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degrowth
How to Save the World: Give Up War, Cars, and Leaf-Blowers... and Unveil the Stars
It's imperative that we stand up to the forces of ecocide, while developing a more realistic vision of the better world that awaits us once we’ve jumped off the growth-by-carbonization bandwagon.
Jan 14, 2026
Let me start by putting things bluntly: Don’t bother to tell Donald Trump, but with his distinct help, we’re doing nothing less than cooking ourselves. Thanks to the continued use of fossil fuels in a staggering fashion and the growth of greenhouse gas emissions, almost half of the world’s population now suffers through 30 additional days of extreme heat annually. Heatwaves roll in thicker and faster every year.
On average, according to the medical journal The Lancet, 84% of the extremely hot days we’ve faced over the past five years would not have occurred without human-induced climate change that the American president seems intent on making so much worse. Heat-related deaths are already 63% more frequent than in the 1990s. That Lancet article also reported that heat- and drought-related hunger, as well as deaths from wildfire smoke and industrial air pollution, are breaking records globally almost yearly.
Climate Impacts Tracker dubbed 2025 “The Year of Climate Disasters,” noting:
Flash floods tearing up a Himalayan village in India, hurricanes and wildfires ravaging the US, heatwaves and wildfires scorching Europe, record-breaking heat in Iceland and Greenland, torrential rains and floods roaring through Southeast Asia—2025 marked yet another year of human tragedies, driven by extreme weather events.
The number of environmental disasters and their destructiveness are only ratcheting up in step with increases in global greenhouse gas emissions, ever more extraction of key minerals, the ever-greater exploitation of biological resources, and outbreaks of resource wars (most recently with the US assault on Venezuela). All of that is linked to one crucial phenomenon: the single-minded pursuit of economic growth by the owning and investing classes. Not surprisingly, they reap the lion’s share of the benefits from such growth and bear next to none of its devastating consequences.
Though it’s seldom highlighted, the world economy has indeed reached an astounding physical scale. During the past century, resource extraction has doubled every 20 years or so. Indeed, humanity reached a grim milestone in 2021, when the global quantity of human-made mass—that is, the total weight of all things our species manufactured or constructed—surpassed the total weight of all living plant, animal, and microbial biomass on this planet. And worse yet, that mass of human-made stuff continues to grow, year by year, even as the natural world diminishes further.
In other words, our species is vainly striving to circumvent what’s come to be known as Stein’s Law from an aphorism credited to economic guru Herbert Stein: “If something can’t go on forever, it won’t.”
Societies could indeed achieve a distinctly better quality of life because of (not in spite of) degrowth.
Count on this: At some point, global economic growth will finally have to grind to a halt and shift into reverse. After all, if the corporate and political powers carry on with business as usual, such growth will end in chaotic, violent collapse. (Think Mad Max.) But if the elites can be thwarted and we can dramatically reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and other resources in a reasonably well-planned way, we might be able to avoid that fate.
That’s the pitch put forward by the degrowth movement. In essence, it’s a refutation of the “green growth” doctrine. (Green-growthers, ignoring Stein’s Law, claim that technological “innovation” will ensure that economies can continue to grow indefinitely.) In that debate, degrowth finally seems to be getting a leg up. A 2023 survey of nearly 800 climate-policy researchers found that almost three-quarters of them favored degrowth or no growth over green growth.
And here’s the reality the rest of us need to take in: Societies could indeed achieve a distinctly better quality of life because of (not in spite of) degrowth, since full-scale restraints on the endless extraction and consumption of fossil fuels could force them to ensure that their limited resources would be used to satisfy basic human needs instead of being wasted on yet more increasing profits for the already wealthy few.
The growth-addled political and economic forces pushing us toward ecological doom are many and formidable indeed. And that makes it ever more important that people in rich, overconsuming countries like ours come to realize how important it is that we stand up to the forces of ecocide, while developing a more realistic vision of the better world that awaits us once we’ve jumped off the growth-by-carbonization bandwagon.
One way to bring that better world into sharper focus is to examine a few of the many miseries and dangers that degrowth would help us alleviate or even leave behind. What follows is just a handful of examples.
Goodbye, War Machine
Topping the list of American institutions and resources that a degrowth economy could starve would be the US military-industrial complex. After all, the Pentagon is actually the largest institutional user of fossil fuels in the world. The greenhouse gases our military emits, even in peacetime, are believed to have a global-warming impact of 60 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually. The Earth can’t handle that any longer.
To begin shrinking our military’s now trillion-dollar annual budget would not only prevent a significant amount of global warming but also save countless human lives and greatly enhance the quality of life in this country and across the planet.
With degrowth, for example, the Defense (not—thank you, Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, and crew!—War) Department’s nearly 3 million employees, who enable the resource-heavy, deadly work of war-fighting, imperialism, and, if the Trump administration gets its way, the suppression of domestic political protest, can find themselves better jobs. After all, employees in all but the top echelons of the military, underpaid and exploited, endure often harsh working and living conditions. Zeroing out the Pentagon would free up a vast workforce to help meet people’s actual needs rather than killing all too many of us on this planet (most recently, at least 115 in the bombing of Venezuelan boats and 40 more in the January 3rd attack on Caracas). And they’d be better off losing those jobs.
Enlisted personnel receive such small paychecks that many are eligible for SNAP (“food stamp”) benefits, even if only 14% apply for them. Among the families of junior enlisted troops, 45% often can’t afford enough food. More than 286,000 of them don’t get an adequate variety or amount of food and, of those, about 120,000 report sometimes skipping meals and eating less than they need for fear of running out of money.
And that’s not all. A nationwide analysis suggested that towns and cities abutting military bases have higher crime rates (19% greater for property crimes and 34% for violent crimes) than similar towns not near such installations.
Worse yet, people living or working in or around military bases are often exposed to dangerous levels of toxic contamination over long periods and can also be plagued by noise pollution. Not surprisingly, studies have also found high rates of hearing loss among the troops. In the United States, almost 15% of active-duty personnel suffer hearing impairment of some sort (and it’s one of the most common health problems among veterans as well).
Dismantling our war machine would also help restore a better quality of life for tens of millions of people elsewhere. Consider the death and misery our military has inflicted during the past six decades on Indochina, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Kuwait, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Iran, and now the Caribbean Sea, the Eastern Pacific Ocean, and of course Venezuela.
As if that weren’t bad enough, for decades, our military-industrial complex has provided armaments to repressive, murderous regimes around the globe—Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people being the most recent example.
