Your weekly guide to Sustainable Investment

Robert Rubinstein 
October 28th

Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist. — Kenneth E. Boulding

Let’s get this out of the way upfront. Our global economic system isn’t just broken; it’s a goddamn death cult run by lunatics who’ve never met a finite resource they didn’t want to infinite.

I’m talking about the Growth Cult.

Picture this: you’re at a party, and a guy is having a heart attack. The economists in the corner don’t call a doctor. They shout, “Give him cocaine! He needs stimulation! MORE STIMULATION!”

That’s our system. The patient—our planet, our society—is having a coronary, and the prescription is a double dose of whatever’s killing him.

Growth isn’t policy anymore; it’s a state religion. It has its high priests (Nobel laureates with their heads firmly in the theoretical sand), its cathedrals (Wall Street, the WEF), and its holy, unquestionable dogma: “Thou shalt grow by 3% annually, or be cast into the outer darkness of recession, where there is wailing and the frantic updating of CVs.”

We’ve been running this economic marathon for seventy years, and we’re so terrified of stopping that we don’t realize we blew past the finish line decades ago and our kneecaps are shot.

Let’s talk about what “growth” really is. It doesn’t mean more happiness. It means more transactions.

If I pay you to punch me in the face, GDP goes up. If we get a divorce and hire lawyers, GDP goes up. If I get cancer and spend my life savings on treatment, GDP goes up. The economy is literally feeding on our misery.

And the kicker? The system treats the depletion of natural resources as income. It’s like a company selling off its factory, piece by piece, and calling it a profit. The high priests call this “sustainable development.” I call it a suicide pact with fancy terminology.

They’ll smile condescendingly and say, “Ah, but technology will decouple growth from resource use!” Sure. And I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you. It’s made of pure efficiency. In the real world, efficiency just means we can destroy the planet at a slightly better rate.

The real joke? It’s not even working. GDP has tripled since the 60s, but happiness hasn’t budged. The 1% has captured 38% of all new wealth since 1995, while the bottom 50% got a crumbs-on-the-floor 2%. The solution? “Trickle-down economics.” Here’s a thought: maybe instead of waiting for wealth to trickle down, we could just not hoard it at the top?

But that’s heresy. In the Growth Cult, redistribution is the ultimate sin. You can’t take from the “job creators”™—they might stop creating those wonderful minimum-wage jobs we’re all so grateful for.

Then There’s the Other Extreme: The Degrowth Delusion

If the Growth Cult is a cocaine addict, the Degrowth movement is the reformed addict who now thinks everyone should live in a monastery. They’ve seen the damage, but their solution is… extreme.

Their basic premise is right: infinite growth on a finite planet is batshit crazy. But their solution often sounds like austerity dressed up as enlightenment. “You don’t need all that stuff anyway!”

Easy to say when you’re a tenured professor in Paris. Harder to swallow when you’re working three jobs in Detroit.

They romanticize poverty, talking about “voluntary simplicity” in a way that’s condescending to those experiencing involuntary complexity. There’s even a whiff of neo-colonialism: “We got ours, but you in the Global South should stay poor for the planet’s sake.”

And they’re politically naive. They think if they just explain it clearly, politicians and CEOs will say, “Oh, you’re right! Let’s make less money for the good of humanity!” Good luck with that. You might as well try to convince a shark to become vegan with a PowerPoint on the ethics of eating fish.

The Radical Truth: The Post-Growth Reality

So, what’s the alternative? It’s not perpetual growth, and it’s not forced degrowth. It’s Post-Growth. And the most radical idea in this whole circus is one word: Enough.

Imagine you’re in a restaurant. You’ve finished a meal. The waiter offers dessert. You say, “No thanks, I’ve had enough.”

A normal interaction, right? No one screams, “BUT THE DESSERT ECONOMY WILL COLLAPSE!”

Yet apply that to the broader economy—the idea that maybe we have enough stuff and should focus on better rather than more—and suddenly you’re a dangerous radical.

