Ecomodernism and the Sacred Shibboleth

I recently wrote a post criticizing ecomodernism as “magical thinking”.  I argued that it ignores key scientific studies on the unviability of absolute decoupling in order to advance an ecologically reckless insistence on growth.  Not surprisingly, ecomodernists were not particularly happy about this.  Linus Blomqvist of the Breakthrough Institute posted a rebuttal.  It’s worth reading, because it gives a useful indication of the arguments that ecomodernists fall back on when challenged, and presents an opportunity to stress-test them.  This is an important process.

And the results are revealing.

Blomqvist does not dispute the fact that absolute decoupling of material use from GDP is impossible on a global scale.  He simply chooses to ignore this fact in favor of pointing to specific dimensions of resource use that he says are more hopeful.  Here he relies on a single example: that “land use by agriculture… has been in slight decline since the mid-1990s, even as consumption of crops and meat has increased by 60%.”  This is good news, he says, because it shows that absolute decoupling is possible after all.

Blomqvist says that he draws this conclusion from FAO data.  But unfortunately the FAO’s data don’t in fact jive with his story.  Since 1990 total land use (for cropland and grazing) has grown from 4.79 billion hectares to 4.87 billion hectares. True, during the first decade of the 21st century agricultural land use held basically steady, but it’s been rising again since 2010, having increased by 50 million hectares – roughly the size of Spain. So this is not in fact an example of absolute decoupling, and it is frankly irresponsible for Blomqvist to invoke it as such.  Relative decoupling, yes.  But that’s not good enough.

Even if land use did represent a story of absolute decoupling, we can't so easily claim, as Blomqvist does, that decoupling of this one impact means we can achieve decoupling across all key impacts.  Indeed, isolating “good news” stories risks violating the basic principle of ecology – namely, that everything is connected. 

Land use is a good case in point.  We have been able to increase agricultural yields by pumping the land full of industrial chemicals.  But at what cost?  We are dramatically overshooting the planetary boundaries for phosphorous loading and nitrogen loading, with all sorts of devastating consequences: (a) insect populations are collapsing, including pollinators, and birds are going down with them; (b) coastal waters are scarred by enormous “dead zones” from chemical runoff, which have quadrupled in size since 1950; (c) soil depletion has reached crisis levels, with scientists warning that on our present trajectory topsoils will only support another 60 years of harvests; and (d) dying soils are emitting immense plumes of greenhouse gas emissions, contributing substantially to global warming.

These are not minor problems. They are existential threats, widely recognized as such by the scientific community.  But Blomqvist dismisses this evidence as “vague appeals to ecological connectedness”.  Because, as we’re beginning to learn, in Ecomodernist Land evidence doesn’t really matter very much if it gets in the way of growth.

Now, here’s where it gets interesting.  Blomqvist agrees that the objective should be to reduce agricultural land use.  He agrees that this is ecologically important.  But he thinks that the best way to do this is to continue to intensify our extraction from the land so that we can keep growing the industrial agricultural sector – exponentially, forever.  Because whatever else, the mantra of growth must not be questioned.  It is the sacred shibboleth.

There’s a much easier and more sensible way to reduce agricultural land use: waste less food, and distribute food more fairly.  We already produce enough food for 10 billion people, but a disproportionate amount of the world’s food ends up flowing to rich countries, where much of it ends up as waste.  In the US and Europe, consumers bin up to half the food they purchase.  The UN finds that cutting global food waste by only a quarter and redirecting it to where it is needed most would eradicate global hunger in a single stroke.  (For citations see The Divide, where I develop this argument more fully).

This would allow us to simultaneously improve human well-being, making people healthier and happier and more food-secure, while at the same time reducing land use as well as reducing chemical loading.  But it would also mean that the industrial agricultural sector would shrink.  It would de-grow.  Is Blomqvist against this idea?  Against eliminating food waste and redistributing food more fairly?  I’d love to hear his answer.  Because really this is what it all comes down to.  Indeed, this is precisely the purpose of de-growth: to scale down ecologically destructive output that is not necessary for human well-being. 

Now, to Blomqvist’s next point.  He writes “There is substantial reason to doubt that reducing GDP growth in the developed world will have the environmental benefit that Hickel seemingly believes it must, given that it is in developed countries that the promising decoupling trends have emerged.”  This is a favorite line of the ecomodernists.  The argument, when you state it plainly, is that growth is the solution to ecological collapse. We need more growth – more production and more consumption, exponentially, forever – so that we can become technologically advanced enough to decouple growth from environmental impact. 

