I am on several Sierra Club North Star chapter mailing lists and recently got an invite to a Degrowth Team meeting. The meeting invite included a link to an article for shared reading by Christopher Marquis, published on the Harvard Business Review and titled, In Defense of Degrowth. I saved a copy of the article to read later, and casually browsed the topic of degrowth for a few minutes to become a little better informed. I found several interesting resources, including the Manifesto for a post-growth economy, which the Degrowth article has a link to in the opening paragraph, and the Dark Mountain manifesto. I mention this because I read the Dark Mountain manifesto before reading the degrowth article and found that it offered a more deeply human perspective that I will come back to later.
I should disclose at this point that I am a “techno-optimist”. My background as an engineer means I can assess the many sound pathways to a carbon free energy system and my passion for minimizing the impacts of our energy use require that I do what I can to help (the reason for this blog). As I read the degrowth article to prepare, my inner critic started alerting on statements that I knew I could easily find counterfactuals for. I’ll start by cataloging the article statements I have the greatest issues with and summarizing how the article comes up short.
I wanted to write on this topic because I agree on the need to treat degrowth as a serious alternative to our default assumptions about prosperity and growth. Linking human progress to economic growth seems broken for a large majority of people and has driven wholesale destruction of our planet’s ecosystem on which human health and happiness depend. But, as Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and part of my personal mission is to present the best possible evidence.
Article Critique
Degrowth is a profound idea that challenges deeply held assumptions on how human society should be organized. It also presents a personal challenge for all of us in the wealthy Western world, to examine what we value in our own lives, and why. Marquis’ article only provides vague, business-driven solutions and assumes that 1) companies in all industries and of all sizes can be the primary drivers of degrowth by providing “sustainable” products and 2) consumers will happily abandon “non-sustainable” products and services and switch wholesale to “sustainable” ones. The focus of the article on business-centric solutions makes sense in the context that it is published in the Harvard Business Review.
Apart from that general critique, let’s look at a few of the specific statements presented matter-of-factly in the article:
- “The core of the degrowth argument is the historical fact that economic growth and emissions are inexorably connected.”
Counterfactual: The vast majority of global economies have in fact decoupled growth from emissions, see https://ourworldindata.org/co2-gdp-decoupling. The statement of historical fact is true, if your dataset ends in the 20th century. - “A wholesale transition from fossil fuels to renewable sources is arguably a fantasy.”
Counterfactual: Professor Mark Z. Jacobson of Stanford and team laid out a 50 state plan to convert to 100% wind, water and solar, in 2015. https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2015/06/50states-renewable-energy-060815). The real fantasy is that all solutions must come out of the existing capitalist, economic growth structure. - “The environmental impacts of mining raw materials for EV batteries, plus producing and disposing of them, are serious and mostly unaccounted for, and potentially offset the perceived gains in emissions reductions per mile traveled.”
Counterfactuals: This is an area I have done a lot of research on and therefore can easily debunk. Here are just a few sources:
Electric Car Myth Buster — Well-To-Wheel Emissions
Well to wheels, most EVs are 61% cleaner than gas in Minnesota
Greenhouse gases, Regulated Emissions, and Energy use in Technologies (GREET) Well to Wheels (the definitive analysis of all powertrain types).
Given this blog’s focus on electric vehicles, I will expand on the last point. There is good reason for the wealth of misinformation on EVs when you recognize the political and economic power of the fossil fuel industry and their decades long investments in generating and disseminating misinformation to justify their ongoing business. There is no denying that manufacturing the battery in an EV (the primary difference to an internal combustion engine vehicle) generates more emissions. But the balance tips early in the vehicle’s life, is on a steady path of improvement and EVs are headed toward a circular lifecycle with battery recycling. Most of the rest of the car, like all vehicles, is also recycled).
Burning fossil fuels, on the other hand, is an irreversible process (direct air carbon capture is a fossil fuel fig leaf, see this and this). In addition, consider the environmental costs of drilling and fracking, pipeline leaks, offshore oil rig leaks, oil tanker leaks and accidents, energy to transport, energy and pollution to refine oil into gasoline and diesel, fuel transport and distribution, before one drop is burned to move a vehicle. Contrasted with the “well” for our EVs which is often the solar panel systems we have on our roof, where the energy travels about 40 feet from source to end use.
As Mark Jacobson pointed out ten years ago, all of the technologies needed for a zero carbon energy economy are mature (10 years more so today) and still developing rapidly. As an example, the Aptera vehicle is able to generate 30-40 miles of range directly from built in solar panels and has a range of over 300 miles. If that doesn’t sound like much, consider that 97% of vehicle trips are less than 50 miles and that 40 miles per day equates to 14,600 miles / year.
The Human Side
I strongly agree with the need to actively question the premise of economic growth and seek fundamental changes in our assumptions about human prosperity and happiness. But what does this mean on a personal level? It has been noted that increasing consumption of manufactured goods often leads to lower, not higher happiness. This seems like a promising area to explore as a win-win change to human behavior (save money and be happier!) Exposure to the natural world has also been shown to improve people’s lives and open the door to a wider perspective, as has travel outside one’s home region.
My expertise in human behavior is strictly amateur, except for a role in teaching soft skills to engineers. There, we looked at critical thinking skills and the barriers to critical thinking, including cognitive biases. Rather than attempt to write on another topic, I’ll just reference a book that we used in the Critical Thinking class, Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman. The brief summary is that the human mind defaults to automatic (Type 1) thinking where many mental shortcuts are used with little effort expended. Some lead to good outcomes, but many lead to bad ones. System 2 thinking on the other hand, requires effort. In our complex world, created by us, but in which we have had too little time to adapt, our instincts fail us in dramatic ways.
It is minds; not technology, industry, business or government that must change to point us toward a path of human progress that meets the needs of all people.
Post Script added after the Sierra Club meeting
About 14 people attended the meeting and there were several individual contributions. I had a few minutes to describe some of the thoughts in this post and thoughts inspired by the conversation. A few of us stayed on after the formal meeting was over and the great conversation continued. Following are links to a few resources shared by attendees.
- Black Elephant pin from The Institute for Collapsonomics The Black Elephant “is the emblem of collapsonomics, an unholy hybrid of two boardroom clichés: it’s an event that when it happens, everyone will try to pretend was a “black swan”, when all along it was the “elephant in the room”.
- The New Enlightenment with Ashley a YouTube channel by Frank Gery Associate Professor of Economics, Ashley Hodgeson
- Degrowth paper—entry for the Elgar Encyclopedia of Ecological Economics
- Why Well-Off Brits Who Think Collapse Is Coming Still Stay Silent—article on resilience website, a program of the nonprofit organization Post Carbon Institute
- Degrowth—Medium post by one of the Sierra Club meeting participants, David Ve
This definition of degrowth, from the Elgar Encyclopedia entry and shared by Emma, captures the essence of the meaning of Degrowth for me:
Degrowth means equitably downscaling wealthy societies’ throughputs of materials and energy. It entails reorganizing the economy to meet people’s needs regardless of what happens with GDP. The literature on degrowth, which emerged from the Francophone décroissance school, brings together diverse critiques of economic growth and its pursuit: growth is absurd, unnecessary, unsustainable, homogenizing, destructive, exploitative, and uneconomic. Scholars of degrowth call for collective self-limitation, through politics, to reduce resource use and avoid transgressing planetary thresholds beyond which lie an inhospitable Earth system. Such limits, they argue, can open space for diverse conceptions of the good life and how to pursue it.
Thanks for your insight, Brian. We need to measure things differently to get better results. Corporations should be judged by how they help society. GDP can grow while 99% of us become worse off.