We must consider degrowth
We must consider degrowth
The assumption of perpetual growth is subtle, pervasive, and ultimately hard to support.
It continues to seem clear to me that the industrialized world probably doesn't understand the situation that it is actually in. Most people I know are aware that we are in a global climate crisis. Some aren't. Outside my circles of relationship, across the United States, I know the gaps are even wider. No industrialized country but the U.S. has a major political force so influentially and completely in denial about the climate crisis.
Of the people I know who are aware of the seriousness of the situation, some appear to have the view that the industrialized world needs to take radical action to reduce emissions. Some don't. Some appear to be aware that so far, the industrialized world is failing to meet its reduction targets (Last month U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned that the we stand to increase global emissions 14% by 2030, rather than reducing them by 45%, which, according to a fairly broad consensus, is a sensible goal.) Some are not apparently aware.
More importantly, some appear to have some sense that we need to be making the journey into a more sustainable way of living personally, before institutional leadership helps us get there. And some don't feel this way.
And perhaps most importantly, some are making a concerted effort to make this journey, starting now.
And some -- most, I'd say -- aren't.
To me, a big part of the underlying confusion involves whether or not we can realistically imagine an end to the 21st century in which economic growth continues as it did through the 20th century and thus far into the 21st. All major institutional response to climate change is based in the assumption that this will be possible, and it seems to be the underlying assumption of most everyday people as well. Apart from a few who are really living a primarily "off-grid" lifestyle, I know very few people that are plugged into more conventional forms of earning a livelihood or making a home who are making a concerted effort to determine whether their lifestyle is in integrity with planetary limits, or to really do anything major about it if they come to the inevitable conclusion that something has to change.
At this point, I wouldn't intend to blame or shame anyone who is in this position. For one thing, I'm almost certainly not living within my personal allowance with regard to planetary limits, either, and I have made some effort in that direction. It's hard to do, and the progress I've made has been made easier by the fact that my life is pretty simple -- I'm not married, I don't have kids, I am currently in a job that affords personal freedom over any great amount of material security. In terms of downsizing, I have distinct advantages over others. And it's still hard.
But it does seem important to consider how realistic anyone is being in the situation that we're in, though. Because no matter how innocent it is is or is not, I think that there's reason to suppose, even now, that the general tendency is for people to not only be unrealistic but to be catastrophically unrealistic.
There are two thoughts have stuck out to me in this regard in particular recently. One involves a study that was cited in an article I read this week. The study observed that very few economies have been able to "decouple" their GDP growth from carbon emissions. (In other words, to achieve a situation where the increase in GDP is no longer matched step-for-step with an increase in greenhouse gas emissions.) A survey of 116 countries found that only 14 had consistently been able to increase their GDP growth without increasing greenhouse gas emissions, and that some countries that had previously achieved decoupling had found that they had to "recouple" afterward. And many of the successful counties had pretty simple economies to begin with.
You might not find this surprising. The U.S. just passed its first major climate legislation last week. It may feel like we're just getting started. But I think a few things are worth noticing there. One, we are not just getting started. Or we shouldn't be. The first IPCC climate report, the one that was really the "shot heard around the world," was published in 2018 -- that's four years ago. And one of the identified gateways in the timeline of reform was 2030 -- twelve years from the first report, and eight years from now. Fully one third of the time has elapsed before that first gateway, and the world is still on track to increase emissions, not reduce them.
It's also worth noticing that reductions not only have to contend with current levels of output, but growing levels of demand. More and more people want to live more and more materially comfortable lifestyles, and that means more demand for carbon-producing energy -- and concrete, and steel, etc. So we can be making progress, even major progress, in carbon reductions and still have those major reductions be eclipsed by increasing demand. In fact, this is what's currently happening.
Apart from the troubling report about the possibility of greenhouse gas reductions, we have to be thinking about the possibility of "degrowth" altogether. Because the greenhouse gas challenge is in fact nested in a larger challenge, and it seems to me that the focus on emissions tends to eclipse this fact.
