"This book navigates the practice and strategies of the movement, looking at its strengths and weaknesses. Covering horizontal democracy, local economies and the reduction of work, it shows us why degrowth is a compelling and realistic project."
Desirability and feasibility of perpetual economic growth is a matter of academic debate.
As of now degrwoth is not even considered as a climate change mitigation measure in projections of future #climatechange. Instead, they rely on technological innovation and further growth.
Here is cool new paper on the challenges of implementing the concept of #degrowth in models. 👇
There are disputes on how to talk about climate change so that individuals care more about or "buy" climate protection. Not too alarmist, mainstream, positive enough?
Meanwhile CO2 emissions - the primary driver of #climatechange - are still rising globally and atmospheric CO2 reaches new record values.
I have come to the conclusion that fighting directly against our capitalist rulers in an attempt to overthrow them will never succeed. They are too rich, too powerful, and completely unwilling to act rationally.
So our best choice now is to "be the change we want to see in the world," to demonstrate a better way of living. By doing that, we will also prepare ourselves and those we can involve in the effort to survive the coming collapse of modern industrial society and perhaps emerge from the rubble with a chance to help our species move forward.
Kate Raworth asks us to consider a new meaning of progress...
Instead of pursuing endless growth, it is time to pursue well-being for all people as part of a thriving world, with policymaking that is designed in the service of this goal. This results in a very different conception of progress: in the place of endless growth we seek a dynamic balance, one that aims to meet the essential needs of every person while protecting the life-supporting systems of our planetary home.
When we turn away from growth as the goal, we can focus directly on asking what it would take to deliver social and ecological well-being, through an economy that is regenerative and distributive by design. There are many possibilities – such as driving a low-carbon, zero-waste industrial transformation, with a green jobs guarantee, alongside free public transport, personal carbon allowances, and progressive wealth taxes.
Policies like these were, only a decade ago, considered too radical to be realistic. Today they look nothing less than essential.
Growth or Scale? By Tom Murphy, originally published by Do the Math May 22, 2024
"...It’s not too hard to lay hands on records of global resource use. One publication I ran across has some useful graphs for a few raw materials in common use. The first graph shows annual extraction of copper, zinc, and lead since 1900, usefully...
...From 1960 to 2005, in no region of the world did annual production of timber moderate alongside growth. The total global activity almost doubled (77% increase) over this interval rather than stagnating or tumbling by a factor of two as growth did.
The result for all of these resources is clear: scale is a more apt correlate than growth. The curves bear a family resemblance to the hockey-stick scale curves: far less resemblance to the peaking growth curves. A confounder in this is that per-capita resource extraction has also risen for many materials, in association with economic growth..."
Kevin Anderson is professor of energy and climate change at the Universities of Manchester (UK), Uppsala (Sweden), and Bergen (Norway). Recently he was asked to write an article for The Conversation. The piece he submitted was turned down, however, because the editors claimed it was “too polemical.”
Here are a few excerpts. A link to the full original submission is below.
The wealthiest 1% of people on the planet are responsible for double the greenhouse gas emissions of the poorest 50%.
This 1% of humanity uses its awesome power to manipulate societal aspirations and the narratives around climate change. These extend from pseudo-technical solutions to labeling extreme any narrative that questions inequality. This dangerous framing is compounded by a generally supine media owned or controlled by the 1%.
It is clear is that a rapid response to climate change demands a fundamental reallocation of society’s productive capacity, its labour and resources. Three decades of failure have removed any wiggle room.
Our commitments to 1.5°C and 2°C demand that existing houses and buildings be transformed, that public transport, walking and cycling be the main modes of moving in cities, perhaps with small pools of rented electric vehicles in rural areas, that our energy supply rapidly become electrified, from around 20% today to near 90% by 2040 – and all of it generated without fossil fuels.
Fast international travel will have to be for urgent or emergency purposes only. A triage approach is needed to ensure that the reallocation of society’s small carbon budget, its labour and resources, are used wisely.
Spot on. I wasn't aware data centers were substituting water use for CO2 emissions as a form of greenwashing, but can't say I'm surprised.
