Guardian Invokes Betteridge's Law Of Headlines: "Economic Growth Is Still Heating The Planet. Is There Any Way Out?"
Ed. - In case you're not familiar with Betteridge's Law Of Headlines, it states that for any headline composed as a question, the answer is 'No".
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But experts heavily contest the evidence of decoupling. “It’s inconclusive because it focuses on the wrong thing: annual flows of emissions rather than their accumulation,” said Peter Victor, an emeritus professor at York University in Toronto. “It is the accumulated stock of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that causes climate change, not the annual flows. We are very far from decoupling the stock of atmospheric carbon dioxide from economic growth.”
Others point out that while some countries may have decoupled their growth from domestic emissions, the picture is more mixed when accounting for imported goods. Meanwhile, many countries – notably India and China – have yet to significantly decouple annual emissions from growth.
More broadly, since Limits to Growth was published, our understanding of how economic activity is damaging the planet has widened beyond just carbon emissions. Post-growth economics has emerged alongside the study of so-called “planetary boundaries” – hard environmental limits that, once crossed, could have disastrous consequences.
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n 2018, researchers at the University of Leeds applied these boundaries to more than 150 countries, looking at metrics such as CO2 emissions, ecological footprints and land use. They examined how many of these boundaries a country had breached and compared this with progress on a variety of social indicators such as income, nutrition and life satisfaction. Their key finding: no nation had met the basic needs of its residents while also staying within its biophysical limits.
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2026/feb/09/economic-growth-carbon-emissions-impact-global-heating
