Nearly all the world’s governments and vast numbers of its people are convinced that addressing human-induced climate change is essential if healthy societies are to survive. The two solutions most often proposed go by various names but are widely known as “green growth” and “degrowth”. Can these ideas be reconciled? What do both have to say about the climate challenge?
The crude version of green growth – the solution that dominates the discourse of developed countries – is essentially that technology will save us if we get the incentives right. We can stick with the idea that economic growth is the central determinant of human flourishing, we just need technological fixes for unsustainable industrial practices. These will emerge if we get prices pointing in a green direction, which is first and foremost about carbon taxes.
Yet this sort of thinking still seems head-in-the-sand. Yes, the emissions intensity of per-capita GDP growth is generally falling, in part because added economic value increasingly comes from ideas not widgets.
Sweden, for example, has increased its GDP by 76% but its domestic energy use by only 2.5% since 1995. But we are still missing carbon reduction deadlines by wide margins and struggling to enact meaningful carbon pricing.
Eco-socialism and political suicide: the caricature of degrowth
The crude version of degrowth is that to ensure sustainability, GDP must contract. Endless growth got us to where we are, and endless growth will kill us. We need to throw out the status quo and make our revolutionary way to eco-socialism. Rich countries need to stop where they are and transfer wealth to poor countries so we can equitably share what we have.
This sort of thinking is easily caricatured as political suicide and more likely to undermine enthusiasm for sustainability than achieve it.
Yet these caricatures can be easily dismissed. While it’s hard to pin down exactly what each camp stands for, since they represent amorphous agglomerations of ideas in a fast-moving discourse, it’s clear many advocates of both green growth and degrowth are sophisticated in their views and share many points of agreement.
Where green growth and degrowth agree
The first is that contemporary industry is too environmentally intensive – it crosses multiple planetary boundaries in its carbon emissions, ocean acidification, nitrogen, phosphorus loading and so on.
Second, to avoid ecological collapse, sectors such as fossil fuels, fast fashion, industrial meat farming, air travel, plastics and many more need to draw down their economic activity.
Meanwhile, other sectors need to grow. These include clean energy, obviously, but also biodegradable materials, green steel and pesticide-free agriculture, on and on. Effecting this structural transition will require both carbon taxes and more muscular industrial policy of the Green New Deal sort.
Third, environmental damage is both licensed and exacerbated by a narrow policy focus on gross domestic product (GDP). We need to shift priorities away from GDP and towards frameworks and budgets – such as those used in New Zealand, the Australian Capital Territory and other places – that do a far better job than GDP does of measuring whether we are using our resources effectively to advance human wellbeing.
And many of these wellbeing goals can be achieved using a fraction of the wealth of advanced nations. For example, Cuba, with about an eighth of the GDP per capita, has similar life expectancy and literacy rates to the United States.