The circular reasoning here is truly astounding. Remember, in my last post I challenged Blomqvist to explain why he thinks that endless exponential growth in rich nations is a desirable objective, given that it does nothing to improve social indicators or human well-being.  His answer, bizarrely, is that it is ecologically necessary. 

Now, if there was even a shred of evidence that absolute decoupling was possible across all key impacts, and at sufficiently rapid rates to reverse ecological collapse, we might have a conversation.  But there is not.  Here again, Blomqvist’s position is reckless and unscientific.  There’s just no other way to put it. 

Blomqvist suggests that rich nations need to continue growing, not because it improves human lives, but because it is the only way to achieve decoupling. This is a remarkable turn of logic.  What’s happened here is that decoupling itself has become the goal.  The ecomodernists, having failed to offer compelling reasons for why growth is socially necessary, have turned their sticking point into their sole raison d’etre.  It’s like saying that we need to chop down more trees each year on an exponential curve, not because we need the wood, but simply so that we can learn how to chop down trees more efficiently. 

But this is where things get really odd.  Blomqvist says “There is substantial reason to doubt that reducing GDP growth in the developed world will have environmental benefit.”  Really?  Is this really the ecomodernist argument?  Is Blomqvist seriously proposing that there would be zero ecological benefits if rich nations consumed less?  The suggestion boggles the mind.  If GDP is tightly coupled to material use, and material use is tightly coupled to ecological impact, then if GDP goes down then ecological impact goes down.  If rich nations were to consume fewer SUVs, fewer McMansions, fewer single-use plastics, fewer commercial flights, and less beef – as de-growth proposals suggest – their GDP would go down.  Blomqvist offers not a shred of evidence that this would somehow magically not reduce ecological impact.

And then of course there is the strawman.  Blomqvist accuses me of wanting to de-grow developing countries – “a problematic political and ethical proposition, given how much these countries would benefit from higher incomes, better infrastructure, more employment”.  But I have never once called for de-growth in developing countries, so this is a non-argument.  It is not poor people who are the problem when it comes to ecological collapse.  It is rich people.  People in low-income nations consume only 2 tonnes of material stuff per person per year – way under the planetary boundary (7 tonnes).  People in rich nations, by contrast, consume a staggering 28 tonnes per person per year. 

So Blomqvist is concerned about poverty in developing countries.  Good – me too.  And that’s precisely why we should care about overconsumption in rich countries.  After all, we know that the ecological impact of the latter is disproportionately inflicted on the developing world.  Developing countries are responsible for only 30% of historical greenhouse gas emissions, and yet bear 82% of the costs of climate-change (nearly $571 billion in 2010), and suffer 98% of climate-change related deaths (400,000 in 2010). Even the World Bank is now warning that climate change is on track to cause mass famine and human displacement across the South, this century, sending global hunger and poverty rates up (once again, full citations are available in The Divide).

Here’s the real “problematic political and ethical proposition”: to assume that it’s okay for rich nations to continue growing needlessly while knowing that this is actively destroying the lives of poor people across the South. If we want to be serious about eradicating poverty in poor nations, de-growth in rich nations is going to have to be part of the equation.

The Magical Thinking of Ecomodernism

I recently wrote an article for Fast Company explaining why “green growth” is not a thing.  I looked at three high-profile studies showing that even aggressive taxes and rapid improvements in technological efficiency will not be enough to cut global resource use as long as we keep growing the world economy.  Right now we are consuming about 85 billion tons of material stuff per year, exceeding the sustainable threshold by 70%.  According to the UN, our resource use will rise to at least 132 billion tons per year by 2050, and possibly as high as 180 billion tons. 

It is on this basis that scientists have concluded that absolute decoupling of GDP from aggregate resource use is not possible.  But the ecomodernists at the Breakthrough Institute aren’t convinced.  Linus Blomqvist wrote a blog post responding to my article, arguing that focusing on aggregate material flows is “misleading”, and that in reality absolute decoupling “is still a very real possibility.”  The stakes are high.  After all, decoupling is the central objective of ecomodernism.  No decoupling, no ecomodernism.

Blomqvist seems to agree that absolute decoupling of GDP from aggregate material use is not possible; or at least he doesn’t dispute the point.  But we needn’t worry about this fact, he says; it doesn’t matter if we keep using more and more resources each year, because aggregate material use is not a meaningful proxy for environmental impact.  Industrial and construction materials, for instance, “account for a pretty small portion of environmental impacts like greenhouse gas emissions or land use,” and while biomass use keeps growing, land use has peaked (at least for now). 