The climate crisis, and in particular the narrative about the climate crisis which focuses on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, is really most accurately seen as a symptom of a larger environmental crisis that involves all aspects of industrial-level human consumption. The Stockholm Resilience Centre is one of the organizations that has done a better job of articulating this, I feel. They are the ones who identified the nine planetary boundaries that appear to be necessary for sustaining the "Holocene equilibrium" (the unusually mild ten-thousand year climatic moment we are living in, the gentle stability of which appears to be essential in order for humans to be able to farm), and who have noted that we have surpassed four of these boundaries and are on track to surpass the other five.
Another group that is doing a fair job of articulating this is the Global Footprint Network, which summarizes industrialized consumption in terms of land use. (They're the ones that note that we'd need five Earths if everybody lived like the average American.)
The U.S. comprises 25% of the global economy, and Americans consume something like 20% of global resources -- while constituting about 4% of the global population. It should be clear that the rest of the world simply can't catch up to us. Either there are going to be increasingly intense strains on resources, or we have to set an example by doing more with less.
I think that one of the simplest, best ways to understand the larger consumption problem is just to do some basic, rough math. Global manufacturing -- which we could say, pretty simply, is the process by which humans turn nature into human-designed stuff in an almost entirely one-way system -- expands fairly reliably at a rate of 3% per year. To roughly estimate the amount of expansion from one year to the next, you could take numbers from the start date and multiply them by 1.03 to get a rough estimate of the expansion after a year. So if you manufactured a hundred widgets this year, multiply that by 1.03 and you could (roughly) predict you'd manufacture 103 widgets next year.
A very rough way to estimate the global expansion of manufacturing by the end of the 21st century, then, would be to take that (1.03) and raise it to the power of 78 -- which would represent what would happen if you multiplied any original figure by 1.03 seventy-eight times, for the seventy-eight years left in the 21st century.
That number, 1.03 to the 78th power, is about ten. In other words, current rates of the expansion of manufacturing would roughly forecast that, by the end of the 21st century humanity will be turning nature into human-designed stuff, an almost entirely one-way system, at ten times the rate it is today.
It should be clear that this is just not possible, and it should be clear from a variety of angles:
We cannot foresee a way to continue economic growth as is and achieve what appear to be necessary greenhouse gas reductions.
We cannot foresee a way to continue economic growth as is and stay within what appear to be planetary limits necessary for sustaining the Holocene equilibrium.
We cannot foresee a way to continue growth such that everyone on Earth lives the way that industrialized people do, particularly the way Americans do.
We cannot even foresee a way to continue expanding manufacturing at the rates we do generally without catastrophically overtaxing the planet.
And yet, still, there is simply NO institutional response to climate change, or to the larger environmental crisis, that does not wholly adhere to the notion of continued economic growth. Everywhere the notion is far too politically expensive for any leader to suggest it.
And again, it seems pretty clear to me that most people -- consciously or not -- are living with the assumption of continued economic growth in their day-to-day lives. They are either planning for that growth personally, or they are planning for that growth globally as they dream for a world of greater social equity -- as there is a heck of a lot more economic growth ahead if the rest of the world is to catch up to the way we live, without any of us in the global North making any sort of sacrifice in our consumption habits.
It seems to me that one of the ways that people think their way around the problem is through a basic suspicion of Malthusian math. Thomas Malthus famously argued that there would always be human deprivation because expansion of land use is linear, and population growth is exponential, and so the number of people will always tend to shoot up above the ability to provide for everyone.
But since Malthus so theorized, advances in technology have shown humanity to able to be increasingly productive in ways that have suggested we may be able to outrun that fateful intersection of the linear equation (resource provisions) and the exponential equation (human need). Isn't it likely that we'll be able to rely on technology in this situation, too?
Sure. Possibly. But I think that it's important to consider how basically reckless that thinking is. For one thing, it's only a possibility. There's just no plan by which technology saves us, so to rely on technology alone is, quite simply, a gamble.
To be clear: To continue to expand economically on the assumption that technology will figure something out is, categorically, to gamble with the future of civilization itself.