The fact that reducing CO2 has become (incorrectly) synonymous with sustainability certainly disguises much of the damage we do and the root cause of the problem. At its core, it's not that we emit too much carbon, it's that we overconsume and the climate crisis is one symptom of it.
Theoretically, it is still possible that all the leaders of major governments could jointly choose to enact radical degrowth policies — but a realistic look at the world today makes it clear how unlikely that would be.
No matter how much we want it, how loudly we yell, or how hard we protest, I can’t see that happening.
So what’s the alternative?
Since I began posting regularly here at Mastodon a year and a half ago, many people have asked in comments: What can we do? What actions can we take?
My answer has always been that the most important steps you can take are personal and local. No, I don’t mean just lowering your carbon footprint, although of course that’s a good idea. I mean beginning to make the big changes now on a local level that are coming to us, sooner or later, whether we like it or not.
We must simplify. We will simplify, at some point, so why not start now? Be an example. Find others who want to change, and join with them. Build a community. Create co-ops, clothing and furniture exchanges, neighborhood gardens, seed libraries, tool libraries, and establish teaching and training sessions.
Develop systems of sharing resources — such as low-carbon transportation, small-scale solar or wind power, engineering know-how, financial assistance, medical expertise, and more. The possibilities are endless.
You can do this. We can do it. Together, we will change our world.
Rupert Read (@GreenRupertRead) was formerly part of Extinction Rebellion and is now co-director of the Climate Majority Project. Although I don’t agree with everything he wrote in the essay linked below, I do want to emphasize this piece of good advice…
When we are failed by our leaders, when the system fails, this does not absolve us from responsibility. On the contrary, everything is now at stake. If you care about anything at all, then whether you know it or not, you care about the climate crisis. For we are on track to have it sweep away all that we hold dear.
If you care about the arts, or about disability rights, or about your own children, then you care about this: for they will all, on a default setting, get swept away by the climate meltdown. So you must, at minimum, consider what you can do to change this situation, to avert or cope with this mother-of-all-threats hanging over us now.
How can you be most effective in the shared struggle for a future? If you are rich, it is probably by throwing your money into the ring (and thus, in due course, becoming not-rich). If you are in business, the raft of things that you ought to do starts with lobbying hard for government to regulate the business world more effectively, to reward ecologically sound behaviour, and end the race-to-the-bottom that competitive markets otherwise create.
For teachers and academics, it is about teaching and researching the crisis, and communicating it lovingly and truthfully, supportively and efficaciously. For creatives, the way forward is somewhat similar: put your talents into helping imagine how we can get through this. Until we can see a path through what is coming, we are unlikely to get serious enough about building it.
For many people, the work will be to get seriously involved in climate-preparedness, in resilience-building in your community, as best you can. The beauty of such preparedness-building is not only its practical value, but its tendency to wake up others to the crisis.
Feeling small and relatively powerless does not absolve you. So long as you have any power or voice whatsoever, you are obliged to use it. You are not absolved by wondering if it is perhaps too late. Too late for what? Yes, it is way too late for a smooth ‘net zero’ transition, or for us to be able to stay in the climatic ‘safe’ zone.
It is too late for this civilisation to continue to exist. But it is not too late to co-create a new one; it is not too late to transform and adapt; and it is never too late to seek do the right thing in the place you find yourself.
Yesterday we learned how climate scientists feel about the looming existential threat of global climate change. They’re terrified. It’s obvious to them and it should be to us that the only rational option is to change course, quickly and decisively.
So, are we ready now to face some hard questions about what level of degrowth is actually necessary? To examine what that might look like, and how different it would be to live in a truly ecologically sustainable society?
Today I will devote an extended series of posts to the best description I’ve found yet about how severe our present situation is, and what we can and should do in the face of such daunting challenges. I’m going to excerpt heavily from a recent long article by Ted Trainer, an Australian academic, author, and advocate for degrowth. Trainer is a retired lecturer from the School of Social Work, University of New South Wales. He has written numerous books and articles on sustainability and is developing Pigface Point, an alternative lifestyle educational site near Sydney.
