Only growth offers a viable path through decoupling and green technology.

How to fight climate change while building good human societies

Degrowth’s radicalism isn’t where I part ways with it: The future will almost certainly require us to eat much less meat, dramatically change land use, and potentially invest a significant chunk of society’s resources in mitigation indefinitely.

But I don’t tend to see such efforts as fundamentally futile. Degrowthers do — even when there have been significant successes.

Climate scientists have spent a long time warning the world about climate change, but they nonetheless tend to sound a more optimistic note than degrowthers like Hickel. “It’s undoubtedly a monumental challenge,” Mann told me. “We have the technology to solve the problem — renewable energy, smart grid technology, and existing energy storage. We just need the political will to act.”

Take solar panels. Two decades ago, cheap solar panels were just a dream. Now they’re everywhere and have become a crucial tool in the fight against climate change.

Not only that, solar panels have democratized electricity. Just one small-scale instance: In rural Kenya, you can see donkeys saddled with solar panels so that farmers can charge their phones. And there are many such examples that count as a win for both human progress and our fight against climate change.

It should go without saying that since rich governments got us into this climate mess, they should be at the forefront of getting us out of it. We need massive investments in carbon capture, green energy, plant-based meat, mitigation, and straight-up cash transfers to poor countries disproportionately affected by the climate crisis.

Many of the researchers I spoke to were open to the idea that in the long run, humanity would need to rethink many of our cherished assumptions about how economies work, in order to build a civilization that can flourish for thousands or millions of years. They didn’t reject degrowth as a philosophical contribution to the question of what future human civilizations should care about.

But such articulations of different philosophies of human flourishing should not be mistaken for public policy.

We don’t have very long, and we need to decarbonize quickly. We have technologies that have made a big difference already, and they must be made available on an unprecedented scale. We have more speculative solutions, technological and societal, and we should be prepared to try those, too. The scale of the problem is such that we need to act now — and we need to be clear-eyed about which ideas truly move the needle.