It’s time we gave up on our growth obsession
After a year or so of watching YouTube and reading books like How Everything Can Collapse, I realised in January this year there was one more possibility. So I started a new nonprofit called Degrowth Aotearoa New Zealand.
It wasn’t long before we had a keen group talking to each other. Just four months ago our energetic secretary started a Facebook group. It now has more than 400 members, some of whom are overseas.
We have a rapidly growing and highly motivated tribe.
Why this huge interest? Surely the very word ‘‘degrowth’’ turns people off? Shouldn’t we change the word and make it sound a bit more politically palatable?
Well, apparently not. When degrowth groups discuss this topic, they invariably return to the original word because it says what it means and there is no sugar coating. Just a pity you don’t like the word. Suck it up! A growing number of academic articles are being published.
Well, isn’t espousing degrowth a suicidal step for a politician? Maybe. Perhaps we should turn to Europe, where the degrowth and overshoot discussion is ahead of ours.
In June this year, one of Spain’s governing parties, the United Left, adopted degrowth.
A representative told the media ‘‘that we have to live within the limits of the planet was already clear; now we are going a step further and proposing that degrowth is a reality and that together we have to design a political roadmap so that this degrowth does not fall, as always, on the most vulnerable’’.
But first let’s define degrowth. It is a planned and democratic reduction of unnecessary production in rich countries designed to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a safe and equitable way.
It is now 50 years since the publication of the landmark book Limits to Growth. Tony Brunt, the founder of the Values Party of New Zealand wrote in 1972 that economic growth was causing pollution. Now, of nine planetary boundaries, we have breached seven. The one we talk about most is climate change.
Shockingly, Putin’s war on Ukraine has brought the crisis forward. In early October, the prime minister of France talked about the need for energy sobriety. She wants a 10% reduction in overall energy use.
France mandated lower indoor temperatures, turning off advertising signage at night, reducing speed on the highways and no hot water in government buildings at night.
This is a dress rehearsal for all of us, not just France and Germany and the UK.
We rely on an economic system that relies on buried ancient sunlight. Globally we now use so much fossil energy it has been estimated that it is the equivalent of everyone on Earth having 100 slaves working for us 24 hours a day.
Technology isn’t the answer to the ecological problem of overshoot.
Nate Hagens left his career in Wall Street to study ecological economics. He teaches a university course called Reality 101 – A Survey of the Human Predicament, and hosts a podcast, The Great Simplification. Since Nate has been alive, we have lost 70% of birds, animals and fish.
And for me, an octogenarian, 90% of all the fossil fuels ever used have been burnt in the time I have been alive, and 50% in the past 30 years. Globally, we have used more fossil fuel almost every year, but our stroke of luck is all going to come to an end.
[Degrowth] is a planned . . . reduction of unnecessary production in rich countries.
So how might a degrowth agenda be tackled by government, given that on the surface it sounds like political suicide? It depends. Greta Thunberg thinks politicians won’t do anything much. That is true. Politicians can never be too far ahead of the people who elect them.
So a massive public education campaign is needed. Only when every club and family and friendship group starts to discuss and argue on the topic of degrowth will the population move enough for politicians to act.
Given France aims to cut its energy use by 10% in two years, and that economic growth is very tightly linked to energy growth, it may be that economic growth will decline about 10%. They will have to face doing it so it doesn’t burden the poor.
Hopefully, it will be degrowth by design and not by disaster.