In the linked article, Trainer criticizes and debunks inadequate proposals such as the Green New Deal, along with the whole idea of ‘green growth’. He argues, however, that we must not only reject capitalism but also must recognize the inability of Marxism or even state-centered eco-socialism to make all the necessary changes that could avert societal collapse and global catastrophe.
This is a brief introduction. Eight separate posts will follow soon…
ARTICLE TITLE: A (Friendly) Critique of the Degrowth Movement
SUBTITLE: Sufficient degrowth cannot be achieved without enormous and radical transition to some kind of simpler way.
THEME: The recent spread of degrowth is encouraging — however, the movement is founded on a number of confusions and mistaken initiatives. This is understandable given its early stage, and can be regarded as a healthy exploring of possibilities. The literature welcomes pluralism, but we should try to find unifying directions.
First, the issue of definition: what is degrowth about, and what should it be about?
The term is not a good descriptor for the movement that has emerged. The movement is asserting a wild variety of criticisms of and alternatives to the present globalized, industrialized, urbanized, financialized, neoliberal, sexist, grotesquely unequal, extractivist, imperialist, etc. world order. The expressed goals include all manner of social criticisms, ideals, and policies, ranging from mildly reformist to ultra radical.
Many of these — such as monetary reform, making trade more equitable, housing justice, curbing advertising, fairer taxes, reducing debt, indigenous rights, decolonization — actually have nothing to do with the reduction of economic growth, or could easily be implemented within an economy that continues to be about growth.
Thus the term ‘Degrowth’ has become a rag-bag of utopian dreams. A more accurate title might be the ‘Finally Fed Up With Capitalism’ movement. All manner of ideals, dreams, and alternate policies in a wide variety of fields have been put forward as degrowth proposals. This is highly desirable because it shows that discontent with consumer-capitalist society is finally boiling over.
These many and varied discontents can be welcomed as undermining the complacency that characterized previous decades. But the scene is quite confused and chaotic, especially with respect to causes and solutions, and this is reflected within the degrowth movement. Even among degrowth advocates, there is little realization that the multi-factored global predicament cannot be resolved unless there is an extremely big and difficult revolution whereby most of the elements within our present economic, political, and cultural systems are scrapped and replaced by radically different systems.
Degrowth should, instead, be seen in terms of reducing resource consumption and environmental impact, which means it is essentially about one thing: reducing GDP.
The crucial point here is that the new lifestyles and systems must be materially very simple. Little of the degrowth literature recognizes this, let alone focuses on it. Most of it proceeds as if we can all go on living more or less as we do now, with more or less the same kinds of institutions we have now, via reformed institutions and better policies.
The degrowth movement does not recognize that the magnitude of the overshoot — the degree of unsustainability of present society — totally prohibits that. To recognize this would decisively focus thinking about goals and strategies, and rule out many currently popular options.
Excerpts from an article titled “A (Friendly) Critique of the Degrowth Movement”…
Most people do not grasp the extent to which this society has become unsustainable. We have far exceeded the limits to growth. There is no possibility that current per capita levels of resource consumption in rich countries can be kept up for long. Only a few of the world’s people enjoy these living standards, and the rest can never rise to anything like them. This is the basic cause of our big global problems, including resource depletion, environmental damage, the deprivation of billions in the poor countries, and resource struggles.
There is a strong case that if we are to live in sustainable ways that all could share, rich world per capita rates of consumption must be reduced by 90%. The common response is the ‘tech-fix’ claim that technical advance will enable GDP growth to be ‘decoupled’ from resource and environmental impact. But there is now overwhelming evidence that, apart from some limited areas, this is not happening and is not going to happen. [See https://thesimplerway.info/DecouplingRefs.htm]
If GDP is increased, impacts increase. It is not possible to solve the biggest problems if we are determined to maintain present levels of consumption and production — the solution can only be found on the demand side; that is, by greatly reducing production and consumption.
A major cause of our predicament is that we have an economic system which must have growth and which allows the market and profit to determine what happens. As a result, what is produced, who gets it, and what is developed is determined by what is most profitable to the few who own most of the capital. The outcome is not determined by what is most needed. That is why 1% now own about half the world’s wealth, and the poor countries have been ‘developed’ into a form which ships their resources out to enrich corporations, while most people in even the richest countries struggle to get by.
