Unchecked economic growth dooms globe – warming, biodiversity, entity pollution, nitrogen. Current methods fail AND degrowth only feasible solution

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

The climate crisis isn’t the only symptom of an unsustainable economic system. Scientists have defined nine planetary boundaries that have kept Earth stable for the last 10,000 years. Human activity has so far breached five of them. In addition to global heating, those are biodiversity loss, habitat loss, nitrogen and phosphorous pollution and the pollution of novel entities such as chemicals and plastic. Resolving the climate crisis through a technological switch to renewable energy coupled with somehow removing sufficient amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere would not remedy an economic model that sees the Earth as a collection of natural resources to be extracted and exploited for economic gain. The destruction of ecosystems and the sacrifice of frontline communities for intensive agriculture or the rare earth and other minerals needed for the energy transition would continue. Efforts by developers to seize chunks of the bush were defeated under historic laws enacted to protect Kenya’s dwindling forests from unchecked logging and environmental destruction. Biodiversity loss, for example, is a major environmental crisis with a million plant and animal species now at risk from extinction, primarily because of land use change, hunting and harvesting, the climate crisis, other pollution and the introduction of invasive species. It is well documented that, as GDP rises, so do many of the drivers of biodiversity loss. Land used for agriculture and the use of fertilizer and pesticides have all risen alongside GDP since the 1960s. Meat consumption also rises with per capita GDP. GDP growth is also associated with an increase in urban area and greenhouse gas emissions, while the expansion of international trade facilitates the spread of invasive species. Although correlation is not causation, it is clear to see how economic growth would naturally lead to more resource use and trade, which would each increase the boot print of human activity on the natural world. A 2022 Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Assessment Report on the Diverse Conceptualization of the Multiple Values of Nature and Its Benefits concluded that the current mainstream values of economic growth and prioritizing short term profits were a major contribution to the ecological crisis. It suggested “degrowth” as one possible alternative model that could lead to a more sustainable and equal future.