Adiós, Vehicular Supremacy
In a much less resource-intensive American society, human needs would also no longer be subordinated to those of gasoline-driven motor vehicles, and our collective quality of life would improve dramatically.
Based on the importance of keeping this planet livable, any ecologically sane society would break free from what Gregory Shill has labeled “automobile supremacy” and that, of course, would be a particularly significant accomplishment for any degrowth movement in the United States or other wealthy countries.
As a start, motor vehicles are regularly among the top 10 causes of death for US residents under the age of 55. Worse yet, pedestrian fatalities, which had been falling for decades, shot up by 71% between 2010 and 2023, while fatalities caused by increasingly taller, heavier, more aggressively armored pickups and SUVs climbed at precisely twice that rate, 142%.
Starving militarism and automobile supremacy of resources, while improving the quality of life of our communities, would also go a long way toward halting the ecological breakdown of this planet while the sources of many smaller-scale dangers and ills would also fade into the past.
With private gas-driven vehicles largely replaced by extensive transit networks, electric vehicles, and bike and foot traffic, we also won’t have to contend with as many road-raging drivers in armored pickup trucks the size of World War II tanks. We won’t face the health dangers posed by air and noise pollution from vehicle traffic. Our cities will have vastly more green space, because significant parts of the 30% of their soil surface now covered by concrete or asphalt solely to accommodate motor vehicles could be revegetated. And we won’t suffer the extra-blistering summer heat that comes with such over-paving.
With degrowth and the end of automobile supremacy, traffic jams will vanish into the past; we’ll no longer risk being killed while simply walking, biking along a roadway, crossing a street legally, or engaging in lawful, peaceful protest; and everyone will all too literally be able to stop driving everyone else crazy.
Farewell to So Many Other Fossil-Fuelized Plagues
Starving militarism and automobile supremacy of resources, while improving the quality of life of our communities, would also go a long way toward halting the ecological breakdown of this planet while the sources of many smaller-scale dangers and ills would also fade into the past. Taken alone, each might appear insignificant, but cumulatively, such culprits severely degrade the quality of life in our wildly growth-oriented economy. As just one example of something that, with degrowth, we could say “good riddance” to, let me suggest that loud-mouthed neighborhood bully, the leaf blower.
Generating wind speeds approaching those of an EF5 tornado, gas-powered leaf blowers blast out noise at 95 to 115 decibels (two to eight times louder than the safe upper limit set by federal agencies). Electric leaf blowers, while less noisy, still significantly exceed the maximum safe noise level near schools, hospitals, daycare centers, retirement homes, or anywhere else where there are vulnerable people present.
Most gas-powered blowers and other deafening lawn machinery are operated for long hours by commercial landscaping crews, whose ears are just a couple of feet from the roar. Often surrounded by other leaf blowers, lawn mowers, and gas-powered equipment, such workers commonly suffer hearing loss.
The noise of a leaf blower, like that produced by vehicular traffic and wind turbines, is rich in low-frequency sound that carries long distances, easily passing through walls. Exposure to such noise raises the risk of a range of health problems, including sleep disruption, mental stress, high blood pressure, heart ailments, stroke, and immune-system dysfunction.
And keep in mind that the substitution of leaf blowers for perfectly functional rakes is just the tip of the iceberg. Our economy is now chock-full of unnecessary products that diminish the quality of life and would be left in the nearest ditch if energy consumption were deeply reduced.
Hello Again, Night Sky
By ending profligate energy consumption, degrowth could also restore much-loved wonders of nature that the growth economy has stolen from us.
Consider the night sky. Since 2010, in cities and towns, as well as anyplace near them, “skyglow” (a bleaching out of the night sky that hides stars from view) has been increasing at an astonishing rate of 10% a year.
This surge in light pollution has coincided with the rapid adoption of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) for streetlights and other outdoor illumination. Such LEDs produce far more light per watt of energy consumed than older light sources. Unfortunately, companies and municipalities have taken advantage of LED efficiency not by cutting their energy consumption, but by flooding parking lots, streets, billboards, sports fields, and car dealerships with even brighter light.
We’d reap myriad benefits by deeply cutting resource use while ensuring that collective sufficiency and justice for all become the focus of our world.
Most LED lighting now in use is rich in short wavelengths at the “cool-blue” end of the visible spectrum, which ensures that it will be scattered by the atmosphere more efficiently and so produce a rapid increase in skyglow. As a result, stars have all but disappeared from the night sky in cities, suburbs, and nearby rural areas.
Exposure to cool-blue light at night also threatens humans and other species by disrupting our circadian sleep-wake cycle. Among the impacts on human health are gastrointestinal disorders, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and even cancer.
A degrowth society dialing down its energy use would not only reduce light and noise pollution but achieve significant advances in environmental justice. Brightly lit industrial and commercial facilities and parking lots are all too often placed in low-income, racialized communities. As a consequence, across the United States, light pollution is more severe in neighborhoods where a larger proportion of the population is Black, Latino, or Asian.
Amid mounting ecological and humanitarian crises and with Donald Trump still in the White House for another three potentially devastating years, the vanishing of the heavens may be regarded as a problem only for astronomers and aesthetes. But such a view badly underestimates how important the starry night sky has proven to be to our culture, scientific progress, and social cohesion. It was an unalloyed good, shared freely and equally by all humanity. And it could be so again if, with degrowth, we put our cities and towns on a dimmer switch.
To be clear, the degrowth movement’s not claiming that the way to prevent ecological and civilizational collapse is simply to play Whac-A-Mole by working our way through individual problems like traffic congestion or light and noise pollution. In fact, the point of degrowth is that societies should leave all such problems, including the potential disaster of climate change, in history’s trash heap. We’d reap myriad benefits by deeply cutting resource use while ensuring that collective sufficiency and justice for all become the focus of our world.
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A Different 'Abundance Agenda': Avoiding Delusions and Diversions
If there is to be a decent human future—perhaps if there is to be any human future—it will be fewer people consuming less energy and creating less stuff.
Mar 30, 2025
For the next few weeks, the buzzword in US debates on the liberal/left about economics and ecology will be “abundance” after the release of the book with that title by Ezra Klein (New York Times) and Derek Thompson (The Atlantic magazine).
The book poses politically relevant questions: Have policies favored by Democrats and others on the political left impeded innovation with unnecessary red tape for building projects? Can regulatory reform and revitalized public investment bring technological progress that can solve problems in housing, infrastructure, energy, and agriculture? The book says yes to both.