Post-growth isn’t about going backwards. It’s about growing up. A healthy economy for infants focuses on growth. A healthy economy for adults focuses on maintenance, development, and fulfillment. Ours has been a spoiled, destructive adolescent for a century.

In a post-growth economy, we’d measure what actually matters:

• Health, not just healthcare spending.

• Time affluence—imagine a 20-hour workweek!—not just monetary wealth.

• Community strength, not the number of security systems sold.

We’d still have innovation, but directed at what enhances life, not what generates the most profit. We’d ask not just “Can we?” but “Should we?”

The transition is hard because our entire system is a house of cards built on the assumption of perpetual growth. But these are human systems. We built them. We can change them.

The good news? The transition is already happening. In community land trusts, worker co-ops, and repair cafes. It’s a quiet rebellion against the screaming insanity of the circus.

The Growth Cult sells a story of scarcity: there’s never enough. The Post-Growth reality recognizes the abundance that already exists and asks how we can share it more wisely. The real scarcities aren't material—they're scarcities of care, connection, and meaning. And no amount of GDP growth can fix that.

This is the radical truth: We already have enough to create good lives for everyone on this planet. The scarcity is manufactured. The "need" for endless growth is a con.

We can keep running this three-ring circus until the tent collapses on our heads. Or we can have the courage to step out and build an economy that serves life, not the other way around.

What’s it going to be?

#PostGrowth #BeyondGrowth #RadicalTruth #EconomicTransformation #Degrowth #WellbeingEconomy #NewEconomy

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This is an adaptation from the upcoming book, "Radical Truth." Think your network needs to hear this? Share it. Let's start a real conversation.
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‘Change course now’: humanity has missed 1.5C climate target, says UN head

A flooded village in the low-lying island nation of Kiribati. The UN secretary general says Indigenous communities must be better represented at Cop climate summits. Photograph: Jonas Gratzer/LightRocket/Getty Images

ByJonathan Watts and Wajã Xipai

Humanity has failed to limit global heating to 1.5C and must change course immediately, the secretary general of the UN has warned.

In his only interview before next month’s Cop30 climate summit, António Guterres acknowledged it is now “inevitable” that humanity will overshoot the target in the Paris climate agreement, with “devastating consequences” for the world.

He urged the leaders who will gather in the Brazilian rainforest city of Belém to realise that the longer they delay cutting emissions, the greater the danger of passing catastrophic “tipping points” in the Amazon, the Arctic and the oceans.

“Let’s recognise our failure,” he told the Guardian and Amazon-based news organisation Sumaúma. “The truth is that we have failed to avoid an overshooting above 1.5C in the next few years. And that going above 1.5C has devastating consequences. Some of these devastating consequences are tipping points, be it in the Amazon, be it in Greenland, or western Antarctica or the coral reefs.

He said the priority at Cop30 was to shift direction: “It is absolutely indispensable to change course in order to make sure that the overshoot is as short as possible and as low in intensity as possible to avoid tipping points like the Amazon. We don’t want to see the Amazon as a savannah. But that is a real risk if we don’t change course and if we don’t make a dramatic decrease of emissions as soon as possible.”

The planet’s past 10 years have been the hottest in recorded history. Despite growing scientific alarm at the speed of global temperature increases caused by the burning of fossil fuels – oil, coal and gas – the secretary general said government commitments have come up short.

Fewer than a third of the world’s nations (62 out of 197) have sent in their climate action plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs) under the Paris agreement. The US under Donald Trump has abandoned the process. Europe has promised but so far failed to deliver. China, the world’s biggest emitter, has been accused of undercommitting.

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Wind power has cut £104bn from UK energy costs since 2010, study finds

Surging renewable energy generation across Europe has lowered gas demand and prices, researchers say. Photograph: John Keeble/Getty Images

Fiona Harvey Environment editor

Wind power has cut at least £104bn from energy costs in the UK since 2010, a study has found. Users of gas have been among the biggest beneficiaries, the research suggested.

