Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

by Jason Hickel

Structural adjustment fundamentally reshaped the economies of the South. Governments were forced to abandon their focus on human welfare and economic independence and focus instead on creating the best possible conditions for capital accumulation. This was done in the name of growth, but the consequences for the South were disastrous. The imposition of neoliberal policies caused two decades of crisis, with rising poverty, inequality and unemployment. Income growth rates across the South collapsed during the 1980s and 1990s, down to an average of 0.7% over this two-decade period.8 But as far as capital was concerned, it worked like a charm: it enabled multinational companies to post record profits, and sent the incomes of the richest 1% soaring.

Under capitalism, companies are constantly finding ways to increase labour productivity in order to push down the costs of production. As labour productivity improves, firms need fewer workers. People get laid off and unemployment rises; poverty and homelessness go up. Governments have to respond by scrambling to generate more growth just to create new jobs. But the crisis never goes away; it just keeps recurring, year after year. This is known as the ‘productivity trap’.12 We are in the absurd position of needing perpetual growth just in order to avoid societal collapse.

Growth is so deeply embedded in our economics and politics that the system can’t survive without it. If growth stops, companies go bust, governments struggle to fund social services, people lose their jobs, poverty rises, and states become politically vulnerable. Under capitalism, growth is not just an optional feature of human social organisation – it’s an imperative to which all are hostage. If the economy doesn’t grow, everything falls apart.

It’s not growth that’s the problem, it’s growthism: the pursuit of growth for its own sake, or for the sake of capital accumulation, rather than to meet concrete human needs and social objectives.

raw material consumption. This metric tallies up the total weight of all the stuff humans extract and consume each year, including biomass, metals, minerals, fossil fuels and construction materials. These figures tell an astonishing story. They show a steady rise of material use in the first half of the 1900s, doubling from 7 billion tons per year to 14 billion tons per year. But then, in the decades after 1945, something truly bewildering happens. As GDP growth becomes entrenched as a core political objective around the world, and as economic expansion starts to accelerate, material use explodes: it reaches 35 billion tons by 1980, hits 50 billion tons by 2000, and then screams up to an eye-watering 92 billion tons by 2017.13

some of this increase represents important improvements in people’s access to necessary goods (in other words, use-value), particularly in poorer parts of the world; and we should celebrate that. But most of it does not.

Scientists estimate that the planet can handle a total material footprint of up to about 50 billion tons per year.14 That’s considered to be a maximum safe boundary. Today we’re exceeding that boundary twice over. And, as we will see, virtually all of this overshoot is being driven by excess consumption in high-income nations – consumption that is organised not around use-value but exchange-value.

Keep in mind that every ton of material stuff that’s extracted from the earth comes with an impact on the planet’s living systems. Ramping up the extraction of biomass means razing forests and draining wetlands. It means destroying habitats and carbon sinks. It means soil depletion, ocean dead zones and overfishing. Ramping up the extraction of fossil fuels means more carbon emissions, more climate breakdown and more ocean acidification. It means more mountaintop removal, more offshore drilling, more fracking and more tar sands. Ramping up the extraction of ores and construction materials means more open-cast mining, with all the downstream pollution that entails, and more cars and ships and buildings that demand yet more energy. And all this entails more waste: more landfills in the countryside, more toxins in our rivers, and more plastics in the sea.

there has been extraordinary growth in renewable energy capacity, which is worth celebrating. In some nations, renewables have begun to displace fossil fuels. But 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.

if high-income nations were to consume at the average level of the rest of the world, we would not be overshooting the safe boundary at all. We’d be operating roughly within the planet’s biocapacity, rather than staring down the barrel of an ecological emergency. By contrast, if everyone in the world were to consume at the level of high-income countries, we would need the equivalent of four planets to sustain us. Crucially, this is not only because people in high-income countries consume more stuff; it’s also because their provisioning systems are more materially intensive. If you buy a can of Pringles produced in a faraway factory, shipped across the world on aeroplanes and trucks, stored in huge warehouses and packaged in copious amounts of plastic and cardboard, it is more materially intensive than buying potato chips from a stall at your local farmers’ market. The more an economy relies on corporate supply chains, the more intensive its material use is likely to be.

What brings a nation’s birth rate down? Investing in child health, so that parents can be confident their children will survive; investing in women’s health and reproductive rights, so that women have greater control over their own bodies and family size; and investing in girls’ education to expand their choices and opportunities. With these policies in place, population growth falls fast – even within a single generation.24 Gender justice must be central to any vision for a more ecological economy.

The United States is single-handedly responsible for no less than 40% of global overshoot emissions. The European Union is responsible for 29%. Together with the rest of Europe, plus Canada, Japan and Australia, the nations of the global North (which represent only 19% of the global population) have contributed 92% of overshoot emissions. That means they are responsible for 92% of the damage caused by climate breakdown. By contrast, the entire continents of Latin America, Africa and the Middle East have contributed a combined total of only 8%. And that comes from only a small number of countries within those regions.27 In fact, the vast majority of global South countries have emitted so little in historical terms that they are still under their fair share of the planetary boundary. India is still 90 gigatons under its fair share.

the higher-income countries that have gobbled up not only their own fair shares but also everybody else’s owe a climate debt to the rest of the world. What’s happening here should be understood as a process of atmospheric colonisation. A small number of high-income nations have appropriated the vast majority of the safe atmospheric commons, and have contributed the vast majority of emissions in excess of the planetary boundary.