The crucial point is that we have to shift to values and ways that enable all to live well on a very small fraction of the per capita resource and environmental impacts we in rich countries have now. We cannot achieve a sustainable way of life which all can share unless there is an enormous degrowth transition to far simpler lifestyles and systems.
The magnitude of the required degrowth is not sufficiently recognised within the movement. Nor are the implications for social change — because the current overshoot is so big that only change to extremely different lifestyles and systems can solve the global problems.
Excerpts from an article titled “A (Friendly) Critique of the Degrowth Movement”…
The basic element of the required sustainable social form will be most people living in small, highly self-sufficient, self-governing cooperative local communities, willingly embracing far simpler lifestyles and systems. Features would include:
🟢 Extensive development of commons providing many free goods, especially “edible landscapes”
🟢 Building using earth, enabling all people to have very low-cost modest housing
🟢 Many committees, e.g., for agriculture, care of aged, youth affairs, entertainment, leisure and cultural activities
🟢 Production of most basic goods by many small local firms and farms (some cooperatives, some privately owned) within and close to settlements
🟢 Much use of intermediate and low technologies, especially craft and hand-tool production, mainly for their quality of life benefits
🟢 Few paid officials
🟢 Large cashless free goods and gifting sectors
🟢 Little need for transport, enabling bicycle access to work and conversion of most suburban roads to commons
🟢 The need to work for monetary income only one or two days a week, at a relaxed pace — thus enabling much involvement in arts and crafts and community activities
🟢 Town-owned banks
🟢 Local currencies that do not involve interest
🟢 Relatively little dependence on corporations, professionals, bureaucrats and high-tech ways
🟢 No unemployment because communities organize to use all productive labour and to ensure everyone has a livelihood
Most people must live in settlements of this general kind, but there could still be (small) cities, industrial centres, universities, high-tech hospitals, etc. When unnecessary production is eliminated, there could be more socially useful R&D than there is now.
This simpler way is classical Anarchism. It is about thoroughly participatory democracy, enabling communities of equals to cooperatively take control of their functioning and fate. It cannot involve centralized control or top-down authority; all must be involved citizens who come together to collectively govern themselves.
Sufficient degrowth cannot be achieved without enormous and radical transition to some kind of simpler way.
Excerpts from an article titled “A (Friendly) Critique of the Degrowth Movement”…
Degrowth literature does not recognize the stunning enormity of the task. We are confronted by a daunting ‘degrowth conundrum’. Degrowth of the magnitude described above means phasing out, writing off, and scrapping most of the present amount of factories, corporations, transport, trade, industry, investment, financing, and profit-making.
It requires ceasing most of the producing and consuming going on. And this in an economy, a society, and a culture that is fiercely and blindly committed to constant and limitless increases in production and consumption and ‘living standards’. It is also an economy structured in such a way that it must have growth or it implodes.
Degrowth means reducing production, jobs, incomes, investments, profits, and living standards. But even a slowing of growth in the current economy creates bankruptcies and unemployment and discontent with government. It is an unavoidable ‘grow or die’ trap.
The most obvious consequence is that capitalism cannot possibly move in the degrowth direction. Capitalism is a growth system. Its fundamental nature is about investing capital to accumulate more capital to invest in additional productive ventures. If growth even slows, the system sickens. The few who own most of the capital constantly look for investment outlets for their ever-increasing volumes of capital. They have no choice about this. If a capitalist doesn’t try to take or generate more sales opportunities, then his rivals will do so and drive him bankrupt. Capitalists are trapped in capitalism like everybody else.
Again, the existence and magnitude of this conundrum receive almost no recognition in the degrowth literature. There is no discussion of what to do with those workers who used to produce goods to sell but will no longer do so. Most accounts calmly state vast and highly problematic utopian proposals (such as debt cancellation) without any sign of trepidation in the face of the overwhelming difficulties. The implicit reassuring assumption is usually the one common in Green New Deal literature, that at worst only slight reductions will be needed, existing institutions will be capable of making them, and more efficient technology will cut waste, etc.
