermelon coolers and smart phones for dogs with which we are urged to fill our lives, my #extremecivilisation prize now goes to the PancakeBot: a 3-D batter printer that allows you to eat the Mona Lisa or the Taj Mahal or your dog’s bottom every morning. In practice, it will clog up your kitchen for a week until you decide you don’t have room for it. For junk like this we’re trashing the living planet, and our own prospects of survival. Everything must go.

Read the piece by Guardian columnist, George Monbiot - “Everything Must Go.”