July 26, 2023

She is reconnecting business leaders back to earth – Erin Remblance

58 minutes

Today we are learning from Erin Remblance.

Erin began her career in business with over a decade of experience in Blue Chip FMCG corporation in Sydney and London, however, she found it difficult to reconcile the growth she was tasked with achieving with the ecological crises that were becoming impossible to ignore. Erin now focuses her time on sharing her knowledge about degrowth and system change through her writing on Illuminem and Resilience and through the online workshop she co-created called (re)Biz.

What a great conversation this was, I learned a lot about degrowth, Modern Monetary Theory, are fixation on growth, well-being and more.

Let's get started...

In this conversation with Erin I learned:

Selling offsets for carbon is not enough.

For degrowth economics, you have to do the work yourself.

A lot of sustainability roles were about sustaining business as usual.

With Rebiz she created a sustainability course that was very honest about the changes we need, individually, organizationally, and systemically.

Compound interest and exponential growth by investing early and young is fantastic, unless it is correlated highly with a geological footprint, then it is destructive.

Growing at a rate of three percent in 24 years it is a doubling, over 100 years it is nineteen times larger.

Companies getting bigger by selling carbon offsets.

For the remainder of the years after overshoot day, we will be stealing from future generations.

We need 1.7 planet earths to sustain our current live stiles. There are some countries that live as we have six planet earths.

We are breaching six out of nine planetary boundaries.

There is no healthy metric that says we can continue to grow our economies further. We are already too big.

Try to live hope free.

We just need to do what the world requires of us.

We don't have a right to ask whether we're going to succeed or not. The only question we have a right to ask is what's the right thing to do? What does this earth require of us if we want to continue to live on it? - Wendell Berry

Just keep moving forward, and keep doing what I am capable of doing.

There is a conversation around grief: denial, bargaining, depression, anger, and acceptance. Moving to that acceptance stage the grieve can turn into action.

There are no climate-friendly governments in power, doing what we need to do to reach the Paris Agreement, yet.

Her theory of change is in social tipping points. If you get 25% on board, it very clicky becomes 75%.

Don't see yourself as a consumer, but be a citizen. We can be so much more than just consumers or employees.

There is a point where it is too much effort to be a good consumer, and you could spend that time becoming active on a larger scale.

Don't get stuck in the individual footprint.

Why would we ever think that individual actions are enough to change the system that is eating up our planet?

Reconnecting business leaders back to earth.

Definition of degrowth: a planned and democratic reduction of material and energy throughput, in over-consuming nations, while improving well-being in those nations and global justice.

GDP and well-being have been decoupled since the eighties. Well-being has stagnated.

The way that the global economic system has been set up is just unjust at the moment. We are taking labor and resources from the global South and using them to drive growth in the global North.

Definition of degrowth by Serge Latouche ‘Decolonization of the social imaginary and an implementation of other possible worlds'

"The quickest way to end capitalism is to continue with capitalism." - Roger Hallam

Currency-issuing nations score in a baseball game, there is no limit on the amount of points a team can score, or the amount of money a country can issue. - Stephanie Kelton

If the climate was a bank, the government would have rescued it already.

More about Erin Remblance:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/erin-remblance/

https://illuminem.com/illuminemvoicesprofile/erin-remblance

https://www.rebiz.io/

Other resources:

Book Full Circle by Scott Ludlam (former federal Greens senator from Western Australia)

Extinction Rebellion - Extinction Rebellion Nederland

Kate Raworth - Donought economy

Inner Development Goals

Documentary - Forget shorter showers

Book The divide - Jason Hickel.

Purchasing power parity (PPP)

Serge Latouche