Digital Economy: Does digitalization facilitate green growth? | Steffen Lange

It is often assumed that digitization enables green growth. Green growth means that increasing economic growth is accompanied by significantly decreasing emissions. But our research shows: Digitalization increases economic growth only slightly, and the positive and negative ecological effects of digitalization roughly cancel each other out. So digitalization has not yet succeeded in enabling green growth. For digital technologies to really contribute to ecological sustainability, the economic framework would have to change fundamentally. Only as part of a far-reaching socio-ecological transformation beyond growth can digital potential be leveraged.

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About the project:
This video is from the project "Digitalisation and sustainability". We’re a team of young scientists who critically examine digitalization from the perspective of different disciplines. We investigate the potentials but also the risks of digital technologies for the urgently needed sustainability transformation of the economy and society. Our project is a cooperation between the Technische Universität Berlin (TU Berlin) and the Institute for Ecological Economy Research (IÖW).

We are:
Prof. Dr. Tilman Santarius, Technical University of Berlin
Dr. Steffen Lange, Institute for Ecological Economy Research
Friederike Rohde, Institute for Ecological Economy Research
Dr. Maike Gossen, Technical University of Berlin
Dr. Vivian Frick, Institute for Ecological Economy Research
Johanna Pohl, Technical University of Berlin

The project "Digitalization & Sustainability" is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung [BMBF] within the funding program "Junior research groups in Social-ecological research" (Nachwuchsgruppen in der Sozial-ökologischen Forschung).

[Nullius_in_verba]

Its obviously that in a digitalized society all depend on the sources needed to produce electricity...letting alone silicon materials involved. Until gasoline will be the most source used to produce energy there will be not significant decreasing in pollution. Nuclear fusion is the only answer. Anyway, pollution or not, gasoline will run out anyway sooner or later. So if we dont find another source we will return to the analogic era.