Degrowth won’t solve – targets the wrong problem, worsens the environment, shifts the problem to the Global South

Ultimately, the proposal for degrowth as proposed by the Degrowth movement turns out, much like that of green growth, not to be a solution. Most importantly, degrowth has been criticised that its proposal to reduce the GDP of advanced economies will have no significant impact on reducing the world’s Material Footprint (MF), or carbon emissions, significantly enough to avoid an ecological overshoot. This is because most (63%) of current carbon emissions come from developing countries - where it will only continue to increase in the foreseeable future. The 2022 Emissions Gap Report notes UNEP (2022, p. 67) that “virtually the entire future increase in global primary energy demand is expected to occur in these [developing] economies.” And after the GDP of rich economies are downsized - say by a significant 40%, there would still remain a footprint of 60% and 60% of their economies to de-carbonise (Hickel and Hallegatte, 2022). van den Bergh (2011, p.885) concluded that “Even if we would manage to ‘scale the economy down’ to 50% [....] we still only would have reduced the size of the environmental problems by half. But this is by far insufficient for most environmental problems.” It is clearly insufficient to halt the growth in material footprints and carbon emissions and not reduce these “tout court.” Phillips (2019) uses the example of the successful reduction in the hole in the ozone layer to illustrate the shortcoming of the Degrowth proposal, explaining that: “we embraced degrowth with respect to ozone depletion by attempting to arrest growth in, say, the number of fridges in the world—or even reduce the total number—instead of regulation to enforce technology-switching, disaster would have befallen us. Saying ”this many fridges and no more” would only have arrested the growth in emissions, not emissions tout court” (Phillips, 2019). Moreover, even if the GDP growth of all countries, not only that of the developed countries, could be curtailed, it may still not be effective to reduce carbon emissions and MF sufficiently to achieve climate goals. This can easily be seen using the so-called IPAT identity, used to gauge the drivers of the environmental impact of the economy (Bretschger, 2021; Stijn, 2021). The IPAT identity decomposes the environmental impact (I) of an economy into the consequences of population (P), affluence (A) and technology (T) (Holdren, 1993). It can be written as follows (where a ‘hat’ over a variable indicates a rate of change): I = Pˆ + Aˆ P + Tˆ A (1) If affluence (A) - say measured in GDP - is reduced as per degrowthers’ proposal, it will lead to a reduction in impact (I ). This is the basis of degrowth. However, if Pˆ continues to grow, and if technological innovation (Tˆ) declines or remain slow, then the reduction in impact caused by GDP degrowth would be offset. The important point to note is that both of these offset mechanism are more likely to apply at lower levels of GDP. Furthermore, if reduced GDP lead to a reduction in technological innovation in the richer countries, the environmental impact may be even worse. Holdren (1993, p.5) shows in this regard that “a change for the worse in the technology of production is more serious environmentally if it occurs in a populous, affluent society than if it occurs in a small, poor one” - which are the type of the societies that the Degrowth movement want to downsize. Worse even, not only is downsizing the economies of rich countries not likely to be effective, but it may worsen ecological overshoot in several ways. “degrowth might turn out to be dirty” (van den Bergh, 2011, p.882). One is that countries will have less resources to invest in climate change mitigation and adaptation technologies, and hence they will be more vulnerable to the impacts of ecological deterioration (Phillips, 2019). A second is that firms may substitute more expensive cleaner production techniques for cheaper, but more polluting, technologies. Third, government revenues will drop - an inevitable consequence of economic shrinkage. Governments would not be able to borrow further to spend on social and basic needs or environmental protection. They would need to repay their existing debt - in the EU, the rule that government debt cannot exceed 60% of GDP implies that, if GDP declined, debt would also need to fall (Stijn, 2021). Fourth, poorer households in (degrowthed) rich countries are likely to revert to deforestation30 and environmental destruction - as they did during the 2021/2022 winters in Europe when faced with rising energy prices following the Ukraine war (Moloney, 2022; Rankin, 2021; Kauppi et al., 2006). A further shortcoming of degrowth is that if one considers degrowth as a method to decreasing carbon emissions, it is a much more expensive method than any currently comparable technological investments as green growth is pushing for. According to calculations