Those debates have short-term political implications but are largely irrelevant to the human future. The challenge is not how to do more but how to live with less.
All societies face multiple cascading ecological crises—emphasis on the plural. There are many crises, not just climate change, and no matter what a particular society’s contribution to the crises there is nowhere to hide. The cascading changes will come in ways we can prepare for but can’t predict, and it’s likely the consequences will be much more dire than we imagine.
If that seems depressing, I’m sorry. Keep reading anyway.
Rapid climate disruption is the most pressing concern but not the only existential threat. Soil erosion and degradation undermine our capacity to feed ourselves. Chemical contamination of our bodies and ecosystems undermines the possibility of a stable long-term human presence. Species extinction and loss of biodiversity will have potentially catastrophic effects on the ecosystems on which our lives depend.
Why aren’t more people advocating limits? Because limits are hard.
I could go on, but anyone who wants to know about these crises can easily find this information in both popular media and the research literature. For starters, I recommend the work of William Rees, an ecologist who co-created the ecological footprint concept and knows how to write for ordinary people.
The foundational problem is overshoot: There are too many people consuming too much in the aggregate. The distribution of the world’s wealth is not equal or equitable, of course, but the overall program for human survival is clear: fewer and less. If there is to be a decent human future—perhaps if there is to be any human future—it will be fewer people consuming less energy and creating less stuff.
Check the policy statements of all major political players, including self-described progressives and radicals, and it’s hard to find mention of the need to impose limits on ourselves. Instead, you will find delusions and diversions.
The delusions come mainly from the right, where climate-change denialism is still common. The more sophisticated conservatives don’t directly challenge the overwhelming consensus of researchers but instead sow seeds of doubt, as if there is legitimate controversy. That makes it easier to preach the “drill, baby, drill” line of expanding fossil fuel production, no matter what the ecological costs, instead of facing limits.
The diversions come mainly from the left, where people take climate change seriously but invest their hopes in an endless array of technological solutions. These days, the most prominent tech hype is “electrify everything,” which includes a commitment to an unsustainable car culture with electric vehicles, instead of facing limits.
There is a small kernel of truth in the rhetoric of both right and left.
When the right says that expanding fossil energy production would lift more people out of poverty, they have a valid point. But increased production of fossil energy is not suddenly going to benefit primarily the world’s poor, and the continued expansion of emissions eventually will doom rich and poor alike.
When the left says renewable energy is crucial, they have a valid point. But if the promise of renewable energy is used to prop up existing levels of consumption, then the best we can expect is a slowing of the rate of ecological destruction. Unless renewables are one component of an overall down-powering, they are a part of the problem and not a solution.
Why aren’t more people advocating limits? Because limits are hard. People—including me and almost everyone reading this—find it hard to resist what my co-author Wes Jackson and I have called “the temptations of dense energy.” Yes, lots of uses of fossil fuels are wasteful, and modern marketing encourages that waste. But coal, oil, and natural gas also do a lot of work for us and provide a lot of comforts that people are reluctant to give up.
That’s why the most sensible approach combines limits on our consumption of energy and rationing to ensure greater fairness, both of which have to be collectively imposed. That’s not a popular political position today, but if we are serious about slowing, and eventually stopping, the human destruction of the ecosphere, I see no other path forward.
In the short term, those of us who endorse “fewer and less” will have to make choices between political candidates and parties that are, on the criteria of real sustainability, either really hard-to-describe awful or merely bad. I would never argue that right and left, Republican and Democrat, are indistinguishable. But whatever our immediate political choices, we should talk openly about ecological realities.
That can start with imagining an “abundance agenda” quite different than what Klein and Thompson, along with most conventional thinking, propose. Instead of more building that will allegedly be “climate friendly,” why not scale back our expectations? Instead of assuming a constantly mobile society, why not be satisfied with staying home? Instead of dreaming of more gadgets, why not live more fully in the world around us? People throughout history have demonstrated that productive societies can live with less.
Instead of the promise of endless material abundance, which has never been consistent with a truly sustainable future, let’s invest in what we know produces human flourishing—collective activity in community based on shared needs and reduced wants. For me, living in rural New Mexico, that means being one of the older folks who are helping younger folks get a small-scale farm off the ground. It means being an active participant in our local acequia irrigation system. It means staying home instead of vacationing. It means being satisfied with the abundant pleasures of this place and these people without buying much beyond essentials.
I’m not naïve—given the house I live in, the car I drive, and the food I buy from a grocery store, I’m still part of a hyper-extractive economy that is unsustainable. But instead of scrambling for more, I am seeking to live with less. I know that’s much harder for people struggling to feed a family and afford even a modest home. But rather than imagining ways to keep everyone on the consumption treadmill, only with more equity, we can all contribute ideas about how to step off.
Our choices are clear: We can drill more, which will simply get us to a cruel end game even sooner. We can pretend that technology will save us, which might delay that reckoning. If we can abandon the delusions and diversions, there’s no guarantee of a happy future. But there’s a chance of a future.
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This Peak Buying Season, It's Time to Rethink Fashion's Growth Obsession
Moving beyond growth and the mentality that "more stuff is better” could help reshape the fashion system—and make us happier in the long run.
Dec 08, 2024
Fast fashion is a poster child of capitalism. Over the past 20 years, fashion production, consumption—and textile waste—have doubled in volume. The current neocolonial status quo is characterized by labor exploitation and cultural appropriation, overproduction, resource depletion, and unprecedented waste generation.
The environmental and social impacts of fashion choices in the Global North are disproportionately affecting vulnerable populations in the Global South. Material throughput of the fashion system should be cut at least in half to stay within the planetary boundaries—but the industry is programmed for growth, mostly in synthetic or plastic garments, on a trajectory to take up to a quarter of the global carbon budget.
Looking good does not have to mean contributing to a broken system.
Our society's addiction to growth fuels this cycle, prioritising profit over all else. While offering consumers the illusion of choice, the current linear fashion business model leads to wardrobe clutter, constant pressure to keep up with trends that causes the feeling of exclusion—and exacerbates further the class divide.
But looking good doesn't have to mean fueling a destructive and exploitative growth model. Moving beyond growth and the mentality that "more stuff is better" could help reshape the fashion system—and make us happier in the long run.
The Beyond Growth Vision
What would it mean to move beyond growth in fashion—in practice?
