A Final Mental Reset … Struggles About the Global Justice Report … Sunday Thoughts … Summer Reading and Conference Preparations

The Lighthouse Keeper | Edition 36 | July 2026

This new edition of the Lighthouse Keeper comes later than expected. I took most of June off after celebrating my 60th birthday in late May and had gathered around 35 of my best friends to cherish the moment. I also had a special treat for them. Tyketto-frontman Danny Vaughn, one of my heroes in rock music of all times, came and performed a ‘living room concert’ and also performed 4 Tyketto songs together with one of Germany’s best guitarists, Markus Pfeffer. Danny sang on various albums of Markus’s project Barnabas Sky, but they had never performed music together in the same room, and without any rehearsal. It was a brilliant world premiere. This was by far one of the most important connection moments of me with my 60 year’s past, and going forward, hopefully for still quite a while. It was also a moment of community where most of us realized the value of friendship and being there when needed. I was so lucky that everybody but one friend I invited was able to come, and the one apology simply had to do with the Trump regime and its ridiculous immigration terror.

A Final Mental Reset

So came June, and we went to Sweden and Norway for 4 weeks in total. I really longed for that. Both countries are lovely, the people are lovely and all you see and interact with breathes some sort of love. Love for people, love for detail, love for local food, love for beauty, love for connecting, love for nature, love for the moment. I was soaking this all up. When arriving in Norway, I felt even more embraced by the roughness of nature; every fjord, every mountain, every waterfall, every glacier, all tundra and plants had a story to tell, and certain epiphany moments made me felt embraced by Gaia, and helping me to readjust priorities of the essentials in my life. This has consequences, especially completely letting go of all occupational therapy of the current economic system (a real physical and mental killer machine, slowly, but brutal), things that create a sort of ‘mental sleeping pill’, a sort of ‘as if’ something relevant could be achieved with certain topics. It was another (and potentially final) peeling off certain past and well-meant ideas such as

• ESG is in any way meaningful as a stand-alone discipline;
• Standards can deliver sustainability (that was the belief I once started with in 1987);
• Ratings, rankings, indices and taxonomies can help to create sustainability;
• Something like sustainable finance or investment would actually really exist;
• Governments will make the right decisions for all life on Planet Earth;
• Conventional philanthropy can do any good for regenerative transformation;
• Our economic system design would change for the better by learning;
• International treaties or contracts create the necessary national responsibilities;
• Court decisions would be respected and properly executed;
• Climate Change, Biodiversity Loss and Displacement can be reversed;
• We have the resources for renewables on global scale;
• AI is the big life-saver for humanity.

If the answer to all these is a blatant ‘NO’, and you still see 99% of all those in the sustainability field cling to exactly those (as the answer is threatening their existing ‘business model’ mindset), the remainder is fierce: say no to opportunities that somewhat sneak around the ‘real’ topics, call out the bullshit when it pops up (I could do that all day, but refrain from that and be selective), but first and foremost find ways to energise and still feel appreciation and humility for what’s possible instead, the alternatives that are indeed there and need love, engagement support, funding and visibility. I came back feeling assured that I am doing the right thing, and well, being 60 now, all what is done to me is now somewhat irrelevant, all that matters is what I do for the next generations (Intergenerational equity) in the timeframe that’s left for me to contribute. I will most likely be gone when worst comes to worst, so I should best hurry up. I also realised that an ‘after me the flood’ approach isn’t helpful either. Or this T-Shirt print:

In the last edition of this newsletter, I wrote a long essay about my vision of Europe in between the superpowers and how it could become a differentiator with its very own superpowers, but directed towards a future for all life. The halo was overly positive, but often with a caveat that it would be illusional to think it could become reality. So, there’s no real will for a vision! And in the meanwhile, Europe is burdened by yet another heatwave, more wildfires, more destroyed biodiversity buffers, more burnt down houses and infrastructure, and lost lives. The numbers that are mentioned are minimally 20.000 extra deaths due to the climate, and growing. 2 billion € worth of grain destroyed, more than 200.000 hectares of forests lost, entire villages burnt down. The surreal pictures that got posted show ignorance, powerlessness, and simply … more collapses, place by place, person by person. And the political statements are the same as in all years before.

I therefore long struggled what to cover in this new edition of the Lighthouse Keeper, except adding all the Sunday Thoughts of the last three months (most of them now on Substack and just copied into a Linkedin Post with a teaser headline).

Struggles About The Global Justice Report

But in the end and in all of the turmoil around us, and of course with my bioregional hat on and having just presented my vision for Europe in the last Lighthouse Keeper, one discussion stuck out for me in all the weeks: the release of ‘The Global Justice Report 2026’by Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty et al., and the World Inequality Lab.

Quoting from the Executive Summary: ‘Its main conclusion is simple: it is possible to reconcile planetary habitability and high well-being for all, but only if the transformation rests on three pillars simultaneously. Fast decarbonization of energy systems is necessary. But we also need a major shift toward sufficiency – understood as a sharp reduction in labour hours and material footprint and large changes in consumption patterns, food habits, land use, and forest cover. In addition, neither decarbonization nor sufficiency can be financed and politically sustained without a drastic reduction in inequality of income, wealth and power, both between countries and within them. The compression of global inequality is not only compatible with deep decarbonization; it is a necessary condition for shared prosperity on a finite planet.

‘The Global Justice Report is the first attempt to propose a fully quantified plan going in this direction, combining four dimensions that today’s debates often treat separately: redistribution at the world scale, a deep reform of the international financial and economic order, a radical transformation of energy systems, and substantial shifts in consumption patterns. To most climate scenarios, including by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the main novelty is we model all four dimensions together and place inequality and sufficiency at the center of the analysis.

