Several of my favorite climate writers, despite their enthusiasm for green technology, routinely bash capitalism on Twitter - it has become a meme and a motif of the movement. Anticapitalism is the animating force of the Sunrise Movement and of the Green New Deal. There are endless articles written about it, in the New York Times, in the Guardian, in the Nation, in online publications and city newspapers. Īnticapitalism has become one of the major themes of climate activism for a while now - longer than degrowth, actually. There’s just one catch: The organizations that advocate Green New Deal style programs support growth, but only if it comes via the abolition of capitalism. Wally Nowinski wrote a guest post about it here: Some legacy environmental groups don’t necessarily use degrowth rhetoric, but practice an ethos of degrowth - blocking solar plants and wind farms and other types of economic growth that are crucial for decarbonization. Thus, the entire article relies on one economist’s flagrant ignorance about how GDP is measured.)
When the interviewer confronts “pioneering economist” Herman Daly with the question of why growth can’t continue to shift to things like software and services that use fewer natural resources, Daly ludicrously responds that economic growth should be defined as growth in resource use - which is not how GDP is actually calculated anywhere in the world - and that dematerialized GDP growth should be called “development” instead of “growth”. (Side note: This NYT interview is really, really bad. If you think that some supportive comments on an NYT article on degrowth mean the idea has legs, at a time when Americans are up in arms about $4.50 gasoline, you really need to think again.
It also doesn’t help that the research literature behind degrowth is incredibly shoddy: And even if this impossible task were successfully carried out, a halting of economic growth would make it much more difficult to afford the research and deployment of new green technologies necessary to sustain even a constant level of living standards. It would require central planning of the global economy that goes far, far beyond anything ever attempted. There’s also the fact that degrowth is ridiculous on the merits. Thus, embracing degrowth makes the politics of climate change much, much more daunting. But this is a very heavy ask - it enormously raises the bar for how much popular urgency climate activists will have to create in order to motivate the country to action. It’s possible that Americans would accept a vast diminution of their living standards as an alternative to death. middle class to the level of a country like Thailand. Global degrowth with continued catch-up growth in poor countries would require a vast diminution of living standards in rich countries - we’re talking about the reduction of transportation, energy use, etc. Halting growth in rich countries and continuing it in poor countries would not make much of a difference to climate change (despite the poorly informed claims of degrowth salesman Jason Hickel). One fundamental fact here is that degrowth is politically unacceptable to lots of people.
The failed strategy: Degrowth, anticapitalism, and doomerism But first, this requires talking about the strategy that has been ineffective, and why it has failed. I want to talk about the strategy that I think will be effective against climate change. So what can we do? Give up and sit around all day feeling a gnawing certainty in the pits of our stomachs that the planet is as good as cooked and there’s no reason to go on? You can go ahead and do that if you want, but I’ll pass, thanks. But this is simply a thing that is not going to happen in the time frame we need it to happen.
It is now time to conclude that the “scare people into making a big push” strategy that climate activists and leftists have been using over the last few years has decisively, utterly failed. Polls like the one that Wallace-Wells cite above consistently find that climate change is a relatively low priority for Americans, even among Democrats. Biden’s more realistic plan was killed by Joe Manchin.
Other ambitious plans like Jay Inslee’s were ignored. The Green New Deal is so dead that uttering the name now sounds like a bitter joke. I have seen any number of articles about climate anxiety. I have seen climate strikes and Extinction Rebellions.
I have seen Netflix release a disaster movie about how everyone is complacent about the climate. I have seen Sunshine Movement activists angrily confront Senator Dianne Feinstein in her office. I have seen climate activists tell everyone to read books like David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth.