Towards a new economy and lifestyle?
Development over the last 200 years has resulted in great technological and scientific progress, as well as increased human welfare. Still this path is not sustainable in the long run. The environmental cost is too high and the available resources will not last. Exactly what a new and more sustainable economy and lifestyle will look like is, naturally, an open question, but there are some recurring themes that can be pointed out:
- Decoupling of economic growth from resource consumption, aka dematerialisation.
- A shift to a less energy- and resource intensive lifestyle in wealthy nations
- “Leapfrogging” in developing countries, implying a jump past the environmentally destructive technologies that have dominated the industrial world (so far) directly to new