Degrowth: Slowing growth for the environment?
More and more climate activists and political decisionmakers are calling for a reduction in global economic activity – or degrowth. Many believe it's the only way to save the planet. So, how would it work – and is it actually feasible?
Transcript
00:00 Having more has given us a lot of comfort and a lot of choice, but with a pretty big price tag.
00:05 Like more carbon emissions, more resource depletion, more pollution.
00:09 Our addiction to making and consuming more stuff is exhausting the planet.
00:14 Everyone's talking about avoiding a climate catastrophe,
00:17 but is switching to renewable energy and buying electric cars while keeping the status quo really going to help?
00:24 A growing number of people say no.
00:27 They want us to fundamentally change the way we run our economies and with that our lives.
00:32 Some call it degrowth.
00:34 For decades, countries have been judged by the growth of their GDP.
00:40 That's gross domestic product.
00:42 The more goods and services produced, the higher the GDP, the cooler the country.
00:46 To keep having GDP growth accumulating, you also need to keep having more material stuff extracted and going through the economy.
00:53 This is not sustainable on a planet with a finite amount of resources.
00:58 So this is where the idea of degrowth comes in.
01:02 The term degrowth is credited to André Gortz, an Austrian-French social philosopher who in 1972
01:08 questioned whether it was a good idea to constantly make more stuff.
01:12 Shortly after, academics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a report called "The Limits of Growth."
01:18 This rigorous forecast concluded that unless growth was curved, civilization would collapse by 2072.
01:26 Suffice to say, it didn't go down well.
01:29 The academic journal Nature even called it a "whiff of doomsday."
01:34 Degrowth talk started to crop up again in the 2000s, once data began to show just how irreversibly we were harming the planet.
01:42 A recent paper in Nature - yes, the one who pooh-poohed degrowth back in the 70s - suggested that it should be "widely and thoroughly considered."
01:50 And the term has now made its way into the most recent IPCC report on how to stay below 1.5 degrees Celsius.
01:58 One degrowth approach that has been widely considered is decoupling, where you get to maintain economic growth while reducing carbon emissions.
02:08 Where I live in the UK, it's very proud of itself because it claims that it's managed to successfully decarbonize its economy while GDP, I mean, it's not doing well,
02:16 but GDP is growing slowly while our emissions appear to be going down.
02:21 Surprisingly, especially countries with advanced economies, have been able to do it, for example, by shifting towards renewable energy sources.
02:29 Like Denmark, which reduced its consumption-based emissions by 35 percent between 2000 and 2019, while growing the GDP per capita by 16 percent.
02:39 Germany reduced its carbon emissions per capita by 24 percent in the same time frame, while growing 26 percent.
02:46 And even the United States did the same.
02:49 Which sounds great, and definitely is a first step. But the problem is that decoupling is only concerned about CO2.
02:56 We live in many ecological crises, not just one. It's not just an issue of fossil fuel emissions.
03:01 So if we just say words about decarbonization only, you're missing ecological degradation, biodiversity loss.
03:09 The UK has some of the worst biodiversity of any country in the world, never mind the EU. And this doesn't solve that problem.
03:15 What next? The problem is, even those who support what degrowth stands for think the word itself is problematic.
03:23 Why I don't like the term degrowth is it has a negative feel to it. The key thing is shrinking material, the material inputs into economic activity.
03:37 Degrowth sounds scary, like it wants people to return to the dark ages.
03:41 But it actually just means scaling down the least sustainable industries, like mass-produced meat and dairy, fast fashion, car and aviation manufacturing.
03:50 Or ensuring that the things we rely on, refrigerators, phones, washing machines, have a longer shelf life.
03:57 Repairing instead of replacing something the moment it stops working.
04:01 So it's not just about stopping growth, but about increasing growth in sectors that benefit society as a whole.
04:08 Like creating green jobs, training workers on installing renewable energy, insulating buildings and regenerating ecosystems.
04:16 And investing in public transportation and services.
04:19 But is that just wishful thinking? Might this new approach to growth actually make life worse for us?
04:25 This is a crux of the degrowth debate. Would it unravel the advances humans have made?
04:30 Many facets of modern life, like living longer and lower rates of child mortality, are associated with high GDP, among other factors.
04:39 Economists that are in favor of the current system say that more immediately, degrowth could mean widespread job loss, mortgage defaults and business closures.
04:49 That it would force us all into a permanent recession, curtailing research and innovation, the things we need to develop green and more efficient technologies.
04:58 The problem is that active degrowth hasn't happened anywhere yet, meaning that nobody knows whether that would happen.
05:06 How do you address the creation of a world where rich countries don't effectively slam the doors behind themselves and say,
05:15 "We're going to diminish our growth a bit, but we're not going to let you catch up to where we are?"
05:19 And that is a challenge. And a lot of the solutions around that involve large-scale redistribution of wealth and resources between countries that might be possible in a perfect world, but in the real world is very politically challenging.
05:32 One suggestion by degrowthers is that unpayable debts held by low- and middle-income countries should be canceled, so that they can focus their spending on public services.
05:43 The idea is to even the playing field.
05:45 Key things for the global south are technology transfer, to leapfrog dirty technologies and to get the latest generation of renewable technologies to global south countries for their energy needs.
06:03 Number two, finance, climate finance, to make that possible and also to finance other poverty alleviation and so forth.
06:12 Supporters say that through economic degrowth, the needs of more people could actually be served.
06:17 Still, we seem to perceive increasing GDP as a sign that we're winning, that, however you frame it, giving it up for the sake of our future on this planet sounds to most people like we're asking them to start losing.
06:29 So, is the answer to deliberately slow down economic growth? You won't find many governments willing to do that.
06:37 We're moving away from GDP, for example, to metrics that value human impact across a variety of dimensions.
06:43 The Human Development Index that the UN provides is a good example of that.
06:47 There's been some experimentation with the country Bhutan and its gross happiness index that they've talked a lot about.
06:54 And so there might be ways to redefine these metrics of success that would make it more palatable for politicians to embrace things that don't necessarily increase GDP, but increase the average well-being of people in a way that is less resource intensive or destructive.
07:12 Another example is what former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern did in 2019 when she announced a national budget that prioritized citizen well-being and happiness over GDP and economic growth.
07:24 Under the budget, all new spending was required to advance government priorities like improving mental health, reducing child poverty and addressing the inequalities faced by its indigenous population.
07:35 Degrowthers envision an economy driven by alternative principles.
07:41 The wager on degrowth is that we need to imagine a different future, a new ecological, a new relationship between humans and non-human nature in which humanity, but also nature can flourish and thrive.
07:55 tribe.