Only growth solves extinction via cosmic risks, disease, war, and environmental collapse where we’re already past tipping points

Unpacking this argument, it is perhaps useful to first recognize that, stable as the Holocene may have seemed from a human perspective, life was always vulnerable to a number of cosmic risks, such as bolide collisions, risks that only advanced technologies can mitigate. Similarly, the Black Death of the 14th century should serve as a powerful reminder of the extreme vulnerability of pre-industrial societies at a microbiological level. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to think of the Holocene as providing a relatively stable baseline against which the ecological effects of technological interventions could hypothetically be evaluated. With most human activities being distinctively local, nature would for the most part “bounce back” (even if the deforestation of the Mediterranean basin during the Roman period is an example of that not always being the case) while larger geophysical processes, such as the carbon cycle, remained entirely beyond human intentional control. Even if there has been some debate about what influence human activities had on the preindustrial climate (Ruddiman 2007), anthropogenic forcing was in any case both marginal and gradual.

All this changed with the onset of the Great Acceleration by which humans came to overwhelm the great forces of nature, causing untold damage to fragile ecosystems and habitats everywhere, forever altering the trajectory of life on the planet (Steffen et al. 2011b). In a grander perspective, humanity may one day become an interplanetary species and thus instrumental in safeguarding the long-term existence of biological life, but for the moment, its impact is ethically dubious at best as the glaciers melt, the oceans fill up with plastics, and vast number of species are driven to extinction.

Faced with these grim realities, it is of course not surprising that the first impulse is to seek to restore some kind primordial harmony and restrain human activities. Yet, it is important to acknowledge that, even if their aggregate impact may have been within the pattern of Holocene variability, pre-modern Western agricultural societies were hardly “sustainable” in any meaningful sense. Experiencing permanent scarcity, violent conflict was endemic (Gat 2013), and as much as some contemporary academics like to attribute all evils to “capitalism” (Malm 2016), pre-capitalist societies exhibited no shortage of religious intolerance and other forms of social domination. It is thus not surprising that some have argued the need to reverse the civilizational arc further yet and return to a preliterate hunter-gather existence (Zerzan 2008) even if this, obviously, has very little to do with existing political realities and social formations.

Under Holocene conditions, the short-term human tragedy may have been the same, but it did not undermine the long-term ability of the planet to support life. In a world of eight billion people, already accumulated emissions in the atmosphere have committed the planet to significant warming under the coming centuries, with an increasing probability that committed warming already exceeds the 1.5-degree target of the Paris Agreement even if all fossil-fuel emissions were to stop today (Mauritsen and Pincus 2017). This means that sustained negative emissions, presumably in combination with SRM, will most likely be needed just to stabilize global temperatures, not to mentioning countering the flow of future emissions. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), assuming that all the pledges submitted under the Paris Agreement are fulfilled, limiting warming to 1.5 degrees will still require negative emissions in the range of 100—1000 gigatons of CO2 (Hilaire et al. 2019, p. 190). The removal of carbon dioxide at gigaton scales from the atmosphere will presumably require the existence of an advanced industrial society since low-tech options, such as afforestation, will be of limited use (Gundersen et al. 2021; Seddon et al. 2020), especially in a future of competing land-uses.

It is against this backdrop of worsening climate harms that the limits of “precaution”, at least as conventionally understood, become apparent. While degrowth advocates tend to insist that behavioral change, even explicitly betting on a “social miracle” (Kallis 2019, p. 195), is always preferable to any technological risk-taking (Heikkurinen 2018), that overlooks both the scope of the sustainability challenge and the lack of public consent to any sufficiently radical political project (Buch-Hansen 2018). While there may be growing willingness to pay for, say, an electric vehicle (Hulshof and Mulder 2020), giving up private automobile use altogether is obviously a different animal, to say nothing about a more fundamental rematerialization of the economy (Hausknost 2020). Again, the problem is one in which change either (a) remains marginal yet ecologically insufficient or (b) becomes sufficiently radical yet provokes a strong political counterreaction. A similar dynamic can be expected to play out at the international level where countries that remain committed to growth would quickly gain a military advantage. To make matters worse, there is also a temporal element to this dynamic since any regime of frugality and localism would have to be policed indefinitely in order to prevent new unsustainable patterns of development from re-emerging later on.

