Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

by Jason Hickel

None of this is to say that growth is bad, in and of itself. That’s not my argument. 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.

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.

The more an economy relies on corporate supply chains, the more intensive its material use is likely to be.

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.

Even in liberal nations women come under heavy social pressure to reproduce, often to the point where those who choose to have fewer or no children are interrogated and stigmatised.

In other words, there is an enormous net flow of resources that goes from poor countries to rich countries, including around 10 billion tons of raw materials per year. The patterns of extraction that characterised colonisation remain very much in place today. But this time, instead of being seized by force, those resources are being extracted and sold, for cheap, by governments that have been rendered dependent on foreign investment and beholden to the growth imperatives of capitalism.

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

Remember, this is happening at 1°C. Two degrees will be a death sentence for much of the global South. The only reason that people have come to accept 2°C as a reasonable target is because climate negotiators from the United States and other powerful countries have pushed for it, over the loud objections of their colleagues from the South – and particularly from Africa. 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”.’

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.

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.

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 a decent shot at keeping temperatures under 1.5°C, we have to cut global emissions in half by 2030 and get to zero before 2050.

Proponents of the Green New Deal have it right: we need to pump public investment into building renewable energy infrastructure at a historically unprecedented rate, reminiscent of the industrial retooling that enabled the Allies to win the Second World War.

When we hear the phrase ‘clean energy’ it normally calls to mind happy, innocent images of warm sunshine and fresh wind. But while sunshine and wind are obviously clean, the infrastructure we need to capture it is not. Far from it. The transition to renewables is going to require a dramatic increase in the extraction of metals and rare-earth minerals, with real ecological and social costs.

We need to switch to electric cars, yes; but ultimately we need to radically reduce the number of cars we use.

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.

Lithium is another ecological disaster. It takes 500,000 gallons of water to produce a single ton of lithium.

The lithium boom has barely started, and it’s already a catastrophe.

Jonathan Proctor, a scientist who studies solar radiation management, says ‘the side effects of treatment are as bad as the original disease’. Janos Pasztor, another expert in this field, points out that the consequences could end up being even worse than we’re able to predict: ‘The global atmosphere is unbelievably complex … we have advanced computer modelling with supercomputers, but we still don’t really know how to model it.’

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.

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.

We conclude that decoupling of GDP growth from resource use, whether relative or absolute, is at best only temporary. Permanent decoupling (absolute or relative) is impossible for essential, non-substitutable resources because the efficiency gains are ultimately governed by physical limits. Growth in GDP ultimately cannot plausibly be decoupled from growth in material and energy use, demonstrating categorically that GDP growth cannot be sustained indefinitely.

Yes, we should absolutely aspire to a more circular economy. But 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.

There is an easy way to solve this problem. For decades, 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 turns out that the relationship between growth and human progress isn’t quite as obvious as we once thought. It’s not growth itself that matters – what matters is what we are producing, whether people have access to essential goods and services, and how income is distributed. And past a certain point, more GDP isn’t necessary for improving human welfare at all.

They fought for a new vision: that cities should be managed for the good of everyone, not just for the few.

This explanation is now backed up by a strong consensus among public health researchers. Empirical data from the United States shows that water sanitation measures alone explain three quarters of the decline in infant mortality in major cities between 1900 and 1936, and nearly half the decline in total mortality.4 A recent study led by an international team of medical scientists found that, after sanitation, the greatest predictor of improved life expectancy is access to universal healthcare, including child vaccination.5 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.

The good news is that this is not at all expensive to do. In fact, universal public services are significantly more cost-effective to run than their private counterparts. Take Spain, for example. Spain spends only $2,300 per person to deliver high-quality healthcare to everyone as a fundamental right, achieving one of the highest life expectancies in the world: 83.5 years; a full five years longer than Americans. By contrast, the private, for-profit system in the United States sucks up an eye-watering $9,500 per person, while delivering lower life expectancy and worse health outcomes.

This means that the US economy could in theory be scaled down by a staggering 65% from its present size while at the same time improving the lives of ordinary Americans, if income was distributed more fairly and invested in public goods.

In the United States, happiness rates peaked in the 1950s, when GDP per capita was only about $15,000 (in today’s dollars). Since then the average real income of Americans has quadrupled, and yet happiness has plateaued and even declined for the past half-century.

