Degrowth fails and means condemning developing countries to economic devastation, hunger, and poverty.

The tension at the heart of degrowth: Can we fix global poverty without economic growth?

One big problem with degrowth is this simple fact: In the coming decades, most carbon emissions won’t be coming from rich countries like the US — they’ll be happening in newly middle-income countries, like India, China, or Indonesia. Already, developing nations account for 63 percent of emissions, and they’re expected to account for even more as they develop further and as the rich world decarbonizes.

Even if emissions in rich countries go to zero very soon, climate change is set to worsen as poorer countries increase their own emissions.

That will, of course, have deeply negative climate impacts. But the alternative is a nonstarter — should the world really prioritize curbing emissions and economic growth if it meant suppressing the growth of those countries?

Degrowthers see no dilemma here. What Hickel envisions is global movement in two directions: Poor countries could develop up to a certain level of prosperity and then stop; rich countries could develop down to that level and then stop. Thus, climate catastrophe could be averted, all while making the world’s poor more prosperous.

“Rich countries urgently need to reduce their excess energy and resource use to sustainable levels so our sisters and brothers in the global South can live well too,” Hickel put it. “We live on an abundant planet and we can all flourish on it together, but to do so we have to share it more fairly, and build economies that are designed around meeting human needs rather than around perpetual growth.”

From a climate change perspective, though, there’s a problem. First, it means that degrowth would do nothing about the bulk of emissions, which are occurring in developing countries.

Second, the global economy is more interconnected than Hickel implies. When Covid-19 hit, poor countries were devastated not just by the virus but by the aftershocks of virus-induced slowdowns in consumption in rich countries.

There’s some genuine appeal to the idea of an end to “consumerism,” but the pandemic offered a taste of how a sudden drop in rich-world consumption would actually affect the developing world. Covid-19 dramatically curtailed Western imports and tourism for a time. The consequences in poor countries were devastating. Hunger rose, and child mortality followed.

Covid-19, of course, wreaked direct economic havoc at the same time, with lockdowns having an especially negative impact on some poor countries; the effects of the pandemic and international demand shock were combined, and in some cases they’re hard to separate. But the United Nations, the World Bank, and expert analyses point to the decline in global consumption as a significant part of the picture.