But this is cherrypicking indicators.  Industrial and construction materials may contribute relatively little to greenhouse gas emissions and land use, but anyone who has ever seen (or lived next to) an open pit mine will know that they are ecological disaster zones in all sorts of other ways.  Plus, Blomqvist’s claim about emissions and land just isn’t true (and he provides no evidence for it): the production of cement, iron and steel alone contributes 10% of anthropogenic CO2, and the use of the end products is clearly linked to fossil fuel consumption. 

As for biomass: let’s not pretend that land use is all that matters here. Our current method for extracting higher yields from land involves aggressive use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, which have already pushed us well over the planetary boundaries for biogeochemical flows.  And those same chemicals are causing insect populations – including pollinators – to collapse, and bird populations along with them.  Indeed, the inputs involved in industrial agriculture are a major driver of biodiversity loss, regardless of whether or not more land is being used.  And they drive soil depletion too, which in turn drives carbon emissions from the land.  

This is the thing about ecology, you see: everything is connected.  The biomass bone is connected to the biogeochemical bone is connected to the insect bone.  And that’s why aggregate material flows are in fact an important indicator of what’s happening to our planet.  Sure, some material use has more dramatic impact than others.  But no material use is impact-free.  You can’t keep increasing aggregate material extraction and consumption indefinitely without increasing environmental impact right along with it.  To believe that doubling or tripling our existing aggregate resource draw isn’t going to cause problems is magical thinking. 

Blomqvist’s next move is similar to the first.  He says that while absolute decoupling of aggregate resource use may not be possible (and sadly even relative decoupling of emissions has come to a halt), there are some happy isolated cases where it does seem to be happening.  Water extraction has peaked in the US, for example.  And several pollutants (like sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide) have peaked or declined globally.  Blomqvist says this counts as “significant progress”. 

If this is the best the ecomodernists have to offer, I despair.  First of all, you can’t look at nations (and particularly rich nations like the US) in isolation, because they have outsourced much of their environmental impact abroad.  If you count all the water extraction involved in producing and shipping the imports that the US consumes, American water use is going up, not down.  As for sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide – yes, there have been gains, and we should celebrate them.  But pollutants like these constitute one of the few examples where the much-misunderstood Environmental Kuznets Curve actually works.  Ecologists have pointed out for years that the EKC doesn’t hold for most other impacts.  So as a defense for endless growth, I’m afraid Blomqvist’s example just won’t do.

I agree with Blomqvist that we should strive to accelerate resource efficiency.  Of course we should!  We need all the efficiency gains we can get.  But unfortunately it’s not going to be enough, in and of itself – and we need to face up to this fact.  Tellingly, Blomqvist doesn’t engage with my claim about the rebound effect, nor about the physical limits to efficiency gains (the paper I cite by Ward et al concludes that “permanent decoupling is impossible for essential, non-substitutable resources because the efficiency gains are ultimately governed by physical limits”).  We can’t just ignore these realities.

If absolute decoupling isn’t a thing, then ultimately we’re going to have to scale down global economic activity.  Blomqvist doesn’t actually explain why he dislikes this conclusion so much.  All he says is that degrowth “seems far-fetched”.  I have no idea what he means by this. But could it really be more far-fetched than achieving what is physically impossible?  Perhaps Blomqvist – or anyone at the Breakthrough Institute – could explain why they think that rich, high-consuming nations (like the US, for instance) need to keep growing their GDP (forever?), when we know that additional growth is not generating any better social outcomes.  Given how powerful the scale effect of growth is when it comes to driving ecological breakdown, it just doesn't make sense to take it off the table.  

This isn't just about pensions anymore - there's a revolution afoot

It was a strategic error, on their part.  Universities UK and USS thought they could score an easy win, but they started a revolution.  The pension thing was the straw that broke the camel’s back, apparently, and it has triggered the greatest wave of staff-student mobilization the sector has seen in decades. 

What did they think lecturers would do while on the picket lines for three weeks?  Chat about the weather?  Snack on cucumber sandwiches?  And what about students?  Were they going to stay at home and sleep?