He found something remarkable: countries that have robust welfare systems have the highest levels of human happiness, when controlling for other factors.

But the researchers found that Nicoyans’ extra longevity is due to something more. Not diet, not genes, but something completely unexpected: community. The longest-living Nicoyans all have strong relationships with their families, friends and neighbours. Even in old age, they feel connected. They feel valued. In fact, the poorest households have the longest life expectancies, because they are more likely to live together and rely on each other for support.

Imagine. People living subsistence lifestyles in rural Costa Rica enjoy longer, healthier lives than people in the richest economies on Earth.

All this amounts to excellent news. It means that upper-middle income and high-income nations can deliver good lives for all, achieving real progress in human development, without needing growth in order to do so. We know exactly what works: reduce inequality, invest in universal public goods, and distribute income and opportunity more fairly.

The richest 10% of the world’s population are responsible for more than half of the world’s total carbon emissions since 1990.

Individuals in the richest 1% emit one hundred times more than individuals in the poorest half of the human population.28 Why? It’s not only because they consume more stuff than everybody else, but also because the stuff they consume is more energy-intensive: huge houses, big cars, private jets, frequent flights, long-distance holidays, luxury imports, and so on.

Public services are almost always less intensive than their private equivalents. Britain’s National Health Service, for instance, emits only one-third as much CO2 as the American health system, and delivers better health outcomes in the process. Public transportation is less intensive in terms of both energy and materials than private cars. Tap water is less intensive than bottled water. And things like public parks, swimming pools and recreational facilities are less intensive than everyone buying bigger yards, private pools and personal gym equipment. Plus, it’s more fun. If you visit Finland, you’ll find a whole society that thrives on the conviviality of public saunas – it’s a national pastime that plays a big role in making Finland one of the happiest countries in the world.

Health insurance premiums have nearly quadrupled since 2000.32 As for education, a family with two kids can expect to pay up to half a million dollars just to put them through college – almost 500% more than in the 1980s.33 These prices have nothing to do with the ‘real’ cost of healthcare and education: they are an artefact of a system organised around profit.

By expanding people’s access to public services and other commons, we can improve the welfare purchasing power of people’s incomes, enabling flourishing lives for all without needing any additional growth.

other words, organise the economy around the needs of humans and ecology, rather than the other way around.

To put these sums in perspective, consider this: to bring everyone in the world above the income poverty line of $7.40 per day, and to provide universal public healthcare for every person in the global South at a standard equivalent to that in Costa Rica, would require about $10 trillion.45 That’s a significant sum, on the face of it. But notice that it’s only half of the annual income of the richest 1%. In other words, if we were to shift $10 trillion of excess annual income from the richest 1% to the global poor, we could end poverty in a stroke, and boost life expectancy in the global South to eighty years – eliminating the global health gap. And the richest 1% would still be left with an average annual household income of more than a quarter million dollars: more than anyone could ever reasonably need, and nearly eight times higher than the median household income in Britain. And that’s just income; we haven’t even touched wealth. The richest 1% have accumulated wealth worth $158 trillion, which amounts to nearly half of the world’s total.46

Henry Wallich, a former member of the US Federal Reserve Board, once famously pointed out that ‘growth is a substitute for equality of income’.

But we can flip Wallich’s logic around: if growth is a substitute for equality, then equality can be a substitute for growth.

Once we realise this, it becomes clear that we can fund the transition quite easily by directing existing public resources from, say, fossil fuel subsidies (which presently stand at $5.2 trillion, 6.5% of global GDP) and military expenditure ($1.8 trillion) into solar panels, batteries and wind turbines.

Is it really reasonable to grow the plastics industry, the timber industry and the advertising industry in order to get more efficient trains?

We cannot save the world by playing by the rules. Because the rules have to be changed. Greta Thunberg

This is not just about individual behavior change, like turning off the lights when you leave a room. Sure, this kind of thing is important (and obviously we need to switch to LED bulbs, improve home insulation and so on), but ultimately we need to change how the economy works.

Degrowth is about reducing the material and energy throughput of the economy to bring it back into balance with the living world, while distributing income and resources more fairly, liberating people from needless work, and investing in the public goods that people need to thrive.

People become victims of this machine. Blaming individuals misdirects our attention away from the systemic causes.