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. This way of thinking about limits is vulnerable to those who point out that if we can find new reserves, or substitute new resources for old, and if we develop methods of improving the yields of renewable resources, then we don’t have to worry about those limits. Sure, this process of substitution and intensification can only go so far – at some point we’ll reach an absolute limit – but for all we know that could be a long way off. But this isn’t how ecology actually works. The problem with economic growth isn’t just that we might run out of resources at some point. The problem is that it progressively degrades the integrity of ecosystems. As onshore oil reserves run dry we can switch to offshore reserves, but both sources contribute to climate breakdown. We might be able to substitute one metal for another, but ramping up the mining of any metal is going to poison rivers and ruin habitats. And we might be able to intensify our extraction from the land by pumping it full of chemicals, but not without triggering soil depletion and pollinator collapse. The process of substitution and intensification might get us around resource limits for a while, but it still drives ecological breakdown. That’s the problem.

a new concept they referred to as ‘planetary boundaries’.31 The Earth’s biosphere is an integrated system that can withstand significant pressures, but past a certain point it begins to break down. Drawing on data from Earth-systems science, they identified nine potentially destabilising processes that we have to keep under control if the system is to remain intact: climate change, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, land-use change, nitrogen and phosphorous loading, freshwater use, atmospheric aerosol loading, chemical pollution and ozone depletion.

If we overshoot these boundaries, ecosystems begin to break down and the web of life begins to unravel. That’s what’s happening right now. 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.

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.

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.

We’ll overshoot the carbon budget, but that’s OK because BECCS will pull the excess carbon back out of the atmosphere later in the century, bringing us back into the safety zone. Emit now, clean up later.

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

we need to pump public investment into building renewable energy infrastructure at a historically unprecedented rate,

We have made extraordinary gains in renewable energy capacity over the past couple of decades, and this is wonderful news. Today the world is producing 8 billion more megawatt hours of clean energy each year than in 2000. That’s a lot – enough to power all of Russia. But over exactly the same period, economic growth has caused energy demand to increase by 48 billion megawatt hours. In other words, all the clean energy we’ve been rolling out covers only a fraction of new demand. It’s like shovelling sand into a pit that just keeps getting bigger. Even if we doubled or tripled the output of clean energy production, we would still make zero dent in global emissions. Growth keeps outstripping our best efforts to decarbonise.

the transition to renewables will require a massive increase over existing levels of material extraction.

The problem here is not that we’re going to run out of key minerals – although that may indeed become a concern. The real issue is that this will exacerbate an already existing crisis of overextraction. Mining has already become a big driver of deforestation, ecosystem collapse and biodiversity loss around the world. If we’re not careful, growing demand for renewable energy will exacerbate this crisis significantly.

nuclear comes with its own constraints. The main problem is that it takes so long to get new power plants up and running that they can play only a small role in getting us to zero emissions by the middle of the century.

if for whatever reason we don’t manage to stabilise the climate – a real possibility – nuclear sites will be vulnerable to severe storms, rising seas and other disasters that could turn them into radiation bombs.

We may have fusion power sometime this century, but we certainly can’t rely on it to keep us within the safe carbon budget. Without a miraculous technological breakthrough, the energy transition is going to need to focus mostly on solar and wind.

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.

solar radiation management. The idea is to use a fleet of jets to inject aerosols into the stratosphere, forming a giant veil around the Earth to reflect sunlight and therefore cool the planet. It’s relatively cheap and easy to do. So easy, in fact, that scientists worry that rogue agents – say, a meddling billionaire or a desperate island state that’s about to go underwater – could pull it off single-handedly.

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. Geo-engineering represents dualism taken to astonishing new extremes,

emissions are only one part of the crisis. In addition to climate breakdown, we are already overshooting a number of other planetary boundaries, driven by ever-increasing extraction from the Earth. The problem isn’t just the type of energy we’re using; it’s what we are doing with it. Even if we had a 100%-clean-energy system, what would we do with it? Exactly what we are doing with fossil fuels: raze more forests, trawl more fish, mine more mountains, build more roads, expand industrial farming, and send more waste to landfill – all of which have ecological consequences our planet can no longer sustain.

They insist that all we need to do is ‘decouple’ GDP growth from resource use.

