Degrowth key now – econ growth and its destructive effects are compiling every day and green tech cannot keep up

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.

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.”

Despite the inescapable problem with capitalism, modern politicians of left and right cannot abandon the concept. The American philosopher Fredric Jameson once famously said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. Most politicians have recognised that capitalism as it has proceeded until now is no longer possible and have created the concept of “green growth.”

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.

Degrowth depends on reducing energy and resource use to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a safe, just, and equitable way. It means reducing inequality, investing in universal public goods, and distributing income and opportunity more fairly. Because we already have enough. I think of the graph of life expectancy against GDP that shows that life expectancy in countries flattens at around 80 when the per capita GDP is around $12 000 and that countries like the US (per capita GDP $55 000) and the United Arab Emirates (per capita GDP $76 000) have life expectancies below 80. The American ecologist Herman Daly recognised that after a certain point growth begins to become “uneconomic,” creating more “illth” than wealth through polluted air, excessive consumption of unhealthy foods, using machines rather than our bodies, and overwork.

Making degrowth happen will, Hickel writes, “require a movement, as with every struggle for social and ecological justice in history.” He has no ready made formula, but he identifies seven steps. End planned obsolescence. Smartphones are a good example: 13 billion were manufactured between 2010 and 2019 with 10 billion discarded. Cut advertising, most of which is persuading us to buy things we don’t need. Shift from ownership to usership; the future of cars is not everybody owning an electric car but people mostly using public transport and sharing cars when necessary. End food waste seems obvious, but GDP, the aim of growth and a flawed, inhuman measure, rises not only by producing more food, but also by companies disposing of the waste. Scale down ecologically destructive industries like fossil fuels, beef farming, flying, and mining. Work less in paid employment, which would mean better quality of life, lower unemployment, and less environmental destruction. Cancel debts, particularly those of low-income countries. This anti-capitalist measure has religious roots in the Hebrew Law of Jubilee, whereby debts were automatically cancelled every seventh year. The law is associated with the Hebrew concept of redemption.