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Hickel identifies the four major problems with green growth. Firstly, despite huge and admirable progress with renewable energy we can never keep up with a growing economy, meaning we will continue to depend on fossil fuels. Secondly, solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, and electric cars depend on metals and rare earths, and mining on the scale required to feed a growing economy will create massive and growing environmental damage. Nuclear power from either fission or fusion cannot develop fast enough to meet the energy requirements of economies that continue to grow. Similarly, carbon capture technologies are not maturing fast enough, and ironically depend on energy to work; plus they are a response to only one of our environmental problems. Thirdly, geoengineering projects like injecting the upper atmosphere with particles to create a veil to reflect sunlight, which the European Union is already considering, are extraordinarily risky. Fourthly, our problem is not confronted simply with rising temperatures but with a damaged planet, and if we had 100% clean energy we would “raze more forests, trawl more fish, mine more mountains, build more roads, expand industrial farming, and send more waste to landfill—all of which have ecological consequences our planet can no longer sustain.” Economists have long identified a paradox that innovations that create more efficient ways of using energy and resources briefly reduce consumption but then increase it. As Hickel explains it’s not really a paradox but what would be expected—because companies use the savings to reinvest in more production and the growth swamps the efficiency improvements.

In summary, six of the nine proposed planetary boundaries (phosphorous, nitrogen, biodiversity, land use, atmospheric aerosol loading, and chemical pollution) are unlikely to be associated with existential risks. They all correspond to a degraded environment, but in our assessment do not represent existential risks. However, the three remaining boundaries (climate change, global freshwater cycle, and ocean acidification) do pose existential risks. This is because of intrinsic positive feedback loops, substantial lag times between system change and experiencing the consequences of that change, and the fact these different boundaries interact with one another in ways that yield surprises. In addition, climate, freshwater, and ocean acidification are all directly connected to the provision of food and water, and shortages of food and water can create conflict and social unrest.

Climate change has a long history of disrupting civilizations and sometimes precipitating the collapse of cultures or mass emigrations (McMichael, 2017). For example, the 12th century drought in the North American Southwest is held responsible for the collapse of the Anasazi pueblo culture. More recently, the infamous potato famine of 1846–1849 and the large migration of Irish to the U.S. can be traced to a combination of factors, one of which was climate. Specifically, 1846 was an unusually warm and moist year in Ireland, providing the climatic conditions favorable to the fungus that caused the potato blight. As is so often the case, poor government had a role as well—as the British government forbade the import of grains from outside Britain (imports that could have helped to redress the ravaged potato yields).

The real disaster scenario begins with the triggering of invisible  tripwires known as tipping points.

"Climate tipping points are a game-changing risk—an existential threat—and we need to do everything within our power to avoid them," said Tim Lenton, director of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter.

