Search for growth puts humanity on a suicidal path – 06/26/2023 – Market

The economy has become a weapon of mass destruction whose violence, slow and diffuse, is due, not to its existence, but to the central objective that has driven it for some time: endless growth.

That’s what French economist and ecologist Timothée Parrique, 33, says, a new exponent of a movement that emerged in France in the 1970s, which attacks the primacy of GDP and points to the idea of ​​economic degrowth. For Parrique, the quest for economic growth in rich regions of the world is putting humanity on a suicidal path, “a disaster that is already being felt by vulnerable populations”, he tells the Sheet.

Adopted by the climate generation, its current version criticizes the idea of ​​sustainable growth and advocates reducing the growth of rich countries —those that produce, consume and pollute the most— in the face of a planet in the midst of climate turmoil.

In his book, “Ralentir ou périr: L’économie de la décroissance” (Slow down or perish: The economy of degrowth, in free translation), released at the end of last year, Parrique decrees that the green economy, in which the economic powers global investors invest billions, is a fallacy.

According to the economist, the so-called “green growth” has been shown to be incapable of decoupling the production and consumption of goods and services from important environmental impacts on a planet that is already very worn out.

“Degrowth describes a temporary reduction in production and consumption in wealthy regions of the world, democratically designed to lessen environmental pressures equitably and with the aim of improving well-being,” he says in an email interview.

“It’s like a macroeconomic diet to stabilize the metabolism of high-income economies on a scale that can be sustained. That’s because, just as a car’s engine cannot be bigger than the car itself, an economy cannot have a larger size than their supporting ecosystems,” he says.

The fate of this diet, he says, is the so-called post-growth, a kind of global welfare economy.

The book is based on Parrique’s doctoral thesis, “The political economy of degrowth”, which has had tens of thousands of downloads since it was published in 2019 on an academic platform in France and attracted the attention of publishers.

The book earned this economist, ecologist and surfer the classification of naive, but also visionary, invitations to lectures at giants of the French economy, such as Airbus and Saint-Gobain, and the nickname “Fred Mercury of degrowth” because of of the mustache that resembles that of the leader of the band Queen.

In a few months, the book was sold out and is already in its second edition, which reflects a France increasingly impacted by heat waves, floods and droughts that intensified from the summer of 2022 and that resurface, even more strongly, in 2023.

This feeling Parrique sums up in one phrase: “The ecological collapse is not a crisis, it’s a beating.”

His book suggests that humanity has two options: slow economic growth or succumb. Are we at this crossroads? The quest for economic growth in wealthy regions of the world is putting humanity on a suicidal course, a disaster that is already being felt by vulnerable populations whose livelihoods are affected by ecological collapse. The main thesis of my book is that we cannot make growth green. The choice, therefore, is: either decline today or collapse tomorrow. Either we take the time to plan for a smooth transition from now on, or we expect to be faced with heat waves, water shortages, biodiversity collapse, etc., and the range of social unrest that this will provoke.

Why is it not possible to make growth green? It is impossible to produce anything without energy and materials. This is a simple physical truth and contrary to many economic theories that assume that technological progress can completely decouple production from environmental pressures. The work I have done on this topic since the publication of “Decoupling debunked” [Dissociação desmascarada, em tradução livre do inglês]in 2019, it is clear: high-income countries have failed to make their growth “green” by any meaningful definition of the term.

Like this? To make economic growth truly sustainable, it would be necessary to completely decouple production and consumption from all environmental pressures –not just carbon–, wherever they occur and at a sufficiently fast pace to avoid ecological collapse, taking into account targets based on in science. And it would be necessary to maintain this dissociation over time to avoid a re-coupling. Such genuinely green growth has never been achieved anywhere on Earth. And I haven’t seen any convincing evidence showing that it could be achieved.

How to explain, then, that there is so much talk about green economy? The green growth discourse has become a macroeconomic form of greenwashing [expressão em inglês que consiste em maquiar ações e resultados para que pareçam ser mais sustentáveis]. As with typical corporate greenwashing, pointing to a negligible reduction in a single environmental indicator and calling it “green growth” is misleading. As ecosystems break down at a speed unprecedented in history, we are wasting precious time arguing that perhaps, one day, decoupling could happen when the system should be radically transformed.

Part of the cuts in emissions we are currently witnessing can be explained by an economic slowdown. And this is paradoxical: we expect faster economic growth to accelerate decoupling, even though much of the historically achieved decoupling has occurred because of slower growth. One thing is certain: GDP growth makes it difficult to reduce emissions compared to a scenario of negative growth or no growth.

