MatthewHeun
commented
2 years ago How to address this comment:
- MKH to add some content to Ch11 about entrenched interests.
- JVA to add some indices to Ch2 for social sustainability (HDI, Gini coefficient, education attainment, pollution as environmental justice). Some impacts have indices, some impacts have proxy indicators, some impacts have no quantification as of yet. Some known issues have no numerical quantification as of yet.
jgvanantwerp
My second broad commentary is perhaps ‘what’s missing’. You obviously command and deploy a deep understanding of the processes underlying IPARC and the technical challenges in moving towards more sustainability, but I found that your treatment of the social challenges to sustainability a bit too shy, if I may say so. First in chapter 4 you introduce the kind of atomic ‘consumer’ that lives in a world that is ‘optimal’ by definition (barring some externalities that can be fixed completely through changing relative prices in that world), which kind of sets the tone that this is a problem that we face individually, side stepping the structural framework in which individuals operate and which are caught up with politics and political econom. The latter is meant in the sense that some important ’steps to more sustainability’ generate both losers and winners, where the losers tend to be the currently powerful interests, and so steps will not be taken/set aside without political conflict about how, when, whether to make these steps (see also a comment below). Then in chapters 11 and 12 you enumerate a few ‘collective’ and ‘personal’ institutions and actions (not sure they can be so neatly divided, see a comment below) for a ‘more sustainable’ way of living. But in keeping with your emphasis on scale, I wonder whether these actions or institutions are at the scale to meet the problem. Don’t you want to reference the big debates about green growth versus degrowth, the radical demands from the global south for justice and so forth and acknowledge that - collectively - we are in a pretty bad bind where our own societal setups and contracts make it hard to effectively respond to the more and more intensifying unsustainability? I saw in your questions that you’re going more in this direction, but wonder whether it’s the time, in 2022, to acknowledge that perhaps a signficant move towards sustainability involves hard, political choices that are highly contested and not sure to succeed (and one may legitimately disagree about them?)