Tom Clark

"Degrowth" & cutting Fossil Fuel Use to Zero by 2100
November 2014

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My reading in October was restricted by a birding tour in South Africa. The rigours of rising at 5am to look for parrots at dawn, then chasing little brown larks in wide open spaces, then driving to the next overnight stop for an 8pm supper left little time for reading. However, Wayne Ellwood’s excellent little book Degrowth & Sustainability, New Internationalist, 2014, made good reading for the rare moments of time in airports and on flights in the planes.

For much of the book I felt Ellwood was jogging on familiar trails. I concede that he gives a tight historical overview of a number of topical issues: resource depletion; global warming; problems with the economy. And his degrowth idea hovered in the background making me revisit these issues with a new twist. For example “The Growth Machine” chapter surveys the dominant view of the world - a perspective on the times we live in – a world in which we are told growing GDP is good. Stalling GDP is bad. Difficult times are framed in terms of faltering GDP. Yet I wasn’t given bold new directions or insights. It was only near the end that I realized that degrowth was particularly needed in the West to provide some "ecological space" for the poor majority in the world who need it. Perhaps it was useful enough to review all these old and newer ideas together and get me rethinking. This is how he did it.

Ellwood’s opening chapter The Growth Machine reminds us of several well known authors aware of the issue of finite resources and endless growth: Malthus, J.S. Mill, Soddy, and Keynes. He includes the Club of Rome’s influential 1972 Limits to Growth. (He notes that a 2012 30-year update of Limits to Growth came to very similar conclusions.)

My trip to South Africa while reading the book hit me in a special way. Seeing and meeting blacks and others in what they call their “New South Africa” makes the preoccupation with economic growth pale. Despite their problems one suspects South Africans know a lot about what real growth as a people feels like. It comes with a new vision, a new pride. It comes with accompanying stories and heroes (several recognized as Nobel laureates). But back to Ellwood.

Ellwood’s chapter on Sources Sinks and Services points out the insane logic of creating a world in which economic activity has to grow and grow without taking into account that it depends on finite resources which are growing less and less. It is a worldview which simply ignores that economies use up resources and must dump the waste somewhere. The dump or “sink” is the environment which has a finite capacity to deal with waste. And the sink also happens to be the same world we hope to keep living in. The economic growth world view is critically dependent on finite natural world resources and sinks but, incredibly, it is a dependency which proponents of economic growth and their followers simply leave out of their GDP calculations.

Climate Change and Carbon Footprints talks about climate change and the use of fossil fuels. The UN mandated intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC) and other scientific bodies have all concluded that the use of fossil fuels is adding CO2 to the atmosphere and is causing global warming with predictably disastrous consequences. (We might add that the IPCC’s November 2, 2014 Report calls, more urgently, for an end of fossil fuel use by the year 2100.)

The chapter Peak Oil and Tar Sands talks about fossil fuel sources and the sinks for the waste. The current world economy runs on a supply of fossil fuels -- coal, oil, gas -- and their extraction. When the price of oil goes up the economy slows down – and vice versa. These resources are finite and diminishing. The cost of extraction can only go up as the accessible supplies run out. Extraction from less accessible places brings greater risk of environmental disaster. I wanted to add nuclear energy as part of the diminishing resources on account of the finite supplies of Uranium. Ellwood notes the environment has to deal with waste from using fossil fuels in the form of the increasing CO2 in the atmosphere which is producing global warming. I wanted to add that despite the IPCC acceptance of storing CO2, I’m not persuaded there is a reliable way to store it safely permanently. I also wanted to add that there is no safe permanent safe storage for radioactive waste produced by nuclear reactors. So I think the case for degrowth in energy use away from current sources is even wider than Ellwood makes it.

The chapter on Profits, Debt and the Growth Imperative captures some problems with the current capitalism and the convenience of “economic growth” as a safety valve. But he notes that this economic system brought a decent life to many in the West and reduced poverty in China, India, Brazil and other countries. Ellwood notes contradictions with what I would call our under-regulated capitalism: the top priority need for profit links to a need for growth to attract investment; the need for profit seeks lower costs by paying fewer workers. But fewer workers reduces the number of those able to buy products. A growing economy solves this by its capacity to provide new jobs for those who are without work as a result of those efforts at higher efficiency and so hides the contradiction. Debt is also a safety valve – as long as the economy is growing so that work opportunities can continue and the interest can be paid. Then there is a war or military contracts which use public spending but can be part of a “growing” economy. Then there are the government interventions and bailouts. All in all, there has been a shift to fewer meaningful jobs, fewer jobs in general, fewer jobs especially for youth and semi-skilled workers and an increase in rewards to fewer people who were rich to start with. (I wonder if this is a global truth or whether it refers to community experience in the Western world. I'm not sure the same could be said if one was writing from a base in China.) The chapter remains significant in that it shows how deeply economic growth is tied into the economic world we earn our daily bread in and rely on to produce our pensions.

