Why We Need Degrowth

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In this Our Changing Climate climate change essay, I look at how we can decrease overconsumption, overproduction, and consumerism through degrowth. Specifically, I look at why we need degrowth. What exactly degrowth is, and then I explore how we might achieve a degrowth-oriented zero-carbon world.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:00

The holiday season crushes us with products. Mountains of stuff piled high in store aisles and shopping carts under trees, endless boxes, wrapping paper and noise, all cumulating in returned packages and crowded landfills. December is truly the height of overconsumption and overproduction in the Imperial Corps. Every year, we buy gifts that corporations say will bring us joy and in the process burn fossil fuels at ever higher rates. The holiday season lays bare our current societal self-destruction. Over the last 50 years, the global economy has ballooned in size, and with it has come the rapid tick upwards of warmer temperatures. Economic growth, capital accumulation, and rising emissions seem to be in lockstep, which is why we need to envision a different path forward. One where we dramatically reduce production to avoid the worst of climate chaos. A vision that has coalesced in recent years under the banner of degrowth. But there are so many different meanings to that charged term, and many critiques that champions of degrowth must tackle. So today we sift through the flourishing debates and struggles of degrowth in order to understand how we must not only dismantle the growth paradigm, but why we must connect degrowth to broader anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist, and anti-capitalist struggles. Since the marriage of coal and capitalist factory production during the Industrial Revolution, the global economy has been on a perilous ascent of growth. World production and consumption has skyrocketed as companies produce ever more under the churning cycle of capital accumulation. Because growth, the growth of the economy, and the growth of our impact on the earth is ultimately the physical manifestation of capital accumulation. As the authors of The Future is Degrowth note, capitalism appears as growth. And this materialization is not only social, but also biophysical or material.

SPEAKER_01 1:56

So when we hear Biden celebrate economic growth, the United States had the fastest economic growth in nearly four decades.

SPEAKER_03 2:04

What he's really saying is that capital accumulation, or capitalists investing money into the production of commodities to sell for even more money in an endless cycle of overproduction and money hoarding, continues to expand unimpeded. Growth is thus an indicator of the health of a capitalist economy. In other words, an indicator of capital accumulation. But it also has become an ideology. Biden is celebrating economic growth because under capitalism, if an economy doesn't grow, it dies. Put another way, the process of money turning into commodities, turning into more money can never stop or the economy crashes. We've seen this many times throughout history, most recently in 2008 and during the pandemic.

SPEAKER_00 2:46

The GDP shrank by 4.8%. That's the largest decline in the economy since the Great Recession in 2008.

SPEAKER_03 2:53

When the process of capital accumulation is interrupted, the world suffers.

SPEAKER_04 2:57

As DGrowth scholar Jason Hickel notes, if it does not grow, it collapses into crisis.

