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What Kind of a Green Deal? The implications of material and monetary flows¹.

Contents

Introduction: the resurgence of New Green Deals.

Paying for a Green Deal: monetary flows.

Introduction: the resurgence of New Green Deals.

With increasing momentum, the idea of a New Green Deal (or Green New Deal) has entered the mainstream of progressive political debate. While a group of British economists and campaigners promoted the idea more than ten years ago², it didn’t take off then. Now, however, the seriousness of, and public attention to, the climate emergency has helped to revive the idea: an ambitious transformative programme is needed to decarbonise the global economy, not least in the rich countries. Almost simultaneously, a similar set of policy proposals have emerged in several places, including in the USA, with the (New) Green New Deal³ proposed by leftists in the Democratic Party (the “Justice Democrats”⁴) and adopted by some of the prospective presidential candidates, in the UK, with the Labour Party’s Green Transformation paper⁵, in Spain, with the PSOE’s Transformación Ecológica⁶, and in the programme of Yannis Varoufakis’s pan-EU party DIEM 25. These all share the idea of investing in the rapid decarbonisation of the economy, creating “green jobs” in sectors such as renewable energy and housing retrofit, and offering a Just Transition for workers in those industrial sectors (predominantly fossil fuels) that will have to be closed down and replaced.

However, these policy frameworks all have shortcomings: none is, as yet, sufficiently detailed, each leaves significant gaps in the areas that have to be addressed, and all are promoted by parties that have yet to gain power or (in the Spanish case, with a challenging general election imminent) regain it.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The suburbs are the spiritual home of overconsumption. But they also hold the key to a better future

December 14, 2018

The suburbs are the spiritual home of overconsumption. But they also hold the key to a better future

Once is the defining image of the good life under capitalism, commonly held up as a model to which all humanity should aspire.

More than half of the world’s population now lives in cities. Yet with the global economy already in gross ecological overshoot, and a world population heading for more than 11 billion, this way of living is neither fair nor sustainable.

To live within our environmental means, the richest nations will need to embrace a planned process of economic “degrowth”. This is not an unplanned recession, but a deliberate downscaling of economic activity and the closely correlated consumption of fossil energy. We don’t argue this is likely, only that it is necessary.

You might naturally assume this will involve pain and sacrifice, but we argue that a “prosperous descent” is possible. Our new book, Degrowth in the Suburbs: A Radical Urban Imaginary, envisions how this might unfold in the suburban landscapes that are currently emblematic of overconsumption.

The well-known documentary The End of Suburbia presented a coherent narrative of a post-petroleum future, but got at least one thing wrong. There is not a single end to suburbia; there are many ends of suburbia (as we know it).

Reimagining the suburbs beyond fossil fuels

Suburban catastrophists such as James Kunstler argue that fossil fuel depletion will turn our suburbs into urban wastelands. But we see the suburbs as an ideal place to begin retrofitting our cities.

This won’t involve tearing them down and starting again. Typically, Australia’s built environment is turned over at less than 5% per year. The challenge is to reinhabit, not rebuild, the suburban landscape. Here are some of the key features of this reinvigorated landscape:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Stability without Growth: Keynes in an Age of Climate Breakdown

December 5, 2018

What do Keynesian Democrats think about the movement for post-growth and de-growth economics? Dean Baker, a senior economist at the Center for Economic Policy Research in Washington, DC, has given us some insight into this question. In a recent blog post, republished by Counterpunch, he takes aim at two articles that I wrote for Foreign Policy in which I argue that it is not feasible to reduce our emissions and resource use in line with planetary boundaries while at the same time pursuing exponential GDP growth.

Baker agrees — thankfully — that we need to dramatically reduce emissions and resource use to prevent ecological collapse. But he thinks that this is entirely compatible with continued GDP growth.

