It’s getting to look a lot like degrowth: Part 2

This is the second post of a three part series on the existential problem of degrowth in a world that still believes in perpetual economic growth. Part 1 was published on Resilience.org here.

There is only one alternative to the mental model of permanent growth, and that is degrowth, also known as energy descent, post-growth, sufficiency, the great contraction, the great simplification, the great unraveling, or living within planetary boundaries. This is another mental model, so it is subject to the same “stickiness” as its rival. But this model comes with neither the pedigree nor the chorus of defenders and true believers the capitalist model enjoys. Plus, it is based on a radically different set of core principles that are, at a minimum, hard to swallow:

• The end of fossil fuels is inevitable.
• Humanity is in overshoot: we are consuming far more resources than the planet is capable of replenishing.
• This overconsumption is quite unevenly distributed. High income nations are reportedly responsible for 74% of the excess material consumption occurring today.
• Alternative energy sources can compensate for some of the energy fossil fuels have supplied for the last 100 years, but not all.
• Consequently, energy availability in a post-carbon future will be significantly less than energy availability today.
• Degrowth requires scaling down the material and energy throughput of the global economy, focusing on the source of the problem: high-income nations with high levels of per capita consumption.
• Advocates believe degrowth can be achieved voluntarily, by reducing waste and shrinking sectors of economic activity that are ecologically destructive or offer little or no social benefit.
• Voluntary degrowth will require a series of radical and integrated policy reforms to soften the impact of economic disruptions on vulnerable populations.
• Voluntary reductions in economic throughput are likely to produce significant declines in national and global GDP.
• If degrowth is not achieved voluntarily, it will happen involuntarily.

Our ongoing plunder of the planet’s natural resources is not sustainable. Scientists who have studied this issue in depth tell us that overshoot is real (source) and degrowth is impossible to avoid (source). But for those wedded to the mental model of perpetual economic growth, degrowth appears to be a romantic utopian fantasy (source, source). So humanity remains stuck in place, unable to abandon the old mental model that is now failing us, but also unable to embrace a new mental model that requires a degree of sacrifice, altruism, and cooperation that human beings have never had to muster before, at least not since the birth of the nation state.

Sadly, the futility of our current dilemma — desiring to cap global warming at 1.5–2.0°C above preindustrial levels while still embracing economic growth — can be seen in a simple example. Currently, GDP growth of 2–3% per year is considered “normal” (3–4% is considered preferable). As we saw above, nearly all of the IPCC climate change scenarios (including all the Shared Socioeconomic Pathway models examined in a previous post) assume that similar levels of growth will continue throughout the 21st Century. But, as I noted in another recent post, in order to accommodate that sacrosanct assumption of perpetual growth, these models are only able to keep within the Paris Agreement temperature limits by allowing for a “bump” above those limits before the temperature can be brought back down in later decades. This “bump” is needed to compensate for the additional emissions and warming caused by the ongoing economic growth built into the scenarios. It is akin to what software engineers call a “kludge”.¹

“these models now posit that we grow and blow more CO2 into the atmosphere, then rely on magical thinking and unproven, unlikely to scale, but incredibly expensive technologies (carbon capture and storage, CCS, carbon capture and removal, CCR) to pull that CO2 back out of the air, bring that “overshoot” back down to “net zero”, and bring warming back down to 1.5°C (source).”

In other words, economic growth is incompatible with the global warming thresholds established in the Paris Agreements. Rather than accept what the IPCC models are saying — that the world can have ongoing growth or a livable climate, but not both — climate scientists in charge of the IPCC process apparently believe they have “no choice” but to assume that growth must continue, which means that fossil fuels must continue to be burned, emissions must continue to rise, and temperatures can only be brought down to livable levels at some later date to be determined. Further, this course correction down the road will rely on technologies and resources that are unproven today, and may not even exist tomorrow (source).

This is a huge and, some would say, insane gamble. It also a perfect example of the power of mental models. The idea that economic growth might end is so inconceivable, so beyond the collective imaginations of our political, economic, and scientific elites, that they are willing to bet the future of the planet on a highly-speculative, heavily-criticized, longshot gamble to “fix things later”, just to make sure that economic growth remains uninterrupted.

Given our fixation on perpetual economic growth, is voluntary degrowth even a possibility?

What might be more crazy than betting on sketchy carbon capture technologies to save us from runaway climate change? How about betting on humanity’s capacity to voluntarily embrace degrowth, forego excess consumption, roll back excess production, rebuild our damaged ecosphere and, in the words of one influential study, provide “a good life for all within planetary boundaries”?

The maddening thing about degrowth is this: while scientists tell us it is an inevitable outcome of the demise of fossil fuels, our political leaders tell us it is an unrealistic as a political objective. Why is it so hard for political leaders to imagine a world in which humanity agrees to curtail its overconsumption and live equitably within the finite boundaries of the planet’s biosphere? I suspect we know the answer: because they know their people.

