Degrowth: Sanity in Spiraling Chaos
Sheer stupidity and malice is killing us. Degrowth is the united plan we need.
In July 2023, I wrote Degrowth: The Vision We Must Demand. In the essay, I compared the concept of degrowth to the Green New Deal, which was compromised to the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Regardless, neither the Green New Deal nor IRA were adequate. They didn’t recognize overshoot, The Limits to Growth (PDF of the seminal 1972 book here), or the little discussed fact that the renewable economy we were promised is at best an optimistic delusion. Why? Because The End of Oil nears as fracking which turned the US into the biggest oil producer in the world yields less and less energy for more and more energy invested. When EROI (energy return on investment) can no longer produce a profit, the oil age that has powered our lavish lifestyles, impoverished the Global South, and enabled overpopulation will end. It also means those wind turbines and vast acres of solar arrays can no longer be built or maintained. The concrete, steel and minerals required for such politically conceived solutions to be backed by massive energy “smoothing” battery grids can’t be mined, manufactured or built out without heavy crude and diesel. This in part explains Trumps saber-rattling toward Canada and Greenland. They offer strategic real estate as the Arctic melts.
In spite of the melting Arctic tipping into a massive GHG emitter (I wrote about that in Permafrost? Maybe Not), the US, Russia, and China see the region as a resource laden battleground. As it melts, multinationals hunger for newly accessible oil deposits, metals and minerals. I wrote about that in Massive Willow Alaska Drilling Project Approved, finding stunning military documents in the process that expose planning for this competition for decades. This is not tree hugger paranoia, it’s world chess and you and I are the expendable pawns.
The concept of degrowth or “décroissance” originated in France, also in 1972. I was just eleven at the time and unaware the world was in deep trouble. I have many positive takeaways from the 1970s, a time of much needed and remarkable social and environmental movements. Books like Rachel Carson’s warning Silent Spring and Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb entered public consciousness. Nixon was forced to create the EPA. People angered by corporations running roughshod over the planet and ongoing violence and social injustice that built this country — dating to genocide and slavery — took action. Where did that consciousness go? We must get that back. There is no right or left. There is now only our common need to save what we can of an inhabitable planet. The ultra wealthy and the political sycophants doing their bidding are the common enemy. I am reaching out to conservatives, liberals and everyone in between. Labels are tools to leverage us against each other. We’ve ALL been sold out by ghastly political leadership. It’s time to organize in a unified vision. Degrowth is that vision, offering a framework that brings wanton consumption under control, addresses social injustice and offers a path to healing the planet, and stepping back from the brink.
All of us have been led to believe climate change is the enemy. It is an enemy, but just one of a much wider range of cascading planetary wide failures. These failures are never spoken of in the mainstream news. They’re called overshoot. Read The Planet Has Limits. So Must We, to gain a basic understanding of the science of overshoot. Six of nine fatal planetary boundaries critical to our survival are currently crossed.
The fight we must wage is far bigger than Trump, Musk, and Project 2025. The new administration must be dispatched with as quickly as possible because it’s attempting to dismantle decades of sane (if inadequate) environmental controls, undermining FEMA even as ever greater and more frequent climate change disasters occur, and trying to pillage every hard-earned social safety net since FDR’s New Deal. These facts require us to act in aggressive unity. The destruction of an inhabitable Earth is neither a liberal nor conservative matter. We must recognize that which is common to our survival. The Los Angeles wildfires in January took 57,000 acres, 18,000 homes and buildings and 29 lives in three weeks, and it wasn’t fire season yet. That’s yet to come. This is just one event of fossil fuel climate change that featured 27 billion dollar disasters in the US alone last year, 28 the previous year, and far more than 29 will die from the L.A. fires over the coming years from the depression of communities lost, businesses destroyed, and loved ones gone. Broken hearts are real and their own health threat. Immediate statistics to such tragedies never tell the whole story. We face two death scenarios now dear readers, those at the filthy hands of the oligarchs, whose depopulation plan lives openly, and that of salvaging our deeply compromised planet which they delay with deliberate malice.
