Revisiting The Limits to Growth
The choice is that either we end up with unmanaged decline, which would be catastrophic, or a managed levelling out of our economies, shaped by a shift in social values and expectations.
The choice is that either we end up with unmanaged decline, which would be catastrophic, or a managed levelling out of our economies, shaped by a shift in social values and expectations.
In this intervention I highlight an element that has been overlooked in this important debate about “progressive environmental futures” – the dismantling of fossil capitalism.
The English-language press is not informing the public thoughtfully of alternatives to our current political-economic system or the impact of unfettered growth on the planet.
Maybe we should rethink our metrics, measurements, and very meanings of progress, and start reorganising our economies in ways that celebrate human and non-human nature, rather than constrict it.
Students and scholars of steady-state economics must have noticed, by now, that the Degrowth movement in Europe has attained far more traction than the steady-state movement has in the USA (or anywhere).
What degrowth adds is the assertion that growth in high-income nations is not required in order to achieve a flourishing society. What is required is justice.
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.
The wager of the book then, is that environmentalist movements need an alternative vision of limits that begins not from a premise of nature as scarce but rather as abundant, and of limitation not as enforced by outside conditions but rather adopted intentionally as an exercise of political autonomy.
The unprecedented drop in emissions resulting from the shutdown reinforces an idea over a decade old yet too infrequently acknowledged—the need for economic contraction in addressing the climate crisis.
The good news is that the path to both improving our resilience and making a viable Energy Transition to a low-carbon economy, while minimizing the chances of catastrophic climate change, is the same: planning a controlled and socially fair reduction of the material sphere of the economy.
The CUP programme advocates an Ecosocial Transition based on a degrowth of the economy in terms of energy and materials.
The idea of a world based on active transport, and on cycling in particular, is a recurring theme in thinking on degrowth.