Science proves green growth is unsustainable and impossible

The fundamental criticism against green growth that emerges from the preceding discussion is that green growth has not yet, and also does not seem able in future to achieve absolute decoupling between GDP growth and material inputs (resource uses) and carbon emissions (growth impacts). It will therefore not able to prevent, or roll back, the overshooting of planetary systems. Relative decoupling is possible, can extend the availability of resources, and reduce the impact of emissions by a small magnitude, but even these efficiency gains may end up increase total energy use due to rebound (Jevons Paradox) effects. In addition to this devastating criticism, there are also other criticisms of green growth. These will be briefly introduced. One further criticism is that green growth is economically costly, and may make poverty reduction more difficult (Resnick et al., 2012; Dercon, 2014). This has raised the issue of climate justice as a ancillary to global green growth initiatives, reflecting concerns that developing countries who may suffer the worse impacts of climate change, have contributed the least to the current stocks of human emitted CO2 in the atmosphere. In exchange for subscribing to green growth, developing countries are therefore demanding substantial financial24 and know-how transfers from advanced economies - who have pledged US$ 100 billion in financial resources for developing countries to fight climate change, but has failed to live up to this commitment (Diffenbaugh and Burke, 2019; Ehresman and Okereke, 2015; Robinson and Shine, 2018; Timperley, 2021). Another criticism of green growth is that green growth places undue hope in the energy transition, i.e. the phasing out of fossil fuels, and replacing these with renewable energy sources. The first problem is that replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy is not feasible: all renewable energy technologies need fossil fuel energy to be manufactured and renewable energy systems need back-up from fossil fuel or nuclear energy (Hagens, 2020; Rees, 2021). And second problem is that promotion of renewable energy will stimulate the re-materialization of world production - due to the need for various mineral resources as inputs for renewable energy systems. Bleischwitz (2010) and Zeihan (2022) lists some of the critical mineral resources needed for renewable energies, which include copper, lithium, gallium, aluminium, tantalum, nickel, cobalt, silicon, chromium, graphite, zinc, manganese, molybdenum, gold, silver and platinum. In addition to the re-materialization of the world economy that this would stimulate, many of these minerals are found in countries with poor institutional development, meaning that the exploitation of these resources could lead to significant human rights abuses.25 Kara (2023) documents such human rights abuses, which he calls a human rights and environmental catastrophe, in cobalt26 mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo. A final and also devastating criticism of the hope that green economic growth is possible, and could moreover be sustained indefinitely, is provided by the laws of physics. This suggest that even if in a science fiction world full absolute decoupling from physical inputs could be obtained, then there would still be the waste heat, an outcome of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, that will eventually stop growth. For instance, If the world GDP continues to expand at its current rate of around 2% per annum, it will double every 35 years in size. By 2037 the world GDP would be US$500 trillion after which it “explodes” to $30.7 quadrillion in 2046 and to $1.9 quintillion a year later (Roodman, 2020). In just over 8,000 years it would be 3 × 1070 its current size, which would be a physical impossibility(Karnofsky, 2021c). Even if growth slowed and the world economy doubled in size only every 100 years, then after a million years (a very brief period on cosmic timescale) the economy would be 103010 times larger, which implies that if there are around 1080 atoms in the galaxy27, that “each atom would have to support an average of around 102950 people” (Hanson, 2009). One particular constraint which would limit growth long before these time scales is that even if the global economy would be able to increase energy efficiency and be able to decouple much growth from physical resources, it would still need significant amounts of energy to run its soft-and-hardware. The share of the economy that can be non-physical (and that can thus be de-materialized) is ultimately bounded. The economic growth implied in Figure 1 has been due to an annual average growth in energy consumption of around 2,3% per annum (Murphy, 2022b). If one assumes that a Cornucopian economy would eventually be able to generate economic growth which doubles the world economy every month as discussed in the section 2.2 (see also Hanson (2018)) but with such energy efficiency that energy use continues to grow at only 2,3% then energy use on the planet will grow from its current (2019) level of 18 Terawatt (TW) to 100 TW in 2100 and 1,000 TW in 2200. Murphy (2022b) calculates that at such a rate the economy would use up all the solar power that reaches the earth in 400 years and in 1700 years all of the energy of the sun. The use of so much energy would generate tremendous waste heat independent of any future smart green-energy technology. It would be so hot as to boil the surface of the Earth in about 400 years (Murphy, 2022b). The upshot is that even if the optimistic Cornucopian green economy scenarios could be realised, any acceleration in economic growth will ultimately be a transient event - if it ever happens. As Murphy (2022b, p.847) has warned, “we would be wise to plan for a post-growth world.”