The English edition of this book is quite different from its three editions in Portuguese (2015–2018). With the exception of the final three chapters, all the others have been partially or totally rewritten and enriched with new data, analyses, and projections. Since 2018, fresh scientific knowledge has further reinforced the perception of how much faster capitalism’s inherently expansive mode of functioning is destroying our bountiful biosphere and changing the stable climate of the last twelve millennia that has made mankind’s material and spiritual journey during the Holocene possible. A global environmental collapse is slowly unfolding and its first unequivocal signs are already here. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, we have experienced the most lethal heatwaves, droughts, hurricanes, floods, and wildfires ever recorded. We are witnessing accelerating defaunation and species extinctions in all taxonomic groups, less fertile soils, desertification, growing food insecurity, sea level rise at an unexpected speed, and the emergence of millions of people who fall into a new category of refugees – climate refugees. We are also suffering unprecedented sanitary crises, with increasing antibiotic resistance and the cancer burden jumping to 18.1 million new cases in 2018, up from 12.6 million cases in 2012 (+44%), more threatening pandemics such as Covid-19, more devastating plagues such as Africa and Asia and South America’s recent locust outbreak, more widespread pollution, intoxication, and hormonal disturbances. This new world is accurately portrayed not only by the flourishing dystopian fiction of the last decades, but also, and with even darker tones, by a growing sum of converging scientific data and projections. Acceleration is maybe the most defining feature of our time. In 2018, I drew attention to the fact that what had been previously expected to occur only at the end of the century was then expected by mid-century. These imbalances include a global warming of at least 2 °C above the pre-industrial period, the disappearance of several tropical forests, the transition of the eastern and southern parts of the Amazon forest to a savanna vegetation, the first iceless September in the Arctic, extensive thawing of land and seabed permafrost, global mean sea level rise of over 50 cm (above the 2000 level), and large-scale extinctions of species. This English edition shows that the possibility of these occurrences is now being projected for the second quarter of the century. The historical cycle of twentieth-century capitalism’s relative material success pertains to… the twentieth century. The world of which our parents and grandparents were beneficiaries has ended. GDP growth rates are now steadily decreasing and, most importantly, economic growth no longer translates into a better quality of life. No significant social improvement is possible in a rapidly deteriorating environment. The so-called “emerging” economies, such as those of India and China, are typically trapped in a devastating machine that is, in reality, making them sink more deeply, and before other countries, into extreme levels of pollution, very serious public health crises, lethal climactic anomalies, and acute water scarcity. Their high growth rates have, in short, put them at the forefront of the environmental nightmare with which our planetary society is contending. The truth is that the curve measuring environmental costs against the economic benefits of capitalism has irreversibly entered into a negative phase. Despite this, there are still those who argue that global warming, deforestation, biodiversity loss, pollution, and increasing intoxication of organisms are the price to pay for economic growth. They persist in the belief that states and corporations can be “educated” to have a more environmentally sustainable behavior. L’éducation fait tout hails the long-living enlightenment tenet... Most are also deluded by the empty words of the Kyoto Protocol, the Paris Agreement, the Sustainable Development Goals, the Aichi Biodiversity Targets, and the New  York Declaration on Forests (NYDF), among other texts that delight diplomats who are experts at negotiating new targets to reduce devastation, as long as they do not undermine the growth plans of corporations and their governments. Proceed on the path of GDP growth and fit back into the biosphere, thanks to the miraculous formulas of “sustainable capitalism”! Not many escape this magical thinking. But the few who do, know that any given quantity that grows at 2% rate per year doubles every 35  years, or every 23 years if it grows at 3% yearly. They also know that there is no available or future technology capable of allowing for more indiscriminate economic growth without having a further impact on the biosphere and on a climate that is already transitioning towards an additional 1 °C above the current averages. In short, these few people know that there is no longer a chance of escaping a cascade of socioenvironmental disasters unless we radically redefine the meaning and purpose of economic activity, reduce social inequality, and enforce democratic control of strategic investments. This means putting a new economy at the service of reducing environmental impact. This also means investing in widespread sanitation infrastructure, in local and organic agriculture, and in public policies of demographic degrowth, beginning with the right to free and state-assisted access to all forms of contraception and termination of unwanted pregnancies. In the history of mankind, there is no record of a rupture in the growth paradigm, nor of changes of this magnitude and at such speed. There is no record because such rupture and such changes have never been necessary. Now, they are. It is not a question of underestimating the extreme difficulty of putting this program into practice. But nothing can be considered impossible when what is at stake is the fate of our societies, if not our species. The few who perceive the causal relationship, in essence a very simple one, between corporate expansion and environmental collapse in a Preface to the English Edition ix finite world are growing in number and in persuasion. And they are beginning to have a weight on the balance. Not yet, it is true, on the balance of political power, but at least on the balance of ideas, and especially in the growing conviction that capitalism’s obsolete economic and political recipe will not offer a way out of the impasse and challenges posed by the Anthropocene. A new radicalism of philosophical thought and political action is required in our times. We need a recovered confidence, reborn from the ashes, that we, as a society, are capable of overcoming capitalism in the direction of a new social contract founded on a natural contract, as proposed by Michel Serres, among others. No social justice project is politically conceivable in a scorched Earth. This book seeks to raise a more acute awareness of the extreme gravity of our situation. Its aim is also to add more evidence to the fact, already highlighted by two or three generations of scholars, that “sustainable capitalism” is a contradiction in terms. Capitalism is the disease. It cannot offer, therefore, any credible therapy to mitigate the ongoing environmental collapse. We are, of course, guided by science, but the question of whether societies will be able to significantly mitigate this collapse is not a scientific one. “Rather it is a question,” as pointed out by Damon Matthews and colleagues (2018), “of what we believe human societies to be capable of achieving.” The ultimate hope of this book is to contribute in some way so that this belief does not falter among its readers.

The word degrowth stands for a family of political-economic approaches that, in the face of today’s accelerating planetary ecological crisis, reject unlimited, exponential economic growth as the definition of human progress. To abandon economic growth in wealthy societies means to shift to zero net capital formation. With continual technological development and the enhancement of human capabilities, mere replacement investment is able to promote steady qualitative advancements in production in mature industrial societies, while eliminating exploitative labor conditions and reducing working hours. Coupled with global redistribution of the social surplus product and reduction of waste, this would allow for vast improvements in the lives of most people. Degrowth, which specifically targets the most opulent sectors of the world population, is thus directed at the enhancement of the living conditions of the vast majority while maintaining the environmental conditions of existence and promoting sustainable human development.

Science has established without a doubt that, in today’s “full-world economy,” it is necessary to operate within an overall Earth System budget with respect to allowable physical throughput. However, rather than constituting an insurmountable obstacle to human development, this can be seen as initiating a whole new stage of ecological civilization based on the creation of a society of substantive equality and ecological sustainability, or ecosocialism. Degrowth, in this sense, is not aimed at austerity, but at finding a “prosperous way down” from our current extractivist, wasteful, ecologically unsustainable, maldeveloped, exploitative, and unequal, class-hierarchical world. Continued growth would occur in some areas of the economy, made possible by reductions elsewhere. Spending on fossil fuels, armaments, private jets, sport utility vehicles, second homes, and advertising would need to be cut in order to provide room for growth in such areas as regenerative agriculture, food production, decent housing, clean energy, accessible health care, universal education, community welfare, public transportation, digital connectivity, and other areas related to green production and social needs.

