Green (Living) Review: degrowth

Showing posts with label degrowth. Show all posts

How to Shrink the Economy without Crashing It: A Ten-Point Plan

The human economy is currently too big to be sustainable. We know this because Global Footprint Network, which methodically tracks the relevant data, informs us that humanity is now using 1.5 Earths’ worth of resources.

We can temporarily use resources faster than Earth regenerates them only by borrowing from the future productivity of the planet, leaving less for our descendants. But we cannot do this for long. One way or another, the economy (and here we are talking mostly about the economies of industrial nations) must shrink until it subsists on what Earth can provide long-term.

Saying “one way or another” implies that this process can occur either advertently or inadvertently: that is, if we do not shrink the economy deliberately, it will contract of its own accord after reaching non-negotiable limits. As I explained in my book The End of Growth, there are reasons to think that such limits are already starting to bite. Indeed, most industrial economies are either slowing or finding it difficult to grow at rates customary during the second half of the last century. Modern economies have been constructed to require growth, so that shrinkage causes defaults and layoffs; mere lack of growth is perceived as a serious problem requiring immediate application of economic stimulus. If nothing is done deliberately to reverse growth or pre-adapt to inevitable economic stagnation and contraction, the likely result will be an episodic, protracted, and chaotic process of collapse continuing for many decades or perhaps centuries, with innumerable human and non-human casualties. This may in fact be the most likely path forward.

Is it possible, at least in principle, to manage the process of economic contraction so as to avert chaotic collapse? Such a course of action would face daunting obstacles. Business, labor, and government all want more growth in order to expand tax revenues, create more jobs, and provide returns on investments. There is no significant constituency within society advocating a deliberate, policy-led process of degrowth, while there are powerful interests seeking to maintain growth and to deny evidence that expansion is no longer feasible.

Life in a ‘degrowth’ economy, and why you might actually enjoy it

What does genuine economic progress look like? The orthodox answer is that a bigger economy is always better, but this idea is increasingly strained by the knowledge that, on a finite planet, the economy can’t grow for ever.

This week’s Addicted to Growth conference in Sydney is exploring how to move beyond growth economics and towards a “steady-state” economy.

But what is a steady-state economy? Why it is it desirable or necessary? And what would it be like to live in?

The global predicament

We used to live on a planet that was relatively empty of humans; today it is full to overflowing, with more people consuming more resources. We would need one and a half Earths to sustain the existing economy into the future. Every year this ecological overshoot continues, the foundations of our existence, and that of other species, are undermined.

At the same time, there are great multitudes around the world who are, by any humane standard, under-consuming, and the humanitarian challenge of eliminating global poverty is likely to increase the burden on ecosystems still further.

Meanwhile the population is set to hit 11 billion this century. Despite this, the richest nations still seek to grow their economies without apparent limit.

Naomi Klein to Degrowth Conference: Climate Change Can Deliver 'People's Shock'

Status quo is not an option if we are to rein in runaway emissions, This Changes Everything author says in address to conference

"You're having the core conversation of our time."

That was the message delivered on Tuesday by author Naomi Klein to participants of a conference whose focus is on "concrete steps towards a society beyond the imperative of growth."

Klein's opening address to the Fourth International Conference on Degrowth for Ecological Sustainability and Social Equity, which kicked off Tuesday in the German city of Leipzig, made perfect sense, as the themes of her new book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. The Climate, overlap those of the conference — that addressing the climate crisis is incompatible with the current growth-focused economy.

"The premise from which my book begins is one that I think we all pretty much agree on," Klein said, "that when it comes to addressing the climate crisis, we ... have failed catastrophically."

The world's track records on climate action "are not something to be proud of," she said, and they have set us on on a trajectory to live in a world that could see as much as a 6-degree rise in temperature from pre-industrial levels.

The "status quo is not an option," Klein said. "Radical change of some kind, whether physical or political, are our only options left."

"This is why the climate crisis challenges centrist liberals most of all because they subscribe to an ideology that is so resistant to the idea of radical change, to the idea of anything but incremental, reformist change."

As she argues in This Changes Everything, she said in her address that "our failure, most of all, has to do with the tragic, bad timing of this particular crisis." Scientific consensus on emissions-drive carbon crisis has been in for over 50 years, yet it took until the late 1980s when noted climate scientist James Hansen testified before Congress about the link between emissions and warming for it to hit a turning point in North America, she explained. Yet, she said, this same moment in time marked a so-called triumph of "liberal ideology." It was the time of the rise of "free trade" and WTO trade tribunals, austerity policies that clash with measures that could prevent and deal with climate disruption, the global north's refusal to own up to climate debts it owes the global south, and the privatization of energy sector fueled by profit motive. These liberal triumphs "systematically sabotaged the actions that were needed to respond to this crisis," she charged.