Degrowth 101
What is degrowth?
There are smarter people than I who have been discussing this for years, so let’s start with a definition from some of them about degrowth. Degrowth is:
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.[1]
Pretty simple right?
Degrowth can also be seen as a de-emphasis on growth. Our global economy is set up to be a perpetual growth machine. But we are running into a problem. We can’t keep growing forever on a planet with finite resources. We are bumping up against environmental disasters that are directly linked to our consumption. Climate change is just one of these.
Planetary boundaries are a framework to describe limits to the impacts of human activities on Earth’s systems. Beyond these limits, these systems may not be able to self-regulate. In addition to climate change, these boundaries include things like ocean acidification, biosphere integrity, land-system change, and freshwater change. You can see from the below graphic from the Stockholm Resilience Center that we are already on the bad side of 6 of 9 planetary boundaries.
Graphic from Stockholm Resilience Center: 2023
We have crossed these boundaries because we aren’t managing our natural resources very well. We are overusing them, overconsuming and when we do consume them we tend to discard them in ways that harm the planet. The “Novel Entities” boundary from the charts above are things that we have created and introduced into the environment that have disruptive effects on earth systems. This includes things like pollutants and plastics.
So where are we headed?
In the 1972 report, The Limits to Growth, scientists took a serious look at where our society was headed with an eye on the resources available to humanity. They concluded that by about the mid-21st century, our society would likely collapse under a business-as-usual scenario – the one we have continued since then. The
researchers forecasted several scenarios for the future, most of which predicted a point where natural resources would become so scarce that further economic growth would become impossible, and the quality of human life would drastically fall. The report predicted a collapse of global populations due to food and resource scarcities.
In 2020, a researcher from KPMG, Gaya Herrington, decided to revisit the findings of the original Limits to Growth report. Herrington found that even in the most positive scenario she called Comprehensive Technology (CT), where technological advancements helped mitigate climate change pollution and increase food supplies, many natural resources would still run out. A collapse of society is still very much a possibility, if not the most likely scenario in the coming decades.
We might be a little ahead of schedule. The environmental breakdown is already happening.
Why are we doing this? The tyranny of GDP.
In the 1930s, the economist Simon Kuznets was commissioned by the US Department of Commerce to come up with better economic metrics for measuring the economy than those that were in use at the time. Kuznets came up with gross domestic product (GDP). Gross domestic product simply measures everything produced in an economy. More formally, GDP is defined as:
The total monetary or market value of all the finished goods and services produced within a country’s borders in a specific period.
To be fair to Mr. Kuznets, at the time he warned that GDP should not be used to judge the total welfare of the country because it only measured economic output, ignoring all the factors that went into that economic output.
GDP is how we measure our success as a nation and as a planet. Every month reporters wait with bated breath to hear the monthly or quarterly GDP numbers so they can tell everyone if the economy has grown or not. These reports are framed to report if the country has succeeded or not.
I understood from a very young age the importance of GDP when I watched the nightly news with my parents. I quickly understood that GDP was seen as the report card for the nation. If GDP went up, all would be well. If GDP went down, we could have a recession, which would be bad for everyone.
However, GDP is a horrible measure of human well-being. It is a great measure of whether our capital (money) is producing more goods and services than we consume. But well-being and economic growth are not the same thing. Yet, that is what we are told GDP means.
If everyone in the world smoked a pack of cigarettes per day – that would be great for global GDP because those cigarette sales would boost GDP in the short run. In the long run, we would have serious health and productivity problems that outweighed the increase in GDP from mass smoking.
We shouldn’t overvalue GDP, but that is how we measure our success currently, and how politicians get elected. Every politician will promise growth – even as we are beginning to understand that such an addiction to growth is killing us.
That’s okay, well just switch to “green growth”. No, you won’t, and not fast enough.
This is where a rational person who has been paying attention to what is happening in the world will say, “Let’s just green our growth”. As of 2020, about 84 percent of global energy use came from fossil fuels. We should switch that energy mix over to “green” sources as soon as possible.
But that won’t be enough. Things like solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear, hydroelectric, hydrogen, wave power, and fanciful notions like energy beamed from space and nuclear fusion may play an increasing role in our energy mix in the coming decades. But none of them alone can replace fossil fuels. Even when we add them all together, these “green” fuels can’t help us avoid catastrophic climate change and other planetary boundary-based tragedies. For example, ocean acidification may wipe out most marine life this century.
