Climate change necessarily presents a profound political challenge in the present historical era, for the simple reason that we are courting ecological disaster by not advancing a viable global climate-stabilization project.footnote¹ There are no certainties about what will transpire if we allow the average global temperature to continue rising. But as a basis for action, we only need to understand that there is a non-trivial possibility that the continuation of life on earth as we know it is at stake. Climate change therefore poses perhaps the ultimate ‘what is to be done’ question. There is no shortage of proposals for action, including, of course, the plan to do nothing at all advanced by Trump and his acolytes. In recent numbers of nlr, Herman Daly and Benjamin Kunkel have discussed a programme for a sustainable ‘steady-state’ economy, and Troy Vettese has proposed re-wilding as a means for natural geo-engineering. In this contribution, I examine and compare two dramatically divergent approaches developed by analysts and activists on the left. The first is what I variously call ‘egalitarian green growth’ or a ‘green new deal’.footnote² The second has been termed ‘degrowth’ by its proponents.

Versions of degrowth have been developed in recent work by Tim Jackson, Juliet Schor and Peter Victor. A recent collection, Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era, offers a good representation of the range of thinking among degrowth proponents. As the editors put it: ‘The foundational theses of degrowth are that growth is uneconomic and unjust, that it is ecologically unsustainable and that it will never be enough.’footnote³ As is evident from the fifty-one distinctly themed chapters in their collection, degrowth addresses a much broader range of questions than climate change alone. In fact, as I will discuss, a major weakness of the degrowth literature is that, in concerning itself with such broad themes, it gives very little detailed attention to developing an effective climate-stabilization project. This deficiency was noted by Herman Daly himself, without question a major intellectual progenitor of the degrowth movement, in his recent nlr interview. Daly said he was ‘favourably inclined’ toward degrowth, but nevertheless demurred that he was ‘still waiting for them to get beyond the slogan and develop something a little more concrete.’footnote⁴

Let’s dispose of some red herrings at the outset. First, I share virtually all the values and concerns of degrowth advocates. I agree that uncontrolled economic growth produces serious environmental damage, along with increases in the supply of goods and services that households, businesses and governments consume. I also agree that a significant share of what is produced and consumed in the current global-capitalist economy is wasteful, especially most of what high-income people consume. It is obvious that growth per se, as an economic category, makes no reference to the distribution of the costs and benefits of an expanding economy. As for Gross Domestic Product as a statistical construct, aiming to measure economic growth, there is no disputing that it fails to account for the production of environmental bads, as well as consumer goods. It does not account for unpaid labor, most of which is performed by women, and gdp per capita tells us nothing about the distribution of income or wealth.

One further general point. Introducing his nlr interview with Daly, Benjamin Kunkel states that ‘fidelity to gdp growth amounts to the religion of the modern world.’footnote⁵ A large number of degrowth proponents express similar views. This perspective makes the critical error of ignoring the reality of neoliberalism in the contemporary world. Neoliberalism became the predominant economic-policy model with the military coup of Pinochet in Chile in 1973, and the elections of Thatcher in 1979 and Reagan in 1980. It has been clear for decades that, under neoliberalism, the real religion is maximizing profits for business in order to deliver maximum incomes and wealth for the rich. The financialization of the global economy under Wall Street’s firm direction has been central to the neoliberal project. As is well known, the concentration of income and wealth in the advanced economies has proceeded apace under neoliberalism even while average economic growth has fallen to less than half the rate that was sustained during the initial postwar ‘golden age of capitalism’ that ended in the mid-1970s. If economic growth were really the ‘religion of the modern world’, then its high priests would be concentrating on how to put capitalism back on the leash that prevailed during the ‘golden age’ rather than on consolidating the victories achieved under neoliberalism.footnote⁶

Returning to climate change, it is in fact absolutely imperative that some categories of economic activity should now grow massively—those associated with the production and distribution of clean energy. Concurrently, the global fossil-fuel industry needs to contract massively—that is, to ‘de-grow’ relentlessly over the next forty or fifty years until it has virtually shut down. In my view, addressing these matters in terms of their specifics is more constructive in addressing climate change than presenting broad generalities about the nature of economic growth, positive or negative. I develop these points in what follows.

To make real progress on climate stabilization, the single most critical project is to cut the consumption of oil, coal and natural gas dramatically and without delay. The reason why this is so crucial is because producing and consuming energy from fossil fuel is responsible for generating about 70 per cent of the greenhouse-gas emissions that are causing climate change. Carbon dioxide emissions from burning coal, oil and natural gas alone produce about 66 per cent of all greenhouse-gas emissions, with another 2 per cent caused mainly by methane leakages during extraction. The most recent worldwide data from the International Energy Agency (iea) indicate that global co2 emissions were around 32 billion tons in 2015.footnote⁷ The reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (ipcc), which provide conservative benchmarks for what is required to stabilize the average global temperature at no more than 2° Celsius above the pre-industrial average, suggest that global co2 emissions need to fall by about 40 per cent within twenty years, to 20 billion tons per year, and by 80 per cent as of 2050, to 7 billion tons.footnote⁸

The global economy is nowhere near on track to meet these goals. Overall global emissions rose by 43 per cent between 2000 and 2015, from 23 to 32 billion tons per year, as economies throughout the world continued to burn increasing amounts of oil, coal and natural gas to produce energy. According to the iea’s 2017 forecasting model, if current global policies remain on a steady trajectory through 2040, global co2 emissions will rise to 43 billion tons per year. The iea also presents what it terms a ‘New Policies’ forecast for 2040, with the global ‘new policies’ corresponding closely to the agreements reached at the un-sponsored 2015 Paris Climate Summit. Coming out of the conference, all 196 countries formally recognized the grave dangers posed by climate change and committed to substantially lowering their emissions. Nevertheless, the iea estimates that, under its New Policies scenario, global co2 emissions will still rise to 36 billion tons per year as of 2040. Moreover, the iea’s forecast takes no account of the fact that the Paris commitments were non-binding on the signatory governments, nor that the United States under Trump has renounced the agreement. In short, there is at present nothing close to an international project in place capable of moving the global economy onto a viable climate-stabilization path. footnote⁹