For Citizens
Addressing the constant push for "more" would be a good start. Why do we seek more stuff? If we zoom into the basic needs behind our overconsumption, we'll find the needs to belong, to be part of a community and respected by our peers, and the needs for self-expression and feeling safe in our environment. But what if there were other ways to fulfil these basic needs instead of buying more stuff?
Buying more consciously—prioritizing quality, longevity, circularity, ethical and local production—is important. But we cannot buy our way out of the crisis of overconsumption by buying "green." The only consumer-citizens' action that can make all the difference is to simply buy less new stuff.
Before we rush to defend our right to shop as if there's no tomorrow, as enshrined in the "constitution" of capitalism, let's take a moment to talk about "less." More isn't always better, and less isn't always worse. Think about war. Production of weapons contributes positively to the growth of GDP—but are weapons a good thing? Could it be possible that too much fashion is not a good thing? And if so, how much fashion is enough? Consider this:
- A Parisian woman in the 1960s had a wardrobe of 40 garments, including shoes and accessories.
- An average Dutch wardrobe today contains 175 garments.
- A wardrobe to stay under the 1.5°C limit of the Paris agreement should contain 80 garments.
- People who voluntarily chose to downsize their wardrobes and only keep garments they love report higher levels of subjective well-being.
It turns out that, not only can we do with less, but living with a curated "less" makes us happier, more conscious about style and more in control of our spending. And—it is also great for the planet. Importantly, moving beyond the "buy more" mentality could help us take back creative control over our self-expression and encourage more diverse personal styles and empower true uniqueness.
Scaling down our irresponsible and wasteful buying habits can have a long-term reinvigorating effect on individuals and on our communities. Instead of buying new things online, alone, to feel better in a crazy world we live in, we could join mending and repair workshops, swaps, upcycling or creative clubs—meet like-minded people, make friends, and become part of a community.
For the Fashion Industry
There is no easy way to replace centuries of growth-oriented business logic overnight. For businesses, moving beyond growth would mean experimentation with ownership structures, new business models and revenue streams to move toward circularity and sufficiency. Profits are not wrong per se, but how they are distributed makes a major difference. The ordeal that Patagonia went through to transform its ownership model to create an environmental fund to replace its shareholder structure indicates that our legal systems are so tailored to growth models that even moving from shareholder to stakeholder capitalism is difficult.
It would also require rethinking the current overproduction strategy. The majority of items today do not sell: An average sell-through rate is 40-80%. Which begs the question: Does this strategy even work in a saturated market? The industry should take a look at how to reduce stock keeping units (SKUs) and focus on developing more products for circularity as opposed to more products overall. Extending responsibility of brands to what happens to their product after the sale, all the way to the end of life, could be the critical mindshift point opening up doors for responsible circular practices that have not existed before. These would include designing for the next use, repair, and re-manufacture.
Citizens are more than just consumers, and we can advocate for change and shift the narrative toward a beautiful fashion future in which less is more.
However, these changes cannot occur in competition with the dominant unsustainable and unethical growth-oriented industry practices. To move beyond growth and let post-growth business experimentation flourish, it is critical to even out the playing field through regulations. Governments could take the first step by banning or restricting business practices that constitute fast and ultra-fast fashion models. A great example is France that sets a tax for companies that put more than 2,000 styles on the market daily.
Another example is Amsterdam. They city made an effort to go beyond GDP by applying Doughnut Economic Frameworks to align the fashion industry with well-being economy principles, such as reducing waste and promoting sustainable practices. One initiative encourages citizens to mend their clothes through repair cafes, fostering a culture of reuse and reducing the demand for fast fashion.
Other options could be tax incentives for sustainable practices, restrictions on harmful materials, monitoring for transparency, support for circular economies, and education (e.g. learning how to repair your clothes). It is also crucial to regulate planned obsolescence, reinforce the right to repair, as well as implement non-for-profit extended producer responsibility. Side policies could also include banning some advertising, especially that of fast fashion brands, as well as the use of algorithms and tracking consumer data by brands.
Fashion Forward
Looking good does not have to mean contributing to a broken system. Citizens are more than just consumers, and we can advocate for change and shift the narrative toward a beautiful fashion future in which less is more. Choosing to recognize our core needs and find alternatives, as well as finding creative and joyful ways to fill them other than shopping for clothes, is an act of empowerment that can heal us, our planet, and the very system that is very, very sick.
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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 Times reported 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 Times reported 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 Press reported.
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 Nature article, 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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We Must Reject Ego-Nomics to Prevent Human Extinction
To secure the well-being of all of Earth’s people and the many other members of Earth’s household, we will need a new economics, an “eco-nomics” that guides us on a path to a life-centric civilization.
Apr 03, 2024
Our modern lives are largely determined by economic policies shaped by prevailing economic theory. Yet current economic theory serves us well only if our societal purpose is to exploit people and Earth to make money for the already rich. This economics is better named ego-nomics, as its focus on personal financial return is more ego (from the Latin “I”) than eco (from the Greek “oikos” meaning household). In our current interdependent world, our household is Earth and all its living beings.
Humans confront an unprecedented challenge. Science tells us that by the end of this decade we must reverse the damage we are doing to the Earth or reach a point beyond which repair becomes impossible. To secure the well-being of all of Earth’s people and the many other members of Earth’s household, we will need a new economics, an “eco-nomics” that guides us on a path to a life-centric civilization, an Ecological Civilization dedicated to caring for one another and all members of the Earth household.
The challenges of the transformation we must now navigate are daunting. Yet human self-extinction—the likely consequence of failure—makes it essential that we join in common cause with serious commitment.
The challenge of our time is to fulfill our true and largely unrealized human potential as we learn to live in beloved communities of mutual caring and service to one another and the natural and human commons.
As we examine the environmental and social failures of modern society, we confront a host of self-evident truths that conventional ego-nomics ignores. Earth is our common home and the source of our existence and well-being. Money has no meaning or utility beyond the human mind. Indeed, most modern money is only invisible electronic traces stored on computer memory chips.
Not only has ego-nomics ignored these truths. It has also led us to create a world in which the vast majority of the world’s people have been reduced to servitude to those who control those electronic traces.
The resulting growth in inequality is beyond obscene. In January 2023, the World Economic Forum reported that the financial assets of the world’s super-rich were growing by $2.7 billion a day. The average billionaire was gaining roughly $1.7 million in new financial assets for every $1 in pay received by a person in the bottom 90%.
