Episode 223: Timothée Parrique

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Aug 22

Today's guest is Timothée Parrique, a researcher in ecological economics at Lund University in Sweden.

Degrowth is one school of thought in the path towards decarbonization, but the topic is rife with controversy. Proponents argue against growing economies and instead shrinking production and consumption while favoring sustainability, social justice, democracy, and well-being. In other words, instead of measuring GDP as a monetary or market value, those who advocate for degrowth measure health and happiness. Skeptics aren’t convinced. Can degrowth be a powerful lever for change and is it realistic given the way some societies are structured today?

Jason posed this question on Twitter and Timothée kindly offered to share his expertise. Titled “The political economy of degrowth” (2019), Timothée’s PhD dissertation explores the economic implications of degrowth. And while we don’t get to cover everything in this episode, the conversation is another example of the importance of spending time to discuss debated concepts and tease out some of the nuances that can’t be found in 280 characters on Twitter. Enjoy the show!

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Episode recorded on August 4, 2022.

In today's episode, we cover:

[8:23] Timothée's background in ecological economics or the interaction between economy and nature
[14:29] Having a holistic perspective of climate change
[17:51] The 1.5 degree threshold
[27:07] How production and consumption contribute to climate change
[28:52] The carbon budget
[33:32] Government integrating climate mitigation into politics and environmental awareness among youth
[35:27] Finland's climate neutrality announcement
[40:37] The concept of degrowth and its origin
[43:17] A culture of low-carbon mobility seen in European countries
[46:04] Positive dividends of reducing our ecological footprint
[51:24] The Rebound Effect
[55:21] Capitalism and the impact of removing drivers for growth
[1:02:47] Technological innovation and the "avoid, shift, and improve" approach

Jason Jacobs: Hey, everyone. Jason, here. I am the My Climate Journey Show host. Before we get going, I wanted to take a minute and tell you about the My Climate Journey or MCJ as we call it membership option. Membership came to be because there were a bunch of people that were listening to the show that weren't just looking for education, but they were longing for a peer group as well. So we set up a Slack community for those people. That's now mushroomed into more than 1,300 members. There is an application to become a member. It's not an exclusive thing. There's four criteria we screened for determination to tackle the problem of climate change, ambition to work on the most impactful solution areas, optimism that we can make a dent. And we're not wasting our time for trying and a collaborative spirit. Beyond that, the more diversity the better. There's a bunch of great things that have come out of that community. A number of founding teams that have met in there. A number of non-profits that have been established. A bunch of hiring that's been done. A bunch of companies that have raised capital in there. A bunch of funds that have gotten limited partners or investors for their funds in there, as well as a bunch of events and programming by members and for members, and some open source projects that are getting actively worked on that hatched in there as well. At any rate, if you want to learn more, you can go to myclimatejourney.co, the website, and click the Become a Member tab at the top. Enjoy the show.
Jason Jacobs: Hello everyone. This is Jason Jacobs. And welcome to My Climate Journey. This show follows my journey to interview a wide range of guests to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change and try to figure out how people like you and I can help. Today's guest is Timothee , a social scientist originally from France. He's currently a researcher at the School of Economics and Management of Lund University in Sweden. And his dissertation was on the political economy of degrowth in 2019 exploring the economic implications of degrowth. Now, I got to Timothee because I actually tweeted that I am skeptical that degrowth can be a powerful lever for change in decarbonization, but I wanted to talk to someone who was well-researched in this area who could try to convince me otherwise. And Timothee raised his hand, I looked into his background and he seemed really well thought out and deep in this area, so I invited him on the show. We had a pretty cordial discussion. I came in with an open mind. I asked a lot of questions and we didn't cover everything there is to cover, but we did cover a lot. Now, I can't say that I came out of there fiercely advocating for degrowth, but I have to say, a lot of what he talked about, at least, some elements of it seem logical and there's more common ground than I expected going in. Like anything, polarization leads to extremes and the truth more often than not is somewhere in the middle in the nuance that you just can't get to in 140 characters or 280 characters on Twitter. So increasingly it's awesome just to take people with different views than me invite them on the show and talk it out. Timothee, welcome to the show.
Timothée Parrique: Hello, Jason.
Jason Jacobs: Well, I'm excited for this one. I have to admit I'm also a little nervous as, I mean, we just prepped a little bit before the show, we just met for the first time, but some context for listeners is that degrowth is something that it's a school thought in the climate world in terms of A, path forward and a philosophy or a theory of change, if you will. And given my roots where I've been an entrepreneur, my whole career, I grew up playing competitive sports as a kid, I like building things and the power of markets. It's what I know. And I've seen the power firsthand and while not factoring in the externalities has got us into a pickle. I just have strong conviction in the power of market forces if harness properly to bring about change. Now, I should say... Oh, so anyways, so I tweeted that, "Hey, I don't personally ascribe to this philosophy, but who are those smartest people out there that could convince me otherwise?" And a lot of angry people came at me as was being a dirty capitalist. And you very politely, you just raised your hand and said I'm happy to talk to you if you'd like, and then a ton of the people coming after me all like, "Like that," or they were like 30 or 40 likes or something like that. And I was like, "Oh, who is this guy?" So I looked into it and you're just so deep in this area. And I listened to one or two of the other shows we've been on our talks you've given. And you also seem like just a likable reasonable guy. And I thought, "Wow, he seems like a great candidate to break the ice here and learn about this thing that I've been allergic to."
Timothée Parrique: Yeah. Well, thanks. The degrowth discussion on Twitter is unnecessarily heated, I find. So it's very easily pitted against people just insulting each other, the progrowthers and the degrowths. And at the end of the day, no one really talks or even the ecosocialist insult the degrowthers, who insult the ecomodernist, who were just themselves disagreeing with the eco-Marxist, and everyone is shooting at everyone. So if we can use that concept degrowth or any concept for that matter, just to have a discussion that help us to better understand the situation, that can be a nice creative stimulation for us to solve problems that we did not manage to solve until today. That's why we create concept.
Timothée Parrique: That's what concept are for, not for ideological battles, but just to help us explore reality in a more effective manner. So I'm, I'm very happy. Yeah. I raised my hand and I just want to say that's not because I considered myself as smart person talking about degrowth, which was returning your message, but just because I really enjoy actually talking to people outside of that bubble, because I find it very important right now to not just lock yourself into some dogmatic little community where everyone agrees with you, because now, the issues we're facing are so big and urgent, that we literally don't have the luxury of just having ego battles to know who's got the better concept, and in 10 years, we'll decide.
