{"id":13333,"date":"2015-10-13T07:16:40","date_gmt":"2015-10-13T12:16:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=13333"},"modified":"2015-10-13T07:16:40","modified_gmt":"2015-10-13T12:16:40","slug":"the-decoupling-debate-can-economic-growth-really-continue-without-emission-increases","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=13333","title":{"rendered":"The decoupling debate: can economic growth really continue without emission increases?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The decoupling debate: can economic growth really continue without emission increases?<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
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Most ecological economists argue that continued economic growth is incompatible with ecological safety. That is to say continued increases in Gross Domestic Product, (GDP and also Gross Value Added, GVA) cannot happen while reducing ecological impacts in general, and climate change-causing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in particular. It isn\u2019t a popular message, and is one that is typically ignored, not least by our political leaders who still seem to think the economy can continue to grow while avoiding ecological catastrophe.
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A year ago, in\u00a0one of our most popular web articles<\/a>, our group, Steady State Manchester took issue with claims from\u00a0New Climate Economy (NCE)<\/a>\u00a0that there was no conflict between climate change mitigation and continued economic growth. NCE argued that by taking action on climate change economic growth could be boosted. While NCE marshalled a lot of useful information on the how of emissions reduction, emphasising the role of cities, investment in clean energy, and adopting more efficient technologies in aviation and shipping, their argument relies on the idea that economic (i.e. GDP) growth can be decoupled from the growth in GHG emissions. While the emphasis here is on the relationship between GDP and GHG emissions, similar analyses are needed for the material flows underpinning transgression of the otherplanetary boundaries<\/a>, in addition to climate change.<\/p>\n

There are two kinds of decoupling1<\/a>.\u00a0Relative decoupling<\/em>\u00a0means that the rate at which emissions increase is lower than the rate at which GDP decreases. That is not a lot of help in the climate crisis, since under relative decoupling, if there is economic growth, then GHGs continue to accumulate in the atmosphere, contributing to the already high risk of runaway global warming.\u00a0Absolute decoupling<\/em>\u00a0on the other hand would mean that as the economy grew, emissions didn\u2019t. If it could be demonstrated, then we might want to rethink\u00a0our critique of endless economic growth<\/a>.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The decoupling debate: can economic growth really continue without emission increases? Most ecological economists argue that continued economic growth is incompatible with ecological safety. That is to say continued increases in Gross Domestic Product, (GDP and also Gross Value Added, GVA) cannot happen while reducing ecological impacts in general, and climate change-causing greenhouse gas (GHG) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[203,240,353,369,2328],"class_list":["post-13333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-degrowth","tag-economic-growth","tag-gdp","tag-global-warming","tag-infinite-growth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13333","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13333"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13333\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13334,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13333\/revisions\/13334"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}