Can degrowth save the climate?

This is the Guardian. Since the 1960s, global GDP, the main measure of economic growth, has been rapidly rising, taking living standards to a record high. But it's come at a cost, because at the same time, global carbon emissions have been rocketing up too. For years, scientists and economists have been asking, "Is it possible to grow without heating and polluting the earth?" And if so, can we actually do it? As we race towards two degrees, the question has come out of niche academic circles and into the mainstream, because if we don't answer it, the planet might for us. So today, as part of the Guardian's special Beyond Growth series, what's the future for economic growth? And what would life look like without it? From the Guardian, I'm Madeline Finley, and this is Science Weekly. And UK GDP figures have hit the wires, and they look better than they expected. Yeah, 4th quarter GDP. Get your reaction to today's GDP figures, which show that the economy. The economy says GDP grew. It's just 1.4%. If it is to do it, then the Democrats shut down. The first one, causing us two points on GDP. Gross domestic product. It's a bit of an obsession for economists and politicians. The number which signals the size of your economy and whether it's growing. Bigger is better when it comes to GDP. The higher the number, the more likely there's higher employment, salaries and living standards. And that's because it measures what we produce, earn and spend during a specific time. But there's a snag. So far in our history, making and doing more means rising carbon emissions, greater pollution and less biodiversity. And the worse our environmental problems get, the harder it is to argue that we can just keep growing as we are. So is there another way to do it? I went to speak to someone who's been grappling with this question for a long time. Hello, I'm Nick Stern. I'm a Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics. I chair the Global School of Sustainability and the Grant and Research Institute on climate change and the environment and I'm a crossbench. That means non-party member of the House Lords. Two decades ago, Professor Nick Stern wrote a vast and hugely influential report about the economic challenges of the climate crisis and the cost of not acting. He's recently published a book updating some of these arguments. The growth story of the 21st century, the economics and opportunity of climate action. One of the first things I wondered was, as many point out, you can't have infinite growth on a finite planet, but growth has brought a lot of benefits to a lot of people. So is there a way to grow the economy without destroying the environment? The statement you can't have infinite growth on a finite planet isn't some basic level true. But we're not talking about infinite, as Woody Allen said, you know, infinity is a long time, particularly near the end. But putting jokes to one side, we're not talking about infinity. We're talking about the next 20 or 30 years. If we do not act strongly to break the link between the way we do our economic activity, production, consumption, the way we live and our environment, then we're in deep trouble. You have to invest. Let me say that again with Old University Teacher, it's important say it twice. You have to invest. Nick thinks we need to keep growing our economies so that future generations have the same, if not better, living standards. But to decouple growth from emissions, there are a few key areas to invest in. Invest in renewables, including of course storage, and including within that the grids so that you can move stuff around over space and time. Clean electricity is cheaper than the dirtier across the world. Second is the transport, particularly public transport in the big growing cities of the world. And the third is the land. At the moment we have something like seven, eight hundred billion dollars a year in agricultural subsidies. And what do we get for it? We get degraded land, we get poison drivers, we get cut down forests, we get deeply damaged oceans. And there's so much we can do to reform. And including investing in restoring degraded land and forests managing our water systems much better. Energy, land and transport. Then there's adaptation, carbon capture and storage, finding efficiency improvements. If we put in a lot of capital, we can stimulate the economy, race living standards and have a cleaner environment. It sounds great. Except what if we grow the new good stuff without the bad stuff changing, more solar panels and more oil and gas. Nick agreed that there are some industries like fossil fuels that would have to be regulated. But right now he says the focus should be on getting going with the new. People think that the only way to save the planet is to consume much less. Well, it could help a little bit in some perspective, but it's a big political turn off. What we're talking about in investing in the new is actually a growth story. And it needs to be to draw people in to get them to see what the attraction is of these new ways of doing things. So if you build up your public transport, if you enable the cycle lanes and so on, so that the pollution from traffic goes down quickly, then people see the benefits. We know that renewables are cheaper than the fossil fuel electricity. People need to see that in their