Timothée Parrique: We have, we are a force to just work hand in hand. And for that, we need to be willing to listen, to chat, and most importantly, to change our minds. So we need to confront ourselves with ideas that sometimes go against our belief and our work, and sometimes just change our minds. And I'm the first one. I consider myself a specialist in changing minds. That's my favorite definition of what it means to be a scientist. I'm paid to change my mind. I'm paid to just gather information, to look, to do research, to find ways of proving myself and other wrongs so that we can collectively learn. So I'm very much looking forward to our conversation.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah. And, I mean, I've been on a similar path where I came in neutral, just checking my assumptions at the door and talking to all kinds of people that I never would've spent time with in my prior entrepreneurial life. But after four years, I find that I'm starting to have some opinions. I would describe those opinions as strong opinions, loosely held though, to your point where I'm starting to have some opinions, but I'm learning more every day. And I think you're right, when it does fall into this tribal or ideological camp where it's more about not caving in than it is just getting to the right path, right? Then I don't think that's good for anybody. So maybe just give an overview, talk a bit about the work that you do today, and then we can maybe get into a quick history of how you got into doing that work. But we'll start with just, what would you do-
Timothée Parrique: Yeah, well-
Jason Jacobs: ... Mr. Random Twitter guy?
Timothée Parrique: Hello, I'm a random Twitter guy. And so I'm a researcher in ecological economics. So ecological economics is one of at least seven schools of thought within economics. And what we try to do as ecological economist is to better understand the interaction between economy and nature. So that's a very broad question. And before being an ecological economist, I was of course trained as a generalist economist. But then I started to focus on trying to better understand that process that is economic growth. And most generally, of course, the prosperity of nations, which is the central question of economics. And as I started to do this, I found it odd that many economic theories were not including ecosystem services, the use of natural resources, the degradation of climate, water pollution, all these things that, for me, were very much connected.
Timothée Parrique: To prosperity, they were just underlying factor of productions for everything else that we do in the economy. So that's when I went a bit deeper, I moved from France to Sweden, which back then had a lot of specialty on ecological economics, started to just read a lot about that. And that's where I bumped into the concept of degrowth. But before doing this, I was studying economic growth. So imagine me now from an ecological economist lens, which means every time I look at something, so a process of production or consumption, I'm always asking myself, "Okay. What natural resources? Where's the materials? Where's the energy? Where do they find them? How do they use them? And what is the consequences that has on ecosystems after?" So through that lens, I've started to see economic growth from a different perspective. I was like, "Oh, wow. When an economy grows, it actually gets bigger in terms of biophysical use."
Timothée Parrique: And that creates a lot of different problems. So that's when I came to understand this, this new biophysical understanding of economic growth, I started to look into the reversal process. So we like, "Oh, wow. If sometime, perhaps we produce and consume a bit too much. And that is still heavily coupled to resource use. And environmental degradations would producing and consuming less be a solution to lower ecological footprint?" So it all started as a hypothesis. And that's where I discovered degrowth, which as you're very well described is not only a concept in ecological economics, but it has developed into a full-fledge paradigm, a constellation of ideas that connect to many different other things from eco-socialism, to ecofeminism, to post-development, post-capitalism, many different ideas that are in this perverse attached moving together with degrowth. But for me, most of my research now is to do really with the macroeconomic implications of degrowth. So the history of its ideas and all of this, not that much the politics of the concept, but really trying to understand like, "What happens when an economy grows?" And then asking yourself the question, "What would happen if an economy degrowths?"
Jason Jacobs: And just in terms of how you spend your days and how you eat, do you teach, or do you study? What do you do professionally?
Timothée Parrique: Okay. So I finished my PhD two years ago at the beginning of the pandemic, which was called the political economy of degrowth. So that was just PhD and theoretical economics, which I did at Stockholm University and a university in France. And after doing this, I went to write a book which actually will be published on September 16th. That's in French. So I'll pronounce it for whoever's listening that knows French it's called [foreign language] Slow Down or Perish the Economics of Degrowth. So after I finished my thesis, I was lucky enough for people to read my actual thesis, which is very unlikely because it's 900 pages in theoretical economics. Usually, no one will read it. Your mom will give it a shot, but that's pretty much it. And your friends will lie and say they've tried, but the thesis was very well-read. And so I was invited more and more to just explain what that was, degrowth.
Timothée Parrique: So that's when I went to and was offered a book contract, and now, the book being finished, I'm calling you from Lund University in Southwest Sweden. So I'm a researcher here. So I work full-time. I don't do much teaching these days. I just do research. And I work now on something a bit specific. I hope we'll have time to talk about it. It's also linked to degrowth, but it is rather linked to what I will describe as post-growth. And it's how do you finance public services in an economy that is not growing? So it's when I was talking of implications, this is one of them. So if you're an economy that grows and the public budget feeds of that growth. Well, then you create a growth dependency. If you want to stop growing or even to degrow, then you have to rethink the way you finance public services. If you still want to have an effective pension system, health system, education system, or even if you want to finance an ambitious Green New Deal. So that's the kind of question I'll be exploring for the next two years.
Jason Jacobs: Awesome. Thanks for that context. Now, of course, I want to talk about degrowth, but before I do, I'd love to, if it's okay, just ask you some qualifying questions about the problem of climate change, just so we're working off the same sheet of music, if you will, around what problem we're trying to address or one of the big problems that we're trying to address, is that okay?
Timothée Parrique: Completely okay. Sure.
Jason Jacobs: Okay, great. So I guess my first question is, some people describe the problem of climate change as the climate emergency or crisis, does that resonate with you? How do you describe the climate? I need to pick a word that's not leading. So I'll say challenge.
Timothée Parrique: The climate challenge?
Jason Jacobs: Yeah. What's the nature of the problem?
Timothée Parrique: Well, the nature of the problem, and now, I'm going to broaden it a bit, because from an ecological economics perspective, climate change is only one ecological crisis among several biodiversity loss, for example, would be another one. Even though global warming, climate change, climate breakdown, many different ways of calling it is by far the one that is most popular, my friends, climatologists and biologists that look at the interaction between climate change and biodiversity loss. They're way much worried about loss of biodiversity, that they are about the adverse impact of climate change. So there's this perfect ecological storm that is unleashed by human activity and most directly the burning of fossil fuels. So here, we need to be very careful because then otherwise that's going to bite us back later in the discussion, do not focus too much on greenhouse gases. Greenhouse gases and the burning of fossil fuel is extremely important for climate breakdown, but there are also other things, for example, extraction of metals and minerals, the use of water, land used, deforestation and its impact on biodiversity.