Global scientists agree that wealthy countries must reduce material production and consumption in order for the world to successfully tackle climate change, biodiversity collapse, ocean acidification, water scarcity and other environmental problems. Yet corporate and political insistence on the need to continually grow gross domestic product (GDP) weakens the will to change course.

Research in the field of degrowth examines empirical relations between economic growth, defined as increased monetary value of goods and services exchanged in a market—often calculated as GDP—and material growth, defined as increased biophysical throughput (energy, material and waste flows) of an economy, measured as “societal metabolism”. Degrowth science connects economics with thermodynamics to demonstrate how the transformation of material and energy into goods and services converts generally reliable and consistent (low-entropy) stocks of resources into disordered and chaotic (high-entropy) waste. Measurements reveal that global societal metabolism has surged over the past two centuries, accelerating even more in recent decades.

Aug 8 (Reuters) - Degrowth - the idea that a finite planet cannot sustain ever-increasing consumption - is about the closest you can get to a heresy in economics, where growth is widely held as the best route to prosperity.

But, as climate change accelerates and supply chain disruptions offer rich-world consumers an unaccustomed taste of scarcity, the theory is becoming less taboo and some have started to ponder what a degrowth world might look like.

While degrowth predominantly targets the Global North’s unsustainable use of fossil-fuels or contributions to biodiversity loss, in a highly interconnected global system, growth in the North necessarily impacts the South in terms of their development, their ecosystems, and the kind of vulnerability these countries are subject to. At the most basic level, increased economic growth means more demand for energy and materials. In a period of an energy transition where those materials are largely found in the Global South—Latin America, Asia, and Africa predominantly—conflicts, injustice, and greenwashing would be inevitable without some kind of just transition that reduces the relative demand for these materials.3 This is where degrowth’s commitment to global justice and ecological sustainability set it apart from other green transition narratives. Let’s use the example of electric vehicles. The batteries in these vehicles rely on minerals like nickel, cobalt, and lithium, which, according to the World Bank, could drive demand up to 500 percent depending on the mineral, all else being equal.4 Indonesia, for instance, holds the world’s largest nickel reserves and environmental degradation is already underway in the pursuit of such a mineral. According to the Environmental Justice Atlas, “Fisheries are declining and health is deteriorating in Kawasi since the local nickel mining and smelting project started dumping waste in the sea.”5 Such local deterioration is explored in visual detail in the Yale Environment 360 film contest winner “From Dreams to Dust,” which shows how the pursuit of materials for green technologies result in polluted drinking water, barren landscapes, and threatened workers and communities.6 Since 2012, at least fourteen Indonesian environmental defenders have been killed.7 This extractive logic applies to other green technologies like solar panels and wind turbines as well, since renewables are still materially intensive (although less so than fossil fuels).8 While it is no doubt true that we need to get off fossil fuels, there are choices to be made about how much energy we use, where it comes from, and who is faced with the risks and benefits. We are already seeing these conflicts play out in real time all over the world, and while still at the earliest stage of the energy transition—if we can even call it that. According to Global Witness, an international nongovernmental organization that tracks the deaths of environmental defenders, the rise in murders among people defending their local land or natural resources has risen almost every year for the last two decades, with the largest source of conflict typically in the mineral sector.9 It is no coincidence that at the same time environmental protection is most needed, environmental conflict has reached its highest point yet. To add insult to injury, the US military is well aware of the importance of these minerals. In the words of the US Department of Defense, “Strategic and critical materials are vital to our national defense and economic prosperity, enabling the United States to develop and sustain emerging technologies. They also improve our warfighting capability, support family-sustaining jobs, and strengthen our alliances and partnerships.”10 In no uncertain terms the US military sees access to these “strategic and critical minerals” as vital to sustain economic growth and the United States’ dominance on the world stage. Unfortunately, without drastic changes in energy demand, this trend will only continue. The United Nations International Resource Panel found that 90 percent of biodiversity loss and water stress are caused by the extraction and processing of natural resources. Given these technologies and materials are largely to service the Global North’s high consumption, a reduction in energy and material use by rich nations would reduce the potential for environmental conflict in the Global South. In addition to reducing conflict over the minerals themselves, it would also help hasten our pursuit of a more sustainable society, thereby reducing the impact of climate change and environmental degradation in countries like Nigeria or Pakistan, both of which experienced major floods this past year.11 As research demonstrates, countries struck by climate-induced disasters see a rise in authoritarian governments and draconian policy shortly in the aftermath.12 A warming world spells increased oppression among the world’s poor both directly by ecological disasters and how governments respond. Moreover, as the United Nations International Resource Panel found, 90 percent of biodiversity loss and water stress are caused by the extraction and processing of natural resources.13 A reduction in energy and material use would thus also reduce biodiversity loss—another area of life-and-death struggle for many (especially Indigenous people) in the Global South.14 Degrowth increasingly appears as one of, if not the only, Northern political programs that can avert ecological collapse, ensure global justice, and provide everyone with good lives.