The Five Fundamentals of Degrowth
1. Abandon GDP (gross domestic product) as a measure of progress. GDP is defined as the total monetary or market value of all the finished goods and services produced within a country’s borders in a specific time period. Economic anthropologist Jason Hickel, a force in the Degrowth concept who publishes here on Substack, suggests GPI, a Genuine Progress Indicator which would account for negatives of growth, such as pollution and poverty. We must account for the price of growth, not just profit as a handful run to the bank.
GDP fails to account for sustainability: increasing GDP is only sustainable if it doesn’t exploit the environment and deplete natural resources beyond their capacity to recover.
GDP fails to account for pollution: GDP doesn’t account for environmental harm, such air pollution, water pollution, the economic costs of climate change disasters, plastic islands in the ocean, or PFAS chemicals in our bodies. In fact, plastic manufacturing is growth as far as GDP is concerned.
GDP fails to account for income inequality: GDP doesn’t account for income distribution. The gulf between rich and poor is unconscionable. Some are privileged to fly private jets 20 minutes for dinner in another city, while others starve.
GDP fails to account for human development and opportunity: GDP fails to measure access to good health care, educational opportunity, and the opportunity to achieve reasonable wealth and security.
GDP fails to account for happiness and quality of life: GDP doesn’t measure mental health, life expectancy at birth, the degree of inequality across society, or particularly in the US, the cost of mass shootings. Gun sales are measured in GDP, though.
2. Scale down throughput and eliminate waste. Throughput is the amount of a product or services a company can produce and deliver within a period of time. Our machines and computers have enabled harvesting the planet at an unsustainable rate. Reducing throughput would reduce energy demand, destruction of ecosystems, and improve the probability of success in a renewable energy transition. We must:
Legislate progressive taxes on resource use, emissions and waste, or impose caps on these activities and tighten them each year.
Require extended warranties on all products to encourage longer lifespans.
Enact laws against planned obsolescence and legislate a right to repair laws.
Prevent supermarkets food waste through fees and fines, and ban food waste from landfills.
3. Shorten the work week to reduce our carbon footprint. This would also encourage the distribution of work equally to promote full employment. Mandating a living wage policy would make shorter hours possible, and universal basic income would assist small businesses.
A shorter work week would shrink carbon footprints, create better employees, lower unemployment, and improve mental health.
Pressure for growth would be reduced. Currently, as productivity increases people are laid off, forcing more growth to create new jobs. Ever-increasing productivity is unsustainable and inhuman.
Jobs could be created without the need for growth by shortening the working week and distributing work more equitably.
Focus on growing clean jobs. Dirty jobs would be replaced with jobs in clean energy, health care, education, housing, mass transportation, internet infrastructure, and local food production.
Promote regenerative agriculture: Regenerative agriculture focuses on improving the health of soil, which has been degraded by heavy machinery, fertilizers and pesticides. With current practices, there may not be enough fertile soil left to feed the world within 50 years. Regenerative agriculture can improve farmers’ incomes, cut emissions and restore soil health. We must also promote sustainable local food production, increased vegetarian food production, and fair agricultural employment conditions and wages.
Environmental restoration jobs: With problems come opportunities. Jobs lost in dirty industries could be replaced with toxic site cleanup, raising urban blight and creating green spaces. We could increase jobs in ecological and biodiversity restoration, conservation, and park maintenance.
4. Expand social services to support good lives without high levels of income. High-quality public healthcare and education should be available to everyone, not centers of corporate profit.
Rent and public housing: Enact rent controls, build affordable public housing, and efficient public transportation. These projects and policies would further reduce the need for high incomes and consumption.
Create more public parks and recreation: Improved access to public parks and recreational facilities would improve both physical and mental health.