SPEAKER_03 3:03

As a result, growth has become the core goal of most every corporation and government across the 20th and 21st century. Economic growth under capitalism has become synonymous with progress. While living conditions did certainly improve for some as economic growth churned onward during the 20th century and into the 21st, the connection between economic growth and so-called progress, however, is more tenuous than many champion it to be. Often, progress comes not from the expansion of capital, but from the struggles of workers in oppressed communities against the elite. It was mass struggle that gained working hour limits, minimum wages, and just recently it was a historic strike that won writers a generous contract in Hollywood. And yet growth is now the primary goal of the global economy. This valorization of growth, undergirded by capital accumulation and profit hunting, is driving a reckless amount of material production. According to a 2022 research paper, every single year the global economy directly wastes or mismanages around 78% of the total water withdrawn, 49% of the food produced, 31% of energy produced, 85% of ores, and 26% of non-metallic minerals extracted. And even with this massive waste, there is still excess production that corporations dump onto consumers regardless of whether it is needed or not. And we gobble all that excess stuff up. Because as workers under capitalism, we are alienated from any real meaning or value in our lives. Our jobs aren't fulfilling, we're separated from the natural world, and we're siloed into single-family homes removed from our communities. All the while, corporations bombard us with messages that the solution to this disconnection is consumption. In short, alienation drives us not to consume for use and subsistence, but instead to fill a hole, to shop for the potential promise of a desirable future that under capitalism will never arrive. By inciting this insatiable appetite for consumption, capitalists can assure that there will be a market for their incessant production. Production which fuels a spiral of expansion, leading to massive emissions output. Economic growth and emissions have historically been tightly correlated. This is because fossil fuels are a foundational part of the cycle of capital accumulation, as I talked about in my previous two videos. As a result of rapid economic expansion in the last 50 years, Alejandro Pedregal and Juan Bordera note that it is estimated that we have already reached 90% of the emissions needed to reach 1.5 degrees Celsius, and in a decade we will have exceeded that limit. And most of this accumulation and growth has been driven by the imperial core. The US and Europe alone are responsible for 49% of cumulative carbon dioxide emissions, while China and India represent just 15%. As writer Ian Angus points out, if the poorest 3 billion people on the planet somehow disappear tomorrow, there would be virtually no reduction in ongoing environmental destruction. In short, the growth of corporations and capitalists in the Imperial Corps that Biden is so excited about has come at the expense of the Imperial Periphery. Indeed, from 1990 to 2015, the Imperial Corps siphoned $242 trillion worth of land, labor, energy, and resources from the Imperial Periphery. That's roughly a quarter of the periphery's total GDP. So to fuel their economic expansion, Imperialist corporations and countries are plundering the landscapes and people of the periphery. We saw this in the looting of Iraqi oil fields and now in the gruesome conditions of cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo. There, multinational companies extract and plunder precious metals for smartphones and electric cars to fuel capitalist accumulation in the Imperial core. This is what growth really means under capitalism. Rampant emissions, imperial plunder, and dispossession of the many while the few benefit and prosper. But there are many who refute these claims, who claim that we can grow the economy and dramatically draw down our emissions. They champion the idea of green growth, an enticing dream, but as we'll soon see, an unattainable one. In 2017, Barack Obama released a paper in the journal Science with a simple thesis: the U.S. can grow the economy and cut emissions at the same time. This green growth or decoupling strategy has been the primary approach for capitalist forces. From the Paris Agreement to some models of the IPCC, technologies unproven at scale, like carbon capture and storage, combined with a massive renewable build-out, are held up as evidence that we don't have to dramatically downscale our resource use to take climate action. The core idea being that instead of radical transformation or struggle against fossil capital to address climate change, we can just replace fossil fuels with renewables or electric cars with gas-powered ones and so on. We can somehow continue with business as usual, but just make everything electric. Unfortunately, the promise of green growth has fallen flat on its face. It is not a viable strategy considering the speed at which we need to reduce emissions. Indeed, there is no indication that on a global scale, green growth has moved the needle. An exhaustive 2020 synthesis of 835 peer-reviewed papers on decoupling found that while there are some rare examples of countries decoupling emissions from economic growth, large, rapid, absolute reductions of resource use and greenhouse gas emissions cannot be achieved through observed decoupling rates. In part, this is due to the rebound effect, or what's called the Jevons paradox. As we increase efficiency of energy or material use, that efficiency often leads to more energy use, not less. We're seeing this play out with renewables. Even though the percentage of renewables installed has grown globally, the total amount of fossil fuels produced and consumed has also grown. This is because our economy constantly thirsts for more energy to sate its ever-expanding production. And when the economy grows, the total amount of energy needed also grows. Looking outside energy consumption and emissions, the materials and resources needed to sustain a fully electrified economy today, not to mention one that continues to balloon, would mean extensive exploitation and plunder of the imperial periphery. Essentially, the bigger the economy gets, the deeper the hole we have to dig ourselves out of.

SPEAKER_05 9:36

As degrowth researcher Timothy Parik explains, So if you decarbonize the economy, but then you just re-materialize by just, you know, using a lot of minerals to build a constantly increasing renewable infrastructure, you've just shifted the problem elsewhere.

SPEAKER_03 9:51

And even if some form of Green New Deal passes in the United States, if it does so without an anti-imperialist framework, countries in the periphery like the Democratic Republic of Congo will feel the brunt of a new green imperialism hunting for precious minerals and resources.

SPEAKER_06 10:06

Helping rich countries hit their environmental targets comes at a cost to the people who mine it.

SPEAKER_03 10:16

The accumulation of capital and the growth it manifests is incompatible with a zero-carbon just world. As younger generations look ahead to the future, growth no longer represents progress. But instead, it means a future of climate chaos. We have to prevent that future. And degrowth is the key. As we blow past carbon budgets and global temperature checkpoints, the promises that capitalism has doled out over the last 40 years feel superficial. We need real, rapid, and transformative action to address climate change. And so far, capitalist solutions based on growth and continued capital accumulation have yet to move the needle, which is why we need degrowth. But what exactly is degrowth? At every turn, it seems to have a different definition.

SPEAKER_04 11:04

For Jason Hickel, it's kind of planned and democratic uh reduction of less necessary forms of production in rich countries to bring economies back into balance with the living world in a safe, just, and equitable way.