The chapter exploring GDP and happiness begins with reference to Daly and his notion of “uneconomic growth.” The world was not empty before the industrial era and the GDP! Ellwood cites authors who warn us that human groups like the Easter Islanders likely died out by using up the natural resources on which they depended. Growth and increasing the GDP should not be equated with “progress.” The GDP does not measure the resources depleted or the waste created. Ellwood talks about alternatives to GDP like the human development index. Citizens do not necessarily feel more or less happy because the GDP of their country is higher or lower. The Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) is intriguing: it grows with GDP over the years from 1950 until 1980 but then levels off. There has been no genuine progress since then! The Happy Planet Index uses life satisfaction and life expectancy but adds environmental footprint, so that Canada, which ranks high on life satisfaction and expectancy, drops to number 62 on the list when environmental footprint is included. Discussing the widening gap between rich and poor Ellwood introduces the income equality Gini coefficient which measures countries on a scale of 0-1. When Gini = 0, everyone has an equal income. When Gini = 1, one person has all the income. Ellwood maintains that it is one’s wealth and social standing relative to others in the society that determines one’s sense of well-being. The Occupy Wall Street movement was a protest by the self proclaimed 99% that the 1% in banks and on Wall Street had a disproportionate share of wealth and had received public fund bail outs. “Growth must not trump equality” he says.

Life on the Treadmill is a critique chapter about life in the West: Black Friday is an orgy of selling; the economy produces not for needs but for selling; consumer power is an illusion; shopping is a religion – we do it to cheer ourselves up; advertising has exploded and is all-pervasive; and the consumer society has undermined community by challenging the individual to look after his or her interests first. “Growth becomes an endless cycle: efficiency destroys jobs, GDP growth creates them.” There is too little and too much work. Many work grueling hours. That prevents participation in community affairs. This was not what was expected from labour-saving technology. Writers like Gortz expected more leisure time. Ellwood notes alternatives like Peter A Victor’s 2008 study Managing without Growth in which a computer model showed that -- with major policy changes in key areas -- a no growth economy in Canada could reduce poverty and reduce emissions of greenhouse gasses. Reduced working hours was a major element. But bringing about such a model economy would not be easy. Mainstream economists no longer even hope for full employment. However the present growth-dependent model with increasing environmental debts and decreasing biodiversity no longer makes sense.

The last chapter On the Road to Degrowth has suggestions of the way to go but no computer program! Conventional wisdom to escape the current ho-hum economic situation is either Keynesian – boost demand by government spending and shoot up the public debt - or, austerity – cut public spending until the public debt goes down. Neither form of old wisdom moves towards a sustainable economy. And sustainability is now a passé concept from the 1987 Bruntland report: Our Common Future. De-growth requires rich countries to scale back needs and industrial production to clear ecological space for those who need it. The poor majority has a right to its share of the earth’s resources. Cutting back is unfathomable unless we appreciate the new reality: we will not flourish as a species or improve the lives of the poor majority if we destroy the basis of our species’ future well-being. Ellwood talks of an economy of sufficiency or a solidarity economy – an intentionally non-growing economy. And the idea of the good life must go beyond consumption alone. Ellwood usefully points out that few corporations have failed to wrap themselves in the flag of green growth. But given his analysis, growth cannot be green – only degrowth. Similarly, sustainability misses the point. Only degrowth can cut it!

Ellwood gives components for the way forward: stabilizing population; reducing inequality; reining in resource use (getting off use of fossil fuels in particular); capping use, and contraction and convergence in resources; sharing out the work; investing in public goods (such as education and public transport); putting the free trade genie back in the bottle; countering consumerism.

So there you have it: Ellwood’s review of situation into which the IPCC sent its dramatic November 2 called for zero fossil fuels by 2100 plus his call for degrowth.

I would have liked Ellwood to have offered a few more concrete suggestions. Mention of a computer simulation showing how the Canadian economy could provide employment and cut dependence on fossil fuels was intriguing, but it was briefly noted in passing. Yet Ellwood may be right to leave us to deal with his tight review of the unsustainable status quo and the notion degrowth. We can return to debate the solar and wind energy incentives instead of our present coal oil and gas industry tax breaks and nuclear industry insurance write-offs, knowing that solar and wind energy need not grow indefinitely but only need to end up being “enough.” And we now know that we should be thinking of things like not more than one recyclable electric car per family for every 10 years or more.

And perhaps the South Africa experience has something to tell us about moving from a preoccupation with economic growth. People can be usefully engaged by national projects in which they map out together new ways of living as peoples and as a country. South Africa managed to agree on a rather fine rights-respecting constitution -- with a big shift in the direction of equality, which Ellwood notes is desirable. Canada has yet to agree on a Constitution.

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