The problem with DMC is that it ignores a crucial piece of the puzzle: while it includes the imported goods a country consumes, it does not include the resources involved in producing those goods. Because rich countries have outsourced so much of their production to other countries – mostly in the global South – that side of resource use has been conveniently shifted off their balance sheet. To account for this, scientists prefer to use a measure called ‘material footprint’, which includes the total resources embodied in a nation’s imports. Using this more holistic measure it quickly becomes clear that the material consumption of rich nations hasn’t been falling at all. In fact, in recent decades it’s been increasing dramatically, even to the point of outpacing GDP growth.

the incomes people make in the service economy end up getting used to buy material goods. People might earn their money on YouTube, but they spend it buying things like furniture and cars.

decoupling of GDP and material use is simply not possible on a global scale.

his steam engine, which was significantly more efficient than previous versions: it used less coal per unit of output. Everyone assumed that this would reduce total coal consumption. But oddly enough, exactly the opposite happened: coal consumption in England soared. The reason, Jevons discovered, was that the efficiency improvement saved money, and capitalists reinvested the savings to expand production. This led to economic growth – and as the economy grew, it chewed through more coal. This odd result became known as the Jevons Paradox. In modern economics, the phenomenon is known as the Khazzoom-Brookes Postulate, named after the two economists who described it in the 1980s. And it doesn’t just apply to energy – it applies to material resources too. When we innovate more efficient ways to use energy and resources, total consumption may briefly drop, but it quickly rebounds to an even higher rate. Why? Because companies use the savings to reinvest in ramping up more production. In the end, the sheer scale effect of growth swamps even the most spectacular efficiency improvements.32

The technological innovations that have contributed most to growth have done so not because they enable us to use less nature, but because they enable us to use more. Take the chainsaw, for instance. It’s a remarkable invention that enables loggers to fell trees, say, ten times faster than they are able to do by hand. But logging companies equipped with chainsaws don’t let their workers finish the job early and take the rest of the day off. They get them to cut down ten times as many trees as before. Lashed to the growth imperative, technology is used not to do the same amount of stuff in less time, but rather to do more stuff in the same amount of time.

In a system where technological innovation is leveraged to expand extraction and production, it makes little sense to hope that yet more technological innovation will somehow magically do the opposite.

Growth in GDP ultimately cannot plausibly be decoupled from growth in material and energy use, demonstrating categorically that GDP growth cannot be sustained indefinitely.

We’re going to need all the innovations and efficiency improvements we can get to drastically reduce the resource and carbon intensity of our economy. But the problem we face doesn’t have to do with technology. The problem has to do with growth.

once we are liberated from the growth imperative, we will be free to focus on different kinds of innovations – innovations designed to improve human and ecological welfare, rather than innovations designed to speed up the rate of extraction and production.

the idea that recycling will save capitalism doesn’t hold water. First, most of our material use cannot be recycled. Forty-four per cent of it is food and energy inputs, which become irreversibly degraded as we use them.33 Twenty-seven per cent is net addition to stocks of buildings and infrastructure. Another big chunk is waste from mining.34 In the end, only a small fraction of our total material use has circular potential. Even if we recycled all of it, economic growth would keep driving total resource use up.

Recycling costs money, and the cost of paying for recycled materials makes it more difficult to generate ever-rising surplus. And the pinch gets tighter over time: materials degrade each time you recycle them, so you need ever-rising energy inputs – and ever-rising cost – in order to maintain their quality.

we should absolutely seek to build an economy that’s as circular as possible! But the growth imperative makes this dream unnecessarily difficult to achieve. It would be much easier to improve circularity in a post-growth economy.

ecological economists have proposed that we can put an end to the debate once and for all with a simple and elegant intervention: impose a cap on annual resource use and waste, and tighten that cap year-on-year until we are back within planetary boundaries.36 If green growthers really believe GDP will keep growing, for ever, despite rapid reductions in material use, then this shouldn’t worry them one bit. In fact, they should welcome such a move. It will give them a chance to prove to the world once and for all that they are right.

none of these people has ever bothered to justify their core premise – the assumption that we need to keep expanding the economy, year-on-year, for ever. It is simply taken as an article of faith. Most people don’t stop to question it, and indeed in some circles to do so is a kind of heresy. But what if this assumption is wrong? What if high-income countries don’t need growth? What if we can improve human well-being without having to expand the economy at all? What if we can generate all the innovations we need for a rapid transition to renewable energy without a single dollar of additional GDP? What if instead of trying so desperately to decouple GDP from resources and energy use, we could decouple human progress from GDP instead? What if we could find a way to release our civilisation, and our planet, from the constraints of the growth imperative?

after sanitation, the greatest predictor of improved life expectancy is access to universal healthcare, including child vaccination.4 And once you have these basic interventions in place, the biggest single driver of continued improvements in life expectancy happens to be education – and particularly women’s education. The more you learn, the longer you live.5 Don’t get me wrong. It’s true that nations with higher income tend in general to have better life expectancies than nations with lower income. But there is no causal relationship between these two variables. ‘The historical record is clear that economic growth itself has no direct, necessary positive implications for population health,’

the interventions that really matter when it comes to improving human welfare do not require high levels of GDP. The relationship between GDP and human welfare plays out on a saturation curve, with sharply diminishing returns: after a certain point, which high-income nations have long surpassed, more GDP adds little if anything to human flourishing.7 The relationship completely breaks down.

Costa Rica ranks among the most ecologically efficient economies on the planet, in terms of its ability to deliver high standards of welfare with minimal pressure on the environment.

What explains the remarkable results that these countries have achieved? It’s simple: they’ve all invested in building high-quality universal healthcare and education systems.9 When it comes to delivering long, healthy, flourishing lives for all, this is what counts.