Hardly.  For starters, we learned a few things.  We learned that there is no “deficit” in the pension fund; in fact, there is a surplus.  We learned that the whole thing is a ruse to justify offloading financial risk onto pensioners so that universities can get cheaper credit to buy new buildings – which has somehow become the raison d’etre of higher education in the UK.  We learned that richer universities, like Oxford and Cambridge, were instrumental to this scheme.  We learned that women are going to be hardest hit by the pension cuts.  We learned that pension bosses make obscene amounts of money, in excess of £1.2 million per year.  And we learned that UUK and USS are opaque and anti-democratic.

But we’ve also been thinking way beyond pensions.  Pensions are the last thing on our minds now.  What we’re really after is nothing short of reclaiming our universities from the banal and reductive logic of neoliberal capitalism - including the uberization of lecturers, the CEO-ification of managers, and the customerization of students.  Because really, what’s at stake here is the public university itself.  Across the country, staff and students are forming groups, sharing ideas, discussing strategy, even staging occupations toward the goal of making our universities fairer, more caring, more democratic places.    We’re not content to weed around the edges of this broken system.  We’re going straight to the heart of it. 

Demands are snowballing.  Everything is on the table.  Some of us have found inspiration in a list of ideas posted by Jacob Bard-Rosenberg from Birkbeck.  I’ve reproduced some of them here, and added others that seem to be gaining traction.  This list is only partial, of course – and it’s just the beginning.  

• Reject the proposed cuts to pensions.  More specifically, demand an immediate re-valuation of USS.  There is zero reason for this process to take 3 years.

• Abolish tuition fees, and restore adequate block-grant funding to higher education.  Public universities should be publicly funded with progressive taxation.

• Democratize university governance. Open the Academic Board (and the vote) to all academic staff, including post-docs and fractional workers, and extend the powers of the Academic Board to include the right to review decisions made by the Council and the Vice Chancellor.  Once we have meaningful democratic power over university management, we will be able to enact much of our broader vision, including many of the points listed below.

• Include service staff on university management committees all the way to the top, including those on the lowest pay such as cleaners.

• Demand transparency at UUK and USS.  Subject UUK to the Freedom of Information Act, and require USS to publish its valuation reports and methodology.  Bring UUK/USS salaries in line with normal salaries in the HE sector.

• Demand that all university staff receive annual pay rises in line with inflation as a contractual right.  And introduce reasonable fixed pay ratios between lowest-paid workers and highest-paid managers.

• Demand an end to outsourced labour; bring all university staff in-house and guarantee them equal working conditions (pensions, holiday, sick leave, etc).

• Demand an end to zero hours contracts in the sector.

• Refuse to take part in REF and TEF, which show no evidence of improving research or teaching and which create destructive competition and hierarchies.

• Refuse to publish anything held behind paywalls (the knowledge monopolies of Elsevier, Springer, and Co. must be ended).  Set up free online alternatives where necessary (as anthropologists have done with Hau and Anthropology of This Century).

• Refuse to publish books with academic presses where books are so expensive only institutions can purchase them.   Set up alternative presses where necessary (publishing is now remarkably cheap).

• Refuse to take part in league-tables, which create destructive competition and hierarchies.

• Demand a student-staff ratio cap, so that increases in student numbers are matched by new academic hires.

• Demand an end to PREVENT, and an end to the use of lecturers as a surveillance mechanism against students who are not UK citizens.

• Allow departments to review the use of marks and time-bound exams, which often narrow the meaning of learning and trigger unnecessary anxiety for students.

• Ensure that students have access to adequate and affordable accommodation. 

• Abolish the position of Vice Chancellor and replace it with an internally elected role in service of democratic bodies like the Academic Board and Council, paid like a public sector worker rather than a corporate CEO.

After the pensions dispute is over, the status quo will no longer be an option.  Our employers are kidding themselves if they assume otherwise.  Ideas are proliferating like a thousand butterflies.  What once seemed impossible now seems imminent.  

A letter to my students about the UCU strike

Dear students,

For some time now I have been mulling over what to say about the upcoming strike by the University and College Union.  I know it must be frustrating for you, to have your education disrupted like this.  I know that some employers have chosen to cast this as a selfish act by staff more interested in defending their pensions than in teaching their students.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  

To understand why, you need to know that what is at stake here is not really pensions.  What is at stake is the public university itself.  

When tuition fees were introduced a number of years ago, faculty across the nation raised their voices in loud dissent.  We joined our students to march in the streets, day after day, facing down lines of aggressive police.  We did it because, like our students, we fundamentally rejected what fees do.  They commoditize education, they render students as consumers and put them at financial risk.  They individualize and atomize, and they break down the solidarities that underpin the university as a public good - as a commons. 

