The human race is currently, collectively, doing too much of everything,i with disastrous consequence. We produce, purchase, and trash too much stuff, raze too much forest and other natural habitat, and release way too much greenhouse gas to the atmosphere by burning way too much fossil fuel. In accomplishing all of this, we’re stripping resources out of the Earth faster than the planet can regenerate them. We’re also driving dangerous global warming, climate chaos, social injustice and unrest, the Earth’s next great mass extinction, and the collapse of ecosystems across the globe.
To assuage any urge to stop doing this, or at least slow down, we like to dream that advances in green technology and energy efficiency will bring our living of this high life into the realm of the sustainable, saving climate and the biosphere from our bad habits. The world just needs to hang in there until we grow so advanced! But, still, there’s this pesky bunch who will argue that this really is just dreaming.
The only way we’ll make our lives sustainable in time to avoid total catastrophe is to embark upon a serious course of “degrowth”, intentionally powering down our activities and either shrinking or stagnating our economies in order to reduce our carbon emissions and other negative effects on climate and the environment.
Ouch!
Pursuing degrowth, which is to say aiming our economic activities at social and environmental well being instead of at the endless expansion of gross domestic product (GDP), would be a radical solution to the radical climate and environmental problems we are facing. Yet it is also sort of the most obvious solution. If doing too much and consuming too much are causing too many problems, to the point where the threat is becoming existential, the most instantaneous way to stop is… to stop… or, at least to cut way back.
But is degrowth really the easiest, most feasible answer? Could it work, if we could even manage such a tall order as slowing down.
Our Obsession with Economic Growth
For quite a good chunk of this last century, economists, politicians, leaders, and businesspeople have been obsessed with keeping their economies expanding. And not without reason. They’ve seen what can happen when economies stop growing, and have come to expect that these negative outcomes are a given when a local, regional, or global economy slows down.
Here are some of the more dramatic reasons why economists, politicians, world leaders, and business people are terrified of anything but endless growth in GDP.
Let’s start with the sort of down turn we’ve all experienced: recessions. As just about everyone who lived through the Great Recession of the latter part of the first decade of this millenium knows, recessions are hard on people. Tons of people lose their jobs. A lot of other people, such as small business owners, wait staff, and hairdressers, experience severe drops in real income. Overall, people’s standard of living perceptibly declines. The lesson here is that even a few months to a couple of years of shrinkage in GDP can be devastating.
And that’s even before we start talking about depressions, which is the stage you reach when a recession drags on for more than a couple of years or when GDP drops by more than 10%. Depressions are recessions on steroids, resulting in widespread unemployment and poverty.
If recessions can bring down banks (except when governments bail out the “too big too fail”), depressions can bring down banking systems, such as during the Great Depression that started in the USA and spread throughout a good chunk of the world. It took a literal world war effort’s worth of governmental spending to pull the world out of the Great Depression. If economists and politicians are scared of recessions, they’re absolutely terrified of triggering depressions.
Another thing economists are terrified of is triggering economic death spirals like hyperinflation. Mind–blowing hyperinflation in Germany in the early 1920s, saw monthly inflation rates shoot up to thirty thousand percent and the German mark plummeting in value from near worthless (17,000 marks to the dollar) to impossibly worthless (4.2 trillion marks to the dollar) over the course of a single year (1923).
And, as if this wasn’t enough to destroy people’s lives and life savings, this period of hyperinflation was followed by the Great Depression in the 1930s. Down toppled Germany’s first attempt at democracy (the Weimar Republic), giving Nazism its chance to take root and bring about World War II and the Holocaust. So, let’s not mess with functioning economies, think most politicians and economists, rather reasonably, lest they spin off into such sucking whirlpools as hyperinflation.
Complex systems such as economies have yet other pitfalls they can fall into when things go wonky with GDP. In the 1970s, for instance, a brand new, never previously seen period of stagflation occurred.
This combination of stubbornly high inflation combined with no to slow economic growth that results in, among other things, high rates of unemployment, brought the postwar boom in western economies to an end, got US President Carter voted (and booed) out of office faster than you can say ‘oil crisis’, and ushered in the neoliberalism of politicians like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan (who felt it was the role of the state to support “the market” rather than to support society) that was not even entirely absent in the policies of later Democrats like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
If the lessons the leaders and economists took from all of those downturns was don’t let GDP decrease, the lesson they took from the booming decades following World War II was keep GDP growing. Because, the first few decades following World War II—fueled by a combination of the gaping room for economic growth created by the war and the injection of so much “free” productivity thanks to the sudden boom in our exploitation of petroleum and natural gas—were the biggest boom in humanity’s history. This utterly historically unprecedented economic growth pretty much did indeed float all boats.
So that’s the story behind the mindset we’re locked into today: continuous economic growth means prosperity. Stagnation, or worse, shrinkage in GDP, results in job losses, declines in standards of living, destabilized countries, decent politicians hounded out of office, the rise of authoritarianism, and the outbreak of war.
But Not Everyone Believes Endless Growth Is Sustainable
But not everyone believes that endless economic growth is sustainable. At the moment, it is unsustainable.
