The barrier to climate progress is political, not material---the transition would be so politically disastrous that it’d irreversibly set back political progress against climate change. Speed is key, so only existing dematerialization and renewables can solve in time.

But now let me talk about degrowth more in the terms of it is a direct political project, which is as an answer to climate change. I would cut this into a few pieces. Is degrowth necessary for addressing climate change? Is it the fastest way to address climate change? And is it desirable? It has to be at least one of those things to be the strategy you’d want to take.

And I don’t think it is. Let’s start with necessary. Many countries in Europe, even the United States, are growing while reducing their carbon footprint. Now, you could say they’re not doing so fast enough depending on the country. But they could all do so much faster if there was enough political will to deploy more renewable technology, to tax carbon, to do a bunch of things that we have not been able to pass. So it is clearly true that we can decouple growth and energy usage.

Hickel, to be fair, will say that that may be true. But given the speed at which we need to act, we can’t just be deploying renewable energy technology. It would also help the situation if we stopped using as much through material consumption. That is, I think, conceptually true and politically false.

I mean, let’s just state that speed is, first and foremost, a political problem. There is a delta between where we are right now in terms of what we are doing on climate change and where we could be. That delta is big, and that delta gets bigger every year because it gets harder every year. And the time we have to act before we start getting some of the really truly catastrophic feedback loops in play is shortening. So you’re now talking here about the speed at which you can move politics.

So for something to be faster, it doesn’t just need to be faster if you implemented it. It needs to be something you can implement such it accelerates the politics of radical climate action. And that’s where I think degrowth completely falls apart. And I have tried to look for the answer people give on this, and I’ve never found one that is convincing.

So again, I’ll quote Hickel on this: “Degrowth has a discriminating approach to reducing economic activity. It seeks to scale down ecologically destructive and socially less necessary production, i.e., the production of S.U.V.s, arms, beef, private transportation, advertising and planned obsolescence” — by which he means there, the fact that expiration dates are built into a lot of our electronics — “while expanding socially important sectors like health care, education, care and conviviality.”

And I’d urge people to think about that for a minute. I mean, you can listen to that and you will assume correctly that I am sympathetic to the idea that a lot of those goods are not great. I’m a vegan. I don’t eat beef. I would like nobody else to eat beef.

I think that if the political demand of the climate movement becomes you don’t get to eat beef, you will set climate politics back so far, so fast, it would be disastrous. Same thing with S.U.V.s. I don’t like S.U.V.s. I don’t drive one. But if you are telling people in rich countries that the climate movement is for them not having the cars they want to have, you are just going to lose. You are going to lose fast.

We watched this happen for years before Elon Musk and some others began inventing cars that were both electrified and were actually cool cars. You weren’t going to get everybody in a Prius. You might, over time, get them into the post-Tesla generations of electronic vehicles.

This is where the politics of it for me fall apart. I’d at least like to see some empirical evidence for the claim that degrowthers are right, and that their appeal will speed the politics of doing hard things on climate change. Because I think it will do the opposite. And I don’t see politicians winning in the countries they would need to win on anything like this platform. Quite the contrary.

I watched the most effective attack against Joe Biden’s climate policies. It dominated the news for a day or two. It was Fox News just making up — just completely making up — a false claim that Biden was going to limit or restrict red meat.

ANNIE GALVIN: Right. [LAUGHS]

EZRA KLEIN: So my worry with degrowth is that it is trying to take the politics out of politics. It is attacking the flaws of the current strategy as not moving fast enough when the impediments are political, but then not accepting the impediments to its own political path forward.

I will say, because I think it’ll be weird to people if I don’t mention this, that there is the big problem, of course, that the rising generation of emissions is coming from China, from India. I think it’s something like ⅔ of emissions are now from middle income countries. That is only going up.

Hickel and other degrowthers will say that, yes, the point of this is that the rich countries, which have already used more than their fair share of the carbon budget, should cut their carbon usage so poor countries can grow. I cannot imagine how you are going to enforce this as a political and economic planning regime. How you will get rich countries to agree to do less so poor countries can have more. I mean, look at what has happened with vaccine hoarding.

I don’t want to say that this isn’t a good moral weight on the conversation or, in the long term, a good push for people to think about different ways of having growth, different ways of human flourishing. But the entirety — as the degrowth people will agree — the entire question of the climate change conversation is speed. And I just don’t see the argument for degrowth as being anything but an extraordinarily slower way of approaching the politics, probably counterproductive compared to what we’re doing, which is I think you can make tremendous strides on climate change by deploying renewable energy technologies and giving people the opportunity to have a more materially fulfilling life atop those technologies.

And by the way, when that happens in rich countries, as we have seen, it ends up subsidizing these renewable energy technological advances for poorer countries. So it is a fact that Germany and other countries did so much to subsidize solar for themselves, it has also made it possible for countries like China and India to have such a rapid advance in solar technology that it’s affordable for them to do a lot of their growth on that platform.

So I also think there are cross-subsidies in rich countries trying to maintain growth renewable energy deployment that end up helping poor countries change what they’re doing in a useful way, too. So that’s my take on degrowth. But I understand its appeal. I just don’t understand its politics.