electricity bills. If they see green spaces in their cities, for example, so they're genuine improvements, I mean, really big improvements, but you have to move quickly and effectively. And you need to be very clear about the kinds of risks that are being radically reduced by strong climate action. So there's a policy challenge and there's a communications challenge. And for Nick, the argument's just getting more and more persuasive that green growth is the path forward. And it's a paradox, really, that every time we look at the science, it looks worse. The severity of events is more extreme. They come through earlier. Every time we look at the technology, it looks better. So essentially we have a good basis for action and it's a very attractive form of action. But are there countries that have actually managed to keep growing while substantially bringing down their emissions? One country that's done it faster than anywhere else in Europe, perhaps the world, is Romania. Under the communist dictatorship of Nikolai Chotescu from the 1960s to 1980s, Romania embarked on a rapid and intensive program of industrialisation, becoming dependent on brown coal and heavy oil in the process. Towards the end of the communist era, they entered a period of deep austerity. By the early 2000s, Romania joined the EU. They reduced and modernised their agriculture and shifted to a service-based economy. Many citizens suffered in the transition. But as a country, Romania has doubled real GDP since 1990 and emissions have plunged by 75%. It proves pollution and growth can be decoupled. But where does Romania go now? With the low-hanging fruit taken care of, can it keep decarbonising while growing? This is the point many countries have now reached. The graphs might be going in the right direction, but total emissions are still much higher than they need to be, and they're not falling fast enough. In the scientific literature, this is actually not considered green growth, because what matters when it comes to climate mitigation is speed, not just any degree of decarbonisation, but decarbonisation that's fast enough to achieve the Paris Agreement goals of limiting global warming to 1.5 or no more than 2 degrees. And on that front, we are not doing well at all. Professor Jason Hickle is an economic anthropologist at the autonomous University of Barcelona and visiting Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics. So we recently published a paper in the Lancet showing that at current rates of decoupling, the best performing high-income countries will take over 200 years to reach zero emissions, blowing through their fair shares of the Paris Agreement many times over. So there's nothing green about this, right? So like simply achieving rising GDP and declining emissions is not good enough. And so the question becomes why are these nations failing, including the UK, failing to achieve sufficiently rapid decarbonisation? Again, it's because as they pursue growth, more growth requires energy, and energy use is already too high and making it too difficult for us to decarbonise fast enough. Jason is also the author of the book Less is More, How Degrowth Will Save the World. It describes one part of an increasingly influential school of economics, post-growth. new models that abandon the goal of constant expansion. Growth is simply about increasing industrial production. It doesn't matter what industry it is, whether it's helpful or it's harmful, whether it's tear gas or it's health care, all that matters is that it's profitable. According to Jason, the problem is, in a capitalist system, production is controlled by those with, well, the capital. That's big banks, big corporations and the wealthiest 1%. Ultimately, they decide what we produce, what our labour looks like, and how to use the planet's resources, with the overriding goal of maximising and accumulating profits. And for profits to keep going up, production has to constantly rise too. The result is that we end up with, I think, quite irrational forms of production. Right? We get massive overproduction of things like fossil fuels, SUVs, fast fashion, mansions and weapons, because these things are obviously highly profitable to capital. At the same time, we're overproducing many damaging things we don't really need. We're also underproducing in areas that are much less profitable or aren't profitable to private capital at all, like affordable housing, public transport and renewable energy. And this is true, even in the UK, which is one of the richest countries in the world, massive levels of total production, more than 4 million children live in poverty. It's absolutely crazy. And I put it to you that this paradox arises, because capital misallocates production primarily towards what's profitable rather than towards what's most socially necessary. This paradox is what post-growth wants to address. With a simple idea, we need to bring down our total energy use, which means decrowing or scaling down industries that would be almost impossible to decarbonise, like fossil fuel production, private jets, cruises, fast fashion, throw away tech with planned obsolescence. It's crucial that we think of ways to organize production more around what is most necessary for social and ecological goals that are democratically ratified, that we actually want to achieve, right? So this is a