“Degrowth” begins to move from the European political margins

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It is a sign of the times that a book entitled Like blowing up an oil pipeline, in which Swedish climate activist Andreas Malm advocates the targeted sabotage of physical property, is getting the film treatment. Even as political and corporate Europe has definitively moved in favor of the decarbonisation agenda, the hardline wing of the climate change movement is increasingly arguing that this is not enough.

proponents of “degrowthThey say that addressing climate change requires nothing less than a fundamental rejection of the entire principle of continuous economic growth as a policy goal. Their concerns have slowly but surely moved from the margins of the European political debate to at least gain a hearing in the EU institutions.

Earlier this month, MEPs staged the second iteration of a conference titled “Beyond Growth” (the first was in 2018). Philippe Lamberts, a Green MEP behind both events, says he faced “a lot of pushback from the [European] Commission” the first time. The attitude then, she says, was “if I don’t believe in growth, I’ll have to find another job.”

Five years later, it’s a different story. Now “the big boys” — top EU officials — are “playing ball” and engaging in the debate, Lamberts says. president of the Commission Ursula von der Leyen and several of its commissioners and senior civil servants spoke at the conference, as did European Parliament president Roberta Metsola and Frank Elderson of the European Central Bank’s executive board.

It may be useful for the MEP not to openly call for an end to growth. The conference materials carefully avoided the word “degrowth.” Lamberts says he prefers to talk about “shared prosperity across planetary boundaries.” He argues that we should discuss which economic developments are consistent with this and act accordingly – “discussing such things is no longer seen as sacrilege”. As for von der Leyen, his speech underscored a vision of sustainable growth, and drew applause when he declared that “a growth model centered on fossil fuels is simply obsolete.”

If you can have decoupling from GDP to materials and energy use, then you can have growth. [But] if not, what are the implications?

Others, however, go further. For example, in a item for the scientific journal Nature last December, a group of ecologists, environmental scientists and economists wrote: “Wealthy economies should abandon gross domestic product growth as a goal, reduce unnecessary and destructive forms of production to reduce the use of energy and materials and concentrate economic activity aimed at ensuring human needs and well-being. . . Degrowth is a targeted strategy to stabilize economies and achieve social and ecological goals. . . “

But most economists give in to the suggestion that there is an inherent problem with the growth of GDP, a measure of total paid-for output in the economy. Sir Dieter Helm, professor of economic policy at Oxford University, insists that “a sustainable economy can grow because technical progress continues”. He points out that “energy demand and emissions have decreased in the UK regardless of the level of GDP”.

This divergence between carbon emissions and economic growth is known as “decoupling,” and disagreements about climate policies hinge, to a large extent, on how much decoupling people think is realistic to expect.

“If you can have decoupling from GDP to materials and energy use, then you can have growth,” Lamberts agrees. But “if not, then what are the implications for fiscal policy, social security, labor markets, trade policy? . . . This is what we want to start a discussion about.

Opinions such as Helm’s still dominate this debate. The idea that we might have to reduce GDP “is still extremely controversial,” says Diana Urge-Vorsatz, a professor of environmental sciences at the Central European University in Vienna and one of the authors of the Nature paper. However, she and her co-authors point out that mentions of degrowth and “sufficiency” have begun to enter reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the United Nations body that evaluates scientific knowledge about climate change — as possibilities worth considering. worth exploring.

In Europe, in particular, a further impetus to the debate came from Russia’s war in Ukraine and the energy crisis caused by its stockpiling of gas supplies. Less than a year after the full-scale Russian invasion, large EU countries had reduced their natural gas consumption by more than 20 percent compared to the five-year average, without a corresponding increase in oil and coal consumption. Their overall industrial production, however, strongly supported.

The experience of 2022, in other words, has shown that large cuts in energy use and emissions are possible with concerted policy action.

It is an open question whether this plays into the hands of degrowth advocates or decoupling advocates who argue that decarbonization is perfectly compatible with growth. What is certain is that the past year will have changed expectations about what political action can achieve. There is “huge potential for increased efficiency,” Lamberts says. “German industrialists now admit to me that gas was so cheap there was no point in saving it.”