The literature shows little or no sign of shock or despair at the magnitude of the task we are confronted with, and it offers no ideas as to what is to be done with the displaced workers or the capitalist class. This is a stunning failure to join the dots; degrowth means, among many other hugely difficult things, scrapping capitalism. Anyone within the movement who is reluctant to face up to this is seriously confused.
Excerpts from an article titled “A (Friendly) Critique of the Degrowth Movement”…
Given the situation we are in, the amount of degrowth needed is enormous, and this means the goal has to involve huge and radical reductions and simplifications in lifestyles and systems. This, in turn, means transitioning to radically different economic, political, settlement, and cultural arrangements.
So what does that mean for strategy?
Most degrowth pronouncements explicitly or implicitly assume that strategy must focus on getting the state to implement desired policies. It is about pleading with government to implement degrowth, or demanding that it do so, either soon or in the future. This assumes that the state is capable of implementing degrowth policies (which, I argue, it is not).
This focus on the state as savior is most evident within the Marxist/socialist strand of the degrowth movement. Marx’s analysis of capitalism and its contradictions, dynamics, and fate are of great importance, but his ideas on the revolutionary goal and the transition process are seriously mistaken, due primarily to the advent of the limits to growth. A satisfactory post-capitalist society must contradict the dominant socialist vision deriving from Marx. It cannot be capitalist, but nor can it be highly industrialized, or state-centred, or affluent, or have a high or growing GDP.
Degrowth is essentially a cultural problem, not primarily an economic or redistributive or power problem. It has to involve largely dismantling the existing industrial, trade, agricultural, financial, etc. systems and replacing them with smaller and radically different systems driven by citizens committed to new ideas and values.
This cannot be done by force; it can only be achieved by people who understand and willingly accept simpler lifestyles and systems. The state cannot give or enforce the worldview, values, or dispositions — without which such structural changes cannot be made. No amount of subsidies or information or secret police can make villagers cooperate enthusiastically and happily to plan and develop and run their thriving local economies.
Excerpts from an article titled “A (Friendly) Critique of the Degrowth Movement”…
We are a very long way from the ideological conditions that must prevail before significant movement towards degrowth can possibly take place. We cannot get anywhere unless and until some kind of simpler way has come to be widely understood and willingly accepted. Thus, strategy must concentrate on how to bring about that huge cultural change.
The eco-socialist is strongly inclined to counter that if we had state power, we could facilitate that change in consciousness, help people to see the need for localism, etc. But there is a major logical confusion here. No government with the required policy platform — one focused on transition to simpler systems and lifestyles and cutting the GDP — could get elected unless people in general had long before adopted that extremely new and radical worldview.
So the main task would be to work on the development of that change in grassroots consciousness, and if that succeeded to the point where the right sort of party was elected, the revolution would have already been won. The essence of this revolution is in the cultural change, and if that is achieved then the taking of state power and the structural changes thereby enabled will be consequences of the revolution. Focusing on taking state power here and now would not contribute much, if at all, to cultural change.
A major tactical implication is: ‘Do not fight to eliminate capitalism’. This contradicts the socialist’s fundamental assumption that we must get rid of the old before the new can be built. But the historically unique situation we are now in presents us with the need for a non-confrontational strategy, one that involves turning away and ‘ignoring capitalism to death’. (This does not deny the need to confront over specific threats, such as logging a forest.)
Again, getting rid of capitalism and installing a socialist government would be of no value unless the newly installed government held a radically different, much simpler perspective — and it would not do so unless it had been elected by a public committed to that perspective. The task therefore is to create that kind of public. But then it would not be the state that had built the simpler way; it would have been done by people taking control of their local communities.
Excerpts from an article titled “A (Friendly) Critique of the Degrowth Movement”…
Few people have any understanding of the limits to growth situation and the need for large-scale degrowth. The almost universally held supreme goal among virtually everyone in executive government and the associated bureaucracies, in the corporate world, in the economics profession, in the media, and by the general public, remains indubitable commitment to limitless increases in production and consumption.
For these reasons it is evident that this society is not capable of dealing with the predicament. Our fundamental premise is that there is no possibility of achieving transition to a sustainable and just society deliberately and rationally via the existing official policymaking institutions and processes.