Let’s imagine, he says, that a new government imposes massive taxes on greenhouse gas emissions and resource extraction while at the same time increasing spending on clean technologies, with subsidies for electric vehicles and mass transit systems. Baker believes that this will shift patterns of consumption toward goods that are less emissions and resource intensive. People will spend their money on movies and plays, for example, or on gyms and nice restaurants and new computer software. So GDP will continue growing forever while emissions and resource use declines.

It sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? I, for one, would embrace such an outcome. After all, if growth was green, why would anyone have a problem with it? Baker makes the mistake of believing that degrowthers are focused on reducing GDP. We are not. Like him, we want to reduce material throughput. But we accept that doing so will probably mean that GDP will not continue to grow, and we argue that this needn’t be a catastrophe — on the contrary, it can be managed in a way that improves people’s well-being.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How do you degrow?

December 1, 2018

How do you degrow?

We live nextdoor to my partner’s grandmother, Maria, who was born during the Second World War in Northern Italy. This means that she knows what hard times look like. Maria could not believe we would be using washable diapers for our baby boy. With genuine surprise she asked me, “why?”, and then she was curious in which pot we were planning to boil the diapers. In her eyes, we could not possibly be choosing to use washable diapers – to her, an extinct garment reminiscent of poverty and manual labour – when there exists the comfort of the disposable. Therefore, it must be that we cannot afford disposable diapers. Needless to say, for the first six months of our son’s life, every time Maria went to the supermarket, she bought us a packet of disposable diapers.

Everything about the lifestyle we are accustomed to, as rich westerners, has to change. If we let that sink in for a little bit that is when the real disruption comes in, giving way to a radical shift in perspective. So, where do we go from here?

As practitioners of the degrowth creed, the first challenge we face is precisely this, where do we start? This is a very real question that needs to be answered when degrowthers decide to settle down. Since it’s possible to start anywhere, why not start with the closest and most immediate: ourselves. Our life. Our lifestyle, our diet, our jobs. I want to bring forward how this radical decision – to choose the self as the first point of action towards a degrowth future – brings large obstacles, huge consequences, many humbling lessons and above all, so many mixed feelings.

How do we go about practicing degrowth?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Saving the Environment: Is Degrowthing the Answer?

November 28, 2018

Saving the Environment: Is Degrowthing the Answer?

Photo Source Anahi Patricia Jasso Aleman | CC BY 2.0

A friend recently sent me a piece by Jason Hickel, arguing that growth can’t be green and that we need to move away from growth oriented economics. I am not convinced. It strikes me both that the piece misrepresents what growth means and also confuses political obstacles with logical ones. The result is an attack on a concept that makes neither logical nor political sense.

In the piece, Hickel points out the enormous leaps that will be required to keep our greenhouse gas emissions at levels that will prevent irreversible environmental damage. He then hands us the possibility, that even if through some miracle we can manage to meet these targets with the rapid deployment of clean energy, we still have the problem of use of other resources that is wiping species and wrecking the environment.

Hickel’s points about the imminent dangers to the environment are very much on the mark, but it is not clear that has anything to do with the logic of growth. Suppose the Sustainable World Party (SWP) sweeps to power in the next election. They immediately impose a massive tax on greenhouse gas emissions, which will rise even further over time. They also inventory all the resources that are in limited supply and impose large and rising taxes on them.

Furthermore, they pay developing countries large sums to protect regions that are important for sustaining species facing extinction and for the global environment. The new administration also hugely increases spending on research on clean technologies and has massive subsidies for zero emission vehicles and even more importantly for mass transit. As the SWP implements this policy, it has very stimulative fiscal and monetary policies.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The limits of renewable energy and the case for degrowth

November 21, 2018

The limits of renewable energy and the case for degrowth

Photo from Pixabay

The energy transition is the focus of much discussion. To read the accounts in the mainstream media, one gets the impression that renewable energy is being rolled out quickly and is on its way to replacing fossil fuels without much ado, while generating new green jobs. If the claims of Jeremy Rifkin are to be believed, renewable energy will become cheaper and cheaper, on the model of computers and telecommunications.