All this begs the obvious question, if the political and economic enforcement of the planetary boundaries are fraught with such political and social difficulties, would it not be better to instead try to transcend them through technological innovation? Surprisingly, any high-energy future would most likely be subject to many of the same motivational and psychological constraints that hinder a low-energy future. While history shows that existing nuclear technologies could in theory displace all fossil fuels and meet the most stringent climate targets (Qvist and Brook 2015), it seems extremely unlikely, to put it mildly, that thousands of new reactors will be built over the course of the coming decades in response to climate change. Outside the world of abstract computer modelling, real world psychological and cultural inertia tends to ensure that political decision-making, at least for the most part, gravitates to what is considered “reasonable” and “common sense”—such as medium emissions electricity grids in which wind and solar are backed by biomass and gas—rather than what any utilitarian optimization scenario may suggest. Even if the global benefits of climate stabilization would be immense, the standards by which local nuclear risks are assessed, as clearly illustrated by the Fukushima accident which led to a worldwide retreat from nuclear energy despite only causing one confirmed death (which, though obviously regrettable, has to be put in relation to the hundred and thousands of people dying every year from the use of fossil fuels), underscores the uneven distribution of perceived local risks versus global benefits and the associated problem of socio-political learning across spatial scales.

Almost two decades ago, Ingolfur Blühdorn identified “simulative eco-politics” as a key strategy by which liberal democracies reconcile an ever-heightened rhetoric of environmental crisis with their simultaneous defense of the core principles of consumer capitalism (Blühdorn 2007). Since then, declarations that we only have “ten years to save the planet” have proliferated, and so have seemingly bold investments in renewable energy, most recently in the form of US President Joseph Biden’s USD 2.25 trillion climate and infrastructure plan. Still, without a meaningful commitment to either radical innovation or effective degrowth, it is difficult to see how the deployment of yet more wind turbines or the building of new highways will in any way be qualitatively different from what Blühdorn pertinently described as sustaining “what is known to be unsustainable” (Blühdorn 2007, p. 253).

However, all is not lost in lieu of more authentic forms of eco-politics. Independent of political interventions, accelerating technological change, in particular with regard to computing and intelligent machine labor, may one day make large-scale precision manipulation of the physical world possible in ways that may solve many problems that today seem intractable (Dorr 2016). Similarly, breakthroughs in synthetic biology may hold the key to environmentally benign biofuels and carbon utilization technologies. Yet, all such progress remains hypothetical and uncertain for now. Given what is at stake, there is an obvious danger in submitting to naïve technological optimism. What is less commonly recognized is that naïve optimism with regard to the prospects of behavioral change may be equally dangerous. While late-capitalist affluence has enabled many postmaterial identities and behaviors, such as bicycling, hobby farming, and other forms of emancipatory self-expression, a collapsing economy could quickly lead to a reversal back to survivalist values, traditional hierarchical forms of domination, and violence (Quilley 2011, p. 77).

As such, it is far from obvious what actions would actually take the world as a whole closer to long-term sustainability. If sustainability could be achieved by a relatively modest reduction in consumption rates or behavioral changes, such as a ban on all leisure flights, then there would be a strong moral case for embracing degrowth. Yet, recognizing how farreaching measures in terms of population control and consumption restrictions that would be needed, the case quickly becomes more ambiguous. While traditional environmentalism may suggest that retreating from the global economy and adopting a low-tech lifestyle would increase resilience (Alexander and Yacoumis 2018), it may do very much the opposite by further fragmenting global efforts and slowing the pace of technological innovation. Without an orderly and functioning world trade system, local resources scarcities would be exacerbated, as seen most recently with the different disruptions to vaccine supply chains. In essence, given the lack of a stable Holocene baseline to revert to, it becomes more difficult to distinguish proactionary “risk-taking” from “precaution”, especially as many ecosystems have already been damaged beyond natural recovery. In this context, it is noteworthy that many of the technologies that can be expected to be most crucial for managing a period of prolonged overshoot (such as next-generation nuclear, engineering biology, large-scale carbon capture and SRM) are also ones that traditional environmentalism is most strongly opposed to.

