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degrowth
Scientists Blockade EU Commission Offices to Demand Degrowth
Amid elections in Europe, opponents of ongoing planetary destruction argue that the "science is clear: politicians' obsession with infinite economic growth is leading us straight to disaster."
Jun 07, 2024
A group of about 20 scientists and allies on Friday blocked the doors to the European Commission office in Brussels to demand degrowth policies as European Union elections unfold in which no party has such an agenda and pro-environment candidates are expected to lose seats.
The degrowth advocates, who came from Scientist Rebellion and affiliated groups, called for the EU to stop using Gross Domestic Product as an index of prosperity and an end to "over-consumption and the advertising that drives it," among other demands. Carrying placards with messages such as "Green growth is a myth," they prevented employees of the European Commission, the executive branch of the EU, from getting to work Friday morning, they said in an emailed statement.
Wolfgang Cramer, an environmental geographer at the Mediterranean Institute for Biodiversity and Ecology in France and an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) author, supported the action from a distance.
"Economic growth is a concept that was useful almost 100 years ago to help politicians overcome the disaster of the 1929 world economic crisis," Cramer said, according to the statement. "Today, it has become a leitmotif to justify the destruction of our natural resources and to support the redistribution of wealth to the richest. What we need is an economic system that guarantees the well-being of everyone, while respecting the planet's limits. This is entirely possible if we have the political will."
The degrowth movement, which began in the 2000s following work in the field of ecological economics, seeks to address not only the climate crisis but also other ecological crises. Its proponents argue that economic growth is linked with energy and resource use—the more growth, the more difficult to stay within planetary limits on carbon emissions, or, for example, nitrogen and phosphorous use, they argue.
Degrowth is the subject of mockery in some legacy media outlets that hold economic growth sacrosanct and is a matter of fierce debate among leftist political thinkers, some of whom strongly oppose it. Despite the criticism, degrowth has grown in influence, especially in Europe, where the topic has moved from the "policy fringes" toward a "mainstream audience," Financial Timesreported last year. The economic paradigm questioning endless expansion has even received favorable mention in EU policy briefs and IPCC reports.
"It is unlikely that a long-lasting, absolute decoupling of economic growth from environmental pressures and impacts can be achieved at the global scale,” a European Environment Agency briefing says. "Therefore, societies need to rethink what is meant by growth and progress and their meaning for global sustainability."
Many climate policy researchers are in fact skeptical of "green growth" and support "growth agnostic" or degrowth policies, a 2023 study in Nature Sustainability found.
In a manifesto Scientist Rebellion pointed to on Friday, the group argued that, "The science is clear: politicians' obsession with infinite economic growth is leading us straight to disaster."
Científicos de @ScientistRebel1, @ExtinctionR y @growth_kills bloquearon esta mañana la entrada de la Comisión Europea. Lamentan que, en estas elecciones, ninguna partido proponga el decrecimiento como salida a la crisis climática.
Las 5 demandas:
1) Abandonar el PIB como… pic.twitter.com/y07yUjLxI2
— Andrés Actis (@ActisAndres) June 7, 2024
The group's Friday action comes on the second day of this week's EU elections, which run from Thursday to Sunday. Right-wing parties are pushing anti-environment messages with great success, The New York Timesreported Friday.
"The right wing is ascendant," according to the Times, which explained that the European Greens are polling poorly this year, after having won a record 10% of seats in the EU Parliament in 2019—a year of large climate protests, when the "zeitgeist was green."
That victory helped propel the EU toward the European Green Deal, a set of environmental laws and regulations centered around a legally binding target to reduce emissions by 55% by 2030.
However, inflation and high energy prices due to the war in Ukraine have changed some of the political dynamics. Rising prices have helped lead to what the European Council on Foreign Relations has called a “growing greenlash.”
Ahead of the elections, farmers' groups have protested regulations on agricultural pollutants, showing that "agriculture has been instrumentalized by the populist and hard-right groups throughout the 27-nation bloc," The Associated Pressreported.