How much “deconsumption” is required for voluntary degrowth to succeed in keeping global temperatures below the Paris-approved threshold of 1.5–2.0°C above preindustrial levels? According to the study cited above, high income nations are responsible for 74% of humanity’s excess material consumption, driven primarily by the US (27%), the wealthier 28 EU countries (25%), and China (15%). To rightsize this over-consumption, the authors conclude:

“Our results show that high-income nations need to urgently scale down aggregate resource use to sustainable levels. On average, resource use needs to decline by at least 70% to reach the sustainable range.” (source, p. e347)

When degrowth advocates describe the kinds of social and policy changes needed to voluntarily achieve this level of consumption reduction, the challenges become clear. Some proposed changes are quite reasonable and could be implemented relatively painlessly in rich countries around the world. For example (source):

• Legislate extended warranties on products, so that goods like washing machines and refrigerators last for 30 years instead of ten.
• Ban planned obsolescence and pass “right to repair” laws so that products can be fixed cheaply and without proprietary parts.
• Legislate reductions in food waste.
• Ban single-use plastics and disposable coffee cups.
• Enact a “fair share” wealth tax for high-income individuals.

But other changes needed to reach reduce emissions to zero without carbon capture “kludges” would be highly disruptive and transformational, and could only be implemented at the risk of triggering extreme public pushback. Here are some proposals that the authors of one study describe as policy and consumer behavior changes required to stay within 1.5°C of warming without overshoot or carbon capture interventions (source):

• Decrease the share of passenger car transport by 81% in Global North urban areas by 2050.
• Reduce ground freight transport by 62%.
• Limit per-person air travel to one trip per year by 2025 and one trip every three years by 2050.
• Reduce living space per person by 25%.
• Reduce the average number of appliances in Global North homes by 50%.
• Decrease meat consumption in rich nations by 60% by 2030.
• Reduce overall calorie consumption per person in the Global North by 24% by reducing food waste and encouraging healthier diets.
• Severely limit advertising and marketing to reduce pressures for material consumption.
• End subsidies for fossil fuel companies.

If goals like these are to be achieved voluntarily, national governments will need to implement aggressive social programs to counter the inevitable reductions in many industries we take for granted today. Just from the list above, we can envision huge declines in the auto, airline, freight, construction, agriculture, food, marketing, and (of course) energy sectors. Corporations in these sectors employ millions of people today. Should degrowth cause them to disappear or radically shrink (voluntarily or involuntarily), major social interventions will be required to compensate for the subsequent economic disruptions. Policies and programs commonly mentioned by degrowth proponents include:

• Government-directed scaling down of industries deemed ecologically destructive or lacking in social value (including, in one author’s words, “the production of SUVs, arms, beef, private transportation, advertising and planned obsolescence”).
• Government-directed rationing programs to curtail consumption of unsustainable resources and redirect consumption to more sustainable alternatives.
• Massive job retraining programs to channel laid-off workers into more sustainable jobs and careers.
• A shorter work week with full “living wage” compensation to maintain employment levels in the face of shrinking production in scaled-down economic sectors.
• A universal basic income program to sustain workers during periods of unemployment and job transition.
• Much more progressive and aggressive tax systems to reduce income inequality and share national and international income more fairly. Significant increases in taxes on wealth, carbon, land use, resource extraction, and corporate profits.
• A major expansion of public goods and services such as healthcare, education, transportation, and housing, to bring these resources more fully into the public domain, freeing them from access-control by private, profit-driven gatekeepers (i.e., corporations).

So, if you want to implement voluntary degrowth in a country like the US, all you have to do is tell Americans to give up their pickup trucks and SUVs, give up their steak barbecues, stop traveling by air, ban the advertising that funds most of their entertainment, “scale down” their biggest employers, and start rationing supply-disrupted foods and consumables like their great-grandparents did during WWII. While you’re at it, could you please do all this while completely replacing our energy grid with one that can run without fossil fuels? Also, while adapting to these massive changes, please be sure to shrink our annual CO2 emissions by 5-10% or more per year, every year, until we bring emissions down to zero.²

Voluntary degrowth, I fear, is beyond our leaders’ capacity to imagine and beyond our society’s capacity to implement.

Notes

1. According to Wikipedia, a kludge is “a workaround or quick-and-dirty solution that is clumsy, inelegant, inefficient, difficult to extend and hard to maintain.” An apt description of the “overshoot factor” in these IPCC climate models.
2. This last task (reducing CO2 emissions by 5-10% per year) needs to be considered in light of what happened during 2020, the worst year of the COVID-19 pandemic. In that year, we shut down just about everything: schools, retail businesses, commuting, business travel, social gatherings, family vacations, etc. Yet, in what was essentially the biggest voluntary shutdown of global economic activity since the invention of the steam engine, we only managed to reduce our CO2 emissions by 4.6% (source). That’s less than what we need to do, every year, for the next couple of decades. You can draw your own conclusions.

Image generated by DALL-E2, “ants panicking on a log, floating toward a waterfall”.