One big problem with capitalism is that compound growth is exponential, growing faster than humans can imagine. The pandemic helped us understand a little more about exponential growth, but still the best understanding comes from the ancient story of the man who asks a king to pay him with one grain of rice on the first square of a chess board with the number of grains doubling with each subsequent square. After the first row he has fewer than 200 grains, but the 64th square he has 18 million trillion grains, enough to cover the whole of India with rice a metre thick. The graph of global economic growth is the familiar “hockey-stick,” virtually flat until the beginning of the industrial revolution in the early 19th century, beginning to accelerate in about 1950, increasing 10-fold by 2015. As Hickel calculates, if the global economy grows at even a moderate 3% it will double every 23 years, quadrupling before the middle of the century.

This might be acceptable—even desirable—but for a second problem with capitalism, that the earth’s resources—for example, clean air, rivers, seas, and much of nature—are seen as “free goods,” externalities in economic jargon. Fossil fuel companies pay nothing for filling the air with pollutants. Infinite growth and a finite planet are simply incompatible.

∂ From the climate crisis to the , there’s growing evidence that humanity is on a trajectory toward environmental oblivion.∂ It’s no secret that we urgently need a green transition to tackle the climate crisis, overconsumption and the destruction of biodiversity – all of which are rooted in a global economy based on endless consumption.∂ Some experts believe the solution is something known as ‘,’ an approach that promotes economic growth and development while reducing humanity’s ecological footprint.∂ The main idea is that growth can be ‘decoupled’ from resource use, reducing our impact on the planet as economic output increases. This can be done by investing in green technologies and practices, such as renewable energy and sustainable agriculture and forestry.∂ Many international organizations such as , and have already been promoting green growth for over a decade. But is such an optimistic idea even possible?∂ In 2019, the European Environment Bureau (EEB) throwing cold water on the idea of decoupling as a sufficient strategy.∂ “Although decoupling is useful and necessary and has occurred at certain times and places,” it states, “‘green growth’ cannot reduce resource use on anywhere near the scale required to deal with global environmental breakdown and to keep global warming below the target of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.”∂ Economic growth has long been the principle measure of prosperity – but is this changing? Aditya Vyas, ∂ What is degrowth?∂ Enter a radical alternative gaining traction among scientists, policymakers and grassroots social movements: degrowth, an approach that questions the very notion that infinite economic growth is an appropriate way to measure economic prosperity and reduce poverty, or that it’s even possible with the finite resources we have.∂ Proponents of degrowth say rich countries must scale down destructive and unnecessary forms of production to reduce energy and material use, focus economic activity on securing human needs and well-being, and abandon the goal of economic growth altogether.∂ “We’ve overshot the capacity of the planet to support us,” says Peter Victor, professor emeritus of Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto and author of .∂ As his book points out, we are demanding far more of the planet than it can provide through its ability to regenerate – also known as overshoot. Last year, humanity’s ecological footprint exceeded global biocapacity by 71 percent. In other words, we used an entire year’s worth of biological resources in just seven months.∂ “Green growth assumes you can keep expanding GDP [gross domestic product] at the same time you are lightening the burden on the biosphere,” Victor explains.∂ “Degrowth says you can’t reduce this burden unless you reduce the materials and energy used in the economy, and this cannot happen fast enough – or at all – if increasing GDP remains the goal.”∂ Victor believes advocates of green growth don’t recognize that the economy is embedded in the biosphere: we extract raw materials from the earth, transform them into manufactured products, and then dump waste into the air, oceans and land. As the global economy grows, so too does our resource use and pollution.∂ The richest 1 percent of humanity are responsible for more carbon emissions than the poorest 50 percent. Timothy Newman, ∂ A question of environmental justice∂ What’s more, economic output isn’t shared equally between countries or between people within individual countries. As a result, we overuse resources while still failing to meet many basic human needs.∂ As a prime example, the richest 1 percent of humanity cause more carbon emissions than the poorest 50 percent, according to a 2020 .∂ And if everyone on Earth lived the same lifestyle as the average person in the U.S., .∂ “Escape from overshoot requires a much more comprehensive assessment of the situation than simply the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions,” Victor says.∂ That means de-commodifying essential goods and services such as housing, transportation, energy, and healthcare, which should instead be funded through public financing and based on resource-efficient technologies.∂ On the other hand, degrowth would mean drastically cutting the production of goods and services that are not really necessary and have huge environmental footprints – private jets, fast fashion, advertising and military hardware, just to name a few.∂ Some fear that this could lead to mass unemployment, but exponents of degrowth argue that what we need is a fundamental redesign of the global economy, including employment.∂ Government policies would need to guarantee jobs by providing opportunities in the green sector, such as installing renewables and insulating buildings, regenerating ecosystems and improving social care. Demand for these jobs will grow as the economy is decarbonized.∂ As polluting and less ‘important’ industries are phased out, there will inevitably be less work to go around, but degrowth advocates plan on addressing that with a shorter work week, a lower retirement age, and a universal basic income to provide a healthier work-life balance for everyone.∂ What about the Global South?∂ Degrowth is all well and good for the Global North, but what about the developing world? High-income countries are the ones that need to consume less, says Jason Hickel, an economic anthropologist at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.∂ “Our planet provides more than enough for all of us; the problem is that its resources are not equally distributed,” . “We can improve people’s lives right now simply by sharing what we already have more fairly, rather than plundering the Earth for more.”∂ Developing countries can – and should – grow their economies to improve standards of living, but they shouldn’t seek to emulate the consumerism of their richer counterparts, .∂ Instead, as rich countries slash consumption, the Global South can focus on achieving self-sufficiency rather than serving as exporters of cheap labor and raw materials.∂ “Degrowth is about changing our systems to value other things than economic growth,” says Tom Crowther, founder of the and co-chair of the UN .∂ “At the core of this concept is the equitable redistribution of wealth on our planet, which is also the foundation of a sustainable environmental movement. When we redistribute wealth to the communities living in association with nature, that is when biodiversity and people can thrive.”∂ Developing countries can – and should – grow their economies to improve standards of living.

