Degrowth for a habitable Earth 

Economy
Written By Anonymous

Lead authors in the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change report (IPCC report) have stated that degrowth, moving away from our capitalist system towards a regenerative circular economy, is necessary for maintaining a safe and habitable Earth.

Degrowth is also needed to meet our goals of remaining below 1.5 degrees C, considered the safe and habitable zone, of heating because an excessive amount of energy is needed to continue producing at our current rate.

Research has shown that a growing GDP cannot be decoupled from using Earth’s resources and environmental devastation. Each year, we are overshooting what Earth can regenerate earlier than previous years because our capitalist system requires increasing levels of overproduction and overconsumption. 

Even if we were running on 100% green energy, destroying ecosystems that we rely on for clean drinking water, nutritious food, and marine food will lead to uninhabitable Earth.

Resource use and Ecological Destruction 

An ecosystem is a physical environment where the organisms and non-living elements in an area develop relationships. Animals, plants, decomposers, soil, sunlight, temperature and water become interdependent. Each serves a purpose, and any disturbance to their balance can result in a catastrophic, often cascading, outcome.

Burning fossil fuels and global heating are less of an immediate threat to human survival than ecological destruction caused by, in descending order: (1) changes in land and sea use; (2) direct exploitation of organisms; (3) climate change; (4) pollution and (5) invasive alien species.

This includes deforestation, overfishing, burning fossil fuels and biofuels, pesticides, soil depletion from over farming, fertilizers, plastic pollution, and all of the environmental destruction necessary to maintain an economy based on infinite growth. These destructive behaviors have harmed ecosystems so much that they triggered the Sixth Mass Extinction.

This is the first mass extinction that is linked to human behavior.

Degrowth and Third World Countries 

Producing less and using less energy will help reduce human rights abuses and the exploitation of the global south and indigenous communities. Even the creation of electric vehicles and renewable energy infrastructure continues the global north’s exploitation of vulnerable peoples and countries. 

“The key problem is that the renewable energy transition is being performed in the same model that caused the climate crisis,” one that links infinite economic growth and production of goods to progress, the researcher explained. “For [the model] to exist, we have to continue to exploit places and a lot of communities and to ecosystems.”

System Change

Only profound economic system change could limit the damage. But most people in first world countries are so accustomed to our creature comforts that degrowth becomes an impossibility. We need a shift in culture in terms of what we produce and consume and how much of it. A shift away from keeping up with current trends and towards reducing, reusing, sharing, thrifting, and creating things at home that we’d normally buy in store. 

Postgrowth

Jason Hickel talks about post growth climate resilience, which maintains a stable society while keeping standards of living, quality of life, and happiness levels high. At a certain point, economic growth is decoupled from human health and happiness and only becomes a burden on the environment and a threat to the safety and survival of life on Earth. Growth requires resource extraction and energy use beyond what the Earth can regenerate. 

More from Jason Hickel 

“Degrowth scholarship points out that if high-income nations scale down socially less necessary production (i.e., SUVs, fast fashion, industrial beef, planned obsolescence, advertising, etc), we can reduce energy demand and enable a *much faster* transition to renewables.”

“Here's the problem: more growth means *more energy demand* than would otherwise be the case, and more energy demand makes it more difficult for us to cover it with renewables in the short time we have left. It's like trying to run down an up escalator.”

“The *actual* argument is that decarbonization cannot be accomplished fast enough to reach zero emissions in time to stay under 1.5 or 2 degrees, *if high-income nations continue to grow at usual rates*.”


Excerpt from Ben See on Twitter

“The combination of 2.4°C-5.2°C of global warming & ongoing deforestation and pollution (to be expected assuming economic growth) risks mass extinction within one or two centuries.”

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