SPEAKER_03 11:16

For the research and degrowth network, it's an equitable downscaling of production and consumption that increases human well-being and enhances ecological conditions at the local and global level in the short and long term. And for the authors of The Future is Degrowth, it's a movement in constant motion that, in a democratic process of transformation, enables global ecological justice. Degrowth then is really an umbrella term for so many different types of ideas and solutions for pulling the emergency break on reckless economic and emissions growth. But for the sake of this video, we'll treat degrowth as the struggle for a good ecological life for all through the planned democratic and drastic reduction of destructive production in the Imperial core, the redistribution of wealth and knowledge globally, and the eradication of the capitalist mode of production. The vision of degrowth isn't a utopian pipe dream. It's called for in climate models and climate tides. Because the reality is that we need to act decisively on fossil fuel emissions right now if we are to have any chance of avoiding the worst of climate chaos. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects the capitalist tinkering of the Paris Agreement will still push us down a path of roughly 3.2 degrees Celsius of temperature rise by the end of the century. When every decimal of warming increases risks of extreme floods, species extinction, wildfire, drought, and sea level rise, this path is unacceptable. Right now, we're running out of carbon budget, which is a calculation of how much carbon we can burn and still remain below 1.5 degrees or 2 degrees Celsius of warming. So drastic cuts are not only crucial, but scientifically called for. We're hearing arguments for a form of degrowth straight from the IPCC itself, where they write all global modeled pathways that limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius involved rapid and deep, and in most cases immediate greenhouse gas emissions reductions in all sectors this decade. Green growth and capitalist market solutions just aren't delivering these emissions reductions, which is why we need to reduce the rampant overproduction of the Imperial core and multinationals. This is where degrowth comes in. When we look across history, global fossil fuel emissions only declined in times when GDP fell. We saw exactly this during the pandemic, as the global economy fell and emissions dropped drastically for a year. But pure GDP decline is not the goal of degrowth. It is instead the global redistribution of resources and abolition of unnecessary and destructive industries like fossil fuels and the military. Degrowth is necessary because of the Jevons paradox. It's not enough to just build renewables and hope that they will eventually replace fossil fuels. We've seen that fossil fuels and capital are so intimately intertwined that this will never happen organically, which is why we need to actively minimize the production in emissions-intensive industries. And degrowth isn't just the planned dismantling of harmful industries. It's about fostering thriving communities locally and globally. Degrowth is ultimately a divest-invest paradigm. So at the same time, we're reducing unnecessary production, we need to struggle for global climate reparations and the expansion of care work, public transportation, and joyful, sustainable lives for all. In short, degrowth is a framework that reprioritizes public goods, ways of being that heal the natural world and foster happiness and the good life. All the while it seeks to dismantle systems of profit and competition that drove us into this crisis in the first place. Systems that so far have failed to dig us out of this mess. On the grounds of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, artists and authors Christa Decker and Mel Smetz envision a building of the future. A 22-floor student dormitory that's been repurposed into a zero emissions haven. One that's equipped with 750 individual student rooms, communal showers, laundry floors, communal kitchens, biogas digesters that convert food scraps into energy, and wind turbines on the roof. But behind the walls of this dormitory lies something different. There are no elevators in the building, and the bottom three floors of the structure house the human power plant. For De Decker and Smetz, this artistic thinkpiece is one of their many forays into the low-tech and degrowth space. The human power building envisions students spending time at the human power plant, which is essentially a gym, as a way to produce the primary power for their building. For many who first stumble across the concept of degrowth, this is often what comes to mind. Hardship, toil, and sacrifice to minimize our ecological impact.

SPEAKER_02 15:58

Or as one journalist from The Conversation Weekly asks, how could we possibly reduce more without going back into caves and living next to candles?

