Climate change, resource extraction and biodiversity loss are forcing us to reconsider the viability of continuous economic growth.
For decades, gross domestic product (GDP), the measurement of monetary value of goods and services produced by one country, has been used as the primary indicator of success for a nation’s growing economy. But the environmental crisis poses a fundamental challenge to this metric: Can our economies grow even as natural resources dwindle? Or will we need to reimagine prosperity itself by prioritizing life over profits?
These questions have laid the foundation for a debate on potential courses for the future of human development: green growth versus degrowth.
NATHAN VILLASEÑOR / DAILY NEXUS
In its 2011 report “Towards Green Growth,” the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) defined green growth as “fostering economic growth and development while ensuring that natural assets continue to provide the resources and environmental services on which our well-being relies.” Additionally, the report states that “innovation will play a key role … By pushing the frontier outward, innovation can help to decouple growth from natural capital depletion.”
Green growth proponents imagine the possibility of continued economic growth without the environmental degradation associated with it. This model envisions high-functioning, low-carbon societies with green technology such as solar panels, electric cars and circular models of reuse and regeneration rather than excessive waste.
Nordic countries like Sweden, Norway and Denmark are often considered to be the paradigms of nations pursuing a green growth economy due to significant reductions in their territorial carbon footprint while maintaining high standards of living. Sweden, for example, cut its emissions by around 33% between 1990 and 2021 while consistently growing its GDP.
Critics, however, have pointed out that these measures of reduced territorial carbon emissions typically don’t account for consumption-based emissions, or emissions caused by imported goods. Sweden, like many high-income nations of the Global North, is heavily reliant on imported goods from countries in the Global South, primarily China, the world’s largest emitter. The discrepancy between territorial carbon emissions and consumption-based emissions is part of a phenomenon known as “outsourcing” emissions that raises questions about whether green growth in wealthy countries can exist without inhibiting the same sustainable development opportunities for less wealthy countries.
Furthermore, the technological innovation that is critical for green growth does not come without considerable costs. Electric vehicles are often hailed as the forefront solution to reducing carbon emissions in the transportation sectors of wealthier nations, however the lithium-ion batteries that power these vehicles require minerals that can only be extracted through intensive and costly mining operations. Over 70% of the world’s cobalt, one of the minerals critical to these batteries, is mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where freelance miners, including children, work in hazardous and exploitative conditions considered to be emblematic of “modern-day slavery.”
The environmental and ethical trade-offs involved in the development of low-carbon societies and the creation of “clean” technologies complicate the green growth narrative, leading some to believe that it’s merely a fantasy. As a result, the degrowth movement has emerged as an alternative.
Degrowth has been a concept in economics since 1972 when French philosopher André Gorz first coined the word “décroissance,” meaning “decrease.” Gorz asked, “Is global balance, which is conditional upon non-growth–or even degrowth–of material production compatible with the survival of the (capitalist) system?”
It wasn’t until the general population became more aware of the growing threat of climate change in the early 2000s that degrowth became more mainstream.
Degrowth proponents argue that infinite growth on a planet with finite resources is inherently unsustainable and, even if emissions fall, consumerism will still fuel deforestation, pollution and extractivist power dynamics between the Global North and South.
According to a 2020 article published in Nature, degrowth involves “abandon[ing] growth of gross domestic product (GDP) as a goal,” in favor of prioritizing human well-being. The article presents strategies that include reducing production, improving public services and enabling true sustainable development in low and middle income countries. Additionally, it advocates for a green jobs guarantee to end unemployment in a sustainable manner, and reducing the amount of time people spend working so they could focus on welfare-improving activities.
The drawbacks of this model include the uncertainty of what a post-growth world would look like and how we would get there. In her Spring Quarter 2024 Environmental Studies 3 course, environmental studies professor Jen Martin polled students on whether it was easier for them to imagine the end of capitalism or the end of the planet. An overwhelming 90% of respondents stated that it was easier for them to imagine the end of the world, demonstrating the difficulties of envisioning a radically different future such as that degrowth presents.
Although the green growth versus degrowth debate remains unresolved, one thing is clear: Addressing the climate crisis will require us to reimagine our relationship with wealth and well-being, each other and the planet that sustains us.