Timothée Parrique: So, for me, the good reflex I like to teach my students when they learn about ecological economics is never to have your pet environmental impact that you care most about whether that is climate change or dolphin or to always have a holistic perspective. Every time we produce something, that's going to have a myriad of impact. Some of them are going to be more problematic because they affect human communities in catastrophic and short-term ways. And others are going to have long delays before they just affect us. And others are going to affect us here and now if we're talking of local air pollutions in cities, when you drive a car, others like climate change are going to affect others, maybe in the future or in different countries. But to answer more directly to your question, ecological crisis, well, I still use the term.
Timothée Parrique: I like it because the term crisis referring to that moment where we need to make a decision. Something is going in the bad direction and we need to act. I like this. So far, we don't really know what we need to do. I mean, people, of course, have different opinions on what to do, but I think the climate consensus now as we know, the trend we're going to is not sustainable. Something has to be done. And trajectories to maintain global warming to 1.5 degrees as settled to be the horizon of sustainability concerning climate change and how to avoid catastrophic climate breakdown. So the crisis being like, "Okay. Now, that we know, we somehow need to act somewhere." And for me as an economist, I'm like, "Okay. We need to change our mode of production and consumption in order to make our mode of living compatible with a 1.5-degree trajectories." And of course, when you talk about this, the climate is global. It's everywhere. It's an earth feature.
Jason Jacobs: One clarifying question, that one and a half-degree, is that an arbitrary number? Why did you choose one and a half degrees? I know that, I mean, mainstream chooses one and a half degrees, but you also disagree with many other things with mainstream. So why does that one half degrees resonate?
Timothée Parrique: Well, it's one of the threshold considered the safest by the IPCC. So the IPCC, being the highest authority when it comes to scientific study of climate change. So I'm not a climatologist and I've got no authority in linking a certain degree of warming with, for example, the frequency and intensity of weather events or drought or anything else, but climate scientists that tell us and all these people that have been whose knowledge has been aggregated in IPCC reports, if we want to give ourself the best shot at avoiding adverse effect of global warming, well, we need to limit the warming as much as possible.
Timothée Parrique: And if we go over 1.5. Well, that's a threshold after which risk increase in a way that is just uncertain. So, of course, I mean, it would be even better to stop it before that. But 1.5 as first stabilized as this threshold, we should be a ecological ceiling we should not cross. And that's the framework we often use. You've perhaps have heard of Planetary Boundaries Framework by Johan Rockstrom and all the other authors. That's actually where I did my PhD thesis in Stockholm. It was in this Center, the Stockholm Resilience Center.
Jason Jacobs: You are a pretty well-qualified random Twitter guy. I have to say.
Timothée Parrique: Well, I've been looking at these stuff for quite a while. I started to look at degrowth in 2014, and I've been just working full-time on studying and then researching that ever since. So I've seen a lot of this and the Planetary Boundaries remain one of the best compass we have to talk about sustainably in a way that is precise. So sustainability is us as humanity as a whole managing not to overshoot certain ceilings, each Planetary Boundary has its own quantitative ceiling. So climate change is going to be 1.5 degrees. Material footprint is going to be 25 gigaton per year. Water footprint is going to be measured in litters. And biodiversity loss is going to be measured in numbers of extinguished species, compared to just a normal rate of biodiversity loss. These kind of stuff. So for us, this gives us a compass of being sustainable, meaning, not overshooting these thresholds that have been defined by scientists who study these things at the kind of like, "Do not go their threshold," If you just overtake that, we might get run into some problems.
Jason Jacobs: Uh-huh. And so when people talk about this is an emergency and we have 12 years to act or 10 years to act, I mean, depending on what year it is, I forget exactly how many years we have to act at this point, but does that framing resonate with you?
Timothée Parrique: For someone, I mean, imagine my job, every day, I get numbers coming about the state of the climate, about mega fires, about drought, about climate-related famines. And I cannot tell you the last time I received the good news on my desk. It's horrendous. Most of us doing research on that, they develop some what's called eco-anxiety that leads to eco-depressions, and then they have to stop because it's just so dismal. Now, like I was reading a paper by the people that invented the Planetary Boundaries, their last concept it's called Climate Endgame. So they're studying scenarios, which they say, if we go over three degrees of warming, that's a climate endgame in the sense of we're talking potential loss of civilization. So imagine you have to face this. So yeah, when we talk about climate emergency, I guess, is to raise awareness that it's not only a crisis like we have to make a decision at some point in that century, it's just like we have to act now on a diversity of front.
Timothée Parrique: And the climate emergency, I think, most people realize... I'm telling you something very personal, but just last month, so right now in France, there's been a few heatwaves this summer. We've seen over Europe, the breaking of historical temperatures. And this going together with abnormal drought has created a lot of forest fires. And I've watched my home forest burn, which I thought was very abstract, even when you read about the mega fires in Canada and in the US, and everywhere else, in Portugal, in Greece. But now, I was just with my parents over the phone leaving their house, showing me the forest burning and what was after. And so I think people, when they experience this, they'll be just farmers that just experience a drought that forces them to leave their land.
Timothée Parrique: And now we're talking most of the time, it farmers in the Global South or can be like fishermen. I'm talking of so many people who have anchored the entire culture on fishing. But one day there's just no more fish because there's been industrial overfishing. And imagine you have your entire cultural identity. And it's like, "What do we do if we cannot fish anymore?" So I think the sense of emergency, for me, emerges from realizing that we are already experiencing catastrophic effect, climate migration really brutal disruption of livelihoods and climate-induced poverty.
Timothée Parrique: And also if you look at the effect that are just getting worse and worse, and the fact that there's not been much action, or at least not much effective action, which we can measure quite easily, because you can just look at if we're talking about climate breakdown, you look at global rates of greenhouse gases emission. The goal was to curb them, whatever we did did not do that. Even in selected countries, and we'll talk more about this, green growth and decoupling. We've not been as successful as we wanted. So that's calling it a climate emergency means like, "Okay, guys. We need to wake up in the sense of what we did, the solution we applied to that problem didn't work, so we need to rethink and find perhaps better solutions and we need to do it even faster than we thought we would be doing it because the adverse consequences are already at our door."