The present crisis is just the latest wave of the same broad attack on the public university.  First it was fees, now it's pensions.  The privatization of pensions places lecturers at financial risk, and severs the social contract we have with the public.  You see, we lecturers are public sector workers, and we are paid as such.  Most of us could earn double or triple in the private sector, but we choose to take low salaries because we believe in our jobs, we believe in our students, and we believe in the value of public education.  It is a moral decision.  The social contract we have with the public is that in return for this service we will get stable retirement.  We will never be rich - quite unlike the management bosses who take home salaries in excess of £300,000 a year - but we can rely on a modicum of decency in old age.  It is part of our collective commons.  

Now that is being severed.  First with students, now with lecturers, our commons are being enclosed and we too are being made into objects of financialization and risk.  

As I see it, we are in this battle together.  Just as we stood with your predecessors to fight the imposition of fees, we now ask you to stand with us to fight this latest attack on the public university.  But we should not simply be defensive about this.  On the contrary, we should seize the offensive.  Instead of just demanding that they leave the pension system alone, we should demand that they abolish tuition fees too.  Let us bring that battle back.  Let us make it clear that we see these struggles as connected.  Let us demand the full restoration of the public university, and reclaim our commons. 

The truth is that you students have much more power than staff do.  The administration doesn't care if we strike.  They only care if students get upset.  And get upset you should!  There are many things you can do.  You can join the picket lines.  You can write to the members of the Senior Management Team to express your opinions.  You can demand a refund of your tuition, leveraging the logic of fees against those who have imposed them.  And - possibly best of all - you can get your parents to phone the administration.  There are many other tactics I'm sure you'll come up with yourselves.  New student movements across the world - from Chile to South Africa - have recently staged successful campaigns for public education.  We can join them - and we can learn from their tactics.  

I am reminded of that quote I shared with you from Angela Davis at the beginning of the term.  "You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time."  After all, power has never ceded anything without a demand.  If we want to reclaim the public university, we'll have to fight for it.  Together.

In solidarity,

Jason

Human flourishing doesn't require perpetual growth; it requires sufficiency

Martin Ravallion, a former World Bank economist, recently wrote a blog post attacking de-growth.  I will respond here in the hope of clarifying a few matters that he seems to have misunderstood.

Ecological economists argue that high levels of human well-being can be achieved without high levels of aggregate GDP and material/energy throughput. Costa Rica is often cited as an example. With a life expectancy of 80.4 years and levels of wellbeing in the top 7% of the world, Costa Rica matches many Scandinavian nations in these areas and significantly outperforms the United States, despite a GDP per capita of only $12,000, one-fifth that of the US.  In this sense, Costa Rica is one of the most efficient economies in the world: it produces high levels of human development with minimal pressure on the environment (see the Sustainable Development Index). 

The secret to Costa Rica’s success has to do with the country’s longstanding commitment to social policy, with universal access to high-quality healthcare, education and social security.

But Ravallion objects.  He writes: “The problem in this argument is that better social outcomes are not only attributable to better social policies. Higher average incomes have also played a role, both directly (through poor people’s greater command over commodities that matter to those outcomes) and indirectly (by creating the resource availability needed to finance better social policies).”

Ravallion’s argument is levelled against a straw man. Yes, higher average incomes play a role in achieving better social outcomes, for both of the reasons he mentions. My argument is not that social outcomes have nothing to do with income (I’m not aware of anyone in ecological economics who has claimed such a thing), but rather that strong social outcomes can be achieved with relatively modest income – and certainly much less than rich nations currently command.  Costa Rica does better than, say, my home country of Eswatini, which has a per capita income of only $3,800.  It is unlikely that Eswatini could match Costa Rica’s outcomes with this level of income. And yet even so, the importance of social policy becomes clear when we compare Eswatini to Sri Lanka. They have the same GDP per capita, but Sri Lanka’s life expectancy is seventeen years longer (77.1 years), thanks in large part to its universal healthcare and education system.

Ravallion goes on to say that the story of Costa Rica is not just a story of good social policy.  It is also a story of growth: after all, its real GDP per capita has tripled since 1960.  So he concludes: “Costa Rica is definitely not an example of how good social outcomes are possible without economic growth.”