much more rational way to approach the economy. And it also popular, by the way, we did a recent study that found that large majorities of people in the US and the UK support this alternative vision of the economy. But is it possible to decrow while keeping the important benefits of growth we have today? Jason. In fact, there was a recent study published in Nature that found that using this approach, the UK could reduce its energy use by more than 50% while improving people's quality of life, which is a dramatic finding. So to me, that's quite compelling. The study's authors turned the question around from, how do we produce enough clean energy to, how much energy do we actually need to live well? By looking for energy consumption savings from things like heat pumps, insulation, diet changes, and more active travel, they found we could live as well using around 50% less energy. It really gives you a sense for how incredibly wasteful our current economy is under capitalism. I always say, you know, we live in a shadow of the world we could have. Coming up, what would a post-growth world actually look like? And how do we get there? Just like Nick's version of Green Growth, Jason's D-growth future sounds great. But how could it work in practice? Jason told me about a few key policies. One of them is a public job guarantee. The idea here is that anyone who wants to can train and participate in the most important collective projects of our generation. So things like building renewable energy, innovating green technologies, regenerating ecosystems with good wages and workplace democracy. This would permanently abolish involuntary unemployment, enable people to participate in importance, socially necessary work, and ensure good livelihoods for all. And then alongside that, the second thing would be universal public services, such that everyone has access to the core goods and services that we know are necessary for good life. Other post-growth policies include things like four-day work weeks, regulating commercial banks' investments, maximum income caps, and introducing a more progressive tax system. We know from scientific evidence that it's the rich who are overwhelmingly responsible for driving climate breakdown. The recent study found that millionaires alone are on track to burn 72% of the remaining carbon budget for 1.5 degrees. And so, as several economists have pointed out, taxing the rich is essential to reducing their consumption of our planet's resources, reducing their consumption of our energy, and it reduces the damage that they inflict on us. Despite fundamental disagreements on the principles of capitalism, growth, and how we ensure a good life for all, quite a lot of the short-term green growth and degrowth policies aren't so different. And there's one thing they're both advocating strongly for, for us to take the wheel now, rather than letting the climate crisis and free markets dictate where we end up. As it stands, it's getting harder and harder to reach our agreed destination. Global carbon emissions would need to fall by 45% by 2030 to keep to 1.5 degrees C. How do we get back on track? Or at least closer? Jason? Political reform is absolutely required in order to better represent people's aspirations. On this front, there's actually a lot of hope, indeed, there's a statement from Thomas Sankara, the revolutionary leader of Burkina Fasa in the 1980s who used to say, "We are the errors of the world's revolutions." Like all of the rights that we have, all of the good things that we have, they were not handed down, but never lonely by capital. We fought to achieve them. And if we've been able to transform in the world in the past, then there's no way that we cannot do it again now. And I think that's exactly the kind of ambition that is required. Back to Nick. We need good evidence, which we've got. We need good communicators, and we need leadership from those who can. Pope Francis was tremendous on this issue. And he said, "If we destroy creation, creation will destroy us." Regardless what you think about creation, what he's saying is crystal clear. Which economic model would work best in reality? Well, that's an argument for the economists. But both Jason and Nick agree, we're in big trouble if our growth keeps blasting through the earth's natural limits. I just don't think that this is a future that we can tolerate and we must do everything possible to fight for something better. Delay is dangerous. In the Indigangetic Plane, probably 20 years from now, there'll be several extended periods of more than 50 degrees centigrade. That kills you, right? And it took about hundreds of millions of people. You're talking about southern Europe looking like Xajara Desert. Perhaps billions of people would have to move in the second half of this century. Some of the essentially climate deniers, net zero antagonists are also people seem to care about immigration. He's that belief so. Who read what they write or say? Well, in the words of Ronnie Reagan, they ain't seen nothing yet. A big thanks to Professor Jason Hickle and Nick Stern. You can find all the articles in the Beyond Growth series on the Guardian.com. And that's all from us today. This episode was produced by me, Madeline Finley, the sound design was by Ross Burns, and the executive producer was Ellie Beary. We'll be back on Tuesday. See you then.