Jason Jacobs: Uh-huh. And so we can jump in and say like, "Where does degrowth fit in?" But as soon as we say the word degrowth, then it's like people get in their tribal positions and it's like putting on their armor ready for battle. So I want to leave that aside for the moment and just talk about climate change, it's a hard one because it's this invisible villain, right? And you can say, "Well, it's not invisible, wildfires on that, right? But invisible villain is like there's an armed robber in my home, right? Or, I mean, my house is on fire is a good one, right? Or the forest around my house is a good one. But actually, this stuff it is more... It's the atmosphere, and the oceans, and it's like a collective harm that has symptoms that are point symptoms, right? But it's a more horizontal problem, right? It's hard to describe, I mean, look at me struggling right now.
Jason Jacobs: So I don't take issue with any of the framing that you just had. I mean, look, I'm scared shitless about it. That's why I do the work that I do. But before we get into deep growth, just like, "Okay. So that's where we sit, right?" And people debate like, "Well, three degrees and the consequences of three degrees," well, except for big oil shells, no one seems to disagree that it's bad, but the degree of bad and how quickly and catastrophic tipping points, it does seem to be more uncertainty there, but look, let's acknowledge, it's bad and it's getting worse, right? And again, before we get into theories of change, what do we do about it? Collectively, what do we do about it? Because when most people hear this, they think, "Well, that is too big and interwoven and over my pay grade. And so I'm just going to stick my head in the sand because what other options do I have, right?"
Timothée Parrique: Yeah. So that's where it's really important to get good quality information. So when we look at the climate crisis, as I said before, we know it's because of the burning of fossil fuel. When you go on a website to calculate your personal footprint as an individual, you will see that most of your footprint will be concentrated on a few activities. That's also true at the scale of a country. So the top three usually are just first transport with the use of the car and plane taking, second would be food, and especially meat consumption, and third heating, especially if you have oil heating at your home are just gas. So that can be reassuring to know that somehow the things we have to change is not we don't have to scrap society and just build something completely new. We can just look at the, again, I'm speaking like an economist, the things we produce and consume that are most carbon-intensive and work on that.
Timothée Parrique: And we can do this from two different perspective. And that's why you will always hear me saying production and consumption and never... Because they come together. So far, there's been battles, which I don't think have been very interesting by people saying, "Oh, climate change, it's a consumer problem." So it's you, Jason, you need to look at what kind of car you have and what kind of things you buy at the supermarket and compare everything. And other people have said, "No. No. It's a production problem. It's companies. Why are they allowed to sell SUVs? Why are they allowed to open new oil fields?" The reality of an economy is that production and consumption always dances together, and true that in the form of capitalism, we have today in most high-income country, which is large firms capitalism.
Timothée Parrique: The power of producers is often higher than the one of consumers. Especially, if you're low-income households, you don't have much leeway, you're dependent of your car to go to work. You cannot find another form of employment around where you live. What are you going to do? You cannot. On the other hand, companies, wealthy companies, they can, they have a bit more leeway in changing the way they produce in designing which country they produce in all of that. So then we can get into that discussion and that has been recurrent debate between degrowth and eco-socialism. It's an interesting one, but to start with, I prefer to have everything onsite to be like, "You know what, we will have to change the way we produce and we will have to change the way we consume. And we will have to do them together." And in doing so, it's so important to keep in mind that somehow we have this carbon budget, which is one of the most important concept when it comes to the economics of climate change.
Timothée Parrique: So a budget, I mean, we're used to having a budget at home. If I give you $1,000 a month, that's your budget and you decide to spend it. Well, now, imagine I give you five ton per year of carbon budget and you have to spend it. And at the end of the day, maybe you realize, "Oh, I have to decide between flying there for the Holiday or just eating meat or just having my car." Because every activity somehow is using natural resources. Concerning the activities that are not using them, you can do them as much as you want. That's not a problem. So it's also a very selective problem, but the idea of a budget means that we will have to choose. And we'll see how that ramifies into a lot of more complex societal transformation. How do we make these big choices, collective choices of production consumption, but they're all ramify from this one starting point of, "If we want to limit global warming to 1.5 degree or to any threshold of degree, we have to stick to a carbon budget and not overshoot it.
Timothée Parrique: And if we want to stick to that carbon budget, which in high-income nations is always smaller than the one we have." So I'm going to talk about France because that the country I know best. Right now in France, we are at 10 ton per person per year. We want to be at two ton, okay? So we have to divide it like this, but of course it's not the same situation, when you look at the 50% poorest household in France, they're just roughly already at a sustainable footprint. Whereas if you take the 20 richest households, they're just over 25 ton per year. So you have also this wide variation, that means that we will have to be selective, not only in terms of goods and services. So if you start to tell me like, "Oh, yeah. Look, I'm going to buy less books and try to hope to minimize carbon."
Timothée Parrique: Yeah, maybe, but if you're still applying and eating meat, that's not going to change your carbon footprint, also at the level of the society, we need to look at where carbon emissions are and make sure that we tackle the problem where these are. So it's differentiated responsibility as they call it in climate politics. In between countries and within countries, in between geographies, in between classes, in between companies, the big one, the small ones, in between sectors. And that's where it becomes really complicated, but also reassuring because it means that at the end, there's an end to that climate equation. That's the budget we have today, that's the budget we want to keep and we have to trim the fat in between. And now that's ROR in a very subtle manner slide towards the concept of degrowth, which for me, I'll define later as the one strategy to slim down that carbon budget.
Jason Jacobs: I'm going to lay out this flywheel that I see. And I'm curious to get your thoughts on it. So we talked about how this is a grave and pressing problem, which I agree with. And we also talked about how for the average person who's not steeped in this area, it's hard to get their brain around. And they have a lot of other problems that it's easier to get their brain around like, "How do they put food on the table? How do they live a comfortable life? Put their kids through schooling? Have heat in the winter and air-conditioning in the summer, especially as things get hotter," et cetera, right? These are the things that your average person thinks about. They're selfish and it's Darwinism, right? I mean, they're selfish because they want to look out for them and their loved ones' first and foremost.
Jason Jacobs: So given that, I can buy that if we want to have a budget and enforce a budget, that it requires some sort of regulation, and rules and parameters in order to get those rules and parameters in place, you need elected officials, assuming it's a democratic country to put those rules forth in order to get elected officials, to put those rules forth, you need those same ordinary people that are out there, not thinking much about this stuff to elect and support the officials that put those rules in forth upon them, right? I mean, is what I just laid out. Do you take issue with any of that or is that a fair assessment of that flywheel that I'm probably doing a poor job of describing?
