Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

by Jason Hickel

Three Will Technology Save Us? Climate change is an engineering problem and has engineering solutions. Rex Tillerson, former CEO of ExxonMobil

When I reflect on the conflict between science and growthism, I can’t help but think of Charles Darwin. As I mentioned in the introduction, Darwin’s findings about evolution posed such a radical challenge to the dominant world view at his time that they were almost impossible for people to accept. To see humans as descended from non-humans rather than created in the image of God required a total paradigm shift. Something similar is happening right now.

Ecological science requires that we learn to see the human economy not as separate from ecology but as embedded within it.

This narrative relies heavily on the claim that technology will save us, in one way or another. For some, it is a simple matter of switching the global economy to renewable energy and electric cars; once we do that, there’s no reason we can’t keep growing for ever. After all, solar and wind power are getting cheaper all the time, and Elon Musk has shown that it’s possible to mass-produce storage batteries at a rapid clip.

For others, it’s a matter of ‘negative-emissions technologies’ that will pull carbon out of the atmosphere. Still others bank on the hope of enormous geo-engineering schemes: everything from blocking out the sun to changing the chemistry of the oceans.

These hopes have been touted by some of the richest and most powerful people in the world, including presidents and billionaires.

Gambling in Paris

We’ll still be hurtling towards 3.3°C of global warming by the end of the century. In other words, even with the Paris Agreement in place, we’re on track for catastrophe.

What’s going on here? How is it possible that emissions will keep rising even under a plan that’s meant to cut them? And why does nobody seem to be worried about this?

There’s a backstory. In the early 2000s, IPCC modellers realised that the emissions reductions required to keep climate change under control were so steep that they were likely t...

In 2001, an Austrian academic named Michael Obersteiner published a paper describing a brilliant new technology: an energy system that would not only be carbon-neutral, but would actively pull carbon out of the atmosphere.1 The proposal was stunning in its elegance. First you establish massive tree plantations around the world. The trees suck CO2 out of the atmosphere as they grow. Then you harvest the trees, churn them into pellets, burn them in power plants to generate energy, capture the carbon emissions at the chimneys and store it all underground where it can never escape. Voila: a global energy system that produces ‘negative emissions’.

This technology is known as BECCS: bio-energy with carbon capture and storage. When Obersteiner published his paper there was no evidence that the scheme would actually work; it was just speculation.

This helps explain why national plans significantly overshoot the carbon budget for 2°C: it’s because everyone’s relying on scenarios that assume BECCS will save us.

In other words, BECCS sits right at the centre of our big plan to save the world, even though most people have never even heard of it.

Journalists never mention it, our politicians never talk about it; not because they’re trying to hide something, or because it’s too complicated to explain, but because most of them don’t know ...

The future of our planet’s biosphere, and of human civilisation, hinges on a plan that very few people know about, a...

Jumping off a cliff

But there’s a hitch. Climate scientists have been sounding the alarm about BECCS from day one, and their objections have grown louder with every passing year. There are four main problems with the idea – each potentially fatal.

First, BECCS has never been proven to...

Since a typical CCS facility can handle about 1 million tons, we would need to construct some 15,000 new facilities all around the world.2 The scale of this development is enormous – it would be one of the biggest infrastructural feats ever attempted in human history – and we have no idea whether it’s possible to pull it off in time.

In 2014, the year before the Paris climate summit, fifteen scientists penned a letter warning against BECCS in the pages of the prestigious academic journal Nature Climate Change.

They argued that the widespread use of BECCS in the climate models ‘might become a dangerous distraction’ from the imperative of reducing emissions.

Even if we somehow manage to overcome the technical and economic obstacles, we’ll bump straight into another crisis. In order for BECCS to remove as much carbon as the IPCC scenarios assume, we will need to create biofuel plantations covering an area two to three times the size of India, gobbling up about two-thirds of the planet’s arable land.

The fight for 1.5

It means nothing less than the rapid and dramatic reversal of our present direction as a civilisation. We have built up a global fossil-fuel infrastructure over the past 250 years, and now we have to completely overhaul it in only thirty. Everything has to change, in a matter of decades. And keep in mind that this is for the world as a whole.

Rich nations have to cut emissions much more quickly, given the scale of their historical contributions to climate breakdown, while poorer nations can take it more slowly. Scientists at the Stockholm Environment Institute calculate that rich countries need to reach zero emissions before 2030.13

Green growth?

In fact, scientists go so far as to reject green growth hopes as empirically baseless.

The key point to grasp is that while it’s possible to transition to 100% renewable energy, we cannot do it fast enough to stay under 1.5°C or 2°C if we continue to grow the global economy at existing rates. Again: more growth means more energy demand, and more energy demand makes it all the more difficult (and probably impossible) to generate enough renewable capacity to meet it in the short time we have left.

In 2017, the World Bank released a report offering the first comprehensive look at this question.18 Researchers modelled the increase in material extraction that would be required to build enough solar and wind utilities to produce an annual output of about 7 terawatts of electricity by 2050.

If we don’t take precautions, clean energy firms could become as destructive as fossil fuel companies – buying off politicians, trashing ecosystems, lobbying against environmental regulations, even assassinating community leaders who stand in their way, a tragedy that is already unfolding.22 This is important.

None of this is to say we shouldn’t pursue a rapid transition to renewable energy. We absolutely must, and urgently. But if we want the transition to be technically feasible, ecologically coherent and socially just, we need to disabuse ourselves of the fantasy that we can carry on growing aggregate energy demand at existing rates. We must take a different approach.

The planet remade

It’s worth pausing to reflect on the growing fascination with geo-engineering. What’s interesting about it is that it embodies the very same logic that got us into trouble in the first place: the idea that the living planet, rendered as mere ‘nature’, is nothing but a set of passive materials that can be subdued, conquered and controlled.