There’s another straw man here.  Degrowthers have never argued that poor countries don’t need to grow.  Growth may indeed be necessary for very poor countries (like Eswatini) to generate the resources necessary to build social policy and achieve strong social outcomes.  But this does not require perpetual growth; it requires growth to the point of reaching a sufficient level of income.  It's not growth as such that matters, but sufficiency.  Ravallion confuses the two. Yes, growth is part of Costa Rica’s story.  Strong, state-led development policies brought Costa Rica’s income from less than $3,000 in 1960 to $5,000 in 1980 (in constant 2010 dollars).  And with that modest level of income they built up strong social policy and raised their life expectancy from just 61 years (way behind the US) to 71, nearly matching that of the richest nations in the world at the time. 

There is more to Costa Rica’s story. During the 1980s, the US leveraged the Third World debt crisis to destroy state-led development programs and social policy across the global South, with structural adjustment programs imposed by the IMF and World Bank.  Incomes collapsed virtually everywhere as a result.  In Costa Rica, GDP per capita declined from 1979 to 1983, and didn’t recover its pre-crisis levels until 1992, more than a decade later.  Yet during that period, Costa Rica’s life expectancy continued to rise at a world-leading rate, from 71 years to 76, catching up to and surpassing the United States with a GDP per capita that was one-seventh the size.

If growth as such is necessary to improve social outcomes – as Ravallion claims – how did Costa Rica manage this miracle?  It was because, thanks to savvy political maneuvering, the government was able to defy the Washington Consensus and keep its social policy system intact.  It was one of the only countries in the South that managed to do so: a rare beacon amid the wreckage of structural adjustment.

Of course, Costa Rica is not a de-growth economy.  We point to Costa Rica not as an example of de-growth, but as an example of what can be achieved with relatively modest levels of mean income.  This is an important distinction. 

But all of this is somewhat beside the point.  Again, calls for degrowth are not directed at poor countries, but rich countries  Ecological economists argue that rich countries have grown too much, and that they could maintain or even improve their social indicators with vastly fewer resources than they presently consume.

Ravallion claims that this is a fallacy: "The fact that some countries have better social outcomes at a given level of mean income does not imply that richer countries can attain the same social outcomes at lower mean income," he writes.  But why not?  Unfortunately he doesn't explain.  Meanwhile, Europe achieves better social indicators than the US with 40% less income.  Portugal outperforms the US with 65% less income. And we know that the US in the 1970s had better wages, higher levels of happiness, and lower poverty than it does today, with roughly half the real GDP per capita.

Ravallion's response:  "One must seriously doubt that halving today’s average income in the US will restore the social outcomes of 50 years ago.”  This is another straw man.  Nobody has argued that cutting the average income of rich nations would automatically produce better social outcomes.  Ravallion has invented this idea out of thin air.  By contrast, ecological economists focus specifically on the policies that would be necessary in order to maintain and improve social outcomes while scaling down aggregate economic activity (universal public services, shorter working hours, a job guarantee, a fairer distribution of national income, debt cancellation, etc.).  We do not, as Ravallion claimed in a tweet, blindly “hope that economic contraction comes with pro-poor redistribution”.

The research on this is robust. In Managing Without Growth, Peter Victor runs a standard economic model that shows that if you stop or reduce GDP growth, then poverty and unemployment shoot up.  This happens because our economies are structurally dependent on growth.  But they needn't be.  Victor shows that by introducing new policies into the model (such as the ones I indicate above) you can prevent these negative social impacts. More recently, researchers have demonstrated that we could end global poverty and ensure flourishing lives for everyone on the planet (for 10 billion people by the middle of the century) with 60% less energy than we presently use (150 EJ, well within what is considered compatible with 1.5C). As for resource use, we know that high-income nations could meet their citizens’ material needs at a high standard, with up to 80% less resource use, bringing them back within the sustainable threshold.

Unfortunately, Ravallion seems uninterested in such research.  Instead, he says (in another tweet), let’s stick with growth and “try harder on the environmental policies”. 

Yes, we need to get the environmental policies right.  But unfortunately this, in and of itself, is not going to be enough.  Schandl et al (2016) show that even if we (a) impose a carbon price of $50 per ton, rising by an extraordinary 4% per year to $250 per ton, and (b) somehow miraculously manage to double the material efficiency of our economies more or less immediately, rich nations will still only be able to achieve decarbonization of max 4.7% per year. This doesn’t get us anywhere near the emissions reductions required to stay within safe carbon budgets (viz, 10-12% per year).  Plus, with a background growth rate of 2%, nearly half of that decarbonization will be wiped out.  Schandl et al also find that the same best-case scenario achieves no absolute reduction in material footprint in the long term. 