On the plane of [a] transactions with nature, an overall far smaller throughput of matter and energy with less waste, pollution and greenhouse gas emissions would be necessary for economies and societies in the materially rich countries to become ecologically sustainable (Georgescu-Roegen, 1971, Georgescu-Roegen, 1975). As the degrowth literature points out, this for instance requires less production and consumption of unnecessary goods and services, less flying and fewer transportation miles (Trainer, 2012). Such changes necessitate a different attitude towards nature, which means less exploitation and instrumentalism (Naess, 1989) and less transformation of nature into built environments and industrial sites (such as monoculture plantations of food crops and forests) (Nesterova, 2022b). At the same time, more clean energy forms and more behaviour premised on regard for both planetary boundaries and for the characteristics of local regions would be required, as well as valuing (rather than evaluating monetarily) biodiversity, non-human beings and life in themselves (Naess, 1989). This entails more nature- and place-based economic activities carried out with care towards unique constellations of natural (as well as social) structures in different locations (Nesterova, 2022a).

In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) noted that limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels — and avoiding the worst impacts of the climate crisis — would require a level of social and technological change for which “there is no documented historic precedent.” The question is whether that change can be managed through a transition to renewable sources of energy alone without reducing the total energy demand of the economy. Degrowth theorist Jason Hickel argues that this is not possible because economic growth is currently outpacing renewable energy adoption — between 2000 and 2019, only 16 percent of new energy demand from a growing economy was met by increased renewable energy. If GDP continues to rise at around three percent per year, that would require the economy to decarbonize at 10.5 percent per year to limit warming to 1.5 degrees, when the most ambitious decarbonization policies would only facilitate a decarbonization rate of four percent per year. In the past, the IPCC has made up for this by assuming scientists would develop the technology to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. However, in the 2018 report, the IPCC included a “low energy demand” scenario that would cut global energy consumption by 40 percent and the material production of the economy by nearly 20 percent, which Hickel said was essentially a “degrowth” scenario. “Its inclusion in the IPCC report as the only scenario that does not rely on questionable negative emissions technologies suggests that degrowth may be the only feasible way to achieve the emissions reductions required by the Paris Agreement,” he wrote.