Timothée Parrique: No. No. I agree with that. I didn't see anything outrageous so far in what you explained. So-
Jason Jacobs: And so given that, I guess, how do you break that cycle.
Timothée Parrique: First, I think there's environmental awareness rising at each of these levels. So I'm not going to talk about the US, because I'm a very ignorant in American politics, but in Europe you see more and more governments that are just integrating environmental stewardship, climate mitigation into their politics. So that's happening. On the other side, we see massive rise in environmental awareness among citizens, among consumers, among what I find most inspiring among children. I mean, you've heard of school strike for the climate. We started in Stockholm, Greta Thunberg, that is now just has become a global movement of kids that be like, "What's the point of going to school to get an education if in 20 years time, we don't have inhabitable planet?" So I think we should not take these likely. When you do modeling we call them like weak signals.
Timothée Parrique: There's things that could be potentially a game-changer. I'm also thinking of many companies are deciding voluntarily, many companies and many cities to start having climate plans, because companies are run by people. And if you have this general rise in environmental awareness and people running companies are not like all-garden geckos that will just refuse to do anything that just minimize their profits. You see a lot of self-organized cooperatives, a lot of not-for-profit businesses that be like, "Okay, guys. We're going to start to monitor our carbon footprint and we're going to try to minimize it." So the way I see it is not like, "We're doing nothing now and we need to kickstart change in that vicious cycle of not changing." It's rather there changes happening at many levels and we need to connect them together to have synergies.
Timothée Parrique: And so they feed on each other. So for example now, Finland has announced a very ambitious target for climate neutrality, to reach climate neutrality is a bit of the endpoint where your country arrive at the moment where it just emits the amount of carbon that it absorbs. So it's stabilized in terms of carbon footprint, says they want to get there by 2035. And other countries like France that were aiming to get there by 2050, maybe you're going to be "Okay. We need to do that." And maybe Finnish companies that are going to adapt to this climate target by 2035, they're going to start to calculate carbon and change their trajectories. And all of that maybe is going to feed into a virtuous cycle of accelerating this societal change. And I guess, is that going to happen? I don't know, but what I do as a social scientist focusing on theories of transformations for sustainability is trying to imagine pathways where these would happen.
Timothée Parrique: And especially trying to look at obstacles. So obstacles in the way where actually like a stream in a river where you would've the stream getting more powerful and that's get the water flowing, but you have a dam. And so I think our goal is to identify the five, six, 10, 15, 200 dams that are separating us from this ideal situation of getting rid of fossil fuels and doing all the other things we need to do to make our ecological footprint sustainable over the long term. Once we have identified those, again, I find this reassuring because we have a number of problem to work on. It sees us to be this very abstract problem, existential threat that seems very philosophical and very difficult to grab on a conceptual eel, then we're like, "No, it's a number of obstacles that we can work on at many different levels.
Jason Jacobs: Well, I have to tell you, nothing you've said so far I'm allergic to, I mean, if-
Timothée Parrique: Oh, we'll get to that.
Jason Jacobs: If I didn't invite you on the show as the degrowth guy, I think we would be having a perfectly reasonable discussion, so far every time the word degrowth comes up, it makes me break out in hives. And so we'll come back to that, but maybe I'll ask just a follow up question, again, without in introducing these tribal elements to the discussion. And it's that, "Okay. If ultimately we need to get off of fossil fuels and you talk about the complexity, how it's not just GCs, but it's biodiversity, it's methane, it's the full picture of the ecological challenges versus just simplifying it to carbon," right? That makes sense.
Jason Jacobs: At the same time, you could do the same thing as it relates to our livelihoods outside of natural resources, in the sense that over a billion people don't have access to basic electricity, as an example in developing countries. And so when they look at what the West has done over the last many decades, and then it's like, "Oh, how convenient now that the West has carved out this cushy life for itself, just when we're getting a little taste of it, you're going to cut our legs out from under us." Like, "No, you're not," right? Or what's another example? If you do something, I mean, this is one that I think about, there's talk about taxing people that drive into work, right? And it's like, "Okay. Well, that makes sense because I've been to Oslo and the biking culture and walking culture, and it's awesome and amazing. And car culture sucks." That's true.
Jason Jacobs: But the closer you get to a city, the more expensive real estate is. So who ends up having a further drive into the city, especially when public infrastructure is wholly insufficient, if it even exists, right? People that have less income, that don't have a choice about whether they take their car or not. So by taxing them, you penalize them, right? And so those are just some nuggets for context. So given where we sit, I've been told, right? By lots of different people that, "Yes, we need to ultimately get off of fossil fuel," but you can't just rip it out. We're going to rely on it for as far as the eye can see. So I'll just stop right there. How do you respond to that?
Timothée Parrique: Okay. So now, have we been nice and polite and agreed on a bunch of things, I'm going to unload a few more controversial claims. So remember I talked about budgets. So in the same way that you could say, "We have a carbon budget at the level of a country, we have a global carbon budget." So when you're an ecological economist, every natural resource has ultimately a budget, because the planet is finite. And some of these budgets are a bit extensible because we can develop new technologies to find ways of getting to some minerals we could not get before, but some of them are not that flexible. The climate is one of them. It's actually a bit more fragile than we thought it was. So now we are thinking, "Yes. We live in a world where there are still many people that live in situation where they cannot satisfy their needs."
Timothée Parrique: To satisfy these needs, they will need to produce and consume more. They'll need to build houses, roads, pipes, solar panels, windmills, whatever they want to heat their homes and to have electricity. They will have to do this. So that's an allocation decision to be, "Now we realize at the current level we are overusing carbon, so we need to reduce." So degrowth, the way it emerged historically at the beginning of the 2000s was a strategy to complement sustainable development. To say that we need degrowth and high-income countries that are having a very heavy footprint. So see that as a macroeconomic diet so that we can liberate as many resources as possible for the sustainable development of the Global South. So that is here, I think, it connects and that was at the beginning of the 200s when the concept developed. And now this is even truer.
Timothée Parrique: And I want to jump back to another thing you said, because the Global South I don't think envies the Western way of life. What we all want is to be able to satisfy our needs. The Indian economist, Amartya Sen, was calling that Capabilities. So I want to be able to satisfy my needs of mobility. I want to be able to go from A to B to see my friends and family. I want to be able to eat the food that makes me healthy and that I like. I want to be able to hang out with my friends. I want to have a work that has meaning. But when you dissect these needs, the material stuff you're using their means to achieve these. And so when you compare different countries, in terms of need satisfaction, you realize that some countries are much more efficient in satisfying needs than others.
