Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
As ecosystems are getting nightmarishly worse, the fable of green growth is acting as a kind of macroeconomic greenwashing, especially when mobilised to discredit other, more radical solutions to the ecological crisis.
Putting negative-emission technologies and the green growth belief at the basis of the global climate mitigation agenda is an unjust and high-stakes gamble and is not an ecologically coherent approach to the crisis we face.
Yet, for a politician to advocate increased economic growth, given the evidence, they have to be ignorant, wicked or stupid.
In the very same month the IPCC publishes an 8-year in the making, almost 3,000-page report, I find it scientifically insulting that someone dares to cobble a few graphs together in defence of a crackpot hypothesis whose scientific legitimacy has come close to Flat Earth theory.
What I intend to show in this paper is that the reassuring claim that decoupling is feasible, as one may read in the Summary for Policymaker and hear in the media, is scientifically ungrounded, and this based on the very analysis provided by the IPCC report.
Capitalism has various growth imperatives that are inconsistent with environmental limits. That is, capitalism must grow for stability but cannot grow limitlessly on a finite planet. It follows that the future will be post-capitalist – by design or disaster.
So, is green growth happening? The answer is no, not really. As of today, economic growth is still a vector of resource use and environmental degradation.
Promoting economic growth is unethical because economic activity has overshot the carrying capacity of the biosphere and is degrading the ecological system.
Economic growth is closely linked to increases in production, consumption and resource use and has detrimental effects on the natural environment and human health.
In other words, it is impossible, within the time constraints that we are now facing, to decouple GDP growth from environmental damage strongly and deeply enough to be able to adequately repair that damage.
In most prevailing sustainability narratives, increased efficiency is a prominent component. It is a prerequisite for the supposed possibility to combine decreasing pressure on natural resources with economic growth.
My appeal to McAfee: let’s try to get beyond this sort of thing and engage more honestly with the empirical and theoretical work that has been done, so we can have more meaningful conversations. If we are going to realise our shared goals, we can and must do better.