SPEAKER_03 16:07

This fear of anything other than economic growth and capital accumulation lies at the heart of many critiques of degrowth. While some are merely just bad faith or misunderstood readings of degrowth, other critiques are valid and need addressing. For many, degrowth can be misconstrued as austerity by another name. This is not the case. Degrowth seeks a democratically planned contraction of production based on the needs of the masses. This is very different from an economic recession or top-down austerity measures that hollow out public programs for the sake of freeing up the markets and enriching the capitalist class. Degrowth is not austerity, but it may slip into dangerous directions like eco-fascism without the incorporation of racial justice, decolonial, and disability justice lenses. The Decker and Smetz's vision of a human power plant, for example, while intriguing, reveal those pitfalls. Without elevators, this 22-floor building is made with only the able-bodied in mind. In addition, a building powered primarily on the physical toil of humans could easily slip into a form of eco-fascism, especially if implemented under a capitalist system where marginalized communities and people of color are historically the ones forced to power the devices of those living quite literally above them. This envisioned building could easily echo the precious metal mining in the Imperial periphery that powers our smartphones and electric cars in the Imperial core. Ultimately, the human-powered plant reveals the trap of lifestylism that pervades degrowth. A current that claims that transforming the way we live and consume, whether by moving out of the country or going off grid, is how we achieve a decrease in emissions. There are many degrowth communities out there doing just that, but while these might be examples of what's possible in the future, they will unfortunately not end the supremacy of capital accumulation and imperialism. The vast majority of people don't have the luxury to check out of a city or move away from family and bills. Many are trapped under the cog of capitalist production. Narrowing in on individual lifestyle transformation, as the authors of The Future is Degrowth write, is environmentalism of the rich, which blames overconsumption and not the true culprit of overproduction. And in doing so, those who aren't able to minimize their impact because of a disability, the pressures of their work, or so many other forces under fossil fuel-centric capitalism are ostracized by those who do have the luxury and time to build a bubble of personal degrowth within capitalism. So degrowth needs to attack and dismantle fossil capital, not our individual consumption habits, if it is to be successful. Tucked away in the suburbs of Melbourne, Australia, is this unassuming house. Owners Sam and Helen have retrofitted their residence with solar panels, an abundant garden, a biogas digester, and more. Is this degrowth? Well, yes and also no. Sam and Helen's house certainly point to the wonderful possibilities and solutions to building individual zero carbon systems. But for me, if degrowth ends there, at lifestylism, it will ultimately fail as a political project. Which is why, as the authors of The Future of Degrowth claim, Degrowth must envision a pluriverse. They quote the Zapatistas saying, We must envision a world where many worlds fit. According to The Future is Degrowth, these many worlds coalesce in five main currents of degrowth, some of which are more effective in moving past and struggling against capitalism than others. The first of which is the institutional current, a strain of degrowth spearheaded by green liberal reformers. Wielding government power and electoral politics, these degrowthers are trying to use current capitalist governments to push through regulations and fiscal deterrence, like carbon taxes or heat pump subsidies. These are ultimately reforms, many of which, like window retrofit subsidies or electric stove tax rebates, tinker around the edges, avoiding ground-up demolition of capitalism. While others represent radical or non-reformist reforms like income maximums, work-hour reductions, or free electrified public transit, which seek to weaken capitalist power on the road to an eco-social degrowth revolution. But there are also more individualized currents of degrowth, what we can call the sufficiency-oriented current. This current emphasizes the right-sizing of individual consumption through DIY approaches like that of Helen and Sam in the suburbs. While effective on a small local scale, this focus on individual lifestyle transformation not only ignores the constant capitalist forces pushing us to consume, as I mentioned before, but it also, as the authors of The Future is Degrowth write, downplays the importance of necessary social and structural change. In short, completely cutting yourself off from fossil fuels and dramatically decreasing your resource consumption is difficult in a world where most everything around us requires or is produced through fossil fuels. And even if you're successful in that personalized degrowth, fossil capital's profits will still continue to rise unimpeded. Which is why this current must be combined with the third current of degrowth, what the future is degrowth calls the commoning or alternative economy current, with a focus on sovereignty, solidarity, and resource sharing. This current attempts to achieve collective now topias outside of our capitalist mode of production. This looks like community-supported agriculture, worker-owned co ops, or land sovereignty and agrarian struggles in the imperial periphery that seek the production of materials for use rather than exchange and profit. One of the goals of this current is to build enough collective power outside of the dominant capitalist model to eventually challenge it head on. This community centered degrowth current also. Ties into the fourth path of degrowth, the feminist current. Feminist degrowth foregrounds the importance of care and reproductive activities as a crucial part of a zero-carbon world. It's a current which seeks a transformation from the nuclear family and to ways of being and relationships that encourage strong community networks of care, instead. And finally, the post-capitalist current. This type of degrowth argues that international emancipatory revolutions that place the ownership of production into the hands of the masses are crucial for any degrowth agenda. This means building worker and peasant power. It means the destruction of capitalism and in its ashes, the construction of an eco-socialist state that decreases production to focus on use and necessities rather than profit. It also looks like a worker-led revolution to obtain a reduction in work hours, the shuddering of industrial behemoths like the fossil fuel industry, the redistribution of resources internationally, reparations to the periphery for centuries of imperial plunder, and much more. Ultimately, by the numbers, degrowth looks like, as this paper describes, a 60% reduction in global energy consumption, and a 95% reduction of energy use in Imperial Core countries like the US. The researchers of this paper claim that it is possible to do this while also providing a decent living for everyone on Earth. They claim that in this world, everyone has access to highly efficient washing, cooking, and housing facilities, rapid and expensive public transit, free healthcare and education, free internet access, fresh and hot water, and more. There would be abundant green spaces and communal gardens, and substantially reduced work hours. The authors of this paper show that a world that uses and produces less is possible in technical terms. The barriers are not technologies, but instead social and economic forces, which is why we'll most likely need some form of all of those five currents in the struggle to achieve this degrowth. But some of these currents are more crucial than others, because capital accumulation will not magically end because a few communities revealed that living a zero carbon, low consumption lifestyle is possible. Ultimately, degrowth must be married to a post capitalist economic framework, one that places production into the hands of the people, one that is democratically planned so that we aren't creating mountains of waste or products that only mask our hollow alienation for a brief moment. Degrowth must be accompanied by eco socialism.