The ultimate human conceit is the belief that an all-powerful God created the vast cosmos and the finite living Earth for humans to exploit in whatever way might appeal to them. In its ability to sustain life, Earth is distinctive among the planets we have so far observed. And we humans are distinctive among Earth’s beings in our ability to choose and create our future together. This gives us special privileges—and special responsibilities—consistent with our distinctive nature.
Misled by the flawed promises of the ego-nomics promoted by the self-serving who benefit from it, we have allowed money to replace mutual care in mediating our relationships with other people and the living Earth. Indeed, we have come to idolize a small minority of predatory humans who suffer from a grandiose sense of superiority and self-entitlement known as narcissistic personality disorder. Neglected and disrespected in their earliest years, these individuals engage in a relentless quest for excess in an effort to demonstrate their self-worth in the face of their own self-doubt. In the process, they dehumanize themselves and those around them.
The challenge of our time is to fulfill our true and largely unrealized human potential as we learn to live in beloved communities of mutual caring and service to one another and the natural and human commons. Key components of the new eco-nomics involve:
- Replacing GDP with valid indicators of beneficial economic performance.
- Confronting and dispelling the illusion that money is wealth and that growing money benefits us all.
- Embracing biology and ecology as the disciplines most foundational to an eco-nomics for an Ecological Civilization.
We face a series of daunting institutional challenges. We currently debate a choice between socialism (an economy ruled by politicians and public officials) and capitalism (an economy ruled by private financiers). Many of us are fearful of the potential melding of the two into fascism. What is rarely mentioned is the people power alternative rooted in democratic communities and community markets.
An Ecological Civilization depends on the latter. It requires that financial assets be equitably distributed to assure that responsibilities for making significant decisions are truly shared. Predatory monopolistic profit-maximizing corporations will be converted into worker or community cooperatives responsible for serving the needs of all their stakeholders.
Reliance on money as a substitute for caring relationships will be minimized. The private banking system that currently operates beyond accountability to national governments and interests will be replaced by a global system of community banks cooperatively owned and operated by the communities in which they do business.
We are not dealing with a broken system in need of repair. We are dealing with a failed system in need of replacement. We will achieve this transformation to an Ecological Civilization only through a people powered meta-movement in which the world’s people come together guided by a valid eco-nomics in a unifying commitment to creating a world that works for all of Earth life.
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The Problem With Leaf Blowers
This technology’s reliance on gasoline and oil ties it to history’s greatest catastrophe disguised as humanity’s biggest triumph—the fossil-fueled Industrial Revolution.
Nov 04, 2023
Every Thursday our next-door neighbor hires a worker to use a leaf blower. This infernal machine drives me nuts. Rather than letting a pet peeve render me literally insane, I’ve decided to explore the leaf blower’s deeper significance. A psychologist might call this writing therapy. Maybe the result can also provide a little relief for you, the reader, if you share my irritation.
The most obvious critique of the leaf blower is that it’s an obnoxious, destructive piece of machinery. As everyone within earshot of one knows, gasoline-powered leaf blowers are noisy. Deafening, in fact. The device blasts 95 to 115 decibels of sound at its operator. According to the website Dangerous Decibels, this is roughly equivalent to a chainsaw or a passenger jet taking off, and it can cause permanent hearing loss. Further, research into the specific characteristics of sound from gas-powered leaf blowers, published in the Journal of Environmental and Toxicological Studies, showed that, unlike most other loud machines, leaf blowers produce low-frequency noise that travels long distances and penetrates building walls. That’s why a single leaf blower can annoy an entire neighborhood.
Leaf blowers contribute significantly to worsening noise pollution in cities. Wildlife experience chronic stress as a result, with birds having to sing louder to find mates or define breeding territory. Everyone—human or non-human—feels on edge when that ugly noise starts up.
We’re using noisy, polluting machines to do things that, in many cases, we really shouldn’t be doing in the first place.
At the same time, leaf blowers emit toxic pollution. The blower’s two-stroke engine drinks a combustible mix of oil and gas, but a typical leaf blower burns just two-thirds of its fuel, spewing the rest into the air. That’s why two-stroke gas engines have been phased out in nearly all applications—except landscape maintenance. The noxious stew of gases released by leaf blowers—including cancer-causing benzene, volatile organic compounds, ozone, and nitrogen oxides—is a health hazard for workers and bystanders alike.
Regarding nitrogen oxide, the California Air Resources Board figures that using a gas-powered leaf blower for an hour emits as much as driving a Toyota Camry from Los Angeles to Denver. Of course, gas-powered leaf blowers also spew climate-wrecking CO2, but their nitrogen oxide emissions have an outsized climate impact: The EPA estimates that one pound of nitrous oxide has almost 300 times as much global warming effect as a pound of carbon dioxide.
All of these drawbacks have led over 100 cities and towns across the country to ban or restrict the use of gas-powered leaf blowers. California is phasing out gas-powered leaf blowers, but doing so will take many years. My neighbor obviously hasn’t gotten the memo, nor have millions like him.
It Goes Deeper
People use leaf blowers, blasting air at up to 280 miles an hour, to remove tree leaves, with the ultimate goal of keeping their lawns looking neat. But leaf litter is habitat for worms and insect larvae. Leaf blowers are just one reason the total biomass of insects on the planet is declining by about 2% per year. Leaf litter also protects and builds topsoil, of which we’re losing tens of billions of tons per year globally. So, we’re using noisy, polluting machines to do things that, in many cases, we really shouldn’t be doing in the first place.
The leaf blower replaces muscle-powered work, thereby increasing what economists call labor productivity. In this respect it’s just like a wide range of other industrial machines. From the powered loom, which displaced workers in early industrial Britain, to artificial intelligence (AI), which now threatens the livelihoods of millions of information workers worldwide, new machines disrupt economic routines. They make life easier in certain respects, but in doing so they impose environmental and social costs that often eventually overshadow the immediate benefits.
Physical work can be hazardous, particularly if it involves powered machinery or chemicals. But it provides needed exercise, along with the psychological benefit of seeing a process through from start to finish. Do we really want a future in which all we do is push buttons and stare at screens (the button-pushing eventually to be replaced with a brain-computer interface)? Techno-optimists may say that, with ever more machines in our lives, we will be freed to get our exercise by doing yoga or playing pickleball rather than from back-breaking toil. But survival that’s no longer tied to physical effort can leave us feeling unmotivated and useless. Perhaps our rush to increase labor productivity by replacing muscle power with machine power has passed the point of diminishing returns.