Although, the people of the Global North bear far more responsibility for this than the people of the Global South, right now, to sustain our endless expansion in GDP, we burn more fuel; use more electricity; eat more sugar, meat, dairy products, and eggs; and drive and fly more miles than any other people in the entire history of the human race. Meanwhile, we live together with fewer people but in larger dwellings that we decorate, furnish, heat, and cool more aggressively than people did in the past.
To keep our economies growing, much less going, we also need to constantly buy stuff, from cars, clothing, furniture, and appliances to computers, smartphones, and other electronic gadgets, that we also replace ridiculously often, to keep the world’s economic wheels spinning.
But, of course, this comes with a tremendous cost to the environment. And, thanks to deforestation and our burning of fossil fuels to keep our economies growing, this is also driving an increasingly dangerous amount of global warming, further straining the ecosystems we’ve already devastated through our economic activities.
Worse, when you look at the data, there appears to be a direct connection between increasing GDP and increasing consumption of materials and energy. Essentially, the greater our economic activity, the more damage we do to climate and the environment… which isn’t at all surprising given that our economies are centered around consumption of goods and energy.
It feels as if, at some point, the whole system has to collapse because we can’t keep destroying what’s left of the natural world and we can’t keep heating the climate, not forever, not if we want to survive.
Which puts us in a sticky situation. Keep feeding the GDP, either until it all falls apart or we figure out how to make this endless growth in our economies ecologically and climatologically sustainable, whichever comes first? Or try to shrink the GDP, and our destructive influence over the environment, at risk of our economic systems breaking down and much human misery ensuing?
Enter the Idea of Degrowth
Here’s where the idea of degrowth comes in.
Degrowth is something between an anti–capitalist idea, economic philosophy, and movement that questions the value of pursuing endless growth in GDP. It calls for shifting our priorities away from corporate profits and the excessive production and consumption of goods and toward social well–being, equality, and ecological sustainability.
Degrowth calls for things like investing in healthcare and community services at the expense of investments in such GDP–boosters as the military–industrial complex. And it calls for an intentional reduction in our consumption of energy and resources down to levels that are ecologically, sociologically, and climatologically sustainable.
The key to degrowth and why it isn’t just about throttling our economies is that degrowth will be carried out with the welfare of people, rather than of the GDP, as its main economic aim.
Degrowth also posits that we don’t need to keep “overfeeding” our economies to be prosperous. Sure the rapid, massive postwar, fossil fuel fueled boom in the Global North’s economies required excessive consumption of materials and energy. And maybe that was a good thing or maybe that was a bad thing (or more likely it was a bit of both, for it has gotten us to where we are today, for better and for worse).
But the Global North doesn’t need to keep booming. It needs to find a way to reach a more steady state. Or maybe even to slow down and depopulate itself a bit (through declining birth rates), accepting that the frenzied growth phase of its economy and population size need to be over. We people, industries, and nations of the Global North can find ways to dial our overconsumption down to an ecologically sustainable level, without our economies going into collapse.
This can also help make room for the Global South to “overfeed” their economies for a while, in order to build necessary infrastructure, provide people with the levels of education and healthcare their need to thrive, wipe out widespread poverty, and raise the standard of living to a more reasonable level. Then, they too, can reach a prosperous plateau.
The Rebound Effect of Energy Efficiency
Technological advances and increases in energy efficiency mean that per capita greenhouse gas emissions have recently decreased in Global North countries like the UK and even the USA. Given that, it’s easy to tell ourselves that increases in energy efficiency, a transition to 100% renewable energy, dreams of a circular economy, and widespread deployment of carbon capture and storage will mean we can learn to live sustainably while simultaneously continuing to live our high power, high productivity, high consumption lifestyles.
But, at the moment, this is a pipe dream. There is not yet a single study that has found that we can decouple GDP and energy and resource use anywhere near enough to sustainably maintain (or even increase) our current lifestyles and economic activities.
Part of the problem is that advances in energy efficiency don’t translate one to one into a decrease in energy use. That’s just not our style! Instead of saying let’s use that increase in energy efficiency to use less energy to get the same amount of stuff done, we say let’s use that increase in energy efficiency to get more stuff done with the same amount of energy. This boomerang effect mean s that most of any increase in energy efficiency gets used to boost productivity, increasing the GDP.
Instead of using increases in energy efficiency to use less energy, we use increases in energy efficiency to get more work done, produce more goods, drive bigger cars, use faster computers, and run more apps on our smartphones. Overall, more than 50% of the energy savings of increases in energy efficiency are lost to this rebound effect. Which alone kind of obliterates hopes that increases in energy efficiency will lower our carbon footprint or diminish our need for minerals and other raw materials.
Degrowth as the Most Feasible Strategy to Stop Adding to Global Warming
Given the current state of things, pursuing degrowth is the most technologically feasible means for reaching net zero greenhouse gas emissions in time to have a chance not to overshoot 1.5°C, 2°C, or maybe even 3°C of global warming before the end of this century.