But what is the current combined share of solar photovoltaic energy and solar thermal energy, wind and tidal energy, and geothermal energy? (I am not including hydroelectric power and biomass here. While they are arguably forms of renewable energy, they are typically looked at separately because, having reached maturity, they have limited potential for expansion, unlike solar and wind power which remain underexploited.) People tend to think it constitutes 5, 10 or even 20 per cent of total energy production. The figure is actually much smaller: a mere 1.5 per cent. That’s the net result of the last 45 years of progress on the energy transition, according to the official figures of the International Energy Agency.

To break it down, from 1973 to 2015:

The share of petroleum in the global energy mix decreased from 46 per cent to 32 per cent
Coal’s share grew from 25 per cent to 28 per cent
Natural gas’s share grew from 16 per cent to 22 per cent
Nuclear’s share grew from 1 to 5 per cent
Hydroelectricity’s share grew from 2 to 3 per cent
The combined share of biofuels, wood and waste decreased from 11 per cent to 10 per cent
And renewable energy’s share grew by a factor of 15, from 0.1 per cent to 1.5 per cent.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Degrowth as a concrete utopia

November 20, 2018

Degrowth as a concrete utopia

Economic growth can’t reduce inequalities; it merely postpones confronting exploitation. Español

“My Visit to the Mountain Homestead.” Credit: Flickr/Eli Duke. CC BY 2.0.

The emergence of interest in degrowth can be traced back to the 1st International Degrowth Conference organized in Paris in 2008. At this conference, degrowth was defined as a “voluntary transition towards a just, participatory, and ecologically sustainable society,” so challenging the dogma of economic growth. Another five international conferences were organized between 2010 and 2018, with the latest in Malmo in August.

This year also saw the publication of Giorgos Kallis’ landmark book Degrowth,which opens with three bold statements. First, the global economy should slow down to avert the destruction of Earth’s life support systems, because a higher rate of production and consumption will run parallel to higher rates of damage to the environment. Hence, we should extract, produce and consume less, and we should do it all differently. Since growth-based economies collapse without growth we have to establish a radically different economic system and way of living in order to prosper in the future.

Second, economic growth is no longer desirable. An increasing share of GDP growth is devoted to ‘defensive expenditure,’ meaning the costs people face as a result of environmental externalities such as pollution. Hence, growth (at least in rich countries) has become “un-economic:” its benefits no longer exceed its costs.

Third, growth is always based on exploitation, because it is driven by investment that, in turn, depends on surplus. If capitalists or governments paid for the real value of work then they would have no surplus and there would be no growth. Hence, growth cannot reduce inequalities; it merely postpones confronting exploitation.

The growth paradigm.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Excerpt From “De-Growth in the Suburbs, A Radical Urban Imaginary.” Part 4

November 17, 2018

EXCERPT FROM “DE-GROWTH IN THE SUBURBS, A RADICAL URBAN IMAGINARY. “ PART 4

We started publishing 3 weeks ago this series of an excerpt from Samuel Alexander and Brendan Gleeson’s new book, “Degrowth in the Suburbs: A Radical Urban Imaginary”.

The chapter we will be publishing over 4 weeks (Reimagining the Suburbs Beyond Growth) is the first chapter in the book.

You can read the 3 parts we already published here and here and here.

Dr Samuel Alexander, is the co-director of the Simplicity Institute and a lecturer with the Office for Environmental Programs, University of Melbourne, as well as Research Fellow at the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, University of Melbourne.

This book addresses a central dilemma of the urban age: how to make suburban landscapes sustainable in the face of planetary ecological crisis. The authors argue that degrowth, a planned contraction of overgrown economies, is the most coherent paradigm for suburban renewal. They depart from the anti-suburban sentiment of much environmentalism to show that existing suburbia can be the centre-ground of transition to a new social dispensation based on the principle of enlightened material and energy restraint.