The only way to avoid those ill effects would be simply to use less energy—which means doing less with machines, and more with human hands and feet.
Then there’s the problem of economic inequality. Who actually uses leaf-blowers? In most cases, it’s low-income landscape workers, who are exposed to the air pollution and noise from leaf blowers at close range over sustained periods of time. Gas-powered lawn care has been linked to debilitating health issues like cancer, asthma, heart disease, and hearing loss; so, unsurprisingly, it’s the less-well-off who face the brunt of those health insults.
Stepping back, we see this general pattern reflected in the rest of industrial society: Just as leaf-blower noise and air pollution gets shunted mostly toward low-paid landscape workers, resource extraction and polluting industries tend to be located near marginalized communities, nationally and globally. Therefore, the leaf blower just binds us more strongly to already unfair and dangerous social trends.
Finally, this technology’s reliance on gasoline and oil ties it to a historical development that I’ve come to think of as history’s greatest catastrophe disguised as humanity’s biggest triumph—the fossil-fueled Industrial Revolution. Depleting and climate-changing coal, oil, and natural gas have brought about dramatic human population growth, along with immense profits and unprecedented wealth (for the few). But all of these presumed and probably transitory benefits have been based on depleting natural resources, and on processes that are perilously changing the climate and degrading ecosystems across the planet. Every time we pick up a gasoline-powered machine we are viscerally linked to that chain of ersatz benefits and spiraling impacts.
What’s the Solution?
For years, my wife Janet and I just used an ordinary garden rake when we needed to move leaves around. But we live on a quarter-acre lot, with a garden and orchard that require constant upkeep. And we’re getting older. Last year we bought an electric leaf blower, mostly just to remove leaves from the rain gutters on our house—which it does very effectively. It’s much quieter than our neighbor’s gasoline-powered leaf demon (According to the American Green Zone Alliance, the average electric blower produces 65 decibels of noise at the point of use). It doesn’t emit health-harming or climate-changing gases (again, at the point of use). And we have solar panels on our roof to charge the battery that powers it. So: problem solved?
Well, not so fast. Manufacturing the machine, and particularly the battery, required minerals that had to be mined, transported, and processed; along with energy—most of which probably came from coal, since the device was made in China. The resource extraction, energy production, and manufacturing that brought us our electric leaf blower entailed pollution, which probably ended up impacting relatively poor communities. And if everyone used electric leaf blowers, we’d be causing more soil loss and insect habitat destruction.
In some ways, the gasoline-versus-electric leaf blower choice mirrors the conundrums and trade-offs of our larger societal energy transition from fossil fuels to solar and wind power. Climate change and fossil fuel depletion require humanity at large to shift away from its current dependence on coal, oil, and natural gas. But replacing our currently vast fossil fuel energy usage with equivalent amounts of energy from renewable sources will require building enormous numbers of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, and power lines, along with a bewildering array of machines and manufacturing facilities that use electricity rather than fossil fuels. Producing all this new infrastructure will take oodles of minerals and metals, contributing to resource depletion. The manufacturing processes will generate pollution. Factories will likely be located in relatively poor communities. And new solar farms and transmission lines will entail more land use, and therefore more disruption of ecological cycles.
Every time I pick up the machine, I’m reminded that our society’s overall socioeconomic model is unsustainable and anti-life.
The only way to avoid those ill effects would be simply to use less energy—which means doing less with machines, and more with human hands and feet. This is why electric cars are not as much of a solution to climate change as the simple overall reduction of powered transport.
If we started down that path, beneficial results would ripple throughout society; however, during the transition, the medicine of degrowth would have side effects, not all of which might be desirable to everybody. Eventually, corporations, megacities, and economic growth would be replaced by cooperative communities working within local environmental limits. We could preserve scientific knowledge, which might gradually come to resemble traditional wisdom.
But, back to the leaf blower. Why make such a big deal over so small a problem? Compared to the existential predicaments we humans face (including climate change, hyper-partisan politics fueled by spiraling economic inequality and social media algorithms, nuclear weapons, and “forever chemicals” disrupting human and animal reproduction), the gasoline-powered leaf blower is just an annoyance. Why not just use the electric blower and leave it at that? After all, it’s better than the gas version.
Sorry, I can’t stop there. Call it the curse of knowing too much. Yes, Janet and I will keep using our electric blower where raking is impractical. But every time I pick up the machine, I’m reminded that our society’s overall socioeconomic model is unsustainable and anti-life. We need far, far more than a green energy retrofit. We need an entirely different way of existing on this unique, imperiled planet—a way that many Indigenous people are still familiar with.
Buying an electric leaf blower was an interesting experiment that we may not repeat. I’m glad we kept our rake. It gets a lot more use.
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Indigenous Wisdom During The Great Unraveling
A new podcast called Holding the Fire presents the perspectives of Indigenous communities from around the world as all of us reckon with the current polycrisis.
Oct 09, 2023
Given the severity and acceleration of climate breakdown, we are in an unprecedented time of crisis. We are living amid Earth’s hottest year ever recorded. While it has been known for a long time the Arctic sea ice is melting rapidly, recent data show sea ice in the Antarctic, which scientists believed would be shielded from climate impacts for decades, at dramatic all-time lows. New Orleans, situated on the banks of the once-mighty Mississippi River, is facing a drinking water crisis caused by unusually low flows due to drought, allowing saltwater intrusion from the Gulf of Mexico.
Extinctions, wildfires, droughts, floods, instability of crops, and ever-increasing numbers of climate refugees have become the norm.
Meanwhile, fascism is on the rise around the world, and wealth disparity between the haves and the have-nots, already at record levels, increases daily. All of this environmental and social breakdown is happening against the backdrop of inept, dysfunctional governments that are largely incapable of dealing with this polycrisis.
I listened to people who had been through the complete collapse of their worlds, but who were also continuing to do great work.
A few years ago, I would periodically call my friend Stan Rushworth to bemoan the latest news of the polycrisis. He would patiently listen, pause, then say, “Welcome to Indian country,” referencing the fact that Indigenous people have been living amidst their own polycrisis for, in some places, millennia.
I quickly learned to hold my tongue, as his comment promptly and dramatically altered my perspective.