Yet climate activist groups remain determined to push forward. Scientist Rebellion seeks to draw attention to what it sees as the blind spots in the political platforms of even Europe's left-wing and green parties.
"We deplore the fact that virtually no party is proposing a program that is up to the social and environmental challenge," said Laura Stalenhoef, a Ph.D. candidate in cognitive psychology in Germany who took part in Friday's action. "But we do not just denounce political inaction, we put forward concrete proposals for change: we urgently need to abandon GDP as an index of prosperity and organise a voluntary contraction of the economy before we witness ecological and social collapse."
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We've Been Warned: Infinite Growth Can't Continue on This Finite Planet
There’s big trouble ahead and we won’t be able to say that no one saw it coming.
Apr 29, 2024
Something must be up. Otherwise, why would scientists keep sending us those scary warnings? There has been a steady stream of them in the past few years, including “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency” (signed by 15,000 of them), “Scientists’ Warning Against the Society of Waste,” “Scientists’ Warning of an Imperiled Ocean,” “Scientists’ Warning on Technology,” “Scientists’ Warning on Affluence,” “Climate Change and the Threat to Civilization,” and even “The Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future.”
Clearly, there’s big trouble ahead and we won’t be able to say that no one saw it coming. In fact, a warning of ecological calamity that made headlines more than 50 years ago is looking all too frighteningly prescient right now.
In 1972, a group of MIT scientists published a book, The Limits to Growth, based on computer simulations of the world economy from 1900 to 2100. It plotted out trajectories for the Earth’s and humanity’s vital signs, based on several scenarios. Even so long ago, those researchers were already searching for policy paths that might circumvent the planet’s ecological limits and so avoid economic or even civilizational collapse. In every scenario, though, their simulated future world economies eventually ran into limits — resource depletion, pollution, crop failures — that triggered declines in industrial output, food production, and population.
In what they called “business-as-usual” scenarios, the level of human activity grew for decades, only to peak and eventually plummet toward collapse (even in ones that included rapid efficiency improvements). In contrast, when they used a no-growth scenario, the global economy and population declined but didn’t collapse. Instead, industrial and food production both leveled off on lower but steady-state paths.
Growth and Its Limits
Why should we even be interested in half-century-old simulations carried out on clunky, ancient mainframe computers? The answer: because we’re now living out those very simulations. The Limits to Growth analysis forecast that, with business-as-usual, production would grow for five decades before hitting its peak sometime in the last half of the 2020s (here we come!). Then decline would set in. And sure enough, we now have scientists across a range of disciplines issuing warnings that we’re perilously close to exactly that turnaround point.
This year, a simulation using an updated version of The Limits to Growth model showed industrial production peaking just about now, while food production, too, could hit a peak soon. Like the 1972 original, this updated analysis foresees distinct declines on the other side of those peaks. As the authors caution, although the precise trajectory of decline remains unpredictable, they are confident that “the excessive consumption of resources… is depleting reserves to the point where the system is no longer sustainable.” Their concluding remarks are even more chilling:
“As a society, we have to admit that, despite 50 years of knowledge about the dynamics of the collapse of our life support systems, we have failed to initiate a systematic change to prevent this collapse. It is becoming increasingly clear that, despite technological advances, the change needed to put us on a different trajectory will also require a change in belief systems, mindsets, and the way we organize our society.”
What is America doing today to break out of such a doomed trajectory and into a more sustainable one? The answer, sadly, is nothing, or rather, worse than nothing. On climate, for example, the most important immediate need is to end the burning of fossil fuels as soon as possible, something not even being considered by Washington policymakers in the country that hit record oil production and record natural gas exports in 2023. Even a quarter-century from now, wind and solar energy sources together are forecast to account for only about one-third of U.S. electricity generation, with 56% of it still being supplied by gas, coal, and nuclear power.
Now, it appears that rising electrical demand will delay the transition away from gas and coal even further. According to a recent report by the Washington Post’s Evan Halper, power utilities in Georgia, Kansas, Nebraska, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, Wisconsin, and a host of other states are feeling the proverbial heat from exploding electricity consumption. Analysts in Georgia have, for instance, increased by 17-fold their estimate of the generation capacity that the state will require 10 years from now.