Degrowth as Solution to Broader Environmental Crisis

We are failing to mount the response we need to avoid catastrophe from the crisis in climate and nature. If governments continue with the same environmental policies currently in place, the world will become 2.8°C hotter by the end of the century, which would be “a death sentence,” warned the United Nations Secretary General in April.1 If the feedback loops kick in—for example, the release of methane from beneath melting ice—it could be much worse and much faster. We need drastic change—and a move to degrowth may be the only answer. Just before the pandemic began, I attended a debate entitled “Must capitalism end to avoid climate collapse?”2 Although uncertain of the answer before the debate began, I voted—like most of the audience—against the end of capitalism, partly because capitalism was developing technologies that could help respond to the climate crisis and more because it didn’t seem we had time to change our whole economic system. At the debate Adair Turner, the first chair of the UK Climate Change Committee who spoke in favour of capitalism, said that he thought we had only a 30% chance of avoiding economic and social collapse. He would, I’m sure, put it much lower now. At the end of last year, I commented on an article that debated the merits of “green growth” and “degrowth” and concluded “by any reasonable standard of argument, the burden of proof doesn’t lie with the degrowthers: it lies with those who hold fast to growth.”3 I’ve now read “the Bible of degrowth”—Less is More by Jason Hickel and become convinced that “green growth,” which is advocated by the US, European Union, and several British political parties is a fantasy and that we have no choice but to move to degrowth, even though, as Hickel concedes, “No one can give us a simple recipe for a post-capitalist economy; ultimately it has to be a collective project.”4 For most of human history we had economies based on exchange: I cut your hair, and you give me a loaf you have cooked. Such an economy is compatible with money and even with profit. You make a profit on your bakery, but you make roughly the same profit year after year. You don’t feel the need to grow, but if you think you would like to grow you will require investment, capital. The investor expects a minimum of a 3% return year after year, which means you will have to grow and keep growing (compound growth). If you don’t give investors their 3% return, they will invest elsewhere, bankrupting your bakery. As I was taught at the Stanford Business School, it’s grow or die once you start down this path. Small bakeries don’t have to grow, but they may be put out of business by supermarkets, which because of investors have no choice but to grow. Big companies like Amazon, Meta, Pfizer, and BP must find a way to give their investors a minimum return of 3%, allowing the odd down year, or finish—and most companies do die after 20-50 years. Economic growth has produced great benefits, including jobs and taxes, lifting many people out of poverty and funding improvements in health, housing, education, transport, and much more. Politicians, including the present leaders of Britain, see economic growth as essential, although it is proving harder and harder to achieve in mature economies, like that of Britain. One big problem with capitalism is that compound growth is exponential, growing faster than humans can imagine. The pandemic helped us understand a little more about exponential growth, but still the best understanding comes from the ancient story of the man who asks a king to pay him with one grain of rice on the first square of a chess board with the number of grains doubling with each subsequent square. After the first row he has fewer than 200 grains, but the 64th square he has 18 million trillion grains, enough to cover the whole of India with rice a metre thick. The graph of global economic growth is the familiar “hockey-stick,” virtually flat until the beginning of the industrial revolution in the early 19th century, beginning to accelerate in about 1950, increasing 10-fold by 2015.5 As Hickel calculates, if the global economy grows at even a moderate 3% it will double every 23 years, quadrupling before the middle of the century. This might be acceptable—even desirable—but for a second problem with capitalism, that the earth’s resources—for example, clean air, rivers, seas, and much of nature—are seen as “free goods,” externalities in economic jargon. Fossil fuel companies pay nothing for filling the air with pollutants. Infinite growth and a finite planet are simply incompatible. A further problem with capitalism is that it creates huge inequalities. The wealthiest 1% of the global population owns half of the world’s wealth, whereas the poorest 3.5 billion adults own just 2.7% of the wealth. Hickel explains how capitalism has grown by enclosing common land and creating colonies. “The South,” writes Hickel, “has suffered twice over: first from the appropriation of resources and labour that fuelled the North’s industrial rise, and now from the appropriation of atmospheric commons by the North’s industrial emissions… atmospheric colonisation.” And the end of colonialism did not end inequalities: “the real per capita income gap between the global North and global South is four times larger today than it was at the end of colonialism.”

Economic growth creates scarcity. Saito turns the concept of economic growth on its head. Many people assume that growth makes us richer but what if it did the precise opposite? Gross domestic product (GDP), a monetary measure of production, can rise because someone privatises a common good – what British geographer calls “accumulation by dispossession”. Fence a resource that people could previously access for free and start selling it to them. This might inflate GDP but it doesn’t create anything useful. In fact, by preventing people from accessing the means of subsistence it creates an artificial scarcity. The more money accumulates, the more these snatch-and-sell tricks become possible, whether it’s for natural resources, knowledge or labour. In a world where everything becomes a potential commodity (in other words, something which can be bought and sold), the ruling rationality favours lucrative activities over others. Why would you lend your apartment to someone for free if you can rent it on Airbnb? And that’s the catch: once you need money to satisfy your needs, you are forced to play like a capitalist. An emergency brake This self-perpetuating striving for moneymaking pushes us to turn more and more of nature into a commodity. The money companies can make is infinite while the quantities of nature at disposition are getting scarcer. There may be no clearer illustration than the of fossil fuel companies amid . could act as an emergency brake on this vicious cycle, Saito argues, by “terminat[ing] the ceaseless exploitation of humanity and the robbery of nature”. Academics define degrowth as a democratically planned effort to downscale levels of production and consumption in order to lighten environmental pressures. The democratic part is important: the idea is to do this in a way that reduces inequality and improves wellbeing for everyone. It’s difficult to imagine this happening within capitalism, a system which must continually expand and generate more. And that’s Saito’s point: communism is much more likely to achieve these objectives. He reasons that an economy concerned with meeting human need is more likely to avoid producing junk. Without the get-rich-or-perish imperative, many nature-intensive goods and services would cease to be necessary or desirable. Saito calls this “a conscious downscaling of the current ‘realm of necessity’”. This Marxist term describes what we consider our essential needs. Under degrowth communism, this realm would shrink to exclude things and activities which don’t benefit human wellbeing or contribute to sustainability. Suddenly, it’s possible to organise work differently. Gone is the industrial model of producing something as cheaply as possible while sacrificing safety and the pleasantness inherent in a shared effort. Instead of competing for market share, companies could cooperate to achieve common goals like restoring biodiversity. Reducing the importance given to moneymaking would free societies to improve all these things we today trivialise because they aren’t profitable. Such an economy might be slower and smaller money-wise but it would be more sustainable and more effective in delivering wellbeing, which is all we should be asking from an economy anyway.