On Turtle Island, where a country with the name “United States” currently exists, Indigenous people have been living within a polycrisis since first contact with settlers and colonists. They have found ways to live amid collapse and survive genocide, erasure, and ongoing assaults from the government that pushed them off their lands. Today, their traditions, ceremonies, and culture not only continue, but in many places are flourishing.
These are the people who are the experts in navigating times like this, and it behooves us to listen. It has been my honor to host a new podcast called Holding the Fire: Indigenous Voices on the Great Unraveling, which presents the perspectives of Indigenous communities from around the world, as all of us, humans and more than humans alike, reckon with the consequences of a global, industrial society built on growth, extraction, and colonialism.
A long, winding path has led me to hosting this podcast.
Like many people, I have been horrified, outraged, and heartbroken repeatedly by what is happening in the world.
Those in power are unable or unwilling to alter our current course, where the destruction of nature, the pursuit of resources and profit, and the disregard for life are leading us to ruin.
I’ve been drawn to bear witness and document some of the darkest impacts of modern-day empire and capitalism. This started with a risky decision to travel to Iraq during the early months of the U.S. occupation, which turned into a decade of war reporting. I then spent years traveling across the globe to report on the worsening climate crisis, which led me to write The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption.
All of these experiences led me into deep grief; rage, frustration, depression, sadness, and despair became constant companions. My friend Joanna Macy, author, eco-philosopher, and teacher of The Work That Reconnects, calls the collapse of this unsustainable way of life, and all the suffering that comes with it, The Great Unraveling. She also points out how this unraveling precedes The Great Turning, which will be a vital, creative response and a wholesale re-envisioning of our values and perceptions towards the Earth.
Through this journey, I came to see that those in power are unable or unwilling to alter our current course, where the destruction of nature, the pursuit of resources and profit, and the disregard for life are leading us to ruin. We have to look elsewhere for guidance and leadership.
Amid all of this, Stan suggested we talk with Indigenous people. Given that Indigenous populations around the world have been experiencing collapse, genocide, erasure, and racism, and other traumas, for millennia, his suggestion made perfect sense. Together we interviewed 20 Indigenous persons from Turtle Island (North America), which were collected in a book titled We Are the Middle of Forever.
While working on that book, I settled into a new sense of calm and developed a deeper sense of purpose as I began to understand and adopt Indigenous values. I listened to people who had been through the complete collapse of their worlds, but who were also continuing to do great work. They didn’t have false hope. They knew better than anyone what was being done to the planet and to people on the margins of society. Yet here they were, leading the way through our current polycrisis in a calm, dignified, reverent way, simply by living by Indigenous values as they always had.
I had little idea how desperate I had become for this entirely different perspective, not just on what’s happening in the world, but on life itself. I know I’m not alone. I have heard from countless people around the world who’ve expressed their own anger, anxiety, and grief over the ruinous path on which we find ourselves.
Because the polycrisis is both global and is experienced differently around the world, I recently set out, with the help of many allies, to better understand how Indigenous peoples across the planet view this shared moment of crisis and opportunity.
The podcast Holding the Fire, launching today—Indigenous Peoples’ Day—is the outcome of those conversations and gives voice to the insight and wisdom of Indigenous thought leaders from all six permanently inhabited continents, gained from lived experience and cultural memory.
It has been my honor and privilege to speak with, and most importantly, to listen to these remarkable people. The fundamental way I perceive, feel, and experience the Great Unraveling has been changed, perhaps best expressed by Lyla June Johnston, a Diné/Tsétséhéstáhese woman in New Mexico:
The polycrisis, and the convergence of crises in the collapse that we are learning about and experiencing—that crisis happened a long time ago. Actually, it’s manifesting now. But this crisis has been going on since 1492. For example, are we reaping what we’ve sown? Maybe the collapse is fruiting now, but didn’t we plant it a long time ago? And why are we so shocked that this is happening? We’ve been saying this for centuries. It’s almost like Creator was giving us nine lives; it’s like we were acting a fool. And he was patient and said, “Okay, well, let me give you another chance.” And we did it again, and again, and again, kept brutalizing each other, kept brutalizing the Earth, and the Earth can only take so much. The fact that she’s even lasted this long, is incredible, with the amount of brutality and the amount of abuse. But she’s very resilient, she can actually absorb a lot of abuse, she can handle a lot of insanity, but only to a certain point. And at a certain point, we can’t go on like this. And so in that sense, to me, the collapse is almost overdue, like the crisis started a long time ago. And if this is what it takes to sit our butts down and say, “No, you cannot do this anymore. Period, find another way. And if you don’t, I’m gonna force you to!” If that’s what it takes, then so be it, because we’ve been having a ball just being extremely disrespectful to her and to each other, and with no consequences whatsoever. And so, in that sense, it’s not such a radical reframing at all. It’s almost like a no-brainer. What did we expect, extracting her, treating her like a slave, treating the soil like it’s just here for our benefit?
Hosting this podcast has been a journey of heart and mind, one that has taken me deeper in both understanding, feeling, and awareness of what these times are asking from each of us. I trust that by listening with your heart, you will have a similar experience.
As the Great Unraveling deepens, we need as many people as possible to wake from the false, destructive dream of infinite growth and techno-utopian progress and embrace a different, deeper way of knowing and being. The voices featured on Holding the Fire are pointing humanity back to our collective heart. I hope, after listening to these wise people, you will be moved to join in creating the different future we need.
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Is It Time to Drop the D from SDG?
Our problem isn’t growth. Our problem is inequality.
Sep 19, 2023
I recently found myself using one of those ecological footprint calculators on the internet. As a vegan who cycles to work, recycles religiously, refuses to take short-haul flights, wears secondhand clothes, and through being follicly challenged doesn’t require either shampoo or conditioner, I was shocked to find that my lifestyle still requires three Earths. That is, if everyone on Earth were to live like me, we would need three Earths to sustain us. It got me to thinking about the Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs, that I hear so much about. According to the latest estimated figures reported in the Sustainable Development Report, or SDR, for 2023, the highest performing country is Finland who achieved a Sustainable Development Index score of 86.8. Hat’s off to Finland!
So, you might be wondering what got me checking my ecological footprint? Or maybe not! Either way, this summer has brought a cavalcade of disasters one after the other, with Southern Europe alternating between fire and floods, North America ditto, and now tens of thousands may have perished in Libyan floods. Add to this mix the report about the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) possibly shutting down completely by 2025 and you get a sense that we may have entered into uncharted territory. Our overlords seem intent on growing the economy at the expense everything and everyone else, so I figured I would have to try and limit the individual damage I cause instead. One of my personal solutions is to insulate my home to make my energy use more efficient. We’ll get to this later.