by Jakob and Edenhofer (2014) if the world shrinks GDP per capita by 10% (around US$7,000 billion), it will reduce carbon emissions by about 3.3 gigatons, meaning a cost of US$ 2,100 per ton of emissions. In comparison, the social cost of carbon dioxide (SC-CO2) has been estimated at US$ 185 per ton of emissions (Rennert et al., 2022). In additionn to being likely ineffective, to worsen the environmental challenge, and a very expensive way to reduce carbon emissions, degrowth may disproportionately hurt the poorest of the poor - and make global inequality worse. One mechanism through which this could occur is that degrowth in the Global North will severely curtail development in the Global South because of the intertwined nature of the global economy (and there is no time for the Global South to successfully “decouple” if at all that is possible). The COVID-19 crisis emphasized this inter-dependency - poverty rose more sharply in the Global South than the Global North - and indicated how difficult it would be for the Global South to decouple from the Global North. Hence it may be indeed the case that, ”the degrowth people are living a fantasy where they assume that if you bake a smaller cake, then for some reason, the poorest will get a bigger share of it [. . . .] that has never happened in history” (Horowitz, 2022).Ultimately, degrowth will make global inequality worse because it will be the poor will pay the price, and not the rich, who has the means and connections to find shelter31 - and who has arguably the most wasteful consumption. Hence, “Degrowth is, in essence, a form of ecological austerity for working-class people” (Chambers, 2021). Finally, in the words of Stijn (2021) degrowth is not only ineffective, likely to worsen the environment, very expensive and a form of austerity for the working class, but redundant: “Economic degrowth is not necessary, because it targets the wrong enemy. GDP is not the enemy; environmental impact is the enemy. Environmental scientists are able to determine upper bounds on environmental impacts such as pollution. For example, climatologists have determined the carbon budget: how much greenhouse gases can still be emitted that keep the atmospheric temperature increase below 1,5°C. But GDP is measured in dollars, a totally different quantity than kg CO2. Hence, none of the economic degrowthers are able to say what is the upper bound or true limit on affluence. There are no scientific studies that estimate the maximum level of GDP that is still permissible.”

\Engrained mental models of perpetual growth make the degrowth transition impossible

Steve Genco 23 { Steve is author of Intuitive Marketing (2019) & Neuromarketing for Dummies (2013). He holds a PhD in Political Science from Stanford University.} - ("It’s Getting to Look a Lot like Degrowth: Part 1," resilience, published 4-19-2023, accessed 7-15-2023,

At the heart of the flawed mental model that I believe is responsible for our collective failure to address climate change and resource depletion is an apparently unshakeable conviction that any future for human civilization must include the continuation of economic growth. According to this belief, growth is the engine of the current world order and, without it, the system will collapse and human progress will end. This model has several core principles embedded in it. Here are just a few of them: Economic growth has allowed us to expand our human population to eight billion, a clear sign of success. Capitalism is the best and most equitable way to drive economic growth. It balances market forces of supply and demand and allocates resources in the most efficient, and therefore just, manner possible. Economic growth within a capitalist framework is best measured by increases in Gross Domestic Product or GDP. Economic growth is necessary to meet constantly increasing consumer demand for goods and services. Growth fuels demand, demand requires growth. Economic growth produces human happiness, more growth produces more happiness. Supply scarcity does occur, but it triggers self-correcting responses: investments to find additional supplies and inventions to create substitutes for depleted resources. (source) This system is a perpetual motion machine that can and will continue to produce positive outcomes indefinitely. I am not going to debate the empirical accuracy of these principles here. All are demonstrably false, as others have cogently shown (source, source), including here on Medium (source, source, source). The question I am interested in is not why they’re false, but why the world’s elites appear to be doubling down on them when they are known to be false. I believe this is because of the inherent nature of deeply-embedded mental models. In this case, the mental model underlying the faith in economic growth is not only embedded in decades (centuries?) of economic thought, it is also enshrined in the practices, legal frameworks, and institutions that power the global economic