Policies like the GND create political capital.

Furthermore, they argue that the wealth that Western nations currently have could be redistributed globally through global democratic institutions and thus economic growth is not necessary to lift developing countries out of poverty. I definitely agree that there is a massive global inequality of wealth and would be in favor of these democratic redistribution organizations. However, I’m not sure where the political capital for them would come from, especially because it would imply that Western citizens would be much poorer as a consequence and thus likely lobby against them. If there is a theory of change for these institutions, I might be persuaded, but it has not been provided yet. I think massive investments into green energy are more likely to find political capital because they great growth, jobs and wealth rather than redistribute it. Ultimately though, I’m not convinced of the fundamental premise of the strong degrowth movement, namely that economic growth is always linked to climate change and green growth is impossible. The only argument that the website makes is that this has historically been the case. However, they do not engage with the countries in which absolute decoupling has already started, with a transition to service economies or basically any argument for the possibility of green growth. If someone can explain to me why this link necessarily exists or can’t be untethered fast enough, I might be persuaded. Until then, I find the arguments and data for the possibility of green growth more persuasive. Another thing that I do not yet understand is how the strong degrowth movement plans to actually create degrowth. Ultimately, to create localized self-sufficient economies you have to stop or massively reduce global trade, e.g. through large tariffs. This will, with high probability, impact people in growing export-oriented economies such as South East Asia the hardest and keep them in poverty. Since I find it implausible that we can redistribute existing wealth at the scale that would be necessary, reducing economic growth through tariffs probably just makes poor people even poorer. Soft degrowth The second approach I will call soft degrowth. I’m not sure if there is one particular resource that provides a concise summary but the book Prosperity without Growth or The Doughnut economic model might be good starting points. An economy can be optimized for a lot of different metrics. While economic growth is one of them, there are many others such as social cohesion, climate change, pollution, etc. In simplified terms, soft degrowth argues that we currently overoptimize for economic growth while neglecting all the other components. Thus, soft degrowth proposes a reweighing of the different metrics which would deprioritize economic growth. Importantly, they don’t argue that economic growth is bad, just that it’s not imperative and should not be forced at all costs. As a consequence, soft degrowth would argue that the ways in which we currently allow companies to extract resources or pollute the environment for the sake of creating economic growth is wrong and misguided and the latter should thus get more weight in political decision-making. Therefore, it might be possible that the economy could (temporarily) shrink while we sort out the sustainability problems - thus the name soft degrowth. Examples of policy proposals include: a) Companies being held responsible for human rights violations down their production chain. This would weigh another metric, human rights, higher than economic growth and might implicitly lead to a reduction of global GDP. b) Laws that force companies to produce a common good balance sheet, where they have to make public how much they emit and provide certain social information about e.g. their employees. Companies that score high for common good would be subsidized and low scorers would be punished. c) An economy that is built on True Cost Accounting where all external costs are internalized. This is similar to CO2 taxes but for many more aspects such as resource use, land use and potentially social aspects such as future health costs of exploited workers. I think all of these sound like pretty good ideas. But it is hard to accurately approximate these costs and then implement a system that is hard to game for individual companies. In any case, economic growth would probably at least temporarily drop as a consequence since many current products are built on unsustainable practices. If I were to build such a system, I would slowly start to internalize more and more externalizable costs and hope that market forces react to the change and create economic growth while becoming more sustainable in the meantime. I think one could come to similar conclusions with a longterm perspective on economic growth, e.g. to ensure growth in the future, we can’t exploit the planet for fast gains in the present. But overall, I’m sympathetic to many ideas of soft degrowth. The most important distinction between strong and soft degrowth - and why I prefer the latter - is because it acknowledges that economic growth has a lot of benefits and is not in itself bad. Communism Capitalism and Communism are distinct concepts from economic growth, e.g. there can be economic growth within a Communist system. Thus, I personally think arguments along the lines of “Communism would be a solution to climate change because it doesn’t require economic growth” are based on a misunderstanding of the terms. However, the argument is made so often in public discourse, that I feel like I should address it anyway. When people suggest communism as an alternative to solve climate change they can mean very different things. Firstly, they could mean a social democratic system like Norway and mislabel that as communism. Norway is a country with a better social system and cleaner energy mix than most other countries in the world. However, its economic system is very clearly capitalist. The market decides what supply and demand is for the vast majority of goods and not a government planner. So when people mean “the world should be more like Norway”, I’m happy to support them but they then are not embracing communism as a system. Secondly, communism is sometimes used to describe a certain culture or vibe which can include sharing culture, the use of second-hand goods, or demand for fair-trade products. While I’m happy for these people and share this vibe/desire to some extent, it is just not clear why communism would improve it in any way. Within a capitalist system, your desire is translated into demand and someone will provide fair-trade products, found a sharing cycle, or program an online platform for second-hand goods and thereby also contribute to GDP. In a communist society, you have to hope that the people in power actually consider this a problem and target it in their next 5-year planning cycle. I’m not sure why this is more likely to happen than when you create the demand yourself. Lastly, people might argue that the actual economic system of centrally planned economies often found under communist regimes might be a better fit to solve climate change than a mostly free market under capitalism. While I understand the initial intuition of “If we care more about each other, we might actually do something against the climate together”, I think a lot more arguments speak against communism as a solution. First of all, the biggest communist system that we have had so far, the USSR, was much worse for the climate than its capitalist competitor and replacement. The CO2 emissions of Russia decreased 2.5-fold after the collapse of the soviet union while GDP was basically not hit at all. Of course, you could argue that the USSR was just a particularly bad implementation of communism and that a better implementation might solve climate change nonetheless. However, I think communism is systematically less probable to solve climate change than capitalism. In communism, a company has to meet a certain production target. There is little or no reason to improve the efficiency of production as long as the target can be met. Thus it doesn’t matter whether you use coal or wind to power your grid, as long as the energy target is met. If the state gave CO2 targets to combat climate change, there would be no reason to undercut it as you don’t reap the profits. In capitalism, on the other hand, there is always competition for lower prices and thus an incentive to increase the efficiency of production. This means that people are interested in decreasing the energy cost of action because it will improve their profit margins. This, of course, is not a defense of the status quo. Currently, companies have very little incentive to care about climate change because the cost is externalized to future generations. Thus, the key challenge for climate change within a capitalist system is to price these future costs in and align the incentives of companies with those of the broader population. Policy implications After looking at the research and data, I come to the following implications for policymakers. Massive investments into green energy are necessary: As shown in the first part of this post, the rate of decoupling is very proportional to the amount of green energy within a country. When green energy transition is too slow, countries should try to replace coal with gas and nuclear energy since coal is a much worse emitter. Since the clock is ticking, these investments should be massive and much larger than all countries are currently planning. They should be at least as ambitious as the green new deal proposed by AOC, i.e. in the hundreds of billions of dollars. They are probably not only net positive for the environment but also for the economy. They create new jobs in the renewable energy sector and large infrastructure investments such as public transit unlock economic potential by freeing poor people from the necessity to own a car. CO2 taxes and emission trading: The largest reason why the current economy doesn’t reduce CO2 emissions on its own is that the harms are not priced in. The costs are externalized and it is thus rational to emit CO2 whenever it is profit-maximizing.