Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

by Jason Hickel

Virtually every indicator of ecological impact has exploded as a result.

Since 2000, the growth of material use has outpaced the growth of GDP. Instead of gradually dematerialising, the global economy has been rematerialising.

Source: materialflows.net, World Bank

Perhaps most disturbingly of all, this trend shows no signs of slowing down. On our present trajectory, with business as usual, we are on course to be using more than 200 billion tons of material stuff per year by the middle ...

We can see exactly the same thing happening when it comes to climate change. We normally think of climate change as being driven by emissions from fossil fuels. And of course this is true. But there is a deeper mechanism at play that we too often ignore. Why are we burning through so much fossil fuel in the first place? Because economic growth requires energy. For the entire history of capitalism, growth has always caused energy use to rise.

The shift to oil and gas hasn’t been an energy transition, but an energy addition.

on a global scale, growth in energy demand is swamping growth in renewable capacity. All that new clean energy isn’t replacing dirty energies, it’s being added on top of them.

A more holistic way of thinking about growth is to recognise that it is broadly equivalent to the rate at which our economy is metabolising the living world.

Under capitalism, the rate of growth is the rate at which nature and human lives are being commodified and roped into circuits of accumulation.

there is a bitter irony to the fact that we have been persuaded to use the word ‘growth’ to describe what has now become primarily a process of breakdown.

Colonialism 2.0

The word ‘Anthropocene’ is wrong not just because previous economic systems did not pose a threat to global ecology in the way that capitalism does today. It’s also that even today not all people are equally responsible.

Once we grasp the relationship between GDP growth and ecological impact, it’s easy enough to guess that countries with higher GDP per capita will have higher ecological impact, and vice versa.

The horizontal black line indicates the sustainable threshold in per capita terms (cf. Bringezu 2015).23 Source: materialflows.net

As we will see in the second part of this book, most global South countries will need to increase resource use in order to meet human needs, while high-income countries will need to dramatically reduce resource use to get back within sustainable levels.

Of course, we also have to think about the role of population going forward. The more the global population grows, the more difficult this challenge will be.

In the absence of more consumers, capital finds ways to get existing consumers to consume more. Indeed, that has been the dominant story for the past few hundred years: the growth rate of material use has always significantly outstripped the growth rate of the population.

Indeed, material use keeps rising even when populations stabilise and decline. This has been the case in every single historical example of population stability under capitalism.

The coltan in your smartphone comes from mines in the Congo. The lithium in your electric car battery comes from the mountains of Bolivia. The cotton in your bedsheets comes from plantations in Egypt. And this dependency does not run in the other direction. The vast majority of materials that are consumed in the South ultimately originate from the South itself, even if they are cycled through multinational value chains.25

But the biggest problem with the usual media narrative is that when it comes to climate breakdown, what matters is the stocks of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not annual flows.

So we need to look at each country’s historical emissions. When we approach it this way, it becomes clear that the highly industrialised nations of the global North – in particular the United States and Western Europe – are responsible for the vast majority of the problem.

This image depicts historical emissions in excess of national fair shares of the 350ppm boundary (territorial emissions from 1850–1969, consumption-based emissions from 1970–2015). Source: Hickel 2020. Data management by Huzaifa Zoomkawala.26

One way of illustrating these inequalities is to look at the distribution of monetary costs. According to data from the Climate Vulnerability Monitor, the South bears 82% of the total costs of climate breakdown, which in 2010 added up to $571 billion in losses due to drought, floods, landslides, storms and wildfires.28 Researchers predict that these costs will continue to rise. By 2030 the South will suffer 92% of total global costs, reaching $954 billion.

Why are the impacts of climate change so unevenly distributed? For one thing, climate change is causing rainfall patterns to shift north. As a result, drought-prone areas of the global South will have even less water than they do now.

That the excess emissions of a few rich nations will harm billions of people in poorer nations is a crime against humanity and we should have the clarity to call it that.

