The Post: Is degrowth the planet's saviour or a left-wing menace?

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On the fringes of environmental debate lurks an apparently radical idea: degrowth. Some see it as the only solution to the climate crisis; others, as a threat to human prosperity.

Where the truth lies is hard to know, because like many new movements, degrowth is intellectually chaotic. As the name suggests, its origins lie in a forthright rejection of the necessity of economic growth. Superficially, though, its modern proponents have jettisoned this stance.

One recent summary of “degrowth” proposals for reforming production and consumption finds none that actually mention reducing growth. Anthropologist Jason Hickel, a key proponent, insists the aim is to cut not GDP but “excess resource and energy throughput”.

Why, then, give the movement such an unhelpful name? Because the line that it’s “not about reducing GDP” may be mostly rhetoric. Hickel, for one, largely dismisses the value of economic growth, and believes developed nations could thrive on just US$10,000 per person, one-fifth of what New Zealanders enjoy.

Alongside this desired (if disavowed) downscaling of rich economies, degrowth is also an excuse to promote various left-wing causes – co-operatives, shorter work weeks, wealth redistribution – that may be worthwhile, but are only loosely connected to the core theme. Indeed, one of the books currently on the radical-left reading list, Japanese economist Kohei Saito’s Marx in the Anthropocene, is subtitled “towards the idea of degrowth communism”.

Are these ideas useful? To answer that question, we must first ask another: what, ultimately, is GDP? It is, at the risk of oversimplifying, the annual value of the goods and services bought and sold in markets: things exchanged for money. (Accounting for government and other services complicates this picture somewhat.)

This is, famously, an incomplete measure of progress. It values some destructive things, such as the cost of cleaning up oil spills, while ignoring positive ones, such as raising children. Degrowthers love to claim politicians have become “addicted” to raising GDP, pursuing it without cause. But most leaders have privileged it for a perfectly good reason: it marks a lifting of living standards.

There are many things we cannot achieve without conventional economic exchanges. Think about complex medical items like dialysis machines or cancer drugs. These cannot be created efficiently by people in their own homes, or voluntarily in small communities, or by the state’s commands alone.

The hugely complex web of interactions required – thousands of people being organised and motivated to produce output – can only be brought into being through markets.

Economic growth can, on its own terms, be a good thing. Up to a point, it is associated with higher wellbeing, increased happiness and longer lives. Developing countries need more of it. But it is not an end in itself. And of course it can – and has – come at the expense of the environment.

The answer is not to abandon economic growth, then, but to subordinate it. We must insist on rock-hard bottom lines for the planet, reversing the degradation of recent decades. We must stick strictly to the timetable for cutting carbon emissions roughly in half by 2030, and to net zero by 2050. Rich countries, in particular, must curb their pollution.

If, while respecting those bottom lines, we can have greater economic growth, that will often be a good thing; but if not, too bad. Rather than degrowth, this philosophy might be described as a-growth: just as a-tonal musicians are largely uninterested in conventional tonality, a-growthers are relatively agnostic about GDP, not obsessed with increasing or reducing it.

Once degrowth’s attention-grabbing label and false simplicity are set aside, many of its arguments actually amount to a-growth. And that’s a more fruitful concept. It encourages us, for instance, to better use the growth we do have, redistributing income so more people can live better within the current economic envelope, and prioritising the growth needed for medical equipment over that which serves pointless over-consumption.

What remains, though, is Hickel’s point about cutting energy and resource use. It is an open question whether we can, as “green growth” proponents hope, achieve our climate targets while bolstering the economy.

Hickel and others claim that, because even renewable energy has environmental impacts, we cannot attain this utopia: there is no way to slash emissions without massively reducing energy and resource use and, by extension, economic growth.

Certainly we are using the earth’s resources at a wildly unsustainable rate. But remember that the doom-mongers said for decades we couldn’t reduce carbon emissions while growing the economy, and were dead wrong: dozens of countries are now doing so. (This holds even when their imported emissions are counted.)

If it can be done for carbon, it’s not impossible it could be done for all resources. That, though, is a question of facts and sober assessments, not a sweeping philosophical rejection of a concept – economic growth – that lies some way from the heart of the matter.