It is easy to pass tests when you cheat.
Digging a little further I found that out of the 17 SDGs, Finland had achieved three (green), faced challenges with nine (yellow), faced significant challenges with a further two (orange), and faced major challenges with the remaining three (red). If this is the best performing country, what of the worst? I downloaded the data and scrolled down the list to the bottom only to find that propping up the list in 166th place was South Sudan—which according to Human Rights Watch—faced “violence, hunger, and stark challenges” in 2022. According to the report, most goals face major challenges, and the only goal that South Sudan has achieved is Climate Action. How can South Sudan achieve what Finland cannot?
Could it be because Nordic Finland doesn’t have enough sun to transition away from fossil fuels? Apparently not, Finland’s long summer days compensate perfectly for the loss of sunlight in winter, so much so that Finland is able to harness as much of the sun’s rays as Central Europe. So why can’t Finland achieve what the South Sudanese can? The answer is something that we in the West don’t like to admit. We would prefer to be blinded by the obvious. To face the truth would make us extremely uncomfortable at best, and complicit in genocide at worst. The reason for Finland’s inability to meet its Climate Action goal is because it largely exports its emissions. I can say this even as the Finnish Economy Minister Mika Lintilä projects that Finland will be energy self-sufficient by 2024. The SDR refers to this outsourcing as “CO₂ emissions embodied in imported goods and services.” Finland’s imports account for 47.6% of its GDP. This contrasts with 30.1% globally. This piqued my curiosity so I downloaded a dataset from footprintnetwork.org. This dataset included national per-capita-GDP (PCGDP) and the number of Earths that would be needed if all 8.1 billion humans lived in the same way. The results were fascinating.
Of the top twenty SDGI countries, Finland (86.8) beats out its Scandinavian neighbors Sweden (86), and Denmark (85.7), but Denmark tops the Earth consuming league by consuming 4.8 planets worth of resources. This is just shy of the United States, which consumes 4.9 planets worth of resources and sits down in 39th place in the SDGI league. Of this top 20, not a single country consumes the amount of resources that could be sustained by a global population of 8.1 billion. The average number of Earths consumed by this exclusive list of resource vampires is 3.45. Compare this to the lowest 10 consumers who would need on average just 0.68 Earths to sustain the global population at their consumption levels. So what is driving this huge difference between the highest and lowest consumers?
The major driving factor appears to be per-capita GDP. When looking at the highest 20 consumers on the SDGI, the average per-capita GDP is $41,470. Look to the bottom of the list, and the average per-capita GDP is just $1,704. When you filter the list for nations that consume resources sustainably (one Earth or less), only three countries achieve sustainability with more than $10,000: Tunisia ($10,535), Jordan ($10,159), and Egypt ($12,786). The average per-capita GDP of those countries which consume their fair share is a paltry $3,829. Of the top 20 countries on the SDGI, Croatia has the lowest per-capita GDP with $31,007, but Croatians consume two and a half planets worth of resources. This shouldn’t really surprise us as it is well documented that higher GDP correlates with higher consumption, which correlates with higher resource use. According to these results, it would seem that the maximum per-capita GDP that would enable us to live sustainably is $12,786. Can we imagine the changes necessary for those of us in the West to shrink our economies by this much?
Incredibly, many of the richest countries on Earth cannot meet the SDG of ending poverty. If we cannot end poverty in some of the largest economies like the United States, United Kingdom, and Japan, what hope is there if we are to shrink our economies by up to six times to consume sustainably? Even those nations—like Canada, Russia, China, and France—that have apparently succeeded in ending poverty still do not provide their citizens with good health and well-being, which should surely be the ultimate aim. Likewise with poverty, when looking at the SDG of ending hunger, the results are illuminating. In the rich nations of the Global North where absolute hunger is thought to have all but ended—nearly all countries are either facing significant or major challenges when it comes to obesity (BMI >30). New research links this obesity epidemic, not necessarily with overeating, but on a prevalence of “cheap, high energy-dense, ultra-processed foods high in fat and sugar.” Whether in the richest nations on Earth, or the poorest, the case remains the same: Poor people cannot afford access to good quality food, and all around the world hunger is driven by inequality—both domestically and internationally. Add to this the proliferation of food banks in the U.S. and Europe, and it is arguable whether hunger has truly been solved, even in the richest nations on Earth.
Even if we scrap GDP and focus on the United Nation’s Human Development Index (HDI), which includes life expectancy, education, and economic measures, according to the U.N. themselves, “no country has achieved a very high HDI value without contributing heavily to pressures driving dangerous planetary change.”
Let’s call this what it is—cheating, or “Clever accounting and creative PR” as Greta Thunberg termed it. It is easy to pass tests when you cheat. It should be easy to provide adequate nutrition, ensure zero poverty, clean water, quality education, and decent work and economic growth if we are plundering resources from poorer countries in a wholly unsustainable manner. So far though, not a single country has been able to do it sustainably, and it appears to be a mirage to even try. The ecomodernists will argue that human ingenuity will solve the crises we face by increasing efficiency through technology, but the Jevons Paradox suggests otherwise. This paradox finds that when governments and businesses attempt to reduce consumption by increasing efficiency, the opposite actually occurs. As our bills go down, we consume more. Why? Because we can. So, if I insulate my home as the footprint calculator suggests, the paradox implies I will simply increase my energy use elsewhere because I have saved money on my energy bills through insulation.
Our problem isn’t growth—it’s inequality. Just as shopping carts of the Global North need to shrink in order that the Global South can achieve an acceptable standard of living, we have to admit that we cannot grow our economies infinitely. In fact, we need to accept that in order for all humans to thrive in a sustainable manner that allows for our children to live safely, countries with the highest GDP and resource use need to shrink in order that those with the lowest GDP and resource use can increase their health and well-being and meet us in the middle.
For those of us in the richer nations, we need growth like an alcoholic needs beer; sadly, our economic system demands it. Even if we transition to renewable sources of energy, we must use more energy because we must have growth at all costs. This is why, even as we add more and more gigawatts of renewable energy every year, our use of fossil fuels continues to increase, not decrease. Without an end to our outdated and even more outlandish economic system, we will continue to destroy our planet, all in the name of D. Let’s just drop it and focus on S and G, before it is too late.
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