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Degrowth has an image problem it desperately needs to overcome | Larry Elliott
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2024
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OK here we go. Let's go through the arguments.
The biggest one which pervades the article is that for degrowth to matter the politicians have to buy into it. No. The fun thing about degrowth is that a degrowther can just sit there and it works. Are you "underemployed" and happy? You're degrowing. Are you living in a tiny house with a little garden and happy? You're degrowing. Are you skipping out on buying expensive shit like a car? You're degrowing. Are you not having a bunch of children? You're degrowing. Are you using informal economies? You're degrowing.
This causes zero problems for the degrowther but causes massive problems for the ruling class. They will say "how do I force these people to work and buy useless crap and to reproduce so I can continue to exploit them?" Good. We as degrowthers just have to figure out how to stop them. We just become a dwindling tax base and start to solve problems ourselves. Yeah losing healthcare sucks but even if we hustled we probably would have lost it anyway.
The second big argument is the implication (no suggestions are given) that if we somehow "rebranded" degrowth into something sexier and palatable, it would be taken more seriously. I doubt it. If you called it "rewilding" it would get basically immediately re-interpreted to mean "rewilding the economy" along with a bunch of deregulation to allow for clear-cutting forests or whatever.
We're not trying to "brand" this to be friends with the political class. This is meant to be a threat. For us, it means enjoying the breeze and drinking some water. For the ruling class, it means having to jump through hoops to figure out how they can keep their private islands.
The third big argument is that the world's poorest need to "degrow". No. Regular growth is fine for them. The west needs to degrow far enough to make up the difference. Far from the "economic wisdom" of the nineties, it's now extremely clear that the global south can just leapfrog the emitting technologies straight into clean technology. Clean tech which both by necessity and by technology is decentralised. Don't have a robust power grid? You and your community can buy solar panels. Going from no electricity to intermittent electricity is still a boon. Society will adjust appropriately to the point where a "reliable" won't be worth the cost.
Literally the most damage the "growth" crowd can do to the degrowth community is to continue the politics of envy. Try and convince the global south that they should buy an ICE car, not because it's better, but because it shows domination and superiority. A degrowther must counter that by living a good life. A glass of water, a cool breeze, and a smile, and the other guy looks pretty silly with their Ferrari.
There are absolutly policies, which are in effect enabling degrowth. For one things like a well run cap and trade system(no offsets) for emissions, working hour limits and other worker protections, public health care to take out risks of working less, earlier retirment for workers, enabling sharing of resources with liberaries, public transport and so forth, and quite a few more. Sitting back and relaxing is certainly a viable path, but it is not like politics can not pay its part.
Also for the last point, the key metric is per capita income. An Indian billionaire is just way worse for the climate then an English bus driver. The narrative should be from rich to poor no matter what and the middle just transitions to green energy. You get a lot of problems, when using the West vs rest of the world. For example China and the EU have pretty similar per capita emissions today.
Yeah I mostly agree here, but there are two extra bits I'd want to add:
See how you had to add a bunch of clarifying comments, so if I point at a bunch of existing cap-and-trade systems you'd have to sigh and say "no, this one also sucks"? That's what I mean when I say that any idea we can create will immediately get re-interpreted into something completely toothless. I'm not saying we don't need to fight here, I'm saying that Degrowth doesn't have a marketing problem. Even the places with a carbon tax charge way too little. The fangs are a feature.
I agree here but also, the poorer countries have vastly superior sustainability options because waste is simply much harder to deal with there. You can't throw a plastic bottle away because there's no rubbish bin to put it into. There's no garbage trucks, everything is more or less recycled because the government doesn't do that job. The places are also more dense and walkable by necessity, because people can't afford cars. The "rich" countries need to rebuild back what the poor countries already have. Someone from a richer country ipso facto must emit more, so it's all about re-aligning society to be more sustainable.
EU ETS has no offsets and is well enough run, to bring the price to 62€/t. For some sectors such as the electricity sector that is a significant price. For electricity that roguhly doubles the price for coal and about a 50% increase for gas. It is also enough to make large steel manufacturers invest a lot into hydrogen steel manufacturing.
Rich countries have cleaner electricity grids, thanks to massive investments into renewables(for the most part), large rail systems with high speed rail, rail based urban transport systems even in smaller cities and so forth. The challenge is lowering consumption and well change some infrastructure, but that is not that hard.