It is difficult to doubt that we are heading for extreme global system breakdown, likely to be triggered by financial collapse. This could eliminate any chance of building a new society, but it will open the way for us to try. Our task here and now is to help as many people as possible to see the sensible way to go, so that they will work hard on developing local alternatives as things deteriorate. People will be forced by circumstances to come together in an effort to take control of their situation.
How might we get there, then?
We need to work on the cultural problem, to change ideas and values, so that in time enough people are in favor of degrowth. This does not mean stop shouting at government to demand those policy changes: keep doing that, because it helps to get degrowth on the public agenda. But don’t do it with the intention or expectation of getting government to take any notice of you; do it as an educational strategy.
Again, we get nowhere unless and until there is a very different mentality, keenly aware that growth, affluence, and capitalism have to be dumped, and that the answer has to be mostly cooperative, self-sufficient, self-governing, frugal, local systems. The most important thing we can do to contribute to the emergence of that mentality is simply to raise the issues whenever and wherever we can.
Perhaps the most effective way to do this is to get involved in ‘prefiguring’ alternative ways — that is, building some of the structures and processes the revolution is for, such as cooperatives, community gardens, community-owned swap-shops, etc. But it is most important that these ventures be designed as educational devices, intended to introduce visitors to the big picture and thus to raise awareness of the need for huge and radical transition.
Concluding excerpts from an article titled “A (Friendly) Critique of the Degrowth Movement”…
The coming time of great troubles could be the end of us, but if it is slow-onset and mild at first, it will create conditions that will be powerfully conducive to the desired transition. As it impacts, it will force people to realize that the old systems are not going to provide for them and that they will have to get together in their neighborhoods, suburbs, towns, and regions to increase their capacity to collectively provide for themselves.
It is a race against time. Our task is to ensure that as the system crumbles, we will have helped enough people to adopt the new degrowth perspective to be able to begin to build the sustainable and just alternative.
As local economies become more widespread and elaborate, and as the global economy deteriorates, it will become increasingly obvious that scarce national resources must be deliberately and rationally devoted to the production of basic necessities, as distinct from being left for market forces to allocate to the most profitable purposes. Local communities will increasingly exercise more demands on and control over central governments, and will take functions away from them. They will organize their own farms and employment agencies, supply systems, and arrangements between towns for mutual security and assistance.
The size and role of central governments will shrink. Big national decisions will tend to devolve to the local level via referenda, federations, and citizen juries. This is how some large regions proceed now: in New England, Switzerland, and Scandinavia, various big national issues are decided by the deliberations and votes of ordinary people. This means a great deal of planning and regulation will take place, as distinct from leaving things to the ‘free market’, but it will not be ‘big state socialism’ — the planning and implementation will be carried out mostly at the local level.
As with the discussion of goals, this approach to strategy is Anarchist. It is not about the socialist goal of trying to take state power here and now in order to run things from the center. It involves establishing elements of post-revolutionary society in order to raise awareness, which is an Anarchist ‘prefiguring’ strategy. When this is widespread and strong, then changing systems and power structures will probably be fairly smooth, peaceful, and easy, because the fundamental cultural revolution will have been achieved.
The chances of the transition proceeding as has been outlined here are not at all promising, but this is the path that must be worked for. One of its merits is that it envisages a transition that could be entirely peaceful and non-authoritarian.
The revolution does not require heroic sacrifice at the barricades. It requires a long and probably slow effort to communicate new ideas and values. This should be the degrowth movement’s main concern here and now, and for a considerable time to come. Degrowth is gaining attention rapidly, but its forces are scattered and should be more focused on the cultural task.
And that concludes this L-O-O-O-N-G series of posts.
I know I’ve given you a lot to take in and many unorthodox ideas to digest. But if you’ll take the time to read it all, think about it, and absorb what’s being proposed, I hope you will see the same level of wisdom in it that I do.
Can economic growth be decoupled from emissions? Yes, for sure, easily even.
Can economic growth be decoupled from environmental degradation in general? Absolutely not. The sheer throughput of materials through the economy, from extraction to waste disposal, must decrease. If we address GHG emissions in isolation from topsoil and biodiversity loss, we will fail to preserve the ecosystems on which we depend for life.