5. Redistribute wealth. Billionaires are the primary drivers of climate change and collapse of the environment from both their business strategies and hoarded personal wealth. They claim to be job creators, but the jobs are based on consumption and workers are routinely abused and not paid living wages. We must tax the value of inflating billionaire assets, like stock and property, currently impossible unless they sell, yet a primary source of their income, without actually working. We also must raise the pittance of taxes they pay on what is considered their income. In 2018, Elon Musk paid no federal income taxes. This is just one egregious example, there are many more here. Billionaires are a drag on the rest of society.
Accessing this wealth, hundreds of billions of dollars, would help:
Fund investments in renewable energy, public programs, education, and healthcare.
Provide funds for a universal basic income.
Reduce working hours and raise wages in essential public services such as health and education.
Enable debt cancellation for workers and small businesses in the global south.
How many Earths do we need?
Currently, the lifestyle of the US, so unevenly shared, requires the resources of five Earths to be maintained. This statistic does not account for the damage to our bodies from pollution and plastic, or our and minds from living removed from reality on the matrix treadmill. The gruesome mass shootings we witness now nearly daily are evidence of a deeply ill society. We should be able to do better than this. That requires confronting the sociopaths driving us over the cliff NOW. There is no more time.
On the positive, there are signs of waking up.
Musk’s Tesla is taking a beating, even if Trump is promoting his cars on the White House lawn like the two-bit salesman he is, and Musk’s potential Starlink contracts with Europe are becoming questionable. The European Union is investing $11 billion into IRIS², their own satellite system, and the more courageous justices in our courts are pushing back against the constitutionally subversive and illegal actions of DOGE. People are waking up to the seriousness of our situation, and it’s up to you and me to encourage the fight.
The question becomes, what are our demands?
Merely stopping Trump, Musk, and Project 2025 isn’t enough. The system is blatantly sick to its core. It must be abolished, yes that means capitalism. Capitalism isn’t Democracy. Capitalism has enslaved the world, and led to the doorstep of fascism and self-extinction. Oligarchs are ruthless. Degrowth is a path that addresses all of these ills, but ultimately we have to shed blood for it. We’re going to shed blood either way. Will it be as courageous warriors or as sheep led to slaughter? None of us want to lose our lives, but for some of us that will be the outcome. That could be me for writing these words. We must use the tools at our disposal to grind the death machine to a halt. Striking, boycotts, sick outs, organizing and protesting carry risks, but they are the only proven way to affect change in this time of massive, fatal corruption. Check out the burgeoning Shutdown315 movement here. It’s time to end our economic participation, both as suppliers and buyers, of this system of death.
The universe is vast and full of spirals of mystery and beauty. DNA itself is a helix, a spiral. The Earth is finite, but filled with enough mystery and beauty to fill our souls, imaginations, and growth as a species until our sun expands and encroaches into our world. Can we find the wisdom to become caretakers of the planet and each other? Can we make the next jump in evolution, that of our spirits? Each of us is part of the answer.
I'm an old man now, but long ago - at the dawn of the USA's environmental movement - that would the '70's - I realized and began telling people that one word would become the most powerful word in the english language - and that word is "sustainable." In a world where literally ALL resources are finite - human practices that aren't sustainable - be they agricultural, political, manufacturing, military, extractive, religious, etc - literally ALL practices and endeavors - they need to be given the heave-ho at the earliest possible moment and replaced by behaviors and practices that ARE sustainable, because only sustainable practices are compatible with the survivability of the human race. People looked at me funny for years when I started preaching this gospel, but I knew there was no way around the truth of it, so never stopped spreading it. While I despair at what it's taken for people to FINALLY start to see this as inescapable, I'm glad to have lived long enough to see the widespread dawning of a wider realization and acceptance of the concept. Hey - if it's so obvious a 17 year old kid thumbing through the Whole Earth Catalogue can figure it out - there must be something to it - no?
So good, Geoffrey, thank you for this.