Green Growth possible – decoupling, sufficient resources, government intervention

Besides minimizing the class factor, degrowth suffers from two interconnected flaws. First, degrowth underestimates, even ignores, the extent that technology and innovation can decouple economic growth from material usage. As Engels wrote in his critique of Malthus: There still remains an element which, admittedly, never means anything to the economist—science—whose progress is as unlimited and at least as rapid as that of population… Science advances in proportion to the knowledge bequeathed to it by the previous generation, and thus under the most ordinary conditions also in a geometrical progression. And what is impossible to science? Examples of this abound. US crop tonnage has consistently increased for the past 70 years while precision agriculture has enabled the use inputs such as fertilizer and water to decline the past two decades and crop acreage (the amount of land used to grow crops) to remain at a steady level. There’s been the digitization of goods and services. Smart phones have generally replaced cameras, clock radios, calculators, and camcorders, fitting what used to be numerous material devices into one device that fits in the palm of a hand. Aluminum cans are 75 percent lighter than they were decades ago. Building materials are more flexible. As Andrew McAfee describes in his book More from Less, real GDP growth was symbiotic with the consumption of metals for most of the 20th century. However since around 1990 the US has been consuming less metals such as steel, copper, and aluminum all while real GDP growth has continued. Research by Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the Breakthrough Institute, found a decoupling of emissions and GDP growth happening in 32 countries. The Economist recently found such decoupling in 33 countries. A familiar canard that has emerged out of the degrowth movement claims something like “infinite growth on a finite planet isn’t possible.” “Infinite” is perhaps too much to ask of any planet, however we don’t appear to be running out of resources in the near future. According to simulations published in Limits to Growth, even under the most optimistic scenarios, known global reserves of gold would be used up within 29 years of 1972; silver within 42; copper and petroleum 50; and aluminum 55. It is an understatement to say these predictions were inaccurate. Despite a half century of additional consumption, known global reserves of gold are almost 400 percent larger today than in 1972, and silver reserves are more than 200 percent larger. And we haven’t come close to running out of energy or copper. As for aluminum, the most plentiful metal on Earth, it need not be a concern: known reserves are almost 25 times what they were in the early 1970s. Secondly, and more importantly, degrowth mistakes growth itself with markets, ironically echoing libertarians. One of the major contradictions within capitalism is that the system can’t help but reproduce social harms if such harms are profitable and can’t produce necessary social goods if such goods aren’t profitable. There are times when social good coincides with profitability, yet not nearly enough. Degrowth obviously has sprouted in a time of increased anxiety about global warming and other potential environmental catastrophes. Fossil fuels are a perfect example of capitalism’s warped incentives. Fossil fuels, with their energy density, fueled the industrial revolution and helped energetically free us from nature’s dictates. However their continued high use threatens to shift the earth’s temperature from the range that has enabled human flourishing since the last ice age. Market based solutions to carbon emissions such as carbon trading, carbon pricing and offsets, and so-called ESG (environment, social, and governance) investing move far too slowly while depending on the very market incentives that produced the problem in the first place. Carbon pricing, essentially raising the price of energy, also generates resentment from the working class, as the French Gilets jaunes (Yellow Vests) movement showed. Norway is the world leader in electric vehicles, reaching around 80 percent of new car sales this year. Norway is blessed with abundant hydroelectric power, which provides 96 percent of the country’s electricity (electricity prices in Norway are among the cheapest in the world), yet it was the government’s buildout of a wide network of charging stations throughout the country, not just in places where stations are most profitable, along with other steps such as free parking, that accomplished the transition. The largest historical drop in carbon intensity of energy of any economy was France’s nuclear energy program of the late 1970s and early 1980s, a centralized, government led effort. It was the 1972 Clean Water Act that dramatically cut pollution in U.S. waterways. The Clean Air Act did the same for U.S. air pollution. The 1987 Montreal Protocol phasing out of Hydrochlorofluorocarbons (then used in refrigerators and aerosol cans), to this day the only UN treaty ratified by every member state, reversed ozone layer depletion, once the top environmental concern. The reversal began in the early 2000s and is on pace to be completed for most of the planet by 2040. These were neither market nor degrowth solutions. Yet economic growth continued.