We have reviewed the relevant empirical evidence here (“Is green growth possible?”), looking at both emissions and resource use. The literature has expanded since. This review examines 835 empirical studies and finds that decoupling alone is not adequate to achieve climate and ecological goals; it requires what the authors themselves refer to as “degrowth” scenarios. This paper in Nature Sustainability comes to similar conclusions. Also see here and here… the latter paper reviews 179 studies on decoupling published since 1990 and finds “no evidence of economy-wide, national or international absolute resource decoupling, and no evidence of the kind of decoupling needed for ecological sustainability.”

The empirical evidence is clear. Averting climate catastrophe and ecological collapse is going to require that rich countries scale down aggregate throughput.  Our task now is to figure out how to make that happen in a way that enhances - rather than erodes - human flourishing.  This is the biggest challenge of the 21st century, and I hope that Ravallion will join us in rising to it.

*This post was updated in 2020.

FM4 Reality Check

I have two short radio segments here on post-growth:

1. What Costa Rica is doing right

2. Why we need to get rid of GDP

De-growth is feasible: people want a new economy

Branko Milanovic has written a response to my argument.  As I read it, I was struck by two things – both quite significant.  

First, Branko now seems to accept the science on how “green growth” is not a thing, and has backed off his assumption that endless growth is (a) possible, and (b) something we should promote.  Or at least he has chosen not to defend his earlier claims on this matter.  This is quite a shift. 

Second, Branko does not insist that growth is necessary in rich nations.  In fact, he seems to agree that we can maintain well-being in rich nations while reducing material consumption.  And he accepts the notion that we can accomplish this by shifting to a different kind of economy, along the lines of my suggestions.  “I do not think that this program is illogical,” he says.

So far, then, we’re on the same page.

But Branko doubles down on one bit of his earlier argument: that degrowth is not politically feasible.  “It is just so enormous, outside of anything that we normally can expect to implement, that it verges, I am afraid, on absurdity,” he writes.  He claims that people are so penetrated by the ideology of competitive consumerism that they would never voluntarily walk away from the system.  So it will be impossible to put degrowth into practice in a democracy.

I do not disagree with Branko that the task is enormous; I have complete empathy with this perspective.  Indeed, it is the single greatest problem of our century – how to enable human flourishing while reducing emissions and material throughput – and it demands our total focus.  But let me offer three thoughts that give me hope.

1. People are not just consumption bots.

Branko advances a dystopic vision of people who identify totally with the extrinsic values of competitive consumerism and growth.

First, it’s just not true.  People over-consume not because it aligns with their inner values, but because they feel compelled to do so, and because our economy is structured so as to incentivize it.  The system requires endlessly growing consumption, and so externalizes true costs and bombards us with messages and ads to provoke consumptive behavior, seeding us with discontent and anxiety that is particularly acute in conditions of high inequality. 

It will be difficult to overcome these forces, to be sure. We need to change the messages, change the incentives, internalize costs, and ultimately change the logic of the economy itself. But we have on our side the fact that people already yearn for something different.  According to recent consumer research, 70% of people in middle- and high-income countries believe overconsumption is putting our planet and society at risk. A similar majority also believe we should strive to buy and own less, and that doing so would not compromise our happiness.

This is not surprising.  Nobody wants to live in an economy that is so obviously programmed to ruin the planet we call home.  It makes us feel horrible.

Importantly, there is a massive literature in happiness economics, anthropology and social psychology that finds that people have much more nuanced visions of the good life than the old homo economicus model would suggest: that they aspire to good health, intimate relationships, community, knowledge, and time, and are motivated by autonomy, mastery and purpose rather than monetary reward.  We need only appeal to the better angels of our nature.

As for growth, check this out: 81% of people in Britain believe that the government’s prime objective should be “the greatest happiness” instead of “the greatest wealth.”  This throws a wrench in Branko’s argument.  And it brings me to my next point:

2. Democracy is the answer.

Branko articulates a common worry: that the only way to degrow an economy is to have some kind of authoritarian dictatorship do it for us.

I completely disagree. Imagine: what if we had an open, democratic conversation about what kind of economy we really want?  What would the economy look like?  What kinds of objectives would it have?  How would it distribute resources?  The evidence I've cited above leads me to believe it wouldn’t be anything like our current system, with its tyrannical obsession with endless GDP growth and pro-rich resource distribution. 

