Green Growth Fails

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.