Despite unprecedented commitments on  and to a  at the recent climate change conference, or COP 27, in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, a key conversation was missing: . This  and  centers human and planetary well-being, and growth in sectors that promote this well-being, rather than solely economic growth.

Why does this matter? We cannot confront the climate emergency without confronting its economic roots. Our economy depends on  and prioritizes , though  is gaining increasing attention. This means continual wringing out of  and , and relentless reinvestment of the profits from increased productivity into continued exponential growth. Degrowth experts have  our current economic model to a jet that depends on endlessly gaining elevation to stay aloft.

Fossil fuels are—by popular definition—not renewable. We don’t have 100 million years and 100 trillion plants to bury solar energy in liquid batteries under solid rock. Fossil fuels were a one-time inheritance from our dead ancestors, and we’ve blown them all in a few generations, on coke and Ferraris. It was a good run, but there’s no way around it. We’re running out. As Tom Murphy, whose textbook I reference, says, “The current state of apparent success cannot be taken as a meaningful proof-of-concept, because it was achieved at the expense of finite resources in a shockingly short time: an extravagant party funded by the great one-time inheritance. The aftermath is only beginning to appear.” Last Call We are nearly half done with coal, 80% done with oil, and 50% with natural gas. The last bits of these resources will be so difficult to obtain, it’ll be like William S. Burroughs looking for a vein. We’ll be shooting up between our planetary toes. By the end, it won’t even be worth it. The last 10% of fossil fuels will cost more to extract than they’re worth. You could say that there are unproven reserves, but these are again expensive to A) find and B) extract. They are by definition not obvious and easy, or we would have found them. Peak oil happens not when you completely run out, but when you economically run out. When it costs more energy to find the shit than you get from burning it. So the last bit gets left in the ground. What are fossil fuels and why aren’t they renewable? Fossil fuels are trillions of dead plants and animals that have been compressed for millions of years. We don’t have trillions of plants and animals (killed 95% of them) and we don’t have millions of years. We are thus facing a math problem we can’t win. The amount of fossil fuels that get renewed are only enough to power one university campus. And we obviously have higher ambitions than this. We want to get high motherfucker, not study. That’s how we’re blowing our inheritance.

One of the world’s most respected economists believes the banking crisis is far from over, and that U.S. authorities are merely buying themselves some time by insisting the banking system is “sound.”

Nouriel Roubini, chief executive of consulting firm Roubini Macro Associates, argued on Friday that the financial system will be unable to cope with the sheer scale of private and public debt that has already been amassed, spawning a “trilemma” that will soon trigger another phase of panic.