Such an imbalance between energy demand and supply is anything but unprecedented and the source of the problem is obvious. As successful as American industry has been in developing new technologies for generating energy, it has been even more successful at developing new products that consume energy. Much of the current rise in demand, for instance, can be attributed to companies working on artificial intelligence (AI) and other power-hungry computational activities. The usual suspects — Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft — have been on data-center building sprees, as have many other outfits, especially cryptocurrency-mining operations.
Northern Virginia is currently home to 300 football-field-sized data centers, with more on the way, and there’s already a shortage of locally generated electricity. To keep those servers humming, electric utilities will be crisscrossing the state with hundreds of miles of new transmission lines plugged into four coal-fired power stations in West Virginia and Maryland. Plans were once in the works to shutter those plants. Now, they’ll be kept operating indefinitely. The result: millions more tons of carbon dioxide, sulfur, and nitrous oxides released into the atmosphere annually.
And the digital world’s energy appetite will only grow. The research firm SemiAnalysis estimates that if Google were to deploy generative AI in response to every Internet search request, a half-million advanced data servers consuming 30 billion kilowatt hours annually — the equivalent of Ireland’s national electricity consumption — would be required. (For comparison, Google’s total electricity consumption now is “only” about 18 billion kilowatt hours.)
How are Google and Microsoft planning to weather an energy crisis significantly of their own making? They certainly won’t back off their plans to provide ever more new services that hardly anyone asked for (one of which, AI, according to its own top developers, could even bring about the collapse of civilization before climate change gets the chance). Rather, reports Halper, those tech giants are “hoping that energy-intensive industrial operations can ultimately be powered by small nuclear plants on-site.” Oh, great.
It’s the Wealth, Stupid
The problem doesn’t lie solely with data servers. During 2021–2022, companies announced plans to construct 155 new factories in the United States, many of them to produce electric vehicles, data-processing equipment, and other products guaranteed to suck from the electrical grid for years to come. The broader trend toward the “electrification of everything” will keep lots more fossil-fueled power plants running long past their expiration dates. In December 2023, the firm GridStrategies reported that planners have almost doubled their forecast for the expansion of the national grid — probably an underestimate, they noted, given the rise in demand for charging electric vehicles, producing fuel for hydrogen-powered vehicles, and running heat pumps and induction stoves in millions more American homes. Meanwhile, increasingly hot summers could trigger a 30%-60% increase in power use for air-conditioning.
In short, this sort of indefinite expansion of the U.S. and global economy into the distant future is doomed to fail, but not before it’s crippled our ecological and social systems. In its 2024 Global Resources Outlook, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) reported that humanity’s annual consumption of physical resources had grown more than threefold in the half-century since The Limits to Growth was published. Indeed, resource extraction is now rising faster than the Human Development Index, a standard measure of well-being. In other words, overextraction and overproduction while producing staggering wealth aren’t benefiting the rest of us.
UNEP stressed that the need to deeply curtail extraction and consumption applies mainly to wealthy nations and the affluent classes globally. It noted that high-income countries, the United States among them, consume six times the mass of material resources per person as low-income ones. The disparity in per-person climate impacts is even greater, a tenfold difference between rich and poor. In other words, wealth and climate impact are inextricably linked. The share of recent global growth in gross domestic product captured by the most affluent 1% of households was nearly twice as large as the share that trickled down to the other 99%. I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that the 1% also produced wildly disproportionate quantities of greenhouse gas emissions.
In addition, societies with a wide rich-poor divide have higher rates of homicide, imprisonment, infant mortality, obesity, drug abuse, and teenage pregnancy, according to British epidemiology professors Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. In a March commentary for Nature, they wrote, “Greater equality will reduce unhealthy and excess consumption, and will increase the solidarity and cohesion that are needed to make societies more adaptable in the face of climate and other emergencies.” In addition, their research shows that more egalitarian societies have significantly less severe impacts on nature. The higher the degree of inequality, the poorer the performance when it comes to air pollution, waste recycling, and carbon emissions.