Reviews:

“There is nothing that embodies the twisted values of growth-addicted capitalism more visibly than suburban sprawl. Massive matrices of carbon-intensive consumerism, the suburbs reflect the forces that are driving our descent into ecological crisis. But as deepening crises begin to engulf us, Alexander and Gleeson see an unlikely flicker of hope. The suburbs, they argue, hold the potential for a new, more resilient way of living that could help see us through the calamities of the Anthropocene. This is a brilliant, invigorating book, poetically written and full of exciting ideas. A marvellous achievement.’

—Jason Hickel, author of The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Giorgos Kallis’ Degrowth | A review by Sarah Hafner

November 17, 2018

Giorgos Kallis’ Degrowth | A review by Sarah Hafner

Rethinking our economic paradigms is an urgent and fundamentally important task. Giorgos Kallis’ new book Degrowth is adding to a joint endeavour of postgrowth thinking, CUSP PhD candidate Sarah Hafner finds. It offers both, a justification as well as a vision and new imaginary for the degrowth agenda.

Rethinking the prevailing economic ‘growth’-paradigm in economics is an urgent and fundamentally important task. Equally important is it to think about ‘socially and environmental sustainable’ alternatives and the transition towards these alternative/s (see Jackson, 2017; Martínez-Alier et al., 2012).

Giorgos Kallis, Research Professor at the University Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and well-known for his contributions in the degrowth literature, opts exactly for this endeavour in his new comprehensive summary and thought-provoking book Degrowth. This blog provides a short review.

Economic approach / Economic system

The author himself situates his work at the interface of two approaches: the economic and the political or utopian one. This is also how this book review is structured.

The reader of the book learns quickly that in Kallis’ perspective degrowth “is not an economic theory, much less of an economic contradiction” and so, he clarifies from the beginning that his book doesn’t engage with tackling traditional growth and economic theories (see e.g. Lange, 2018 for an overview on the latter; as well as e.g. Jackson, 2017 and Jackson and Victor, 2018 for economic modelling work on this topic), and is focusing instead on the interrelations of the economic system with the political and societal/social system.

Degrowth, as developed in the book, stands in clear contrast to the prevailing capitalist system (see also Foster, 2011 or Jackson, 2017); well-being as a function (up to some level) of income and relative income (i.e. related to status and positional consumption; e.g. Kahnemann and Daeton, 2010; Easterlin, 1975), Kallis argues, is not a universal fact, but heavily related to the emphasized values in the current (capitalist) system.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Gathering degrowth in the American pluriverse

November 14, 2018

Gathering degrowth in the American pluriverse

“When you told your friends and family you were going to a degrowth gathering, they asked, ‘What is degrowth?’ How did you respond?”

The 2018 degrowUS gathering from September 28-30 2018 in Chicago began with this question. The first day’s thirty-odd attendees wrote their responses on sticky notes as they scraped the last bites of lunch off the dishes the event’s organizers had told them to bring from home.

Friday

It turns out, degrowth is a lot of things: a criticism, a proposal, a hypothesis, a provocation, a conversation, a deceleration, a downscaling, a reimagining, a project, a lens, a movement, a set of practices, an invitation to dream of worlds beyond growth. This is not disagreement about the definition of degrowth; it is evidence of the plurality of diverse meanings this potent word packs.

After some introductions to the weekend summit, anthropologist Susan Paulson skyped in a short talk. One of a tiny group of accomplished scholars studying degrowth at U.S. universities, Susan was a bit disappointed not to have been able to attend the gathering. We were disappointed by her absence too, but her virtual visit set the theme for the whole weekend.