Timothée Parrique: So for example, if you go to Oslo, and you have bike lanes everywhere, and it's actually quite nice to bike around and many people do it. So when you go around and you want to go hangout with your friends, they all have bikes, and very easily, you can go there. You have a shower at work when you arrive, you can change, and all those very small things. Then that means that within that infrastructure, you can satisfy your need for mobility at a way lower carbon footprint that if you're living in a countryside in the US, there is no public transport. There is no bike lane. There is no infrastructure, and there is no culture that comes with it. So when you compare the mobility in the US that is just so much more carbon-intensive, that mobility, for example, in Sweden and where I live, it's a matter of infrastructural choices.
Timothée Parrique: So we can learn from this and be like, "Oh, wait. What about we actually invest in the sense of not so far, just not only money, but invest in creating a culture of low-carbon mobility so that we can keep maintaining our need of mobility or even improve it. I think most people, if they could go to work, we're talking about small commutes, I don't know for the US, but in Europe, most of car trips are actually a few kilometers, people going to work. I think the average in France is around six kilometers. So if you could do this in a way with a match of bike and light mode of public transportation, I think people would enjoy it. They would find it empowering. It would be good for their health. It would be more convivial because no one likes to be stuck in a car for traffic jams.
Timothée Parrique: No one liked to live in a city where you hear the sound of cars. And when you breathe the air of exhaust, all of a sudden, you would just be like in Amsterdam and you see the bikes everywhere and it's completely silent and people I think would enjoy it. So here, what I'm hinting at is that we have somehow to differentiate among many different countries, looking at what we call biophysical metabolism. So the way they use resources, some of them are so much more efficient. And what we want to do is not say we need to sacrifice wellbeing in the North and be okay. Now, we're just going to just slash our needs and tighten the belt so that we can save the Global South. There's a part of truth in this. We need somehow to free resources, but we can be intelligent in the way we do that. And find ways of actually collectively reorganizing ourselves so we can maintain quality of life or even improve wellbeing with these low-carbon mode of organization.
Timothée Parrique: I give you another example. So transport was number one, concerning footprint. Number two, has to do with food. Meat consumption in France account for half of food-related footprint. So now, I don't think we have a need for beef. We have a need that is just to get access to the food we like, that we enjoy, the food that we know how to cook, and the food that makes us healthy and happy, that is just tasty and convivial. These are changing needs. They're contextual needs. They move around and we see now communities, and that's something happening a lot of Sweden, that's reduce their meat consumption. They don't do this out of sacrifice. They don't cry in the night because they didn't have as have access to a steak. They just realize that actually, they can also have a very happy, healthy diet without meat consumption.
Timothée Parrique: Actually, when you look at these people, you realize that health-wise you have positive dividends. So these people then they reduce their food bills, because meat is often the most expensive. They reduce also their health bills, because there's a lot of health issue associated with meat over consumption, which is the case of more high-income countries. So here you see we start to see these double dividends of what we need to do to reduce ecological footprint is also things that can improve our wellbeing. So for me, those should be the low-hanging fruits of a sustainability transformation. That should be pretty much consensual in the sense of like, "They will make most people better off." But now, I will finish on this because so far, I'm far too agreeable with. So I need to say something in the sense of so far we've been talking about ways and we've been talking about averages, which is quite dangerous in economics.
Timothée Parrique: And especially in climate politics, because these emissions are so concentrated. Perhaps you've seen this number, but half of world emissions is tied to the mode of living of the 10% richest individual on earth. So that's a staggering number. And even within a country like France, you have the same concentration. So in Europe, let's say, in the European Union, same thing, the 50 half of Europe, the poorest half of Europe is having the same total carbon footprint than the 10% richest Europeans. So here, we need that double set activity. I think the argument still function in the sense of in the Global North, in general, historically this early industrialized countries that have the heaviest footprint today, we need to liberate resources for the Global South. But the way to do this means that we also need to look at inequality, because I don't know if you've seen the Avengers.
Timothée Parrique: And you remember this one Infinity Wars with Thanos, the big villain that is going to gather Infinity Stones to kill half of the population of the universe to preserve its resources. Well, that strategy sucks, actually. If I was the official chief economist of Thanos, I would be like, "Dude, that's not going to reduce, just do the same, and remove the 10% richest and you're actually going to remove pressure." I'm not saying we should remove anyone. I'm just saying, as soon as we talk about climate mitigation, the question of inequality cannot be dissociated from that. That was my first point. But then I'm aware I didn't address your second point about policy, but we can come back to that perhaps later, because I don't want to talk for too long.
Jason Jacobs: Uh-huh. I mean, you say it like it's so controversial. I don't disagree with anything that you said. I think if people eat less meat, for example, it's a good thing. I think if people fly less, it's a good thing. I think if there's more bottoms up awareness, it's a good thing. I think that it is staggering, the inequality in terms of the top 10% versus everybody else. But I want to talk about practically, we sit where we sit, right? And we need to go where we need to go, but how, right? I think a lot of where the debate comes is actually where the rubber meets the road, right? It's the tactics of, "How do we get?" Like, "No, no one disagree."
Jason Jacobs: Well, maybe some people disagree, but those aren't my people. I'd rather spend the time with the people that agree with the overwhelming scientific consensus and talk about what we actually do. And the other question I would bring up is just, "Who's we," right? Because you can want a country to do this or a country to do that, but who's that country's boss? There's no international body that can... So anyways, maybe we'll start there. One, what should actually be done? And then two, by whom?
Timothée Parrique: So we just published a paper with a few colleagues and we tried exactly to answer that question by making a list of all the proposals we could find tied to degrowth. And we found 380 of them. So it was hundreds of different proposals. Something that can be as simple as banning outdoor advertising, or just taxing advertising on polluting product, or banning the production of SUVs, or tax on meat, or something else that's just I talked about creating a culture of cycling culture. So constructing bike lanes, subsidizing train tickets, stuff like this. So all these bags you put together, you get yourself a program. What I'd rather like to see as a toolbox, many instruments you can mobilize. And I think the question becomes a bit like acupuncture, you need to find the sequence that will allow you to create that virtuous cycle of reducing actual footprint. And I'm going to introduce a concept that is extremely important. It's called the Rebound Effect. I don't know if you've heard about that concept before.
