Debunking Degrowth

“Much of our work involves recasting the very language society uses to define its challenges.”

William McDonough & Michael Braungart wrote in their last book The Upcycle: Beyond Sustainability, Designing for Abundance. Being very precise in the definitions we wield is paramount as language is not free but implies intent. Words drive actions. Simple words direct actions to irrelevance, rendering valuable societal resources meaningless.

So let’s take a deep look at the meaning of Degrowth.

The prefix “de” stands for directionality down; away or denotes removal, reversal. So away from growth, removal of growth, reversal of growth. The intent is clear: less than no-growth.

Now let’s try and understand how the growth metric is calculated.

“Economic growth can be defined as the increase in the inflation-adjusted market value of the goods and services produced by an economy over time.

“Economists refer to an increase in economic growth caused by more efficient use of inputs (increased productivity of labour, of physical capital, of energy or of materials) as intensive growth. In contrast, GDP growth caused only by increases in the amount of inputs available for use (increased population, for example, or new territory) counts as extensive growth.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_growth

What does this show us:

• the value generated (often converted per capita). This is often mistaken for productivity. It’s not. Nor does it tell us the origins of this value: groundbreaking innovation, exploitation, higher efficiencies, etc.
• it gives an indication of the financial prosperity of a country. This too is often mistaken for the wealth of a nation. It is not.

So let’s dwell on the calculation of Wealth for an instant …

Every run of the mill accountant knows that you are obliged to process inventory mutations (stocks) for valuation on the balance sheet as current assets. Inventory is part of a company’s (or nations in our case) working capital. The lower these stocks are the less your worth becomes. With elementary accounting, we can calculate exactly how poor we become if we live “from” instead of “on” our Natural Capital. Our Social Capital too for that matter….

Jeffrey Dukes shows in his paper, Burning Buried Sunshine: Human Consumption Of Ancient Solar Energy*, that as of >1870 human net energy use per annum overtook the yearly levels of natural replenishment equivalents. Our current use now stands at factor 400! Removing us from “living ON our capital” to “living FROM our capital”. A significant turning point no school history books teach.

Hall and Klitgaard point out, in Energy and the Wealth of Nations: Understanding the Biophysical Economy, that neoclassical economical models incorrectly relate the empirically observed growth of output purely to the increase in labour and capital inputs. They show that the exponential growth shown after the turn of the 20th century correlates clearly to our use (aka depletion) of earth’s “cheap” stocks of fossil fuel energy.

Most of that Natural Capital was simply burnt instead of wisely invested in systems that had at least a moderate Energy Return on Investment (EROI) like wind energy. So since >1870 the TRUE VALUE of our Economy, our NET WEALTH, has in fact been decreasing. We are since living on borrowed time. We will, as Hall and Klitgaard elaborate, clearly run out of fossil fuels. Some believe peak oil could be the catalyst for global collapse. So the next rush will be for nuclear energy… or back to the pre-industrial era and land as the re-newed metric of wealth as Ronald Rovers** points out, perhaps the true reason behind Bill Gates most recent acquisition.

It’s clear that the metric we use for economic growth gives very poor guidance in how to achieve our objective. Our Ponzi scheme accounting is self-deceiving and has led to, in the long run, a self-destructive lifestyle. But weirdly it’s not the metric that is in debate, but it’s directionality… growth… strange. Very very strange.

Even the original 1972 report “on the exponential economic and population growth with a finite supply of resources”, the Club of Rome does not speak of “Degrowth” but of “The Limits to Growth”. A fundamental difference… as these authors probably knew only too well that since the 1950 Treaty of Detroit growth was linked to War on Poverty: the rise of millions of people in the US and Europe out of dire poverty. Economic growth, by means of significant levels of employment and income redistribution, is highly correlated with health and wellbeing indicators, such as life expectancy and education. Historian Ian Morris goes even a step further and identifies sufficient levels of growth as being one of the indicating factors that prevent societal collapse during periods of turmoil and duress.

Hall and Klitgaard show that the economical stagnation that followed the two OPEC induced oil crises directly led to the fall back to conservative right-wing governments: Ronald Reagan and Margret Thatcher. Leading straight to the No Hope, or Lost Generation. In the ’80s and ’90s every major city had a needle park with thousands of dehumanised drug addicts. Every Millennial with ambitions of running alongside Katherine Trebeck’s bandwagon for Degrowth should be forced to sit through Christiane F.’s Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo.

Beware of what you wish for.

My generation has been there, seen it. So please let’s not go back but move on from what we have learnt. The solution is anything but a quick “DEGROWTH” fix. An absolute reduction of environmental pressures and impacts requires a fundamental transformation to a different type of society. Without a decent framework, like perhaps www.ecogood.org/, and a transition process safely set in place, simply shortcutting today’s reality by saying “all economic growth is bad” is very short-sighted and ultimately extremely harmful.

As William McDonough & Michael Braungart quite bluntly put it:

“Under this dictatorship of ECOLOGISM, we see more codes and standardisation, more regulation that stunts [prevent] economic growth and incentive, more limiting of consumer choices. Taken to extremes, in a world based on ecologisme, only saving resources would matter and quality of life would be secondary.”

“Even now people are using the term “circular economy” with Cradle to Cradle as its basis. […] but Cradle to Cradle is not a circle — not simply close loops — it’s a SPIRAL THAT CELEBRATES GROWTH because of the employment of renewable energy.”

It’s high time to re-frame the Green Narrative as it’s fundamentally wrong… EARTH IS NOT a CLOSED SYSTEM, never has been or life here would never have existed. If we aim for a full decoupling of economic growth from environmental pressures and impacts, a GROWING GREEN ECONOMY is possible. We can use our materials, minerals and nutrients re-generatively and effectively tap into free and clean 173,000 terawatts of solar energy that strikes the Earth continuously…. More than enough energy to make our world go round and limit our growth potential to only our imagination and creativity.

“A new story of place re-connects us with living systems,. [.]… GROWTH, in this story, takes on a new meaning as improvements to the health and carrying capacity of the land, and the resilience of communities — not just money or GDP. Value is created in a bioregion by the stewardship of living systems rather than the extraction of ‘natural resources.” John Thackera wrote in Bioregioning***

“Some people dream of a world that will never exist” writes the Global European Anticipation Bulletin, GEAB.**** Hmmm, I tend to disagree, the future is what we make of it. Or as Nick Sund on Medium puts it: “We are the designers of our future — not history.” High time to revive the ’68 slogan: “Be Realistic — Demand the Impossible”. Or as Christiana Figueres more eloquently names it:

STUBBORN OPTIMISM.

“The mindset that is necessary to transform the reality we are given into the reality we want.”

Amsterdam, April 6, 2021,

Gerald Lindner

*Jeffrey S. Dukes; Burning Buried Sunshine: Human Consumption Of Ancient Solar Energy https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/5212176.pdf

**Ronald Rover http://www.ronaldrovers.com/books/book-form-follows-fysics/

*** John Thackera; Bioregioning https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405872619300012

**** https://geab.eu/en/blog/prochainement-le-geab-no-153-les-desenchantements-de-la-realite/