DISRUPTING EARTH’S CHEMICAL cycles brings trouble. But planet-warming carbon dioxide isn’t the only element whose cycle we’ve turned wonky—we’ve got a phosphorus problem too. And it’s a big one, because we depend on this element to grow the world’s crops. “I don't know if it would be possible to have a full world without any mineral phosphorus fertilizer,” says Joséphine Demay, a PhD student at INRAE, France’s National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment. Since the 1800s, agriculturalists have known that elemental phosphorus is a crucial fertilizer. Nations quickly began mining caches of “phosphate rock,” minerals rich in the element. By the middle of the 20th century, companies had industrialized chemical processes to turn it into a form suitable for supercharging crops, hardening them against disease and making them able to support more people and livestock. That approach worked remarkably well: The post-World War II “Green Revolution” fed countless people thanks to fertilizers and pesticides. But sometimes there’s too much of a good thing. We have liberated Earth’s caches of phosphorus so rapidly that the element now pollutes freshwater ecosystems, where excesses cause harmful algal blooms, infiltrates the snowpack, and decreases levels of dissolved oxygen in lakes and rivers. Studies suggest that humanity has grown too dependent on it for feeding the planet—and we are running out of this nonrenewable resource, which comes from geologic deposits that take millenia to form. When it washes from soil into waterways, it essentially disappears forever. A looming “peak phosphorus” moment threatens to increase prices and foment political tension if demand eclipses supply, as a large majority of reserves exist only in one corner of North Africa. In a paper published this month in Nature Geoscience, Demay broke down how much phosphorus 176 countries have used between the years 1950 and 2017, and she estimated how much the use of mineral fertilizer contributes to soil fertility in each nation. Remarkably, phosphate rock accounts for around 50 percent of the world’s soil productivity. “It has never been quantified like that,” Demay says. And those numbers matter, she says, because “the work really highlights the high gap that exists between different world regions.” Wealthy countries in Western Europe, North America, and Asia use far more of the world’s phosphate rock than Africa, despite African soils being relatively deficient in it. “There is a need to distribute more equally the remaining first rock reserves,” Demay says. James Elser, an ecologist with Arizona State University and the University of Montana who studies the global phosphorus cycle, was taken aback by that 50 percent figure. “That we've been able to mobilize phosphorus from these ancient geological deposits, and spread it around the world enough so that half of soil phosphorus is now comprised of industrial anthropogenic fertilizer, is pretty stunning,” he says. And if the remaining supply goes down, prices will go up, exacerbating the access gap between rich and poor countries, says Dana Cordell, an associate professor and research director of food systems sustainability at the University of Technology Sydney. In 2008, phosphate prices spiked 800 percent due to supply and demand issues, and again 400 percent last year, due to Covid-related disruptions. The new study “shows how our global food system has now become heavily dependent on mined, nonrenewable phosphate rock,” she says. “And even if there is phosphate rock in the ground, it might not be economically viable to access it.” SCIENTISTS HAVE BEEN pointing out the “broken” phosphorus cycle for more than a decade: Humanity has unearthed huge quantities of the element, which winds up in waterways instead of returning to cropland. The problem comes down to crap. People and livestock eat crops and excrete phosphorus as a result. (A University of Iowa researcher calculated that the state’s livestock produce a load of excrement equivalent to a nation of 168 million people.) But most of it won’t end up feeding plants again. Waste treatment can loop sludge or manure back to being fertilizer, but transporting and treating it is often impractical, so it may sit in stockpiles and “dry stacks” without the chance to boost another crop. Or the system may be leaky: Sewage, septic tanks, stockpiles, and eroded soil drip phosphorus into oceans and rivers, where it dilutes to oblivion while degrading those ecosystems. For instance, phosphorus runoff drives the harmful algal blooms that have killed Florida’s seagrass, starving thousands of manatees. Demay’s model determined that in a 67-year span, humans pumped almost a billion tons of nonrenewable phosphorus into food systems. Her team’s figures are derived from statistical data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. The global data, broken up by country, reported agricultural yields—like the amount of wheat grown, or headcounts of pigs and cows—from 1961 to 2017. (Data from 1950 to 1961 came from other data sets.) Her team also broke down use trends. In 2017, Western European, North American, and Asian reliance climbed to nearly 60 percent of the total plant-ready phosphorus available in each region’s soil. Brazil, China, and India are quickly increasing their use, to 61, 74, and 67 percent respectively. The numbers for France and the Netherlands are no longer rising, because they’ve replaced some use of phosphate rock with manure; now they sit at roughly 70 and 50 percent. Yet in African countries like Zimbabwe, a lack of soil phosphorus limits crop yields. Demay's estimates pin mineral fertilizer use in Zimbabwe to the 20 to 30 percent range, which is even lower than the 32 percent average for all of Africa. To Elser, this illuminates a global inequity: Poorer countries access far less fertilizer, despite needing it more. And wealthy countries have been able to amass stockpiles from the rock reserves for decades, while countries that struggle with food security can’t afford to do the same. This raises concerns over who will control the future of fertilizer. Nearly 75 percent of the world’s supply sits in the mines of Morocco and the Western Sahara. Economists get anxious when a commodity is consolidated in the hands of a few powerful people. (OPEC controls roughly the same fraction of the world’s oil, but with 13 member states.) And it’s not entirely clear how long supplies will last. In 2009, Cordell estimated that a global “peak phosphorus” moment could happen as soon as 2030, which would leave 50 to 100 years of dwindling reserves. Today, she and Elser agree that the peak will likely come later, although it’s hard to predict when, because demand may skyrocket for other uses, like lithium iron phosphate batteries. To Cordell, it’s frustrating that this supply chain has been mismanaged. “If this was water—or another resource that we know humanity is dependent on—we would have so many measures in place to monitor those resources, to ensure more equitable and secure access,” she says. And if any other crucial resource was running out, she continues, “we would look for alternatives.” She worries that phosphorus is “slipping through the institutional cracks.” But, she says, it’s not clear who is responsible for overseeing its supply—which government, or even which department. Agriculture? Environment? Health? Water? Trade? “It cuts across all of those sectors,” she says.

Despite holding out the promise of a low-emissions future, lithium production itself comes with eye-watering environmental costs. More than 2.2 million litres of water is needed to mine one tonne of the metal, according to Fairfield Market Research. Extracting the metal is also associated with the release of borax, potassium, and manganese into local water supplies.

From Chile to Serbia, conflict has erupted between miners and people who live near lithium deposits. In North Carolina, residents in the town of Cherryville have railed against plans by Australia-based Piedmont Lithium to open a lithium mine, pointing to unsightly scars left in the landscape by previous miners during the 1950s.

Lithium, the highly reactive silver-white metal that is a crucial ingredient in batteries used in electric vehicles (EVs), is becoming much more expensive – and fast.

In April, as prices hit a record $78,000 a tonne, Tesla CEO Elon Musk floated the idea of the electric carmaker mining and refining the lightweight metal itself due to the “insane” increase in costs.