Susan introduced us to the pluriverse, the idea that there is no single truth, no correct cosmovision. For her work at the intersection of degrowth and post-development, the pluriverse means that many different desirable ways of being and thinking about the good life exist simultaneously. She drew on her work in Latin America, uncovering several parallel ideas and movements that present real alternatives to capitalist development: agroecology, the Zapatistas, and buen vivir – the good life.

We heard remotely from Research & Degrowth founder François Schneider about some of the early history of organizing for décroissance in France.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

An economy that does not grow?

November 14, 2018

An economy that does not grow?

There is now plenty of evidence that economic growth is highly problematic for human welfare and survival. The evidence comes from three domains. 1) The ecological: continual growth uses up the resources that supply and the sinks that take the waste from human activity globally. 2) The social: economic growth does not correlate well with human welfare and its supposed benefits, rather than being shared, become ever more concentrated at the top of the wealth and income pyramid. 3) The economic: economic systems that rely on perpetual growth are inherently unstable, and meet internal and external constraints (or contradictions) that undermine them.

While it may be clear that the wager on endless growth is a bad one, a more difficult question arises: “what would be the characteristics of an economy that does not grow?”.

In his book “Macroeconomics Without Growth¹” Steffen Lange attempts to construct a framework for answering this question, rooted in the three main approaches to theorising the economy, hence the subtitle: “Sustainable Economies in Neoclassical, Keynesian and Marxian Theories”. The book is a valuable contribution to the theory and practice of degrowth and provides a solid grounding for interventions in the policy arena, including those by political parties that seek to construct a coherent alternative, rather than a mishmash wish list of proposals. A strength of the book is its rigorous, formal analysis of the main theoretical approaches and what they say about the preconditions for growth, and the possibilities of zero growth.

As such the book extends to 583 pages, and the detail, with recourse to mathematical formulae to capture the various models and sub-models, will mean that many will not read it. The aim of this essay review, then, is to summarise the book, emphasising the synthesis reached by Lange, and suggesting a few issues that arise.

In search of the macroeconomics of post-growth.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Here’s a Simple Solution to the Growth/De-Growth Debate

November 3, 2018

HERE’S A SIMPLE SOLUTION TO THE GROWTH/DE-GROWTH DEBATE

A number of high-profile economists – people like Carlota Perez and Michael Liebreich – have recently come out swinging in favor of “green growth” theory, trying to assuage mounting public concerns about the fact that climate change and ecological breakdown are being driven by capitalist growth.

What’s interesting about these interventions is that they explicitly pit themselves against their opposite – the idea of de-growth. Even just a year or two ago, de-growth wouldn’t have been part of the conversation. Once the province of ecological economists, it’s now gaining more mainstream attention as the evidence against growth mounts – and orthodox economists have no choice but to reckon with it.

But as they try to edge their way around certain prickly facts, their arguments get stranger and stranger.

Green growth theory relies on the assumption that GDP growth can be permanently and absolutely decoupled from resource use and emissions, and at a pace that’s fast enough to reverse ecological breakdown and keep us under 1.5 degrees, so that GDP can continue growing forever while environmental impacts decline.

There’s just one problem. There’s no evidence that this is feasible.

Let’s start with emissions. Fortunately, we know that GDP can be absolutely decoupled from emissions. The real question is whether we can decarbonize fast enough to stay under 1.5 degrees, without relying on fanciful negative emissions technologies. The answer, sadly, is no. If we carry on with growth as usual, we need to decarbonize at a rate of 11% per year. That’s more than five times faster than the historic rate of decarbonization and about three times faster than what scientists project is possible, even under highly optimistic conditions.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Degrowth: A Call For Radical Abundance

October 30, 2018

When orthodox economists first encounter the idea of degrowth, they often jump to the conclusion that the objective is to reduce GDP. And because they see GDP as equivalent to social wealth, this makes them very upset.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

I reject the fetishization of GDP as an objective in the existing economy, so it would make little sense for me to focus on GDP as the objective of a degrowth economy. Wanting to cut GDP is as senseless as wanting to grow it.

