Ever since Thomas Malthus argued just over 200 years ago that population growth would outstrip “the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man,” there has been a continuous parade of Cassandras fretting that humanity is about to exhaust the planet’s carrying capacity. Neo-Malthusian thinking inspired such 20th-century writings as Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book, “The Population Bomb,” and the Club of Rome’s 1972 “The Limits to Growth,” which predicted civilization would end “sometime within the next one hundred years.” In “Toward a Steady-State Economy,” published in 1973, economist Herman Daly argued that economic growth should be resisted for the sake of the environment.
Climate change is drawing out such sentiments again. Yet the prescription — that economic growth must stop — is as wrong as it was when the grim Rev. Malthus predicted that a growing population would outstrip the Earth’s capacity to produce food, requiring famine, war and pestilence to bring humanity’s numbers back to a sustainable level.
“Degrowth” — the brand name for neo-Malthusianism — ignores how ingenuity and innovation have repeatedly empowered humanity to overcome ecological constraints identified by Malthus, Ehrlich, et al. Degrowthers ignore basic lessons of history: The world experienced no growth for hundreds of years. Getting ahead economically during certain periods of the Middle Ages, for example, required plundering one’s neighbor.
Transactions were zero-sum. The outcome was centuries of conquest and subjugation. Malthus made his predictions just as England and the rest of Europe were about to enter a two-century era of unprecedented economic growth, which liberated much of humanity from misery and drastically improved health and well-being. Ehrlich’s prophecies came just as the Green Revolution in agriculture was saving hundreds of millions from hunger.
Growth built a world in which one person’s gain needn’t require another’s loss. Consensual politics and democracy wouldn’t have been possible without it. We wonder how Daly or his acolytes would be received in the bustling yet poor megalopolis of Lagos, Nigeria, proclaiming the end of growth (or procreation) to save the planet.
And yet degrowth is coming back in fashion. The ranks of degrowthers include progressive journalist Naomi Klein, Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and even Pope Francis. At least one European university is now offering a master’s degree in degrowth.
The truth is that degrowth wouldn’t fix climate change even in the unlikely event it could be imposed. Carbon emissions from economic growth can be understood as the product of four factors: population growth, growth in economic output per person, changes in the amount of energy needed for economic production, and the change in how much carbon dioxide is released when energy is consumed.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates these variables up to 2050. One inescapable conclusion: Zeroing out growth in gross domestic product would do little to reduce emissions. Even if output per person remained stuck at 2023 levels all the way to mid-century, humanity would still miss its 2050 target to reach net-zero emissions — by 26 billion tons of carbon dioxide. Halting growth in rich countries alone — allowing poor countries such as Nigeria to keep growing, hopefully to one day attain the economic well-being that affluent nations enjoy today — would do even less for the climate. Under this scenario, the world would miss its mid-century CO2 target by 38 billion tons.
Cutting emissions to safer levels would require epic degrowth. Getting carbon dioxide emissions below 10 billion tons per year in 2050 would demand inducing recessions that would cut world GDP per capita by about 5 percent per year — more than the loss during the 2008-2009 Great Recession. Cutting carbon emissions produced by the global economy will require massive new green energy infrastructure and new clean technologies. In other words, growth and innovation. The Energy Information Administration assumes that in a world of fast economic growth, each dollar of GDP will require some 13 percent less energy in 2050 than in a world in which growth slows.
Of course, GDP isn’t a true barometer of a civilization’s well-being. Proponents of untrammeled growth ignore the damage that it imposes on the environment and on human health. But that calls for mitigating the damage, not abandoning growth altogether. Degrowth’s prophets offer little more than hand-waving in response to the most elementary questions about their prescription. Degrowth evangelist Kohei Saito suggests “degrowth communism,” seemingly unaware that countries such as Albania and North Korea have already had that experience. Unsurprisingly, most degrowthers were born not in societies that have tried and failed to do without growth but in those that are already rich.