It is not to plan.
It is not to respond reasonably.
It is not to steward ourselves responsibly. Or to steward the Earth responsibly.
But more fundamentally, to expect technology to work something out, and to allow us to continue to grow in material accumulation, leaves the most basic assumptions of our current economic system wholly unquestioned -- when there is, in fact, every reason to question the assumptions of our economic system.
It is very worth considering whether the entire arc of industrialized capitalism, which we have largely just labeled as an act of progress, has in fact been a centuries-long experiment, for which now the results are coming in. A certain amount of material improvement is unmistakably a good thing. But what about the rest?
It is worth considering, for instance, that in the entire history of industrialized capitalism, one of the motivations for perpetual economic growth has been the fact that it makes more people more likely to accept growing inequality. Many people have benefited, but that does not make industrialized capitalism fundamentally a social equalizer. Realize that Elon Musk currently controls 1/2000th of all global wealth. Look at the downward pressure on wages, or the way the Democrats are just wringing everyday people for cash right now, in order to protect democracy itself in America. Inequality is a real problem that has been made more palatable because of slight rises in standard of living for most people while a minority have shot ahead -- literally into outer space. This dynamic, essentially one of palliating through bread and circus, absolutely requires perpetual economic growth.
I think it's also worth considering whether certain types of affluence are just not good for us in the first place. I've pretty much come to accept as axiomatic the arc Sir John Glubb described in "The Fate of Empires": Ascendant societies front virtue. Virtue is efficient and productive and tends to lead to affluence. At some point the affluence become so captivating that the society no longer fronts the pursuit of virtue but it fronts the pursuit of affluence instead. At that point, it goes into decline.
To me, one of the most substantial arguments against perpetual growth is this latter one: Look what it does to us spiritually. Are we really better off in our souls for the ways we have industrialized? Does it make us more purposeful? Does it make us more compassionate, or generous, or wise? Does the world seem to be improving as it clambers toward the lifestyle of the glitzy, wealthy, wasteful global North, particularly in the fashion of the Western world?
If the arc of industrialized capitalism has been an experiment, here's what the results seem to be:
The increase in productivity is a powerful engine -- which must be controlled.
Increases in material provision are great -- up to a point.
In fact, the more powerful we become, the more we have to become clear, and mature, about limits.
It seems clear to me that the consumption crisis is a spiritual crisis. Many of us have borne its effects for the entirety of our lifetimes, feeling an increasing weight and longing for relief. The spirit is almost endlessly durable, though, and so as people have trudged along, it has become possible to imagine that this is just how life must be, that it's foolish to imagine anything different.
But nature is telling another story. The natural world is giving us the opportunity to navigate the ambiguity in our spirits with clarity.
Nature begins to tell us, in the most concrete terms, that our current ways are not sustainable. There is nothing to indicate that we can expand our rates of consumption through the end of the 21st century without some form of collapse.
It seems to me that it simply has to be, at the very least, entertained that this is the reality: We need to consider that we are complicit in an engine of perpetual growth and then consider the very real evidence that that engine simply cannot continue in the direction it has been going. It is too expensive to our planet, and it is too expensive to our souls. And if we continue to feed that engine, it will soon be stopped by the planet's inherent homeostatic mechanisms -- with increasing systemic shocks, as prelude to very real systemic collapse.
It's clear to me that what we are called to is not just a more sustainable world, but ultimately a more wholesome and nourishing one. There is mounting evidence that this is the case. If you have no idea where to start to think about this, there are entire genres of documentaries about this that you can access through any number of streaming services.
The evidence indicates that if we keep going the way we are going, we are going to crash. The evidence also indicates that if we change course, we will steer toward something better.
Let the supply chain stresses of the pandemic, the car shortage, the baby formula shortage, expand our imagination for the fact that systemic collapse can really happen. Meanwhile, let us listen for the tones of the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.
Crisis is danger AND opportunity.
I think it's high time for everyone to think seriously about the idea of degrowth.