‘Concretely: Per capita monthly national income converges to €5,000 in every country, closing a 16-fold gap. The share of the bottom half of global wealth increases from 2% to 30%, while the share of the billionaire class decreases from 6% to 0.05%. Nearly 90% of the world’s population double their income while working roughly half as many hours as they do today. Warming reaches 1.8°C by 2100, rather than over 4°C under baseline macroeconomic and policy trends.’

In essence the report says that we mainly have an unfair distribution of wealth, and curing that could save us all. There is enough wealth for all of us on this planet. But beyond the targets, this plan also needs certain means that are far off from what we have right now, and modelling them gets us to the numbers. Those means are:

• A global wealth tax up to 20% on billionaires.
• Income taxes reaching 90% at the top.
• A World Sovereign Fund at 10% of global capital.
• Ending financial transfers that currently flow from poor to rich countries: 0.6–0.8% of world GDP annually, twice total development aid.

Wow! Doesn’t that sound like a perfect plan? And there are really great names behind this 2-year study. And still, isn’t this too good to be true? And are there any pitfalls in the research model? Why was I not totally excited? I took time to let it sink in, it is a 136 pages report.

After a short while I saw critique coming in, from Hans Stegeman (Triodos Bank), Timothée Parrique, Kasper Benjamin Reimer Bjørkskov, and others. I read them all, and for those really interested in terminology, the differences between degrowth, sufficiency, recession and certain scenarios are well guided to read Timothée’s and Kasper’s contributions, a great study piece on essential details. It becomes clear that the use of wording like ‘uniform degrowth’ are misappropriated in the report.

Parrique in my view sums it up best in his piece when he writes: ‘If sufficiency is the principle of “enough,” which justifies specific policies and practices, I would say that degrowth is its macroeconomic counterpart: the deliberate, equitable downscaling of an economy as a whole. And just as sufficiency is usually posed against efficiency, degrowth is posed against green growth, the wager that GDP can keep growing while footprints decrease due to the eco-efficiency gains brought by technological progress. […] Degrowth is all these three things together: (1) a critique of economic growth justifying (2) a transitional slowdown of rich economies making way for (3) a radically different economic system (often described with terms like “post-growth” and “post-capitalism”).’ In consequence it means that the degrowth scenario, if well defined, would actually trump sufficiency scenarios.

The whole aspect even went further when the Financial Times used the study for their usual degrowth-bashing, so Timothée Parriquealso pointedly responded to that. So that is that.

But my concerns would be much more fundamental. I think I’d summarize them in three parts:

Timeframe:

The report extrapolates up to 2100, based on the data of the last 200 years. Is that in any way realistic? The report also considers an immediate or at least quick uptake of the sum of the means. Is that realistic? The story of politics, international agreements and taking national and global responsibility towards the challenges is one of delay, denial, ignorance, nationalistic ego and focus on ever more wealth hording through creating control of access to means. In one of my Sunday Thoughts I called it ‘Chokepoint Economy.’ This is where I agree with Hans Stegeman’s criticism: ‘Every delayed reform is an extra tenth of a degree of warming. Every decade of institutional stagnation is a generation growing up convinced that progress is impossible. And in the meantime, the concentration of wealth continues to grow, which increases the power to perpetuate that belief. That is what makes the time factor so crucial. The longer redistribution is delayed, the greater the concentration of power. It is a downward spiral, and we are right in the middle of it.’

Collapse:

There is little recognition of the already happening collapse happening right here, right now, and how it’s culmination of topics has created a dangerous brew, called polycrisis. Since about a decade we are seeing the correlations of global heating through climate change, the eradication of biodiversity, ongoing exploitation of ending resources through advanced forms of colonialism, displacement of people and increasing stress-based violence. Is a pure extrapolation of data at all helpful, and then mainly framed around climate change, one of the many interconnected topics of collapse. Will the better distribution of wealth change any of these dynamics in a short timeframe? I doubt it.

Economic System:

The report remains in an existing economic system design without tackling the broader challenges that I consider necessary for a regenerative economy. The static of national boundaries vis-à-vis the concept of bioregions, the design of ecosystem funding capacities in a financial market structure that rightly prices in sufficiency and abundance, and the need to replace politics by bioregional governance in and between bioregions is a non-existing component in the report. The financing of most of the burden through billionaires giving away most of their wealth also hasn’t functioned, why should it now happen? In short: this economic system design fiercely resists and fights back transformation and Stegeman’s point kicks in again. And as today’s Global Overshoot Day (July 30) and the SDG Report 2026 clearly shows, the existing system deeply sucks!

If you read the list of the ‘topic failures’ I mentioned at the beginning of this newsletter and see how they are deployed in this study, the mirage becomes visible, at least for me. Feel free to disagree, but at least you know my standpoint as a basis for responses.

Sunday Thoughts

I have published the first 178 Sunday Thoughts (and some Bioregional Nomads on the Road posts) here on Linkedin. From #179 onwards I primarily publish them on my Substack account (rthurm@substack.com) as articles, and only post a link to them here separately. Please sign up to my substack to read them all. Here’s an overview (sorry for the eye-candy, it’s quite a lot since last time):

Wishing you all a great rest of the summer. My summer literature has recently arrived, so time to dig in, do further work on the r3.0 Conference (including 80+ Confluences, please find posts on my feed here regularly), and our collapse resilience projects. Let’s all find peace of mind in this collapsing world. There’s still loads to do!