Jason Jacobs: I have.
Timothée Parrique: Uh-huh. Beautiful.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah. I had someone on the show, I'm blanking on his name, Harry something, but he's the Rebound Effect guy. So, yeah. That was good. It was an older one, a couple years ago.
Timothée Parrique: Quick reminder for people, the Rebound Effect, and that's pretty much how it sounds is when you manage to reduce consumption of a resource, either through better technologies, or eco-innovations, or just through sufficiency, less consumption. So let's say you stop eating meat, but that carbon you're going to save through less meat, you're going to spend flying more, something like that. So the carbon is going to rebound. And so what we want is to find the right policy settings to make sure we avoid rebound. Now, a study was done for the US data shows that the rebound is around 100%. And that was for energy use. So every unit of energy you save within two years, it will be used elsewhere in the economy. So that shows us something quite interesting. And that's how I'm going to just march towards discussing capitalism, where hopefully, we will have more entertaining disagreement for our audience.
Timothée Parrique: Right now, we have an economy that is organized around economic growth. And so every time we liberate resource somewhere through the effort of some companies to change the machines, they use to some consumers to change their lifestyles. Someone else in the economy is going to see this as an opportunity to make money out of using that unused resource. And that happens at least at three levels, which we call growth drivers. At the level of the company, if you have a for-profit company whose success depends on sales. Well, it makes sense, they're going to try to sell more. That's why advertisement exists. As an economist, I've always been surprised at the existence of advertisement, which I find it very strange institution, but advertisement exist because communis have incentives to boost sales. And so they engage in practices that make this happen.
Timothée Parrique: So we have this productivism at the level of the company where to maximize profits, they're going to try to slash cost. Very often when you want to slash cost, that means you're going to evacuate environmental issues, because these are expensive, and they're very easy to evacuate, because the environment doesn't have a bank account and a lawyer that's going to sue you if you don't pay them. So they're going to do this. And then they're going to try to maximize sales. So we have this productivism at the level of the company, at the level of consumers. Consumers, they want to increase their purchasing power. So they want to have higher wage so they can buy more stuff. And we have a culture in many high-income countries that of materialism that is fueled by advertisement, not only by many different things, also where people somehow want to consume more. And then you have the government, which is the third level that is framing that protectivism at the level of the company consumerism, at the level of citizens into what we like to call growthism.
Timothée Parrique: So to make sure that, "Well, as a government, I want to maximize GDP because that's how I define prosperity of my economy. So I want companies to sell as much as they can, and I want consumers to buy as much as they can, and I'm going to do whatever that is fiscal policy and monetary policy to accompany this." So that system, which is one core feature of capitalism. Capitalism does that very good, because capitalism is a system where every single time there's an opportunity to mobilize a resource, to accumulate more resources, people do it. That's in the name. The definition of capital is a resource you can mobilize to create more through a process of production. Which is fantastic, perhaps if you're trying to reconstruct an economy after a war or out of nowhere, because that creates a lot of incentives for people to get busy and producing consume more, but in a situation where you've already reached a state of relative abundance and where the task is ready to reduce your footprint is a bigger emergency that increase production. Then that becomes an obstacle.
Timothée Parrique: So now, remember my analogy with acupuncture. So that means we need to act. So for example, what if we say, "Well, now, government, instead of just trying to maximize GDP is going to use other indicators." Again, that is already happening. New Zealand in 2019 introduce the Wellbeing Budgets. So no more GDP. Now public governance in New Zealand is trying to maximize 65 indicators of wellbeing, including social health and ecological sustainability. So here, you get rid of one of these growth drivers. In France, we have a few thousands of not-for-profit cooperatives. So I'm sure you've heard many, but these alternative business models can be the mission-oriented companies, B Corp, stuff like this. Basically, people are trying to organize what a business does. So just process of production, but by minimizing the importance of profit. So just turning down the profit motive to be like, "You know what, we produce for needs. We produce for wellbeing. We produce for resilience."
Timothée Parrique: At the end of the day, we might make a profit, but that motivation for profit should not be what drives or decisions of what to produce so much to produce. So now, I'm engaging in a wild thought experiment. If we were to take the 4.5 million companies in France and to be, "Okay. Now, you guys cannot be for-profit private companies anymore. You need to be not-for-profit companies." Then we would get rid of another driver of growth. And now, let's tackle with the third one. In Sweden, we have a law that forbid advertisement targeting kids under 12. Which, I mean, it's very difficult to be against that, but if we extend it to saying advertisement is creating cravings and unsustainable patterns of consumption, especially for things we don't want, SUVs, for example, then we could just ban advertisement for SUVs.
Timothée Parrique: Many countries have done, so banning advertisement for tobacco and alcohol. So it's pretty much would be the same. And then you get rid of other little driver of growth at the consumer level. So I've just given you three examples here, but just if we take all the hundred little instruments and acupuncture style, we're trying every single time to just diffuse these growth drivers, already we are getting rid of this self-sustaining accumulative patterns you find in the economy. And that's where my big claim comes. Just if we were to do all of that, I think that economy would end up with could not be described as a capitalist economy anymore, because we would've gotten rid of the essential features of defined what capitalism is.
Jason Jacobs: One question I have is if you took away all the changes that you just said, and you did nothing but just put a high price on emissions, and essentially, factor in the externalities that today are getting ignored, as you said, the environment doesn't have a lawyer or a bank account to sue, what impact do you think that would have, if any, and would that make meaningful headway towards the end result that you're advocating for?
Timothée Parrique: Putting a price of carbon has often been considered by economists as a silver bullet solution to climate breakdown. I don't think it's that easy. So perhaps you've heard of the Yellow Vest Movement in France, which was a reaction to a very poorly designed carbon tax. And so I think the cautionary tale of the French Carbon Tax is showing us that we need a variety of policies. There's going to be no silver bullet. So for example, if we want to put a price on carbon, so first, let's not get back into the monomania of carbon. There's just many things we want to look into, but if we want to put a price on carbon, then we need to do it in a way that accounts for inequality, that accounts for also different sectors. So emitting a ton of carbon, if you're a hospital, it's not the same as emitting a ton of carbon if you are a jet ski location service provider.
Timothée Parrique: So same thing, here, we are coming back to a fundamental question of political economy, which is what do we want to produce and how, and for whom. And again, if we admit that we have ecological budgets, it means that for now and forever, that question will forever haunt us. We have to choose. We cannot have both, the private jets and the steak at every meal, and the high-tech surgery, and the dentist, and the clean water, and all this kind of stuff. We need to divide. But when you look at actually the studies that I've tried to divide, we realize something quite interesting. If you put on a graph on one X, you have, let's say, carbon footprint, you realize that certain goods and services have very high-carbon footprint. Taking a plane. For example, others have very low-carbon footprint.