Research by University College London found that from 2010 to 2023, energy from windfarms resulted in electricity bills being lower by about £14.2bn than they would have been if gas had been needed to generate the same amount of power.

However, the reduction in the cost of gas that could be attributed to wind generation – owing to the cut in demand and not needing to build new infrastructure – was much greater, at about £133.3bn.

Over the same period, consumers paid about £43.2bn in green subsidies, levied on electricity bills rather than gas bills. The net result was a reduction of £104.3bn in UK energy bills over the 13-year period, according to the researchers.

Surging renewable energy generation across Europe made demand for gas – and thus gas prices – lower than they would otherwise have been, and meant electricity companies had less need to build costly new gas-fired power stations, according to the analysis. The way that the UK’s energy market works also means gas-fired power stations are in effect allowed to set the price of electricity.

The analysis applied to 2010-23, leaving out the lingering impacts of the leap in gas prices in early 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine.

Colm O’Shea, a former hedge fund manager, now a master’s student at UCL and lead author of the report, said: “Far from being a financial burden, this study demonstrates how wind generation has consistently delivered substantial financial benefits to the UK. To put it into context, this net benefit of £104bn is larger than the additional £90bn the UK has spent on gas since 2021 as a result of rising prices related to the war in Ukraine.

“This study demonstrates why we should reframe our understanding of green investment from costly environmental subsidy to a high-return national investment.”

Mark Maslin, a professor of Earth system science at UCL, said the UK’s consumers would benefit to a greater extent if the electricity market were reformed to reflect the reality that wind generation was reducing bills. “At some stage, the UK government must decouple gas and electricity prices,” he said. “That would mean gas prices would reflect the global markets, while the electricity price would reflect the savings from wind and solar.”

Ana Musat, the director of policy at RenewableUK, the trade body for the wind sector, said: “This research highlights the long-term economic benefits for UK plc of investing in renewable energy generation. The only way to reduce energy costs for good is to minimise our exposure to volatile global fossil fuel prices and increase the share of electricity generation from clean homegrown sources.”

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India’s Renewable Energy Mix Hits Major Milestone

Cyrene Oraya Reyes

India’s renewable energy mix has crossed a crucial threshold, with more than half of its installed power capacity now coming from non-fossil fuel sources.

According to government and industry reports, India has reached a significant milestone in its energy transition journey. As of early 2025, 50.3% of the country’s total installed electricity capacity comes from non-fossil sources. This includes solar, wind, hydroelectric, nuclear, and biomass energy. The achievement marks a major step toward India’s target of 500 gigawatts of non-fossil fuel power by 2030.

The country’s total installed capacity is approximately 429 gigawatts. Out of this, about 215 gigawatts are now generated by clean sources. Solar energy is leading the way, contributing nearly 82 gigawatts. Wind energy follows at over 45 gigawatts. Hydropower and other renewable forms make up the rest. This transition places India among the few major economies where clean power dominates the energy mix.

This progress is significant in the context of India’s commitment to climate goals made under the Paris Agreement. The country pledged to reach 50% of its electricity generation capacity from non-fossil sources by 2030. That target has now been met five years ahead of schedule.

The central government credits this success to a combination of policy, innovation, and private sector participation. Initiatives like the International Solar Alliance and Production Linked Incentive schemes for solar panel manufacturing have accelerated growth in renewable energy infrastructure. Large solar parks, wind corridors, and grid modernization projects have also played key roles in scaling up clean power sources across the country.

However, it’s important to note that installed capacity is not the same as energy output. While non-fossil sources now account for over half the capacity, fossil fuels, especially coal, still dominate actual electricity generation. This is because coal plants typically run more consistently, while solar and wind depend on weather and daylight conditions. Nonetheless, as battery storage and grid integration improve, clean energy’s share in actual usage is expected to grow rapidly in the coming years.

India’s renewable energy mix is also a response to rising energy demand. With a population of over 1.4 billion and rapid urbanization, the country needs reliable electricity to support its economic development. Clean energy provides a sustainable path forward, reducing dependence on imported fossil fuels and limiting greenhouse gas emissions.

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