In addition to green power not being able to supply all we need, there will be more people in need of power and energy each coming year. The global population will continue growing to about 10.4 billion people (there are about 8 billion now) near the end of the century before peaking and slowly declining.
Green growth deals with the “supply” side of the energy equation. Yes, we should green that supply as quickly as possible. But we need to tackle the demand side of things as well. That is where degrowth comes in.
So degrowth will save us! Yes and no.
I plan to go into more depth on all the aspects of degrowth as I continue writing here, but I’ll give a summary here.
Degrowth tries to focus on human outcomes rather than the economic outcomes that are currently emphasized in the capitalist system in which most of us live. Degrowth emphasizes scaling back or shutting down those industries that are harming us (fossil fuel production, plastics) and growing those sectors that help human well-being (green energy, elder care, education).
Degrowth isn’t a destination in and of itself, it is the road you take to get there. Degrowth isn’t an economic system such as capitalism or socialism. Degrowth is a path to a “steady state” economy in which we are living within our resources as a global civilization. According to the landmark report, The Economics of Biodiversity, published in 2021, we are using earth's resources as though we had 1.6 earths to use.
Degrowth is the path we need to take so that we only use the resources of 1.0 earths per year.
Degrowth is about slowing down and living our lives in a way that does not overconsume our resources. Degrowth values human outcomes over economic outcomes so that we can eventually settle on an economic model that allows us to live meaningful lives without destroying our planet and ourselves.
Degrowth is not austerity or forcing the global economy into a depression. No one needs to go back to living in caves. But we do need to re-evaluate how we are running our economies. We need to throttle back on the things that are harming us and invest more in the things that will help us. Human outcomes like well-being, life expectancy, literacy, infant mortality, and yes, happiness should be used to judge our success as a civilization, not GDP.
I will speak more about the different aspects of degrowth in the coming weeks and months. This is just an introduction. Some of the topics to look forward to in our discussions are:
- A four-day workweek
- Income inequality
- Not investing in what is destroying us
- Investing in what can help us thrive
- A just transition
- Getting rid of planned obsolescence
- Scaling down marketing
- Universal public services
- Universal basic income
- What to measure if not GDP
- Modern monetary theory
- Public job guarantees
- Redesigning our cities
- Rethinking how we travel
- Rethinking what we eat
- Change in our culture is needed
- Change in our politics is needed
- Change in our leadership is needed
This isn’t an exhaustive list, but it is too much to get into here without you yelling at me to stop writing. So, I’ll stop. But that list above is a taste of what is to come. If there is something that you want me to cover that isn’t there, please let me know.
Degrowth isn’t some utopian dream. It is about survival.
I don’t consider myself an environmentalist or a socialist. If people are those things, that’s fine. I don’t consider myself those things. I say this here because degrowth is often associated with those two groups. Degrowth is heavily focused on positive environmental outcomes and many degrowth policies reside on the left side of the political spectrum. I’m not making any judgments there; I just want to tell you where I come from. I live in the United States, and I have voted for liberals and conservatives in the past. I consider myself independent politically.
I think we need to take the degrowth path because it offers us the best chance of survival. Politics has nothing to do with it.
I have spent the last 20 years of my life working in the finance industry, focusing on sustainability issues. I have researched plenty on sustainability, green growth, and where we are heading if we don’t address climate change and other planetary boundaries we have crossed.
If we do nothing or don’t act fast enough, we are guaranteeing a dismal existence for our children and the potential collapse of our societies and maybe even our civilization. This isn’t hyperbole. The predictions of Limits to Growth were correct. Scientists today are telling us the same things. We will destroy ourselves unless we change how we live.
I don’t care what your politics are. More importantly, Mother Nature doesn’t care what your politics are. Physics and chemistry will determine the future of our existence, not our political views. We need to all realize that and act accordingly.
Degrowth is not the only answer, but it is a part of the answer to the question of how we can get where we need to be.
Thank you for coming this far with me so far.
More to come.
[1] Francois Schneider, Giorgos Kallis, and Joan Martinez-Alier, ‘Crisis or Opportunity? Economic Degrowth for Social Equity and Ecological Sustainability, Journal of Cleaner Production 18 (2010): 511.