Degrowth is necessary to prevent extinction threats—green tech inevitably fails due to the long timeframe

The word degrowth stands for a family of political-economic approaches that, in the face of today’s accelerating planetary ecological crisis, reject unlimited, exponential economic growth as the definition of human progress. To abandon economic growth in wealthy societies means to shift to zero net capital formation. With continual technological development and the enhancement of human capabilities, mere replacement investment is able to promote steady qualitative advancements in production in mature industrial societies, while eliminating exploitative labor conditions and reducing working hours. Coupled with global redistribution of the social surplus product and reduction of waste, this would allow for vast improvements in the lives of most people. Degrowth, which specifically targets the most opulent sectors of the world population, is thus directed at the enhancement of the living conditions of the vast majority while maintaining the environmental conditions of existence and promoting sustainable human development.

Science has established without a doubt that, in today’s “full-world economy,” it is necessary to operate within an overall Earth System budget with respect to allowable physical throughput. However, rather than constituting an insurmountable obstacle to human development, this can be seen as initiating a whole new stage of ecological civilization based on the creation of a society of substantive equality and ecological sustainability, or ecosocialism. Degrowth, in this sense, is not aimed at austerity, but at finding a “prosperous way down” from our current extractivist, wasteful, ecologically unsustainable, maldeveloped, exploitative, and unequal, class-hierarchical world. Continued growth would occur in some areas of the economy, made possible by reductions elsewhere. Spending on fossil fuels, armaments, private jets, sport utility vehicles, second homes, and advertising would need to be cut in order to provide room for growth in such areas as regenerative agriculture, food production, decent housing, clean energy, accessible health care, universal education, community welfare, public transportation, digital connectivity, and other areas related to green production and social needs.

When the first systems of national income accounting were devised at the time of the Second World War, all increases in national income, regardless of source, were characterized as constituting economic growth. Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, became the primary measure of human progress. Nevertheless, much of this was questionable from a wider social and ecological standpoint. According to the prevailing system of national economic accounting, anything that provides “value added,” in accordance with the capitalist valorization process, represents “growth.” This includes such things as war spending; the production of wasteful and toxic products; luxury consumption by the very rich; marketing (encompassing motivation research, targeting, advertising, and sales promotion); replacements of social by private consumption, as in the substitution of the private automobile for public transportation; expropriation of the commons; business expenditures to enhance the exploitation of workers; legal costs related to the administration, control, and enhancement of private property; anti-union activities by corporate management; the so-called criminal justice system; rising pharmaceutical and insurance costs; financial sector employment; military spending; and even criminal activities. Maximum extraction of natural resources is seen as crucial for rapid economic growth, since it draws on nature’s “free gift…to capital.”

In contrast, nonmarket and subsistence production carried out throughout the world; domestic labor mainly performed by women; numerous expenditures for human growth and development (seen as relatively nonproductive); conservation of the environment; and reductions in the toxicity of production were all seen as “counting for nothing” or assigned a diminished worth, since they do not enhance productivity or directly promote economic value.

Today the elemental tragedy of this is all around us. It is now widely perceived that economic growth, based on nonstop capital accumulation, is the main cause of the destruction of the earth as a safe place for humanity. The Earth System crisis is evident in the crossing of planetary boundaries related to climate change, ocean acidification, destruction of the ozone layer, species extinction, disruption of the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, loss of groundcover (including forests), depletion of fresh water, aerosol loading, and novel entities (such as synthetic chemicals, nuclear radiation, and genetically modified organisms). The drive to capital accumulation is thus generating a “habitability crisis” for humanity in this century.

The world scientific consensus, as represented by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has established that the global average temperature needs to be kept below a 1.5°C increase over pre-industrial levels this century—or else, with a disproportionately higher level of risk, “well below” a 2°C increase—if climate destabilization is not to threaten absolute catastrophe as positive feedback mechanisms come into effect. In the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6, released in its various parts over 2021–23), the most optimistic scenario is one of an end-of-the-century increase in global average temperature over pre-industrial levels of below 1.5°C. This requires that the 1.5°C boundary not be crossed until 2040, rising by a tenth of a degree to 1.6°C, and then falling near the end of the century back down to a 1.4°C increase. All of this is predicated on reaching net zero (in fact, real zero) carbon emissions by 2050, which gives a fifty-fifty chance that the climate-temperature boundary will not be exceeded.