What is the difference between degrowth and recession? A recession is a drop in GDP that happens accidentally, often with undesirable social outcomes such as unemployment, austerity and poverty. Degrowth, on the other hand, is a planned, selective, and equitable reduction in economic activities. Associating degrowth with a recession just because both involve a reduction in GDP is absurd. It would be like arguing that an amputation and a diet are the same thing just because they both lead to weight loss.

Furthermore, the very concept of degrowth emerged to criticize an economistic view of the world that sees everything in terms of monetary indicators. Degrowth is not the antithesis of growth, but its nemesis – a concept whose raison d’être is to dethrone a way of thinking that sees everything as a rise or fall in GDP.

What is the problem with measuring development based on GDP? The biggest threat of a growth-obsessed economy is that it ends up sacrificing ecological sustainability and social health on the altar of Gross Domestic Product, an abstract indicator that is fundamentally ill-adapted to measure prosperity. We need to completely reformulate the functioning of already rich economies so that they produce and consume less, which is degrowth. At the same time, we need to transition to a system where these economies can thrive with much lower levels of resource use, which is post-growth.

The goal of the green economy is a good example of this obsession with GDP. Why are we focusing so much on greening economic growth? We are prospecting in the wrong direction. Instead of doggedly trying to decouple GDP from greenhouse gases, we should try to decouple well-being from environmental pressures. In high-income countries, where GDP per capita has lost all correlation with quality of life, it seems foolish to waste precious natural resources to produce more, while alternative strategies based on sharing would be not only more sustainable but also more effective in raising standards. of life.

What are the metrics that should replace GDP? There are many alternative indicators and any one of them would be better than GDP. One example among many: New Zealand’s Wellbeing Budgets. It is a panel of 65 indicators of economic activity, social well-being and ecological sustainability, divided into two broad categories of present and future well-being. Development is a complex process that should not be simplified into a single monetary number. Life expectancy should be measured in years, food availability in calories, electricity in kilowatts, the number of cycle paths in kilometers, global warming in degrees, fresh water in liters, biodiversity in number of species, etc.

You wrote that “the economy has become a weapon of mass destruction”. Is it not exaggeration? Today, to “save the economy”, we are sacrificing the planet. We are concerned about the impact that global warming will have on GDP, but what we should be concerned about is the degradation of the very habitability of the living world.

I’ll be even more provocative: economic growth is an imperial phenomenon. Part of what is being recorded in high-income countries as an apparently benign increase in GDP is actually an unfair and unsustainable appropriation of working time and natural resources across the planet.

[O geógrafo britânico] David Harvey calls this “accumulation by expropriation” to remind us that what we label “growth” is more like a reorganization of existing assets. Let’s not be shy and even speak of “accumulation by contamination” to recognize the toxic trail that economic growth leaves behind. The situation is this: the macroeconomic expansion of the rich regions of the world acts as a giant vacuum that treats the global South and nature as an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Is it fair to demand degrowth from developing countries as well? The concept of “décroissance conviviale” (convivial degrowth) emerged in France in 2002 as a strategy for global justice. The promotion of degrowth in a country like France was not a self-serving struggle for survival, but rather an attempt to free the global South from the “imperial way of life” of rich nations and excessive consumption.

We have known for a long time that most environmental pressures are exercised by the richest. For example, the richest 10% of the world generate about half of all emissions on the planet. And we know that the impact of lifestyle in rich regions of the world deprives poor countries of their natural resources. That’s why degrowth targets high-income nations; it is not a universal recipe, but a macroeconomic diet for those few nations and classes that live above their sustainable means.

North America and Europe are responsible for half of all emissions since 1850, which makes the remaining carbon budget quite small. Would we rather burn our last barrels of oil to upgrade Western cars to SUVs or to build solar panels, water pipes and hospitals in the global South? This logic applies to all natural resources. Wealthy consumers eat more steak, take more planes, build more houses, etc., but at the cost of less biodiversity, water and food sovereignty in countries that need to deforest to provide cheap raw materials to the global North, as well as less climate stability and less minerals available to build renewable energy infrastructure. In a world that has crossed its ecological limits, too much in one place systematically means not enough in another.

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Economist and ecologist, Timothée Parrique, 33, is a researcher at the Researcher at the University of Lund, in Sweden, and author of “Ralentir ou périr: L’économie de la décroissance” (ed. Seuil), which deals with the economic degrowth of rich countries as a way to stop the ecological collapse of the planet. He is also the author of the study “Decoupling debunked”, which deconstructs the idea of ​​sustainable growth.