The message is clear: curtailing ecological breakdown while improving humanity’s quality of life requires banishing the material extravagance of the world’s richest people, especially the growing crew of global billionaires. That would, however, have to be part of a much broader effort to rid affluent societies of the systemic overextraction and overproduction that threaten to be our global undoing.
Phase Out and Degrow
Old-fashioned computer simulations and present-day realities are, it seems, speaking to us in unison, warning that civilization itself is in danger of collapse. Growth — whether expressed as more dollars accumulated, more tons of material stuff produced, more carbon burned, or more wastes emitted — is coming to an end. The only question is: Will it happen as a collapse of society, or could the reversal of material growth be undertaken rationally in ways that would avoid a descent into a Mad Max-style conflict of all against all?
Increasing numbers of advocates for the latter path are working under the banner of “degrowth.” In his 2018 book Degrowth, Giorgos Kallis described it as “a trajectory where the ‘throughput’ (energy, materials and waste flows) of an economy decreases while welfare, or well-being, improves” in a fashion both “non-exploitative and radically egalitarian.”
In the past few years, the degrowth movement has — how else to put it? — grown, and quickly, too. Once a subject for a handful of mainly European academics, it’s become a broader movement challenging the injustices of capitalism and “green growth.” It’s the subject of hundreds of articles in academic journals, including the new Degrowth Journal, and a stack of books (including the captivating Who’s Afraid of Degrowth?). A 2023 survey of 789 climate researchers found almost three-quarters of them favoring degrowth or no-growth over green growth.
In a 2022 Naturearticle, eight degrowth scholars listed policies they believe should guide affluent societies in the future. Those include reducing less-necessary material production and energy consumption, converting to workers’ ownership, shortening working hours, improving and universalizing public services, redistributing economic power, and prioritizing grassroots social and political movements.
Could such policies ever become a reality in the United States, and if so, how? Clearly, the private businesses that dominate our economy would never tolerate policies aimed at shrinking material production or their profit margins (nor would the federal government we know today). Nevertheless, if more enlightened lawmakers and policymakers ever took control (hard as that may be to imagine), they might indeed head off the societal and environmental collapses now distinctly underway. The most effective pressure points for doing so would, I suspect, be the oil and gas wells and coal mines that now power such destruction.
As a start — unbelievable as it might seem in our present world — Washington would have to nationalize the fossil-fuel industry and put a nationwide, no-matter-what cap on the number of barrels of oil, cubic feet of gas, and tons of coal allowed out of the ground and into the economy, with that cap ratcheting briskly downward year by year. The buildup of wind, solar, and other non-fossil energy would, of course, be unable to keep pace with such a speedy suppression of fuel supplies. So, America would have to go on an energy diet, while the production of unnecessary, wasteful goods and services would have to be quickly reduced.
And yet the government would need to ensure that the economy continued to satisfy everyone’s most basic needs. That would require a comprehensive industrial policy directing energy and material resources ever more toward the production of essential goods and services. Such policies would rule out AI, bitcoin, and other energy gluttons that exist only to generate wealth for the few while undermining humanity’s prospects for a decent future. Meanwhile, price controls would be needed to ensure that all households had enough electricity and fuel.
My colleague Larry Edwards and I have been arguing for years that such a framework, what we’ve called “Cap and Adapt” is a necessity not for some distant future, but now. Similar federal policies for adapting to material resource limitations worked well in World War II-era America. Unfortunately, we live — to say the least — in a very different political world today. (Just ask one of this country’s 756 billionaires!) If there was ever a chance that a national industrial policy, price controls, and rationing could, as in the 1940s, be passed into law, that chance has sadly vanished — at least for the near future.
Fortunately, though, the international situation looks brighter. A burgeoning, vigorous movement is pushing for the two initial actions that would be essential to avoid the worst of climate chaos and societal collapse: the nationalization of, and a rapid phaseout of, fossil fuels in the affluent world. Those could turn out to be humanity’s first steps toward degrowth and a truly livable future. But the world would need to act fast.