Timothée Parrique: I think a picnic with your friend in a lake or something like this. Or reading a book in your hammock. But then, if on another access on the same graph you put the wellbeing footprint. So how much pleasure? How much need satisfaction do you derive from different goods and services? You can differentiate four types of product, right? You can see what is high-carbon footprint and very low wellbeing. So basically, those are the stuff that can be easily phased out, you can just reduce footprint without losing on wellbeing. I think the use of private jet is a good example, because so few people use them. So if you were to phase out private jets right now, completely, with maybe a few exceptions for humanitarians emergency and stuff like this, I don't think you will see a dent in the collective wellbeing of a country. Actually, I think it could just be improving. That's also what we see, a country with lower rates of inequality are happier country overall, they're healthier countries overall.
Jason Jacobs: We do need to wrap up in a couple minutes, which is unfortunate because we have a lot more than a couple minutes worth of things left to discuss. But one thing I want to make sure that we address is, you talked about how, a lot of I hear is it's not either or it's not either or, right? It's multiple fronts, but I haven't heard anything about technological innovation. And I know there's some people that believe that technological innovation is the way. I certainly don't believe that. Although, I focus on working a lot with technological innovation, but it does seem to be a way, and I haven't heard you mention it a single time. Where does technological innovation fit into getting us to where we need to go? If at all, in your view?
Timothée Parrique: I mean, first, we need to divide in technological innovation. There's a lot of technological innovation that is aggravating the problem. So if you devise a new way of doing industrial fishing, a more efficient, cheaper way of just dragging mega nets over the bottom of the ocean, you patent this, that technological progress, but that's not where we're going to go. So first, if you look at technological innovation and be like, "One challenge is to have as much eco-innovation as possible," right? That's the first thing, problem. In a capitalist economy where you're rewarded based on the money that innovation, the return on investment. And again, the environment has no bank account. So the fish are not going to pay you if you manage to find a way to save them, companies are not investing in the right things.
Timothée Parrique: So we have much more innovation that goes in the bad direction than innovation that go in the right one. And one way of looking at this and this is why I've not talked about technological innovation, because I think even though that's one part of the solution, it's a secondary part, is because of that logic used by the APCC of avoid, shift, and improve. The most sustainable resource is the one we don't have to use. So somehow, if we manage to consume off of the meat we consume, because we realize it's healthier, then that's something we won't have to find a technological innovation to capture the carbon that is emitted by the cows and all of that. So avoid. And that's where I locate most of degrowth thinking. It's finding, avoiding strategies so we can shrink our economies by just reducing the production consumption of this high footprint goods and services and the mode of leaving of the people who consume them.
Timothée Parrique: Then we go to the shift, if you really have to use a car, an ambulance, then maybe you can use an electric ambulance. I mean, you go to Amsterdam, you see all taxis, they're electric. Well, maybe that's an easy thing to do. We can still use car, but they can be electric. And then you go to the improve. That's the third step. If really you cannot phase out that car and then you've used the best car there is, then the improve, we need to focus our technological creativity to make that car the greenest as possible. But the order matters, so far, when you look at the debate on sustainability people are a bit too hyped about technology is going to save us, you're being that joker card. I see this nowhere in the numbers. And it's not like we're starting to want technological innovation today that has been running since the 70s.
Timothée Parrique: That was actually the main criticism against the Meadows Report back then. Result. It has not worked. And then I connect back, full loop to what I started with. If you're expecting something we've been doing now to radically solve the problem, whereas it has not solved or even make a dent in the problem in the last 30 years, how can you expect that to make a dent in the next eight years that the IPCC gives us to mitigate climate change? That's why, now, I think the challenge is most on the avoidance shift than it is on the improve. Even though of course, we need to redirect most of our creativity and innovation on the problems that will reap social wellbeing and environmental sustainability, even though they don't return, they're not profitable financially.
Jason Jacobs: Uh-huh. And as I said, we could totally have a chapter two at some point, but anything I didn't ask that I should have or any parting words for listeners?
Timothée Parrique: I mean, now I'm a bit of shame because we did not even define what degrowth was in the first place. So maybe I'll end up on this. And now, there are many books you can read on degrowth. Jason Hickel has written Less is More, which is a good first book to read. If you want to get deeper, The Future is Degrowth, it was published last month. It's a great literature review, but I'm just going to end up on that definition, because so far we've talked a lot about degrowth as a process of reduction of production and consumption to reduce environmental footprint. But in the literature you have three extra challenge and have only talked a bit about that, that decrease to be democratically planned, because again, as I said needs, they're contextual, they're evolving. So bringing back democracy is the only way to make that choice how do we want to use our carbon budget.
Timothée Parrique: So democratically planned reduction of production and consumption that is equitable. I've talked a bit about this. It's not degrowth in the Global South, it's not degrowth for the households that struggle to put food on the table. It's degrowth for those who can afford and should have the capacity in both responsibility to reduce their levels of consumption and production, and lastly, while improving wellbeing. So I talked also a bit about that, but in the way we organize this, if we managed to do it intelligently, then we could reap this double dividend of ecological sustainability and wellbeing. So if you put these four features together, sustainability, social justice, democracy, and wellbeing associated with the reduction of production and consumption, that gives you degrowth as it's currently being discussed.
Jason Jacobs: Great. Well, Timothee, thanks again for coming on the show. Sorry to cut this short, but, yeah, awesome discussion and looking forward to having an ongoing dialogue as well. I think we can. Well, I know I can learn a lot from you, maybe you can learn something from me, but at anyway, it'd be awesome to keep the lines open as our journeys each evolve.
Timothée Parrique: Let's do that. Thanks for having me, Jason.
Jason Jacobs: Hey, everyone. Jason, here. Thanks again for joining me on My Climate Journey. If you'd like to learn more about the journey, you can visit us at myclimatejourney.co. Note, that is .co not .com. Someday we'll get the .com, but right now, .co. You can also find me on Twitter @jjacobs22, where I would encourage you to share your feedback on the episode or suggestions for future guests you'd like to hear. And before I let you go, if you enjoyed the show, please share an episode with a friend or consider leaving a review on iTunes. The lawyers maybe say that, thank you.