We have never had this conversation on a mass scale, because (a) our media is controlled by a small number of mega-corporations that are structurally disinclined to facilitate such a conversation; and (b) we do not live in real democracies.  As a recent study pointed out, the United States resembles an oligarchy with the policy preferences of elites routinely overriding those of the majority. The same is likely true in every nation where money buys political outcomes.

So, as George Monbiot put it in an elegant proposal on Viewsnight recently, kick big money out of politics, dismantle the media conglomerates, and let’s have a real discussion about the economy.  Our vision of a different economy does not require totalitarianism.  Quite the opposite: it requires the exercise of democracy against the violent tyranny of growth.

3. There is already a movement for change.

Branko concludes on a frustrated note, saying, basically: “if you really believe in degrowth, then why don’t you try to make it happen?”  He assumes that we are crying out in the wilderness, and that nobody will actually accept what we propose. 

I’m not so pessimistic.  But let me be clear: is there widespread public support for de-growth?  Not yet.  And that's hardly surprising: as I have been at pains to point out, degrowth is structurally impossible in our existing economy.  So the first step is to change the logic of the economy.  And on this front the movement is surging. 

The US states of Vermont and Maryland have already adopted an alternative to GDP – the Genuine Progress Indicator – and a number of European governments are considering the same.  Key economists like Stiglitz and Sen support this shift, and it appears as a goal in the SDGs.  As for decommoditizing social goods, there is overwhelming popular support for this in most rich nations.  About debt: there is the Jubilee campaign, and the anti-debt movement among US students, and virtually everyone in Greece.  And on fractional reserve banking there is Positive Money, and the Chicago Plan promoted in a recent IMF report.

A carbon tax would be a key step – something that Branko himself supports, along with a growing chorus of others, as a way of internalizing costs.  I bet getting rid of the $5.3 trillion fossil fuel subsidy would be popular too (look at the divestment movement for proof of mass resistance to fossil fuels).  As for redistribution as a substitute for growth: is there momentum there?  Just look at Occupy, the Bernie campaign, the Corbyn Labour Party – or talk to any person on the street. 

Speaking of Labour, Dr Dan O’Neill, a prominent degrowth economist, was invited to write a policy brief that the Labour Party has publicized, highlighting a number of sensible objectives, including limits on resource use and waste production, and a shorter working week.  These ideas were unthinkable even a decade ago.  Now they are shooting into Europe’s biggest political party – and finding concrete expression all over the place, from the local food movement and Transition Towns to alternative currencies and regenerative farming. 

This is just a small fraction of what’s out there.  We are already building the new economy.  Nearly everyone I meet is inspired by this – and students and young people rally around it with energy and passion.  Still, we have a lot of work to do.  I hope that Branko will join us.

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Our demands are not “absurd”, as Branko claims.  What is absurd is to believe we can continue with the status quo, against the rising tide (literally) of evidence to the contrary.  Fortunately, we have one thing in our favor: while it may not be possible to change the laws of physics, it is possible to change social and economic systems – we have done it many times in the past, and we will do it again.  We have to.

This brings me to another thought.  In service of his bleak view of consumption bots, Branko recruits the image of Sudanese immigrants crammed into tiny compartments on trains so that they can make it to France and… “buy more stuff.” 

I bet any actual migrant would object.  As someone who has spent years living with migrants and researching migration, I know I do.  They’re not risking their lives because they want to buy more stuff, but because they want to survive, and – if luck is on their side – live a decent life.  Many risk the journey because they’ve been displaced by violent military intervention in the service of Western capital, or in order to flee the ravages of climate change in their home countries.  It is coercion, not choice.

If we zoom out, it becomes clear that these refugees are in many cases victims of Western over-consumption and excess growth, not disciples of it.  They are a living, breathing reason for why we need to change the system.

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Let me finish by clarifying one key point.  On a couple of occasions Branko has tweeted his dismay that we simultaneously call for degrowth while also calling for the end of austerity.  But this is not a contradiction.

Think about it: the whole point of austerity is to slash public goods in order to re-start economic growth, with devastating consequences for the poor.  Austerity is a violent expression of our system’s need for endless growth.  In this sense, de-growth is the exact opposite of austerity.  It calls for redistribution (in support of public goods, for example) in order to render growth unnecessary.  It names the violence of the growth imperative and calls for something better.