And no excuses, okay? We’ve been given fair warning.
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How to Build a Climate Bomb
Starting and then stopping solar geoengineering would cause the warming that had been temporarily held in abeyance to show up quickly and with a vengeance.
Apr 10, 2024
A major effort to limit climate change could actually make the problem much worse. If that sounds maddeningly paradoxical, then welcome to the bizarre science-fiction world of solar geoengineering.
There are two main pathways for deliberately altering Earth systems (i.e., geoengineering) in order to reduce the severity of global warming: carbon dioxide removal and radiation shielding. The former pathway is widely discussed, though little progress is being made. Methods of removing carbon from the atmosphere are either biological (regenerating soil and planting trees) or mechanical (building machines to suck carbon dioxide out of the air). Generally, biological methods show far more promise. But, regardless of method, the problem of scale is daunting: As a result of decades of rising greenhouse gas emissions, there’s a hell of a lot of excess carbon that needs to be removed.
Hence the alternative pathway of radiation shielding or solar geoengineering. Why not cool the Earth by reducing the amount of sunlight warming it? By most calculations, this would be a cheaper and faster way out of the climate crisis than carbon removal. Again, there are diverging pathways. The two most frequently discussed are sending up high-altitude planes to disperse tiny reflective particles (this is known as stratospheric aerosol injection, or SAI), or building a space parasol to shield the planet from some of the sun’s rays.
What’s really needed to reduce climate risk is a coordinated effort to greatly shrink humanity’s overall energy usage and material consumption, along with massive investments in nature-based carbon removal.
Many people regard these as last-ditch, risky projects. However, the failure of humanity so far to reduce carbon emissions, plus a flurry of alarming recent studies about rapidly warming oceans, climate feedbacks, and tipping points, are leading some scientists and activists who previously dismissed solar geoengineering to now have second thoughts.
The first SAI pilot projects could start soon. But to achieve global cooling of, say, 1°C would require a fleet of planes hoisting and dispersing several million metric tons of particles high in the stratosphere. Forging international agreements for such a project and building the required infrastructure could take well over a decade. Constructing a space parasol would probably take even longer and be more expensive.
What could go wrong? Tinkering with the climate in one place could trigger droughts or mega-storms elsewhere. Only wealthy nations or corporations could undertake solar radiation geoengineering at the scale needed to achieve significant results, so there is at least the theoretical possibility of the technology being used in a subtle or overt form of global extortion. (Nice climate you’ve got there. You want it to stay that way? Pay up.) Also, fossil fuel industries and governments dependent on fossil fuel revenues could use geoengineering as an excuse to keep polluting.
But there’s one important risk that is discussed less frequently. If a global solar radiation management program were to start but then stop, then the warming that had been temporarily held in abeyance would show up quickly and with a vengeance. This is how a European Parliament briefing document from 2021 puts it:
Once started, solar geoengineering cannot be stopped. Assuming that carbon emissions continued, the artificial sunshade would mask increasing amounts of extra warming. If geoengineering ceased abruptly—due to sabotage, technical, or political reasons—temperatures would shoot up rapidly. This termination shock would be catastrophic for humans and ecosystems.
How Big of a Bomb Are We Talking About?
The word “catastrophic” in the text just quoted gives little indication of scale. A termination shock would be bad—but climate change is already bad. How awful might a geoengineering termination shock actually be? A couple of metaphors could prepare us to estimate the potential size of such a shock.
Think of climate change as a wildfire. An uncontrolled burn releases energy previously held in trees and grasses, adding it to the local environment in the form of heat. Similarly, by trapping solar radiation, greenhouse gases add energy in the form of heat to the global climate system (elsewhere, I have proposed calling the fossil-fueled industrial era “the Great Burning”).
In contrast, a sudden release of pent-up warming would metaphorically more closely resemble a bomb, whose explosion releases energy far faster.