3. Finding Indicators

From the vantage point of the far-future, at least the kind depicted in the fictional universe of Star Trek, human evolution is a fairly straightforward affair along an Enlightenment trajectory by which ever greater instrumental capacity is matched by similar leaps in psychological maturity and expanding circles of moral concern. With the risk of sounding Panglossian, one may argue that the waning of interstate war in general and the fact that there has not been any major nuclear exchange in particular, does vindicate such an optimistic reading of history. While there will always be ups and downs, as long as the most disastrous outcomes are avoided, there will still be room for learning and gradual political accommodation.

Taking such a longer view, it would nevertheless be strange if development was simply linear, that former oppressors would just accept moral responsibility or that calls for gender or racial justice would not lead to self-reinforcing cycles of conservative backlash and increasingly polarizing claims. Still, over the last couple of centuries, there is little doubt that human civilization has advanced significantly, both technologically and ethically (Pinker 2011), at least from a liberal and secular perspective. However, unless one subscribes to teleology, there is nothing inexorable with this development and, it may be that the ecological, social, and political obstacles are simply too great to ever allow for the creation of a Wellsian borderless world (Pedersen 2015) that would allow everyone to live a life free from material want and political domination. On the other hand, much environmental discourse tends to rush ahead in the opposite direction and treat the climate crisis as ultimate evidence of humanity’s fallen nature when the counter-factual case, that it would be possible for a technological civilization to emerge without at some point endangering its biophysical foundations, would presumably be much less plausible. From an astrobiological perspective, it is easy to imagine how the atmospheric chemistry of a different planet would be more volatile and thus more vulnerable to the effects of industrial processes (Haqq-Misra and Baum 2009), leaving a shorter time window for mitigation. Nick Bostrom has explored this possibility of greater climate sensitivity further in his “vulnerable world hypothesis” (Bostrom 2019) and it begs to reason that mitigation efforts would be more focused in such a world. However, since climate response times are longer and sensitivity less pronounced, climate mitigation policies have become mired in culture and media politics (Newman et al. 2018) but also a statist logic (Karlsson 2018) by which it has become more important for states to focus on their own marginal emission reductions in the present rather than asking what technologies would be needed to stabilize the climate in a future where all people can live a modern life.

Combined, it is not surprising that the larger picture gets blurred. Obviously, not everyone shares the cosmopolitan vision of a world of equal opportunity and, as such, chronic poverty abroad has emerged as somewhat of a silent “solution” to climate change. Even the most ambitious plans of renewable energy expansion (Jacobson et al. 2017), assume that energy access remains deeply unequal in the future and, correspondingly, there has been little serious discussion about the energy needs of a fully developed world (Arto et al. 2016). Instead, rich countries, which already have stable electricity grids thanks to a baseload supply of fossil fuels, have been able to deploy weather-dependent renewable energy sources at marginal costs below those of new fossil generation, creating a seemingly credible media narrative that renewable energy has become “cheaper than coal” while ignoring the full system costs of any hypothetical 100% renewable energy system (Clack et al. 2017) or if the Energy Return on Investment (EROI) of such a system would even be sufficient to support an advanced society in the first place (Capellán-Pérez et al. 2019). The latter point has become further obscured by the fact that rich countries do not have to take full responsibility for all embodied energy as they can import solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries from other countries. Taking a broader look, it is unlikely that renewable energy can ever meet present global energy use (Dupont et al. 2018; Moriarty and Honnery 2016), let alone allow for the 5–10 times higher energy levels that would be needed to make, say, Nordic energy consumption patterns universal. Despite the recent wave of net-zero emissions pledges, it is worth remembering that the share of fossil fuels in global primary energy consumption has remained fairly stable above 80% for many decades.

It is in this context that the search for meaningful indicators for sustainability must be understood. With regard to climate change, large-scale carbon capture technologies now appear essential for climate stabilization and restoration (Dorr 2016), especially since renewable energy sources are unlikely to have a sufficiently impact on global emissions trajectories to avert dangerous warming even if their widespread political popularity makes any move toward more broad-ranging and ambitious policies unlikely. Yet, large-scale carbon capture does not currently enjoy widespread political support (Moe and Røttereng 2018), in part perhaps because its deployment has been seen as a distraction aimed at prolonging the use of fossil fuels. The lack of political commitment to carbon capture technologies means that climate risks will continue to increase, most likely until the use of SRM, despite its profound governance challenges (Möller 2020), will become necessary if a full-blown climate disaster is to be avoided.