system today. This is why an often-repeated quote rings as true today as it ever has: “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” (source, p. 1) Adherence to the gospel of economic growth permeates many of the most popular climate change mitigation and adaptation scenarios in circulation today. Indeed, although the IPCC started issuing climate change reports in 2000, it was not until 2022 — and then only after numerous calls by climate scientists (source, source, source) — that a self-described Low Energy Demand (LED) scenario was added to the portfolio of models (source, Table 1.1, p. 174). Why do we cling so desperately to the idea that civilization cannot survive without economic growth? There are most likely two reasons why the world’s political and economic elites cannot acknowledge that we have entered an era in which economic growth must inevitably come to an end with the depletion of fossil fuels. First, our political leaders can’t give up on the idea of growth because, without growth, the only way they can respond to climate change and resource depletion is by radically decreasing human resource consumption, primarily in the global North. This is seen as politically unfeasible and career suicide for any politician who might suggest it.¹ So no political leader, with the possible exception of the Secretary-General of the UN (who is not the leader of a sovereign nation), is willing to talk about it. One consequence of this reticence among our political leadership is that the general public knows much less about resource depletion than it does about climate change. This is likely to leave the world’s population dangerously unprepared for understanding the shortages and scarcities that are already beginning to appear, as climate change disrupts food production, manufacturing, and distribution channels around the world (source). The second reason our political and economic leaders can’t give up on the idea of economic growth is because, without growth, capitalism has no solution to the problem of persistent economic inequality, both within and between nations. Defenders of capitalism like to point out that “economic growth has lifted billions of people out of poverty” (source). This assertion may be technically correct (although there is strong evidence it is not), but it masks a deeper fact: the rate at which growth has contributed to reducing poverty at the bottom of the income ladder is minuscule compared to the rate at which growth has concentrated income and wealth among the world’s most wealthy. According to one recent report on global inequality: “Some countries have reduced the numbers of people living in extreme poverty. But economic gaps have continued to grow as the very richest amass unprecedented levels of wealth. Among industrial nations, the United States is by far the most top-heavy, with much greater shares of national wealth and income going to the richest 1 percent than any other country.” Increasing inequality is a feature, not a bug, of modern capitalism (source). As French economist Thomas Piketty has shown, because return on capital historically grows faster than return on labor, capitalist accumulation inevitably increases the gap between rich and poor. As long as the whole system continues to produce growth, the needs of those at the bottom can presumably be met without sacrificing any of the wealth of those at the top. But without growth, the economic pie becomes fixed and any gains at the bottom must come out of the shares of those at the top, most likely through much-feared and highly-resisted wealth taxes. Or so it is believed by our political and economic elites, which gives them a compelling second reason to reject imagining a world without growth. As one commentator has put it: “economists and policymakers often regard growth as a substitute for equality: it is politically easier to grow total income and expect that enough will trickle down to improve the lives of ordinary people than it is to distribute existing income more fairly, as this requires an attack on the interests of the dominant class.” (source, p. 57) Capitalism is not a system for maximizing abundance or human wellbeing, it is a system for maximizing capital accumulation. This leads to a kind of abundance, but only for some, the small minority of capitalists at the top of the global economy. Ultimately, these people are so deeply invested — both financially and cognitively — in the system that nurtures them that they seem unable to even imagine a world in which it no longer operates. So, why do we cling so desperately to the idea that civilization cannot survive without economic growth? The short answer is: because capitalism cannot survive without economic growth, capitalists cannot survive without capitalism, and the modern neoliberal order cannot survive without capitalists. QED, civilization — as we know it today — cannot survive without economic growth. Ironically, that’s something pretty much everyone can agree on.