The sudden release of just one year’s worth global warming energy would be the equivalent of nearly 1,000 times the energy yielded by exploding the world’s entire nuclear arsenal.
How much energy? Let’s run the numbers. First, we should settle on a unit of measure. Energy can be expressed in watt-hours or joules, but for our purposes it might be more fitting to use a measure typically reserved for describing the energy released by nuclear weapons—the megaton (Mt), which refers to the explosive energy of a million tons of TNT.
The energy transfer that’s causing climate change can be measured in megatons. A recent study found that the Earth’s oceans, which absorb most of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases, capture “the heat of five to six Hiroshima atom bombs per second.” The Hiroshima explosion was estimated at 15 kilotons of energy, so a little quick math tells us the oceans are absorbing at least one megaton of energy from global warming every 13 seconds or so.
The total firepower of all current nuclear weapons is estimated at 2,500 Mt. A bit more arithmetic tells us that’s about nine hours’ worth of global warming. So, the sudden release of just one year’s worth global warming energy would be the equivalent of nearly 1,000 times the energy yielded by exploding the world’s entire nuclear arsenal.
That’s a really, really big bomb.
I’m not saying that the effects of global warming would mirror the immediate effects of detonating the world’s nuclear arsenal 1,000 times over. But there would surely be horrendous consequences from the Earth having to absorb all that energy so fast.
If we continue spewing greenhouse gas emissions, we will be capturing the same amount of energy from the sun and heating the planet just as much, but more slowly and over a longer time (that’s the metaphorical wildfire). Adaptation to global warming at current rates will be extremely challenging for societies and ecosystems; in some cases, adaptation will probably fail, leading to casualties and collapse. The last thing we should be doing is speeding up the rate of change by building a climate bomb.
If we Start Geoengineering, How Likely Is an Unintended Termination?
Whether the risk of humanity’s failure to maintain a solar geoengineering program, once it has started, is seen as substantial or trivial depends partly on whether you view modern industrial civilization as inherently sustainable.
Most governments and economists see industrial civilization as here to stay. We may have a few problems to contend with, say the techno-optimists, but these can be solved; ultimately, technological progress is unstoppable.
However, researchers in the fields of ecology and systems science claim that our current global industrial system will necessarily be self-limiting over time, due to resource depletion and pollution. We can improve the efficiency of industrial processes up to a point, but increasingly they are limited by supplies of natural resources and availability of waste sinks. For wealthy modern societies, whose resource flows and waste streams are gargantuan by any historical measure, those natural limits are set to bite soon, and bite hard.
If world leaders continue to fail to mount that effort and make those investments, will they eventually turn to solar radiation geoengineering as an alternative solution, because it’s cheaper and doesn’t involve as much perceived sacrifice? We’d better hope not, because it would be an epically, apocalyptically horrible idea.
Rockets, satellites, and high-altitude planes are all fixtures of the early 21st century. They depend on mining, manufacturing, and transport systems that didn’t exist until the late 20th century, and that probably can’t be maintained for more than another few decades. The future will be all about simplification—whether by design or default.
So, to me, the failure of humanity to maintain a solar radiation geoengineering project, once it has started, is not a remote risk; rather, it’s the most likely thing that would happen.
Maybe I’m wrong about that. Perhaps there’s only a 10% risk of a geoengineering failure resulting in a sudden global warming rebound. But it’s a risk that would entail global heating of a speed and magnitude that would be both unprecedented and terrifying.
What’s really needed to reduce climate risk is a coordinated effort to greatly shrink humanity’s overall energy usage and material consumption, along with massive investments in nature-based carbon removal. If world leaders continue to fail to mount that effort and make those investments, will they eventually turn to solar radiation geoengineering as an alternative solution, because it’s cheaper and doesn’t involve as much perceived sacrifice? We’d better hope not, because it would be an epically, apocalyptically horrible idea.
Finally, here’s the good news. Solar geoengineering is still in the category of bad things that aren’t happening, but might. This means that, with more public awareness, it could be prevented.
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