Degrowth is fundamentally flawed – economic growth is not the cause of environmental challenges and is the only solution to overcome present issues

First, growth, whether economic growth or population growth, is not the cause of climate change or other environmental challenges. We have had many other environmental challenges in the past that we have overcome, or largely overcome — such as the hole in the ozone layer, acid rain, lead pollution, and a great deal of air and water pollution in the West — and the solution to all of these did not come from halting growth, but instead from new technologies and economic planning in the form of regulation and technology policy. As recently as the 1980s, the ozone layer challenge was perhaps an even greater existential threat than climate change, for it threatened the very ability of macroscopic life on land to exist. We didn’t solve that problem by halting growth in fridges, cans of hair spray, and air conditioning units (and other machines and processes using the chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, that contributed to ozone depletion), but by regulating a transition away from the use of CFCs. Today, there are far more fridges and cans of hair spray than ever before. As a science journalist, I would also say that degrowth fundamentally misdiagnoses the cause of climate change, biodiversity loss, and other environmental problems, and as a result has a poor theory of change (a strategy for how the problem can be solved). Imagine a fully socialist twentieth century. Socialists would argue that health care, education, electricity, and industrialization would have been spread to the whole of the world, and not restricted to the West. Prior to the discovery of the full extent of the problem of global warming in the 1980s, socialist societies would have mainly used fossil fuels to power all of this, especially in those areas where the geography does not allow for hydroelectricity. Socialists want their public hospitals to be able to run 24/7 (and indeed many of their factories and other services essential to social well-being). We don’t want to wait for the sun to shine or the wind to blow for the ventilators and dialysis machines to be turned on. Indeed, the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions entered the atmosphere not since the Industrial Revolution, but since the 1950s, what geosphere-biosphere scientists call “The Great Acceleration.” This is coincident with the advent of the welfare state and the legalization and institutionalization of trade unions across much of the West.