The idea here is that because of the strong link between GDP and use of energy and material resources, then intentionally decreasing GDP will automatically decrease humanity’s ecological footprint and release of greenhouse gases. If, by 2050, the Global North reduces its energy demand by 53% and the Global South (which is still developing) reduces it by 32% (for a global reduction of 40%), humanity would lower its greenhouse gas emissions far enough fast enough to give us a chance to avoid truly catastrophic levels of global warming.
Unlike all of the scenarios proposed by the IPCC in its special report on avoiding 1.5°C of global warming, this degrowth scenario does not require pie in the sky reliance on carbon dioxide removal and carbon capture and storage technologies.
We can’t yet anywhere near scale these technologies up to the levels that are called for in the IPCC scenarios—none of which include economic degrowth—that manage to avoid overshooting 1.5°C. If we could manage the drastic act of reducing our energy use by 40% over the next 26 years—while simultaneously transitioning from the use of fossil fuels to renewable energy—we wouldn’t need to rely on any still currently unworkable carbon capture and storage technologies to bring out greenhouse gas emissions under control.
This is what makes such significant degrowth the only physically and technologically feasible scenario to keep global warming to levels that are merely somewhat, as opposed to severely, catastrophic.
Whether degrowth of the extent called for by this scenario of 40% reduction in energy use is a politically or socially feasible scenario is, however, another story entirely.
Can Degrowth Be Done?
Decreasing our energy use by 40% would require a massive decrease in GDP. That might save us from shooting our climate into absolutely devastating levels of global warming, but would that be at the price of devastating recessions and depressions and all the misery, unemployment, and social upheaval that would go along with that?
This is not a trivial question! Look at how much poverty, hunger, unrest, tumult, and rise of the far right and authoritarianism we’re facing right now with (mostly) robustly growing GDPs. Also not a trivial question is how you could get people and countries to voluntarily power down when societies and populations who use more power per capita tend to replace and/or eradicate those who use less.
There’s little question that putting the brakes on GDP without triggering the social harms of recession and depressions will require significant socioeconomic reform. Capitalism will have to go out the window in favor of systems that invest in sustainability, the environment, and in the well being of their people.
It will take beefing up progressive taxation and introducing taxes on wealth to reduce inequality within countries. It will take investment in health care and social services instead of in banks, capital, and goods–producing companies. It will call for adoption of poverty–fighting schemes such as universal basic incomes, which will probably be a good idea anyway as AI comes for all of our jobs.
With such means could economies remain robust without having to endlessly increase their productivity, unsustainably consume natural resources, and belch greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Speaking of AI
Speaking of AI, achieving degrowth will also take us stopping inventing new and increasingly insatiable uses for energy. Just as digitalization in general has led to increases in energy consumption, in part by increasing energy efficiency and thus, through the rebound effect, expanding economic productivity, the skyrocketing use of generative AI, cryptocurrencies, and storage of data in “the cloud” is driving an incredible increase in demand for electricity.
Generative AI and cryptocurrency mining and transactions process incredible amounts of data and chew through incredible amounts of materials, because of the data centers that need to be built, maintained, and updated.
This skyrocketing use of AI in general will almost certainly result in incredible growth in GDP. They will get so much more of certain types of work done faster than human beings or mere machines before them, thereby increasing productivity. This might result in the next new curveball our complex economic system could throw at us: an increase in GDP that goes hand in hand with widespread unemployment, as people become unnecessary for so much of this work.
Talk about a cavernous widening of the wealth gap, as the handful of people who own companies with the most powerful and sophisticated AI technologies rake in all of the money that used to go to the people who now suddenly no longer have jobs. Meanwhile, any dreamt of decoupling between GDP growth and use of energy and resources will go out the window as the banks and banks of servers needed for the use of AI build up and up and up.
It is a nightmarish scenario that would destroy the possibility of avoiding catastrophic global warming and ecosystem collapse via powering down and degrowing our economies while simultaneously annihilating what’s left of our well being and communities.
But Not All Hope Is Lost… Yet
Yet, not all hope is lost just yet. Systems evolving toward higher use of energy per capita might be the natural order of things. Ditto for our habit of using increases in energy efficiency to boost our GDPs instead of being satisfied with doing what we were doing before, only now using less energy to do it. And ditto for AI being the next massive step up in the GDP and energy (and resource) use game.
But since when have human beings simply accepted the natural order of things?! If that was our habit, we’d still be living in caves. So, for once, let’s use our habit of controlling our environment to do so for the benefit of everyone and the rest of the biosphere.
Let’s decide that, yes, we aren’t just simply animals. We can control our own behavior. And, through policies, laws, and treaties, we can control the behavior of the global economy.
We can decide that enough economic growth is enough already. We can decide that now is the time to calm our economies down and invest in social well being and the natural environment.
It will take changing everything about the way we live… for what will be the better for most of us. And it will take replacing capitalism and widening wealth inequality with an economic system that favors sustainability and social cohesion.
There’s tons of us out here who would totally go for that.
I have faith in us. We can manage it.
We just need to start working on it.
i Although, it must be said that not all people nor all regions of the world are equally to blame.