Is “Degrowth” The New Green Growth?
“Green growth” programs have been all the rage among government planners across the developed Western countries. President Biden’s misnamed $369-billion Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), celebrated its first anniversary last week as the most aggressive Federal action on tackling the climate crisis in American history. It promises to “lift up American workers and create good-paying, union jobs across the country” while reducing not only carbon emissions but also energy costs by “incentivizing domestic production in clean energy technologies like solar, wind, carbon capture, and clean hydrogen.” What’s there not to like?
The EU’s $270 billion “Green Deal Industrial Plan” was launched in February with the goal of enhancing the competitiveness of Europe’s net-zero industry against the US’ green subsidies promised by Biden’s IRA. In October 2021, the UK adopted its landmark Net Zero Strategy setting out how it will secure £90 billion in investment by 2030 on its path to ending its contribution to climate change by 2050. Other key Western economies such as Australia and Canada have their own versions of green growth plans to “fight” climate change.
But the Church of Climate is a broad-tented one, and it has its own increasingly-radicalized sceptics straying from the ‘green growth’ party line. The sceptics are none other than from within the Church’s inner sanctum, a global group of 789 “climate policy researchers” surveyed in Nature Sustainability, a sister peer-reviewed scientific journal to the prestigious Nature journal. The survey, published on 7th August, found that “a growing body of research within the scientific community is challenging the idea that green growth is fundamentally possible or even desirable”. The survey’s authors conclude that “despite the strong promotion of green growth by policymakers and international institutions, there is mounting criticism concerning the compatibility of continued economic growth with sustainability goals.”
All Good Things Go Together in Green Growth
The intellectual origins of green growth can be traced back to the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, the same year that the Club of Rome published its Limits To Growth report on the Malthusian scare of a world running out of resources. The call for environmental sustainability is, and has been for the past five decades, the most shared secular value espoused in the Western developed world. Environmental sustainability is mom’s venerable apple pie, something no reasonable person could object to. There are no difficult trade-offs to be made since green growth ensures both economic growth and environmental sustainability. It would make people better-off materially and save the planet from the “climate emergency”.
Private companies signal their commitment to it in advertisements, annual reports, management speeches and glossy ESG brochures. Thinktanks and “development experts” publish endlessly on the sustainability concept. Environmental NGOs and activist shareholders demand that sustainability goals drive business investments and government policy. International agencies such as the UN’s Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Energy Agency (IEA) are all for green growth.
In May 2021, the IEA issued an astonishing report calling for an immediate halt to all investments in oil, gas and coal. It claimed that the report was “the world’s first comprehensive study of how to transition to a net zero energy system by 2050 while ensuring stable and affordable energy supplies, providing universal energy access and enabling robust economic growth”. Unsurprisingly, the report was met with derision by industry practitioners such as the Saudi oil minister who called the report a sequel to “La La Land.” Interestingly, it is now the anti-growth sceptics from within the climate industrial complex that question the central fiction of the green growth narrative: that governments can drastically reduce fossil fuel use while supporting continued economic growth.
‘Degrowth’ Is Not New But Now It’s Totalitarian
In the Nature Sustainability survey, a large share (28%) of the climate experts rejects green growth in favor of “degrowth”. What is degrowth? It is “a deliberate and equitable reduction in material consumption and economic activity in high-income countries to achieve more sustainable and socially just societies.” The “moderate” majority (45%) argue for “agrowth”, a sort of steady state of no-growth in GDP, jobs or wages while the policy focus remains on environmental sustainability above all else. According to the survey, on average around the world, a minority – 27% of climate researchers — support green growth.
That almost three quarters of the climate priesthood surveyed in the Nature Sustainability article support either anti-growth or no-growth strategies for “environmental sustainability” shows how radical the climate policy research community has become. But the call to return to a simpler lifestyle of an earlier uncorrupted age is nothing new. St. Francis of Assisi founded the 12th century order of material poverty as the path to spiritual salvation. In the mid-18th century, Rousseau’s imagined nobel savage best expressed European nostalgia for a simple, pure, idyllic state of nature, posed against rising fossil fuels-based industrialism, consumerism and sophistications of modern urban society.
One may trace the idea of living in “harmony” with nature even further back. India, the Land of the Buddha, was surely among the first civilizations to give rise to a moral philosophy that took “sustainability” seriously. In “Buddhist economics”, a term coined by E. F. Schumacher in 1955, the classical economic problem is stood on its head: instead of insatiable human appetites and finite natural resources (which so worried Malthus), Buddhist economics saw an ethical civilization that lived “simply” and well within the bounties of mother nature.
While the sentiments of the ‘agrowthers’ and ‘degrowthers’ in the climate movement are not new, the means of achieving environmental sustainability differ radically. It is not a program of voluntary reduction of standards of living among ordinary people along the lines of a St Francis, a Rousseau, or the Buddha that the climate research community is seeking. Nor is it a concerted effort on the part of paternalistic governments to ‘nudge’ human behaviour and impose climate mandates to bring about both economic growth and environmental sustainability. Rather, this sect in the Church of Climate aims is to achieve totalitarian control over the means of production and force the quick end of cheap energy by precluding economic growth as a legitimate objective of government policy.
Just Say Yes To The Climate Technocrat
One may dismiss the anti-growth crowd (both the ‘degrowth’ and ‘agrowth’ types) as hopeless radicals in search of a lost cause (“we want a permanent recession”!). But climate policies have already done a remarkably effective job of lowering standards of living via de-industrialization and raising energy prices across the Western world (here and here). To save the planet, a vow of voluntary poverty is not the point. You need only acquiesce in the elevation of climate policy technocrats to positions of ever greater coercive political and economic power over your “carbon footprint”. Considering the fate of the planet (the UN has proclaimed the era of global boiling) and all that, it’s not much to ask, is it?
But the true hope of salvation, at least for those 7 billion people living outside of the countries of the developed West and its allies, lies in one other finding of the Nature Sustainability article: a clear divide among researchers between rich and poorer countries. In the European Union, just 13.8 percent of climate researchers are pro-green growth. The rest (86.2%) want to halt economic growth in its tracks or even contract it. In North America, 73% of those surveyed were against economic growth. In contrast, the article finds “more than half of the researchers from non-OECD countries expressed views supporting a green growth position. Researchers from Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—collectively known as the BRICS—were slightly more in favour of green growth and against degrowth than those from other non-OECD countries.”
Perhaps the climate researchers in the BRICS countries realize that human flourishing requires fossil fuels, and that “green growth” is the politically correct way of putting across the need to ensure their populations’ continued access to cheap energy. The material aspirations of people who are at the breadline have little use for St. Francis’ vow of poverty. They would probably prefer the blessings from Lord Ganesh, the Indian elephant-headed god of prosperity. What they don’t need is an international climate technocracy taking away their chances for a better life.
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