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Andreu Escrivà: “The sustainability of capitalism wants to maintain the current situation and is unsustainable”

  • The Salto interview Andreu Escrivá, researcher and environmental expert, on the occasion of his last book, "Against sustainability". It exposes the strategies that green capitalism uses to strengthen itself and how they generate a false idea of sustainability.

22 August 2023 - 06:03
Last updated: 2023-08-23 08:43
Andreu Escrivà. Argazkia: Gabriel Rodriguez / El Salto.

“The attempt to sustainability capitalism seeks to maintain the current situation, that is, an unsustainable situation,” says Escrivà in the dialogue. That we can continue with the illusion of sustainability and that the market has realized sustainability: by buying something they sell us “helping the planet.” “We are trying to maintain an unsustainable system that many companies are leading,” he said.

It is critical of the idea of sustainability that is understood today and states that we associate sustainability with “less environmental impact”, but that it is not “true sustainability”. “To be sustainable would be to buy something indefinitely, because it can be maintained over time. Today it makes no sense,” says Escrivà. Example car: It will never be sustainable, even if industry tries to sell.

The interview also talks about the carbon footprint, a carbon footprint concept created by an oil company for a marketing campaign. Escrivà has denounced the strength of the fossil industry and how marketing campaigns blame the individual citizen as an individual change, although collective and structural changes are truly important.

"Mercantilist and capitalist sustainability wants to keep the current system the same," he said. The ecological transition, seen within that framework, brings us to the same system, even if it is unsustainable.

As for the idea of circular economy, it says that it is impossible, that in a productive process you can never have a closed circle at all. See the need for another economy: “I want another economy, a planned economy, a social and solidarity economy, which is not seeking economic growth, but people’s well-being.”


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