As Philip Alston, the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, has put it: ‘Climate change is, among other things, an unconscionable assault on the poor.’29

When the 2°C target was announced at the Copenhagen summit in 2009, Lumumba Di-Aping, the Sudanese chief negotiator for the G77, said: ‘We have been asked to sign a suicide pact.’ ‘It is unfortunate,’ he went on, ‘that after 500 years-plus of interaction with the West we are still considered “disposables”.’

How to think about ‘limits’ in the 21st century

The thing about growth is that it sounds so good. It’s a powerful metaphor that’s rooted deeply in our understanding of natural processes: children grow, crops grow … and so too the economy should grow. But this framing plays on a false analogy.

The natural process of growth is always finite. We want our children to grow, but not to the point of becoming 9 feet tall, and we certainly don’t want them to grow on an endless exponential curve; rather, we want them to grow to a point of maturity, and then to maintain a healthy balance. We want our crops to g...

This is how growth works in the living world....

We do see this pattern playing out in nature, sometimes, but only with devastating consequences: cancer cells are programmed to replicate for the sake of replicating, but the result is deadly to living systems.

To imagine that we can continue expanding the global economy indefinitely is to disavow the most obvious truths about our planet’s ecological limits. This realisation first struck home in 1972, when a team of scientists at MIT published a groundbreaking report titled Limits to Growth.

The report outlined findings from the team’s cutting-edge work using a powerful computer model called World3, which was designed to analyse complex ecological, social and economic data from 1900 to 1970, and to predict what would happen to our world in...

The results were striking. The business-as-usual scenario, with economic growth continuing at its normal rate, showed that sometime between 2...

Driven by the compound nature of the growth function, renewable resources would begin to reach the limits of their renewability, non-renewable resources would begin running out, and pollution would b...

Nations would have to spend increasing amounts of money to try to solve these problems, thereby spending less on the reinvestment that...

Economic output would begin to fall, the food supply would stagnate, living standards would diminish, and populations would begin to shrink. ‘The most probable result,’ they wrote, somewhat ominously, ‘will be a rather sudden and unco...

then the backlash came – and it came with overwhelming force. The report was denounced in the pages of the Economist, Foreign Affairs, Forbes and the New York Times, and big-name economists came out railing against it.

The Oxford professor Wilfred Beckerman went so far as to say that, thanks to the wonders of technological progress, there is ‘no reason to suppose that economic growth cannot continue for another 2,500 years’.

Ronald Reagan ran an election campaign against incumbent President Jimmy Carter – an environmentalist – by attacking the notion of limits, and linking a celebration of limitlessness to the spirit of the American Dream itself.

During the decade that followed, with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 and the euphoria around the globalisation of American-style consumerism, Limits to Growth was more or less forgotten.

Its warnings were cast aside in favour of the consensus celebrated by Francis Fukuyama in his 1992 book The End of History: free-market capitalism was the only game in town, and it seemed for all the world that it was going to last for ever.

But then something changed. With the global financial crisis of 2008 the party came crashing to an end. People’s faith in the limitless magic of the free market and the universal promise of the American Dream was shaken to its core.

The problem with the Limits to Growth report is that it focused only on the finite nature of the resources that we need to keep the economy running.

In recent years, ecologists have developed a new, more scientifically robust way of thinking about limits. In 2009, a team led by Johan Rockström at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, the US climatologist James Hansen, and Paul Crutzen, the man who coined the term Anthropocene, published a groundbreaking paper describing a new concept they referred to as ‘planetary boundaries’.

The Earth’s biosphere is an integrated system that can withstand significant pressures, but past a certain point it begins to break down.

According to the most recent data, we have already shot past four of the planetary boundaries: for climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation and biogeochemical flows. And ocean acidification is nearing the boundary.

As the political ecologist Giorgos Kallis has put it, the problem isn’t that there are near-term limits to growth – it’s that there aren’t. If we want to have any chance of surviving the Anthropocene, we can’t just sit around and wait for growth to crash into some kind of external limit. We must choose to limit growth ourselves.

We need to reorganise the economy so that it operates within planetary boundaries, to maintain the Earth’s life-supporting systems which we depend on for our existence.32