Growth is sustainable and no transition – decoupling and dematerialization mitigate ecological impacts.

Second, pessimists, who recognize that the human population may actually shrink in the future, worry that free enterprise will continue to drive human consumption of resources to higher and higher levels.[6] Again, the data do not agree. In our response to Katherine Trebeck and Dirk Philipsen, we already mentioned McAfee’s 2019 book, More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources―and What Happens Next. Sophisticated economies, McAfee found, are currently producing ever more goods and services, while at the same time using ever fewer resources. That is a result of a sustained transition in advanced countries from industry to less resource-intensive economic activities that deal with services and information.

To that process we may also add dematerialization, which refers to declining consumption of material and energy per unit of gross domestic product (GDP). According to Jesse Ausubel from Rockefeller University and Paul E. Waggoner from the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, “If consumers dematerialize their intensity of use of goods and technicians produce the goods with a lower intensity of impact, people can grow in numbers and affluence without a proportionally greater environmental impact.”[7]

Why would people do that? Dematerialization replaces atoms with knowledge and makes economic sense to producers, since spending less on inputs can swell profit margins and make outputs cheaper and therefore more competitive.[8] It makes sense to consumers as well. Consider, for example, the growing use of smartphones. The product combines functions that previously required a myriad of separate devices, including a telephone, camera, radio, television set, alarm clock, newspaper, photo album, voice recorder, maps, compass, and more.

Replacement of many devices with one produces substantial efficiency gains. How substantial? In 2018, a team of 21 researchers led by Professor Arnulf Grubler from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria estimated the “savings from device convergence on smartphones … for materials use (device weight) and for its associated embodied energy use.” They found that smartphones can reduce material use by a factor of 300. They can reduce power use by a factor of 100 and standby energy use by a factor of 30.[9] That means that we use 99.67 percent less material, 99 percent less power, and 97 percent less standby energy.

To summarize, pessimists worry that future growth will mirror that seen during the Industrial Revolution: bigger and deeper mines, bigger and more polluting steel mills, and so on. But economic growth does not have to come from bigness. On the contrary, it can—and does—come from “smartness” with things like miniaturization, as in the computing industry, which saw the replacement of massive mainframe computers with smaller and much more efficient personal computers. To quote the economic historian Joel Mokyr,

The main logical issue here is that economic growth can be resource saving as much as resource-using, and that the very negative effects that congestion and pollution engender will set into motion searches for techniques that will abate them. Such responses may be more effective in democratic than in autocratic regimes because concerned public opinion can map better into public policy, but in the end the need for humans to breathe clean air is about as universal a value as one can find. Investment in soil reclamation, desalination, recycling, and renewable energy count just as much as economic growth as economic activities that use up resources. Whether or not wise policies will help steer technological progress in that direction, the basic notion that per capita income growth has to stop because the planet is finite is palpable nonsense.[10]

Third, pessimists assume that humanity will sit idly by and allow environmental problems to overwhelm our planet. That is highly improbable given our species’ track record of tackling past challenges. According to Nordhaus, it took six times as much land to feed a single person in the Neolithic period as it does now. If we were still harvesting einkorn with sticks and stones, we would certainly be above our carrying capacity. Instead, we’ve improved our agricultural efficiency so much that less than 2 percent of the U.S population actually has to farm at all.[11]

As Ausubel and his colleagues noted in their 2013 article “Peak Farmland and the Prospect for Land Sparing,” if the productivity of the world’s farmers increases to U.S. levels, humanity will be able to restore at least 146 million hectares of cropland land to nature. This is an area two and a half times that of France or the size of ten Iowas.[12] As Bailey observed, “the UN Food and Agriculture Organization reports that land devoted to agriculture (including pastures) peaked in 2000 at 4.915 billion hectares (12.15 billion acres) and had fallen to 4.828 billion hectares (11.93 billion acres) by 2017. This human withdrawal from the landscape is the likely prelude to a vast ecological restoration over the course of this [21st] century.”[13]

In fact, as we write, many of the problems identified by the pessimists are being addressed or are on the cusp of being addressed. The forest coverage is growing in rich countries, species are being protected at record levels throughout the world, freshwater reserves are being replenished through desalination in the Middle East, soil erosion is being reduced through precision agriculture in Israel, and CO2 emissions have fallen in nuclear-friendly France and Sweden. In the future, genetically modified crops could lead to a decline in the use of nitrogen and phosphorus, and wild fish stocks could bounce back through greater use of aquaculture, which is rapidly expanding in China. What’s needed to address current and future problems is freedom and brainpower.

Finally, Kallis is right to note that “de-growth” cannot be expected from poor countries “that need to industrialize and produce necessities.” Yet that is exactly where the greatest population growth and environmental damage occurs and will be occurring for decades to come. With their shrinking populations and environmentally friendly policies, rich countries have greatly reduced their impact on the planet, and further measures—unless they are exceedingly expensive in terms of money and reduced living standards—can only make a marginal difference to the overall environmental trajectory.

Kallis seems to be aware of that when he argues that “satisfactory levels of wellbeing can be achieved at a fraction of the highest national incomes.” Unlike Kallis, we are unconvinced that such measures (even if desirable, which we don’t believe they are) can be sustained within the democratic context. Opinion polls show that support for pro-green policies in rich countries falls off in proportion to the expected reduction in the standard of living. Gilet jaunes, anyone?