The objective, rather, is to scale down the material throughput of the economy. From an ecological standpoint, that’s what matters. And indeed some orthodox economists might even agree. Where we differ is that while they persist in believing (against the evidence) that this can be done while continuing to grow GDP, I acknowledge that it is likely to result in a reduction of GDP, at least as we presently measure it. In other words, if we were to keep measuring the economy by GDP, that’s what we would see in a degrowth scenario.

And that’s okay.

It’s okay, because we know that human beings can thrive without extremely high levels of GDP.

There are many pieces to this argument, but I want to focus on one here in particular. One of the core claims of degrowth economics is that by restoring public services and expanding the commons, people will be able to access the goods that they need to live well without needing high levels of income.

Take London, for instance. Housing prices in London are astronomically high, to the point where a normal one-bedroom flat can cost upwards of $1 million.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Durable Goods

October 26, 2018

Durable Goods

Ed. note: The post below is a transcription of Post Carbon Fellow Stephanie Mills’ remarks at the 50 year anniversary of the publication of the Whole Earth Catalog.

Gratitude to Mother Earth, ground of being. Gratitude to Stewart and Ryan and their colleagues for realizing this event. Gratitude to Stephanie Feldstein for her partnership tonight.

The image was taken this summer in a stand of old growth White Pine saved in 1973 from the chainsaws by a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens. The flowers are Bunchberry and Canada Mayflower. Gratitude to all those beings.

Stewart, master of compressed utterance, asked for five minutes on the last and next half-centuries: More than a tweet, less than a tome.

Fifty years is an eyeblink. Yet despite many good faith efforts at every level to prevent waste and ruin, the growth of industrial civilization has ravaged the Earth, depleting soil, water, and biodiversity, contaminating oceans and the atmosphere.

In 1968 Paul and Anne Ehrlich dropped The Population Bomb. There were about 3.5 billion of us then, over seven billion now. Contraceptive means improved, while political calculation, cultural conservatism and patriarchy hampered their widespread adoption.

Sixties temblors of revolutionary change cracked a few foundations. In 1972 from the Club of Rome we got a world systems model forecasting industrial civilization’s inescapable limits to growth. In 1974, Congress heard of M. King Hubbert’s curve mapping the limits to oil production, the end times for a petroleum-driven global infrastructure. Big business as usual has continued. Critical thresholds have been crossed. A late-breaking discussion of degrowth is underway but yet to reach a wide audience.

A half-century ago we thought about living more responsibly. “Access to tools” enlivened possibilities of household, homestead, village, and neighborhood self-reliance. There was hope of stalling the Apocalypse Juggernaut. There still may be.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Excerpt From “De-growth in the Suburbs, A Radical Urban Imaginary.”

October 24, 2018

EXCERPT FROM “DE-GROWTH IN THE SUBURBS, A RADICAL URBAN IMAGINARY.”

Over the next 4 weeks we will be sharing with you excerpt from Samuel Alexander and Brendan Gleeson’s new book, “Degrowth in the Suburbs: A Radical Urban Imaginary”.

Prelude: The Great Resettlement

This book opens, as it must, by acknowledging that the human species stands at the precipice of self-made destruction. At the very hour when modern humanity arrived at the pinnacle of triumph – a global market economy promising riches for all—the skies have been darkened by the terrible spectres of ecological and social threat. Global warming is only one of these storm clouds, but this alone has the potential to lay waste to our species, as well as most others. At the same time, vast oceans of debilitating poverty surround small islands of unfathomable plenty, exposing the violent betrayal of the growth agenda, euphemistically (or just deceptively) known in public discourse as ‘sustainable development’. This is a race leading towards an abyss, both enabled and entrenched by a sterility of imagination.

The late German scholar Ulrich Beck spoke of how triumph and crisis simultaneously emerge and remerge in a world pervasively and con- tinuously remade by capitalist modernisation.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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