Yet, according to leading climate scientist Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research, this scenario is already out of date. It is now necessary, based on the IPCC’s own figures, to reach the zero-carbon dioxide emissions point by 2040, in order to have the same 50 percent chance of avoiding a 1.5°C increase. “Starting now,” Anderson wrote in March 2023, to not exceed 1.5°C of warming requires 11% year-on-year cuts in emissions, falling to nearer 5% for 2°C. However, these global average rates ignore the core concept of equity, central to all UN climate negotiations, which gives “developing country parties” a little longer to decarbonise. Include equity and most “developed” nations need to reach zero CO2 emissions between 2030 and 2035, with developing nations following suit up to a decade later. Any delay will shrink these timelines still further.

The World Meteorological Organization indicated in May 2023 that there is a 66 percent chance that the annual average near-surface global temperature will temporarily exceed a 1.5°C increase over pre-industrial levels during “at least” one year by 2027.

Existing IPCC scenarios are part of a conservative process, designed to conform to the prerequisites of the capitalist economy, which builds continued economic growth in the wealthy countries into all scenarios while excluding any substantial changes in social relations. The sole device relied upon in such climate modeling is to assume price-induced shifts in technology. Existing scenarios thus necessarily rely heavily on negative emissions technologies, such as Bioenergy and Carbon Capture and Sequestration (BECCS) and Direct Carbon Air Capture (DAC), that do not presently exist at scale and cannot be instituted within the prescribed timeline, while also presenting enormous ecological hazards in themselves. This emphasis on essentially nonexistent technologies that are themselves environmentally destructive (given their enormous land, water, and energy requirements) has been challenged by scientists within the IPCC itself. Thus, in the original Summary for Policymakers for the mitigation report, part 3 of AR6, the scientists authoring the report agreed that such technologies are not viable in a reasonable time frame and suggested that low-energy solutions based on popular mobilization might offer the best hope of carrying out the massive ecological transformations now required. All of this, however, was excluded from the final published Summary for Policymakers as determined by governments, as part of the normal IPCC process, which allows for censorship of the scientists.

Price-induced technological solutions, which would allow continued economic growth and the perpetuation of current social relations, do not exist on anything like the required scale and tempo. Hence, major socioeconomic changes in the mode of production and consumption are needed, running counter to the reigning political-economic hegemony. “Three decades of complacency,” Anderson writes, “has meant that technology on its own cannot now cut emissions fast enough.” There is thus a drastic need for low-energy solutions based on changes in relations of production and consumption that also address deep inequalities. The necessary reductions in emissions are “only possible by re-allocating society’s productive capacity away from enabling the private luxury of a few and austerity for everyone else, and toward wider public prosperity and private sufficiency. For most people, tackling climate change will bring multiple benefits, from affordable housing to secure employment. But for those few of us who have disproportionately benefited from the status quo,” Anderson insists, “it means a profound reduction in how much energy we use and stuff we accumulate.”

A degrowth/deaccumulation approach that challenges accumulative society and the primacy of economic growth is crucial here. Social provisioning for human needs and sharp reductions in inequality are essential parts of a shift to a low-energy transformation in the economy and the elimination of ecologically destructive forms and scales of output. In this way, the lives of most people can be improved both economically and ecologically. Accomplishing this, however, requires going against the logic of capitalism and the mythology of a self-regulating market system. Such a radical transformation can only be achieved by introducing significant levels of economic and social planning, through which, if carried to its fullest, the associated producers would work together in a rational way to regulate the labor and production process governing the social metabolism of humanity and nature as a whole.

Classical nineteenth-century socialism in the work of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels saw the need for the institution of collective planning in response to the ecological and social contradictions of capitalism, as well as its economic ones. Engels’s analysis insisted on the need for socialist planning to overcome the ecological rift between town and country, while Marx’s theory of metabolic rift, operating on a more general level, insisted on the need for sustainable human development.

Planning has been crucial to all economies, both capitalist and socialist, in times of war. Giant, monopolistic corporations have themselves instituted of their own accord what economist John Kenneth Galbraith called a “planning system,” though operating largely within, rather than between, multinational conglomerates. Nevertheless, the whole idea of economic planning is seen, in the received ideology, as antagonistic to the capitalist market and has been effectively banned from public discussion—declared unworkable and a form of despotism—following the triumph of capitalism in the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union.

This is now rapidly changing. As French economist Jacques Sapir recently noted, “plan and planning are back in fashion,” due to the internal and external contradictions of the capitalist market system. It is now clear that, without the return of planning and environmental-state regulation of the economy in a context of the degrowth/deaccumulation of capital, there is zero possibility of successfully addressing the present planetary emergency and ensuring the continuation of industrialized society and the survival of the human population.